by E. E. Knight
They cooperated.
Valentine snipped the telephone wires, hoping that if it activated a trouble alarm, there wouldn't be enough New Year's staff to investigate right away. He and set Rollings to work unscrewing the station's radio from the shelf at the com desk. They did a quick sweep of the building while the Wolves watched both ends of the road, and then started looking through the armory.
The river patrol had good gear, including rocket-propelled grenades that Corporal Glass looked over and selected. Valentine found a case of four Type 3s—that had been the weapon issued to his Razors by Solon, who'd evidently had a bigger budget than the river patrol. The small arms were a little disappointing, mostly cut-down versions of the venerable M16. On the other hand, there was a plentitude of small support machine guns that could be carried or fixed to a boat mount. Most of the weapons were packed in protective lubricant—it would take hours to clean them—so the platoon would have to get back with what they brought.
They ended up filling two truck trailers with boxes of weapons and ammunition and other assorted pieces of lethality, plus as much com gear and medicines as they could find. As Valentine and Patel supervised the loading, the assigned drivers checked the tires and tested the lights and horns on their vehicles.
The men rode in the beds of the camouflaged service trucks with the prisoners secured to floor bolts. They'd even liberated some walkie-talkies so the drivers could communicate with each other. Condensed and dehydrated foodstuffs and extra gear was piled in bags hanging off the back and strapped to the hoods.
They even took the dog. Valentine didn't mind; he liked dogs. Though it was heartbreaking if you had to eat them.
As they pulled out and bumped west, witch fingers of tree branches scratched the sides of the truck.
In the dark, with the roads potholed and washed out, they couldn't go much faster than a man could trot. Patel had the Wolves lope ahead and behind, scouting and checking for pursuit.
All that marked their departure was noise, and that only briefly. A siren started up from the armory as soon as they were out of sight.
"What you figure that signifies, Major?" the man at the wheel asked.
"We'll find out soon enough," Valentine said.
Valentine shifted the machine pistol to his lap and checked the soldier's rifle and the bandolier resting on the dash. He and this version of Southern Command's single shot breechloaders were old, conflicted friends dating back to his days in the Labor Regiment. It was a fine gun, accurate with stopping power sufficient to knock a Reaper off its feet, if you didn't mind having to reload every time you fired a round.
Valentine opened the glass panel between the cabin and the back of the truck.
"Someone ask our prisoners what that noise is," Valentine said over the truck's protesting suspension.
"Alarm, sir."
"Was there someone there they didn't tell us about?"
Valentine waited a moment while Patel asked a few questions.
"Could be a gargoyle, Major. They overfly the area all the time. One might have seen the trucks leave. Could be he flew down to investigate. Gargoyles are smarter than harpies."
They're also smart enough to guide in a few Reapers.
Valentine opened the truck door, checking that he wouldn't be swept off, or worse, by the branches ahead. He searched the night sky.
The glare of the following truck's headlights made it difficult to see.
"Kill the lights," Valentine said to his driver, dropping back into the cab.
"Pass back to the following truck: Kill the lights," Valentine said to Patel. Patel lifted a brand-new walkie-talkie from the armory and spoke into it.
With the lights out on the rear truck, Valentine tried again, ducking under a branch that snapped and snipped as it broke along the truck's side.
A shadow hung behind the trucks, following the road. A shadow that closed in on itself, thickening as it followed their vehicles.
Harpies. Dirty, flapping—
Valentine wondered what they were carrying, apart from ugly. He wondered if the theoretical gargoyle had sent them after the trucks. They had enough cunning to know something was wrong and that they'd be rewarded for stopping the trucks.
Fixated by the shadow, Valentine starting to pick out individual wings and short, skinny bowlegs. A branch slapped him out of his trance, and he ducked back into the cabin.
"Harpies," Valentine said. "Pass the world. Honk and bring the Wolves in."
He hated those snaggletoothed bastards. A sort of cold clarity took over as he stifled the urge to get one in his hands and dismember it like a well-cooked chicken.
