by E. E. Knight
A bullet caught the Reaper in the armpit, staggering it. A heavier leather-clad missile hurled itself onto the Hood’s back. Patel’s body blow brought it down, and using every ounce of his formidable strength, the sergeant managed to keep it on the floor until Valentine brought his machete onto the back of its neck. The blade bit deep into flesh and bone, but failed to sever the head. Oily, ink-black ichor poured from the wound, but still the thing rose, rolling Patel off with a heave. The sergeant fought on and bore down on one arm, ignoring the deadly teeth opening for him. Valentine lashed out again with his machete, catching it under the jaw. The Reaper’s head arced off to land with a thud next to Selbey’s lifeless body.
“Jesus, they’re in, they’re in!” someone shouted.
A few Ravies, ghoulishly white in the glare of the candle, clambered through the gap in the wall created by the decapitated Reaper. Valentine shifted his parang to his left hand and reached for his pistol. The empty holster turned the movement into comic mime as he realized he had dropped the gun while getting the candle. But other Wolves drew their pistols, snapping off a shot at the shrieking forms.
The screaming grew into a chorus: a Ravie plunged in among the families. Valentine rushed to the corner to find the howling lunatic pinned against the wall by a man who’d had the presence of mind to grab an old pitchfork when the fight started. The Ravie had both hands on the haft of the weapon, trying to wrench the tines out of her belly, when Valentine came in, swinging his parang to strike and strike and strike again until she sank lifeless to the floor, at long last silent.
The screaming outside had ceased. The Wolves opened ammunition pouches and took bullets from belts and bandoliers. A final bullet or two ended the spasms of the few crawling, crippled targets still living and therefore still dangerous. The men in the loft called downstairs, in anxiety over their comrades. Valentine ignored the chatter and saw with a kind of weary grief that one of the wives had been bitten by the impaled Ravie. He went to check on Patel. The husky sergeant was on his feet, one arm hanging limp and useless, Valentine’s pistol in his working hand.
Patel handed the pistol back to the lieutenant. “Quiet, up there! And keep your eyes peeled,” the sergeant shouted at the uncomprehending floorboards above. He held his hurt arm closer to his body, grimacing.
“Broken collarbone, I think,” he explained. “Could be my shoulder is out, as well. Are you okay, sir?”
“Hell, Patel, enough is enough. Next it’ll be ‘I hope you liked your drink.” Let’s get that arm in a sling, for a start.“ Valentine motioned an idle Wolf over to help his sergeant. He saw another of his men bandaging the Ravie bite on the woman as her anxious family crowded around. ”We’ve got a widower there who doesn’t know it yet,“ he said, sotto voce. His sergeant nodded with sad understanding, and Valentine thought of Patel’s family. They had been taken by the Raving Madness five years ago.
The lieutenant walked through his shaken command, checking on his men, and came into the corner sheltering the escapees. He shot a significant glance at his Wolf attending to the woman; the man caught the hint and nodded. “The bleeding’s stopped already, sir.”
“Quick action, Mosley. Grab someone and get that”—he pointed at the lifeless Ravie—“out of here.”
The candles outside were sputtering out. Valentine walked over to the ladder, intending to check with Gonzalez upstairs…
… when the floor suddenly tilted beneath his feet. Thrown to the floor, he saw an albino-white arm open a heavy trapdoor in an explosion of dirt, dried leaves, and twigs.
The barn had a cellar.
The Reaper got halfway out the trapdoor as the bullets zipped over Valentine’s head. His Wolves, still keyed up from the fight, aimed their guns with lethal accuracy and pumped bullet after bullet into the yellow-eyed creature. Under the point-blank cross fire from five directions, the black-robed shape jerked wildly and fell back into the basement.
“Grenades,” Valentine bellowed. Three of his men gathered at the trapdoor, now shooting down with pistols.
Striking matches or using the lanterns, two Wolves lit fuses on the bombs and hurled them down the square hole. Valentine grabbed the trapdoor and flung it shut. The rusty hinges squealed their complaints.
