by E. E. Knight
Valentine hated to admit defeat. “How shall we answer you, then?”
“We will be in touch. But if you ever wish another audience, simply tie a bedsheet on top of one of these vehicles. They will be observed. We will send a messenger.”
So, the Kurian knew all about their vehicles. They hadn’t seen its silhouette flying around in daylight, so it must search for them at night. Well, there were ways to hide vehicles and disperse lifesign.
“Be vigorous, Valentine. Do not delay even one day. We do not make empty threats; we choose the time and the place of their being carried out. The seeds of the destruction are already planted. My brethren only need to give the signal for them to sprout. You, Valentine, shall be the agent of this land’s destruction. It will be your responsibility. The question is, of course, can you handle the responsibility? Can you handle responsibility?”
“You talk too much,” Frat said. “The major’s under orders, like the rest of us.”
“Negotiating such an arrangement, even if the Kentucky Assembly is interested, would take a lot of time,” Valentine said. “If this whirlwind is as imminent as you claim, you had better delay it, or you’ll find yourself taking refuge in a wasteland.”
The bird thing cocked its head. “Keep in touch.”
Valentine nodded to Frat, who gave it a vigorous turn. He walked it out of camp.
Valentine turned to Habanero. “Wagon master, see if you can raise Fort Seng on your radio. We need to find out where Brother Mark is.”
He turned to the owner of the biggest property in the Free Territory. “Mrs. O’Coombe, I’m sorry, but the needs of Southern Command and Kentucky will have to delay finding your son.”
She tore her eyes from the strange strut of Jack in the Box’s avatar. “But you said tomorrow we will be in the territory where he’d been left.”
“We’ll get there. Just not tomorrow.”
She drew herself up. “Mister Valentine. I equipped this convoy with the best communications equipment I could find. The transmitter alone is worth one of my barns and its resident livestock. Are you telling me it is not adequate to pass along a message that may or may not be an empty threat?”
“Brother Mark may need transport to whatever responsible parties can decide what to do about this.”
“Are you giving me an order?”
“If I have to,” Valentine said, careful to keep his rifle under his arm as the camp began to line up behind their respective leaders, the Bears and Wolves with Valentine, the drivers and mechanics and security men and medical staff with Mrs. O’Coombe. Stuck just stood up and stared at Valentine.
Duvalier hopped up on top of the Bushmaster. “Cool off, all of you. I don’t know who or where this Jack-in-the-off is, but we start throwing down on each other, he’ll be laughing until the robins come back.”
The camp broke into a dozen separate arguments over the reality of the threat:
“If a Kurian told me my dick was on fire, I wouldn’t look down and give him the satisfaction.”
“They always give you a last chance.”
“So this Kurian makes peace with Kentucky. What about the rest of them? It’s all well and good to be neutral, but others gotta respect it or it don’t mean jack.”
“It’s like a game to the Kurians,” Stuck said to Valentine’s Bears. “Sometimes their threats are empty; other times they are carried out to the last degree and beyond. They keep us guessing and on edge.”
“Just good poker,” Chieftain said. “Sometimes you can win a pile on the cheap, if you know how to bluff.”
“I have Fort Seng, five-five,” Habanero said from the radio.
Valentine walked over to the parked Rover. So much for sleep. “Tell them to get Colonel Lambert on the line. Wake her up if they have to. We need to talk.”
You never knew how much of a Kurian threat was illusion and how much was steel. They were like magicians, always diverting attention from the operating hand.
Valentine put a steadying grip on Chieftain’s arm.The Bear’s hair had risen on top of his head. Valentine had known Bears who turned purple when readying for a fight, or whose eyes lit up like a pair of flares, or who turned into snorting, steaming, turf-tearing bulls. He’d never seen one give himself a war headdress before. Valentine had always assumed that Chieftain’s name came from the Bear’s characteristic tomahawks.
“Eloi and Morlocks?” Valentine asked, by way of calming him down.
“I could never much stand reading, Major. But I liked that H. G. Wells guy. Except for Food of the Gods; that one was just too weird.”
