by E. E. Knight
Valentine turned the dial again.
“. . . fight in Pine Bluff. Put me down for twenty coin on Jebro. He’ll take Meredith like a sapper popping an old woman. Over.”
“Sure thing. You want any of the prefight action? Couple of convicts. It’s a blood-match; the loser goes to the Slits. Over.”
Valentine had heard the term “Slits” used by rivermen on the Mississippi. It referred to the Reapers’ slit-pupiled eyes, or perhaps the narrow wounds their stabbing tongues left above the breastbone.
“No, haven’t seen ’em. I’d be wasting my money. Over.”
Valentine heard a horse snort and jump outside the cracked window, the way an equine startled out of sleep readies all four feet for flight. The sound brought him awake in a flash. A pair of alarmed whinnies cut the night air.
Ahn-Kha came awake, nostrils flared and batlike ears up and alert.
“Arms! Quietly now, arms!” Valentine said to the sleeping men, huddled against the walls in the warm room where they had enjoyed dinner. He snatched up his pistol and worked the slide.
Ahn-Kha followed. How so much mass moved with such speed and stealth—
“What is it, my David?” Ahn-Kha breathed, his rubbery lips barely forming the words.
“Something is spooking the horses. Watch the front of the house. Post,” Valentine said to his lieutenant, who had appeared in his trousers and boots, pulling on a jacket. “Get the Smalls and M’Daw into the cellar, please. Stay down there with them.”
Valentine waved to the wagon sentry, Jefferson, but the man’s eyes searched elsewhere. Jefferson had his rifle up and ready. Two of the horses reared, and he stood to see over them.
Three Reapers hurtled out of the snow, black-edged mouths open, bounding on spring-steel legs. Three! He and all his people would be dead inside two minutes.
“Reapers!” Valentine bellowed, bringing up his pistol in a two-handed grip. As he centered the front sight on one he noticed it was naked, but so dirt-covered that it looked clothed. A torn cloth collar was all that remained of whatever it had been wearing. He fired three times; the .45 barked deafeningly in the enclosed space.
At the sound of the shots his men moved even faster. Two marines scrambled to the window and stuck their rifles out of the loophole-sized slats in the shutters.
A Reaper leapt toward Jefferson, whose gun snapped impotently, and Valentine reached for his machete as he braced himself for the sight of the Texan’s bloody disassembly. Perhaps he could get it in the back as it killed Jefferson. But it didn’t land on the sentry. The naked avatar came down on top of a horse; on the balls of its feet, like a circus rider. It reached for the animal’s neck, got a good grip—Valentine almost heard the snap as the horse suddenly toppled. The Reaper’s snake-hinged jaw opened wide as it straddled the fallen animal to feed.
The other two, robeless like the first and running naked in the snowstorm, also ignored Jefferson, chasing the horses instead. The Jamaicans’ rifles fired in unison when one came around the cart and into the open, but the only effect Valentine saw was a bullet striking into a mount’s rump. The horse dropped sideways with a Reaper on top of it. Some instinct made the wounded animal roll its heavy body across the spider-thin form and came to its feet, kicking. As the Reaper reached for the tail a pair of hooves caught it across the back, sending it flying against the cart. It lurched off into the darkness, clutching its chest and making a wheezing sound.
The third disappeared into the snowstorm, chasing a terrified bay.
“Stay with the others,” he said to Ahn-Kha, who stood ready with a Quickwood spear point. He threw open the door—and held up his hands when Jefferson whirled and pointed the rifle at him, muzzle seemingly aimed right between his eyes. The gun snapped again.
Valentine almost flew to the feeding Reaper. It heard him and raised its head from the horse, the syringelike tongue still connected to the twitching animal. It lashed out. Valentine slipped away from the raking claw. The momentum of the Reaper’s strike turned its shoulder, and Valentine buried his knife in its neck, forcing it facedown in the snow as the tongue retracted, flinging hot liquid like a bloody sprinkler. He ground the bowie into the Reaper, hearing its feet scrabble for purchase on the snowy ground. It tried to shrug him off. Valentine brought up a knee, pressed on the blade . . .
The Reaper twitched as nerve tissue parted. In five seconds it was limp.
