Valentine's Resolve (Vampire Earth #6)

Valentine's Resolve (Vampire Earth #6) Page 4

Nancy's, March: David Valentine first learned of Nancy's from his old tent mate Lieutenant Caltagirone of Foxtrot Company.

Nancy's had been a retirement home for Tulsa's well-to-do who were unwilling to quit the rolling hill-country of eastern Oklahoma. Its single-story, vaguely Prairie-school architecture was spread out over several acres, with a central hub and an outbuilding or two. In the Kurian Zone people were "retired" in much the same manner as an old, worn-out tire, with the Reapers serving as mechanics, but its layout made it a convenient rehabilitation center for Quisling veterans. Nancy herself was something of a legend in the Nebraska Guard for her devotion to the maimed and shattered.

She kept her charges busy with arts and crafts, which she sold in Tulsa at Kurian patriotic festivals to buy a few luxuries. The "Nancy's" sticker became so famous that an art colony of sorts had sprung up in the area, with workers of metal, leather, wood, ceramics, and paint adding to the trade.

Nancy's also had the best food in three states. Kurian Order and New Universal Church dignitaries often spent long weekends visiting the "home" and enjoying the cuisine as they got their picture taken shaking hands with the more photogenic of the wounded.

It seemed the last place one would expect to be a warehouse for the resistance. When the Kurians heard the occasional whisper or screamed confession that Nancy's had been the place guerrillas got their explosives, they assumed that their prisoners had been coached into fingering the establishment in the hope that the whole staff would be swept up in a purge. The routine searches revealed nothing.

Of course, they didn't remove the wounded from their thick, comfortable, bleach-scented bedding, pillowcases lined with gleaming rows of decorations. Only the laundry staff, under careful supervision of senior nurses, ever changed the bedding.

Nancy's had grown since the last time Valentine visited, as a tired and hungry lieutenant trying to supply his men scouting the Kurian Zone.

The "Kurian Pillar" he remembered, breaking the horizon like a white needle, now had a cross openly displayed upon it, and the trees had spread their shade over the windows and doors. The vegetable gardens and stands of tomato vines had multiplied and spread to both sides of the road that met the old interstate a couple of miles south. New houses, mostly two-or three-room shotgun shacks built around a common well pump, circled the grounds like campers keeping warm at a fire. A red-painted market that Valentine had remembered being a livestock barn, promised fuel * food * lodging thanks to a blue and white sign salvaged from the interstate. To the southwest, behind a small hill, birds circled the community trash heap. No distance seemed too great for gulls to travel in search of garbage.

A few hardy souls were out on the blustery day, mostly working in the vegetable patches or trying to dry laundry under the eaves. Some muddy kids and dogs chased one another through the culverts at the roadside.

Valentine paused at a roadside tap for water, tried to get some of the caked-up grime off his face and hands, and then turned up toward the main entrance of the hub.

WE'RE FULL

a repainted folding yellow caution sign told him.

Valentine ignored it and paused in the entry vestibule. A six-foot panel of plywood served as a local notice board. Along with advertisements for watchdogs ("Garanteed to bark at Hoods") and ironmongery

and the weekly swap meet and different flavors of Bible study were dozens of messages giving names and destinations, probably of refugees from the destruction in Tulsa. Valentine scanned them until he found what he wanted.

Black--

I'm in Comfort 18.

--Red

Ali had written their old nicknames from the trip across Tennessee and Kentucky. A faint pang of regret at their parting - she'd insisted he was crazy for harboring Blake...

Jury's still out on that one.

Valentine stepped into the old reception area of the nursing home. The limestone of the outside gave way to cool, homey brick within. Two armed men wearing five-pointed stars played cards at a round wooden table, rifles and shotguns placed across a pair of ottomans with a snoring mutt between. A wide reception window looked out on the doors and waiting area, and behind it, a disarmingly young teenage girl sat writing on a pad.