"We could stop under thick trees, Major."
"No, that'll just give them more time to figure something out. And let them aim."
Valentine looked at the bungees holding the cargo on the roof. He detached a couple of the S hooks and fitted them on to his vest and belt. Testing his grip, he exited the cab, closed the truck door, and hooked another bungee to the bars covering the passenger window.
"Stop a sec and pass me up the gun and bandolier," Valentine said. "And try to keep to the left."
As the truck ground into motion again, Valentine now hanging on the outside with his foot on a fuel tank, he found that the side-view mirror protected him from the bigger branches. All it did for the smaller ones was bend them back to give them a little more energy for a swat.
The Wolf scouts returned and perched on the hood and front hedge cutter. At a turn Valentine saw the following truck also had Wolves atop the driver's cab.
"Pass the word: Wait until I shoot," Valentine ordered.
The shadow broke into individual forms as it neared. Valentine searched the flock for the bigger, longer-legged form of a gargoyle. The harpies darted and zigzagged as they flew; it was how their bodies kept aloft. He placed his foresight on one hurrying to get ahead of the trucks. Its course was a crazy mix of ups and downs, backs and forths. . . . But between the frantic beats of the wings you could sometimes track them on a glide—
BLAM!
Valentine had been so used to firing guns equipped with flash suppressors he'd forgotten the white-yellow photoflash. And he'd forgotten just how hard you had to press into the stock to absorb the shock.
Valentine worked the lever and ejected the little thimble of the shell casing, his shoulder smarting with the old mule kick.
Missed.
The Wolf on the hood had a combat shotgun, a sensible weapon for brush fighting. He tracked one of harpies above and fired.
Valentine heard a high, inhuman scream.
Time to get down with the sickness.
The sickness. The shadow half. The monster.
Valentine had a few names for it, depending on his mood. He'd learned long ago that a part of him rejoiced in the death of his enemies and his own survival. Whether it was a character flaw or some piece of strange heritage passed down from his Bear father didn't matter. The awful exhilaration he felt when he killed, triumphed, made him wonder whether he wasn't even more deserving of destruction for the good of the world, like some rabid dog.
But for now the sickness had its uses.
Valentine, remembering his early years in the Wolves, made an effort to thank those left behind at the landings and hear their accounts.
He shouldered the gun. One was diving right at the truck. Its feet rubbed together and a plastic strip fell—it had armed some kind of grenade. BLAM!
Damn cranky gun.
Maybe he put a bullet through its wing and spoiled the dive. It flapped off to the left and dropped its explosive.
It detonated, orange and loud, in a stand of brush. Valentine wondered what the birds and critters residing in the undergrowth thought.
Don't get weird now, mate. Job at hand.
Valentine heard canvas tearing. The men in the bed of the truck were hacking off the truck-bed cover to better employ their guns.
Valentine aimed again, but a twiggy smack in the back of the he
ad spoiled his shot.
"Four o'clock!"
A line of harpies were coming in, bright plastic grenade tabs fluttering as they pulled the arming pins. They were flapping hard, each bat form describing a crazy knuckleball course.
"There's a good straightaway ahead, sir," yelled the driver.
"Put on some speed," Valentine said.
He fired, and the men in the trucks fired, and when the orange ball of light cleared there was only one harpy left. It dropped the stick grenade on the road and flapped hard to gain altitude, but someone in the second truck brought it down.
Their luck was in. The device didn't go off.
Another line of harpies had gotten around the front.
"Twelve high!" the Wolf hanging off the brush cutter called.
Now the small, questing branches could whack him on the cheek and bridge of Valentine's nose. A good deal more painfully, as the truck had picked up speed.
He tasted his own blood and felt something sticky on his neck, but he didn't feel anything worse than a scratch or two.
The night smelled like blood, wet leaves, and rotten eggs.
