by E. E. Knight
He felt the mental echo of a Reaper in the direction of the bridge. It was in motion, crossing to the north bank. Wiggling up the bank and into cover, he checked the bank. In the darkness in the direction of Pulaski Heights he saw the twin red eyes of a pair of sentries smoking cigarettes. They weren’t near enough for him to smell the tobacco, even though he was downwind. The sentries wouldn’t hear or see his Bears, if they were careful.
Valentine inspected the remains of the buildings along the riverbank. He found an old outlet for the storm sewer system and waved the Bears over. The concrete mouth was wide enough to store the rubber raft. No words were necessary; the Bears took up their weapons silently. Styachowski had armed herself with a silenced .223 Mini-14 along with her bow. Valentine issued each Bear a Quickwood stabbing spear, almost the last of the precious supply. Ahn-Kha and the squad of Jamaicans, who proudly bore the informal label “Hoodhunters,” had the few others.
They cut through the Ruins, skirting their old TMCC campsite. Their weeks at the camp—now occupied by a field hospital for those wounded in the siege—gave them a knowledge of the buildings that let them pick a route to cross the fallen city discreetly. They went to ground twice, once for a dog-led patrol that passed a block away, and a second time when Valentine felt a Reaper on his way to the hospital. Had the Kurians been reduced to feeding on their own badly wounded? Or did Mu-Kur-Ri fear to send his avatars far afield in search of auras?
They could see the Kurian Tower clearly now, no longer just a white blur in the distance. Valentine, then Nail, examined it through night binoculars from the vicinity of Xray-Tango’s burned-out headquarters. The old bank had no flag before it as when Xray-Tango had made it his headquarters, though a few lights glimmered inside and a sentry paced back and forth behind it.
“Wonder how many are in there?” Nail asked. “Southern Command has to have driven a few out of their holes down south.”
“I was hoping Solon had moved in,” Valentine said. “I’d like to catch him in the temple of his gods.” He swept the building with hard eyes, using the glasses and naked eyes alternately, naked eyes to spot motion, glasses to identify the source. “There’d be more guards if he had. Looks like the Quislings think the place is bad news.”
“There’s bars over the windows. And bunkers at the corners. How are you going to get through?”
“Don’t worry about that. Just make sure you handle Xray-Tango’s old building.”
Nail smiled. “If there’s anything they hate worse than Quisling soldiers, it’s officers. They won’t need a fire to look into to go Red.”
“This is it then. When the shellfire starts, give me a few minutes. Then hit them. Look out for men on the roof.”
“I didn’t get the Bear bar on my collar by not knowing how to hit a building quiet. Take Rain at least, sir; he’s worth a whole team of Bears.”
“You’re the hunter at the rabbit hole. I’m the ferret going in. I want to flush them, not fight.”
“What if they hole up in a bunker and just work their Hoods?”
“Not your problem. Just get into that basement where I told you.”
“Let me go with you, sir,” Styachowski volunteered.
Valentine hesitated to say “no” and she filled the gap. “Lieutenant Nail and his Bears are a team; I haven’t trained with them. . . .”
“Okay, two ferrets, Nail. See you below.”
“One way or another, sir,” Nail said, smiling as he gave a little salute.
Like a pair of rats, alternately hunting and being hunted as they went over—and under—the debris of old Little Rock, Valentine and Styachowski threaded their way toward the Kurian Tower. Construction hadn’t stopped; they’d finished the second level and were starting on the third, even with the fighting across the river. It looked like an unevenly baked wedding cake with the layers stacked off center, or maybe a soft-serve ice-cream cone, Valentine couldn’t decide which.
They found a rubble-filled basement loading dock just outside the glare of the tower’s lights. The spiderwebs told them that the Quisling patrols didn’t visit it, and they made themselves comfortable. They sat next to each other and looked up at the night sky through a gap above.