“But maybe the most topical, considering tonight’s conversation,” Valentine said. But to be honest, he’d skimmed it too when he was thirteen.
“I read my share of the stuff when I was a boy,” Valentine said, remembering the long winters in Father Max’s library. He’d once thought it profitless idling, but it gave him a truer picture of the world before the cataclysm in 2022 than he received through bits and pieces of the reworked histories of New Universal Church photo-studies children in the Kurian Zone received.
Valentine had sat in any number of New Universal Church lobbies, waiting for free cocoa or bread issued in exchange for attending a short lecture. He’d paged through photograph after photograph of poverty, devastation from war, death by starvation and disease, every horror imaginable and most of them featuring children as victims.
In the Free Territories most of the history the kids learned had to do with the post-2022 resistance and the crimes perpetrated in the Kurian Zone. It was taken as a given that the Old World was a pleasant idyll. One side showed ugly pictures of a hell; the other painted fair, vague portraits of a heaven.
Valentine believed the reality to be a blend. Perhaps whether you lived in heaven or hell depended more on your mental attitude than anything.
Back to the present. One of the drawbacks of aging, Valentine thought from his venerable age of having recently turned thirty, is a tendency to dwell on the past. Living in many of his memories would mean a waking nightmare. Better to think about the future.
With that thought firmly in mind, Valentine examined the baton the flying Reaper had brought. Mrs. O’Coombe’s crew was already calling it “Mothman.”
The baton case looked like polished bone, possibly a femur from a preadolescent human. Valentine didn’t know bones well enough to determine. Besides, the joints were sawn off where the tube had been threaded and capped.
He buried the cylinder and its caps. No telling what the Kurian might have planted in the baton in the way of location devices. For all he knew there could be an audio-video transmitter.
The offer itself took up only one paragraph. There was no signature or date. The paper had a watermark that looked vaguely like a stylized depiction of an eclipse—a ring of faintly red fire, offering just enough of a glow to read the letters in darkness. Perhaps that was the Kurian’s version of a commitment.
Valentine touched it with a first-aid kit’s tweezers.
A FAIR OFFER OF A SECURE FUTURE
—it began, and went on to outline the same deal the Reaper had spoken of. Autonomy for Kentucky save for the Kurian bridgehead at Louisville—a fair exchange for Evansville—provided it remained neutral in the war.
Frat returned, looking thoughtful, and stowed his rifle and gear. Valentine waved him over to the radio, where he was waiting to see if Lambert could make contact with Brother Mark—then perhaps he and the old churchman could have personal communication.
The lieutenant looked like he’d aged a year since Valentine had last seen him. Had the Kurian figured out a way to siphon off a little aura? He’d decided some time ago that that was what had happened to him at the Owensboro western bridge.
“How’d that thing ever find you, Frat?” Valentine asked. “Did it just flap down?”
“I thought I heard an engine—aircraft, maybe—and went up a hill so I could find a better listening spot.
“It gave a chittering soun
d from a tree above. I looked up and there it was. I thought my number was up. But it had a white hand towel in each mitt and waved them.”
“You shouldn’t go poking around alone,” Valentine said.
“What, some good ol’ boys around here will bend me over and make me squeal?”
“That’s a dream date compared to what a Reaper might do to you.”
Frat shrugged.
“Frat, one more thing. Did it have anything in that bag?”
“I searched it. Nothing but dog hair and stank. I think that was a ration pouch. Maybe some toy poodle got packed as its lunch.”
“Didn’t seem like the kind of creature that could fly far to me.”
“Maybe the engine noise was from an aircraft, dropping the thing off.”
Valentine nodded. “We had a little argument over the management of the column while you were gone. We’re going to get Brother Mark.”
