Valentine's Exile

by E. E. Knight

  Two crows held a tug-of-war over a piece of viscera.

  "Oh God—" Duvalier said.

  Valentine could never decide which sound hit his ears first after Duvalier's retch. The wet splash of vomit was certainly louder, heard with his right ear. The high-pitched wailing from the left startled him more, bringing back all the emotions of his first small-unit action as a junior Wolf lieutenant. Perhaps they arrived simul­taneously.

  Valentine clutched Duvalier's hand and pulled her to her feet. Her walking stick clattered to the ground and Everready grabbed it, unslinging Trudy and running with the carbine in one hand and the stick in the other.

  "Follow me!" Everready called. "Don't shoot, you'll just draw more!"

  Duvalier came off her feet again, wet-mouthed, unable to con­trol her stomach. Valentine released his weapon and picked her up in a fireman's carry.

  He followed Everready up a short slope to an intersection.

  "Let me down, I'm okay," Duvalier said.

  Valentine went to one knee. He looked back and saw a dozen or so figures running in a more or less arrow-shaped formation. At this distance their bare feet were so dirty that most looked as though they were wearing black shoes and socks.

  Kudzu-covered, tree-filled service stations and fast-food restau­rants lined the road leading toward the casinos, according to an an­cient brown sign. Everready almost leaped across the highway toward a small doughnut shop. A shriek from the direction of the Mississippi let them know that trouble would soon be running in from a second direction.

  "Why not the bank?" Valentine yelled. A little way up the road a stout-looking brick structure promised safety—for money or those fleeing psychotics—from behind a wall of scrub pine.

  "Too big. Can't stop them from getting in."

  Valentine heard footsteps just behind. So sick but able to run so fast. . .

  He dropped behind Duvalier and turned, holding the U-gun by barrel and grip. A swift-running young screamer got the butt in his face as he reached for Valentine. He went down, rolling. Valentine shifted his grip and employed the gun in a credible backhand.

  The screamer didn't get up again.

  There was no glass in the door or the windows. Everready vaulted over the counter and entered the cooking line. The display cabinet held nothing but empty trays and an oversized wasp nest.

  Valentine ran around a permanently parked car and entered the formerly white doughnut stop. Duvalier had tears in her eyes as she covered the front of the store with her pump-action.

  "In here. Help me with this!" Everready called.

  They fled into the cooking line, and Everready and Valentine moved a fryer to block the path to the narrow kitchen. The lighting seemed wrong—Valentine looked up and saw a hole in the roof. Weather or animal activity had enlarged it to the size of a picture window.

  Everready emptied the damp mess resting within a plastic garbage can and wedged it above the fryer as Valentine heard screams from within the doughnut shop.

  "Nice scouting," Valentine said, pointing to the hole in the roof.

  "Hope they don't climb up there," Duvalier said, shifting her shotgun muzzle from the barricade to the roof hole.

  Everready put his back to the fryer. Its rear was festooned with smeared warnings. "Planning nothing, never been in here to scavenge. I'd be shocked if there wasn't a hole in the roof of most of these places."

  Pounding and screaming came through from the other side of the fryer, horribly loud, horribly near. Valentine fought the urge to run to the other end of the kitchen.

  "Valentine, help me hold this—no, the plastic can, they're trying to crawl over! Girl, check the back, there might be a door!" Everready said.

  Duvalier hurried to the other end of the kitchen and disappeared around a corner. Two shotgun blasts followed immediately.

  "Oh shit," Everready swore.

  Duvalier flew back into the kitchen, her coat billowing and bringing the smell of cordite as she turned and braced herself against a tall refrigerator. "There's a door. Or there isn't—that's the problem."

  "How many?" Valentine asked.

  "How many are there?" she shot back.

  "Thousands," Everready said.

  "Sounds about right," Duvalier said.

  They came, more like a single organism comprised of scream­ing heads and waving arms than a series of individuals, filling the kitchen with noise. Valentine brought his U-gun to bear, feeling the pounding on the other side of the fryer against his back.

  "The roof!" Valentine shouted, firing. "Go, Ali!"

