March in Country (24 page)
Authors: EE Knight
One of the men Ahn-Kha had armed with a shotgun fired right into one of the giant Grog’s faces. It turned away, threw out an arm and punched the man into red-topped mush.
Another was crushed beneath a stomping foot the size of a wheelbarrow.
Ford and Chevy, the core of Valentine’s old heavy-weapons group, each carried a vehicular machine gun in a harness. They held their guns high so as not to hit any of their allied, and scattered bursts at the monsters. Valentine saw bullets strike, tearing out chunks of hide, but the beasts showed no more sign of feeling it than the armored car Valentine had shot some weeks before.
Valentine froze. The giant Grogs had yellow eyes with slit pupils.
One opened a cavernous mouth as though to bellow in his face. Instead, a stabbing, barbed tongue the size of a harpoon shot toward Valentine’s chest.
He ducked under both tongue and chin, swung the axe with every iota of strength he could summon. The blade buried itself deep in the beast’s neck. It let out a startled cry and reared, dragging the axe handle out of Valentine’s hands.
Its tongue was limp and flopping. Valentine must have severed some nerve, or the trunk of the tongue itself.
Weaponless, Valentine froze. The creature stepped forward and put a wide foot on its own tongue. It crashed down, threatening to bury Valentine, but a powerful arm hauled him back.
Ahn-Kha blasted another of the beasts in the eye with his shotgun, wielding it with the quick ease of an experienced gunfighter with a pistol.
“We must run, my David. Explosives are needed!” Ahn-Kha said.
The creature Valentine had struck in the neck fell dead at last.
One of the Grog-reapers had picked up a tent pole and swung it this way and that, knocking soldiers about like a man killing rats with a club.
It was Bee who finally turned them back. She rushed forward with a white tank resembling a field soup pot in one hand and a burning rag on a stick in the other.
She hurled the tank, tearing the valve free with her toe. Valentine heard it hissing as it flew. She followed it with the brand, then threw herself on her face.
“Good thinking, Bee,” Valentine said.
She said something in return. Valentine recognized the Grog word for “fire.”
“She heard you say that they needed to be killed with fire,” Ahn-Kha said. “A propane tank makes the most fire she’s ever seen.”
“Well, they sure blew the hell out of that barbecue, suh,” Gamecock said, surveying the smoldering ruin of cookout, helicopter, and giant Reaper the next morning.
The salvage teams crawled over the corpses of the helicopters, uniformed ants on mechanical carcasses wielding wrenches, tin snips, and screwdrivers.
Pellwell, meanwhile, had forgotten her ratbits for a moment. Or if not forgotten, was at least ignoring them in her haste to examine the beastly mega-Reapers. She’d scared up a camera from somewhere and was taking pictures and writing notes with each frame.
“Hey, they did us a favor. Maybe we can fill the craters with wood and roast a couple pigs.”
“Dangers of a night attack. There might be confusion.”
Valentine shook his head, wondering. “I’ll give this to Atlanta. They learned who hit them. They struck back, and meant it. Both had some bad luck tonight. They attacked a barbecue rather than our main buildings. We lost months’ worth of work.”
“Let’s hear from observation points. North, south, east and west. All of them, and send out patrols. The air raid might have been a setup for the finish.”
“If they want us out of Fort Seng,” Valentine said. “I wonder if it might be best to accommodate them.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Trails: North America is once again a land of trails. With so much wartime destruction and neglect to land corridors, outside of an individual Kurian Zone or the free territories, getting from here to there proceeds mostly in fits and starts. One makes a fast, exhausting dash of long days of travel to the next safe area, where packs can be refilled, animals rested and exchanged, fuel and munitions purchased—if they’re available, that is. Complex does not even begin to describe it.
It’s possible to carve out a new trail, of course. One just needs the manpower to establish waypoint bases for rest and resupply. There’s already a well-established trail between Southern Command and Fort Seng; the only thing that changes are the river crossing points on the Mississippi and the Tennessee. Escapees from the Kurian Zone flow one way, a trickle of replacements and supplies travels the other.
What Valentine and company propose to do has not been tried before on this scale. Their plan involves establishing a one-shot “river trail” from the Mississippi bank north of Saint Louis to Evansville. There are no substantial Kurian forts on the river between the two points, as the area largely belongs to the Grogs. While the land route would be much shorter in miles, the river will allow speed, which could prove vital for transferring a stadium full of Golden Ones without it turning into a late twenty-first-century trail of tears.
“You know, David,” Brother Mark said, “there’s a fine old saying ripened by the distinction of years. Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is one definition of insanity. Which is how establishing a new freehold in the mid-South is beginning to look to these weary eyes.”
