by E. E. Knight
The wheel came off its mount. Blake picked up the wheel and offered it to Valentine, "papa help bwaykh!"
"You can do it yourself. See? Circle in the circle?"
Blake's bony features screwed up in thought. He put the spinner back in the little green dish of plastic. But he didn't align it and settle it on the pin. Valentine reached, but Blake gave it an experimental spin and sent it skittering across the floor.
"Bwoke!" Blake said, smashing his fist onto the green cradle. The green plastic shattered and Wobble froze. Blake made a gurgling sound.
"Now it is," Valentine said. Narcisse stroked the back of Blake's neck with her intact hand.
"Sowwy," Blake said in his faint, breathy voice, "vewy sowwy, papa."
Valentine picked him up again. "We'll make a new one." A piece of planking and a small, dulled nail would do. "Together."
Blake liked the sound of that. He showed all his fangs.
* * * *
The days passed like the cars of a speed freight. Valentine contrived to take Blake on a fishing trip. Sufficient dirt, an oversized droopy boat hat, and some baggy clothes made him into a lean boy whose arms and legs were finishing up a growth spurt. The fish were biting, but any sort of motion, from a frog's leap to a rabbit's careful hop, made him drop his rod and investigate.
On his own, Valentine visited a little shrine near the old arch that he'd found on his first trip to the city. Years ago his father had eliminated the Kurians from St. Louis—he learned this not from his father but from some men who had served with him—and the Grogs set up their form of memorial in the lobby of what had been an elevator to the top of the monument. Some bits and pieces laid out in an arch of parachute "silk" that imitated the one above—bullet casings, a canteen, a K-bar-style knife, a climbing glove, and some nylon rope he understood, but there was also a fox tail, a bunch of oddly shaped dice in a clear plastic tube, and a stoppered bottle of what looked like salad oil.
The mementos were meticulously dusted. Maybe at festivals a storyteller hopped up on the display (did the Grogs believe that putting the items behind glass detracted from their power?) and used the props. Or perhaps there were bodies buried behind the access door the heavy case blocked; the Grogs often put mementos outside grave sites. It wasn't even taboo for a Grog to take them up for a moment's examination or obeisance, provided they were returned when the task was done.
He was tempted to take the glove. Though it was larger than his own hand it still seemed small when compared with his memories of his father's huge, capable ones, but the aging Grogs clustered at the doorstep were already snorting and huffing when he bent too close to the display.
Cutcher took him up to the riverbank bluffs and showed him a house with a rambling basement cut into the limestone, lately occupied by a river trader who owned a wharf-side sawmill and a bone-wracking tubercular cough. In a fit of anxiety about his approaching death, he'd donated the property entire and its furnishings to the church.
"One last trade, this time with God," Cutcher chuckled. "May his bargain pay off."
They planned to move Blake as soon as the researchers from the Miskatonic did their last set of visual-acuity tests. He'd have room to explore up there, in the moonless darkness under the trees. Cutcher said that keeping up with him would be good for his cardiovascular health.
It felt wrong to say good-bye in a basement. Good-byes were for front yards, garden gates, train platforms, and bus pick-up corners, not shuttered basements that smelled like soaking diapers.
"If you need more money—," Valentine said to Narcisse.
"Monsignor Cutcher has ample sources. We want for nothing."
"Except the sight of one of those big palms."
"Royal palms," Narcisse said, nodding. "I do miss them, and the smell of morning wind off the sea."
"I want to thank you again for—"
She poked him in his good thigh. "Daveed, please. I am old, and have learned the difference between needed and used. Here I am needed. Here I talk long through the nights with our fine priest as we watch. A deep, kind man with the magic of the right hand. I have known only two or three others like him."
"I wish I'd had time to find Blake some blocks. And some early-reader books."
"I will find or paint some Scrabble pieces. Like the ratbits had. He will learn ABC's when he is ready. He learns, but his mind has not yet caught up to his body."
