Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  Valentine poured some more milk. “I need cheering up. Give me the full list,” Valentine said.

  “I won sixty bucks this week at poker,” Post said. “It’s a short list.”

  Valentine tossed back the rest of the glass of milk. “I think you’re right about that ulcer.”

  Post’s advice was absolutely correct. Javelin hadn’t worked. It hadn’t died; in a way it had won, dealing a deathblow to the vicious Moondaggers. But it hadn’t worked out as planned. Give it up and move on, the way you folded when you drew into a promising poker hand and came up with nothing.

  Except the pieces were scattered across Kentucky along with his bit of ear, and they included a big, hairy Golden One named Ahn-Kha; Tikka, brave and lusty and vital; and the former Quislings who’d put their lives and the lives of their families into jeopardy by switching sides. Southern Command had run up a big bar tab in blood.

  The next day Valentine sat through a second series of debriefings with Southern Command personnel and civilians whose professional interests included the function and capabilities of the Kurian Order. He was questioned about political conditions of the legworm tribes and the organization and equipment of the Moondaggers. He even had to give a rough estimate of the population of Kentucky and the Appalachian towns and villages he’d seen.

  He had to watch his words about the Kurian manipulation of Javelin’s COs through a mutt they’d picked up named Red Dog, the strange doubt and lassitude that temporarily seized even as aggressive a woman as Colonel Bloom, who was back with what was left of Javelin in Kentucky just south of Evansville. It sounded too fantastic to be true, but he did his best to convince them.

  Finally, a researcher from the Miskatonic queried him again about the flying Reaper he’d seen.

  “You sure it wasn’t a gargoyle?” she said as Valentine sorted through sketches and photographs. They had one sketch and one blurry, grainy night photo of something that resembled what he’d seen. She had the air of someone used to talking to soldiers who’d seen bogeymen on lonely watches.

  It had been wearying, answering questions from people who weren’t interested in his answers unless they fit in with the opinions they’d had when they sat down in the tube-steel office chairs. Valentine let loose. “I’ve seen gargoyles, alive and dead. They’re strong and graceful, like a vulture. This was more spindly and awkward. It reminded me of a pelican or a crane taking off. And it wasn’t a harpy either. I’ve seen plenty of those snaggletooths up close.”

  “Yes, I know.” Valentine thought he recognized his thick Miskatonic file in front of her.

  “So do you have a theory?” he demanded.

  “The Kurians made Reapers by modifying human genetic code. They could have done the same with a gargoyle.”

  All very interesting, but he wanted to be back with his command.

  His last stop on his tour of headquarters was Operations Support. General Lehman had come through with logistics: There was a barge on the Arkansas river being loaded with supplies for his new recruits and to replace the most vital matériel used up in the retreat across Kentucky. Valentine would accompany it back to Kentucky.

  He picked up mail—presorted for the survivors of Javelin. Valentine wondered what happened to the sad little bundles of letters to dead men and women.

  The mail had been vacuum-wrapped in plastic to protect it from the elements, but it still took up a lot of room, especially since the locals used all manner of paper for their correspondence. The mail office had a variety of bags and packs for the convenience of ad hoc couriers such as himself, and Valentine just grabbed the biggest shoulder bag he could find. Judging from the waterproof lining and compartments, it might have once been meant to hold diving or snorkel gear.

  He made a trip to the PX and picked up some odds and ends: Duvalier’s favorite talc, a bottle of extra-strength aspirin for Patel, and a couple of fifty-count boxes of inexpensive knit gloves. If there was one thing Valentine had learned over the years of commanding men in bad weather, it was that they lost their gloves, especially in action. He liked carrying spares to hand out.

  Valentine needed peace, quiet, time to think. He caught an electric shuttle and wandered into Jonesboro and found a café by the train station—a family-owned grill with three gold stars in the window. He learned from photos and boxed decorations inside that they’d lost two sons and a daughter to the Cause.

