Winter Duty (35 page)

“Yes. The bomb. Blowing up some of your own. You won your goal, but the herd you stampeded is heading for a cliff. Keep your workmanship in mind in the coming days as the bodies pile up and this beautiful, rich land becomes a waste.”

“We’ll take you along to meet the Assembly,” Valentine decided.

“No, I know that trick as well. You think you’ll use our avatar to locate us.”

“Maybe we won’t give your avatar a choice.”

“All I have to do is have it hold its breath. These flying forms are frail. Their hearts explode if deprived of oxygen for long. But that would be a shame. You will have no way to give an answer.”

Valentine hated to admit defeat. “How shall we answer you, then?”

“We will be in touch. But if you ever wish another audience, simply tie a bedsheet on top of one of these vehicles. They will be observed. We will send a messenger.”

So, the Kurian knew all about their vehicles. They hadn’t seen its silhouette flying around in daylight, so it must search for them at night. Well, there were ways to hide vehicles and disperse lifesign.

“Be vigorous, Valentine. Do not delay even one day. We do not make empty threats; we choose the time and the place of their being carried out. The seeds of the destruction are already planted. My brethren only need to give the signal for them to sprout. You, Valentine, shall be the agent of this land’s destruction. It will be your responsibility. The question is, of course, can you handle the responsibility? Can you handle responsibility?”

“You talk too much,” Frat said. “The major’s under orders, like the rest of us.”

“Negotiating such an arrangement, even if the Kentucky Assembly is interested, would take a lot of time,” Valentine said. “If this whirlwind is as imminent as you claim, you had better delay it, or you’ll find yourself taking refuge in a wasteland.”

The bird thing cocked its head. “Keep in touch.”

Valentine nodded to Frat, who gave it a vigorous turn. He walked it out of camp.

Valentine turned to Habanero. “Wagon master, see if you can raise Fort Seng on your radio. We need to find out where Brother Mark is.”

He turned to the owner of the biggest property in the Free Territory. “Mrs. O’Coombe, I’m sorry, but the needs of Southern Command and Kentucky will have to delay finding your son.”

She tore her eyes from the strange strut of Jack in the Box’s avatar. “But you said tomorrow we will be in the territory where he’d been left.”

“We’ll get there. Just not tomorrow.”

She drew herself up. “Mister Valentine. I equipped this convoy with the best communications equipment I could find. The transmitter alone is worth one of my barns and its resident livestock. Are you telling me it is not adequate to pass along a message that may or may not be an empty threat?”

“Brother Mark may need transport to whatever responsible parties can decide what to do about this.”

“Are you giving me an order?”

“If I have to,” Valentine said, careful to keep his rifle under his arm as the camp began to line up behind their respective leaders, the Bears and Wolves with Valentine, the drivers and mechanics and security men and medical staff with Mrs. O’Coombe. Stuck just stood up and stared at Valentine.

Duvalier hopped up on top of the Bushmaster. “Cool off, all of you. I don’t know who or where this Jack-in-the-off is, but we start throwing down on each other, he’ll be laughing until the robins come back.”

The camp broke into a dozen separate arguments over the reality of the threat:

“If a Kurian told me my dick was on fire, I wouldn’t look down and give him the satisfaction.”

“They always give you a last chance.”

“So this Kurian makes peace with Kentucky. What about the rest of them? It’s all well and good to be neutral, but others gotta respect it or it don’t mean jack.”

“It’s like a game to the Kurians,” Stuck said to Valentine’s Bears. “Sometimes their threats are empty; other times they are carried out to the last degree and beyond. They keep us guessing and on edge.”

“Just good poker,” Chieftain said. “Sometimes you can win a pile on the cheap, if you know how to bluff.”

“I have Fort Seng, five-five,” Habanero said from the radio.

Valentine walked over to the parked Rover. So much for sleep. “Tell them to get Colonel Lambert on the line. Wake her up if they have to. We need to talk.”

You never knew how much of a Kurian threat was illusion and how much was steel. They were like magicians, always diverting attention from the operating hand.

Valentine put a steadying grip on Chieftain’s arm.The Bear’s hair had risen on top of his head. Valentine had known Bears who turned purple when readying for a fight, or whose eyes lit up like a pair of flares, or who turned into snorting, steaming, turf-tearing bulls. He’d never seen one give himself a war headdress before. Valentine had always assumed that Chieftain’s name came from the Bear’s characteristic tomahawks.