  "I can jump better than either of you. I'll cover you."

  More appeared and Valentine didn't wait to argue. He stood on a prep table and tossed his weapon up through the hole, hoping he didn't overthrow and land it in the parking lot. He grabbed an elec­trical conduit pipe and pulled himself up, got his foot into a light fixture, and climbed. The roof was thick with growth, and dis­turbed butterflies hurried into the sky.

  Everready passed up his gun to Valentine, and Valentine heard Duvalier's Mossberg.

  "Forget the packs!" she shouted.

  Everready made it to the roof with less difficulty than Valentine.

  Duvalier crouched to spring up through the hole in a single leap and they were on her. She spun like a dynamo, slamming one against the fryer, even now moving from the pressure at the other side, screaming as another sank its teeth into her shoulder.

  "Goddamn!" Everready swore as yet another grabbed her.

  Though mad, though they felt no pain, her attackers weren't Reapers. She pushed one off, kicked another, punched a third, pale limbs and coat a whirling blur of motion. Everready shot a fourth with his carbine.

  Valentine dropped back through the hole.

  "No!" Everready shouted.

  Valentine picked up her sword cane and used it as a club, swinging at the heads and arms coming around the fryer.

  "Jump!" Valentine yelled as Everready shot another one down. Valentine struck a ravie on the floor as it clawed at her ankle; his kick broke its jaw.

  Duvalier crouched and jumped, and went up through the hole like a missile.

  Valentine drew the blade from Duvalier's sword stick. Using the wooden tube in his other hand, he battered his way back toward the office. He felt hands clutch at his canvas boots and broke the grip—if they were snakeproof they'd probably be ravies-resistant— then cracked one across the jaw.

  "Val, where are you going?" Duvalier shouted.

  "Lemme at that bite, girl!" he heard Everready say.

  "Diversion!" he shouted.

  Screaming his own head off, Valentine rushed into the office. The back wall had bloody splatters and buckshot holes. A staggered ravie, holding himself up on the desk, received Valentine's boot to his chest, throwing him back onto one coming through the door. Valentine pinned the fresher one like a bug on a piece of Styrofoam with the sword point and vaulted through the door, running.

  "Oily oily oxen free!" Valentine shouted, banging a Dumpster with the wooden half of Duvaliers sword cane. "Come out, come out, wherever you are. London Bridge is falling down!" He hurried around into the next parking lot, banging on empty car hoods.

  Ravies turned and began to run toward him, screaming. Fine, better the oxygen flowing out of their pipes than into their bloodstreams.

  "Meet me by the casinos tonight!" Valentine shouted to the pair on the roof. He saw Everready applying a dressing and the iodine bottle to Duvalier's shoulder.

  "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" Valentine called again. "Hey diddle diddle, the freak and the fiddle—"

  The doughnut shop began to empty, and other ravies hurried up from the direction of the riverfront.

  Just about. Just about!

  "Ring around the rosy!"

  The last few around the doughnut shop turned toward him.

  "Warriors, come out to play-yay!" Valentine didn't know what childhood game the last one signified, but an old Wolf in Foxtrot Company used to employ
the taunt on hidden Grogs, clinking a pair of whiskey bottles together.

  He ran.

  The ravies followed, screaming.

  * * * *

  Ten minutes later and a mile away . . .

  His bad leg ached, but he had to ignore it. Ignore everything but the staggered line of ravies running behind him. Valentine turned another corner, his third right through the suburban streets in a row. The pursuers were screaming less, growing weaker—which was just as well; he didn't know how long he could hold out.

  Two more blocks, one more. He summoned the energy for one final sprint to the last turn, running with the sword cane like a baton in a relay race. His speed came at the cost of a deep, deep burn in his legs and lungs—

  And there they were, a few stumbling ravies in a line, following the ones ahead of them, emitting an occasional strangled yelp. The very end of the long file of pursuers, formed into a wagon-train-like circle around six square blocks of Tunica suburbs.

