by E. E. Knight
“Frat, even if we don’t get through, these blood samples need to. They’re more important to Southern Command than everything in this convoy.”
“Understood, sir.”
He watched the youth rumble off, trying not to think of his own misadventures as a courier. Maybe somewhere on the road Frat would meet another capable young teen, the way Valentine had long ago met Frat. Part of being in service was helping train talented young people to take your place.
By the time Frat had left, the plane had taken off too, flying back to the north—probably across the Ohio in just a few minutes.
Valentine tried to raise Fort Seng to inform Lambert that Frat was on the way, but he couldn’t make contact. With one more thing to worry about, Valentine returned to Rover and put the convoy in motion again.
“See if you can find a road turning north,” he told Habanero. “I’d like to see what that plane is up to.”
“Looks like a flea market that broke up quick,” Duvalier said.
Valentine wouldn’t forget the sight of the body field as long as he lived.
Even as an old man he’d remember details, be able to traverse the gentle slopes dotted with briar thickets, stepping from body to body.
You had to choose route and footing if you didn’t want to step on some child.
Judging from the injuries and old bloodstains on the bodies, these were ravies victims. Some had torn or missing clothes, and all had the haggard, thin-skinned look of someone in the grip of the raving madness.
“What killed them, Doc?” Valentine asked.
“My guess is some kind of nerve agent. That accounts for some of the grotesque posing. Whatever it was, it happened quickly.” He knelt to look at a body. “Notice anything funny about these?” Doc asked.
“There’s nothing funny in this field,” Duvalier said.
“Strange, then. Look at the ravies,” Doc said.
Valentine had a tough time looking close. This was like peeping into a Nazi gas chamber. Though he felt a bit of a hypocrite; he would have turned the Bushmaster’s cannon on them if they’d been attacking his vehicles.
“I don’t—” Duvalier said.
“The hair,” Doc said. “Ears, chins, eyebrows, arm hair. Worse on the men than the women, but everyone but the kids are showing very rapid body hair growth. A side effect of this strain of ravies, perhaps?”
Valentine let the doctor keep chattering. Valentine wondered where the pilot of the little twin-engined plane was now. Enjoying a cup of coffee at an airstrip, while his plane is being refueled?
“I don’t think they really knew what was happening,” Doc said. “Ravies does cloud the mind a bit.”
“Wolves found something interesting, sir,” Chieftain reported, looking at a deerskin-clad arm waving them over.
The vehicle tracks were easy to find and, sadly, easier to follow. They stood at the center of the field, in an empty space like a little doughnut hole surrounded by bodies.
“Okay, they drove in, or the ravies found them here,” Doc said. “Then when the ravies were good and tight around the vehicle, those inside slaughtered them all in a matter of minutes.”
“This one was still twitching,” Valentine said, looking at a victim who’d left gouges in the turf. “I think he tried to crawl toward the truck.”
Chieftain said, “Maybe it was a field bakery van or a chuck wagon. Food, you think? Baskets of fresh bread hanging off it? They look hungry.”
“Ravies does that,” Doc said. “You get ravenous. It’s a hard virus on the system. The body’s usual defense mechanisms—fatigue, nausea—that discourage activity during hunger are overridden.”
Valentine wondered what could attract such throngs of ravies, yet keep them from tearing whatever made those tracks to bits. His own column would probably have need of such a gimmick before they returned to Fort Seng.
Nine circles filled in . . .
Maybe it was the sun in their eyes as they drove west. Maybe it was error caused by driver fatigue. Maybe it was the speed. Valentine was anxious to move fast—there was less snow on the ground, and they had a chance to be back at Fort Seng that night.
They dipped as they passed under a railroad bridge, much overgrown, and suddenly there were ravies on either side of them and the headlights of a big armored car before them.
It wasn’t an equal contest. Rover folded against the old Brinks truck like a cardboard box hitting a steamroller.