“Eloi and Morlocks?” Valentine asked, by way of calming him down.

“I could never much stand reading, Major. But I liked that H. G. Wells guy. Except for
Food of the Gods
; that one was just too weird.”

“But maybe the most topical, considering tonight’s conversation,” Valentine said. But to be honest, he’d skimmed it too when he was thirteen.

“I read my share of the stuff when I was a boy,” Valentine said, remembering the long winters in Father Max’s library. He’d once thought it profitless idling, but it gave him a truer picture of the world before the cataclysm in 2022 than he received through bits and pieces of the reworked histories of New Universal Church photo-studies children in the Kurian Zone received.

Valentine had sat in any number of New Universal Church lobbies, waiting for free cocoa or bread issued in exchange for attending a short lecture. He’d paged through photograph after photograph of poverty, devastation from war, death by starvation and disease, every horror imaginable and most of them featuring children as victims.

In the Free Territories most of the history the kids learned had to do with the post-2022 resistance and the crimes perpetrated in the Kurian Zone. It was taken as a given that the Old World was a pleasant idyll. One side showed ugly pictures of a hell; the other painted fair, vague portraits of a heaven.

Valentine believed the reality to be a blend. Perhaps whether you lived in heaven or hell depended more on your mental attitude than anything.

Back to the present.
One of the drawbacks of aging
, Valentine thought from his venerable age of having recently turned thirty,
is a tendency to dwell on the past
. Living in many of his memories would mean a waking nightmare. Better to think about the future.

With that thought firmly in mind, Valentine examined the baton the flying Reaper had brought. Mrs. O’Coombe’s crew was already calling it “Mothman.”

The baton case looked like polished bone, possibly a femur from a preadolescent human. Valentine didn’t know bones well enough to determine. Besides, the joints were sawn off where the tube had been threaded and capped.

He buried the cylinder and its caps. No telling what the Kurian might have planted in the baton in the way of location devices. For all he knew there could be an audio-video transmitter.

The offer itself took up only one paragraph. There was no signature or date. The paper had a watermark that looked vaguely like a stylized depiction of an eclipse—a ring of faintly red fire, offering just enough of a glow to read the letters in darkness. Perhaps that was the Kurian’s version of a commitment.

Valentine touched it with a first-aid kit’s tweezers.

 

 

—it began, and went on to outline the same deal the Reaper had spoken of. Autonomy for Kentucky save for the Kurian bridgehead at Louisville—a fair exchange for Evansville—provided it remained neutral in the war.

Frat returned, looking thoughtful, and stowed his rifle and gear. Valentine waved him over to the radio, where he was waiting to see if Lambert could make contact with Brother Mark—then perhaps he and the old churchman could have personal communication.

The lieutenant looked like he’d aged a year since Valentine had last seen him. Had the Kurian figured out a way to siphon off a little aura? He’d decided some time ago that that was what had happened to him at the Owensboro western bridge.

“How’d that thing ever find you, Frat?” Valentine asked. “Did it just flap down?”

“I thought I heard an engine—aircraft, maybe—and went up a hill so I could find a better listening spot.

“It gave a chittering sound from a tree above. I looked up and there it was. I thought my number was up. But it had a white hand towel in each mitt and waved them.”

“You shouldn’t go poking around alone,” Valentine said.

“What, some good ol’ boys around here will bend me over and make me squeal?”

“That’s a dream date compared to what a Reaper might do to you.”

Frat shrugged.

“Frat, one more thing. Did it have anything in that bag?”

“I searched it. Nothing but dog hair and stank. I think that was a ration pouch. Maybe some toy poodle got packed as its lunch.”

“Didn’t seem like the kind of creature that could fly far to me.”

“Maybe the engine noise was from an aircraft, dropping the thing off.”

Valentine nodded. “We had a little argument over the management of the column while you were gone. We’re going to get Brother Mark.”

“Before we get Mrs. O’Coombe’s son? Hope you know what you’re doing. She seems like a useful woman to know, if you ever decide to turn civilian and take up private employment.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

C
entral Kentucky, January: The locals have a saying: “You have to come here on purpose.” This is the fastness of Kentucky, the region that stretches southeast from Louisville to the Tennessee Valley. It is a bewildering maze of knobs, gullies, streams, ridges, choked at the swampy bottoms and backwaters, breezy and cool and clear atop the region’s many ridges
.