Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  He took up one of the Ordnance hand grenades. It was the more powerful of the two used by their military, designed to be thrown from cover at an advancing enemy. Javelin had captured plenty from the Moondaggers, who used them to clear buildings.

  “Hold up for a moment,” Valentine said.

  After a quick read of the yellow letters on the side to double-check the instructions, Valentine stripped off the red safety tape and pulled the fuse pin. The grenade whispered like a snake.

  He knew better than to stand up in a canoe, so, kneeling and bracing as best as he could, he hurled the grenade at the following head.

  It was a poor throw. It plopped short and detonated in a fountain of water with a rumbling roar that sounded like an oversized toilet flushing.

  “Well done, my man,” Brother Mark said.

  “We’ll see,” Valentine said.

  The last of the water fell and the head was still there, though it had halted and drifted with the current. It took a cautious stroke or two toward them again, letting the current put more distance between them.

  “Not easily discouraged,” Brother Mark said.

  “Row hard,” Valentine said.

  Paddling hard enough to froth the river, with Valentine steering and Brother Mark puffing with the effort of providing power, they beached the canoe on the little brush-overgrown spit that they’d used to cautiously launch it a few hours before.

  The Reaper scuttled up and out of the water sideways, like the crabs Valentine had seen on the Gulf Coast.

  “Lord, oh lord, the thing’s stalking us,” Brother Mark said.

  It had killed before but not fed. Valentine saw the yellow eyes, bright with something that was probably hunger in this cold, fixed on the slower-moving Brother Mark.

  Valentine no longer felt sorry for the creature. The easy sympathy that came when he pictured it wandering the woods, confused and hungry, had been replaced by pale-skinned, black-fanged reality.

  “Anything in your bag of tricks that lets you suggest something to a Reaper? Like going back across the river and trying the hunting in Indiana?”

  Brother Mark closed his eyes, opened them, and then closed them again, this time firmly. “No, Major, nothing, I’m afraid. I get no sense of a mind there, not even a human one.”

  Valentine put his sights on it and it froze. It retained enough knowledge, then, to know what a pointed gun meant.

  That made it more dangerous.

  It slipped behind a tree with a swift step that cut the air like the sound of an arrow in flight.

  “Shit,” Valentine said.

  He had one hope left.

  A predator has a stronger survival instinct than most people credit it with. To the hunting cat or the pursuing wolf, serious injury is synonymous with death. If not defending young or scrapping with a challenger for territory, a predator will usually shy away from an aggressive display, especially if you can overawe it in size and noise.

  Of course this isn’t the case with all meat eaters. A wolverine or a bear will often welcome a fight.

  He handed his remaining grenade to Brother Mark. “If it gets its tongue in me, toss this. They get lost in the act of feeding. You could run up and hang it off its back.”

  Valentine had lost a comrade in the old Labor Regiment that way near Weening, the night he killed his first Reaper. Weening still had the skull nailed to the town gate. The kids sometimes chalked words under it that appealed to a teenage sense of humor.

  Valentine rolled up the Moodagger sleeves and slipped into his old, comfortable Cat claws. He advanced on the Reaper, arms spread wide.

  It peeked from around the bole of the tree at him.

  “Ha!” Valentine shouted. He swept one outstretched arm against winter-bare branches, stripping bark and crackling twigs.

  “Ha!” Valentine shouted again, pantomiming a lunge as he approached.

  “HA!” he tried again, stomping hard with his good leg.

  If it came at him, he might still live. A good swipe across the nose might blind it.

  The Reaper was dripping water from its robes but not moving. Nothing to do but go all in.

  Valentine ran at it with a scream, and its eyes widened. It sprang away, running hard to the east up through the riverbank brush.

  Valentine pursued it for as long as he could keep up the sprint and then lobbed a rock in its direction. His aim was better this time. The stone struck it in the leg and it jumped, crashing through some low-hanging branches and falling. It picked itself up and kept running.

  “Yeah, you do that,” Valentine puffed.