Valentine passed his time looking at the TMCC officer’s handbook, a list of field regulations and procedures condensed to pamphlet size. He opened it to a page he had turned down and reread the passage he’d penned a tick next to. Even in their almost lightless refuge, the script stood out against the paper to his Cat-eyes as if it was on an illuminated screen. He finished and put the book back, trying to relax against the cold concrete. Rodents scurried somewhere farther inside the building.
The whistle-crash of the first shell ended the respite. The 155s came down with a terrifying noise—not as bad as the monster shells of the Crocodile, but unnerving all the same. He let five land to give the Quislings time to take cover, then nodded to Styachowski. They left their hideout.
They wriggled their way to a good view of the Kurian Tower, its white sides already smudged by the explosions. Valentine counted each shell burst; they arrived almost on the minute. After twenty had been fired, he grabbed Styachowski by the shoulder and they ran toward the tower, dodging their way through construction equipment and supplies. He heard one distant alarm whistle but ignored it. They made for the concrete bunker flanking the construction entrance to the tower. A scaffold with an electric elevator stood next to the entrance, on the other side of the bunker. Styachowski tore the colored tabs off a thick cylinder of a grenade, squatted listening to the fuse hiss—and threw it in the firing slit of the bunker.
“Hey!” someone inside shouted.
It would have been ideal if the next shell had landed at the same time as the grenade exploded, but they were seconds apart. The grenade went off first, followed by the louder, but farther off, explosion of the artillery shell.
Valentine had his own grenade to deal with. It was a green smoker. He pulled the pin and rolled it under a sluice on the steel curtain door of the construction entrance. It went off like two cats spitting at each other, and green smoke began to billow out from around the edges of the door. Valentine threw two more green smokers around the edges of the buildings. When the grenades were spewing he pulled the dinner bell from his bag and pulled out the sock he’d used to silence it. He rang it, loud and long.
“Gas! Gas! Gas!” he shouted. He rang the bell again.
“Gas! Gas! Gas!” Styachowski added, deepening her voice. She pulled out a pair of crowbars.
Valentine clanged the dinner bell for all he was worth, then tried the electric lift. No juice.
“We climb,” he said.
Valentine went up first while Styachowski covered him, shrouded with green smoke. The gas warning had been taken up by men inside the building. Valentine heard a klaxon go off, three angry buzzes, followed by the triple “gas” call over the PA system within. He took the crowbars from Styachoski and pulled her up.
Valentine went up the scaffold to the platform on the first level. Styachowski joined him and they put their crowbars to work, pulling at a metal screen blocking a window. It was more of an iron grate than true bars, designed to explode an RPG aimed at the window. Nothing but cardboard stuck in a fitting for thick glass closed the window beyond, but the bars blocked them out.
Styachowski roared in frustration.
Valentine tucked his crowbar nearer hers. Together they pulled, shoulder to shoulder. Styachowski’s muscles felt like machine-tool steel against his.
“Graaaaaa!” Styachowski heaved. She set her leg against the tower face. They pulled again—
The grate gave way, pulling the masonry at the top and bottom of the narrow window with it. Styachowski pulled an opening big enough for them to climb through.
Eyes wild and burning, Styachowski swung through, knocking the cardboard away. Wisps of green smoke could be seen within, and the gas alarm was still bleating its triple call every ten seconds. The tower’s interior was still be
ing worked on; the walls were nothing but cinder block coated with primer paint.
Valentine felt something crackling inside his mind, like a man running a sparkler firework across the field of an empty stadium. Or maybe two or three, waving and parting and separating like schooling fish. With them were the colder, darker impressions of Reapers.
“Downstairs! They’re down, in the basement, heading north.”
“How can you tell? I don’t hear anything but that friggin’ alarm,” Styachowski asked from the other side of the room, covering the hall with her gun.
“I just do. Find the stairs.”