The first explosion threw the door forever off its aged fastenings, and the second boomed with an earsplitting roar. Smoke mushroomed from the square hole.
A Reaper sprang from the gap like something a magician had conjured from the smoke, arms nothing but two tarry stumps, and head a bony mask of horror. Even with its face blown off, the Reaper was on its feet and running, seeming to favor them with a splay-toothed grin. The guns rang out again, but the creature fled through the exit, knocking Patel aside like a bowling pin in the path of a cannonball as the sergeant attempted another body blow. A tattered and smoldering cape streaming out behind it as it ran, the Reaper disappeared into the darkness.
Some of the children had hands over their ears, screaming in pain. Valentine tried to shake the drunken sensation that had come over him, but it was no use. The acrid air of the barn was too thick to breathe. He staggered to the doorjamb and vomited.
An hour later, with the barn cleared of bodies except for the unfortunate Selbey, who lay in his poncho in the empty blackness of the blasted cellar, Gonzalez again shared his discovery with Valentine. His scout, after asking for permission to speak privately in the loft, presented him with a filthy strip of cloth.
Valentine examined the excrement-stained yellow rag with tired eyes.
“Uncle smelled something, sir, you know? He told me to check the area where we heard the bloodhounds real careful after everyone pulled out. I found this in the bushes where the Red River people… er, relieved themselves, sir,” Gonzalez elaborated, half whispering.
He read the semiliterate scrawl by lantern light: “N + W, bam, about twenty gun, yrs trly.”
Betrayal. That explains a thing or two. But which one is “yrs trly ” ? Valentine wondered. He remembered a couple of: the farmhands had hurried to the bushes as they assembled for I the flight to the barn. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the! time: the fear in the night had turned his own bowels to water, j as well.
He gathered three Wolves from downstairs and explained j what he wanted to do when the sun came up.
Mallow and his reserve platoon trotted up to the barn, just beating the sun. He suppressed the urge to hug the panting Lugger, who looked as tired as Valentine felt.
The senior lieutenant responded to Valentine’s report with a low whistle. “One in the basement, huh? You had some bad luck, rookie. But it could have been worse. Good thing the was too thick to breathe. He staggered to the doorjamb and vomited.
An hour later, with the barn cleared of bodies except for the unfortunate Selbey, who lay in his poncho in the empty blackness of the blasted cellar, Gonzalez again shared his discovery with Valentine. His scout, after asking for permission to speak privately in the loft, presented him with a filthy strip of cloth.
Valentine examined the excrement-stained yellow rag with tired eyes.
“Uncle smelled something, sir, you know? He told me to check the area where we heard the bloodhounds real careful after everyone pulled out. I found this in the bushes where the Red River people… er, relieved themselves, sir,” Gonzalez elaborated, half whispering.
He read the semiliterate scrawl by lantern light: “N + W barn, about twenty gun, yrs trly.”
Betrayal. That explains a thing or two. But which one, “yrs trly”? Valentine wondered. He remembered a couple o the farmhands had hurried to the bushes as they assembled for the flight to the barn. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time: the fear in the night had turned his own bowels to water as well.
He gathered three Wolves from downstairs and explained what he wanted to do when the sun came up.
Mallow and his reserve platoon trotted up to the bam, jus beating the sun. He suppressed the urge to hug the panting Lugger, who looked as tired as Valen
tine felt.
The senior lieutenant responded to Valentine’s report wit a low whistle. “One in the basement, huh? You had some bad luck, rookie. But it could have been worse. Good thing.
“A kid, whaddaya know,” one of the men sighed. A couple of others swore.
The boy broke down, alternating threats and curses in between sobs. His ashen-faced father held his distraught wife. She already trembled with the weakness of the first stage of the disease that would claim her life within two or three more days, when she would have to be shot like a rabid dog. Mallow and Patel ignored the grieving parents and questioned the boy in time-honored good cop-bad cop fashion.
