by E. E. Knight
"Thank you, Corporal Young."
He got into the uniform. It was a bit roomy, but he didn't look ridiculous once he punched a new hole in the belt with the knife's awl. It was a handy little tool: two kinds of screwdriver, two blades, a saw/fish scaler, a can opener, a file, an awl, and a clipper—though the last didn't look up to the job of cutting the wire in the yard.
He put wadded-up papers—one of them was the mystery note—around his feet so they fit better in the size-twelve shoes.
It occurred to him that if he were to pass as Young at a cursory glance he'd need to be heavier. He wound a sheet around his midsection and put the belt back on at its worn notch.
Feeling hot with excitement he stepped into the hall, trying to walk with his head turned down and handkerchief wiping his nose. He'd never seen cameras in the hall of this part of the prison but he wanted to be safe.
He left the room behind with no regret. When was the last time he slept in the same spot so many days in a row? His cabin in the Thunderbolt, most likely.
He walked down the hall in the direction of the edge of the asterisk. Then he stopped in front of a door two down from his. Roderick's.
The man was guilty of an atrocious crime. But if the system was gamed—
Valentine looked through the window. The cot was empty— had Young arranged for two escapes? Then his eyes picked up a figure in the gloom behind the sink/toilet.
Roderick had cheated the hangman.
What looked like a twisted-up sheet was knotted around the sink tap. Roderick was in a sitting position, butt off the floor and held up by his sheet, face purple and tongue sticking out as stiffly as his legs.
He turned away from the window, and looked at the dim hallway light to get the image out of his retinas.
Every other time they'd brought him through the center of the asterisk, but there was a fire exit sign above a heavy door. While he knew some of the routes through the center of the building, there was too much chance of meeting another guard. Valentine tried the red key on the heavy lock, Roderick's purple tongue filling his vision every time he didn't concentrate, and the fire escape door opened. For an aged guard Young thought things through well enough. He listened with hard ears, and heard footsteps somewhere on the floor below.
Valentine slipped off the guard shoes, wincing at the sound of paper crinkling—the tiniest sounds were magnified when one was trying to keep silent—and padded down the stairs to the bottom level.
He searched the door frame leading outside.
The door to the exterior had an alarm on it. Valentine flipped up a plastic access cover and saw a keypad with a green-faced digital readout. Someone had written 1144 on the interior. Valentine passed a wetted thumb over the ink and it smeared easily—it was still fresh. He punched the numbers into the keypad and then hit a key at the bottom marked ENTER.
Nothing changed color.
Every nerve on edge, Valentine pushed open the crash door.
"Thank God for minimum security," he whispered. A real prison would have had at least two more layers of doors.
He put the shined shoes back on. While rugged enough for street wear, he wondered how long they'd last if he had to hike out. His good boots were in storage somewhere in the bowels of the prison complex.
The night air felt cool and clean, but the best thing about it was the amount. Free sky stretched overhead as far as even Cat eyes could see. Valentine drank in the Arkansas night like a shot of whiskey, and even the memory of Roderick's tongue faded ... a little.
Keeping to the shadows, he walked around the edge of the building. Every now and then he stopped and pulled on a window as though checking to see if it was locked, all the while making for the pathway from the center of the asterisk to the gate in the double wire.
A few lights burned in the subsidiary buildings and the courthouse. Valentine stepped onto the path leading to the gate and strode toward the gate.
He heard high, feminine laughter from the gatehouse.
Valentine sneezed repeatedly into his handkerchief as he stepped into the flood of light around the twin vehicular gates. Valentine had seen the gatehouse in operation often enough; people were supposed to travel through the inside but guards desiring access to the area between the double row of fencing usually just had them open the gates.
Cap pulled low on his head, he looked into the window. Then stopped.
Alessa Duvalier sat on some kind of console, legs prettily crossed though she was in what Valentine thought of as her traveling clothes—a long jacket was folded carelessly next to her, her walking stick, which concealed a sword, next to it.