A blur—Jefferson’s rifle butt came down on the back of the Reaper’s head so that Valentine felt the wind pass his nose. Jefferson raised the gun up again.
“It’s done,” Valentine said.
Valentine pulled his knife from the Reaper’s corpse, and Jefferson clubbed it again. “Jefferson, calm down. You might try loading your weapon. It’s deadlier from the other end.”
“Sorry, Captain. Sorry—”
Valentine ignored him and listened with hard ears all around the woods. Years ago, when he’d learned the Way of the Wolf, a Lifeweaver had enhanced his senses. When he concentrated on his senses—hardening them, in the slang of the Wolves—he could pick up sounds others would miss. He heard branches breaking in the snow somewhere, in the direction of the Reaper who had been kicked and then run. Valentine tried to make sense of the behavior. They had attacked randomly and hit the biggest targets they could see. Evidently they were masterless; their Kurian had probably been killed or had fled out of control range and they were acting on pure instinct. The severed-necked Reaper gave a twitch of an arm, and Jefferson jumped a good two feet in the air.
“Just a reflex,” Valentine said.
“Should we burn it or something?”
“Get inside. Don’t worry about the horses for now.”
The Texan backed into the house. Valentine put a new magazine in his gun and took a few more steps around the yard, still listening and smelling. Nothing. Not even the cold feeling he usually got when Reapers were around, but his ears were still ringing from the gunshots inside, and the snow was killing odors.
He rapped on the door and backed into the house, still covering the Quickwood.
“Anything out back?” he called, eyes never leaving the trees.
“Nothing, sir,” Botun said.
He heard a horse scream in the distance. The Reaper had caught up with the bay.
“Post,” Valentine shouted.
“Sir?” he heard through the cellar floor.
“I’m going out after them. Two blasts on my whistle when I come back in. Don’t let anyone shoot me.” Valentine caught Jefferson’s eye and winked. The Texan shook his head in return.
“Yessir,” Post answered.
Valentine tore off a peeling strip of wallpaper and wiped the resinlike Reaper blood off the bowie. He considered bringing a Quickwood spear, but decided to hunt it with just pistol and blade: It would be vulnerable after a feed. He nodded to the Jamaicans and opened the front door. After a long listen, he dashed past a tree and into the brush of the forest.
A nervous horse from the other team nickered at him. He moved from tree to tree, following the tracks.
Valentine dried his hand on his pant leg and took a better grip on his bowie. He sniffed the ground with his Wolf’s nose, picking up horse blood in the breeze now. He instinctively broke into his old loping run, broken like a horse’s canter by his stiff leg, following the scent. He came upon the corpse of the bay, blood staining the snow around its neck. He turned and followed the footprints.
He didn’t have far to travel. After a run that verged on a climb up a steep incline, he came to the Reaper’s resting spot. Water flowing down the limestone had created a crevice cave under the rocky overhang. An old Cat named Everready used to say that Reapers got “dopey” after a feed, that with a belly full of blood they often slept like drunkards. This one had hardly gotten out of sight of the horse before succumbing to the need for sleep. He saw its pale foot, black toenails sharp against the ash-colored skin, sticking out of a pile of leaves.
Valentine heard whistling respir
ation. He put his hand on his pistol and decided to risk a single shot. He drew and sighted on the source of the breathing.
The shot tossed leaves into the air. The Reaper came to its feet like a rousted drunk, crashing its skull against the overhang. A black wound crossed its scraggly hairline. It went down to its hands and knees, shaking its head. Valentine sighted on a slit pupil in a bilious yellow iris.
“Anyone at the other end?” Valentine asked, looking into the eye. The thing looked back, animal pain and confusion in its eyes. It scuttled to the side, shrinking away from him. Valentine tracked the pupil with his gun. “What are you doing out here?”
Harrrruk! it spat.
It exploded out of the overhang.
Valentine fired, catching it in the chest. The bullet’s impact rolled it back into the cave, but it came out again in its inhuman, crabwise crawl, trying to escape up the hill.
It moved fast. As fast as a wide-awake Reaper, despite its recent feeding.