The tower appealed to some kind of Kurian sensibility for architecture; the “stairs” were a tight ramp-spiral in a corner under the tallest part of the tower. Valentine could hear footsteps climbing the stairs above in between the klaxon bursts; the Quislings or construction workers or whoever were sensibly getting as high as they could above what they thought to be lethal fumes.
There was a change in the air as soon as they got underground. They came to a corridor; the lighting fixtures and flooring told Valentine it was pre-2022 construction. A man in a uniform with a gas mask over his face was leading another toward the stairs, the one behind had his hand on his leader. Neither could see much through the eyeholes in the dusty old masks, and they were going down the corridor like they were playing blind man’s bluff. One had a radio bumping against his chest.
The Kurians were still below and moving away somewhere. Where was that rathole to Xray-Tango’s old headquarters?
Valentine and the Bear hurried down the corridor, catching up to the men. Valentine heard the radio crackle.
“Townshend, Townshend, what’s the situation? Is there gas in the tower?”
As Valentine passed him he lashed out with his fist, landing a solid jab in the radio-wearer’s breadbasket. The man went to his knees, gasping. Valentine caught the other under the jaw with the butt of his machine pistol.
“Help—-haaaaaaaaaaa—help,” the radio man on his knees gasped into the mike. His battle for air sounded authentic enough. Valentine kicked out sideways, catching him in the back of the head. The Quisling’s head made a sound like a spiked volleyball as it bounced off the wall, and he went face-first on top of the radio, unconscious or dead.
“Val, here,” Styachowski said, checking a room at the end of the corridor.
It was a utility room. Snakes of cable conduit ran up from the floor and across the ceiling; boxes and circuit breakers lined the wall. Another stairway descended from a room beyond. The steel door had been torn off its hinges. Valentine recognized the nail marks of a Reaper. He picked up the mental signature of the fleeing Kurians again, this time clearer.
“You ready for this?” he asked Styachowski.
She nodded, giving him the thumbs-up.
He handed her two of his four Quickwood stakes. “Remember, they can make themselves look like a dog, anything. Just kill whatever you see. Unless it’s another Bear, or me. No, strike that. If you see another me, kill him, too. I’ll just hope you pick the right one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s do it.”
They went down to a boiler room, connected by another missing door—this one long since removed—to an arch-topped tunnel. Two Quislings, in gas-mask chemical weapon hoods, stood at the portal.
Styachowski’s Mini-14 came up. She shot twice, the action on the gun louder than the bullet through the silenced weapon, and both men crumpled. As Valentine looked down the corridor she shot each Quisling again for insurance.
It wasn’t much of a tunnel, only a little wider than the passageways on the old Thunderbolt. Old conduit pipes and newer wires ran along the walls and ceiling, lit here and there by bulbs encased in thick plastic housings like preserve jars. It smelled like damp underwear and bad plumbing.
Valentine went in first—trailing the psychic scent like a bloodhound—in the bent-over, lolloping run he’d picked up going through the underbrush in his days with the Wolves. He heard Styachowski behind; an occasional splashing footfall sounded as she hit a puddle in the damp tunnel.
He heard firing at the other end of the arrow-thin passageway.
The sparking mental impressions grew clearer. They were coming. With their Reapers.
Valentine pulled up. “They turned around.”
“Shit! How many Reapers?”
“I don’t know. Several.” The corridor went dark. Styachowski pulled a flare out and lit it in a flash, then threw it down the corridor toward the coming Reapers. She reached for a fist-sized metal sphere on her vest.
She pulled the pin on the grenade. “Want to keep it?”
“No, throw it. When I tell you. If there’s anything beyond Red . . . like Violet maybe, you might want to give it a try.”
Styachowski pulled her bolo blade. It was a nice length for the tunnel. Valentine wished he had his old straight-edged sword. He felt oddly light and fearless. Just a mouth like dry-rotted wood and hands greasy with sweat and aching from rope burn. He shifted his grip on Ahn-Kha’s stabbing spear.
