March in Country (32 page)

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Authors: EE Knight

BOOK: March in Country
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Fat Daddy got a grip on his shirt and started slapping him, hard, back and forth. Valentine lashed out, felt his fist glance off a meaty pectoral rather than the chin he’d been aiming for.
“
Oh, will you
,” Fat Daddy snarled. The slaps turned into closed-fist blows, hard, into the painful sweet T between nose and eyeline.
Valentine went momentarily blind. He felt more hands grabbing at him, a hot panting.
“Finish his ass-face off, Daddy,” Beach Boy said, strong fingers suddenly pulling at his hair.
The smooth-chested bastard twisted his ear, hard, as though trying to tear it off. Something that must have been a brick struck him in the jaw, and through sheets of rainbow lighting Valentine saw Fat Daddy pulling back for another punch.
Then it came. The red rage. It flooded through Valentine’s bloodstream from somewhere behind his liver. When it hit his chest and heart, he felt as though his hot muscles might burn through his skin. Valentine had Bear blood in him by way of his father. A lifetime of unconscious emotional training held it in check—but when some combination of pain, fear, anger, and sweat washed through him, the shadow monster slipped its leash.
He pulled the two men pinning his arms down to the ground—hard. Fingers closed on a forearm and he felt a snap, his fist tightened as though he were pinching off a flowing garden hose. With his right hand he grabbed something—anything—and got a finger. He twisted and it popped off like a banana squeezed out of its skin.
Beach Boy shrieked and hopped away, injured hand clasped between his knees.
Fat Daddy looked down in horror. Valentine saw his snarl reflected in the formerly eager eyes.
Valentine spun on his hip so his body faced opposite Fat Daddy’s, got his instep across his throat, and kept a hold tight on the chunky arms.
A horrible crushing, choking sound from his windpipe:
Kckchckhhh . . .
Whistles and calls of
fight! Fight in the pens!
sounded like the distant roaring of falls in a canyon far below.
Valentine rose, picked up Fat Daddy by the waistband and neck-hole, and threw him around like a tackling dummy. Thunk—up against the wall. Then Valentine tested the man’s ability to cushion an attempt to bust through the cinder blocks. He smelled blood. The cinder blocks didn’t give but something in the man did and Valentine upended him onto the floor and came down after him, leading with a hard-driving elbow as though trying to knock a new drain hole. Again, the floor resisted the blow, but a cartilaginous sound like a thick sheaf of paper tearing showed that his victim’s body saved the floor from its punishment. Valentine picked him up again and saw men scattering, threw the broken body through one set of bunks and knocking down a second.
Valentine raged around an ever-widening circle of men in white scrubs. Some sane sliver of his consciousness realized he was foaming at the mouth.
Then the floor rose up and hit him, hard. He felt water pounding up his back and realized the cleaning hose had been turned on the room.
Of course there was an inquiry into Fat Daddy’s death. Pappy broke the silence of the labor gang.
“Was two-on-one, chief. First blood was on Fat Daddy’s fists.”
Looking at the damage to Hole Three’s boss, the inquiry evidently assumed some sort of group justice had taken place, and Valentine, being the new guy, was “volunteered” to show some damage and had his lights convincingly punched out. The query was closed as quickly as it was opened, at least insofar as the healing Valentine could tell.
The men in the pens seemed to assume that Valentine wanted the strongman-leader position vacated by Fat Daddy. They took to calling him Fast Scar and offered tobacco, toiletries, even tin cups of sack-made fruit-cocktail wine that might be mistaken for some sort of acidic drain cleaner.
Valentine wasn’t interested in having toadies or allocating who would change whose bedsheets and when in exchange for downcast eyes whenever he passed. But he did see to it everyone had their soap again.
“Sort it out yourself,” he said with a shrug to other matters.
The food was dreadful, the worst kind of Kurian Zone canned, waterlogged vegetables and freeze-dried shoe leather passing as meat. Only copious amounts of ketchup, the one condiment available (no need for salt; every dish tasted like it had been dragged through an oceanside brine pool).
Valentine had earned himself a reputation as a fighter. They sometimes gave him the day off, then at night he’d be taken to the old entry rotunda on the megachurch, an octagon that might have been a modernized Globe Theatre in that three levels of audience could look down on him from balconies leading to various spaces in the headquarters building. There, under strings of lights hanging down from the skylight, he’d go up to three rounds in a boxing match or a no-holds-barred fight. Valentine gave a good account of himself, despite not being able to box, though the gloves and soft toes of the kickboxing boots often left his face swollen and painful.
He found, in his fights, that it took a few blows before his blood started jumping. For all his years as a fighting man, he wasn’t much with his fists, the more skilled boxers shed his blows like a slicker kept the rain off. Only once his nose was bleeding and body blows making each rib come alive in pain did it come. Then, no matter how skilled his opponent, it was just a matter of harrying him into a corner and beating down his guard with blow after blow after blow until the ref pulled him off. The men in his corner took to throwing an ice-cold towel over his head like a panicked horse.