“Who put you up to this, boy?” Mallow asked, leaning to put his face below the boy’s downcast eyes. “What did they promise you? If it were up to this guy here, he’d snap your neck with his good arm. I can’t help you unless you talk to me. Tell you what, you leave another note, only write on it what we tell you, and you won’t get hanged. Can’t promise anything else, but you won’t hang.”
The boy’s fear exploded into anger. “You don’t get it, do you? They’re in charge, not you. They make the laws. They run the show. An‘ when they get tired of you, you’ll be emptied an’ the Grogs’ll have the leftovers! Them that don’t want to die gotta go along with orders.”
Valentine, sick with fatigue, stepped outside to watch the dawn. As the yellow-orange sun burned through the morning haze, he wondered what doom of fate had selected him to be born into such a fucked-up time.
Chapter Two
Northern Minnesota, the thirty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: He grew up in a pastoral setting among the lakes of upper Minnesota. David Stuart Valentine was born during one of the interminable winters in a sturdy brick house on Lake Carver. The scattered settlements of that area owed their survival not so much to resistance as to inaccessibility. The Kurians dislike cold weather, leaving the periodic sweeps and patrols of this area to their Quislings. The Reapers come only in the summer in a macabre imitation of the fishermen and campers who once visited the lakes between May and September.
In the first few years after the Overthrow, myriad refugees supported themselves amid the abundant lakes and woods of what had been known as the Boundary Waters. They exterminated the remaining disease-infested Ravies hotzones, but the settlers refused aid to would-be guerrilla bands, as most of them had already tasted Reaper reprisals elsewhere. They wished nothing more than to be left alone. The Boundary Waters people were ruled only by the weather. A frantic period of food storage marked each fall, and when snow came, the families settled in for winter, ice-fishing for survival, not sport. In summer they retreated into the deep woods far from the roads, returning to their houses after the Reapers were again driven south by the cold.
Young David’s family reflected the diaspora that found refuge in the region. He had a collection of Scandinavian, American Indian, and even Asian ancestors in a family tree whose roots stretched from Quebec to San Francisco. His mother was a beautiful and athletic Sioux from Manitoba, his father a former navy pilot.
His father’s stories made the world a bigger place for David than it was for most of the children his age. He dreamed of flying across the Pacific Ocean the way some boys dream of being a pirate or building a raft and drifting down the Mississippi.
His early life came to an abrupt stop at the age of eleven, on a cool September day that saw the first frost of the northern fall. The family had just returned from summer retreat to their home, but a Quisling patrol or two still lingered. Judging from the tire tracks that David found later, two trucks — probably the slow, alcohol-burning kind favored by rural patrols—had pulled up to the house. Perhaps the occupants were also liquor fueled. The patrol emptied the larder and then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon raping David’s mother. Attracted by the sound of the vehicles, his father had died in a hail of gunfire as he came up from the lakeshore. David heard the shots while gathering wild corn. He hurried home, accompanied by a growing fear that the shots had come from his house.
David explored the too-silent house. The smell of tomatoes, which his mother had been stewing, filled the four-room cabin. He found his mother first, her body violated, her throat slit. Out of spite or habit, the intruders had also killed his little brother, who had just learned to write his own name, and then his baby sister. He did not cry —eleven-year-old men don’t cry, his dad said. He circled the house to find his father lying dead in the backyard. A crow was perched on the former pilot’s shoulder, pecking at the brains exposed by a baseball-size hole blown out of the back of his skull.
He walked to the Padre’s. Putting one foot in front of the other came hard; for some reason he just wanted to lie down and sleep. Then the Padre’s familiar lane appeared. The priest’s home served as school, church, and public library for the locals. David appeared out of the chilly night air and told the cleric what he had heard and seen, and then offered to walk with the Padre all the way back to his house. The saddened priest put the boy to bed in his basement. The room became David’s home for the remainder of his adolescence.
A common grave received the four victims of old sins loosed by the New Order. David threw the first soil onto the burial shrouds that masked the violence of their deaths. After the funeral, as little groups of neighbors broke up, David walked away with the Padre’s hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder. David looked up at the priest and decided to ask the question that had been troubling him.
“Father Max, did anyone eat their souls?”
