March in Country (15 page)
Authors: EE Knight
He saw the first vehicle with its dead gunner. Its driver was better than Duvalier; he was hurtling down the road, swerving around the bigger tree trunks, sending a constant hail of clipped-off branches back at the followers. He must be aware something awful was up.
Duvalier had to thump along in his wake as best as she could.
Valentine tried a burst, then a second. The bullets made a hole or two, but he could see no other effect.
Their quarry swerved and Duvalier struck a red oak trunk with a glancing blow, tearing off a sheet-sized piece of bark and knocking Valentine out of the seat. The Georgia driver had waited to the last second to swerve around it and only Duvalier’s keyed-up reflexes prevented them from crashing into it.
No good throwing grenades in this mess. Valentine climbed out of the cupola, flexed his fingers and tested the skin on his hands for machine oil.
He crouched next to Duvalier.
“Get right up behind him!” he shouted in her ear.
She hit the gas, edged closer in the green tunnel.
Valentine crawled across the top of the armored car, the little cylinder of the grenade held carefully in his lips and teeth, like an oversized cigar butt. Overgrowth ticked off his legworm leathers.
Weirdly, he thought of the saunas he sometimes took in the winter up in Minnesota. The locals up there liked to hit each other with birch branches, claimed it brought the blood up to the skin and was good for the circulation. A bunch of naked men flogging away at each other in a stone-heated room made an impression on him as a preteen, and he’d tried a branch on his arm. It felt like this thresher of a green tunnel.
He tapped Duvalier, pointed at the forward armored car. She nodded, pulled up close enough for him to see the hinges on the forged steel grids over the rear lights.
Valentine waited for a gap in the growth above—he didn’t want to be knocked by a tree limb under Duvalier’s wheels—and leaped.
He landed hard, and badly, with the wind knocked out of him and the grenade rolling away. He somehow ignored the instinct to hold on with both hands and tried to retrieve it, and missed. It rolled up against the gunner’s ring, wobbled there as though deciding which way to go, and he picked it up this time.
Ring out, lever off—he got around the gunner Duvalier had nearly decapitated and underhanded the grenade toward the end of the driver’s compartment.
“Grenade!” he heard someone shout within. So there was a third man in this car.
The driver looked over his shoulder.
Valentine showed him the grenade ring.
The driver got one arm out, then the explosion launched him like a champagne cork.
Valentine found himself atop a careening armored car. It bounced off a tree root.
Duvalier was braking, hard.
The world tipped on its side and Valentine felt momentarily weightless, before he landed, painfully and like tricky old Br’er Rabbit, in a thorny tangle.
When he regained his bearings he felt the warm sensation that meant the pain would come in a minute or two. He cautiously moved each limb and looked down at his body. He felt like Scarecrow after the monkeys had finished tearing the straw out of him.
Duvalier appeared, smiled through a mask of drying blood, and held out a hand.
“I think we’re each down one of our lives,” she said. She helped him to his feet.
They sure build these things tough
, Valentine thought.
Typical Control quality
.
, Valentine thought.
Typical Control quality
.
They found the driver of the first armored car, bleeding and unconscious. She drew her skinning knife.
“No. We can take him with us as a prisoner. He’s good, and he’s lucky. I’ve never seen someone blown out of a vehicle like that still living.
They spent ten minutes working on the driver’s injuries—abrasions and contusions, luckily for him—and secured him with a plastic restraint. Then they took a look at the vehicles.
He learned why they were hustling back to the camp so quickly to tell their news. The vehicle on its side was rigged for long-range radio. The antenna, designed to lie flat atop the armored car, had been torn away somewhere or other.
“The base still doesn’t know about us,” Valentine said.
“Unless there’s a Reaper prowling around,” Duvalier said. “I checked out the interior of ours. Either the previous users had really big feet or the car carried a Reaper recently. Long, pointed boots with the climbing toe.”
The Wolves, pounding down the road in a double line, caught up to them.
“Lieutenant Carlson says a couple of platoons left camp in trucks and a command car, sir,” the sergeant in charge reported.
The dead driver from Valentine’s car looked clownish now, in that big white hat and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. Like Carlson, he was black. Valentine had an idea.
With tow cables, a stout tree, and some judicious driving by one of the Wolves, they managed to right the tipped armored car. They drove back to headquarters at a much more cautious pace, with Valentine and Duvalier tucked inside the front one, tending to each other’s scrapes and cuts.
“Lieutenant,” Valentine said, upon their return. “Do me a favor. See if that hat fits.” He handed Carlson the hat and sunglasses.
“The glasses are prescription, but I can manage,” Carlson said.
Valentine took a cautious look at the camp. “They’re expecting these armored cars, right? Let’s have ’em drive right up to the gate.”
They had hidden the damage somewhat by hanging packs and ponchos over the bullet holes. It looked sloppy, but if the plan went right the Georgia Control sergeants would have graver concerns than chewing Frat out about the gear exposed to roadside growth.
Valentine filled both armored cars with Wolves, and distributed the grenades.
Carlson drove up to the gate, and in an inspired move, sounded the Klaxon and flashed his lights. He took off his hat and waved it.
The Wolves, before opening fire, whipped off their Georgia Control helmets and jackets. Valentine himself had done plenty of damage wearing the enemies’ uniform, but Carlson had told his platoon differently.
