Winter Duty

by E. E. Knight

  Mrs. O’Coombe jumped out of Rover. “Mister Valentine. If there is the ravies virus in town, shouldn’t we drive on—”

  “If the weather were clear, that would be my choice,” Valentine said.

  Habanero nodded from the window. “He’s right; we’re lucky to have gotten this far.”

  Frat and his Wolves needed something to do. Valentine sent them up a short set of steps and into the mill’s office to look for messages from the town’s inhabitants.

  “No noise,” Valentine said.

  “Put Rover over there,” Valentine told the wagon master, indicating a corner by the old loader equipment. “Get Chuckwagon in here.”

  “The medical wagon is more valuable,” Mrs. O’Coombe said.

  “Right now the fuel in Chuckwagon’s trailer is the most important thing,” Valentine said. “And we can all get a hot meal. We can refuel Rover, Chuckwagon, and Bushmaster, and then put Chuckwagon outside and bring Boneyard in.”

  Mrs. O’Coombe blinked. “Very well. You are thoughtful under stress, Mister Valentine. I admire that. But I still think we should hurry on, weather or no weather.”

  “You could make yourself useful by refueling Rover,” Valentine said to Mrs. O’Coombe, urgency consuming his usual polite phrasing with the great lady.

  “Snow’s killing the sound,” Stuck said, entering the mill. He had a skullcap of snow already. “Ravies are drawn to motion and sound. They won’t see us or hear us even if the town’s full of them. As long as there’s no shooting.”

  Habanero spoke into his comm link. Valentine heard the Chuckwagon backing outside.

  Bee, who was riding in the Chuckwagon to give her two-ax-handle-wide frame elbow room, hopped out and trotted to Valentine’s side, sniffing the blood in the air.

  “Easy now, Bee. It’s okay,” Valentine said. How much she got from syntax and how much from tone he didn’t know, but she went to work arranging the bodies neatly head to toe. She put Thursday one way and the ravies victims Valentine had shot the other.

  Stuck was at the gate entrance, a big gun in a sling across his chest. Valentine had to look twice, but he recognized it as an automatic shotgun. He wondered where Stuck had acquired it and where it had stayed hidden in their travels—the weapon in his arms was easily worth its weight in solid silver. It was one of the few weapons that didn’t require a tripod and that could kill a Reaper with a single burst of fire.

  With the Chuckwagon parked, its trailer well inside, Valentine had Habanero tell the driver of the Bushmaster to back up the APC through the gate and into truck dock. It would fill it, perhaps not as tight as the Dutch boy’s finger in the proverbial dike, but close.

  Backing up the Bushmaster was no easy matter—the driver didn’t have the usual rearview mirrors. Rockaway was at the top forward hatch, passing instructions to the driver.

  Figures flashed out of the darkness, barefoot in the snow.

  “Get inside, get inside, get inside!” Valentine shouted to Stuck. “Habanero, Bushmaster needs to clear the gate and get in the loading dock. Have Boneyard pull forward and wait, buttoned up tight.”

  Valentine heard a scream. Rockaway lit up the night with his pistol, firing at the ravies running for the Bushmaster.

  Another charged out of the snow on his blind side. Valentine swung to aim, but the ravie jumped right out of his sights and landed on Rockaway, biting and pulling.

  “Keve,” Mrs. O’Coombe screamed from the doorway.

  Rockaway emptied his gun blind and over his shoulder into the thing biting him.

  Chaos. Everyone shouted at once, mostly to get the gate down.

  “How the hell do you shut this door?” Stuck hollered.

  “Inside!” Valentine yelled to Stuck. He was fumbling around with the wheel Thursday had used to raise the gate.

  The Bushmaster rumbled through the gate.

  A flash of brown and Duvalier was up on the gate rails. Duvalier had leaped nine feet in the air and now hung from a manual handle, trying to bring it down with her slight weight.

  Valentine finally thought to look on the side of the wall opposite the crank and saw a pawl in the teeth of a wheel. There was a simple lever to remove it.

  The compressed thunder that was the fire of the automatic shotgun licked out into the night, turning snowfall orange.

