Valentine's Rising (50 page)

 

There was already a pamphlet printed about the fight at Big Rock Hill. It was rolled up in Valentine's bag next to his order book. He'd read a few pages—the author had relied on the collected radio reports from the hill for a day-by-day record of events, as interpreted for him by a decorated veteran of the Central Operational area named Captain Randolph—and given up after it described Lieutenant Colonel Kessey's brilliant rising in the prison yards of New Columbia, when a Quisling division was put to flight by men keen on avenging their outraged women. He'd heard they were renaming the battlefield Kessey Heights, which was fine with him. Her body lay on it.

Folded into the pamphlet, for protection rather than as a book-mark, was a radiogram from Jamaica.

The Quickwood tree would have a nice life ouside Weening. He found a boy from the Peterson family—they'd been the first to see the empty homes of Weening for the opportunity they presented and move the extended family there. The boy was eleven and watched him through wary but intelligent eyes. He seemed old enough for the responsibility of watching over the tree. Valentine didn't want some clown clearing brush to cut down the Quickwood sapling.

Valentine tried to explain the importance of Quickwood to Mr. Peterson, but to the literal-minded man it came down to a tree that could grow a magic wooden stake that killed vampires. Valentine left it at that. There were things to do, so many things to do. Solon's dream of owning the Mississippi and its tributaries vanished with the consul, but far-sighted men from Texas to the Ozarks might be able to bring the evil man's idea to fruition—under new management, of course. Already there was talk of taking back New Orleans. Then the great gateway to the Caribbean would be open, a navy could be floated, and Southern Command would be able to put troops anywhere a keel could go.

And he could see his daughter.

Someday the Quickwood could be used properly. He'd returned to the Free Territory thinking the Haitian discovery would be a wedge he could drive into the heart of the Kurian Order, piercing it and breaking it up the way he did logs. But a wedge was only as good as the force driving it. All along, it had been cooperation between people, himself and Ahn-Kha, Styachowski and Post, Narcisse and Hank, Samoza and Jefferson, each doing their part in a whole that was even now being born.

How had the governor phrased it, after the formal military union of Texas and the Free Territory? “A new stake of freedom wedged between the Mississippi and the Gulag”? Something like that. Valentine liked to think of it as seed. A fast-growing seed, he hoped, and as deadly to the Kurian Order as the Quickwood he'd scattered over hundreds of square miles.

“Here you go, Gabby,” Valentine said, covering the seed with moist earth fresh from the river. He knelt at the nongrave. “Keep it safe for me. Something happened this summer. A miracle. We took the worst they could throw at us—ended up the stronger for it. The Texans have the Dallas Triangle ringed in now, and we're sending captured artillery to finish the job. It's only a matter of time. I've got a daughter, if you can believe it. And here I've planted my last seed. It's a good day for me. It's a new beginning for us.”

The future beckoned. The past, his regrets, his mistakes, all lay buried with the seed. No more looking back.

David Valentine glanced up at the hot noonday sun and wiped the sweat from his forehead, now beneath chin-length black hair, and wondered at the strange fate that saw him in the right place at the right time. Dreadful and deadly work still needed to be done, but it was work born of Hope.

 

David Valentine breathed in a last snootful of clean air and descended into the muskrat-den reek. He stepped down carefully, holding an uprooted young dandelion in his gun-free hand. The stairway to the old control tower basement was mostly gone. The entryway had been enlarged, replaced by churned-over earth paved with plywood strips dropping eight feet to the hole in the cinderblock side of the foundation where the basement door had been.

The entrance to the Razorbacks' headquarters resembled an oversized anthole, if anything. It fooled the eyes that sometimes drifted high above the besiegers' positions.

He rested his gun in a cleaning becket and stood on a carpet remnant in the entryway while he let his eyes adjust to the dim light within. Deaf old Pooter, one of the regiment's guinea pigs, rolled up onto his hind legs and whistled a welcome from his chicken-wire cage perched on a shelf next to the door. Valentine tossed him the dandelion.

“They didn't hit us after all,” he told Pooter.

Pooter chuckled as a length of milky dandelion stem disappeared into his fast-working jaws.

If the Kurians dusted again, Pooter would expire in a noisy hacking fit, giving the men inside time to ring the alarm, lower the plastic curtains, and put on their gas masks and gloves.

Valentine felt tired. He'd spent the past eight hours moving across the forward posts, keyed up for a battle that never came. He was probably more tired than he would have been had there been action: The weird I'm-alive-and-I-can-do-anything exhilaration of surviving combat would have floated him back to the Razors' HQ.

