by E. E. Knight
This time she clung to him as he carried her, running for the telephone poles.
* * * *
Valentine heard voices, and turned toward the sound.
"I can't believe you used me as bait," Thatcher said.
"I got it, didn't I?" Duvalier chided.
"A second later and it would have popped my head off."
"Uh-uh. I never leave less than a second and a half to chance, sweetie. Wait—-"
The last was at the sound of Valentine setting Gail on her feet again.
"It's us," Valentine said, holding his jaw. He came into what might pass for a clearing—thick grasses rather than trees—around an old barn. The telephone poles lined a road like the Roman crucifixes on the Via Appia.
Duvalier knelt down, working.
Valentine stepped up and found what he expected, a headless Reaper.
"Hell, Val," Duvalier said.
"Uf igh," Valentine tried. "Rluff nigh."
Thatcher seemed lost in his own thoughts as he stared at the Reaper corpse. "You should have seen it—the Reaper was coming for me. I tried to fire but my gun was on safety, and before I could even flick off it reached, and there she was behind it."
"Big tactic," Duvalier said, examining the robe she had stripped off the Reaper for black—and poisonous—subcutaneous fluid. "Lying in the grass like a snake."
"You're one of those . . . one of those Hunter-things," Thatcher said.
"You have a problem with that?" Duvalier asked.
"Offerz," Valentine garbled. "Oturs."
"The others?" Duvalier said. "I dunno. I didn't hear any screams."
"Are there any more around?" Thatcher asked.
"Ope nog," Valentine said.
Thatcher took a better grip on his gun and looked warily around. "How do you know?"
"He knows," Duvalier said. "He just knows. Leave it at that." She gave him his rifle back, as though glad to give up an unpleasant burden.
"Can we sleep soon? How about in that barn?" Gail asked.
Valentine waved tiredly. "Attitude, Gail," Duvalier said.
"Stick the attitude. My feet are killing me," she said hotly.
"I think she's getting better," Thatcher said.
* * * *
It took them a while to find the trail of Dr. Boothe and Pepsa. Valentine found their marks in the long grasses. They'd cut over to a legworm trail and followed it up the hillside.
"What are they going back in that direction for?" Thatcher asked.
Valentine shrugged, resolved to communicate with hand signals. Gail groaned as they started up the hill.
They caught up to the pair, Boothe hiking along behind Pepsa carrying the gun in one hand, her medical bag slung.
Valentine elbowed Duvalier, pointed, and made a T with his hands. She nodded and slipped into the bushes, gripping her walking stick like an alert samurai carrying his sword.
"What's the matter?" Thatcher asked, keeping his voice low.
Valentine found he could whisper coherently. He spoke into Duvalier's ear.
"Something's wrong," she said. "Somebody's been giving us away."
Back in the legworm valley, Valentine heard hoofbeats. Two legworms and perhaps a dozen men on horseback were investigating events in the pit. They looked like native Kentuckians intermingled with Grogs.
"Let's catch up," Duvalier said.
They went up the hill as quickly as Gail's weary, unsteady legs would allow.
The vets must have heard them coming. Both turned around. Pepsa looked frightened.
Boothe brought up the pistol and pointed it between them.
Shit. Guessed wrong. Why didn't I just shoot the pair of them?
Because they might not be in it together.
"Hey, Doc, it's us," Thatcher said.
"Guns! Drop them," Boothe said. The gun shook in her hands as she pointed. Tears streamed down her face.
Tears? Why would a Kurian agent cry?
"Epsah!" Valentine shouted, shouldering his rifle, sighting on the first Kurian agent he had ever looked upon.
The U-gun burned. Its stock burned him, the trigger guard; he felt the flesh on his hands cook; the agony of the steam in the Kurian Tower redoubled and poured through his nervous system. Drop it, all he could do was drop the gun.
Don't~think~so, a voice in his head said.
Thatcher brought up his rifle—what the hell?—the burning agony left, relief and wonder at freedom from pain but why was Thatcher shouldering his rifle with the barrel pressed to his collarbone and the butt pointed at Pepsa
Krrak!