Valentine reloaded as the harpies made their run. He could see their beady eyes reflecting red in the moonlight.
One of his soldiers in misty denim, a big man with bushy sideburns, let loose with a double-barrel, dropped the gun to someone below, and took up a pump action. Valentine aimed and fired. He watched his target plunge, falling loopily as a kite with a cut string, but suspected the man resting his aiming arm on the cab hood had downed the beastie.
The others dropped their explosives. Grenades bounced all over the road. The man hanging off the brush cutter disappeared into flash and smoke, but when they emerged again from the blasts he was still there, blackened and frazzled but evidently intact.
Valentine, with the thick fuzzy head and the muffled hearing of someone who'd been a little too near a blast, saw another harpy fall, brought down by the truck behind. The flock, perhaps not liking the punishment being handed out with little to show for it, turned and gathered to the east, doing a sort of whirling corkscrew aerial conference.
"Eyes on the road," Patel bellowed at the driver.
A pushed-over tree blocked the road.
The driver braked hard, and the truck jumped to a tune of squealing brakes. The Wolf on the front, evidently uninjured but stunned by the explosion, was thrown by the sudden braking, struck the trunk of the downed tree, and went heels-over-head onto the other side of the trunk.
Valentine, more or less secured by the bungees, lost nothing but his dignity as he saw himself swinging, holding on to the bars over the passenger window.
Patel was already out of the truck, running with a first aid kit.
Valentine saw a big, wide-winged shape flapping away low. He raised his gun, aimed, and fired at the big target.
The gargoyle lurched but kept flapping.
Valentine swore. The big, soft-nosed bullet should have brought it down. His old marksmanship trainer in the Labor Regiment had promised the kick in the shoulder was nothing to what the target experienced. He'd seen a round take a softball-sized chunk of flesh out of a wild pig. He must have just clipped it on a limb.
It disappeared behind a line of trees.
Valentine looked at the roadblock.
What kind of super-gargoyle could push over a tree? Nothing short of a Reaper could. Valentine looked at the tangle of old, weatherworn roots. The tree had been downed some time ago and moved off the road. The gargoyle had simply moved it back. Still, an incredible display of strength. Their flying arms were supposed to be powerful.
Worse, the harpies were heartened by the stationary trucks. They formed a new shadow, and then an arrow, pointed straight at the delayed trucks.
"Get that tree out of the way," Valentine shouted.
The men piled out of the trucks while the other Wolf helped Patel with the injured man.
"Faster," Valentine urged. He raised himself up so he could shout to the truck behind. "Second squad, deploy. Let's keep those bastards off us."
The men, with their varmint and bird guns mixed in with the militia rifles, spread out.
Valentine fired into the flying mass without picking out a target. Hitting with the wonky old rifle was purely a matter of chance.
"Watch each other's backs—there's more coming around from eight o'clock," Valentine shouted.
The rest began to pepper the harpies with careful shots. One pair, Rutherford and DuSable, shifted position to give better covering fire to the men working on clearing the fallen log. Valentine made a note of it—the noise and confusion of gunfire short-circuited some and they forgot the bigger picture. A flier spun down; another followed intentionally, coming to its aid. Perhaps they were a mated pair.
Valentine fired three more times quickly, and then jammed the gun. The ejector had torn off the heat-softened brass rim on the casing. He grabbed the hot barrel at the other end. The ornery weapon would be more lethal as a club anyway. Then he remembered his machine pistol.
He flipped open the stock and extended the foregrip. It did group tightly, and the harpies were closing.
The prisoners in the trucks began to yell. They'd been left handcuffed inside.
The harpies swooped over the vehicles, dropping grenades and plastic arming tabs. Valentine watched a grenade bounce under the truck, realized that the same bungees that kept him secured to the passenger door were keeping him from jumping off—
All he could do was wait for it. He fired a burst at a harpy coming straight for the cab, watched with satisfaction as the bullets tore it into a blood-rain of gory pieces.