  Valentine wasn’t looking forward to the walk back to the truck. He’d have his rifle up and his sphincter tight the whole way, leading Brother Mark in wide circuits around anything big enough to hide the Reaper.

  He had the funny feeling they hadn’t seen the last of this fellow. And he’d have to pass the news to the Kentucky volunteers that there was a wild Reaper loose on their side of the river.

  Just what the remaining Wolves and Bears would want to hear after the action at the power plant—assuming some catastrophe hadn’t left the grounds of the power plant strewn with bodies.

  They drove back Fort Seng at a crawl, the vegetable-oil-powered diesel banging away in first and second gear over the broken-down roads. Valentine, exhausted and half-asleep in his seat, had the driver take them to the power plant first.

  He was relieved to see a pair of Wolves step out and halt them on the last turn before the plant. They had to carefully go off road and route around a roadblock the Wolves had cut, unsure of the possibilities of a counterattack from the bridge and wanting to hold it up long enough for the Bears and Wolves—and one unpredictable Cat—to escape.

  They found the power plant in Southern Command’s hands and only lightly damaged in the offices, where explosives had been used to drive out the confused Reapers.

  Valentine felt dwarfed by the immense architecture of the power plant and the towering smokestack. It seemed like a monument that would stand forever, like Independence Rock in Wyoming or the great Kurian tower in Seattle.

  “Made angel food out of ’em, sir,” Chieftain, the senior Bear NCO, said. He liked to decorate his uniform with feathers of various raptors—and a vulture or two.

  Silvertip, another Bear who loved Kentucky and had decided to settle there and become a dealer in legworm leather, was partially undressed, sitting in the chill air and carefully scrubbing blood out of his studded leather with an old toothbrush. “Six,” Silvertip said. “Don’t remember ever taking so many in one day before.”

  “The Ghost did that,” Chieftain said. “Shut down their master. Wolves saw the flare, certain enough, and got word to us. We went in and found the whole place in a tumult.”

  “Where’s Ali?” Valentine asked. There were several leather-winged harpy bodies in a pile near the gate. Not enough for Valentine’s taste, but they’d picked off a few.

  “The Cat? I think she’s sleeping in the kitchen.”

  There were Wolves near the exterior door, all asleep with bits of a meal scattered across the floor except one sergeant in deerskins quietly putting a freshly cleaned Remington back together. He pointed Valentine in the direction of the cafeteria.

  The cafeteria had blood and black Reaper tar on the floor and a good deal of damage to the walls from bullet holes. The windows were broken where the Bears had come in.

  Valentine found Duvalier in the kitchen, curled up between a steaming stove and a basket of potatoes. One of his Wolves was opening cans of tomatoes and pouring them into a vast soup pot.

  She was sleeping cradling her sword stick, looking like a little girl snuggling with an anorexic doll. Valentine nudged her with a toe.

  “Good job,” he said as she blinked awake and yawned.

  “You found the Kurian.”

  “Where we thought he was,” Valentine said. “Just a little one.”

  “He was hungry enough.”

  “How did you feed hi
m?”

  “With the Moondaggers,” Duvalier said, pouring herself some coffee from an urn. “It was like one of those Noonside Passions episodes I used to watch in New Orleans. I pretended to be a girl looking for her brother who was being held in the power plant, and this sergeant promised to get him back for me. The name I gave was for a dead man. Lying bastard. So he slobbered on me for a bit and then fobbed me off on a private to take me back to the gate where other family members were waiting, trying to shout messages to the men in the cafeteria.

  “I played up to the private a little, the sergeant saw it and got jealous, and the next thing you knew they were fighting. Some officer-priest broke it up, took me away for ‘counseling’ and he started groping me five minutes later. I screamed bloody murder and the next thing you know half the Moondaggers were fighting with each other. I’ll admit, I egged it on a bit by snatching a dagger and sticking it in the priest’s kidney. The Reapers broke it up and killed two of them and hauled the bunch of us into the cafeteria. Then they lost it and started running around like a chickens with their heads off. Next thing I knew the Bears were coming in the windows.”

  “Your feminine wiles have lost nothing over the years,” Valentine said.