When the stars began to fade from Valentine’s eyes, he heard angelic strings playing. For a moment, he couldn’t decide if he was hallucinating or ascending to a very unoriginal, badly lit, bare-bones heaven.
Valentine looked out the spiderwebbed window and saw tattered ravies all around, cocking their heads, milling, either working themselves up to an attack or calming down after one.
Then he saw the big armored car, and it all came back to him.
The music was coming from the armored car. Chopin or someone like him.
Valentine prodded Habanero, but it would take more than a friendly tap to revive him. He was impaled on the steering column like a butterfly on a pin.
Duvalier opened her door and fell out, still gripping her sword cane. Brother Mark seemed to be unconscious, blood masking his face, with a similar stain on the window.
Valentine heard an engine roar, and the armored car backed up. He waited for it to rev up, roar forward, and crush what was left of Rover.
He took his rifle out of its clip and climbed out. The least damaged of any of them, Boelnitz or whatever he called himself crawled forward and out.
Boneyard came forward to their rescue.
The music suddenly died. A new tune struck up, a harsh number welcoming them to a jungle with plenty of fun and games.
The ravies didn’t like the sound of the music. They began to spread away from the armored car in consternation.
Boneyard’s driver came out of his cab. He slammed the door as he climbed down.
The ravies heads turned, looking at him.
“Careful,” Valentine said.
Boneyard’s driver put his gun to his shoulder and fired at the speaker atop the armored car.
Which showed initiative but not very good judgment.
A pair of teenage ravies came running, as though the spitting assault rifle was an ice cream truck’s musical bell.
Bushmaster bumped off road and gave them covering fire, Silvertip at the turret ring with the 20mm cannon.
Like sand running out of an hourglass, more and more ravies sprang into violent motion, running toward the vehicles.
Nothing to do about it now.
Valentine went around behind Rover, set his rifle on the rear bumper, and began to fire into the ravies. Machine guns and cannon tore into them.
Regular troops would have scattered or taken cover on the ground. Not these men, women, and children. Most of them went for the Bushmaster: It was the biggest and—
“Chuckwagon,” Duvalier shouted in Valentine’s ear, pointing.
A mass of ravies hit Bushmaster like an incoming tsunami. They tipped it, perhaps by accident, in their fury to get at the noisy guns.
Valentine pulled Brother Mark out of Rover and threw him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. A ravie with a mustache gone mad sprang around the corner.
“Uungh!” Duvalier grunted as she opened the ravie from rib to hip point with her sword. She spun and took a child’s head off behind her.
Chuckwagon pulled up next to Boneyard, forming a V by having the front bumpers just meet.
“Leave them, leave them!” Mrs. O’Coombe shouted to the Boneyard’s driver. “Get me out of here!”
Silvertip extracted himself from Bushmaster’s cupola. But he’d left an arm behind, crushed against the autocannon. He tottered a few steps toward the tattered crowd beating at the driver’s front window, studded leather fist raised, and toppled face forward into the snow.
Valentine set down Brother Mark between the two big trucks.
He brought down three approaching ravies, clicked on empty, and changed magazines.
But there was still fighting around Bushmaster.
Longshot climbed out one of the side doors, now a top hatch on the prostrate APC. Her bike was strapped there. All she had to do was untie it and right it. Valentine watched, astonished, as she gunned the engine, laid a streak of rubber with the back tire as the front stayed braked. She released and shot along the armored side of the Bushmaster, flew off its front, and knocked a ravie down as she landed. Sending up a rooster tail of snow, she tore off east.
“That coward,” Mrs. O’Coombe sputtered. “There were wounded in there.”
A figure tottered out from around the back of Bushmaster, looking like a doomed beetle covered by biting army ants. Bee staggered under the weight of a dozen men, women, and children. She shrugged one off.
All Valentine had left for the Type Three was Quickwood bullets. He loaded and used them, sighting carefully and picking two off of Bee.