"... so the blonde gives birth and asks the doctor, 'How can I be sure it's mine?' " They laughed.
"Shit, how did someone as ugly as Young end up with you?"
"Kindness," Duvalier said. "He's a very kind man."
"If you ever want to trade him in on a newer model . . ." the young guard said. He sputtered with laughter as he waved casually at Valentine—not taking his eyes off Duvalier—and Duvalier said, "Oh, let me!" She thumped something without waiting for permission and the twin gates hummed as they slid sideways on greasy tracks. Valentine nipped out of sight of the gate and walked quickly down the road.
Valentine heard a thump from behind, a door open, and then quick footsteps as Duvalier caught up.
She pulled him off the road and gave him a brief embrace, nuzzling him under the chin with her nose. "I can never leave you alone, can I?"
"My luck always turns whenever you're not around," Valentine admitted.
"If they arrested everyone who ever quietly shot a Quisling ..." she said.
"Let's not mention arrests or prisons for a while, alright? As of this moment I'm a fugitive from justice subject to the Escape Law."
"It's not so bad. My whole life, I've been a fugitive from just about everything," she said.
"What's the plan?" Valentine asked.
"That's your end. But I've got a start under way. Oh, that Corporal Young's a good man. We need to burn those clothes."
"You've got replacements?"
"They're with Ahn-Kha."
She turned him into the woods and an owl objected, somewhere. Valentine heard the soft flap of bats above, hunting insects in the airspace between branches and ground.
They stopped to listen twice, then found a burned-out house. A transport truck with a camouflaged canvas-covered back sat in front of it. Valentine marveled at it. The ruins of the garage held a small charcoal fire and a very large, faun-colored Grog.
"My David," Ahn-Kha said. "We have escaped again."
"If we're still at liberty in twenty-four hours I'll call it an escape. Where'd you get the truck?"
"Styachowski requisitioned us a transport," Duvalier said.
Valentine stripped out of his uniform, and Duvalier flitted about gathering up the guard's clothing.
Ahn-Kha handed him a too-familiar dun-colored overall.
"Labor Regiment?" Valentine said.
"It goes with the truck," Duvalier said. "The big boy looks like he could do a hard day's work with a shovel."
"And you?"
She covered her fiery red hair with a fatigue cap. "I'm management. You two look like the all-day lunch-break type. Besides Val, you're the suckiest kind of driver."
"Where do we go?" Ahn-Kha asked. "My people will gladly shelter us at Omaha."
"We'd have to cross half of Southern Command. No, let's go east."
Duvalier climbed into her own overall and zipped it up over freckled shoulders. "East? Nothing there but river and then the Kurians. Until the Piedmont."
"I have an old friend in the Yazoo Delta. And I've got a mind to visit Memphis."
"Memphis? The music's to die for, but the Kurians see to it that you do the dyin'." She sprinkled something that smelled like kerosene out of a bottle onto the clothes and tossed them on the charcoal. They began to burn with admirable vigor.
"Ali, I've got my claws into a job. I'm
wondering more and more about Post's wife, Gail."
"She's gotta be dead if she was shipped."
"No, she was some kind of priority cargo. I'll explain later. We need to go to the area around Arkansas Post on the river. Can you manage that?"
"Says the guy who just broke out of a high-security lockup thanks to me!" Duvalier chided.
"Medium security," Valentine said.
She tossed her bundle of traveling clothes and sword stick into the back of the truck; "How do I look?"
"You're better suited singing in the Dome than for the Labor Regiment," Valentine said.
"Gratitude! The man's got a vocablarney like a dictionary and he doesn't know the meaning of the word!"
"Please," Ahn-Kha said. "We had best be going."
* * * *
The truck bumped eastward along the torn-up roads. A substantial piece of Consul Solon's army had been borrowed from the area around Cairo, Illinois, and points east, and they had employed a spikelike mechanism called a paveplow to destroy the roadbeds as they went home.
Patching was still being done, so most vehicles found it easier to drive on the gravel shoulder.