Something about Valentine caused the security's antennae to twitch, and they gave him a long, careful look as he inquired of the girl. She directed Valentine to the appropriate room.

"Much obliged", Valentine said, and gave a friendly nod to the constabulary. He risked a glance back as he found the appropriate hall, and noted that they'd left their cards to watch him.

Valentine smelled barbecue and laundry soap and disinfectants - sharp odors of chlorine and borax. A New Universal Church hostel smelled much the same, albeit with potatoes and cabbage substituted for the barbecue. Someone had brought in bluebonnets and redbud for the vases at the hallway intersections, adding color and aroma. He thought them a nice touch. Four-color propaganda posters provided the only color in NUC lodgings.

The halls were wide for the accommodation of hospital gurneys.

Now spare cots stood in the halls and the little social rooms used by the patients. A TV or two blared old digital recordings in all their sound and spectacle - pre-'22k titles were much sought after, as the message-riddled Kurian productions had all the artistry and interest of an appliance manufacturer's instruction manual. More children played in the halls, racing toys on the smooth flooring or hard at work with blocks, LEGOs, and Tinkertoys.

Valentine found Duvalier's room. Its door stood open.

He knocked at the bathroom just to be sure.

He heard a step in the hallway. A matronly woman in one of the cheery, embroidered staff aprons chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment as she looked him over. He noted the frame of a cart behind. "The young ladies in this room are either at the clothes swap or the" - she lowered her voice - "bar. There's gaming and music and storytelling for those who like wasting good daylight".

"Thank you".

"They said a tall man with straight black hair would be coming. You shining on one of those gals, or are you already married up?" She fiddled with a scissors in her apron and Valentine wondered if he were being measured up for a trim.

"Not exactly".

The honey in her voice turned sticky. "Then there's something wrong with you. Sweet things. They shouldn't be unprotected".

If the other "sweet thing" was Moira Styachowski, the pair needed as much protection as a pair of ornery wolverines.

"Thank you. Clothing swap..."

"The big green aluminum barn to the north", she supplied.

"Right. Or bar".

"It's not on Nancy's property. I never met a man who couldn't find a bar hissownself. The owner's name is Trumpet".

"Trumpet. Thank you, ma'am".

"You can thank me by handing me that water pitcher. The stuff from the tap is strictly wash water unless you're a local and used to it".

Valentine held it for her while she filled it from a set of big plastic jugs on her cart, and replaced it on its aluminum tray.

He wandered to the clothing swap first, and found the cavernous barn filled with odds and ends from darned socks to snappy but stained felt hats. A giant iron-bottomed laundry pot bubbled over charcoal and filled the whole barn with a faint smell of lye. More women and children sat on folding chairs or fruit boxes, talking and sewing.

"Offering, trading, or needing?" a bored teenage boy asked. He carried a plastic hamper.

"Looking", Valentine said.

He hadn't seen a bar coming into Nancy's, so he made for the other end of her property. Sure enough, some entrepreneur had taken an old buffet franchise resting just on the other side of the hill from the garbage pit and turned it into a sawdust-and-fat-lamp saloon. A tarnished trumpet hung from the sign outside. A few biodiesel pickups, several bicycles, and some wagon teams were arranged outside, with shade given to the animal transport and proximity to the door taken by the bikes. The pickup trucks were parked facing the road to give passersby a good look. One driver had even popped his hood to show off chrome exhaust pipes and a supercharger.

Valentine entered through the door cover, a carpet-remnant strip that acted as a windbreak.

Under the light of the front windows a guitar and banjo were keeping each other company, with bootheel syncopation as percussion.

Valentine smelled fryer oil and kidney-filtered beer. As soon as his eyes adjusted he picked out Duvalier in what would have been a crowd if everyone weren't spread out as though trying to keep out of one another's business. He walked past tables with cards and dominoes and guns being examined for trade or sale. A pair of women worked behind the bar, serving drinks and making sandwiches.