  “Cease fire,” Valentine shouted. If the Bushmaster opened up with its cannon, it would draw every ravie for a mile. “You’ll just attract more. Habanero, tell the people in Boneyard and Bushmaster to turn off lights and engines—don’t fire. Don’t fire!”

  Habanero repeated the orders.

  The smaller door on the back of the Bushmaster opened, and Boelnitz jumped out, pulling a bloody-shirted Rockaway out, and the two ran for the mill.

  Panicky fool! The fear of ravies caused just as much damage as the sufferers.

  A shirtless figure tore out of the darkness. It didn’t so much as tackle Boelnitz as run over him. It pulled up, as though shocked he’d gone down so easily.

  Rockaway fell on his own.

  Stuck took a quick step from the door crank and swung with his rifle butt, cracking the ravie across the back of the neck. It turned on him, swinging an arm that sprawled Stuck.

  Valentine aimed the Type Three and put two into the ravie’s back. It went down on its knees. Boelnitz, stunned, crawled toward the door and the safety of the mill’s interior, lit by the headlights of Rover and Chuckwagon. Stuck picked Rockaway up by his belt and almost threw him through the door like a bowler trying for a strike.

  “The hell’s the matter with you?” Stuck said, kicking Boelnitz toward the mill. “Why didn’t you stay in the APC?”

  Valentine let loose the lever on the pawl, and the door, still with Duvalier hanging on it as she tried to force it with her leg, descended. Valentine stopped it high enough so a man could still enter at a crouch.

  Stuck rolled in and sighted his gun to cover Bushmaster.

  Valentine dragged Boelnitz in.

  “Dumbshit didn’t shut the door on Bushmaster,” Stuck said, swinging the barrel of the auto-shotgun and pressing it to the thick, soft hair on Boelnitz’s head.

  Mrs. O’Coombe hugged her bloody son. “My God, my God . . . ,” she kept repeating.

  Valentine kicked up the gun barrel, and Stuck head-butted him in the gut.

  Duvalier dropped from above, landing on Stuck’s shoulders, and wrapped her legs around his back. She put her sword stick across his throat.

  “Okay, okay,” Stuck said. “Get ’er off!”

  “Close the door, somebody,” Valentine gasped as they untangled themselves.

  Mrs. O’Coombe worked the lever and the door rattled down at last.

  A pair of hands thrust themselves under the gate. Mrs. O’Coombe pushed the pawl back in, held it there.

  Metal bent at the bottom of the gate as though a forklift were being used to pull it up instead of a pair of hands. The bottom of the gate groaned and began to bend.

  Duvalier’s sword flashed and sparked as it ran along the gate bottom, leaving severed fingertips lying about like dropped peanuts.

  “The pawl, ma’am,” Valentine shouted. Rockaway reached for it. Mrs. O’Coombe broke out of her reverie and extracted it.

  Valentine stomped the handle hard. The door slammed shut.

  “You better?” he asked Stuck.

  The ex-Bear nodded.

  “I’d forgotten how much I enjoy noise and danger,” Mrs. O’Coombe said to no one in particular. “Very little, to be precise.”

  “You wouldn’t have really shot me, would you?” Boelnitz said, picking himself up.

  Stuck took a deep breath. “Maybe not me, but the Bear sure as hell was about to.”

  Boelnitz looked at Valentine. “Thank you. I owe you.”

  “Valentine, what the hell was that?” Stuck said, pointing at the fingers on the ground.

  Valentine ignored him, tore open his own tiny first-aid kit, opened the little three-ounce flask of i
odine, and poured and dabbed it into Rockaway’s bites and scratches.

  “Doc says they’re nervous in Boneyard,” Habanero reported as Valentine’s heartbeat began to return to normal. “It’s not exactly an armored car.”

  “Get Doc in here at once,” Mrs. O’Coombe said. “My son’s been bitten.”

  “I’m not opening the door until things quiet down out there,” Valentine said. “This is the best we can do.”

  “What the hell was that?” Stuck continued, shaking his head. “Have you ever seen a ravies case like that?”

  “They were . . . like Bears,” Duvalier said. “I’ve never seen anyone bend steel like that, except a Bear.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t human. Maybe they’ve got a more human-looking Reaper,” Valentine said, looking at the fingers.

  “A Reaper would have just torn through it,” Duvalier said. “Trying to lift it is a dumb way to get in. Reapers are smarter than that.”