Blood and bone flew from Thatcher's shoulder, the gun fell, the spent cartridge casing spun and before it completed its parabola Duvalier was out of the Kentucky grass, sword held up and ready
Stupid ~ bitch!
Duvalier screamed, dropped her sword, jumped back from it as though it were a snake striking—
Valentine grabbed his short legworm pick, lunged up the hill.
Boothe turned her gun at Pepsa, no, not at her, at a patch of dark shortleaf pine behind her, and fired.
Behind him Thatcher screamed. Valentine was still three strides away, the pain came, the legworm pick lightning in his hands . . . no, fire, hot blue flame that burned—
Lies. They fight with lies. Lies can't change steel to flame.
He raised the pick, screaming in agony, fighting the pain with sound.
You ~ dumbfuck ~ terrorists, Pepsa said between his ears.
And he threw, sent the pick spinning at her, watched it hit, saw the point bury itself in one fleshy breast, a gurgle, went to Boothe, took the hot gun from her shaking hand, pointed and fired
Where ~ are ~ you ~ lord?
Another shot, HEEELP ~ the ~ burn! the gun clicked empty, even as she toppled over he straddled her, hitting her with the pistol butt, silencing the screaming from between his ears by caving in her skull and the awful warble of her tongueless mouth, but nothingness yawned beneath him like a chasm, he felt himself tottering at the edge of an abyss.
Duvalier picked him up off her corpse, pulled him out of the darkness. Hoofbeats. The loom of riders in the darkness. Words, Boothe bending over Thatcher, applying pressure as Duvalier waved the riders over. Finally the strange emptiness in his head left, and he could distinguish faces again.
"Haloo, Bulletproof. You're far from home. What hospitality can fellow tribesmen offer?"
* * * *
They bartered the Reaper's robe for transport and found their way back to the Bulletproof. In a few days they again knew Kentucky hospitality in a chilly, Z-shaped valley fed by artesian springs, his jaw braced and bandaged with baling wire by Boothe. Valentine learned to appreciate smashed cubes of legworm flesh, slathered in barbecue sauce sucked through a straw. He also got mashed squash, pumpkin, and corn, eating out of the same pot as the resident babies.
A giggling nursing mother offered him a spare teat after feeding her daughter. It hurt to laugh.
Once his jaw knit he borrowed an old-fashioned horse, loaded up a second with grain and dried meat, and rode out to where he had last seen Ahn-Kha. He left a stoppered bottle of Bulletproof bourbon at Grog-eye level with a note to his friend, telling him where they were wintering until warmth allowed travel again. He tried to learn what had happened to Ahn-Kha and his pursuing column, but only found some shattered glass and debris that might have been from a motorcycle eight miles away.
The fruitless search left him moody and depressed. His tender mouth troubled him every time he spoke and ate, and a fragment of mirror showed that his jawline now had an uneven balance to it thanks to the break. The only bright spot was Gail Foster's transformation into a convivial, charming woman, though she remained a little pallid, even on the hearty Bulletproof cooking. She looked as though she were about to have twins. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a woman with such a wide belly after the baby dropped.
The baby came on December 22.
Duvalier woke Valentine
and passed him a hot cup of grassy-tasting tea. "Gail's water broke. Our vet is attending. Suki's there too."
She brought him to a modest, pellet-stove-heated home that served as a sickroom for the local Bulletproof.
Suki was a Bulletproof midwife. She was young, perhaps a year or two older than Valentine, but had a calming effect on Gail brought about by nothing more than her quiet voice and cups of the honey-filled silvery cinqefoil tea she brewed. Gail had given birth once before, but remembered nothing of the event but gauzy business on the other side of her screened lap.
Valentine went in and saw Gail lying on her side with her knees drawn up and buttocks at the edge of the hammocklike "birthing bed." He gripped her hand through a contraction, sponging the sweat from her forehead when it was over. She'd soaked through her shirt even in the winter cool.
"I wish Will was here," she gasped. "He always ..." The words trailed off.