Lounging in a wooden, high-walled booth, Duvalier was in her usual earth-toned Free Territory clothing. Her knife-cut red hair dirty and disarranged, she'd put a good deal of effort into making herself look less attractive than she was, wrapped up in the duster that hid

her body from the neck down. Valentine didn't recognize the young woman with her, noted only that she was blond with a longish face and nose. Duvalier pointed for the benefit of her companion, and Valentine took in the blonde's wide-set, steady eyes.

Then she blushed and dropped her gaze.

"Blackie, this is Jules. Be nice, she's like a sister to me".

Public code for another Cat. Valentine wondered what her real name was.

"Max Argent", Valentine said.

Duvalier waved over one of the bartenders and ordered three ciders.

"Bad news, looks like", Duvalier said. "Your shipment's delayed. Em is still getting it together".

Valentine wondered at that. Lambert could take a plane for a rendezvous with a potential operative, but they couldn't get a footlocker of gear to the edge of what amounted to the Free Territory?

United Free Republic, he reminded himself.

Jules spoke. "I hope you weren't planning to meet a train". Valentine wondered at her voice; there was a bit of Eastern giddyup to it. She must not have operated in the KZ much or she would know to smother the accent; it attracted too much attention.

"No. I dropped word at Hobarth's that I'm looking to pass west".

"Not as driver, I hope", Duvalier said. Most of Valentine's efforts behind a wheel were illfated.

"Scout work, security, maintenance, whatever they need. There'll be westbound convoys for a month or two".

"I'll leave tonight to let Em know you've arrived", Duvalier said. "You can have my bed".

Valentine waited for a remark about staying in it; Duvalier treated his cocksmanship as something of a joke - which it was, considering the results.

"Traveling at night?" Valentine asked.

"It's almost as quiet as the Ozarks around here nowadays. Nearest organized Kurians are a hundred miles away west and north".

"Diddo-dish", Jules said, using Iowa slang for something easily accomplished.

In the last three years the Great Plains had been transformed into a bloody quilt of territories in revolt and those still under the Kurians. Grogs and mercenaries from as far away as inland China were holding on to North America's breadbasket.

The ciders came and Duvalier paid in cigarettes, one of the lower denominations in a ranking that went thus: gold, batteries, whiskey, ammunition, tobacco. Lesser necessities like darning thread, pens, gloves, and toothbrushes also served as unofficial currency in booze boxes from Kurian Zone to Freehold and back again, if someone was running short and could be talked into a swap.

Between songs, they made small talk about the weather and the food. When the guitar and banjo made enough noise to cover conversation, Valentine learned that Jules hailed from a privileged family in Iowa - her father owned an estate that sounded similar to the one he'd visited in search of F A. James. She'd spent her teenage years "out East" at school and returned to the usual privileged child's choice of military, church, or management career. She ran away just in time to get caught up in Consul Solon's bid to put the Trans-Mississipi under the Kurians.

"I tried to join the guerrillas, but since I wasn't anybody's cousin or sister-in-law I couldn't find out anything about where they were hiding. When the 'strike' speech came", she said, "I didn't get to hear it but saw it on a leaflet... I didn't know what else to do, so I started a fire in a tire pile outside a TMCC garage. Some janitors were executed for it".

"Don't put it like that", Valentine said. "The Kurian Order executed them, not you".

Valentine waited for her mind to leave memories of strung-up bodies and return to Oklahoma. "I did a bunch of other stuff", she continued. "Punctured tires at night. I learned how to cut a hot electrical wire. Stuff where I could do a little damage quietly and then run away".

"A girl after my own heart", Duvalier said.

"I take it she never went through our little ceremony". Valentine looked at the scar on his palm, barely distinguishable from legworm-hook-hardened skin.

"No", Duvalier said, and Jules looked down, hiding under her hair. What did the girl have to be ashamed of? It wasn't her fault the Lifeweavers had disappeared.

