by E. E. Knight
A little higher-pitched whine: "The doc said out for twelve hours for sure. Nothing like that, nothing near."
"Knowing his system, he probably just had a nice nap," a female voice added. She cleared her throat. "Get him inside and sit him up. I'll get the others."
Nice nap, indeed. Valentine flexed, tried to clear the creosote someone had substituted for blood in his limbs. They settled him into a chair and he felt a distasteful squish in his underwear.
A needle went into his arm. This time he stayed awake.
Sort of.
Hard to tell if time was passing or not. He swore, but it came out as a dry-throated moan. It seemed the first part of his brain that was willing to try to work his mouth had a vocabulary limited to profanity.
More words, but they didn't make sense.
Then he was awake, only now the fabric over his face was wet; so were his chest and shoulders.
"Up and at 'em, Valentine," the husky voice said, more intelligibly this time.
They know my name. This can't be good.
Husky voice again: "You reading me?"
Valentine needed time to think, but more water came.
"Anyone want to work him over with a bar of soap? He really needs it," a faraway female voice said. Hard to tell if it was the same one he'd heard before; the earlier conversation came back vague as a dream.
Another voice, female, nearer: "David S. Valentine, former major with Southern Command, we meet at last."
"Mutfurker," Valentine croaked.
"I suppose you know you've made a lot of powerful enemies. Someone gets to be too big a thorn, it gets pulled out and snapped." A throat clearing followed by a soft cough. This voice was the same as the one in the car.
"Death teams, man," the husky voice said. "You got death teams on your ass. Just like the one that got your folks. Just like the one that has you now."
"He's awake now, I saw his head jerk," the faraway female voice said.
So that's it, Valentine thought. I wonder if they'll leave me strung up like F. A. James in Iowa. No, some Kurian will get me.
Husky voice: "Big reward. All we have to do is take you north of the Missouri. We'll all be rich."
"Spend it right away, you pricks," Valentine said. The words were slurred but sounded intelligible enough to him. "There's some Bears and a Cat who'll get you in turn."
Valentine heard light footsteps and the bag came off his face—a little painfully, it took a scab on his chin with it.
Alessa Duvalier stood in front of him, holding the feed sack. Her freckles had faded with the season and she had a fresh bandage on her hand. A long, tattered coat hung off her thin shoulders. "If I'm s'posed to be the Cat, I wouldn't be so sure, Val," she said. "I still remember the tap you gave me in St. Louis. The cut inside my mouth took forever to heal."
Confused relief flooded Valentine. He tried to form words, but they wouldn't come. His eyes went wet.
"Get him some water, Roberts," a woman in uniform said from the other side of the room. The air smelled like mold and termites. She had her back to him, and was studying a series of wedding pictures on the wall. It had peeling paper and old, dust-covered fixtures that at one time had thrown light on the pictures. A few pieces of furniture with the cushions long removed had been pushed against the walls, and Valentine noted that he sat at one end of an oval dinner table, once a fine piece of work but now scratched and water warped. A single fat white candle leaned at the center of the table, providing the only illumination in the room.
A short, wiry man with horn-rimmed glasses in a Southern Command uniform offered the mouth of a canteen. Valentine noticed a corporal's chevron on his arm. "Just water," he said, in a surprisingly deep voice for his slender frame. Valentine drank, marking another man in Wolf leathers snoring on the bare spring bed of a sofa, oblivious to the conversation.
"So I've been recaptured by Southern Command?" Valentine said.
"For the record: name, place of birth, most recent rank?" the female with her back to him said.
"David Stuart Valentine, unincorporated Minnesota, major," Valentine supplied.
"He's sensible enough," Duvalier said. "Hungry, Valentine?"
"I'll eat." Valentine was shocked to see Moira Styachowski step in from another room. His artillery officer from the fight for Big Rock Hill on the banks of the Arkansas had put on a little weight since last he saw her, but her face still looked pale and her eyes tired.
"Quite a reunion," Valentine said as Duvalier slid flatbread and a jar that smelled like fatted bean paste across the table.