“Before we get Mrs. O’Coombe’s son? Hope you know what you’re doing. She seems like a useful woman to know, if you ever decide to turn civilian and take up private employment.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Central Kentucky, January: The locals have a saying: “You have to come here on purpose.” This is the fastness of Kentucky, the region that stretches southeast from Louisville to the Tennessee Valley. It is a bewildering maze of knobs, gullies, streams, ridges, choked at the swampy bottoms and backwaters, breezy and cool and clear atop the region’s many ridges.
The meadows, breathing in the shadows of the ridges, are the gut of the country. So rich in blackberry bramble and cherry, with grasses that grow indefatigably in summer and only a little less lushly in the brief winters, the meadows support dairy cattle for the landholders and such an abundance of deer that even the region’s skilled hunters hardly trim the population.
Winters here pass mild; snow blows across several times a year but melts quickly. Even the songbirds seem to be resting between mid-December and February; all the greens and browns fade and blend together and everything looks washed-out and dull.
The water is the same, winter or summer. The hills are rich in wells and springs, all flowing with clean, crisp, limestone-filtered water tastier than any city tap could produce. Underground flows and seeps have worn away the region’s limestone, honeycombing it with sinks and caves famous, dangerous, and unknown.
The people are clannish in the best sense of the word. Interlocking circles of families spread news, offer support, celebrate marriages, and mourn deaths at the many little churches dotting the region. They are fiercely independent, even from their fellow Kentuckians: the city folk outside Cincinnati and Louisville, the flatlanders of the more gentle hills to the west (not that they don’t range their legworms there and maintain good relations with the Jackson Purchase locals), or the Appalachian mountain folk. In past decades some were moonshiners and marijuana growers; later they ran Internet start-ups and were artisans. They were the first in Kentucky to learn how to wrangle legworms, to study their herds and breeding cycles, unafraid to learn from even the smattering of Grogs in southern Indiana, becoming elderly veterans of the battles following the cataclysm in 2022 in worm riding and harvesting.
They use the many caves and holes to hide their weapons, their precious machine tools, their spare radios, and even explosives.
This is the heartland of the old Kentucky Alliance that accompanied Southern Command’s Javelin into West Virginia. Now what’s left of that fellowship is reorganizing itself into the Army of Kentucky—at least that’s the formal name on the documents coming out of the government. The worm riders, wintering their mounts in the protective heaps they form around each year’s eggs, are now a group called the Line Rifles and organized into three troops: the Gunslingers, the Bulletproof, and the Mammoth.
Men like to have something or someone to follow. Sometimes it’s nothing but a favorite song; other times a bullet-torn flag. In the case of the Mounted Rifles of the Army of Kentucky, their standard is a warrior queen.
Young and beautiful in her full bloom, with a mane of hair flowing and alive as a galloping horse’s tail, she wears her authority the way another woman might wear a favorite hat, only taking it out for special occasions and drawing all the more eyes because of it. She’s a natural atop a legworm or a horse, and she designs and sews her own uniform from egg skins she’s harvested herself, bearing a pistol that belonged to her father and a pair of binoculars presented to her by the old Bulletproof clan chief she grew up calling her leader.
Her words were the ones the Kentucky Alliance listened to on the long retreat back from the Appalachians, when many were discouraged and wished to go home. Her voice gave the order for the counterattack on the banks of the Ohio that sent the Moondaggers running. Under her leadership they chased the bearded invaders all the way to Bowling Green.
She has her hands full at the moment. There’s a white-hot blood feud with the old Coonskin clan, who betrayed the Kentucky Alliance on the long retreat, dividing cousin against cousin, uncle against niece. What’s left of the Coonskins have taken on the Moondagger faith, and members of the Mammoth troop are forever disappearing for weeks at a time while they avenge some sister or cousin.
As if that’s not enough, the newly constituted government of Kentucky is still getting itself organized. Volunteers come in unequipped, untrained, and irregularly, hungry and in shoes with old pieces of tire serving as soles, adding to the food supply problem even while they wait for a rifle.
Valentine’s luck was in. As it happened, Brother Mark was also in the Karas’ Kentucky Alliance heartland. They managed to get a fix on each other over the radio and agreed to meet on Gunslinger clan ground.