In the five weeks they'd occupied the airfield, Narcisse and her staff had set up sinks and stoves, and even had a pizza oven going. Companies rotating to or from the forward positions always had a pizza party before creeping out to their strongpoints, covering the approaches to Dallas. Narcisse wore no uniform, held no rank, and wandered between the battalions' kitchens and infirmary as the mood struck her, dispensing equal helpings of cheer and food, pulled in her wheelchair by a steadfast mutt who'd wandered into camp on the Razorbacks' trip south from the Ouachitas. The men and women whose job it was to aid and comfort the frontline soldiers obeyed the old legless Haitian as though she were a visiting field marshal.

Valentine said good morning to the potato peelers, who were working under faded paint that once demarked a maintenance garage. He rinsed his hands and poured himself a mug of water from the hot pot. He plopped in one of Narcisse's herbal tea bags from a woven basket on a high shelf. He covered his brew-up with a plastic lid masquerading as a saucer and took the stairs down to the subbasement and the hooches.

He smelled the steeping tea on the way down the stairs. It tasted faintly of oranges—God only knew how Narcisse came up with orange peel—and seemed to go to whatever part of the body most needed a fix. If you were constipated, it loosened you; if you were squirting, it plugged you. It took away headache and woke you up in the morning and calmed the jitters that came during a long spell of shellfire.

Valentine had a room to himself down among the old plumbing fixtures and electrical junction boxes. In the distance a generator clattered, steadily supplying juice but sounding as though it were unhappy with the routine. A little nearer down the hall Colonel Meadows occupied an old security office, but Valentine didn't see light creeping out from under the door, so he turned and moved aside the bedsheet curtaining off his quarters.

Even before his eyes picked out the L-shaped hammock in his wire-frame bed, his nose told him that someone lay in his room. A pale leg ending in a callused hammertoed foot emerged from the wooly army blanket, and a knife-cut shock of short red hair could just be distinguished at the other end.

Alessa Duvalier was back from the heart of Dallas.

Valentine examined the foot. Some people showed experiences of a hard life through their eyes, others in their rough hands; a few, like Narcisse, were bodily crippled. While the rest of Duvalier was rather severely pretty, even exquisite when mood or necessity struck, Duvalier's feet manifested everything bad the Cat had been through. Dark, with filth between the toes, hard-heeled, toes twisted, and dirt-crusted nails chipped, scabbed at the ankle, callused, and scarred from endless miles on worn-through socks—her feet alone told a gruesome tale.

A pair of utility sinks held her gear, reeking of camphor from its smell in the decontamination barrel, her sword-concealing walking stick lying atop more mundane boots and socks.

“Val, that you?” she said sleepily from under the blanket, voice muffled, a fistful of wool over her mouth and nose to keep out the basement chill. She shifted, and he caught a flash of upper thigh. She'd fallen into his bed wearing only a slop shirt. They'd never been lovers, but were as comfortable around each other as a married couple.

“Yeah.”

“Room for two.”

Not really; it was a small bed. “Shower first. Then I want to hear—”

“One more hour. I got in at oh-four.”

“I was out at the forward posts. Pickets didn't report you—”

She snorted. Valentine heard Hank's quick step on the stairs he'd just come down.

He looked at his self-winding watch, a gift from Meadows when the colonel assumed command of the Razorbacks. The engraved inscription on the back proclaimed forty-eight-year-old eternal love between a set of initials both ending in C. “One more hour, then. Breakfast?”

“Anything.”

Valentine took a reviving spout-shower that kept Hank busy bearing hot water down from the kitchen.

“Haven't seen Ahn-Kha this morning, have you?”

“No, sir,” Hank said, reverting to military expression with the ease of long practice.

Valentine hadn't smelled the Grog's presence at headquarters, but Ahn-Kha kept to himself in a partially blocked stairwell when he was at the headquarters. Ahn-Kha was evaluating and drilling some of the newer Razorbacks, mostly Texan volunteers who'd been funneled to them through Southern Command's haphazard field personnel depot north of the city. Southern Command tended to get recruits the all-Texan units didn't want, and Ahn-Kha knew how to turn lemons into lemonade. The first thing Valentine wanted recruits to learn was to respect Grogs, whether they were friends or enemies.

Way too many lives had been lost thanks to mistakes in the past.

Valentine asked Hank to go fill a tray, saw that the light was on in Meadows' office, and poked his head in to see if his superior had anything new on the rumored attack.

“Forward posts all quiet, sir,” Valentine reported. “Anything happen here?”

Meadows was closing his shirt, his missing-fingered hand working the buttons up the seam like a busy insect. “Not even the usual harassing fire. They're finally running out of shells. Big Wings overhead in the night.”