Winter Duty (2 page)

All the layers of clothing made them look like bloated ticks. A ratty undershirt covered by variegated flannel with a windbreaker over that, and then an old military gear vest with ponchos in assorted configurations pinned back but ready to rearrange if the strangely warm fall rain started up again.

Headhunters returning from a successful raid, probably bound for Memphis or Nashville. The Kurians had few scruples about stealing population from one another’s territories. Human rustling could make a person rich.

In this case what the raiders were doing was a little less dangerous. They’d probably rounded up people displaced by all the fighting in Kentucky in the summer and fall, or perhaps caught escapees from some Kurian principality or other making a run for the Free Territory across the Mississippi.

Twelve poachers. Plus two kids and the women. That he and Duvalier could see. Maybe more in the tents or out of camp hunting or on errands. They were old-school with their transportation: a gas ATV, a few motorbikes, tough-looking mules and llamas, a knot of sleek brush ponies, and two trucks towing big horse trailers for their captives, riding like livestock on the way to the slaughterhouse.

Damned if he’d see them driven into those carts again.

But twelve. A job for a company of soldiers.

Or a small, very careful team. He had one of the best Cats in the business lying next to him. She’d volunteered for the operation in Kentucky last summer. He still wondered why.

Duvalier lowered the binoculars. The wide, light-hungry pupils turned on him. Valentine picked up a faint glitter in the darkness, like polished copper reflecting flame. “You’re thinking about those scruffs.”

Slang for future aura-fodder. Anything to keep from thinking of them as someone who might be a brother or a daughter.

“And if I am?”

“Will you at least let me go in first and shave the odds?”

Of course his orders said nothing about rounding up strays. He had to consider that if it went bad, his wounded could end up driven to the Kurians south or north of here.

The rewards in return for the risk didn’t amount to much. The people who had the guts and resources and luck to make it to the Freehold often needed years of education before they were more of a blessing than a burden. Without someone to schedule every moment of their lives, they wandered like lost sheep or were taken advantage of by hucksters and con artists.

Their kids, however, took to the Free Territory like famished horses loosed in good pasture. The ones with memories of the Kurian Zone often made the best fighters in the Cause. They accepted the discipline and regulation and privation without complaint. They soon learned that the Quisling thugs who’d robbed and bullied everyone under their authority ran like gun-shy rabbits when put up against trained soldiers. Even more, the Reapers, instead of being invulnerable avatars of the local dread god-king, could in fact be hunted down and dynamited out of their holes and killed.

Colonel Seng, who’d led Javelin across Kentucky in the most skillful march into enemy territory Valentine had ever experienced, had once been one of those children.

The Free Republics could use another Colonel Seng.

But twelve. Plus two kids and the women
.

He couldn’t do twelve. Not all at once, not without running too many risks of a mistake. Duvalier might be able to, but it would take her all night in her methodical manner. But perhaps he could stampede them.

Two paces away, Alessa Duvalier lay swathed in her big overcoat with her sagging, flapped hunter’s cap pulled down low. You had to look twice to be sure there was a person there rather than an old, lightning-struck stump.

Her eyes sparkled red, alive at the thought of cutting a few throats. Duvalier had a personal grudge against all Quislings. She’d selected Valentine years ago to become a Cat, tutoring him in sabotage, sniping, assassination, intelligence gathering—all the variegated duties that covert operations in the Kurian Zone entailed. They still bore faint, matching scars on their palms that sealed the odd bond between them, a strange blend of mutual respect and an almost filial blend of conflicting emotions.

“They’ll send out scouting parties in the morning, sure as sunrise,” Duvalier said.

“Bound to cut the legworm trail,” Valentine agreed.

“We could nail the scouts headed our way.”

“Which might draw more trouble, if this is just an advance party of a bigger operation,” Valentine said. “Besides, it won’t help those poor souls in the trailers.”

Duvalier’s mouth opened and shut again. “Let’s skip the usual argument. I know you’ll just pull rank anyway.”

Valentine answered by stripping off his uniform tunic as she muttered something about crusades and hallelujahs and saving souls.

“We’ll need someone good with a rifle,” Valentine said. “Just in case they don’t bite.”

“That old worm driver, Brian something-or-other—he has that scoped Accuracy Suppressed. He hit a deer on the run with it. His kid’s always carrying it around.”

They ended up bringing the son—his name was Dorian—forward. The father came along as spotter. Dorian’s father claimed the boy was just as good a shot, with better eyes. He’d already seen action that summer and been blooded at what in better times would be called the tender age of fifteen at the river crossing where Valentine had taken out a company of Moondaggers with a handful of Bears. Dorian’s swagger showed that he considered himself a hardened veteran.

Valentine could just remember what it was to be that young.

He outlined the plan and had Dorian repeat it back to him.

“Steady now, Dorian. Don’t pull that trigger unless they throw down on me, or I signal. And the signal is . . . ?”

“You hit the dirt,” Dorian said, even though they’d already been through it once.

“Remember to check your target. I’ll be moving around a lot in there. Can do?”

“Can do, Major Valentine.”