Valentine shot again . . . again . . . again. Black flowers blossomed on the thing’s skin at the wet slap of each slug’s impact. It fled beneath a deadfall, slithering like a snake, trying to avoid the hurtful bullets. Valentine leapt over the trunk after it, bowie ready. He pinned it, driving the knee of his good leg into the small of its back, wishing he hadn’t been so cocksure, that he’d brought Quickwood to finish it. He raised the blade high and brought it down on the back of its neck, the power of the blow driving it into the monster’s spine. He tried to pull it back for another blow, but the black blood had already sealed the blade into the wound.
It continued to crawl, only half of its body now working.
Valentine stood up, and drove his booted heel onto the blade. If he couldn’t pull it out, he could get it in farther. He stomped again, almost dancing on the back of the blade. The Reaper ceased its crawl, but the head still thrashed.
Urrack . . . shhhar, it hissed.
Valentine put a new magazine in his gun. It was beyond being a threat to anything but an earthworm or a beetle now, but he wouldn’t let it suffer. He brought the muzzle to the ear-hole, angling it so the bullet wouldn’t bounce off the bony baffle just behind the ear. He didn’t want to risk the jaws without a couple of men with crowbars to pry the mouth open and a pliers to rip the stabbing tongue out.
He heard a sliding footfall behind, and turned, the foresight of the pistol leading the way.
It was the other Reaper, blood covering its face but cruel interest in its eyes. It squatted to spring. It had possessed instinct enough to approach from downwind.
Valentine emptied the magazine into it, knocking it over backward. Then he ran. Downhill. Fast.
It followed. Faster.
Valentine listened to it gain on him in three awful seconds, its footsteps beating a snare-drum tattoo. The footfalls stopped, and Valentine flung himself into the dirt in a bone-jarring shoulder roll.
It passed overhead, a dervish of raking claws and kicking legs. As he rolled back to his feet, he saw it fly face-first into a thick-boled hickory with a thunk Valentine felt through the ground.
Valentine had never felt less like laughing in his life. He continued his run downhill, blowing the whistle for his life, as the Reaper picked itself up.
He saw the house, and Post with the marines at the window. Jefferson, terror written on his face, pointed his rifle right at him.
Valentine dived face-first into the snow, sliding the last few feet down the hill.
Jefferson fired, not at him but over. More shots rang out, bright muzzle flashes reflecting off the dusting of Christmas snow like photoflashes.
The Reaper behind him went over backward. Valentine rolled over, pistol aimed in a shaking hand. Someone must have got in with a luck shot, for it lay thrashing, trying to rise. Failing.
“Hold your fire,” Valentine panted. “Post, give me your spear.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” Jefferson said, opening the bolt on his rifle and setting it down carefully. He reached behind the door and came out with a pick. “This is how we finish ’em in the Rangers.”
“Careful now, Jefferson,” Post said. “It might be playing possum.”
Jefferson approached it, pick raised high. Valentine stood aside with his Quickwood stake. Jefferson needed this, after his fright earlier.
“Okay, dickless. Time to see what happens when you steal a Texan’s horses.”
“Damn, that fella right. That bomba doesn’t have one,” Botun said over the sights on his rifle.
Jefferson grunted, and swung the pick down. The Reaper brought up a limb to ward off the blow but the pick went home through its face and into the ground beneath. It stiffened into immobility.
Valentine turned to the marines at the windows. “Thank you, Post. Good shooting, men. Six shots, four hits. That’s outstanding for a running Reaper.” Valentine hoped the light-hearted tone didn’t sound forced.
“On Jamaica bullets are rare, sir,” a marine named Andree said.
He turned to look at the private. “In the Ozarks, men who can shoot like you are even rarer.”
Chapter Three
Magazine Mountain, Arkansas, January of the forty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: A Southern Command Station Post once stood here, huts and wooden cabins placed to take advantage of folds in the ground and the canopy of trees for concealment and defensibilty.
