by E. E. Knight
Bullets rattled off the engine in reply. But the men began to move, NCOs tapping their charges on the shoulder and gesturing.
Valentine watched the spectacle of confused sheep and goats caught in a cross fire. Even experienced soldiers would hesitate to just gun down animals—there wasn't a man among them who didn't sympathize with the poor dumb brutes with little control over their fate, for the obvious reason that soldiers occasionally felt like sheep in that way—and Valentine's company used the confusion to scuttle back behind the rocks blocking the railroad cut.
The rocks were comforting in their thickness and sharp edging. There was good cover for shooting all along the fall; a crenellated wall on a medieval castle wouldn't have been more heartening.
The engineer and Crow leaped for the rocks, jumped over, and took cover, Crow leaving his rifle behind in his panic, the idiot. Valentine picked it up.
He tapped the gunner's leg. "C'mon. Leave it."
The gunner ignored him, emptied the weapon's box, and stood dumbly for a moment, as though waiting for someone to reload the weapon. Then he turned and looked down at Valentine with confused eyes. There was blood running down his face from a wound on his scalp.
"Out, back to the rocks," Valentine shouted, slapping him hard on the ankle.
The gunner finally left the cupola, slithered like a snake out of the battle seat and stirrups, and jumped out.
Valentine reversed the gears on the train one more time, clamped the pedal of the deadman's switch shut with a heavy wrench left for that purpose, and sent the engine puffing back down the tracks after the freewheeling boxcars, more to open the field of fire from the rock pile than anything. He paused in the doorway, suddenly tender about jumping, and leaped so that he landed on his good leg. He scrambled back toward the rock slide as sheep bleated in alarm at the engine picking up speed through their midst.
Valentine wished he'd thought to set some explosives in case a hero tried to jump into the cab to stop the engine before it collided with the boxcars.
The Quisling rail soldiers came up the cut one more time, but Glass and Rutherford and DuSable poured fire down the cut as the rest of the company took positions in the rock pile. More sheep and goats fell than men, but the return fire was inaccurate in the dark. Mortar shells began to explode on the hillside. The fire corrected, and a shell dropped into the rocks. Valentine heard a scream and he saw Cabbage run forward toward the blast, the big medical pouch bouncing on his hip.
Valentine drew his sword. The Reapers would come now, with the whole company listening to the sound of a man screaming his life out. Or they'd kill the men high on the hillside and then come tumbling down the grade like jumping spiders.
But he didn't feel them. The only cold on the back of his scalp was from the chill of the Kentucky spring night.
"They're coming! Brigade's coming," he heard Ediyak shriek from somewhere above.
Valentine felt a lump in his throat. He heard horse hooves and a motor from somewhere up the cut. The mortars shifted fire, sending a few rounds exploding back along the ridge, and then went silent.
Valentine saw a wave of soldiers pour over the ridgeline to his right, taking up positions to fire down on the railway Quislings. Every yard the enemy had fought for now meant a yard they'd have to fall back under fire from support weapons on the hillside. Valentine saw hands go up or men stand with rifles held over their heads, hurrying toward the rock slide to surrender.
His company ran forward to group the prisoners and relieve them of their weapons. Valentine saw one officer carrying the machine pistol he'd lost; he recognized the colored tape holding the magazines together.
Harmony relieved the prisoner of his souvenir.
Valentine felt dazed, half awake, with the smell of gunfire and smoke and livestock and sweat in his nostrils. The weird elation that settled on a man when he starts to believe he'd survived, won, picked him up and floated him back toward the foremost troops to report.
Seng, frowning, sat in the passenger seat of his Humvee, issuing orders into a headset.
"You caused me at least two days' delay, Major," he said in response to Valentine's salute. "More likely three."
"Yes, sir," Valentine said, wondering if he was in for a dressing down.
"I'll take it," Seng said. "Gamecock's Bears and the legworm outriders are hitting the support train now, and the Wolves are raising hell with some artillery tubes at the crossing they set up where you destroyed that bridge. A captured prisoner says their Kurian Lord's in a panic, disappeared into some secret area of his command car."