Duvalier drove, Ahn-Kha rode shotgun—with his formidable gun pointing out through the liftable front windscreen to rest on the hood—and Valentine bounced along in the back, feeling every divot the worn-out shock absorbers struck and hanging onto the paint-and-rust frame for safety.
About noon he felt the truck lurch to a stop.
"Just a road check," Duvalier said through the flap separating the driver from the cargo bed. "Rounders."
Valentine's stomach went cold. There was an old riot gun in the back, but he couldn't shoot his fellow citizens, even if it meant being rearrested.
"Afternoon, digger," Valentine heard a voice say from up front. "Transport warrant and vehicle check. Jesus, that's some big Grog. He trained?"
"He's a citizen. Sick relief to Humbolt Crossing," Duvalier said, cool as ever. "There's the medical warrant. We've got an unidentified fever in the back, so you want to keep clear."
"Do we?" another voice said. "We'll have to risk it. Orders to check every vehicle. We had a breakout at the military prison in Mountain Home."
"Someone important, I take it," Duvalier said.
"David Valentine, part-Indian, black hair, scar on right side of face."
Duvalier again: "Never heard of him. He run over a general's dog?"
Valentine heard footsteps approaching the bed. There was nowhere for him to hide inside. He might be able to cut his way onto the roof. He reached for the knife, opened the saw blade . . .
"Killed some Quisling prisoners, they say."
"He use too many bullets?" Duvalier said.
"Whoa, Sarge, we got someone back here."
Light poured into the back of the truck, hurting Valentine's eyes and giving him an instant headache. The hole was only big enough to put his head through.
Valentine heard a harsh whisper from Duvalier.
"Well, well, well," one of the Rounders said.
"He doesn't look too sick," the one with sergeant's tabs agreed. "Wouldn't you say, slick."
That's it. Trapped. Back to trial.
"No."
"This look like our Quisling killer to you?"
The other squinted. "No, Sarge. Five-one and Chinese, three gold teeth; no way this is our man."
"I should get my eyes checked," the sergeant said, writing something down. "I need to erase, because I see a six-six black individual with a big tattoo of Jesus on his chest. Oh, crap, this stop form looks like shit now." He tore a piece of printed paper off his pad, wadded it in one massive hand, and tossed it over his shoulder.
"Anyway, it ain't our killer."
"No, that's not David Valentine," the sergeant said, winking.
"Too bad, in a way," the other said. "Old friend of mine, Ron Ayres, fought under him in Little Rock. I'd buy this Major Valentine a drink, if I could."
"So you've told me. About a hundred times," the sergeant said, closing the back flap.
Valentine listened to the boot steps return to the front of the vehicle.
"Okay, get your sick man outta here before we all catch it," the sergeant said. "I'd turn south for Clarendon about three miles along; there's an old, grounded bus shell with RURAL NETWORK PICKUP J painted on it alongside the road. No roadblocks that way to slow up your sick man, and I think this thing can make it through the wash at Yellow Creek."
"Thank you, Sergeant."
"Thank you for having such a pretty smile. Pleasant journey." And thank you, old friend of Ron Ayres, Valentine thought.
Chapter
Six
The Lower Mississippi, July: The river has reverted to feral since the cataclysm of 2022, a continent-crossing monster unleashed. The carefully sculpted and controlled banks of the twentieth and early twenty-first century are gone, or survive as tree-lined islands surrounded by some combination of marsh, lake, and river.
Even on the best and sunniest days, the Mississippi can only manage a rather lackluster blue between banks lined with opportunistic shell-bark hickory, willow, and river birch. It is more frequently a dull navy, muddy brown at the edges, striped in the center by wind and broken by swirls or flats created by snags, shallows, and sandbars. Below the Missouri and Ohio joins, the flooded river is sometimes three miles wide, and moves at a steady four miles an hour toward the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with it rich loads of silt—some insignificant fraction of which will be dredged up and placed into the vast rice paddies around the partially flooded Crescent City. The rest accumulates here and there, gradually changing the course and shape of the Father of Waters.