What was left of the old alliance welcomed them into the Gunslinger camp squatting for the winter in the ruins of a megachurch near a group of their worm piles outside of Danville. If not cheering, exactly, there were shouted halloos and greetings and excited children rolling around and bumping like marbles.
The camp was unsettling in one manner, though. It seemed to be devoid of men between fourteen and forty. All Valentine saw were boys and old men. He knew the Gunslingers had suffered losses during the summer’s fighting, but he had no idea they were this grievous.
There were plenty of horsemen and vehicles and guns in camp, however. Tikka was there with a column of her all-Kentucky army, and Brother Mark had arrived with a few members of the Assembly and their staff.
“Lots of mouths to feed, mouths that didn’t do any planting or weeding or varmint shooting this summer,” one of the cooks grumbled as he spooned soup into variegated plastic containers.
Valentine presented Mrs. O’Coombe to the temporary leader of the Gunslingers, an old woman who’d long served as an advisor to their clan’s leader. Mrs. O’Coombe quivered like an excited horse as she asked about her son.
The Gunslinger leader asked the camp doctor, who stepped up and cleared his throat. “I have good news for you, madam,” he said. “Your son is alive and well. I saw him not four days ago.”
“May I see him, please?”
The temporary clan chief shook her head. “He is with our muster. They left to meet the Coonskins on the Kentucky river some ways north of here. Corporal Rockaway is serving with the new army’s artillery.”
“But—he is a soldier of Southern Command,” Mrs. O’Coombe said. “He has four years left. . . .”
“An informal arrangement,” the Gunslinger said. “He’s still in what’s left of the Southern Command Guard uniform. Settle, ma’am; settle. He’s just along so we can show strength if they try another decapitation attack. Fine boy you raised.”
“It’s that Last Chance,” Brother Mark said. “Raving about some kind of apocalypse that’s going to hit Kentucky. Sad thing is, he’s getting a few converts.”
Valentine fought his body. It wanted to be up and in action, chopping wood or clearing brush for kindling if nothing else.
“We’ve had a lot of townies flee to Coonskin territory,” the cl
an leader said. “Mostly people who drew breath thanks to the Kurian Order anyway, so good riddance to them.”
“If you would provide me with a guide—,” Mrs. O’Coombe said.
“Sorry, ma’am. I hate to say no to a worried mother—I have four myself and one grandchild—but it’s a clan rule. When a fighting man is away, no parents, no children, no spouses until the fighting’s over.”
“But there is to be no fighting,” Mrs. O’Coombe said.
“We hope not. As I was saying, our people end up worrying more about their families than the enemy, and they get themselves in trouble that way. But it looks like you brought a few gunmen of your own. If you want to send them up with a message to your boy, they’re welcome to join young Tikka upcountry. Until then, I’d like to offer you our hospitality.”
Gunslinger hospitality was meager with all the visitors in camp and the holidays emptying larders.
Everyone was talking about the peace conference between the Gunslingers and the Coonskin-Moondaggers northeast of them in the Bluegrass proper. The idea that Kentucky might be allowed to just let the bodies lie and stop the raids and counterraids that had been going on ever since the Moondaggers marched across Kentucky, burning and kidnapping, gave everyone hope for an early spring without gunfire exchanged in Kentucky’s tangled dells.
Valentine had the disquieting feeling that their hopes would be in vain. This cease-fire might be the final calm before the storm.
The reinforcements were already pulling out of the Gunslinger winter camp to join the others to the north. Tikka’s Army of Kentucky were dressed like scarecrows in everything from denim to black-dyed sports uniforms, but most sported new winter hacking coats in a uniform deerskin brown, A-o-K stenciled on the shoulder. Behind them were guns and commissary wagons. Valentine hadn’t seen such a mule train since the campaign in Dallas. The animals looked fresher than the men.
Tikka greeted Mrs. O’Coombe’s lined-up staff and Valentine’s Southern Command additions. She and a few members of her staff took a quick appreciative look at their bikes and vehicles.