One of Valentine's company trotted up and presented him with his recovered gun. It now bore a nice set of scratches on the barrel just behind the foresight, a souvenir of the Reaper's power.
Valentine begged off from the questions and congratulations to check on the wounded. Which reminded him: "I've got wounded, sir. Can we set up a field hospital here?"
"Of course. This ridge is good defensive ground. I'll establish brigade HQ here until all our, ahem, stray sheep and goats are rounded up."
The fight already had a name—Billy Goat Cut. Valentine heard one of his corporals relaying the details to a Guard sergeant deploying his men for a sweep of the battlefield to look for enemy wounded or hiding.
Duvalier wandered out of the hills with Ediyak trailing behind, his clerk looking like she'd just been through the longest night of her life. Duvalier carried a Reaper skull by its thin black hair.
"Found him lurking on the ridge, all dazed and confused," she said, sticking the skull on a rail grade marker with a wet squelch that sounded like a melon being opened. "I thought I'd solve his problem for him."
Just like a Cat. She did everything but leave it on the back step.
"Don't mess with that," a corporal warned a curious Guard. "You'll seize up and die if you get some of that black gunk in you."
"It's safe once it's dried," Duvalier said, rubbing some on her index finger and making a motion toward her mouth. Valentine slapped her hand down.
"Cut it out, Ali. What's the matter with you?"
"I wonder sometimes," she said.
* * * *
Valentine's holding action was just one-third of the story. The Bears, Wolves, and assorted legworm-mounted troops had fallen on the support trains like hyenas on a pair of sick cattle.
Gamecock had found a piece of tentacle that looked like it came from a Kurian in the wreckage. It was already sealed in a specimen jar for eventual delivery to the Miskatonic.
Of course, there was no way to identify the remains positively. Valentine imagined the Kurians weren't above sticking some unimportant former rival or inconvenient relative in an aquarium marked "In case of emergency, break glass," so to speak, should a body ever need to be left behind while the Kurian stuffed itself up a hollow tree somewhere, or in the rear engine that managed to decouple and escape at full speed.
Moytana's Wolves had their own triumph, tearing up the artillery support hurrying toward the railroad cut. They were already working on chain harnesses so the legworms could haul the tubes up and down Kentucky's hills.
Seng was wrong about the delay. It took four days to get everyone organized, the refugees and the two men too shot up to move to a local brand.
Miraculously, Valentine had no one killed in the fight; his only losses were wounded—and the jibes from the rest of the expedition.
* * * *
They crossed the Big Sandy into West Virginia. Special Executive Karas commemorated the occasion by having his legworm riders offer a banquet.
They sacrificed an egged-out legworm to feed the troops. For all their size, legworms didn't offer much in the way of edibles. The tenderest pieces were the claw-like legs themselves. They reminded Valentine of the shellfish he'd eaten in New Orleans and the Caribbean. The farther away you traveled from the legs, the worse they tasted. The riders assured him younger legworms were both tenderer and tastier, as were unfertilized eggs—"Kentucky caviar."
&nb
sp; Legworm flesh barbecue was something of an acquired taste and depended greatly on the quality of the barbecue sauce. Southern Command's soldiery invited or shanghaied into attending chewed manfully.
Valentine ate his with a lot of cider vinegar.
They put Karas' chair on another stump, this one only a foot off the ground at the high end of the picnic field's slope, but it still gave him a commanding view and a sort of dais from which to command his legworm-riding knights-errant.
Seng tapped Valentine on the shoulder. "Major, our ally heard about Billy Goat Cut. He wants to see you."
Gamecock and Moytana were there as well, along with a Guard captain whose command had taken a whole platoon of railway security troops prisoner. A small crowd of legworm riders and soldiers had gathered to watch events, while sneaky dogs, including Valentine's company mutt, raided unattended plates. Valentine saw Duvalier's freckled eyes in the crowd. She had a broke-brim felt hat pulled down almost to her knees and looked lost in her ratty old overcoat.