Valentine regretted the lost mah-jongg pieces. Blake would probably enjoy the colors and intricate designs. Valentine's last reminder of the good days with Malia Carrasca were in some prison warehouse deep in the Nut, probably.
Narcisse gave him a bag of dried-meat sticks, a bag of glazed biscuits, and some nuts mixed with oats and corn-bread crumbs—the Grog version of trail mix. He rolled one of the cheroot-sized tubes of meat and sniffed the greasy, peppery coating. Narcisse could make even the spongiest legworm flesh taste like tenderloin medallions in a sauce, but he suspected this was pork.
"You must not leave yet," she said. "I must press one last hug on you.
He knelt down so she could hug him. Those mauled limbs that had first met around his neck on a sunbaked Haitian street pressed at either temple, pressed hard, as though trying to meet somewhere in his corpus callosum. She closed her eyes and spoke in her Creole, sliding the words together so fast and low he didn't have a hope of understanding with his mother's Quebecois French. It went on for some moments and his pressed skin began to tingle.
Finally she stopped.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
"I asked heem to put honeycombs in your path, so your journey is sweet. There is too much bitter in you, Daveed, and it finds its way out."
Narcisse had a talent for cryptic expression that sometimes rivaled that of the Lifeweavers. Valentine wondered if he'd been cross with Blake, or the Bloch brothers from the Miskatonic when he gave them their marching orders. "If only you could add a little molasses to me, the way you do to the spoon bread."
Narcisse pursed her lips, then poked him in the breastbone with her maimed arm. "You already look better. Go now, or I cry some. Maybe I cry some anyway, but I don't want you around for that."
* * * *
Valentine made Nancy's north of Tulsa in three days of round-the-clock legworm travel, arriving on the eve of the promised rendezvous. He'd made a deal with a driver from the Rabbit's Foot clan whom he silently called "Tic-tac" because the Grog's back-hide scars looked like a couple of drunks had started playing tic-tac-toe on it with hot knives.
Which wasn't out of the realm of possibility. Captured Grogs were sometimes cruelly treated to put the "fear of Man" in them before they were released. Of course captured men were often eaten when not enslaved, so cruelty was a matter of perspective.
They took turns driving the beast through day and night, skirting the UFR. Valentine hoped that the unofficial truce of the Missouri brush that had settled in when he'd first become a Cat was still holding, and that no wide-ranging patrols would risk a flare-up by potting what looked like a human small trader and his driver.
Difficulty showed itself in a six-man patrol. Three challenged him, and three more waited, kneeling in the brush. Five kids and a senior NCO. The kids were too young and the NCO was grizzled right to the hair growing out of his ears.
Valentine felt for the oldster, riding herd on a bunch of downy cheeks too young to know how easily they could die. But the Missouri bushwhack country would lend itself to giving the kids some experience without the risks that went with the swamps around New Orleans, the open plains to the west, or the alley between Crowley's Ridge and Memphis.
Valentine watched the rifles and picked out an escape route through the brush. If things looked bad, he'd topple off the legworm and run like a rabbit, twisting and turning across the mud through first spring flowers of the blackberry bramble.
"Hey, Freebies," Valentine called. "You boys looking for a little joy juice to keep out the nightly chill?"
"Check out tha
t chair. Quite a ride he has on that legworm," one of the kids in the brush remarked to his fellows.
The NCO's rifle dangled in its sling, but the officer kept his hand hooked casually in his ALICE belt, close to the butt of his sidearm. "Just a friendly warning, Wally," the NCO said, using the Missouri slang for a trader who bartered with the Grogs. Valentine had been called worse. "You're about ten miles out of a UFR settlement. They'll panic at the sight of a worm and open up on you."
"Like a bunch of potato diggers could hit a legworm if it were on top of them," one of the kids in the brush said. The two backing up the NCO knew better than to add comment, but one kept swinging his rifle muzzle back and forth, making little figure eights in the air.
"Where you bound for?" the NCO asked, looking at the packs and accoutrements dangling from both sides of the legworm.
"South of Kansas City, Kansas."
