Winter Duty (42 page)

“Everyone needs to eat as much garlic as possible,” Ma said from the Chuckwagon as she sorted through her stock. “I’ll make a poultice for Keve.”

“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Stuck said.

“Well, I got to be an old wife by following old wives’ tales, so you’ll eat your garlic.”

Valentine had heard dozens of folk remedies supposed to ward off ravies. Eating asparagus was one of the stranger ones.

Getting iodine into a ravies bite right away was the only one the Miskatonic people said worked. Iodine and a quick broad-spectrum antibiotic within a few minutes. The latter was a good deal less easy to come by in the Kurian Zone.

Instead of reminiscing, he should be refueling Rover and getting the Boneyard in, and then they could take care of Bushmaster. Everyone should get a hot meal and catch some rest too, and he’d better see how the Wolves were doing battening down the office in front.

So much for the responsibility-free tour of central Kentucky.

As it turned out, Doc snuck in the front door with his bag, moving extremely quietly. He cleaned Rockaway’s wounds and gave him two injections, one for the pain, the other an antibiotic.

“Contact with Fort Seng,” reported Habanero, who hadn’t quit listening to Rover’s radio since pulling it into the mill.

They’d rigged lanterns in the mill. Valentine had considered running the tiny portable generator to spare the vehicles’ batteries but decided against it. A storm this intense couldn’t last much longer, not in Kentucky.

He took a deep breath to wake himself up and put on the second headset.

“Major, we’re getting reports of ravies outbreaks all across the Mississippi plateau,” Lambert’s voice crackled at the other end of the radio. “Report position and status, please.”

“Grand Junction. We’ve just had a brush with them, sir.”

“Repeat, please.”

“We’ve fought a skirmish. Two casualties.” Technically they’d just lost Thursday, but Rockaway had been bitten. . . .

“Major, I’m hearing strange reports about this strain. The infected cases are unusually strong and ferocious.”

“I won’t vouch for the ferocious, but they are strong, exceptionally strong. Like Bears.”

“Are there other outbreaks in Kentucky you know of?”

“No, sir. This is the first we’ve seen of it. How are things at base?”

“Quiet. No sign of it. A new patrol has just gone out to check Owensboro. We’ve lost contact with the town.”

“Orders?” Valentine asked.

“Get back as quickly as you can. The underground has informed us that that armored column has moved south from Bloomington and is now outside Owensboro. They’ve been shelling the city.”

“We’ll be mobile as soon as the weather lets up,” Valentine said.

“Good luck,” Lambert said. “Report when you’re moving again.”

“Wilco. Signing off.”

“Signing off.”

“We were lucky, I think,” Stuck said. “I’ll bet there is only a handful of ravies left in this town—mostly ones who were torn up in scrapes with them and succumbed to the infection.”

“Lucky?” Boelnitz said, looking at Rockaway, who was being tended to at the far end of the mill by Doc.

“I said we,” Stuck said. “Not him.”

With time to think and a hot cup of Mrs. O’Coombe’s tea inside him, Valentine realized the Kurians had played a brilliant double cross in Kentucky.

Or perhaps it was a triple cross, if you considered the attack on the Kentucky River position a double cross. He almost had to admire the genius of it. If the attack on the A-o-K had routed the principal body of armed and organized men in central Kentucky, the Kurians would have been in the position to act as saviors when the ravies virus hit. The New Universal Church could show up en masse, ready to inject the populace with either a real antiserum or a saline solution, all the while persuading the populace of the advantages of returning to their semiprotected status in the Kurian Order.

As it turned out, the attack failed, but it also served to concentrate their enemies. With the storm raging, they wouldn’t be able to spread out and contain the virus to a few hot spots. Instead, the A-o-K would suffer the agonies of men knowing their families were threatened and unable to do a damn thing about it. Given the brief existence of the A-o-K, it might dissolve entirely, like salt in a rainstorm, fragmenting into bands of men desperate to return home.

The one patch of light in the snowy, howling gloom was that Kentucky wasn’t the earthquake-and-volcano-ravaged populace of 2022. The legworm clans were armed to the teeth—man, woman, and child—and were used to living and working within the confines of armed camps organized for defense. Ravies bands fought dumb. They didn’t coordinate, concentrate properly, or pick a weak spot in their target’s defenses—except by accident.

Valentine didn’t like the look of Boelnitz. He had been pale and quiet ever since the madness between Bushmaster and the gate.

Worried that the journalist might be going into shock from stress alone, Valentine squatted down next to him.

“Something for your notebook at last,” Valentine said, noticing that the paper under his pencil was empty. “Don’t let it bother you.”

“The wounded in Bushmaster. They saw O’Coombe’s boy was bitten. They said he had to go out, or they’d shoot him. I think they meant it.”

Boelnitz looked at his notebook. “When I said I owe you, I meant it. I owe you the truth,” Boelnitz said. “I’ve been flying under false colors, I’m afraid. Here.”

He handed Valentine the leather notebook with a trembling hand and opened it to a creased clipping.

“It’s one thing to write about wars and warriors and strategy,” Boelnitz said. “It looks very different when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun. Or up one.”

Valentine read a few paragraphs.

It was always a strange sensation to parse another’s depiction of oneself, like hearing someone describe the rooms in one’s own home, bare facts attached to memories and emotions but as artificial and obvious as plastic tags in the ears of livestock. Valentine took in the words in the
Clarion
’s familiar, sententious style and typeface with the unsettling feeling of reading his own obituary:

Valentine couldn’t read any more.

“I only showed that to you because I can’t reconcile the figure described in Southern Command’s archives, at least the ones I was given clearance to see, and
Clarion
’s articles with the person in the flesh. I just thought it was time for a little honesty. Pencil Boelnitz is a fiction; it’s the name of my first editor, the English teacher who helped us run the school newspaper. My real name is Llewellyn. Cooper Llewellyn.”

“You thought . . . you thought that if I knew you were from the
Clarion
. . . what? I’d run you off base?”

“Something like that.”

“I have to say, I like Pencil Boelnitz better. He seemed like the kind of guy who’d observe and relate what he observed without trying to psychoanalyze a man he’d known for only a few weeks.”

“You’ve a right to be mad. But there’s a sign up at the
Clarion
:
Anyone can transcribe. A journalist reveals
.”

Valentine chuckled. “I can’t see why your paper is so beloved for its editorial page, if that’s the best they can do. It’s easy to come up with something like that for any profession.
Anyone can disrobe. A stripper profits
.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN