March in Country (16 page)
Authors: EE Knight
They bounced off on their oversized hind legs, making Valentine think of a kangaroo he’d seen on a TV documentary in his time with the Coastal Marines.
Pellwell looked anxiously at the sloping ground between the hill and the old prison.
“Worried they’ll screw up?” Duvalier asked.
“Not so much that,” she said, blinking fast. “They know what to do. Before, it was all play in old warehouses and apartments and school offices. One of them gets caught down there, it isn’t just a loud no and a spell in isolation. They’ll get stomped on and scraped out into the garbage.”
Valentine had his own anxieties. He’d heard nothing from Gamecock’s Bears.
The only blemish on the operation was that they couldn’t destroy the foundation of the Kurian tower. No one wanted to venture in to get the explosives and face the fangs of that locked-up, anxious Reaper.
Valentine nearly had the prisoners organized for the ride back. Thanks to the armored cars, some utility trucks, and a personnel transport bus, everyone would be able to ride.
As dawn came up, Valentine thought he heard gunfire in the distance, but he couldn’t be sure. His ears sometimes played tricks on him when he pressed them.
A Bear messenger rumbled in on a captured motorcycle. He reported that Gamecock’s radio had “crapped out” before they even hit the crossroads blockhouse, and the Bears had successfully executed their ambush. Gamecock would pursue the Georgia Control Company south for an hour or so to “keep up the skeer” and then turn back north and head for the rendezvous.
The Gunslingers came in on their legworms and picked through the camp. Valentine was giving them advice on keeping well clear of the explosives dump when Pellwell returned. She gave him a salute.
“You don’t have to do that, you’re a civilian.”
“Oh, sorry ... I was excited. Major Valentine, my guys are back from the prison. They searched the whole thing. They counted three soldiers there, four other men total, one other.”
“One other what?”
“They’re not sure.
Big like her
, they say.”
Big like her
, they say.”
“Like Bee?” Valentine asked. “You sure they didn’t mean scared of them or something like that, but ‘big’?”
“I think they might mean even bigger.”
“You think they mean a legworm? What’s bigger than Bee?” Frat asked.
“We’re going down there to find out,” Valentine said.
As the Wolves came in the front the guards ran out the back. Valentine decided to let them go. They were ordinary security types, by the look of them, not soldiers. None ran off with anything larger than a pistol. They wouldn’t even give the Gunslingers any trouble if they decided to turn and fight.
The prison had only one wing cleared for human habitation, the rest still had much of its moldering infestation, with thick slimes growing in all the drainage fixtures, revived by the recently repaired water system.
A few of the cells were occupied with backwoods Kentucky folk, probably rounded up by patrols while hunting for their families. Valentine felt a wash of achievement. There was nothing like the look on a man’s face when he stepped out of a cage.
The “other” was not in a cell. In fact, he startled Bee into an excited yelp as he emerged from a dank stairwell.
Seven feet tall without even drawing himself up to his full height. Golden faun-colored fur, darker on the back and lighter toward the belly and beneath his manhole-cover pectorals. Well-scarred, crudely stitched, missing a piece of ear, with fur patchy over his wounds and fresh blood, sticky and spiky, about his muzzle.
He carried a short aluminum pole threaded to take a variety of tools. In this case, the handle was capped by a small shovel blade, bright at the edges where it had been recently sharpened and so bloody and covered in dripping shards of viscera it looked as though it had been used to stir a vat of grue.
“Well, my David,” Ahn-Kha said. “This saves much explaining in both directions. Could you offer me a detachment? A few skulkers fled into the woods, and there may be one or two more in the basements. I might need some assistance in rounding them up.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Cutthroat’s Room, Fort Seng: It would appear that once Valentine’s bedroom suite in the old mansion house belonged to someone named Cuthbert. THE CUTHBERT ROOM is carved in elegant letters on the door lintel.
Southern Command’s soldiers, being who they are, defaced the beautiful woodwork in such a way that it now reads THE CUTTHROAT ROOM.
Many of Fort Seng’s soldiers are better at fighting than spelling, it seems.
His quarters are sparse but not quite Spartan. Military billets were the only home he’d known since leaving the Northwoods at seventeen. He’s done what he can to make this unusually lavish room his own.