It felt good to run. Valentine enjoyed losing himself in his body. Idleness left his mind free to visit the nightmare graveyard of his experiences, or calculate the chances of living to see another Christmas or summer solstice, or think about the look on the old man with the goatee’s face when his fellow prisoner ripped the heel of bread right out of his hand. So he escaped by chopping wood, loping along at the old easy Wolf cadence—even the rhythmic thrust of lovemaking.

Though the last left him feeling vaguely guilty for not being attentive enough to the woman.

Since they’d said good-bye to the Bulletproof legworm clan after the battle across the river from Evansville, he had nothing but memories of Tikka’s vigorous sensuality and the musky smell of her skin. They could be revisited at his leisure. Now he had work to do.

He had the sense that their affair was over, her curiosity, or erotic interest, or—less flatteringly—the desire to cement good relations between Southern Command’s forces and her clan being satisfied.

He crouched in a bush, watching the young sentry, who seemed to be watching nothing but stars and the rising moon.

Valentine checked his little .22 automatic, which he usually carried wrapped up in a chamois with his paperwork. Over the years he’d had cause to kill with everything from his bare hands to artillery fire, but he’d found a small-caliber pistol more useful than any other weapon. It was quiet, the rounds were accurate at close range, and you could carry it concealed. With the lead in the nose etched with a tiny cross so it would fragment and widen the wound, it did damage out of proportion to the weight of the round.

He wondered if the Kurians’ death-machine avatars, the Reapers, felt the same electric nervousness when they stalked a victim.

Of course, in a meadow like this, in open country, Reapers did not stalk, at least not for the last few dozen meters. They acted more like the big, fast cats Valentine had seen loose in the hill country in central Texas, covering the distance in an explosive rush that either startled their prey into stillness or made escape futile.

Of course, in the city it was something else entirely. Urban Reapers were the trap-door spiders of many a ruined block, striking from a patch of overgrowth, a pile of garbage, or a crack in the ceiling. But he doubted these headhunters worked the cities. Too much law and order, even if the bad law and order of the KZ.

He turned his senses to the camp, trying to get a sense of the rhythms of the headhunters.

They were singing. Three of the men were passing a bottle, falling out and joining in the tune between swigs, taking turns improvising rhyming lyrics in old-style rap.

The sentry sat in a tree overlooking the bowl-shaped field and soggy patch, within hallooing distance of the camp.

The safety went back on the little .22, for now. Valentine guessed why they put the youth on watch. Young men had good eyesight, especially at twilight. He’d probably be relieved by a veteran for the late shift. The boy was alternately yawning and chewing on bits of long grass root, glancing back toward the camp for signs of his relief.

Valentine balanced the chances of the young man doing something stupid against the possibility of using the kid to get into camp armed with some bargaining power. If Valentine just approached the poachers, they’d have him facedown in the dirt until they secured his weapons, at the very least.

Valentine wormed his way up to the trunk from downwind, using a mixture of crawling and scuttling during the sentry’s frequent glances back to look for his relief.

The relief sentry started his walk uphill to the lookout tree, holding a heavy, swaddled canteen by its strap.

Valentine loosened his sword and pocketed the automatic, grateful that he hadn’t had to use it. He shifted to his submachine gun, double-checking the safety.

The boy, anticipating his relief, clambered down from the scrub oak. Valentine slipped up behind.

Valentine moved quickly, clapping a strong left hand over the kid’s mouth and elevating the kid’s wrist to his shoulder blade with the right.

“Don’t crap yourself, kid. I’m not a Reaper. But I could have been. I want you to remember that when we get back to your campfire sing-along. I could have been. What’s your name?”

“Trent. Sunday Trent,” the boy sqeaked.

“Sunday? Like after Saturday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Knock off the ‘sir,’ boy. I’m not some local trooper you have to polish. They call me the Last Chance.”

Valentine couldn’t say why he picked the name. One of the Moondaggers had called himself that. An emissary sent to deliver threats and ultimatums, he hadn’t intimidated the Southern Command’s troops—the quickest way to get their backs up was to start making demands and informing them they were beat.

Valentine thought of tying the kid’s hands—he had spare rawhide twine in a pocket, as it had lots of uses around camp—but settled for looping his legworm pick in the back of the boy’s pants and prodding him along with the haft. Less aggressive that way and it kept Valentine out of elbowing distance in case the boy made a gesture born more of desperation than inexperience.

Being careful about others’ actions as much as your own was how you stayed alive on Vampire Earth.

“Sunday, I need to talk to the boss of—What do you call yourselves, a gang?”

“Easy Crew, sir. Blitty Easy’s Crew.”

“Which one’s Blitty Easy?”

“The one with the tall hat, sir.”

Valentine thought of giving the kid a poke the next time he said sir.

“Call me Chance, Sunday.”

“The one with the hat, Chance bo—Chance.”

The use of names was relaxing the kid a little.

They met the relief sentry on the way, a man with no less than nine Old World jujus around his neck, a mixture of car manufacturer iconography and bandless watch faces. Valentine recognized a Rolex and Bulova dangling from gold chains. Valentine remembered some of the decorations as Gulf Coast Reaper wards.