For one awful second Valentine wondered if she was a Kurian agent, slowly digging her way into Southern Command. No, Duvalier was a good judge of character. You didn't walk up and apply to be a Cat; the Cats found you.

After the evening meal Duvalier disappeared. In all the time he'd known her she'd rarely been an initiator of good-byes - like a careful extra in a stage play she liked to make unobtrusive appearances and disappearances.

Probably why she still had blood in her veins after all these years in and out of the Kurian Zone.

Valentine explored Nancy's. It still housed dozens of crippled Quislings, pitiful objects limited to bed and wheelchair. They'd taught him in his Southern Command lectures that the Kurians consumed cripples, even those wounded in defense of their Order, save for a few to be trotted out at rallies and blood drives. Whether the soldiers still lived because of some shell game of Nancy's, or the sudden turnover of territory spared them, or he'd even been given a spoonful or two of medicinal propaganda, he didn't attempt to determine.

He saw Nancy herself, behind a wide nurses' counter, speaking to what looked like doctors. Her face drooped like a bulldog's. Hair that could be mistaken for a hawk's pole-top nest gave her a bit of a madwoman's air, but even the medical men listened to her speak.

As night fell people filtered back into the connected buildings and gathered around the tiny charcoal stoves on the grounds that provided heat for cooking and boiling laundry.

The talkative in the refuge discussed either Tulsa - when it would finally be cleared so people could return to see what was left of their lives - or the possibilities of finding work far from the fighting in Texas or Arkansas.

Then there were the doomsayers: "They'll be back", one man said, shirtless and with Kurian service pins on his suspenders. "No such thing as 'safe.' 'Scorched earth,' the order said, and just because the flame ain't touched you yet, doesn't mean it's not burning".

Even in the facility's new role as improvised refugee squat, Valentine had to admire the cleanliness of the rooms, painted in an institutional color he called "muted lime". The medicine cabinet in the shared bathroom held a couple of tonics for Duvalier's on-again, off-again stomach problems, antiseptic ointments, and a thermometer. The only disappointment was the ashy-tasting toothpaste.

They went to their individual beds with lights out - Nancy's had its own generators, but fuel for them had to be conserved. Valentine hid under a sheet, a little ashamed of the state of his underclothes. Maybe a visit to the swap is in order after all. Jules produced a bottle of Kurian rum and they passed it back and forth. Valentine refused more than two swigs.

"You need to be careful with alcohol in the KZ", Valentine said. "They say a little helps cut lifesign by relaxing you. Whether it's true or no, I'd rather be alert".

"This isn't the Kurian Zone. Not anymore".

Though she asked, he didn't want to talk about the rising in Little Rock. Instead he shifted the conversation to their childhoods. He told her a little about growing up in Minnesota - to an Iowan, nothing but hairy, thick-blooded barbarians lived north of Rochester - and in between swallows she painted a picture of the privileged life of a Ringwinner's daughter.

"I was supposed to go into the church", came the voice from the darkness. If anything, her diction became more precise as she drank. "I was a youth-vanguard leader, of course. Then it was army, church, or industry. Since Ving Junior went army, and Kirbee got her master's

in production, we had that dried-up old prune of an priest sitting me down for improvement, effort, humility, care, and acceptance". Valentine's ears picked up movement in the darkness as she listed the church's virtues. You were supposed to touch forehead, right shoulder, right hip, left hip, and finally left shoulder as you said them. Her words faded as she spoke. "Man in his unnatural state. Spiritual recycle. Can't believe how much of that crap I remember. Didn't even try to learn it, but I can still recite the Truths word for word".

Valentine listened to her breathing until he too drifted away.

He woke, a little, when she got up to use the bathroom. He woke further when she returned and slipped into his bed. She nuzzled his ear.

"Object?" she asked.

Her clean-smelling skin enticed, and her hand knew what it was doing. He felt an erect nipple against his tricep. "Ask a silly question ...", he said.

She tested him with her grip. "Nice answer. Not a bit silly. Drop in.