Servicemen walking about on their duties added life and color to the camouflaged buildings. The Guards, the common soldiers in their neat charcoal gray uniforms and regimental kepis, would march past files of scarecrow-lean Wolves in fringed buckskins. The Wolves, rifles cradled in tanned fingers, assorted pistols and knives shoved in belts and boots, and no two hats alike, struck one as sloppy-looking when compared to the disciplined Guards. A Cat might be sleeping beneath an oak, head pillowed on rolled coat and Reaper-killing sword, exhausted after two months spying in the Kurian Zone, but still coming to full wakefulness at a gentle tap. Everyone from cur dog to colonel of the Guards would make room when teams of Bears entered the post. Southern Command’s shock troops, wearing uniforms of patched-together Grog hide and bullet-ablative Reaper cloak, the latter’s black teeth hanging from neck or ear, were people one instinctively avoided. Perhaps it was the forbidding war paint, or the scalps of Grogs and even Quislings dangling from belt and rifle sheath, or the thousand-yard stare, but whatever the source the Bears had an aura about them demanding a wide berth. Then there were the others in camp, the logistics commandos: scroungers who went into the Kurian Zone to steal or trade for what Southern Command couldn’t make for itself, driving their wagons to the commissary yards and yelling at women to get their children out of their mule team’s path. There were always civilians in camp, families of the soldiery or refugees waiting on transportation to other parts of the Freehold. There would be pack traders and mail-riders, gunsmiths, charcoal sellers with black hands, hunters trading in game for more bullets and farmers selling vegetables for government buckchits. It was chaos, but chaos that somehow kept the soldiery fed and equipped, the civilians prosperous (by the standards of the Free Territory) and, most importantly, the Ozarks free of the Reapers.
But that was before.
By that dark, wet winter of ’71, the base of Magazine Mountain had only rats and raccoons standing sentry over burned huts or nosing through old field kitchens that smelled of rancid cooking oil. Bats huddled together for warmth in SCPO mailboxes, and the carts and pickup trucks rested wheelless on the ground, stripped like slaughtered cattle.
Heavy equipment rendered inoperable had a large red X painted on it. The same might be done with maps depicting the Ozark Free Territory.
“Goddammit, another fallen tree ahead,” Post called from a rise in the road. He turned his horse and looked at Valentine for orders. One of Ahn-Kha’s scouting Grogs squatted to rest.
“We might do better off the trail,” Narcisse said to Valentine from her perch in the Quickwood wagon. Joints of horsemeat hung from a frame Jefferson had add
ed to the wagon bed. It was too cool for flies. “These roads are almost as bad.”
Smalls’ son took the opportunity to put a taconite pellet in his wrist-rocket, a surgical tubing sling that he used to bring down squirrels. The boy ventured into the trees while Valentine thought. David looked at Ahn-Kha, who was sniffing the wintry air.
“Rain soon,” Ahn-Kha said.
“The Magazine Mountain Station can’t be far,” Valentine said to Post. “Let’s pull off the trail and camp.”
There had been no more Reapers since leaving the house. The refugees Valentine led made agonizingly slow progress through the ridges of the Ouachitas, with occasional halts to hide at the sound of distant engines. They had seen no living human—though they had come across a Reaper-drained skeleton lodged in the crotch of a tree, giving Mrs. Smalls a warmer coat once it was pulled off the corpse and cleaned. A pack of stranger-shy dogs tailed them, exploring the surroundings of the campfire and digging up the camp’s sanitary holes in search of choice snacks. Valentine had tried to tempt them closer with fresher food than something that had already passed through the human digestive system, but the dogs would have none of it. Every now and then he saw a wary, furry face appear on the road behind, proving that they were still being tailed. Valentine wanted the dogs with them. Dogs hated Reapers—or feared them—and usually whined or bayed an alarm if one was near.
Valentine waved Ahn-Kha and Post over.
“Sir?” Post asked.
Valentine looked up at the flat-topped loom of Magazine Mountain. “Post, we’re near one of the big camps of Southern Command. I’m going to take Ahn-Kha and see what, if anything, is left. Pull off out of sight of the road, cover your tracks and camp. We’ll go on foot; give the horses a rest.”
“Chances are that fort’s in Kurian hands.”
“I know. That’s why I’m bringing Ahn-Kha. Having a Grog along might confuse them long enough for me to talk my way loose, or get the jump on a patrol.”
