Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  Brother Mark’s lips writhed. “I’ll do what I can to confuse matters.”

  “You’ll do nothing. The Ordnance bridge guards are professional soldiers. I broke through a sentry point once and they chased me across half of Kentucky.”

  “No, I was referring to our friend in that oversized wasp nest. I have some . . . abilities where our Kurian friends are concerned, and if it’s an inexperienced mind, I may be able to keep him occupied so you can approach with him unaware.”

  “I’m glad I decided to bring you along,” Valentine said.

  “Further proof that I’m good at what I do,” Brother Mark said. “Hurry along now, daring Valentine.”

  Brother Mark was a man of deep waters—if he was a man. Valentine was beginning to wonder if he was in fact a Lifeweaver.

  But he didn’t have time to think about it. The Bears were scheduled to hit the power plant in two hours—or when Valentine sent up a green flare.

  He took his Type Three out of the horsehide sleeve, checked the action, placed a magazine inside it, and tucked his Cat claws into the wide sleeves of the Moondagger uniform-robe. With that, he set off up the riverbank.

  Valentine considered trying to bull his way through with his brass ring and the Moondagger outfit, but it looked like the sight lines for the guard posts covered the entire bridge. If he passed one they’d be able to see him all the way to the other.

  Plus, there was a shadowy figure in the middle of the bridge that Valentine knew, without a doubt, was a Reaper. Undoubtedly there to guard its master Kurian in its nest high above.

  So the easy way was out.

  A Reaper, when alert and aware, was the most dangerous thing on two legs walking the earth. The eyes, ears, voice, and appetite of their Kurian, the avatars lived off of the blood of their victims. Terrifyingly strong and juggernaut tough, they were almost impossible to sneak up on, as they could sense a sentient mind nearby. As they fed, they passed vital aura, spiritual energies Valentine only half understood, to the puppet-master animating them. After feeding, the Reaper sometimes lapsed into a half-awake state. Some believed the Kurian became either insensible in the manner of a drunkard or preoccupied with savoring the vital aura—that was the time to strike. Or during daylight, when the sun’s energy interfered with the connection between Kurian and Reaper.

  If I can’t go up from the top of the bridge, I’ll take the bottom.

  Valentine heard a dog growl up on the bridge as he approached. He froze.

  There weren’t sentries patrolling the base of the bridge on this side. But up by the lights there were guards pacing here and there, checking the approach to the bridge.

  Damn, he’d have to get wet after all.

  The Kurians and their poor habits when it came to keeping roads, bridges, and utility lines in repair served them badly at the new bridge. They’d strung power lines along the side of the bridge to bring electricity into southern Indiana from the Kentucky plant. Valentine took his shoes off and tied them around his neck, and then waded out into the river and took advantage of cracks in the cement bridge pilings to climb up to the power lines.

  Luckily the high-voltage lines were well insulated.

  Valentine dangled from the line by his gloved hands, swaying in the funneled breezes under the bridge as he moved out over the river a few inches at a time. It was exhausting business, and soon his fingers, forearms, and shoulders burned and screamed. He hung, rested, caught his breath, and went on.

  Once well out of the security lights around the roadblock at the north end, he swung up his torso and quickly rolled across the pedestrian wall on the bridge and dropped to the side, pressing himself into the shadows, and lay like a dead thing.

  He quieted his mind. The only way to get past one was to camouflage yourself, body and brain. The first thing he’d been taught after becoming a Wolf was how to box up much of his consciousness and tuck it away for safekeeping. Breathe in, breathe out, letting go of worry. Breathe in, breathe out, giving your fear to the air. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, your body is nothing but a puff of air, flowing invisibly across the landscape. Valentine lost himself in half-remembered poetry, gone where all things wise and fair descend, moving toward “that high Capital, where kingly Death keeps his pale court in beauty and decay.”

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  He watched the Reaper. There was something robotic about its motions. Was the Reaper idling? Perhaps the Kurian was concentrating on his Reapers at the power plant and ignoring his guard below.