He recognized another Iowaism, but one Valentine had never heard breathed in his ear, only secondhand from guy talk over beers.

"Not so fast", Valentine said, beginning a series of kisses down her neck. He hadn't touched a woman in over a year. Might as well enjoy the opportunity.

Spent, aroused, and spent again, he slept deep and hard in the sweat and slickness of their lovemaking after she retreated to her bed.

Gunfire and screams woke him. For three terrible seconds he was back on Big Rock Hill the night the Reapers dropped from the sky. Waging from a dream, or waging into another nightmare?

Jules sat up in her bed, the flush of lovemaking replaced by an awful pallor.

"Reapers!" came a shout from the hallway.

Her eyes, searchlights of fear, turned to him.

Valentine felt them. His old comrades in the Wolves called it the "Valentingle" and trusted it more than Valentine did. Sometimes he could detect a Reaper with pinpoint accuracy; other times he could walk right over one without sensing it. Now they seemed to fill his whole mental horizon, could be a dozen or more.

"Might mean nothing", he lied. "Every time there's confusion in the dark, someone shouts 'Reapers.' You have a weapon?"

"Beretta. Bag on the chair".

"Get it". She moved for her pants. "No, get it first, then get dressed".

Valentine retrieved his .45 ACP, the weight a calming comfort in his hand. Two more shots, this time from the front of the building where he'd passed the tin stars. "Drop lifesign and..."

"I don't know how!" she said, her words half-strangled with fear.

Jesus, Duvalier...

Reapers hunted using lifesign, an energy created by the vital aura their masters desired. Humans produced more than livestock; livestock produced more than crops...

He checked the window, saw a family hightailing it across the fields, each holding a child over a shoulder as they ran, a dog keeping worried circles.

Over by the barn, a woman ran in the same direction. A shadow, moving so fast it seemed a trick of the eye, followed her across the field and engulfed her.

Or did it?

"Crouch, both hands on the floor", he told her, shutting and locking the doors to the hallway and shared bathroom. She complied quickly enough. He'd been told contact with the earth acted like the ground on a lightning rod, but he suspected it was bullshit. But it was a relaxing pose, you didn't feel as vulnerable as you would lying down, and there's the tendency to shift nervously when standing.

"Picture your whole life folding up, into a box", he said, hard ears searching the building. Still no destructive noises, but a lot of consternation in the halls, a confused babble.

"They'll locate. They sense pregnant women best!"

A beeping racket from a few crackly loudspeakers made her jump. "Emergency Alert Code Black Multiple. Code Black Multiple".

That doesn't sound good.

"What's that?" Jules said.

"Never mind. Fold up pictures of your family, friends, memories, whatever, and put it in a mental box", Valentine said.

The loudspeakers shrieked one final "Stop!" and went dead.

"I don t see..."

"Keep your eyes shut! What kind of flower do you like?"

"Flower?"

"Picture your favorite flower".

"Daisy", she said.

"Great, a daisy. There's just a daisy, nothing else, blackness and a daisy. It's a big one. You're keeping your eyes on the yellow center".

"Yes", she said, sounding a little better.

"Now it starts to spin slowly, like a windmill. Oh so slowly".

"Yes", she said.

Screams and a crash from the center of the building.

"Never mind that". Valentine lowered his own lifesign and tried to open the window. It had been painted recently and was sticky.

"Speed the daisy up. It's spinning faster now".

She didn't respond.

"Slow it down now. Slower and slower and slower". He lowered his voice. "Slower than that windmill, slower than a second hand on a watch, slow it so it's moving like a minute hand. You can barely see it, it's moving so slowly". More screams, this time female. The deep blast of a shotgun and running feet in the hall.

He unwrapped a souvenir from his time with the Kentucky worm riders. It was a short, stout hand ax, blade tapering into a legworm hook. He pulled on his pants and laced his boots.