  She snorted. “Dream on, Valentine. I think they put Chope or one of the other Church aphrodisiacs in that syrupy fruit juice they drink. I tell you, Val, there isn’t enough hot water in the world to wash off the grubby fingerprints.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Owensboro, December: Kentucky’s third largest city, though a little smaller than nearby Evansville, has a vaguely Bohemian air to it. Long a riverfront town, Owensboro had its moments of fame: Its courthouse was burned by Confederate raiders during the Civil War, and once, at the turn of the twenthieth century, it had been shaping up to be one of the pivot points of the new automobile industry before being eclipsed by Ford in Detroit. It was also notable for being the site of the last public hanging in the United States, that of Rainey Bethea for the rape and murder of a septuagenarian named Lischa Edwards in the 1930s.

  If Lexington is more bustling thanks to its status as a transport hub linking the Georgia Control and the rest of the middle and deep south Kurian Zones with the Ordnance and others to the north, and Louisville more industrious because of the huge legworm-rendering plants that turn quasi-insectoid flesh and a corn syrup sauce into WHAM!, Owensboro is proud of its cultural heritage. It prides itself on barbecue and bluegrass and, even in the reduced circumstances of the Kurian era, still manages to hold a few festivals a year dedicated to food and drink.

  Now it is a popular watering hole for wealthy members of the Northwest Ordnance visiting from their vast homes and ranches in the delightful hills of southern Kentucky and the bluegrass outside Louisville. They enjoy the nominally illicit thrill of a visit across the river to dine and shop. The backdoor and under-the-table nature of the commerce along Owensboro’s main street is the sizzle for goods that are often counterfeit, courtesy of the wily Kentuckians. The “Greek” olive oil is from Georgia, the “Colombian” coffee from Alabama, and the “Swiss” chocolate could be bought ten times cheaper in Pennsylvania. The gold in the quarter bars allegedly taken from Fort Knox is real enough; the identifying stamps aren’t.

  The bourbon, musical instruments, and barbecue sauce is real, however, as is the Kentucky weed. For some reason, plants that have been grown from seeds that passed through the digestive tract of a legworm are considered more valuable.

  The giant sassafras tree—according to the locals the largest in the world—is still standing. It was recently the site of another public hanging, that of one of the Moondaggers from the nearby power plant who’d gone over the fence only to be run down by the city’s impromptu militia, mobilized to render aid to Southern Command in the return of their plant workers.

  The city is quieter than usual this December. Though often subdued in the winter, this time around the city is in lockdown. It’s not the troubles at the power plant, or the revolt in Evansville, or the proximity of the forces of Southern Command that has closed the bridge and wharf to Kurian Order traffic. It is the great groups of strangers of all varieties coming in, from long-haired legworm ranchers to statuesque urbane females with gleaming leather courier bags and attractive wool suits.

  There’s a good deal of speculation about who the strangers are. The locals, for all their guitar picking and hurdy-gurdy cranking and trucks with smuggling compartments over the axles, are keener observers of Kentucky politics than it might seem. They suspect that they’re playing host to the Kentucky Assembly but are willing to let history be made before they start talking about it in the main street’s many cafés and bandstand joints.

  The Crucible Legion, as it was now being styled, had its first field operation providing security on the streets of Owensboro. Valentine had a standing order to put anyone who called it “Valentine’s Legion” to work filling potholes, and it didn’t take many days of punishment with wheelbarrow and shovel before the name disappeared.

  Both the informal name and the formal request to go to Owensboro had come through Brother Mark, who’d decamped without a moment’s rest to the Assembly at Elizabethtown and engineered its move to Owensboro.

  Valentine and Lambert allocated two companies to the security detail, one to provide a presence on the streets in town and a second in reserve just to the west, ready to move to the west bridge or travel on the Owensboro bypass as needed. Valentine gave the street detail’s command to Ediyak, and Patel’s company had the reserve duty. Ediyak had an intelligent charm about her that would mix well with civilians, and Patel could be relied upon to get his men from A to B in a hurry if it became necessary.