  The Reaper passed, and none of the bridge guards was eager to approach its perimeter. Valentine noted that in its passing, the Reaper’s foot slapped the pavement of the bridge. One of its boots was missing the sole; on the other the heel was flapping.

  This Kurian didn’t take very good care of his avatars. Or it had just moved far, fast.

  The guards left the center of the bridge to the Reaper. It paced like a trapped tiger, from the north side of the bridge to the south, crossing right lane to left, and then back from south end to north.

  He looked up at the Kurian’s nest. There it was, like a spider’s egg sac in a hayloft, high and tucked out of the weather.

  Sometimes it pays to take the hard way, Valentine thought.

  Valentine got the rhythm of the Reaper’s route around the center pylon. When it turned its back on him and began to walk away, he jumped up to the suspension cable junction with the bridge proper. He went to one of the suspension cables, looped a utility worker’s harness over the cable, and began to climb hand over hand with wool stocking feet wrapped about the cold steel.

  He moved up the cable like an inchworm. The belt harness enabled him to rest when he needed to catch his breath.

  But it was a cold, bad climb. Numb fingers, couldn’t feel his toes, aching arms and back . . .

  He rested at the top, arm looped around a defunct aircraft warning light. Now it smelled like bat guano.

  Off to the east he could see the power plant, lights illuminating the smokestack.

  Valentine had seen Kurian cockleshells before. All he knew about them was that the paperlike material they were made of acted as both structure and climate control. For all he knew it was living cell material, some creature with no more ability to move or alter shape than an orange.

  This odd bubo on the tower was about the size of compact car, perhaps the smallest such residence Valentine had ever seen.

  He had considered bringing explosives on the venture, but the Angel Food was tricky stuff to work with, and Southern Command had departed with the good electric detonators. He might have to climb both ways only to have his bomb not work.

  Valentine fixed a length of climbing line to the protective grid on the pylon-topping light and lowered himself to the Kurian’s enclosure, rope looped around one leg and his waist.

  The Kurian’s nest was also a work of suspension. Two cork-screws of the odd material anchored it to the top of the pylon.

  Valentine slipped on one of his Cat claws and slashed at one of the supports. The material was much tougher than it looked; it was like trying to cut wet nylon with a butter knife. Finally it gave way with a crackly groan.

  Vision, air, sound—all cut off in an instant.

  It was like someone had put a wet leather bag over his head. Seeing stars from it pressing against his eyes, he realized it must be the occupant.

  Valentine had never been this close to a Kurian before.

  He couldn’t fight it without letting go of the rope and plummeting into the Ohio. If he reached up with his Cat claws, they’d go right through the Kurian, and he’d wind up scalping himself, or worse.

  Consciousness filled with gluey sludge, he felt himself go dizzy and light-headed. The Kurian was taking over, denying him the use of arms and legs—

  He settled for banging his head against the pylon over and over, hard.

  OUT OUT OUT! Valentine ordered the confusion.

  Seeing stars, hardly knowing which wa
y was up, Valentine felt his stocking foot slip, and he found himself upside down, suddenly free of the clammy, cold bag.

  Something below spun as it fell through the night: the Kurian, looking a little like a torn scarf with sewn-on legs as it dropped life- lessly toward the river, pushed by the wind rather than riding it.

  And then he realized he was dangling by one lucky loop around his leg, enervated and confused, a hammering sound in his ears.

  Valentine found purchase on the Kurian’s cocoon and dropped on it like a man poleaxed. The texture of the surface against his cheek felt like a dried, oversized spitball.

  Except he’d done a little too good a job with his claws—the structure fell away. It fell slowly and silently, like a Japanese paper lantern might, catching air within. Or perhaps the material was a substance engineered to be near lighter than air.

  The rope around his leg whipped this time like a startled snake. Valentine lashed out and grabbed one of the severed struts that had held up the cocoon. He plunged his Cat claws into it.