Every day at school they had to memorize a Bible verse, proverb, or saying. Often there was a lot of writing down and not much memorizing. Sometimes the lines had something to do with the day’s lesson, sometimes not. The quotation prescribed for the rainy last day of classes had an extra significance to the older students who stayed on for a week after the grade-schoolers escaped the humid classroom for the summer. Their special lessons might have been called the “Facts of Death.” The Padre hoped to correct some of the misinformation born of rumor and legend, then fill in the gaps about what had happened since the Overthrow, when Homo sapiens lost its position at the top of the food chain. The material was too grim for some of the younger students, and the parents of others objected, so this final week of class was sparsely attended.
The Padre pointed to the quotation again as he began the afternoon’s discussion. Father Maximillian Argent was made to point, with his long graceful arms and still-muscular shoulders. Sixty-three years and many long miles from the place of his birth in Puerto Rico, the Padre’s hair was only now beginning to reflect the salt-and-pepper coloring of age. He was the sort of pillar a community could rest on, and when he spoke at meetings, the residents listened to his rich, melodious, and impeccably enunciated voice as attentively as his students did.
The classroom blackboard that day had fourteen words written on it. In Father Max’s neat, scripted handwriting, the words THE FARTHER BACKWARD YOU CAN LOOK, THE FARTHER FORWARD YOU CAN SEE.—WINSTON CHURCHILL Were written with Euclidean levelness on the chalkboard. Normally Valentine would have been interested in the lecture, as he liked history. But his eye was drawn out the window, where the rain still showed no sign of letting up. He had even used the leaky roof as an excuse to shift his desk to the left so that it pressed right against the wall under the window, and the chipped white basin where his desk usually sat was now full enough with rainwater falling from the ceiling to add a plop every now and then as punctuation to the Padre’s lesson. Valentine searched the sky for a lessening of the drizzle. Today was the final day of the Field Games, and that meant the Crosscountry Run. If the Councilmen canceled the games because of weather, he would finish where he now stood in the ranking: third.
The youths came from all over the Central Boundary Waters to compete against others in their age group each spring as part of the general festivities that ended the winter and began the great Hideout. This year Valentine had a shot at winning first prize. Second and third pla
ce got you a hearty handshake and an up-close look at the trophy as whoever came in first received it. The prize for boys aged sixteen to eighteen was a real over-under shotgun, not a hunting musket, and fifty bird-shot shells. A good gun meant a bountiful hunting season. The Padre and David needed all the help they could get. The Padre taught more or less for free, and Valentine didn’t earn much at his job chopping endless cords of firewood for the neighbors. If Valentine won, he and Father Max would be dining on goose, duck, and pheasant until well after the snow flew.
“Mr. Valentine,” Father Max said, interrupting David’s mental meal. “Please rejoin the class. We’re talking about a very important subject… your heritage.”
“Funny,” whispered Doyle from a desk behind. “I don’t remember him saying anything about what a stupid son of a bitch you are.”
Plop , added the basin to his right.
The Padre cracked his knuckles in a callused fist; profane jokes out of Doyle were as natural as water dripping into the classroom when it rained. He evidently chose to ignore both, keeping his eyes fixed on David.
“Sorry, Father,” Valentine said with as much contrition as a seventeen-year-old boy could summon.
“You can apologize to the class by reviewing what you know about the Pre-entities.”
Another whisper from behind: “This’U be short.”
The Padre shifted his gaze. “Thank you for volunteering two hours of your free time to school maintenance, Mr. Doyle. The roof and I are grateful. Your summary, Mr. Valentine?”
Plop.
Valentine could hear Doyle slump in his seat. “They go back to before the dinosaurs, Father. They made the Gates, those doorways that connect different planets. The Interworld Tree. It’s how the Kurians got here, right?”
Father Max held up his hand, palm outward. The thumb was missing from his right hand, and his remaining fingers were misshapen. They always reminded Valentine of tree roots that could not decide which way to grow. “You are getting ahead of yourself, Mr. Valentine. Just by sixty-five million years or so.”