The armored cars tore through the camp’s temporary structures, pouring fire into machine gun positions and the camp’s watchtower. Grenades exploded all around like fireworks, adding a sharper
krack!
echo to the popping noise of the machine guns.
krack!
echo to the popping noise of the machine guns.
Valentine surveyed the action with his binoculars, hurting all over. He served as Bee’s spotter as she employed her heavy, big-game rifle. One of Fort Seng’s armorers, remembering how she probably saved his life by taking down a plane as it started a strafing run, did her loads by hand, testing each production run himself with her rifle on the camp’s range. She eliminated a machine gun crew with three quick shots before they could ready their weapon.
She didn’t even have two good eyes. Remarkable shooting.
With the wheeling armored cars causing chaos within, Valentine watched the Wolves hit the wire like a tornado. They tore through the posts and wire like a scythe through dry straw.
The shooting died off to a trickle, like the clamor of a noisy party winding down as the guests left.
“Carlson signals he’s starting the mop-up,” the coms tech said. “Fourteen prisoners so far.”
Champers’s engineers, an assortment of men and women, mostly over forty-five, Valentine suspected, seemed a strong, capable lot. They and their rescuers eyed each other, misfit to misfit.
Duvalier had gone in to the engineer’s camp before the Wolves hit to poke around, and found a frightened, confused Reaper snarling in the explosives dugout. She quickly locked it within, and the engineers parked a bulldozer across the door. Campers kept everyone well away from the dugout.
“His master’s probably running for Tennessee as hard as he can,” Valentine said.
“Be nice if we could take it alive,” Pellwell said. “The Miskatonic has wanted a living Reaper forever. Especially one bred to be controlled by a Kurian.”
“You’re welcome to try, shanks,” Duvalier said.
Sooner or later it would get hungry and dig its way out. Champers volunteered to try setting off the explosives, but Valentine declined.
“The Control will move back into Site Green sooner or later,” Valentine said. “Having a wild, hungry Reaper lurking in the area will add some excitement to their return.”
Valentine gave the usual speech to the military prisoners, promising them freedom. Anyone trusted with a gun in the Kurian Zone had probably left a hostage or two behind.
“You know what’s in those cells, Major,” Frat said. “Human litter. Petty criminals, terminally ill. They’ll slow us up.”
Valentine thought back on his own days as a Wolf lieutenant, when he’d been upbraided for what his old captain called “rounding up strays.”
More trouble than they’re worth, Valentine
.
More trouble than they’re worth, Valentine
.
“Denial of resources, Lieutenant,” Valentine said. “The Kurian wants them. That’s enough of a reason for us to try to take them away.”
“Perhaps,” Major Grace began, “perhaps we could do our part by just setting them loose.”
“For the Reapers to hunt down?”
“If it keeps them off us,” Grace said.
“You ever heard the expression ‘Whoever saves one life, saves a world entire’?” Valentine asked.
“I’m not sure. Is that some maxim of that Quisling churchman?”
“Older than that. How about ‘Go fuck yourself’?”
“That’s insubordination!”
“I was only asking if you’d heard it,” Valentine said.
Valentine noticed lights on in the old prison. Had the Kurian Lord already begun gathering an aura supply?
He might even have slipped in, but finding him, let alone killing him, in such a large complex would be difficult without surrounding the prison with flamethrowers and having the men burn their way to the center.
For all he knew, there wasn’t anyone in there except a couple of Control soldiers cleaning out the animal and plant infestations that had no doubt built up over the years.
“Leave it alone, Val,” Duvalier said. “Look at that place. I doubt anyone’s in there who isn’t fixing a toilet. It would take us two hours, probably, to get there, check the whole place out, and get back. Plus, probably more killing. Now me, I’d go there just to knife a sentry and set fire to it, but I know you’d want to bring out some one-legged senior citizen who lost the last round of musical chairs at the post office.”
“Maybe I’ll go over and peek in a few windows,” Valentine said quietly. “Or not,” he said, looking at his radioman, who was working a scrambler radio taken from the armored car that should be able to pick up Georgia Control communications.
“Major Valentine, may I—” Pellwell said.
“Cool your engine, college girl,” Duvalier said.
Pellwell drew herself up and ignored the interruption. “You could let me send in the ratbits. They could cover that building in half an hour. If it’s in as bad a shape as it looks, they’d have no problem getting in or getting around.”
Valentine looked at her charges. They’d found a greasy wrapper caught in a bush, probably blown from the construction landfill, and were sniffing stains.
One looked up at Pellwell and chittered.
“Yes, food soon.”
“Do they understand what a uniform is?”
“They know how to tell an armed man from an unarmed one.”
“You send them into that building, and if they find any prisoners and count them accurately, I’ll buy them a steak dinner. Or whatever their favorite treat is.”
She squatted, looking like a grasshopper thanks to her long limbs, and lifted up the biggest ratbit, the one Valentine was calling Patches. She pointed. “That building. Count men. Count soldiers. Very quiet. No steal. No wreck.”
Valentine heard it yeek back. She handed out a piece of bacon to each from one of her big leg pouches. The ratbits stuffed them into cheek pouches as Patches chittered at the others.
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