by E. E. Knight
Ediyak shrugged. "I had to have it pointed out to me. It's not like you'd recognize him unless you're close. Sometimes he's grown in a scruff of beard, sometimes they shave him bald, sometimes he's in a wool watch cap. Anyway, that's his job. Go sit beneath a sign that says 'Clarksville, thirty klicks' and look like you got taken prisoner that morning."
Valentine had to chuckle. "They got the big story right. Just left out a few details."
"KZ papers don't print unpleasant facts. They disappear, like dust swept into a cement crack," Ediyak said.
"Civilizations are won and lost in such cracks," Rand observed.
* * * *
Kentucky's hills exploded into spring colors, fireworks displays of wildflower and dogwood blossoms. Valentine took parties out to show them trees bearing wild legworms. The crawlers would stay in the branches, devouring bark, twig, and leaf alike, until they became so heavy they either snapped the branches or bent them until they were lowered gently to earth. Then they commenced grazing in their long, crooked furrows.
Valentine changed back into his legworm leathers, adding Velcro strips for Southern Command insignia. He had been dreading the Kurian reaction to their march with every step into Kentucky, waiting to see what shape the reaction would take. But the march covered miles with not much more difficulty than they'd experienced on the practice marches in northern Arkansas and the Missouri bootheel.
Every time he topped a rise, every time they took a bend, every time they broke out of forest or heavy brush and into pasture, Valentine expected to see them, campfires and tents and columns of motor vehicles. But the landscape remained as empty as it had when he followed Hoffman Price across the Tennessee and into Kentucky.
Bee seemed happy to be back. When they cut legworm trails, little rises of plant growth and dirt that looked like planted furrows cut by a drunk plowing farmer, Bee urged him to follow. Some sense of hers allowed her to tell which way the legworm had gone, though unless the marks were very fresh Valentine couldn't make head from tail.
The legworm ranchers were a clannish bunch. Some sat you down and offered pie; others would chase you off with bird shot.
And that was just for a few wanderers crossing their grazing lands. Valentine wondered how they'd react to the appearance of better than two thousand Southern Command soldiers.
* * * *
South of Bowling Green Valentine and a team of his men idled on a running pickup at dawn, keeping warm by sitting either in the cab or atop the engine-warmed hood. They'd been tasked with meeting a pair of Cats who were supposed to guide them into the legworm bluegrass.
The pickup sat beneath a power pylon. Birds, with their usual good judgment, had transformed it into a high-rise condominium.
The men passed around thermoses of sage tea and talked about legworms. Valentine told his story of a battle between two legworm clans he'd witnessed, with the gunmen on each side using their beasts as a cross between World War I entrenchments and eighteenth-century fighting sail.
Valentine left to take a leak. As zipped up and turned from the back of the pickup, he tripped. As he fell, he noticed a binding-twine lasso attaching his ankle to the mufflerless exhaust system on the truck.
He fell face-first into spiky dandelion.
Two men jumped off the front of the truck, coming to his aid.
"You okay, Major?"
A shadow unfolded from the beneath the truck. "He deserves it for splattering me with pee," Alessa Duvalier said. "I taped two grenades under your truck and pegged the pins to come out when you drove away. You clowns are lucky I recognized him."
"It got a distinctive left hook or what, sir?" one of the men laughed.
"I meant his leathers," Duvalier said.
Valentine cut himself free from the twine. "They pulled you into this operation? Gentlemen, this is Smoke, one of Southern Command's best Cats. I've covered more miles with her than any living thing."
"Thanks to you, I'm rated as one of Southern Command's expert Cats on the bluegrass," Duvalier said. "I've been working Kentucky since the fall, escorting that churchman around."
uHe's cheery company."
"Never more so than when he's trying to stick a spitty finger inside you. Horny old goat." She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, up-down-up.
Another woman, hair knife-cut high and tight into a cross between a mohavvk and a mullet, rose from the ditch running along the road. She had legworm leather trousers and a poncho concealing what looked to be a military carbine. A camouflage bandanna added a festive touch to her neck.