For Valentine, lowering lifesign meant taking a big, bright blue ball that represented his consciousness and slowly shrinking it to a point like a star, which he watched with all the concentration of an astronomer at a telescope eyepiece.

"Keep watching the petals turn", he whispered. He reached up and gripped a chamois-wrapped handle from beneath his pillow and drew it close beside.

A heavy tread in the hall and she groped for his hand.

"Turning", he whispered.

A door torn open with a sharp metallic cry. Another scream.

"Turning", he repeated. He tried a fearful whining sound in his throat, trying to imitate a whimpering dog.

Something jiggled the doorknob.

More shots from the hall, and heavy, pounding footsteps as the Reaper ran toward the door ...

"Turning", Valentine whispered.

Five minutes later the noises faded into a last distant scream.

"Safe?" Jules asked.

"We are. They're not..".

The old Cat Everready got to be an old Cat by hunting Reapers only in the daylight, when their connection to their master was weakest, or after they fed, when they, or more accurately the master Kurian animating them, got dopey from the aura feed.

The Valentingle weakened and diffused, throbbing on and off in his head like a bulb on fading current.

He stepped into the hall.

Carnage was the only word for it. Bodies, some still dripping and twitching, lay in the hallway, or had been flung across gurneys. Crushed necks and heads mostly. Some bore wet blossoms on their shirts from punches that had caved in rib cages.

Valentine followed the pointy, bloody boot prints down the hall, found the corpse of the person that had saved him with gunfire. The teenage girl who'd checked him in at the desk was folded around her broken ArmaLite, her auburn hair bound up with a cheerful, polka-dot scrunchie. She had a hole at the base of her throat, paying for the insult of her .223 shells with coin drawn straight from the aorta.

Valentine shut her glassy eyes, turned her on her back, and straightened her, tenderly placed her heels together and her palms at her side, put her riven weapon on her chest, and covered her with a bedsheet from one of the gurneys.

He walked out the exit door at the end of the hall. The walk turned into a trot, which turned into a run, which turned into a sprint, ax held like a runner's baton in his left hand, pistol in his right.

The cool night air hit him like a slap, and like a slap, it brought him out of the moment's madness.

These weren't "wild" Reapers, sometimes sent into the Free Territory to brutalize and maul, little dandelion seeds of chaos drifting where instinct took them. These Reapers had gone through Nancy's quickly and methodically, trying to cram as much death into a given number of minutes as possible.

Which probably meant they had a long trip back. Perhaps as far as Tulsa?

Valentine's cat-sharp eyes picked out motion at the outbuildings. A Reaper, moving south, hopping from rooftop to rooftop as it tried to sense if any beings hid within.

He pulled back the hammer on his gun, then dropped it and the pickax on the ground. He sank so his knees hid them.

"Why?" he bawled. Not much acting required for this. He searched the low spring clouds. "Why us?" He covered his eyes, decided not to sob - there was such a thing as overdoing it.

The Reaper didn't even bother to cut back so it could approach him from behind. It approached a little off kilter, shifting this way and that, reaching too far with its lower limbs stepping toward ten and two rather than straight ahead.

Valentine smelled the cordite on it. He hoped this particular one had killed the girl. Dots of blood decorated its face, a sticky pox. Old Father Wolf was proved right again: Enough hate and you felt no fear, just nervous anticipation.

It planted itself in front of him.

"some prayers are answered", it said, sibilants sliding out of its mouth like a snake's. "look up and see".

Valentine knew better than to meet its eyes. He waited for the knees to bend and rolled sideways, shoved the gun almost into the folds of its robe, and fired.

Bullets wouldn't kill it, but the kinetic energy could sometimes stagger Reapers. Even with the powerful handgun cartridges slamming into it, it still reacted aggressively, swung at his head with a scooping motion that would have sent his skull spinning like a field goal kick.

Except Valentine was already behind it.

He buried the pick end of his hand ax into its upper back, where the nerve trunks gathered on their way to the armored brain case. He got lung instead, heard a sucking sound as flesh closed around the point.