Apart from the gun rack with his ready weapons, that mean-looking type three Atlanta Gunworks battle rifle and an unusually elegant 1911 Model .45, plus his blade and pick, legworm leathers, issue helmet, and combat harness.
A neat little .22 isn’t visible, just as it is when he wears it. But it’s in easy reach between the mattress and box spring.
Sketchwork covers the walls, picturesque ruins of old public buildings and burned brick structures around Evansville and Owensboro with new growth in the windows and feral cats lounging. They’re not his art, they’re the work of his Bear chief, the Carolinian named Gamecock.
There are also photos. A surprising number decorate the room on a byway of a big bulletin board salvaged from some office. To those who do not know him well, the little collection of pictures hung in protective plastic baggies—the experienced might recognize the plastic polymer as Ordnance ID sleeves—might seem bewildering. It’s hard to gauge who those depicted are and how old Valentine was when he met them because he’s featured in so few of the shots.
You can hardly see a young, sunburned, shorn young Valentine standing, holding a shovel comically at “present arms” with a group dressed in Labor Battalion overalls outside of a fortified enclave gate reading Weening. A young Asian girl standing beside him makes a classic two-finger addition to his hairline. There’s a shot of a group of soldiers in Wolf leathers showing a mixed group of men and Grogs how to use a Southern Command machine gun, and a picture of a smiling family cutting the ribbon on a prefabricated pole-barn gate, two pretty blond daughters each holding half the shears. A gangly black youth holds two cows ready for entry into their new home.
There’s a shot of Ahn-Kha digging up a massive heartroot—a Golden One staple—for a group of interested farmers and uniformed people. There’s also a picture of a ship with a big gun on the bow and armoring around the bridge and weapon points tied up at a coastal wharf. A photo of a lithe little girl, black hair flying as she chases some seagulls on a sunny beach, shows signs of having been trimmed with a scissors. A newspaper clipping of someone named “Hank Smalls” smiling and holding a game ball after pitching a no-hitter in game one of the Transmississippi All-School pennant occupies a prominent place.
There’s a picture of a salt-and-pepper-haired man in a wheelchair flying down a hill as a woman on his lap hangs on for dear life. Another one shows Valentine at the very back of a serious-looking crowd of bearded men who might be Mennonites standing in front of a massive rock etched with letters.
A photo stamped SOUTHERN COMMAND VERIFIED RELEASE depicts a group of soldiers climbing off a riverbank boat, all wearing shiny, tinfoil skullcaps. A brand-new shot of a commanding-looking woman standing in front of some off-road vehicles with an assortment of hirelings soldiers is a new addition, as the shot is a professionally printed eight-by-ten and Valentine is clearly having trouble finding a protective frame. Her agedbut-still-handsome features and almost prim appearance contrast nicely with the armed men behind. Only Bears wear their atavistic garb of bones and teeth dangling off or pinning together captured Reaper robes with such lethal aplomb.
There’s one newspaper clipping of himself, a shot that made it into Southern Command’s war museum, in fact, of David Valentine sitting mud-splattered in a command car next to the big golden Grog who now slumbers on the floor of his room.
David Valentine had forgotten how much the smell and sound of Ahn-Kha comforted him. The Golden One’s vast presence was like having your old family dog sleeping nearby. Only better. The old family dog can’t knock a Reaper off its feet with one swing of its fist.
As Ahn-Kha slept, bleeding heat like a cooling potbellied stove, Valentine read by a tiny shake-and-glow clip light. The light began to dim, and Valentine picked up the light, shook it vigorously until it visibly brightened, and then returned it to its magnetic cradle.
Every time he did this routine, he marveled at the wonders the world used to produce. To only know the pre-22 world from New Universal Church propaganda, you’d think the old United States produced nothing but pollution, illness, and hunger. But still they made lights like this, still going strong almost a lifetime later.
Not quite as good as those Lifeweaver crystals, of course, which would shine brightly all night if left in the sun for an hour or so. He’d once had one, lost it in Nebraska when he was captured by the Twisted Cross.
With difficulty and care, he turned a page of the spineless mass of print he was reading.
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