  “Everyone needs to eat as much garlic as possible,” Ma said from the Chuckwagon as she sorted through her stock. “I’ll make a poultice for Keve.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Stuck said.

  “Well, I got to be an old wife by following old wives’ tales, so you’ll eat your garlic.”

  Valentine had heard dozens of folk remedies supposed to ward off ravies. Eating asparagus was one of the stranger ones.

  Getting iodine into a ravies bite right away was the only one the Miskatonic people said worked. Iodine and a quick broad-spectrum antibiotic within a few minutes. The latter was a good deal less easy to come by in the Kurian Zone.

  Instead of reminiscing, he should be refueling Rover and getting the Boneyard in, and then they could take care of Bushmaster. Everyone should get a hot meal and catch some rest too, and he’d better see how the Wolves were doing battening down the office in front.

  So much for the responsibility-free tour of central Kentucky.

  As it turned out, Doc snuck in the front door with his bag, moving extremely quietly. He cleaned Rockaway’s wounds and gave him two injections, one for the pain, the other an antibiotic.

  “Contact with Fort Seng,” reported Habanero, who hadn’t quit listening to Rover’s radio since pulling it into the mill.

  They’d rigged lanterns in the mill. Valentine had considered running the tiny portable generator to spare the vehicles’ batteries but decided against it. A storm this intense couldn’t last much longer, not in Kentucky.

  He took a deep breath to wake himself up and put on the second headset.

  “Major, we’re getting reports of ravies outbreaks all across the Mississippi plateau,” Lambert’s voice crackled at the other end of the radio. “Report position and status, please.”

  “Grand Junction. We’ve just had a brush with them, sir.”

  “Repeat, please.”

  “We’ve fought a skirmish. Two casualties.” Technically they’d just lost Thursday, but Rockaway had been bitten. . . .

  “Major, I’m hearing strange reports about this strain. The infected cases are unusually strong and ferocious.”

  “I won’t vouch for the ferocious, but they are strong, exceptionally strong. Like Bears.”

  “Are there other outbreaks in Kentucky you know of?”

  “No, sir. This is the first we’ve seen of it. How are things at base?”

  “Quiet. No sign of it. A new patrol has just gone out to check Owensboro. We’ve lost contact with the town.”

  “Orders?” Valentine asked.

  “Get back as quickly as you can. The underground has informed us that that armored column has moved south from Bloomington and is now outside Owensboro. They’ve been shelling the city.”

  “We’ll be mobile as soon as the weather lets up,” Valentine said.

  “Good luck,” Lambert said. “Report when you’re moving again.”

  “Wilco. Signing off.”

  “Signing off.”

  “We were lucky, I think,” Stuck said. “I’ll bet there is only a handful of ravies left in this town—mostly ones who were torn up in scrapes with them and succumbed to the infection.”

  “Lucky?” Boelnitz said, looking at Rockaway, who was being tended to at the far end of the mill by Doc.

  “I said we,” Stuck said. “Not him.”

  With time to think and a hot cup of Mrs. O’Coombe’s tea inside him, Valentine realized the Kurians had played a brilliant double cross in Kentucky.

  Or perhaps it was a triple cross, if you considered the attack on the Kentucky River position a double cross. He almost had to admire the genius of it. If the attack on the A-o-K had routed the principal body of armed and organized men in central Kentucky, the Kurians would have been in the position to act as saviors when the ravies virus hit. The New Universal Church could show up en masse, ready to inject the populace with either a real antiserum or a saline solution, all the while persuading the populace of the advantages of returning to their semiprotected status in the Kurian Order.

  As it turned out, the attack failed, but it also served to concentrate their enemies. With the storm raging, they wouldn’t be able to spread out and contain the virus to a few hot spots. Instead, the A-o-K would suffer the agonies of men knowing their families were threatened and unable to do a damn thing about it. Given the brief existence of the A-o-K, it might dissolve entirely, like salt in a rainstorm, fragmenting into bands of men desperate to return home.

  The one patch of light in the snowy, howling gloom was that Kentucky wasn’t the earthquake-and-volcano-ravaged populace of 2022. The legworm clans were armed to the teeth—man, woman, and child—and were used to living and working within the confines of armed camps organized for defense. Ravies bands fought dumb. They didn’t coordinate, concentrate properly, or pick a weak spot in their target’s defenses—except by accident.