"This is Vette, Val. She was blooded in Missouri. It's quieter there now, so Southern Command retasked her here because she was born in Bowling Green. Vette, this is Ghost. I went to Colorado and across Nebraska and Kansas with him."
Vette extended hands in fingerless gloves and gave a strong handshake. "Pleased to see you're still alive."
"If you watch him close when he walks, you'll see that he's had some near misses," Duvalier said.
"Hope you learn as much from her as I did," Valentine said.
"She's smarter than you when it comes to picking a fight," Duvalier said, running a knuckle down the scar on his cheek.
"So, what have you got for us?" Valentine asked.
"You guys have moved fast and hard. We're going to take you to sort of a feudal lord. He's got several tribes united under him."
"Including the old crew you ran with, the Bulletproof," Vette said. "I recognize the cut of your leathers."
"No other hints, Smoke?"
"You'll be relieved to know you're about to be reinforced," Duvalier said. "A third of Kentucky is mounting worm to fight."
One of the soldiers snorted. "Worm ranchers fight?"
"On our side, is what he means," another added.
Duvalier glared at the doubters. The fire in her eyes reminded Valentine of how pretty she was, when her real self peeped through the scruffy exterior.
"Six clans have come together," Duvalier said, nodding to Valentine's detail and shaking any proffered hand. "That churchman may like playing stinkfinger with the female help, but he's one hell of a diplomat. Every time things heated up, he calmed them down and got them talking again. It's as much his triumph as it is Karas's."
"Who's Karas?" Valentine asked.
Vette also shook hands all around. "He's a Bowling Green boy too. He's just what the Cause needs. A visionary."
* * * *
The men of the brigade waited. With some fresh bread and Kentucky honey in them, they were in good spirits and chattering like meadow-larks. They lounged on a gentle hillside forming a natural amphitheater, warm in April sunshine that promised summer on the way.
During Valentine's training and time in the Bear caves of Pacific Command, he sometimes spent a few hours at night in the rec room. They had a LCD TV rigged there, and he watched old movies on disk. One Bear favorite was an old movie called Highlander.
While Valentine found it interesting enough, especially the sweeping images of scenery, he'd forgotten the movie until he saw Karas emerge from his vast tent. He immediately thought, that's the Highlander!
Karas had the same strong face, long hair, and impressive build, though the hair was stringier and the build wasn't enhanced by camera angle. He wore a big-pocketed waxed canvas coat that hung to midthigh and rather striking pants that were legworm leather on the inside and what looked like corduroy on the outside. His soft brown boots, with just a hint of felt showing at the top, made Valentine rather jealous. They looked durable and comfortable.
Followed by deputations from the six clans supporting him and by Brother Mark, who looked pleased for the first time since Valentine had known him, Karas approached an old pasture tree that had been butchered just that morning for firewood. Earlier in the morning Valentine had watched two men working a long saw cutting it off, but had wondered at why they went up the tree and sawed off limbs instead of simply felling it in the first place.
Valentine recognized the honey-colored hair
of Tikka among the tribal dignitaries. She'd apparently assumed some role of importance within the Bulletproof.
Karas mounted the stump with the aid of a ladder. Valentine wondered how he'd look to the men in the pasture or on the lower slopes of the hill—a statue atop a column?
The breeze died down as if by command.
A leathery worm rider stepped forward. "Let the Kentucky Alliance take heed," he called in a formidable bass baritone. "Our chief is about to speak."
"This is a sight I've dreamed of for a long time. You all don't know how happy you've made me, marching to these quiet hills. It's been a long time since the Stars and Stripes has been carried openly, pridefully, across these hills. Let me formally welcome you as friends. A mite more valuable: as allies."
Southern Command's troops cheered that.
"Some of you went to school. I only had one teacher my whole life. A simple man. A plumbing contractor, before 2022. That man was my father. He taught me to ride. He taught me to shoot. He taught me to tell the truth.