  Valentine marked the crash scene he'd seen the first time he ran down this street, impossibly compact cars piled into each other in a rear-end collision, looking like the skeletons of two mating turtles. He staggered behind the cars and sank to his knees, desperately trying to control his panting.

  He peered between the cars, looking for his pursuers.

  They followed his path onto the tree-limb-littered street, caught sight of their fellows, and ran to catch up to them.

  Valentine was too tired to smile.

  He crept through the underbrush of a lawn, counted twenty of the pack chasing their own tails. Already some were giving up, dropping to their knees and scratching at the accumulated leaves and pine needles in frustration.

  Then he noticed the bite—or was it a cut? Must have happened in the doughnut shop; none of them had been close to him since— but something had made his elbow bleed. He applied his iodine and prayed. Under stress, some men's mouths spewed obscenity, others Sunday-morning verse. In this case, the latter felt more appropriate as the sting of the iodine took hold.

  * * * *

  The cut had some angry red swelling around it by the time night fell and he walked, slowly and gently, down to the riverfront.

  Two of the defunct casinos had electric light. Several had gigantic red crosses painted on their bargelike hulls, the universal symbol of help to whoever asks. Fire-gutted hotels lined the riverfront road. Valentine could picture the brilliant lighting above and around the multistory parking lots, the banners along the streets, the florid wealth of a gambling haven opening at the side of the Mississippi, beckoning like a Venus flytrap.

  He kept out of the masses of somnambulists wandering under the lights, scooping handfuls of meal out of great troughs lining the streets.

  Naturally, more food meant more piles of feces. And more rats eating the feces. And cats eating the rats.

  He found an empty trough and passed a wet finger through it, sniffed the result. It smelled and felt like ground corn—hog-feed-grade corn, at that. Some rice and millet, too.

  Valentine would rather eat the ants disposing of the leftovers.

  "Val," he heard a hiss.

  It came from the second floor of one of the hotels. He saw Duvalier's face in a window.

  He floated into the shell of the fire-gutted building, a concrete skeleton.

  She met him at the staircase with a hug, and they looked at each other's iodine-smeared wounds.

  "Let's hope the vaccinations weren't just water," Valentine said. Rumor had it that ravies vaccine commanded a fantastic price in the Kurian Zone, and Southern Command had its share of the unscrupulous.

  They crept upstairs. Cats (of the feline variety) scattered in either direction at their approach.

  Duvalier and Everready had his pack and gun. Everready extended a piece of greasy waxed paper. "Cold chicken and a biscuit. From the Missions."

  "What's next?" Valentine asked.

  Everready threw a bone down the hall. A catfight started almost the second it landed. "I passed word to my contact in the Missions. He's going to get in touch with a trading man in Memphis, one of my sets of eyes in the city. Cotswald. Vic Cotswald. He'll take you in. Not the nicest man in the world, but reliable. He thinks I'm working for the Kurians down south, keeping tabs on things in Memphis. He knows me by the handle Octopus. Can you remember that? Octopus?"

  "Great. What's my cover?" Valentine asked.

  "I took care of that, Val," Duvalier said. "You're Stu Jacksonville, a new pimp on the Gulf Coast. We know the area from our time as husband and wife, so there'll only be a minimal amount of bullshitting."

  "You sure you want to play a whore?" Valentine asked.

  "Not whore. Bodyguard. Comrade in arms."

  "Gay caballero?" Valentine asked.

  "Lesbian, if you want to get technical."

  Chapter

  Seven

  Memphis: The dwindling number of old-time residents of this good-times city divide Memphis history into prequake and postquake. The destruction, the starvation, the Kurian arrival, the appearance of Grogs; all are linguistically bound together and organized by that single cataclysmic event.

  When the New Madrid fault went, most of the city went with it. One of the few substantial buildings to survive the quake was the St. Jude Children's Hospital, whose grave granite now houses many of the city's Kurian rulers behind concentric circles of barracks and fencing.

  The rubble left behind was pushing into piles. Eventually those piles were redistributed about the city, forming a fourteen-mile Great Wall of Junk in a blister based at the river that eventually had dirt piled on top of it to turn it into a true barrier. Now a precarious jeep trail circumnavigates the city atop the wall, except for three gaps to the north, east, and south.