The days of tugs churning up- or downriver with a quarter mile of linked barges are gone, along with many of the navigational aids. Barge traffic now looks more like a truck convoy, with various sizes of small craft and tugs pushing a few barges along the river in a long, thin column, led and flanked by small powerboats checking the navigability of the ever-changing river. The Memphis—New Orleans corridor is especially well guarded against quick strikes or artillery attacks by the roving forces of Southern Command, always on the lookout for a chance to seize a few bargeloads of grain, rice, or beans. If they are very lucky, sometimes they free a load of human currency from the Kurian trade system.
Of course the Kurians fight back, in a manner. Booby-trapped barges, or "Q-craft," loaded with mercenaries give the raiders an occasional unpleasant surprise.
There is one long stretch of river, flanked by a northward bend on one end and a southward hook downriver, that causes the barge captains to press close to the unfriendly western side. This is the "Tunica Sands," a stretch of river between Tunica and Memphis avoided by all the river rats as though it was cursed ground. Ten great, weed-choked casino barges on the eastern bank are now landlocked thanks to silt deposits all around their keels. Like a latter-day leper colony, the entire area is surrounded by fencing and watch posts.
Only the sick, under Reaper escort, go in. Only the Reapers come out again.
* * * *
The big Cat hadn't changed much in the eight years since Valentine had last seen him. A little less hair perhaps, a little more waistline certainly, but he was still the big, half-aquatic athlete of the Yazoo swamps with a satchel full of apples. Everready had taught Valentine how to lower lifesign and move without being noticed over the course of one impossibly hot summer, and the fact that he'd survived to return proved the effectiveness of his tutor's methods.
The New Orleans Saints ball cap was gone, though. Now he wore a black, broad-brimmed hat that made him look like a missionary. Strung Reaper teeth rattled at his neck, and layers of bullet-stopping Reaper robe hung off his body in an oversized tunic that no sane man dared call a dress.
Finding him had been surprisingly easy. While casting about for a way to get across the Mississippi they came upon a "summer out" Wolf patrol in charge of monitoring river traffic. The Wolf patrol relied on Everready for info
rmation on the opposite bank in the Yazoo Delta between Vicksburg and Memphis, and the trio crossed the river in a birch-bark canoe with a guide who rested and camped with them at the rendezvous until the legendary Cat appeared to trade supplies for data.
Everready had no young Wolves to train this year, further evidence of the still-echoing disruption of Solon's occupation, and the continuing absence of the Lifeweavers. "Good to have you back, David," he said, upon greeting them. "Even an old swamp-hound gets lonely now and then."
So he was willing, after concluding his exchange with their Wolf guide, to take Valentine and company into Memphis.
"Only four ways into that town, barring being brought in in handcuffs and bite-guard," Everready said in their first camp on the trip north.
They looked like four spirits around their Yazoo swamp camp-fire, the humans under individual shrouds of mosquito netting, while Ahn-Kha followed the Grog manner by pasting his sensitive face and ears under a layer of mud.
"There's the river," Everready explained. "They check everybody at the river, and they're damn good at spotting fake documents, and most visitors are kept to the Riverfront anyway. Then there's the wall. There are gaps at the rock wall, of course, but the smugglers have gone to a lot of trouble to open them and watch 'em, and they won't let you through for free. Then there are the road gates, but it's the same problem, another document check. Most people who come to trade do it at Little City around Memphis, then the middlemen the Memphis authorities know and trust go through the gates with their goods."
"That's three ways in," Ahn-Kha said.
Everready shifted an apple stem to the other side of his mouth. "Yes, sir, Mister Grog, that's only three ways. The fourth is a bit tricky—it's up along the Tunica Run. Tunica's a dumping ground for those that got the ravies bug—Memphis buys 'em cheap off their fellow Kurians and dumps them in Tunica so there's always a feed on for their Reapers. Every now and then they release a batch on the west side of the river to give the Free Territory folks a little trouble, too."