The leaders of the assorted clans of the Kentucky Alliance arranged themselves behind Karas. His handsome face smiled down at them.
Valentine saw Tikka again, standing next to her adoptive brother, Zak. Zak had a welt at the corner of his eye, but then it was a rare day when there wasn't a good fistfight in the Alliance camp. Kentucky men fought the way New Universal Churchmen golfed, as both a recreation and a social ritual.
"The major first," Karas said. "Congratulations on your brilliant fight."
"Brilliant" wasn't the world Valentine would have chosen. Brilliant commanders bagged their enemy with a minimum of shooting back.
Karas stood up. "A presentation is in order, I think. Bravery must be rewarded, just as treason must be punished."
"Bow," Tikka urged in a whisper that somehow carried.
Valentine wanted to tell her that the only time a Southern Command officer bowed was as sort of a preamble before asking a lady for a dance (Captain LeHavre used to say that it gave you a last chance to make sure your shoelaces were tied), but decided to cooperate in the interest of keeping the new allies happy.
"I dub you a knight of the New Kentucky Homeland," Karas said as he looped the medallion over Valentine's head. Valentine notice that Karas' hands smelled like a cheap Kurian Zone aftershave called Ultimate, strong enough to mask a hard day's body odor in an emergency. Valentine liked Karas a little better. No one with royal pretentions would walk around smelling like a blend of gasoline and window cleaner.
Valentine straightened again.
"Kentucky thanks you, son of both Southern Command and our own Bulletproof."
Kind words, but Valentine hoped he wasn't using the word Kentucky the way the Kurian in the Pacific Northwest used to be called Seattle.
While Moytana, Gamecock, and the Guard captain got their ribbons and medals, Valentine examined his decoration.
It looked like a piece of old horse show ribbon with a brassy circle at the end. Valentine looked closely at the medal. It was an old commemorative quarter glued facedown on a disk of brass—the Kentucky state design, rather nicked and scratched, but as clean and polished as elbow grease could make it.
Karas must be some kind of coin enthusiast. That or he was a student of the little common details that built a culture and a community.
Zak gave Valentine a discreet wave. His sister winked and moistened her lips.
* * * *
The rest of the march had its share of difficulties. Valentine lost two soldiers of his company, whether through desertion or simple loss he never learned—they took bicycles into a town that allegedly had a good, safe market and never returned.
Seng was moving too hard to the northeast for Valentine to delay in searching for them. He led a detail in civilian clothes into town but could learn nothing.
Bee slept outside his tent like a dog. Duvalier brought home grisly trophies now and then—Quisling scouts, an unfortunate pimp who tried to drug her at trans-Appalachian Inn, a Reaper who'd lost a foot to a bear trap.
Word of Red Dog's Reaper-sensing powers spread, and Seng attached him to brigade headquarters as scouting and detection gear. The dog went out with Wolf patrols and nighttime picket checks. Red Dog's cheery enjoyment of his excursions rubbed off as they neared their goals.
There certainly were pleasures to the march. Valentine loved the vistas of this piece of country. The old, round, wooded mountains had a tumbledown beauty, and seemed to keep secret histories in the silent manner of aging former belles.
Valentine visited the Bulletproof camp and learned some of the ins and outs of the Kentucky Alliance. All the clans were powerful organizations, powerful enough so the Kurians kept watch on them and sometimes started feuds to prevent any one from getting too powerful. At least that's what Zak thought, expressing his opinion over some well-diluted bourbon at one evening's camp.
After a final pause that allowed Brother Mark and a pair of Cats to attend a meeting with the guerrillas and the underground, they marched to a map reference point and made camp on a defensible hillside. It was well watered, with a nasty rock pile to the north on one flank and a swamp to the south. Below, just visible between two lesser hills, was the town of Utrecht, seemingly chosen for its misty, mountain environs and the echoes of history in its name.
The representatives of the guerrilla army guarding the town seemed woefully undermanned, tattered but well-armed. The leg-worm ranchers mixed with them more freely than the Southern Command troops.
