March in Country (22 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Valentine reached into his tool belt and extracted some plastic triangles and began to shove them into the gap around the lock. He was the proud owner of a migraine, thanks to that damn spotlight running up his optic nerve like a gas flame.
Dirty Nel looked at the wedge. “Where’d you get these? Looks like a kid’s toy.”
“Evansville security services. They’re just wedges with a little quick glue on them. They’d use them when conducting a raid, or temporarily keeping those detained in an improvised secure location. Jam a couple of these into a door or window frame, and no one’s getting through without busting it down and making a lot of noise. Soft enough to jam in from either direction and stick.”
“How do you get rid of them?”
“Easy enough to dissolve, paint thinner and other acetates work. Nail polish remover.”
“Oh, I always keep some of that around,” Dirty Nel said, rolling her eyes.
“We don’t have to worry about opening them for now.”
“Why do they call you Dirty Nel?”
“You know, everyone asks me that within five minutes of meeting me,” she said, as slow smile on her face. “The men, anyways. Well, some women. Problem is, the real answer isn’t very interesting. So I keep silent. Whatever they come up with in they’s own heads, it’s better than the truth.”
Seeing properly handled legworms in action still took Valentine’s breath away. With modified cargo saddles mounting a sort of oar-lock, old suspension cables were run and crossed in such a manner that the network of blocks and tackles could first hoist and then secure the emptied-out boat hulls. Then the paired legworms, with the hull between them like some kind of land-going catamaran, headed up the hill for the overland trip back to Evansville. The legworms moved as though they didn’t even know they were carrying a load—which, considering the tiny mass of nerve ganglia that passed for a brain in their midsection, was very probably true.
The men had worked like furies. Everything that could possibly be done to lighten the hulls was tried. Weapons and armor were stripped; precious gasoline out of fuel tanks and into mobile trailer tanks pulled by the patient legworms; cordage, supplies, even portable stoves and the boat generators were unbolted and fixed to the tops of the worms. Engines were even taken out and put on boat trailers.
In fact, the weapons and engines were more valuable than the hulls. Evansville had plenty of river-worthy hulls, what they lacked were arms and engines.
Valentine gauged their progress to the sound of winter-dry grass crunching under hundreds of clawlike feet, a sound that reminded him of a covered cauldron of popcorn popping. “How long to get them back to the Ohio?” he asked the Gunslinger legworm drover.
Another legworm passed, this one hauling a smaller boat on an old-fashioned trailer with oversized wheels. Despite the wheels, the drovers called the contraptions “sleds.” Other sleds carried engines, armor plating, light cannon on the river-craft mounts, and booty from the warehouses too heavy to risk mounting on the back of one of the worms. Put too heavy a load in one particular spot, and the shaggy skin tended to simply slide off in a big, wet, mattress-sized piece.
“A damn long day, I expect. You boys do your end, we’ll do ours.”
They had one scrape with a column of light armor out of Cadiz that resulted in a night action.
Frat’s Wolves gave them plenty of warning as to size and route.
Gamecock’s Bears, eager to use their new weapons, hustled off to set up machine guns and light cannon. Valentine, restricted to an observation point coordinating the attacks of the Bears and Wolves, saw only the night action from a distance.
The captured ordnance of the River Patrol used an interesting mix of tracer—blues, greens, and reds. Perhaps the distinctive rainbow tracers helped the River Patrol distinguish friendly from enemy craft. Valentine filed the knowledge away, might come in handy at some future point.
Meanwhile, he had boats to drag to the Ohio.
“Well done, Valentine,” Colonel Lambert said, looking over the boats.
“But what’s with all the aphrodisiacs? Is there something in the works I should know about?”
“Yeah, Val, big weekend planned?”
“I’m not sure—,” Valentine said.
“We have twelve cases of Kurian Zone sexual stimulant under a couple of names.”
“That was me, suh,” Gamecock said. “I made sure they brought it along. Not for us, now, but I thought it might be useful for trade. The Grogs love it. Gets them high as kites and horny as hell.”
It was the sort of fuzzy case high-priced jewelry used to come in, a purple so deep it could pass for black in all but the best light.
Valentine opened the presentation case. A shiny old piece of plastic lay inside, a cheap mockery of a police badge.
BROTHEL INSPECTOR
it read.
“I found it last summer in the ruins of a dollar store,” Duvalier said. “I’ve been carrying the stupid thing around ever since, waiting for the right opportunity.”
“Hilarious,” Valentine said.
“You should go over to Orfordville and break it in,” Frat said. “The Wolves say there are a couple of nice houses there. The Ordnance patrols west of Louisville sometimes de-uniform and sneak over.”
“They’re true Kentucky as bourbon. We get regular reports about any loose tongues.”
The party chuckled.
Ahn-Kha’s uneven ears were up and forward. “I do not understand.”
Duvalier, boosting herself up with his axe-handle shoulder like a gymnast mounting a pommel horse, whispered something in his ear.
“Humans,” he muttered, shaking his head.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Banquets: Southern Command is famous for holding feasts at the drop of a hat. There are always a few volunteers ready to drop a hat themselves, if a better reason isn’t on the calendar or out-box.
Word of a “feed” passes quickly, even before the barbecue smoke rises. In this case, the smoke was from one of the winter hogs raised on camp food waste and the inevitable spoiled food brought in on the irregular supply runs up the Ohio River by Southern Command’s “Mosquito Fleet.”
Fort Seng’s were never as resourceful as Southern Command regulars at scrounging “grits, grease, and gluss”—the first two being traditional Transmississippi staples, the third liquor mashed, heated, and dripped out of any stray carbohydrates at hand. Gluss, another of the many names for army busthead, was a variant on Mosquito Fleet acronym General Liquor Unspecified, Standard Ration. Southern Command’s boatmen were legendary in the aptitude for acquiring alcohol—strictly for purifying questionable river water, of course—and, to cut down on the cases of ethanol poisoning, their captains took to issuing a small daily ration unit.
The captured boats were returned briefly to the Ohio, but only to be taken up a short length of river to Evansville, where they were again hauled up out of the water and brought into riverside workshops. One boat, kept fully intact and armed in its drag across Western Kentucky, was tied up next to the old casino, to be used for training.
The battalion was in the best spirits Valentine had ever seen. Upon returning from the operation, the companies that had gone out to get the boats immediately set to laundering and cleaning and polishing their bodies, uniforms, and equipment as though they couldn’t wait to be sent out again.
They’d proved themselves before, certainly, in the fight against the ravies outbreak of the winter. But that had been purely reactive. The raids on Site Green and Respite Point were their idea, successfully carried out by the battalion.
Colonel Lambert decided they needed a reward. The first of the spring vegetables were in, along with a bountiful amount of strawberries, so she decided to sacrifice a few head of cattle for a big steak fry.
They used the big open field to the south where the brigade’s horses grazed. It was the largest stretch of flat, open ground in the confines of the fort. With the horses cleared away, it served as an athletic field for football, soccer, and baseball—and conditioning sprints, of course.
Glass volunteered to miss the festivities—he was no social animal, and stayed with Ford and Chevy, his heavy-weapons Grogs, and the company left on security. Especially at a celebration like this the Grogs sometimes caused trouble. They believed the greatest warrior ate first and most and had trouble with the human tendency to share out by the plateful.
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