  He pleased the owners by ordering eggs accompanied by the biggest steak on the menu rather than the Southern Command subsidized “pan lunch.” The steak was sizable and tough, but his appetite didn’t mind, and the cook had worked wonders with the sautéed onions. The young waitress—very young waitress, make that; only a teenager would wait tables in heeled sandals—chatted with him expertly. Almost too expertly, because he didn’t know any of the local militia outfits, and his equivocal answers made her wrinkle her trifle of a nose. How many single, lonely young uniformed men did she wait on in a month? He tried not to stare as she sashayed back and forth with iced tea in one hand and coffee in the other.

  Whether she was family or no, it would be unseemly to ogle the help under the eye of the mother at the register clucking over her regulars like a hen and the muscular father behind the grill. He couldn’t think with her friendly pats on the back of his shoulder as she refilled his iced tea, so he paid his bill—and left an overlarge tip.

  The little park in front of the courthouse beckoned, and he was about to take a bench and read his mail when he heard faint singing. He followed the sound to a church where a children’s choir was rehearsing and grabbed a pew at the back. Women and a few men sewed or knit while their kids screeched through the Christmas hymns.

  Valentine watched the kids for a few minutes. Typical Free Territory youth, no two pairs of jeans matching in color or wear, rail thin and tanned from harvest work or a thousand and one odd jobs. You grew up fast here on the borderlands. So different from the smoothed, polished, uniformed children of the elite of the Kurian Zones, with their New Universal Church regulation haircuts and backpacks, or the wary ragamuffins of the “productives.”

  The boys were trying to throw one another off-tune by surreptitiously stomping one another’s insteps or making farting noises with their armpits in time with the music; the girls were stifling giggles or throwing elbows in response to yanked ponytails.

  The frazzled choral director finally issued a time-out to two boys.

  Valentine thought better on his feet, so he remained standing at the back of the church, shifting weight from one foot to the other in time to the music like a tired metronome.

  Pull out or go all in for Kentucky? Pull out or go all in for Kentucky? Pull out or go all in for Kentucky?

  Valentine spent an evening enjoying a mock-Thanksgiving dinner with William Post and his wife, Gail. She looked strained by Valentine’s presence—or perhaps it was the effort involved in cooking a turkey with the sides.

  Jenny resembled her mother, white-haired and delicate-skinned. Maybe Valentine’s imagination was overworked, but she crinkled her eyes just like Post when she smiled. The little three-year-old had two speeds, flank and full stop.

  She was shy and wary around Valentine, standing in the protective arch of Post’s legs, but she ate as though there was a little Bear blood in her.

  The two old shipmates talked long after Valentine cleared the dishes away, Post had sorted and stored the leftovers, and Gail and Jenny went to bed. Valentine told the whole story of Javelin’s trek across Kentucky, the sudden betrayal in the Virginia coal country, the Moondaggers and the strange lassitude of first Colonel Jolla and then Cleveland Bloom. He described the victory at Evansville, where the populace had successfully revolted, thinking that deliverance was at hand.

  Valentine chuckled. “The underground was so used to parsing the Kurian newspapers and bulletins, assuming that the opposite of whatever was being reported was true, that they took all the stories about a defeated army being hounded across Kentucky to mean it was a
victorious march along the Ohio. When the Kurians called up whomever they trusted to be in the militia to guard the Moondaggers’ supply lines from the Kentuckians, they acted.”

  A cold rain started down, leaving Valentine with an excuse to treat himself to a cab ride back to the base’s visiting housing. Post asked him to spend the night, but Valentine declined, though the accommodations given a corporal of militia couldn’t match up to Post’s cozy ranch-style. If he spent the night, they’d just be up all the while talking, and he wanted to get back to the logistics and support people about more gear on the alleged barge.

  The “cab” showed up after a long delay that Post and Valentine were able to fill with pleasant chitchat. They shook hands and Valentine turned up his collar and passed out into the cold, rainy dark.