  Hanging there, Valentine swung his leg, retrieved the rope, and hung again by two supports. Where were the damn rungs? Other side. Valentine didn’t so much swing as roll to the other side, feeling with stocking feet for purchase. Finally the steel rung was in his hand and he could think again.

  Valentine wondered what the goddamn thing had done to him. It felt like it was still hanging there. He waved his hand behind his back—nothing.

  Despite the ladder, getting back down wouldn’t be so easy.

  Valentine was caught in the horns of what Duvalier had called “the assassin’s dilemma.” Early on in his training, she said that any fool could walk up and kill a target, provided you learned enough about its habits and grounds. The pro knew how to get away clean, or if not clean, at least alive.

  If he fired the flare from here it would certainly be seen by the observers at the power plant, but the troops on the ground would wonder who’d fired it and why. But he couldn’t delay until he could creep away; it gave more time for the hostage-takers at the power plant to figure out why the Reapers were acting so oddly and react.

  No, Gamecock’s Bears had to strike, and soon.

  But Valentine had an unexpected ally. The Reaper, suddenly undirected and fearful, froze, looking this way and that. Did its master Kurian’s final mental state—assuming they felt anything so prosaic and human as fear—remain in its brain psyche the way a flash left a white echo on the retinas?

  The Reaper rushed toward the guards on the Indiana side of the bridge. Unfortunately for the men there, they were the closer contingent.

  The first man it reached it just knocked aside with a sweep of the arm that left its victim turned around like a broken doll and twitching. It grabbed a man seated in a small, triangular armored car—was Valentine’s crouched image, the last thing its master Kurian saw, reminiscent of the guard’s position?—and pulled the man’s arm out.

  Valentine could hear the screams even high up in the wind.

  It took a pull or two, but the Reaper got the man out of the car. The window wasn’t big enough for the purpose, so the door had to come off, with the man’s torso used as leverage.

  Valentine checked his equipment and began his descent. Equilibrium and energy slowly returned, and he dropped the last ten feet to the base of the bridge.

  Soldiers from the south side of the bridge were nervously peeping over the lane divider, watching the Reaper hunt their comrades like a loosed dog in a chicken run.

  Valentine snuck up next to an Ordnance officer.

  “Are you just going to stand here and let your men get shredded?” Valentine demanded.

  The officer turned on him. “Waiting for—Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m with Vengeance Six,” Valentine said.

  “What the hell’s Vengeance—”

  “Moondagger special operations,” Valentine said.

  “Then where’s the beard and dagger?”

  “It interferes with the disguise,” Valentine said, hoping the man would see only a scarred man with dark hair and features.

  “That’s a nice Atlanta Type Three,” an Ordnance NCO said. “I thought all you Moondagger types were issued Ordnance Columbus Assault—”

  Valentine wanted to quit answering questions, and the best way to do that was to start questioning himself. “Captain, have you ever dealt with a rogue? They’re unpredictable and very dangerous, worse than any rabid dog you’ve ever imagined.”

  “Glad to have you, but I’ll need to—”

  “Almighty, man, the thing’s killed one of your men already. Let’s work out who’s subordinate to whom later. I need some light. A sudden burst of light always confuses them.” Valentine passed him the oversized plastic derringer that served as his signal gun. “Send up a flare, would you?”

  “Sir, where did you come from?”

  “New Universal Church School, Utica,” Valentine said, giving the name of one of Brother Mark’s alma maters. “When I point up, fire the flare.”

  “Who are you to be—”

  Valentine whipped off his glove and flashed his brass ring.

  “If you want to try to corral it, be my guest,” Valentine said.

  “After you,” the captain said. The wild Reaper was carrying around the unfortunate driver’s head, hissing at it like Hamlet speaking to the jester of most excellent fancy.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” an NCO asked a lieutenant in an undertone that Valentine heard easily as he walked toward the Reaper.