The Reapers came in a wall of death, three of them, jaws agape like Cerberus.
“Now,” Valentine said. Styachowski threw the grenade and readied her Quickwood stabber.
The Reapers ignored the bouncing explosive. It went off behind them, throwing them into the Cat and the Bear in a wave of heat and sound. Valentine’s mind felt pain and confusion—his own, and that of the Kurians.
Styachowski went into the first Reaper like it was a badly stuffed scarecrow. Valentine could see the fight as clearly in the faint red glow of the flare as if it were daylight. She chopped off an arm, then buried her Quickwood into its neck. Another jumped on her back like lightning leaping sideways to hit a rod. It got its hands around her, claws reaching to rip open her rib cage, but Valentine plunged his stabbing spear into its shoulder, trying to hit the nerve trunks descending from the armored skull. The spear went through its robes and bit deep, eliciting an angry shriek, the loudest noise Valentine had ever heard a Reaper make.
Suddenly he was flying through the air. He crashed against the tunnel wall, held by the piece of steel that was the third Reaper’s arm. Its eyes burned into his. Valentine slammed the side of his arm down in a chop against the Reaper’s elbow, hoping to fold its arm like a jackknife, but he stayed pinned. The Reaper grabbed his other arm, forcing it to the wall so he hung in the crucifixion pose. Its narrow face drew nearer, jaws opening for the sweet spot at the base of his throat. The stabbing tongue stirred within its mouth like a serpent coiling for a strike.
Valentine brought up his knees, putting his feet on the demon’s chest. It bore in, an irresistible force, folding him until his spine would snap—Valentine screamed in agonized frustration.
Styachowski’s face appeared above the Reaper’s. She was atop its back, her hands black with Reaper juice, her own blood pouring in a river from her nose. She brought her blade across its throat, grabbed it by the handle and tip, and pulled toward herself. The improvised guillotine cut through its windpipe and circulatory system, but the thing dropped Valentine and reached its queerly jointed arms around behind itself for Styachowski.
Valentine, his vision a red mist, brought both of his hands up, uncoiling with his body and helping the blade travel the last few inches. The Reaper’s head went up and off in a gristly pop-snap.
The Reaper’s body staggered off sideways, clawing at the air. The ambulatory corpse did a U-turn, crashed into the wall, and flopped over. There was shooting coming from the far end of the tunnel.
“Your hands!” Valentine barked, as Styachowski was about to wipe her sweating face. She froze.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. Reaper blood was poisonous, whether swallowed or taken in through a mucous membrane. Even the best Hunters sometimes forgot in the midst of a fight. The tunnel was filling with smoke from the grenade, and the fight elsewhere.
Footsteps. Another Reaper charged out of the smoke, robes torn, one arm gone,
its body riddled with bullet wounds. Valentine and Styachowski threw themselves against the passageway and it passed without noticing them.
“Fucker!” Valentine heard Lost&Found shout, spraying bullets up the corridor after it.
“Cease fire, Bear! You’re shooting at us,” Valentine shouted.
The bullets stopped.
“Sir! Sir! We got two of ’em. Two blue bat-winged bastards!”
Valentine could hardly see them through the smoke. He made his way toward the sound of the voices with Styachowski in tow.
“Reapers?” Valentine asked.
“We got two down. One got away from us.”
“He got away from us, too. But I think he was running wild,” Styachowski said, meaning its Kurian had been killed.
Valentine could better make out the haggard four now. They’d almost passed through the smoke. The Bears were missing Brass and Groschen.
“Where are the other two?” Valentine asked. He felt nervous somehow.
Nail jerked his chin up the tunnel the way the Bears had come. “A Reaper popped Brass’s head off. Sorry, sir, couldn’t be helped. Groschen is keeping an eye on the other end of the tunnel. The old headquarters had been converted to some kind of communications center. Lots of field phones and printing machines. We took it out.”