"Top, he's traveling with a stoop—that puts him under suspicion," the twitchy kid said. "Stop and question."
"Question away, I'd like an excuse to get off this damn worm," Valentine said. "It's Tic-tac here who is on tribal-conference business. I just own the worm."
Tic-tac rocked nervously in his saddle, his anxiety evident, but kept his hands away from his long, single-shot varmint gun. Valentine doubted he even had any bullets for it. Instead he had a grip on his sharp-hooked worm goad. Valentine hoped Tic-tac wasn't getting any ideas about the worth of the kid's rifles and hair at the next tribal bragging session. If the kids knew just how quickly a Grog could throw a balanced utility ax like the one dangling from its leather thong on the saddle hook, they'd be back another ten yards or so.
Valentine tried to will the kid into slinging the gun and losing interest in the encounter, but the boy had either imagination or a grudge against men out of the Groglands.
"That's maybe a Kurian agent," the kid insisted. "He should be put under arrest."
"Not another word, Cadet," the NCO said. "If that Grog is a messenger, he'll die before he'll come out of that saddle. Then we'll have a feud with Rabbit's Foot and their allies."
Valentine's stomach sank. The kid was an officer candidate, looking to establish his record for initiative.
"Bury and buckle up, Top. C'mon," one of the kids quietly urged from the brush.
"And if he were a Kurian agent, we'd all be running to check out the sound of seventy legworms passing north of here, or shooting at each other," the NCO added.
Valentine felt a gurgle in his stomach, and took the opportunity to lean to his right and bounce a loud fart off his chair.
"Never could handle those Grog mushrooms," he said.
The NCO chuckled and the quieter of his two charges laughed.
"Pass wind, friend," the NCO said, stepping aside and gesturing with his hand to the west. The cadet glared at him.
"Don't worry, we'll be out of UFR lands by nightfall," Valentine said as they goaded the legworm into its rippling motion again.
The NCO pulled the boys out of the way of the legworm's antennae and nodded to Valentine as they passed. Valentine considered that the peacefully concluded meeting was an example of the differences between the Free Territory and the Kurian Zone. In the Free Territory an NCO could use his judgment. In the KZ they'd be kept waiting while the NCO called his officer, who called a higher officer, who would order them searched and then, when they found nothing of interest, would call a higher officer still, who would ask "Why are you bothering me with this?" and order them released anyway, provided there wasn't a Reaper breathing down his neck with an appetite that made starting a feud with a Grog tribe over a single wanderer's aura worth it.
The kids who were covering from ambush stood up as they passed, and gaped.
There was a time when the whole check in the Nomansland between would have been done by Wolves, who would probably have just observed them from cover and tracked them to see what they were up to, unseen and unheard unless the patrol leader decided they constituted a threat. Then Tic-tac would have been dead and Valentine roped and cuffed in about the stopwatch time it takes a rodeo champ to bring down a calf.
It was a good thing for the UFR that Missouri was so quiet these days.
* * * *
On the third day it took both of them together to keep their mount going—legworms had astonishing reserves, but eventually even the digging goads would have no effect.
Valentine let the Grog have his legworm and rig with many thanks and a swapping of Tic-tac's delicately carved ear-grooming stick for a half-empty tin of Valentine's foot powder. He felt no particular sympathy with Tic-tac, but if this wasn't the longest trip the Grog had ever been on, it was close, and he'd want something to point to when telling the story.
Valentine walked into Nancy's oddly peaked roofs—they always reminded him of old Pizza Huts—under his own steam, taking the first of many steps westward.
Chapter Four
Nancy's, March: David Valentine first learned of Nancy's from his old tent mate Lieutenant Caltagirone of Foxtrot Company.
Nancy's had been a retirement home for Tulsa's well-to-do who were unwilling to quit the rolling hill-country of eastern Oklahoma. Its single-story, vaguely Prairie-school architecture was spread out over several acres, with a central hub and an outbuilding or two. In the Kurian Zone people were "retired" in much the same manner as an old, worn-out tire, with the Reapers serving as mechanics, but its layout made it a convenient rehabilitation center for Quisling veterans. Nancy herself was something of a legend in the Nebraska Guard for her devotion to the maimed and shattered.