It spun, jerking the handle of his pick out of his hands, and both opponents lurched off-balance. Its elbows clicked backward and its arms reversed themselves in a ghastly fashion as it sought the pick.

Valentine restored his equilibrium first, dropped, and sighted under the jawline. He put his remaining bullets into the underside of its chin.

The Reaper went mad, tore the pick free, and took off running, a blind flight with its hand held in front of it and the other holding its jaw on.

Valentine reloaded, retrieved his pickax, and trotted after it. It dived into the culvert beside the road and began to slither south at a pace he could just keep up with if he ran.

The Kurian clearly wanted his puppet back, even with a string or two cut. Had it been willing to sacrifice its avatar, it could have chased him down and killed him, hunting by heartbeat if nothing else. He paused in a tomato garden and calmed himself, tried to sense the emanations from the Reapers, caught a flicker off in the direction of the settlement garbage heap.

Valentine picked out a line of trees and used them as cover for an approach,

hoping there wasn't a sniper or two guarding the gathering. He heard engines and movement, and risked a run.

He broke for the top of the low hill that kept the dump's sight and smell away from Nancy's, got up just in time to see a truck pulling a horse trailer, turning onto a brush-choked access road. A cut-down Humvee with a toothy brush cutter on the front and a winged Southern Command battle star painted on its side led it down the road.

You could pack a lot of Reapers in that trailer. An unpleasant surprise for the soldier who opened the door to check inside.

The vehicles, driving without lights - if they still worked - disappeared.

A roadblock would be helpful somewhere down that overgrown alley, but the false-flagged Hummer could just pull a disabled...

A blatting broke out from the garbage heap and Valentine saw a man in cammies with a scoped rifle slung across the handlebars of a dirt bike take off after the vehicles up the road. A cold wave passed over Valentine. Probably the sniper, tired and anxious after the operation and listening to the sounds of his buddies driving off, hadn't been searching the hill line or the trees in the direction of Nancy's through his night sight.

Had anyone in Nancy's called for help as the Reapers attacked?

They arrived within a couple of hours, a thin string of cavalry on horseback, followed by more troops on mountain bikes, riding in a pair of lines on either side of the road. He watched them the way a rancher might watch a cattle drive - making guesses as to health, morale, and training from everything from the condition of their bootheels to how they shaved their sideburns. Someone in Southern Command knew his business. Valentine guessed this to be a garrison from one of the supply depots supporting operations west of Tulsa.

He sent Jules over to tell the captain in charge. They could radio to scouts around Tulsa. Even if the vehicles couldn't be intercepted, the scouts might be able to track them to whatever hidey-hole they sought.

The woman possessed an agile enough mind, and he could forgive a panic attack with a Reaper scratching at the door.

Valentine helped collect bodies. The Reapers had struck hard and fast, over a hundred deaths and a handful more wounded who would probably die in the coming hours from assorted traumas.

He mopped his brow after lifting one of the starred lawmen into an awning-draped wagon. He was happy to take part in the gory work; nothing quite took the spirit out of a man than having to pile the bodies of friends like cordwood, and as a stranger here he didn't know faces or names. The nasty business had to be taken care of both hastily and reverently.

Shadows on the road. Valentine looked up, saw the captain with a corporal and three soldiers trailing behind, Jules bringing up the rear, probably going inside to find Nancy. He lifted the camphor-dipped bandanna he kept over his face while moving bodies, and covered his features, wishing he'd grabbed a hat.

They turned for him. The hell?

Jules looked anxious. Was the captain going to get another paragraph added to his Q-file by bringing in an outlaw? Valentine went around to the other side of the cart and stuck a stiffened arm back under the awning.

"Excuse me, Mister", the captain said, a little Kansas twang in his voice. He smelled like horse sweat and service aftershave.

"Yes, Cap?" Valentine said.