“He’s like some kind of fuckin’ machine,” a spring-steel hard sergeant gasped to his own corner when Valentine knocked him down the second round, under the eyes of the Gray Baron himself, watching from a balcony. The sergeant was Mongo Station’s reigning boxing champion and fought any weight. “Gasoline on a fire. The more you put into him, the harder he hits back.”
The reputation came with its rewards. They finally issued him some sheets and a pillow, for a start. Ahn-Kha reported that his price had suddenly been met, and he’d had a second offer from the big Gray One Deathring tribal leader, an aging veteran of a hundred battles named “Danger Close,” that he’d like Valentine as an armed bodyguard. Danger Close hadn’t named a price specifically, but it seemed an obligation to him was a good thing to have, whatever the color of your skin and fur.
“They’re getting suspicious,” Ahn-Kha said.
“I have a feeling I can get away from the labor gang easier than this Danger Close. Take the money and get back to the camp. Tell Duvalier that she may need to start poking around headquarters, if she hasn’t already. Assassinating this Gray Baron might be our only out.”
Ahn-Kha didn’t make any obvious comments about the difficulty of killing a warlord in his own headquarters. “Even if that happens, as long as the order my people made their agreement with exists, they will be bound to it.”
“No discontent at all.”
“Well, some grumbling. Those born since the surrender are not bound to its terms, and may leave at maturity if they wish. The men are recruiting them to be in athletic contests and pretend marches and that sort of thing, handing out many toys and prizes. Their elders do not care to see the young ones seduced into being little more than prouder versions of the Deathring Tribe.”
“I need to get going,” Valentine said. “Try and set up a communication system with the ratbits. They should be able to get into the camp at night without much difficulty. If there are any dogs other than strays living off scraps, I haven’t seen them.”
“If you get into difficulty, try to set a smoky fire. Chieftain can arrange a diversion, and you should be able to escape.”
“No heroics this time,” Valentine said. “If I get stuck in here, I’ll just follow orders and bide my time.”
There was another benefit, as Valentine found out when they brought him out of the hole on a warm, three-quarter-moon night.
At first they walked in silence, but as the cavernous headquarters building receded, they started joking about Valentine spending the night on stud detail.
“Don’t worry, buck. With a woman,” the older of the two said.
They brought him to a small trailer house at the base of the hill behind headquarters. It was one of several in a little, politely fenced grove. Valentine heard a woman singing through an open window, and a pair of lusty young voices, wailing away into the night.
They stepped up to an aluminum door. Little Gray One fetishes were tacked three-deep all around it, offerings of teeth and fingers again. “Time to do your duty, Arms,” one of them called through the screen door, rapping.
“’Bout time she earned a pink or blue star,” his comrade said. He’d had some sort of dreadful wound to his cheek, running from the corner of his mouth almost up to the ear.
No one answered the call, or the rapping. Valentine smelled new paint and stale tobacco coming from inside the trailer home. He noticed that the electrical system for this cluster of trailers consisted of what looked like extension cords running on poles back to a concrete platform.
“Bet she’s out dancing in the moonlight, again.”
They took Valentine out around the trailer and up along a little creek. The cool evening air poured into him like a fizzy tonic after spreading shit all day, washing up with a cake of soap seemingly as invulnerable to water and lather as aluminum.
They traced the creek back to a natural spring, or perhaps a natural pool that collected water from the hills. It lay in a little, thickly wooded dimple on the hillside.
A woman splashed in the water there. It took Valentine a moment to realize she was dancing in the ankle-deep pool. She did a routine displaying a rope around her arm.
No, the darkness had fooled him. It was a snake.
She was a diminutive little thing, smaller even than Ediyak. One of his escorts whistled.
“Hey, showgirl. Biological duty time.”
She turned her head just enough to take a glance.
“Biological each other, why don’t you. I’m busy. It’s Warmoon Feast in three days, if you didn’t know. Gotta dance for Danger Close.”
“This comes from the Baron himself, sweetie,” the one with the scar-lengthened mouth said.
“Don’t bend her too hard, buck,” the other said quietly. “She’s little, but she’s like one of them snakes.”
She stopped her dance, lowered her head, and took a deep breath. After a moment, she turned.
She was wearing an oversized undershirt and as far as Valentine could see through the wet clasp of damp cotton, nothing else. She waded up, making no effort to hide her body.
“I don’t know you,” she said to Valentine.
“You will soon,” scar-mouth sniggered.
“Forced labor? Really? What, amI a last request? He gonna get shot at sunrise?” If she showed any resentment at being ordered to service someone at a moment’s notice, she was hiding it well.
“Nothing like that. The Baron just liked the cut of his genes.”
“Not bad looking, either,” she said, tickling the copperhead wrapped about her arm. It was a “Her face wasn’t beautiful, but she could be called pretty,” and an energy crackled out of her through the clinging T-shirt. It was easy for Valentine to imagine her being the source of the bubbling spring, a kind of Lady of the Lake. Or, going back a couple millennia in the literary world, holding an apple in her bower.

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