"One day I was looking at pictures of animals of the world. I liked big cats, lions and black panthers and tigers. He told me that one tiger needed to eat as many as three hundred deer in a year. Three hundred! Of course, the tiger must eat them one at a time. No tiger kills three hundred deer at once."
The spring breeze contested the voice again, but Karas could project, though the men upwind were cupping their ears to catch his words.
"Imagine, though, if those three hundred deer could talk as we do. If they could take the tiger's tally. If they could organize against this tiger. If three hundred deer together hunted the one tiger, threw themselves against it, biting and goring and kicking, I reckon that tiger would never hunt again.
"We have one great advantage over the Kurians. Human beings naturally come together, the way water droplets find their way to pools. The Kurians like to remain individual drops.
"Divided, all we can do is crawl to the Kurians and lick their boots, begging not to be killed. Their tigers are the master of any one of us. United, we will hunt the tigers."
"I'm going to ask you to follow me east into the mountains. There we'll start the biggest tiger hunt you've ever seen. Then with the forces that are meeting there, we'll come back and start taking over town after town, county after county here in Kentucky. Can I count on the men of Arkansas, of Texas, of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri? We're pledged to you, Wildcats and Gunslingers, Coonskins, Bulletproof and Mammoths, and of course my own Perseids."
Valentine cheered along with the rest of him. If he understood it right, Javelin was now the largest operation against the Kurians since Archangel.
Lambert and Brother Mark and the rest had told them they'd have support of some of the legworm ranchers in Kentucky. He thought they meant foodstuffs and fuel; he'd never dreamed they'd be fighting at their side.
Why had they kept so much secret from the officers involved? To avoid disappointment if Karas turned out to be a windbag, full of bluster and promises? Or did Lambert feel it necessary to keep this from Southern Command's own higher-ups?
Valentine laughed at himself as Bee thumped him on the chest, not really understanding the reason for the cheering but enjoying the mood. As the men and women roared their lungs out, thrilled that Kentucky wasn't just supporting their advance but coming to their side, he was considering the possibility of informants high up in Southern Command's officer list.
After the speech ended men and women of the Alliance handed out coins of brightly polished nickel, it looked like. They bore an imposing stamp of Karas in profile. The reverse had a five-pointed star with a 10 at the center and "TEN DOLLARS" written around the edge.
"The king's coin," the boy who handed Valentine his coin said. "Lot more where these came from."
"Long live the King of Kentucky, then," Ediyak said in reply. "What do you s'pose we can buy with it?"
Valentine examined the engraving. A faint halo had been etched around the profile. "A whole lot of trouble, if this man wants us calling him king."
Chapter Seven
Across Cumberland Plateau, April: It is a land of sandstone bluffs and old coalfields, swimming holes and iron bridges, old loblolly pine plantations run amok and new deciduous forests.
Almost every kind of tree found east of the Mississippi can be found here, mixing among each other and gradually reclaiming land from the pines, each occupying land according to water requirements, with chestnuts and shortleaf pines atop the ridges and poplar, blacky gum, and maples in the bottoms.
For much of the early United States history, the eastern escarpment served as a barrier to the gradual migration west. The tough bluffs running the southeastern border dividing Kentucky from Virginia served as a natural choke. Cherokee and Shawnee hunted the land until passages through the Cumberland Gap were mapped out and opened. Even so, the region remained somewhat wilder than the states north and south until the exploitation of coal and timber resources made the area profitable.
The picturesque sandstone gorges once drew photographers, and protect the homes of cliff swallows and bats, but to David Valentine that spring they were a frustrating maze dotted with dead towns so decrepit they reminded him of his first operations as a Wolf in the run-wild forests of Louisiana. Negotiating ridges and valleys meant weary hours of scouting and camping as the columns wound their way east through the twisting, turning cuts, where one mile of red-shouldered hawk flight meant perhaps three up and down and back and forth.
Luckily, it is a wild region empty of Kurian holds. Kentucky always has gone its own way, even in its uneasy relationship with the Kurian Order.