"More than you know," the woman studying the photos said. She turned. A trim, neatly attired woman with a colonel's bird on her tightly buttoned collar regarded him with sparkling eyes.
Valentine felt a little like a hog at a county fair set before a judge. Sharp chin to match the eyes ...
"Dots," Valentine said.
"For my sins, Colonel Lambert now," she said, her words cold and hard.
"Excuse me for not saluting," Valentine said. "I'm cuffed."
"Val, don't be difficult," Duvalier said.
"It's a private joke, Smoke," Lambert said. "I remember he once told me that he'd be saluting me someday, back when he was at the War College."
Duvalier, now sitting at the table, raised an intrigued eyebrow at him and he shook his head.
"Can I clean myself up?" Valentine asked.
"Please," Duvalier said.
"Roberts, take off the cuffs and show him his things," Lambert said.
The corporal led him to what had once been the house's kitchen. A ten-gallon jug of water sat on the counter; soap, towel, razor, and washcloth rested in a bucket.
Valentine saw packs and a duffel. The corporal extracted a set of Southern Command fatigues from one of them. Valentine recognized his old cammies from his stint as operations officer in the ad hoc regiment known as the Razors. His nose detected mothballs, though someone had made an effort to freshen up the uniform by packing it with acacia buds.
Valentine cleaned himself up, passed a forefinger over the thick fabric of the battle dress. Clever of Lambert. Once he was in uniform, sitting across the table from others in similar dress, old dutiful habits would naturally follow the way phrases come back when an adult who has long been in foreign lands speaks the language of home.
But Southern Command had made it amply clear that he was disposable. Valentine eschewed the uniform.
He heard a murmur from the other room and hardened his ears, but the exchange stopped almost as soon as it started. He returned to the table, the pleasant scent of clean women a welcome change in his nostrils.
Lambert watched him approach with steady eyes, a battered leather courier bag open in front of her. Styachowski was smearing peanut butter on a hard roll. Duvalier had taken off her duster and piled a small revolver, knives, and her old sword-cane on the seat next to her.
Valentine sat, the three women at the other end of the table making him feel like Macbeth looking across the cauldron at his witches.
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes," he said.
Styachowski paused, the roll halfway to her mouth. Duvalier's nose twitched, but perhaps Lambert recognized the allusion. Her eyes warmed a trifle.
Valentine waited to hear it, playing with refusals ranging from polite to obscene.
"By now you've guessed we're not here to haul you back to the Nut," Styachowski said.
"I'll listen," Valentine said. "Right up until you slide the pardon across the table. I'm working up saliva."
"You can walk out that door, Valentine," Lambert said. "How long you can keep walking is the question you should ask yourself. The little drama we acted out could have been true. Kurian hit teams have you on their list. You do something traceable and they'll hunt you down."
"They just missed you in Iowa," Duvalier said. "I caught one of their sniffers drunk in a bar outside Garrison Nine."
"Suppose they do catch
up. What's it to you?"
"You used to be one of the best young talents in Southern Command," Lambert said.
"I used to be a lot of things. Now I'm just tired."
Duvalier poked him with her toe. "Quit the burnout talk."
"You sure you want him, Moira?" Lambert asked.
Styachowski nodded.
"How's life treating you, Wildcard?" Valentine asked. "I never thanked you for visiting me in the Nut."
"Valentine, I need your help," Styachowski said. "I'm putting together a new unit."
"A force of condemned men for suicide missions, right? Not interested."
"You used to wait until you knew what you were talking about to open your mouth," Styachowski said, stiffening. "I liked that about you."
Lambert picked up her attache. "Wasted flight."
"You flew here?" Valentine said.
"Once your old partner located you, yes," Lambert said. "Uncomfortable, cold, and loud."
Valentine knew that Southern Command had few air assets. Even generals traveled by train and car. Lambert must be a very big bug to have an airplane at her disposal.
"So Smoke tracks me down and Styachowski offers me the job. How do you fit in ?"