Bee writhed, throwing off a few, breaking another with a punch, crushing a head, removing an arm.
But there were too many, clawing and biting.
Bee dropped under the weight.
Valentine saw her agonized face through the mass of legs.
Valentine lined up his Type Three, ready to put a bullet in her head. Bee opened her mouth—
To bite an ankle.
Valentine only hoped he could end with such courage.
With the bayonet, mes enfants. It’s nothing but shot, Valentine thought, quoting one of the heroes of the Legion he’d read of thanks to the headquarters library.
Valentine had never used a rifle bayonet for anything but opening cans since training. But he extended the one on the Type Three.
Valentine charged, yelling, his vision going red in fury and despair.
The ravies bared their teeth.
Valentine threw himself into them, lunging and wrenching and clubbing. A hand like a steel claw grabbed his arm, and he responded by giving way to the pull, throwing himself into the opponent. He clubbed the butt of his gun into the ravie’s face again and again.
Another lunge and he lifted a young man off Bee like a kebab on his bayonet skewer.
He noticed Duvalier next to him, slashing like mad, killing anything that approached her like a bug zapper firing cold steel bolts.
He got Bee’s arm around his shoulder and dragged her up. She managed to rise.
A storm of gunfire cut down the ravies in his way back to the V between Boneyard and Chuckwagon. Stuck stood atop the Bushmaster, firing his assault shotgun. Chieftain stood at his back, removing fingers and hands from ravies trying to climb atop the wreck.
Valentine realized he was bleeding but he felt no pain, fighting madness coursing through his nervous system.
He stumbled into the Boneyard, almost carrying Bee, rifle dangling by its sling and .45 pistol in his hand now.
“Graawg,” Bee said, tears in her good eye, the other socket a gory pulp, pointing to bloody divots in her shoulder.
“Doc, you got a shot or something you can give her?” Valentine asked.
“I’ll fix her up.”
Valentine waved Stuck over.
“No, wounded inside!” he shouted, gesturing at the Bushmaster beneath him.
He emptied the shotgun into the remaining ravies all around.
Pkew!
A red blossom appeared in Stuck’s shoulder, and he toppled off the APC.
Valentine looked back at the musical armored car. A rifle barrel projected from a rivet-trimmed slot in the front passenger-side window.
He could see the grinning faces of the driver and gunner behind their armored glass.
“Chieftain, take out those fuckers!” Valentine shouted.
The Bear nodded and disappeared.
Stuck, despite the rifle wound, was still swinging. He had a knife in each hand and used them like meathooks, plunging the blades in and pulling his opponents off their feet.
“You want a piece of me? There’s plenty left, you assholes! Reapers and Grogs left enough for yas!”
Stuck led the remaining ravies down the road, shouting and gesticulating even as his steps grew more and more erratic.
While Stuck attracted ravie attention, Chieftain was dragging something away from the Bushmaster. Valentine realized it was the 20mm cannon. The big Bear, hair bristling up like a cockatiel’s, righted it, braced it with his legs, and pointed it at the armored car.
Valentine looked at the armored car. The faces in the cabin weren’t smiling anymore.
Krack! Krack! Krack! Krack! Krack!
The thick glass of the armored car had five holes with little auras of cracks all around, and blood splattered about on the inside.
And still the music played on.
Valentine—covered in quick-and-dirty bandages and iodine, injected with Mrs. O’Coombe’s expensive Boneyard antibiotics, and feeling like he’d been taken apart and put together by a drunk tinker—investigated the musical armored car.
The back door was unlocked. After the cannon fire had killed the men in the cab, whoever was back there ran off into the growing dark.
There were a lot of dials and switches and electronic equipment, a screen and a controller for a camera at the back, and a blinking little box that one of the Wolves told him held all the music the system played in digital form.
Most of the music was soothing light classical, according to the computer-literate Wolf. “I guess they were attracting those Woolies by playing calming music,” the Wolf said, giving this strain of ravies a name that was soon in wide use both officially and unofficially.