The old renegade churchman smelled like mothballs and spiced aftershave to Valentine. It was an oddly comforting mixture, suggesting generations of familial secrets. He was bone tired from putting the fort back together after the air raid, seeing the worst of the wounded into the Evansville hospital, and finishing the plan with Ediyak. “I think ‘
if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again
’ is even older.”
if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again
’ is even older.”
The battalion officers sat in the big entrance hall to headquarters, overstuffed chairs pulled into a circle and sentries posted at the doors and windows. Lambert had finished presenting the plan she, Ediyak, and Valentine had worked out for moving whatever Golden Ones wanted to come to Kentucky.
“It might be wiser to pull back down the Ohio to the other side of the Mississippi,” Brother Mark said.
Ediyak gulped and grew wide-eyed. She’d spent much of her life in the Kurian Zone, and when a churchman spoke, you listened and complied.
“The new freehold was your idea,” Lambert said. “We military types, once we get hold of something, crack our heads against it until one gives way.”
“Can’t stop now. The Kentuckians have thrown in with us,” Valentine said.
“Nobly spoken,” Brother Mark said. “But we’ve brought with us all four horsemen, and they’ve had a run of the land. The Western Coal fields and much of the Pennyroyal is empty, thanks to the ravies virus.”
“Depends on how you define empty,” Devlin said, attending to represent their nearest allies, the Gunslinger Clan. “There are still a lot of legworm herds. We had a good spring for legworm leather. Maybe the cold kept parasites and rats out of the eggs, I dunno, but there’s a record number of young legworms crawling. Those Wolves of yours make good hands for herding once they learn which end is which and how to move ’em along.”
“They should be patrolling,” Lambert grumbled. “I’ll talk to Carlson about it.”
“We’re letting them keep some of the legworm leather from the eggs for their help. It’s good for trade with just about anyone.”
“We’re getting away from the point. Ahn-Kha, how quickly can your people get set up here?”
“Two generations ago the Kurians promised us a rich, green land with good rock for building. I’ve never seen such limestone as is in the hills here. Rich deposits of silver sand, err, what is your word—”
“Mica,” Lambert said. “Used for some glasses, drywall, electrical insulation, and so on,” Lambert said. “Evansville’s still doing a little of that on a shoestring.”
“Mica. Thank you, my colonel,” Ahn-Kha said. “This is good land. Very good. Certainly a milder climate than shivering Omaha. One season of growing, another of building, and we will have the beginnings of roots.”
“The whole history of Kentucky is nothing but immigrants,” Devlin said. “We’re flexible, as long as you let us be. We adapted to using the legworms pretty darn quick. We’d rather have big fellas like Uncle here than the Kurians.”
“Still, I’d better touch base with the provisional government and the Army of Kentucky,” Lambert said. “Brother Mark, are you up for the trip?”
“My spirit never objects to seeing old friends again. My hips and shoulders, however ...”
“The hard part will be getting them to Saint Louis,” Valentine said. “From there, we can use the Mississippi.”
Over the next three days they finalized the plan. Valentine found himself in awe, yet again, at Lambert’s command of detail. And the sheer amount of work she and her two assistants—camp scuttlebutt said she worked one until he keeled over, by which time the other had usually revived from his own marathon session. The three of them plus a secretary clerk for typing orders, produced a working plan.
Still, more had been left to chance than Lambert liked. Valentine had learned to trust luck backed up by tactical flexibility to see himself through difficulties, which would come one way or another.
Control of the river would make so many of these issues simply vanish. The Kurians had held the great rivers of the North American middle—what Lambert had compared to the central arteries of the circulatory system—for so long, both sides had grown accustomed to taking that as a given, like weather or seasons or growing cycles. Certainly, a talented smuggler like Captain Mantilla could get through with his anonymous and ever-reconfigured and repainted boat, but the barges of supplies that would make operating in Kentucky or Missouri or into the rusted-out cities along the Ohio would never pass without notice.
When was the last time anyone tried?
Valentine wondered.
Valentine wondered.
Any way they looked at it, use of the rivers would simplify matters. The tonnage requirements of moving such a population was nothing to a string of barges.
Still, their alternative was workable. Not without risk, but workable.
He and Lambert planned to divide the camp in two very unequal forces, minus those unfit or unable to make the trip, who would remain at Fort Seng.
Lambert would be in charge of “Force Heavy.” Driving every young legworm they could gather, they’d cut across Western Kentucky two waypoints, one on the Ohio of the proposed riverine route, another overland. East of the Tennessee, Kentucky was dangerous ground filled with bounty hunters, legworm ranchers who hadn’t joined, and patrols and troops from Memphis. They could buy stores of food from the locals with packaged and processed legworm flesh, hides, and some captured Moondagger weaponry and whatever footwear and metal cooking pots they could scrape together from Evansville’s market.
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