  The cab was a rather claptrap three-wheeled vehicle, a glorified motorbike under a golf-cart awning that had an odd tri-seat: a forward-facing one for the driver, and two bucket seats like saddlebags perched just behind. The rear wheels were extended to support the awning and stabilize the vehicle. They reminded Valentine of a child’s training wheels.

  Valentine buckled himself in rather dubiously, wishing Post had offered him a drink to fortify himself against the cold rain. Another soldier, a corporal, slouched in the seat with his back to Valentine, his backpack on his lap and clutching the seat belt white-knuckled as though his life depended on it.

  “Don’t mind sharing, do you now, milly?” the driver asked.

  “No. Of course not.”

  He gunned the engine, and it picked up speed like a tricycle going down a gentle grade. Valentine wondered why the other passenger was nervous about a ride you could hop off a few seconds before an accident.

  “Of course you don’t mind. Cheaper for both; gotta save fuel and rubber. Speaking of rubber, if you’ve a mind to expend one in service, I know a house—”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’m taking the other corp. It’s right on the way.”

  That accounted for the nervousness. Worried somebody he knew would spot him. The awning wasn’t like a backseat you could slump down into and hide. “Bit tired, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself. It’s clean and cheap. Only thing you’ll go back to the wife with is a bangover.”

  “A what?”

  “Like a hangover, only your cock’s sore instead of your head.”

  Valentine wondered what percentage the house gave the cabbie.

  They pulled up to the house, a big old brick foursquare in the older part of town. Most of the houses here were vacant, stripped skeletons with glass and wiring removed, metal taken right down to the door hinges. The one remaining had either been under constant occupancy or been restored—Valentine couldn’t tell which in the dark. It had a pair of friendly red-tinted lights illuminating the porch. Candles flickered from behind drawn curtains.

  Seemed a popular place: A party of four was just leaving—

  Valentine felt a sharp tug and his windpipe closed up. He realized a rope had been looped around his throat, and he was jerked out of the seat backward.

  A quick look at looming figures framed frostily against the red porch light of the house. They had on ghoulish rubber Halloween masks. Then the ground hit him, hard.

  The tallest and heaviest kicked him hard in the stomach, and Valentine bent like a closing bear trap around his neck. He opened his mouth to bite, but someone hauled at the rope around his neck, pulling his head away hard.

  “David Valentine. You murderous, traitorous bastard. Been looking forward to this meeting,” one of the masked men said.

  “You hauled my little brother all the way across Kentucky to get him killed,” another kicker put in.

  Something struck him hard on the kidneys with a crack. “Few more officers like you and the Kur won’t need no army.”

  Valentine roared back an obscenity and tried to get his hands up to fight the rope pulling his neck, but two of the attackers closed, each taking an arm above and below the elbow.

  “All your idea. You and that dumb bitch from headquarters,” an accuser continued.

  “Cuff him good—he’s slippery,” someone with a deep voice advised from the darkness. He was too far away be delivering punches and kicks.

  Or maybe his vision was going and it just seemed as though the voice was coming from a great distance. There were painful stars dancing in his vision like a faerie circus. Valentine felt kicks that might have just as well been blows from baseball bats, so hard were the assailants’ boots.

  “You’ve made enemies, Valentine. Now it’s time to settle up.”

  The rain stung; it must be washing blood into his eyes.

  “We don’t like criminals walking our streets, bold as black.”

  They took turns punching him in the face and stomach.

  “Grog lover!”

  “Renegade.”

  “Murderer!” The last was a crackling shriek.

  They added a few more epithets about his mother and the long line of dubious species that might have served as father. Valentine’s mad brain noted that they sounded like men too young to have ever known her.

  “You bring any of those redlegs into our good clean land, they’ll get the same. Be sure of that.”

  “Hell, they’ll get hung.”

  “Like you’re gonna be—huck-huck-huck!”

  “C’mon—let’s string this fugitive from justice up.”

  They dragged Valentine by the rope around his neck. He strained, but the handcuffs on his wrists at his back held firm.