She kept her charges busy with arts and crafts, which she sold in Tulsa at Kurian patriotic festivals to buy a few luxuries. The "Nancy's" sticker became so famous that an art colony of sorts had sprung up in the area, with workers of metal, leather, wood, ceramics, and paint adding to the trade.
Nancy's also had the best food in three states. Kurian Order and New Universal Church dignitaries often spent long weekends visiting the "home" and enjoying the cuisine as they got their picture taken shaking hands with the more photogenic of the wounded.
It seemed the last place one would expect to be a warehouse for the resistance. When the Kurians heard the occasional whisper or screamed confession that Nancy's had been the place guerrillas got their explosives, they assumed that their prisoners had been coached into fingering the establishment in the hope that the whole staff would be swept up in a purge. The routine searches revealed nothing.
Of course, they didn't remove the wounded from their thick, comfortable, bleach-scented bedding, pillowcases lined with gleaming rows of decorations. Only the laundry staff, under careful supervision of senior nurses, ever changed the bedding.
* * * *
Nancy's had grown since the last time Valentine visited, as a tired and hungry lieutenant trying to supply his men scouting the Kurian Zone.
The "Kurian Pillar" he remembered, breaking the horizon like a white needle, now had a cross openly displayed upon it, and the trees had spread their shade over the windows and doors. The vegetable gardens and stands of tomato vines had multiplied and spread to both sides of the road that met the old interstate a couple of miles south. New houses, mostly two- or three-room shotgun shacks built around a common well pump, circled the grounds like campers keeping warm at a fire. A red-painted market that Valentine had remembered being a livestock barn, promised fuel * food * lodging thanks to a blue and white sign salvaged from the interstate. To the southwest, behind a small hill, birds circled the community trash heap. No distance seemed too great for gulls to travel in search of garbage.
A few hardy souls were out on the blustery day, mostly working in the vegetable patches or trying to dry laundry under the eaves. Some muddy kids and dogs chased one another through the culverts at the roadside.
Valentine paused at a roadside tap for water, tried to get some of the caked-up grime off his face and hands, and then turned up toward the main entrance of the hub.
we're full
Valentine ignored it and paused in the entry vestibule. A six-foot panel of plywood served as a local notice board. Along with advertisements for watchdogs ("Garanteed to bark at Hoods") and ironmongery and the weekly swap meet and different flavors of Bible study were dozens of messages giving names and destinations, probably of refugees from the destruction in Tulsa. Valentine scanned them until he found what he wanted.
Black—
I’m in Comfort 18.
—Red
Ali had written their old nicknames from the trip across Tennessee and Kentucky. A faint pang of regret at their parting—she'd insisted he was crazy for harboring Blake....
Jury's still out on that one.
Valentine stepped into the old reception area of the nursing home. The limestone of the outside gave way to cool, homey brick within. Two armed men wearing five-pointed stars played cards at a round wooden table, rifles and shotguns placed across a pair of ottomans with a snoring mutt between. A wide reception window looked out on the doors and waiting area, and behind it, a disarmingly young teenage girl sat writing on a pad.
Something about Valentine caused the security's antennae to twitch, and they gave him a long, careful look as he inquired of the girl. She directed Valentine to the appropriate room.
"Much obliged," Valentine said, and gave a friendly nod to the constabulary. He risked a glance back as he found the appropriate hall, and noted that they'd left their cards to watch him.
Valentine smelled barbecue and laundry soap and disinfectants— sharp odors of chlorine and borax. A New Universal Church hostel smelled much the same, albeit with potatoes and cabbage substituted for the barbecue. Someone had brought in bluebonnets and redbud for the vases at the hallway intersections, adding color and aroma. He thought them a nice touch. Four-color propaganda posters provided the only color in NUC lodgings.