Valentine wrung out the sponge. "Will never forgot about you for a moment. Your husband wasn't the man you thought. Or he was. You'll understand when you see him again."
She smiled and nodded.
"First we have to get your baby into the world. Can do?"
"Can do," she agreed.
But you can't be there to see it. This trip, the risks. You'll never see a payoff. You could just as well have driven away with Ahn-Kha. You can never walk down an Ozark highway again. You're condemned by your own actions, an exile.
"She's quit dilating," Boothe said, bringing Valentine out of his thoughts with a flash of guilt over what Gail must be experiencing. She had a short flashlight attached to her forehead: a medical unicorn. "I'm going to C-section. Pe—Suki, get me the tray I laid out in the kitchen."
Valentine got out of the way as the midwife came in with the tray.
"Suki, keep her chin up."
Boothe poured a shot glass full of Bulletproof, then added a couple of drops of ether to it. She tipped it into a fist-sized wad of cotton.
"Have her breathe this," she said, handing the mask to Suki. Gail inhaled the mixture.
"Christmas baby. You were almost a Christmas baby," Gail said as the ether took effect.
"Enough," Dr. Boothe told Suki. "Gail, keep looking at the ceiling. Over before you know it." Valentine watched her focus on Gail's belly, steadying the scalpel.
Valentine watched, relieved and fascinated at the same time, as the scalpel opened Gail just above the pelvis.
"Coming now. Your baby's doing fine," Boothe said.
Valentine couldn't help but think about Malia. What had Amalee's birth been like? The sweet, burning scent of ether in the air, along with blood, sweat, and amniotic fluid?
God, do they all look like that?
Boothe pulled out a froglike creature, narrow, legs drawn up tight, arms folded like a dead insect's, brachycephalic skull all the more unreal as the doctor held it upside down. "Oh, Christ."
A baleful yellow eye, slit-pupiled, peered at him from a face pinched by internal agony. It hissed, fought for breath.
Gail Foster Post had given birth to a Reaper.
Suki backed away, hand over her mouth.
"Boy or a girl?" Gail said, then, when there was no reply, "What? What?"
Boothe showed her.
"Get it away from me!" Gail screamed. "Bastards! Lying bastards!" Her words trailed off into sobs.
"Stay still," Boothe ordered. "Suki, put three more drops in another shot glass."
"Give it to me," Valentine said, extending a towel. He took the struggling infant—cleaned its sexless body.
"What a mess. Tearing everywhere in the uterus," Boothe said. "I hope I can fix this." She turned her light on Valentine. "Just pinch its nose and mouth shut. Bury it outside."
Valentine took the infant out into the December air, instinctively holding it close against the chill. He looked at the blood-smeared face, purple and green and blue, crisscrossed with veins, horror in miniature. Black nails, impossibly tiny, gleamed wetly as it moved its hand.
The future death machine coughed.
Did yellow eyes make you evil? A pointed tongue?
"Do you have a soul?" someone asked, using his larynx, tongue, and mouth.
Valentine wondered if he'd directed the question to the newborn or to himself. Tiny nostrils, long little jaw; he could smother it one-handed.
My DNA is 98% identical to a chimpanzee. How much code do I share with you?
However much, a tiny amount of it was Kurian. Evil.
Or Lifeweaver. The Dau'weem and Dau'wa shared however many gene pairs they possessed, thirty thousand or three million. They differed only in their opposition over vampirism.
Could he say a creature fresh from the womb deserved to die, thanks to its appearance?
Not appearance, design.
A newborn, innocence embodied in what felt like ten pounds of sugar. Harmless. But experience told him otherwise.
Songs of Innocence and Experience. William Blake.
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Valentine closed up the towel, protecting the newborn tiger against the chill. The Reaper's head turned, sensing something it liked in Valentine's wrist.
Valentine pushed his pulse point a little closer, offering.
Its mouth opened, latched on, and Valentine felt the prick of the sharp tongue. The penetration only hurt a little.
Softly, the Reaper fed.
About the Author
E. E. Knight graduated from Northern Illinois University with a double major in history and political science, and then worked a number of jobs that had nothing to do with history or political science.