  “I hate these special operation types,” the captain said. “They never let us know anything until we start catching hell.”

  Valentine trotted up the side of the bridge toward the north side, which was like a disturbed anthill as the Ordnance soldiers ran this way and that. Only three men stayed at their station: a group at a machine gun covering the roadblock on the bridge. They swiveled the muzzle of their weapon to aim it at the Reaper.

  Valentine put his Type Three to his shoulder. He knelt and braced against a pedestrian rail between the bridge side and the traffic lanes.

  He raised his left hand and waved his pointed finger skyward.

  When the flare exploded into a green glow, the Reaper froze in its activities for a second, startled. Valentine, positioned so that even if he missed he wouldn’t strike one of the few remaining Ordnance troopers on the other side of the bridge, squeezed the trigger.

  The heavy round struck the Reaper squarely on the butt. Valentine doubted the bullet penetrated more than one layer of the strong, unearthly weave the Reapers used in their robes.

  Reapers can scream when they want to. It’s a high-pitched sound reminiscent of sheet metal tearing. The men at the crew-served gun, seeing Valentine shoot, opened up with their weapon as well.

  Their target, probably frightened by the sudden light, pain, and noise, flattened itself under the fire and scuttled north like a crab and sprang off the bridge with an uncanny jump.

  The men with the machine gun tracked it, spraying tracer off into the night. It cleared nine feet of Indiana-side fence topped by three foot loops of razor wire, landed, and disappeared into the darkness.

  Leaving behind a heel from its boot.

  “You’re in a helluva lot of trouble, buddy!” Valentine yelled at the gunner. “I was about to put a round down its throat when you startled the bastard into fleeing.”

  “Thing was going nuts. What—”

  “Now I have to chase it down in the goddamn woods. You know how dangerous that is, going into the woods after a wounded, pissed-off rogue like that?”

  The green light began to pulse as the flare drifted down.

  “You want us to sic the dogs on—” a corporal began.

  “No, they’ll just scare it. I’ll have to hope it calms down enough so I can get a decent shot. And for Kur’s sake, keep your men out of those woods. We’ve had enough bled for one night.”

  “Yes, er—”

  “Get that gat
e. Unlike Jumpin’ Jack Slash, I can’t drop sixty feet and take off running. Is that a box of defensive grenades? Give me two. There’s a good man. You never know.”

  Valentine hung the grenades on the Moondagger cummerbund and trotted off down the road. A pair of Ordnance medics went to work on the human wreckage left behind.

  “Keep those dogs out of the woods,” Valentine yelled at the officer, pointing.

  He confused the officer just enough to get him to turn, and in that moment Valentine hopped over the rail of the bridge and dropped the twenty feet to the riverbank. Valentine took off into the Indiana woods.

  He felt strange pity for the Reaper. What it remembered of its existence as a puppet of the master Kurian, Valentine didn’t know. Would it be worse to awaken, confused and pained as a newborn, to a world of bullets and explosions all around and instinctive hunger that needed feeding, or to suddenly have control over your body again? Or was it something in between, where the Kurian gave his avatar ideas, needs, and desires, and let it carry them out with a little nudge now and then or a few words bubbling up out of the subconscious?

  Valentine and Brother Mark rowed back across the river, fighting the downstream current that threatened to carry them within sight of the bridge. It would be light soon. There was a little highway stop with a good roof that the Wolves used to keep an eye on the bridge. They could warm themselves there and have a hot meal that would refresh them for the slow, bumpy ride home.

  “What’s that?” Brother Mark asked, pointing behind them.

  Valentine put the oar across his thighs and looked over his shoulder. Something like a turtle’s back was cutting through the current. Valentine saw a face come up for air.

  “That,” Valentine said, “is a Reaper head.”

  It wasn’t swimming hard to intercept them; it was just following.

  Valentine put his oar in the water and took six vigorous strokes while he thought. Then he set the oar in the bottom of the canoe and carefully turned around.