Lambert tapped her courier bag. "I'm the answer girl, just like at the War College, Valentine."
"Young for a colonel," Valentine said.
"It looks better on the letterhead," Lambert said. "I had a staff position, really unimportant a few years back, 'cooperative commands operations director.' If something was happening in New England or Europe or South America that the staff needed to know about, I summarized and passed it on. Once in a great while we'd get a liaison visit from Denver or Quebec City and I'd arrange briefings.
"Then Archangel hit and suddenly we were plunged into joint operations with the Texans. I had all the old responsibilities, but suddenly ten times the information was coming in, and we had to coordinate our movements with theirs, work out shared-supply issues, ad hoc attachments of Southern Command and Texas forces. Am I boring you, Valentine?"
Valentine looked up from his hands. "Not at all. I owe you a thank-you. You helped save the Razors."
"Texan enthusiasm saved the Razors. Once they started rolling I got out of their way. I just found them a few tugs."
The emotions of seeing the fleet of little boats come down the Arkansas River came back. Even the pain from the burns on his back and legs throbbed anew with the memory.
"What is my old friend General Martinez up to these days?"
Styachowski glanced at Lambert and shook her head, but Lambert spoke anyway: "Inspector general. It suits him. He keeps to the rear areas, getting expensive dinners and cigars as he makes his rounds. I can't deny he's popular. He sees to it that the food and comforts improve whenever he visits a post."
"Which reminds me," Duvalier said. "I've got a letter for you from Will and Gail. Over a year old now, but you haven't been leaving forwarding addresses." She dug in her duster and produced a wrinkled, grease-stained envelope. The letter smelled like turned bacon, but Valentine accepted it gratefully.
"So much for the past,'* Valentine said. "What do you have in mind for my future?"
"What I'm about to tell you is about as secret as anything can get, Valentine. Does your disenchantment with the Cause extend to materially hurting its efforts?"
"If anyone asks about this meeting, I'll assure them it was purely sexual."
Duvalier rolled her eyes. "Dream on, Valentine."
"C'mon, Major," Styachowski said.
"I don't have anyone to talk to, unless you count my legworm. If Kur does get its hands on me, there's no keeping secrets from them." Valentine had been questioned under drugs before.
"This is more of a morale matter for our side. Our Lifeweavers have disappeared."
"Still?" Valentine remembered that after Solon's brief occupation of the Ozarks the Lifeweavers had fled, but he'd assumed they would return. Assuming makes an ass out of-—
"Almost," Styachowski said. "Your Old Father Wolf has been located in the Sierras in Mexico. We're working on getting him back up here. Ryu and the Bearclaw are thought to be dead. There were a couple others in Southern Command, staff-level advisers, also gone. With no Lifeweavers..."
"No more Hunters," Valentine supplied, so lost in his thoughts that he brought up what was obvious to all of them.
"Our regulars are a match for theirs any day," Lambert said. "Unless they get the bulge on us with artillery. We can even handle the Grogs, most of the time. But when the Reapers show up—"
Valentine knew all this. "I'm supposed to locate some, right?"
"No, the locating's been done. We want you to get a message through to them. Maybe even try to bring a few back."
"They're not just across the Missouri somewhere, I take it."
"Seattle."
Valentine managed to blink.
"You got one out of the Zoo in Chicago," Styachowski said.
"His body, you mean. I came upon Rho by accident, and he died during the escape."
Lambert had clean nails. Valentine got a chance to examine them when she placed her hand, palm down, near his. "This isn't a case of going into a Kurian Zone and breaking one out. You'll simply travel to the resistance in the Cascades, meet one, and let it know our need."
"Simply? It must be fifteen hundred miles. One way."
"You've been traveling the Kurian Zone for years."
"You don't know that."
Three sets of eyeballs exchanged glances. "We just assumed—"
There was that word again.
Valentine let out a breath. "It's not worth arguing. I'm not interesting in slogging over who knows how many mountain ranges, sorry. Send a radiogram."