Self-reliant to what some might call a fault, they saw off the first emissaries of the New Order in the chaos of 2022 with torch and buckshot, demanding to be left alone. Neither at war with the Kurians or cooperative with their Reapers, they bring coal to the surface and legworm grubs to market to trade for the goods they need. Every time a Kurian tries to establish a tower in the Cumberland, he finds his Reapers hunted, his Quisling retainers ambushed and hung, and the alleged rich prospect of Kentucky dissolving into a confusion of legworm tracks and ash.
The tribes have formed a feudal society, quarrelsome when at peace, uneasily united when threatened from outside. Every feudal society needs a king to smooth the former and lead them in the latter.
* * * *
Karas' coins turned out to be only so much shiny dross when it came to bartering with other legworm tribes. Valentine's company went back to trading the crank-powered radios, rifles, and learn-to-read Bibles for butter and eggs.
But the legworm riders did offer spare worms, rigged for hauling cargo. Valentine's company received two, one to carry burdens while the other grazed in its wake, with roles switched the next day. Every third day the column rested now, to give the worms time to feed and recover. For all their size, they could be delicate if mishandled or underfed.
As they passed the more settled central part of Kentucky, the land became a patchwork of small towns and huge, clannish ranches. The towns were controlled by "badges" but rarely saw a Reaper, though Valentine heard fireside tales of bounty hunters and human traffickers who collected criminals and troublemakers.
Contacts with the underground dried up once they reached the ranch lands. Though the soldiers broke into a few locked NUC storage rooms in the dead of night, Valentine scanning for Reapers and his sharpshooters standing by with their blue-striped magazines in the rifles, they rarely returned to Javelin with full carts.
Where no small, easy game were to be had, Valentine felt it necessary to organize a hunt for larger prey.
"This is what's called hitting them where they ain't," Patel said to second platoon.
They were dispersed on a steep hillside overlooking a railroad cut. Valentine stood between Patel and Glass, who had the Grogs' .50 set up within a blind of machete-sculpted brush. Wolf scouts had relayed a report of a lightly guarded cargo train heading north on the Lexington track, and Valentine's
company was dispatched to hit it if it looked like it contained anything useful.
Below them, an engine and ten boxcars stood on a single track in front of a blocked bridge. The engine puffed like an impatient fat man.
Valentine stood above Patel, watching one of his Kentucky recruits talking to the engineer from the cover of a stand of thick redbud. A few other members of first platoon stood, looking at the blocked bridge. Another pair of soldiers, Rutherford and DuSable, who Valentine considered his two coolest heads, stood at the back of the caboose, swapping some captured New Universal Church activity books and Lexington newspapers for cigarettes and what looked like a sheaf of mimeographed crossword puzzles with the guards in the armored caboose.
Whether the engineer wondered why some technical crew just happened to be blocking a bridge where trains were running yesterday, Valentine couldn't say. Crow, the soldier in question, was a good talker and had worked rail crew as a boy and into his early manhood.
The binoculars in Valentine's hands stayed steady on the armored caboose. Patel watched the gunner in the little bubble just behind the engine. They were woefully attentive to duty, experienced enough on the lines to know that any unexpected pause called for extra vigilance.
"Faces. In the boxcars," Patel said. "It's not cargo; it's fodder."
"Another load heading up for Cincinnati," Harmony, a Tennessean, said. "Blood money."
Valentine swiveled his glasses over a few degrees. His vision blurred for a moment as redbud intervened, and then he saw it. A pair of haunted eyes looking out through the bars, knuckles white as the prisoner hefted himself up to the airholes at the top of the car.
He did some quick math. Maybe four hundred human souls behind that puffing engine, bound for destruction.
"No point hitting it now," Glass said. "Nothing we can use."
Valentine ignored him.
"What caused you to get culled, cuz?" Harmony said as if talking to the prisoner. "Heart murmur show up on a health check? Forget to make a payoff? Screwup under the boss's eye on a bad Friday?"
A clean-cut young officer left the caboose. Another railroad guard trailed behind him wearing the harassed look or adjutants everywhere in any army. After a conference with the engineer, they approached Crow, who gestured for them to come and look at the bridge.