The grenade went off but didn't sound much louder than an overstuffed firecracker. Other explosions rocked the second truck.
Valentine brought down another harpy, who'd suddenly appeared from behind a tree as though he'd popped into existence just to aim a leg claw at Valentine's throat. He reloaded, but the sky had cleared. The harpies had had enough at last and the flock was keeping low.
The soldiers moved the obstacle and got on their way again.
The front truck was leaking coolant, and a couple of the mechanically minded did a bird-droppings-and-bubblegum fix that slowed the leak. They had to stop and refill with water. They'd destroy the engine before recrossing the Mississippi anyway.
It got them to the landing.
The men were in admirably high spirits. The only serious injury they'd suffered was to the Wolf from the front truck, who'd broken a wrist, hurt a knee, and taken a piece of shrapnel to his calf, though one of the prisoners had an ugly gash in his scalp and another had torn his wrist open trying to get out of his handcuffs as the trucks were bombed.
The injured Wolf rode back to the landing, scratching the dog's ears in good humor despite his injuries.
At the landing Valentine was happy to let Rand take over.
"Far shore says river watchers report clear river," the man at the radio said. "We've got the okay to cross."
A pair of the Skeeter Fleet roared downriver.
Valentine's head felt thick and the old gunsmoke smell was getting nauseating. "Get the swag loaded and the men on the boats and rafts. And—"
There it was. The cold spot on his mind, a bit of ball lightning lurking in the thick river woods, raising the hairs on the back of his head. Reaper!
"And, sir?" Rand asked.
"And I'm going back up the road a bit to make sure there's no pursuit."
Rand pushed the glasses back up on his nose and nodded. "Ten, fifteen minutes at most, sir."
"Patel. Hoboken."
They trotted over, Patel solemn at the tone in his voice.
"Hood," Valentine said, using Southern Command slang for a Reaper.
They took the news like experienced Wolves. Concern but not panic. Hoboken put his hand on the big parang at his waist.
It was back along the road away, somewhere at the top of the river-bank. It might just be watching, waiting for someone to tr
ot off into the bushes to take a crap. Sure, it could wade into them and do a lot of damage, but how many dead pawns would make the Kurian controlling it think the sacrifice worth the loss of his knight?
But who knew what might be rushing to its aid.
Valentine and the Wolves slipped off into the brush, spread out by a few meters, preventing the Reaper from taking two at once if it decided to fall on them.
"Lifesign down," Valentine said.
Reapers hunted by seeking the emotional signal given off by intelligent minds. The Hunters had spent a good deal of time in mental training, learning to meditate their lifesign down until it was like background radiation.
Problem was, it was hard to forget that you were on the wrong bank of the river, with your friends about to leave, and a walking death machine lurking, probably as fast and strong as all three of you put together. At night Reapers were at the height of their lifesign-sensing powers. He hoped this one was concentrating on the throng at the riverbank.
Valentine quietly removed the stiletto from his forearm. If it grabbed him, he might get it through the eye or ear or jaw as it snapped his spine or tore into him with its foot-plus long, flanged tongue.
Purely a matter of chance which man it would target, but Valentine took the middle. A smart Reaper might strike there, hoping that the others at either wing would shoot at each other in the confusion.
They took turns walking, one going forward while the other two covered, the men behind giving soft clicks of the tongue when the first man could no longer be covered.
Something was wrong—the location. . . . Valentine cast about like a dog in a swirling breeze. No, it was to the side, too high.
He froze, gave a signal for the others to keep still as well.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—
It was up a tree, resting on a flatish branch above a deadfall that gave it a good view of the river and landing. But the silhouette was all wrong—the pelvis and lower limbs were turned around, like a bird's. The limbs were thin. Valentine had seen starvation cases that looked fat compared to this Reaper's limbs. Leathery wings like a bat's extended from overlarge arms and oversized fingers, now flaccid and hanging like a child playing superhero with a sheet pinned to his back and clutched at the fists.