With Bee leading the cart horses and Ediyak sitting beside with the company fund, Valentine took a barter cart down into the valley and saw a better ordered group of men, perhaps in reinforced regiment strength, camped on another hill to the northeast of town. Thinking that this was the partisan army proper, he turned the cart onto a road skirting town and toward their pickets, and received yet another surprise when he saw tattered flags identifying the men as belonging to Vermont and New Hampshire.
"Who the hell?"
"I'll be damned. Those are the Green Mountain Boys," Ediyak said. "Jeebus, all that's missing is a complement of Kee-bec Libertay for us to have every Freehold east of the Mississippi represented here."
Valentine waved hello to a corporal's guard watching the road but the soldiers just stared at him, waiting for orders from their superiors.
They were good-looking men, wearing woodland camouflage, boots, leather gaiters, and a good selection of Kevlar. Most had 4x combat sights on their assault rifles. On closer examination Valentine saw what were probably masked gun emplacements on the hillside, and a headlog or two peeped out from covering brush at the edge of open hillside pasture. Anything short of a divisional assault on this hill, with armored car support, would be torn to bits.
Their tents weren't laid out in an organized fashion, but in little groupings that made their gently sloping hillside look like it had sprouted a case of green ringworm. Camouflage netting covered some tenting and mortar pits; others were open for the world to see.
"Dots, you magnificent bitch," Valentine found himself saying. Good God, how did all this come about? She'd played her cards very close to the chest.
His vision had come true—and then some. He'd imagined leading some Wolves and technicians to the aid of the guerrillas. Lambert had taken that idea and turned it into something for the history books.
It made him clammy just to think about it.
Valentine turned back into town. It was a rather old-fashioned main-street type of town, and every third building seemed to be named after somebody or other, nineteenth-century achievement emblazoned in Romanic letters in stone ready to bear witness to their greatness until wind and rain wore down even their gravestones.
The civilians either were keeping indoors, were terrified, or had fled the gathering of forces. Valentine saw Southern Command uniforms mixing with the timber camouflage of the Green Mountain Boys, guerrillas in patched riding coats and legworm leathers, all meeting and talking and buying each other drinks. A t
rio of milk-shouldered girls in halter tops, plump and tempting, called out to the soldiers from the expansive porch of an old Victorian mansion just off the town square. Valentine wondered if some entrepreneur had followed a regiment on the march and set up shop, or if it was a local establishment operating discreetly under Kurian eyes and now enjoying a quick gold rush of uniforms.
Bee whooped excitedly. Valentine saw a tower of faun-furred muscle, back to him, moving through the crowd in the middle of a complement of men with foxtail-trimmed ponchos hanging from their shoulders. Valentine felt his throat swell. He whipped the cart horses, hard, and caught up to the short column.
"Yo! Old Horse," Valentine called to the Grog's back. It ignored him, perhaps not hearing him in the noisy street. "Hey, Uncle!" Valentine yelled.
The men in back turned, and so did the Grog.
It had a long scar running up its face and a fang missing. An eyelid drooped lazily; the other glared at him, keen and suspicious.
It wasn't Ahn-Kha.
Chapter Eight
The Allegheny Alliance, West Virginia, June: The campaign surrounding the great union in the Alleghenies near the town of Utrecht is one more men claimed to be at than ever were. Or if not themselves in person, a brother, a cousin, an uncle or aunt, or a cousin—laid down like a trump card when veterans get together to talk about their experiences in the Liberation. (Only writers of lurid exploitative novels title the fight against the Kurian Order the "Vampire Wars.")
It's safe to say that Utrecht, West Virginia, had never seen such a feast, even during holidays during the platinum age pre-2022. The town square had a smaller square of groaning white-clothed banquet tables set up within. The old pedestal in front of the courthouse that had once contained a memorial to First World War veterans (replaced by a statue of a Reaper holding a human baby up so it could look up at the stars, and happily sawn off at the ankles the week before when the "guerrilla army" occupied the town) had a new set of stairs, as well as platform and loudspeaker system for speechmaking. Most said Special Executive Karas had been working on a stemwinder for months, looking forward to this moment.