  The old street in Jonesboro had attractive oaks and elms shading the pedestrians from summer heat. Their thick, spreading boughs made a convenient gibbet above the sidewalk and lane.

  The noose hauled Valentine to his feet by his neck. His skin flamed.

  Valentine knotted the muscles in his neck, fought instinct, kicking as he strangled. The rope wasn’t so bad; it was the blood in his eyes that stung.

  Vaguely, he sensed that something was thumping against his chest. An object had been hung around his neck about the size and weight of a hardcover book.

  One of them wound up, threw, and bounced a chunk of broken pavement off his face.

  “Murderer!”

  “Justice is a dish best served cold,” that deep voice said again.

  They piled into the little putt-putt and a swaying, aged jeep that roared out of the alley behind the red-lit house. With that, they departed into the rain. Valentine, spinning from the rope end as he kicked, bizarrely noted that they left at a safe speed that couldn’t have topped fifteen miles an hour, thanks to the odd little three-wheeler.

  Valentine, increasingly foggy with his vision red and the sound of the rainfall suddenly as distant as faint waterfall, looked up at the rope hanging over the branch.

  For all their viciousness with boot tips and flung asphalt, they didn’t know squat about hanging a man. And he’d purposely kicked with knees bent, to give them the illusion that he was farther off the ground than he actually was.

  He changed the direction of his swing, always aiming toward the trunk of the tree. The rope, which his assailants had just thrown over the thick limb, moved closer to the trunk. He bought another precious six inches. Six inches closer to the trunk, six less inches for the rope to extend to the horizontal branch, six inches closer to the ground. With one more swing, he extended his legs as far as they’d go, reaching with his tiptoes, and touched wet earth.

  The auld sod of Arkansas had never felt more lovely.

  Valentine caught his breath, balancing precariously on tiptoe, and found the energy to give himself more slack. He got the rope between his teeth and began to chew. Here the wet didn’t aid him.

  His blood-smeared teeth thinned the rope. He gathered slack from his side and pulled. He extracted himself from the well-tied noose and slumped against the tree. There was a wooden placard hung around his neck, but he was too tired to read it.

  Even with the rope—standard Southern Command c
amp stuff, useful for everything from securing a horse to tying cargo onto the hood of a vehicle—removed from his neck, Valentine could still feel the burn of it. He swept his hand through the gutter, picked up some cold wet leaves, and pressed them to the rope burn.

  They might come back to check on his body. He lurched to his feet and staggered in the direction of the door of the bordello.

  He missed the porch stairs, rotated against the rail until he tripped over them, and went up to the door on hands and knees. Blood dripped and dotted the dry wood under the porch roof.

  His head thumped into the doorjamb.

  “He’s made it,” someone from within called.

  He didn’t have to knock again; the door opened for him. He had a brief flash of hair and lace and satin before he gave way, collapsing on a coconut-coir mat and some kind of fringed runner covering shining hardwood floors.

  “He’s bleeding on the rug. Get some seltzer.”

  “Lord, he’s not going to die on us, is he?” a Texas accent gasped.

  “Uhhhh,” Valentine managed, which he hoped she’d interpret as a “no.”

  “What if they come back to check on him?”

  “They told us not to come out. Didn’t say anything about us not letting him in,” another woman put in. “He made it in under his own power.”

  “They still might do violence, if’n we help him. Toss him in the alley.”

  “Hush up and quit worrying while we got a man bleeding,” an authoritative female voice said. “I’ve never refused a gentleman hospitality in my life and I’m too old to change now. You all can blame me if they do come back. Don’t think varmints like that have the guts, though, or they would have watched till he was cold. Alice-Ann, iodine and bandages.”

  Valentine blinked the blood out of his eyes. The women were of a variety of ages and skin hues and tints of hair, mostly blond or red. He counted six, including what looked and sounded like the madam—or maybe she just catered to the certain tastes in experienced flesh. A gaunt old man moved around, pulling down extra shades and closing decorative shutters with a trembling arm. The doorman? He didn’t look like he could bounce a Boy Scout from the establishment.