  The south gap is a subcarbuncle of its own, a fenced-in stretch of land between Memphis and Tunica full of livestock pens and grain silos, barge docks and coal piles, a supplemental reserve of food and fuel for the city in case events of war or nature cut it off from the rest of the Kurian Order.

  Inside the wall, around the heart of the city, are the great bank camps, a temporary concentration of identical, wire-divided cantonments that stretch in some cases for miles. Once a tent city for those left homeless after the quake, the tents have given way to fifty foot barracks, now wooden-sided, with windows and cooking stoves. Rail lines, sidings, and spurs stretch into the camp like the arteries, veins, and capillaries feeding the liver.

  The residents go out of their way not to think about those in the camps.

  Memphis still has some of its pre-2022 culture along Beale Street and in the "commons," the stretch of city bordering the waterfront. The commons are dominated by the ravaged and only partially glassed superstructure of the Pyramid. This mighty sports arena and convention center has canvas stretched over the missing panes, to admit air without the heat of the sun, giving it the appearance of an impossibly huge sailing ship squatting at the edge of the Mississippi, the trees of Mud Island separating its inlet from the main river.

  The area around the Pyramid rivals Chicago's famous zoo as a center of dubious entertainments, though it is a good deal more exclusive, limiting its clientele to the River Rats, the men who work the barges and patrol craft of the great rivers of middle North America, and those brave enough to go slumming. The Pyramid itself sees a higher order of customer with appetites just as base. As a den where flesh is exchanged for goods or services, temporarily or permanently, the Pyramid has no rival on the continent.

  While the city has any number of competing factions, captains of war and industry, mouthpieces both civil and Kurian, the commons and the Pyramid look to only one man for leadership. The great auctioneer Moyo has bought and sold more slaves in his forty years than many of the tyrants of old. Always to an advantage.

  If anyone has gotten the better of him and lived to tell of it, even the old-timers of Memphis cannot say.

  * * * *

  "You want to do what?" Vic Cotswald said.

>   Cotswald was a heavyset man, and puffed constantly, like an idling steam engine. He took up a substantial portion of the back cabin of his "limo"—a yellow-painted old Hummer.

  "Learn about this fellow's setup," Valentine said. "Everyone's heard of Moyo. Why not do what he did, only somewhere else?"

  They'd met at a roadside diner built out of a pair of old trailers fixed together and put up on concrete blocks. Duvalier looked a little wan and not at all herself. Valentine hoped it was just the pain of her wound and not the onset of ravies.

  He'd know if she started trembling. That was usually the first sign. It might have been better to leave her with Everready in his casino-barge hideout, but she'd insisted on accompanying him into Memphis.

  Valentine was dressed all in black. His costume was, in fact, a cut-down version of a priest's habit—it was the only well-made, matching clothing Everready could easily find at the Missions. Valentine had dyed the snake-boots to match on his own, and after cutting off the sleeves added a red neck cloth and a plastic carna­tion, scavenged from a discarded kitchen on one of the old gam­bling barges. He wore the gleaming pistol openly in its leather shoulder holster. The U-gun was zipped back up with the rest of their dunnage.

  Cotswald wiped grease from his brow and sweat from his upper lip. "Of course everyone's heard of Moyo. Nobody moves deposits in or out of this town without him. The reason Moyo's still Moyo is that he doesn't let anyone get close to him who hasn't come up through his organization. He doesn't just hire Gulfies up to get a chance at the inventory."

  Valentine had already learned two pieces of Memphis slang: deposits were the individuals in the bank camps waiting for transshipment to their probable doom; inventory was attractive women—and a few men and kids, he imagined—meant for the fleshpots, private and public.

  "Octopus is a good guy. Pays well for the little scraps of information that pass my way. What are you offering?"

  Valentine reached under his shirt and pulled up a simple lan­yard that hung around his neck. A shiny ring turned at the end of the line.

  Everready had taken it off a dead general.

  "A brass ring? Is it legit?"