"You haven't heard what we're offering," Lambert said.
"Some kind of pardon."
"Not for you. You know that baby Reaper you brought out of Kentucky—"
"He has a name."
"How can you tell it's a he?" Duvalier asked. Reapers had no vulnerable reproductive organs sharing space with their simple elimination system.
"Calling him 'it' won't—"
"You've been good enough to let the researchers at the Miskatonic take a look at him a couple of times," Lambert interrupted.
"Until he broke two fingers and the wrist of the nurse subjecting him to ultrasonics," Duvalier said.
"They were hurting him," Valentine said, heating at the memory.
Lambert smiled. "The Kurians are very interested in your little Reaper. Their agents have offered substantial bribes for information up and down the Free Territory as to his whereabouts. They think we've got him in a lab someplace."
"Of course," Valentine said.
"Even I don't know where you've got him stashed, 'zactly," Duvalier said. "You always meet the Miskatonic people in the Groglands around St. Louis."
Lambert ignored her. "They think we've got him hidden in the deepest, darkest hole in the Ozarks and they're trying to find it. Sooner or later they'll learn the truth."
Valentine remained silent, waiting for it.
"Or," Lambert said, "I can make sure that every record, every test, every note, and every photograph disappears. We've mocked up a pretty convincing skeleton out of bits and pieces of other Reapers. He'll be listed as dead, killed during testing, the bones archived, some tissue samples dropped into formaldehyde, and everything but abstracts of the research will be destroyed."
How did they know the chink in his armor? Duvalier, probably. At times it seemed she knew him better than he knew himself. She was a sound judge, not just of risk, but of character, vulnerabilities—it made her a better assassin. Save for the bloodlust that sometimes came over her when a Quisling touched her—if she'd had an education beyond the sham of her early years in the Great Plains Gulag, she could have ...
Keen judge of character. She picked you to train.
Valentine didn't know whether to hate the trio or admire them. He'd gotten careless with the l
ast of Mary's murderers gone. Part of him was itching for something to do anyway. How much of his unwillingness was an act?
"There's got to be more to this," Valentine said. "Why not just contact the Pacific Northwest by regular channels? Southern Command must have some kind of communication route."
Styachowski suddenly became interested in a frayed cuff.
Lambert spoke again: "The Cause up there is in the hands of a genius. But like many geniuses, he's got his own ways."
"Friends and enemies both call him 'Mr. Adler,' " Styachowski said. "They say he came out of Seattle, originally. Didn't know one end of a gun from another when he showed up barefoot to volunteer, but he carried sixteen tons of grudge. He took a bunch of guerrillas starving in the mountains and fighting each other as much as they did the Kurians, and turned them into the Terrors of the Cascades. They appear and disappear like a fog, always somewhere the Quislings are weak. He's putting a headlock on the most powerful Kurian in the western half of the United States, Seattle himself. The Big Wheel."
"Him I've heard of," Valentine said. "Wasn't he trying to absorb the whole West Coast?"
"We were both at the War College then," Lambert said. "It was all the talk among the higher-ups, worries that Seattle would be running the whole coast, knock Denver out, then come after us. I suppose it could still happen, if the forces in the Cascades fall apart."
"All the more reason to set up liaisons," Valentine said.
Lambert shook her head. "It's been tried. One mission came back saying this Adler had no time for any war but the one he was waging against Seattle. The next mission we sent quit Southern Command and started singing his praises as the savior of the human race. The third never even made it there."
"Lifeweavers don't exactly advertise their whereabouts," Valentine said. "I don't see how I can find any without this genius' permission."
Styachowski opened her mouth to speak but lost her words in a cough.
"Ahh, but that's your specialty, Val," Duvalier said. "You're going to show up and volunteer."
Styachowski glared at her.
"Barefoot?" Valentine asked.
"I don't think that's necessary," Styachowski said. "You're talented. An ex-Cat of Southern Command. Hero of Big Rock Hill. You're bound to end up in Pacific Command's version of the Hunters."