  Valentine didn’t like the look of Boelnitz. He had been pale and quiet ever since the madness between Bushmaster and the gate.

  Worried that the journalist might be going into shock from stress alone, Valentine squatted down next to him.

  “Something for your notebook at last,” Valentine said, noticing that the paper under his pencil was empty. “Don’t let it bother you.”

  “The wounded in Bushmaster. They saw O’Coombe’s boy was bitten. They said he had to go out, or they’d shoot him. I think they meant it.”

  Boelnitz looked at his notebook. “When I said I owe you, I meant it. I owe you the truth,” Boelnitz said. “I’ve been flying under false colors, I’m afraid. Here.”

  He handed Valentine the leather notebook with a trembling hand and opened it to a creased clipping.

  “It’s one thing to write about wars and warriors and strategy,” Boelnitz said. “It looks very different when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun. Or up one.”

  Valentine read a few paragraphs.

  It was always a strange sensation to parse another’s depiction of oneself, like hearing someone describe the rooms in one’s own home, bare facts attached to memories and emotions but as artificial and obvious as plastic tags in the ears of livestock. Valentine took in the words in the Clarion’s familiar, sententious style and typeface with the unsettling feeling of reading his own obituary:

  The terror of Little Rock during the late rising against Consul Solon, David Valentine has created a career that makes for exciting, if disturbing, reading. Trailed by a hulking, hairy-handed killer bodyguard named Ahn-Kha, Valentine is a man of desperate gambits and vicious enmities without remorse or regret. The corpses of gutted, strung-up POWs and murder to followers like the Smalls . . .

  Valentine couldn’t read any more.

  “I only showed that to you because I can’t reconcile the figure described in Southern Command’s archives, at least the ones I was given clearance to see, and Clarion’s articles with the person in the flesh. I just thought it was time for a little honesty. Pencil Boelnitz is a fiction; it’s the name of my first editor, the English teacher who helped us r
un the school newspaper. My real name is Llewellyn. Cooper Llewellyn.”

  “You thought . . . you thought that if I knew you were from the Clarion . . . what? I’d run you off base?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I have to say, I like Pencil Boelnitz better. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d observe and relate what he observed without trying to psychoanalyze a man he’d known for only a few weeks.”

  “You’ve a right to be mad. But there’s a sign up at the Clarion: Anyone can transcribe. A journalist reveals.”

  Valentine chuckled. “I can’t see why your paper is so beloved for its editorial page, if that’s the best they can do. It’s easy to come up with something like that for any profession. Anyone can disrobe. A stripper profits.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ravies.

  One of the most terrifying weapons in the Kurian Order’s arsenal is the disease that makes man revert to a howling beast, a lizard brain seeking to kill, feed, and, yes, sometimes even procreate.

  How they remove all the higher brain functions, leaving the lower full of savage cunning and reckless determination, only their elite scientists would be able to say.

  The fear of a ravies outbreak is one way of keeping their human herds in line. There’s such a thing as civilizational memory, and the human strata of the Kurian Order have been taught that only timely arrival of help from Kur stemmed the howling tide that threatened to wash away mankind in the red-number year of 2022. They instinctively know that without the protection of the towers, the screamers might return.

  Anyone who’s heard the dive-bomber wail of a ravies victim in full cry has the unhappy privilege of hearing it repeated in nightmares for years to come.

  Of course in the Freeholds, they know that ravies is just another Kurian trick up one of the sleeves of a determined and ruthless creature with more limbs than can be easily counted on a living specimen.

  Folk remedies abound, all of them nearly useless. A bucket of ice-cold water is said to distract a sufferer long enough for you to make an escape. If you suck a wound clean while chewing real mint gum mixed with pieces of pickled ginger, onion, and garlic, you’ll never catch an infection from a bite. Pregnant women are naturally immune—this particular canard leads to all manner of bizarre remedies as others seek the mystic benefits, from drinking breast milk to pouring umbilical cord blood into a fresh wound. And, of course, that the only sure way to stop a ravies sufferer from getting at you is to shoot them in the head.