“It must soothe them,” Doc said.
“And attract them at the same time. Must have been what they used to gather them . . . so the plane could spray them. That’s how they killed them off,” Valentine said, words finally catching up to his guesswork.
They fiddled until they had music playing and put some gentle Mozart up. A few ravies, wandering back from their final encounter with Stuck, shuffled up to the truck to listen.
Valentine gave orders that they weren’t to be harmed. More important, they weren’t to be disturbed by any aggravating noise.
They were prevented from engaging in further speculation by the arrival of a company from the Fort Seng battalion.
They were on bikes, Captain Nilay Patel wobbling unevenly at their head.
“The cavalry’s a little late to the rescue,” Valentine said with an effort. He had at least three bloody ravies bites, bound up in stinging iodine.
“The cavalry is having a hard time biking on melting ice,” Patel said. “It’s Colonel Lambert’s idea, sir. We were leading a party of civilians out of Owensboro with the full battalion in field gear. There’s a whole Northwest Ordnance column of trucks and motorcycle infantry and light armor getting set to cross the bridge where you got that Kurian.”
“And you were heading toward them or away?”
“Trying to keep as quiet as possible as we got away, obviously, sir. That fury on a motorcycle came roaring up and said you’d had some difficulty. Colonel Lambert sent me back for you and Captain Ediyak ahead with the dependents, and then organized the rest into a Mike Force to support either if we ran into trouble. She’s a better than fair tactician, sir.”
“Where’d you get the bicycles?”
“We found them in a warehouse in Owensboro. Ownership seemed to be a matter of some dispute, as they were meant for transport to a purchaser in the Ordnance, but said trader was in no mood to fulfill his end with ravies in town. Colonel Lambert made him a generous purchase offer.”
“What was that?” Valentine asked, but he suspected he knew Lambert’s bid.
“He could ride along with the rest of the civilians, provided the bikes came as well.” Patel looked at the stuporous ravies gathered around the musical truck. “What are we going to do with this lot?”
“Give them back to the people who creat
ed them.”
“An excellent idea, sir, but just how do we do that?”
“We’re going to need some noise, Patel. A whole lot of noise.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged. Music or—”
“I have three vocalists in mind,” Valentine said. “My radio’s wrecked. Can you put me in touch with Fort Seng?”
They cleaned out the armored car’s cab and brought the engine to life. Valentine put Ma at the wheel, as she understood both the armored car’s controls and the volume and direction controls on the loudspeakers. Valentine had them turn down the road toward Owensboro. According to Patel, the city had been hard hit by ravies.
Bee with her Grog gun, the techie Wolf, Boelnitz for the sake of his story, and Chieftain just in case rode in back. Valentine road shotgun, squeezed onto the seat with Duvalier, who was clinging to him like a limpet.
“I’m worried about those bites,” she said. “First sign of trembling, you go into handcuffs.”
Valentine wondered if the bites were taking their toll. He was so very tired. But he had to see this through before he succumbed to either exhaustion or the disease.
They passed through the beltline of the city and drove among the Woolies like wary naturalists intruding on a family of gorillas. They thronged thicker and thicker around the armored car.
Suspicious, bloodshot eyes glared at them. Nostrils flared as the Woolies took in their scent.
“A little more soothing music,” Valentine said.
Ma fiddled with her thumb, rolling it back and forth across the ancient, electrical-taped device. Harsh, synthesized music blared.
The Woolies startled.
The music hushed, stopped. A big Woolie, his mouth ringed by a brown smear of dried blood like a child’s misadventure with lipstick, lurched toward the speaker, head cocked.
Ma said something under her breath—Valentine had no attention to spare for anyone but the big Woolie—and a soothing cello backed by violins started up.
The speakers ratcheted up, filling the main street with noise.
More Woolies emerged from alleys and doorways, some dragging dead dogs or more gruesome bits of fodder.