  Valentine had little to do but get to know the town and keep his men from talking too much in the bars or being too high profile on the streets. The soldiers of the legion had the unusual orders to keep out of the establishments of the downtown they were guarding.

  He felt odd patrolling a town not in Southern Command control, but as the Owensboro Emergency Council explained it, the delegates didn’t trust some of the hotheads in the more vociferous clans not to try to storm the convention center and force the vote their way at gunpoint.

  While the forces of Southern Command couldn’t be called “neutrals” in Kentucky politics, they were famous for letting the civilians carry out votes without anything more than a soldier’s fatalistic interest in the events of elected officials.

  All Valentine’s soldiers could do was provide an illusion of security. They stood in pairs and trios on the street corners and walked through the old town square and along the rusted, broken river walk. But if a file of Northwest Ordnance gunboats came chugging down the Ohio, all they could do was point the delegates to their designated bombproofs.

  Of course, an illusion could be a powerful thing, as Valentine had learned at substantial pain in the Kurian Zone.

  Owensboro had a police force, of sorts, who appeared to have one law for the town’s residents and another for strangers and transients. Valentine had to keep in the good graces of the local police captain, his deputies, and his “detectives”—who, as far as Valentine could tell, were in charge of extorting money from the shadier local establishments.

  The Kentucky Assembly met at the waterfront conference center that played host to Owensboro’s famous flea markets. Instead of socks and shoelaces and genuine Japanese electric razors, they traded votes during the day and drinks at night.

  Valentine set up his command post in the old town welcome center right on the main street, with a good view of his observation post on the old severed bridge over the Ohio that ran into the center of town. The welcome center had become a sort of lounge for restaurant and accommodation touts and cabdrivers. The touts and drivers were so busy with the Kentucky Assembly in town, they had no need of a place to sit out of the weather and swap lies about their clients, and Valentine had moved in without any protest.

  Brother Mark came in on a coal train with a few other del
egates, including Tikka, now dressed in an impressive mix of cotton, legworm leather, and riding boots that made Valentine think of a dashing flying ace of the First World War. She looked Valentine levelly in the eye and shook his hand before excusing herself.

  “That bright young woman’s building an army for Kentucky. Or an Army of Kentucky, though they haven’t settled on a name,” Brother Mark said in admiration.

  “I hope word doesn’t get out.”

  “Kentucky is turning into the proverbial tar baby for the Kurian Order,” Brother Mark bubbled. Valentine wondered if he was drunk. Perhaps it was the stimulation of so much social intercourse, running from faction to faction, picking up on the queer electrical currents that run through political assemblies. “They’re like Br’er Fox, getting stuck in the tar.”

  “I think the version I heard had Br’er Rabbit getting stuck. Br’er Fox wins one for a change,” Valentine said.

  “Well, either way the analogy is sound. Every time the Kurians try to attack Kentucky, they only get themselves stuck in worse trouble. They sent the Moondaggers in after us, and they perpetrated outrages against a people that tend to pick up their guns and let the lead fly until the point of honor is settled. Just when matters were beginning to calm down, they tried their gambit at the power plant. Now all of Kentucky is talking about that over their back fences and cracker barrels.”

  “I’ve yet to see a cracker barrel my whole time in Kentucky,” Valentine said. Brother Mark had a city man’s habit of cornpone clichés to make his points about the rural folks.

  “Yes, yes, well, you know what I mean. But they’re stuck in worse now. The bombing of Elizabethtown is another example. It united the delegates just as it chased them out of the city. Half were ready to break off and go home until the bombs started falling.”

  “And delivered them right into our lap,” Valentine said.

  “You’re a victim of your own success, my daring Valentine,” Brother Mark said. “All Elizabethtown spoke of the way you handled the power plant difficulty, and that smothered the idea of moving to Bowling Green or Danville. When planes hit the conference center unexpectedly again in a night raid, they decided to relocate in secret to Owensboro. We picked up two more legworm clans and several of the towns in the south. The only major hold-outs are the towns in the Cincinnati-Louisville-Lexington triangle, but you can hardly blame them, practically in the shadow of all those Kurian towers.”