"Major Valentine", a man with corporal stripes said, saluting. His hedgerow eyebrows had collected some road dust.

"Sorry to disturb, I'm..."

"Tonley, from the Razors. Corporal Tonley now, by the look of it".

"Recognized your walk, sir. Saw you goin' up toward the buildings".

"Glad to see you again, and well. Or should I be?"

"No, Major", the captain cut in. "Nothing like that. I just wanted a chance to shake your hand".

Jules let out a deep breath.

"Glad it's that way". Valentine toweled off assorted flavors of filth and shook hands all around.

"Oh, you thought...", Tonley said.

"Hell no. Hell no, sir!" an unfamiliar private added. "Any sooner tries that, he'll have to walk back to the depot with his bike shoved up his ass".

"I beg your pardon", Valentine said. "Sooner?"

Tonley chuckled. "Oklahoma mounted. Mounted on bikes, that is. Get there sooner than the next guy and all that".

Tonley kept looking at his jaw as he explained the term and Valentine tapped the fracture point and said, "A nasty left hook". Unsaid was that the pugilist had been a Reaper, hunting him and Gail Post in the hills of Kentucky.

Valentine was invited to offer an opinion on tracking the Reaper-bearing vehicles, and the captain broke out his map. The party broke up within minutes, leaving Valentine with the feeling that he'd just got up from a long meal with old friends. Such was the nature of Southern Command's terrible, tasking comradeship.

"Sorry about that", Jules said. "I tried to tell them it was some big mistake, but they insisted on talking to you. They told me they just wanted to shake hands, but Duvalier said..."

"It turned out all right. But you needn't have worried, even if it hadn't. I would have gone quietly. They're Southern Command's boys".

"Meal break?"

"I won't feel like eating till tonight", Valentine said.

"Oh. Of course".

"Mind if I ask you something, though?"

She blanked her face, wary. "You bet".

"What was that about pregnancy last night? You're not expecting, are you?"

She glanced around, as though searching for an escape. "I was scared. I had a close call a little while ago".

"If I'd known you weren't on the pill", Valentine said. "Dumb chance to take last night".

"It's a chance, all right", she said.

"I'm used to riddles from the Lifeweavers, or in the Kurian Zone. But not from fellow Cats".

Her shoulders sagged. "Can we go somewhere and talk?"

All the music and liveliness had vanished from the bar. Its door had been torn from the hinges. One of the bartender girls scrubbed a stain on the floor, and the other's eyes were downcast and red.

They had free Lemonclear, a sour concoction posing as lemonade, thanks to the soldiers. Southern Command's forces were departing, the bikers down the road and the horsemen cross-country. Before they'd left they'd put tabs of Lemonclear in five-gallon plastic jugs of the local water. The medicine both killed bacteria and water parasites and gave it a mild flavor.

They found a quiet corner out of hearing of the bartenders. Valentine skipped the polite talk. "Get it out. You'll feel better".

Jules' hands went to her kneecaps. "It's like this. You know we can't find the Lifeweavers, right?"

"I've heard rumors", Valentine said. No reason for her to know his mission.

"I feel like a creep. We should have just told you, but Ali said you'd have more fun the other way".

She expected a "Told me what?" so Valentine offered it.

"It's my way of, hopefully, becoming a Cat. I know the Lifeweavers do something to us, change our physical makeup somehow. They trigger a switch that's already inside us. That's the way it was explained to me, anyway".

"I don't think anyone really knows", Valentine said.

"Like blood from Bears, a transfusion heals stuff, practically makes a miracle. Or the way a couple of Wolves have sex and their baby turns

out able to smell really well. Seems like if Southern Command wants more Hunters, it's up to the Hunters to make them".

Jesus, we're being bred like foxhounds, Valentine thought.

"There's also the Dulcimet effect", Jules said.

"I've never heard of that", Valentine said.

"This doc, Dulcimet, with the Miskatonic discovered it. He did this study on a Cat from the Yazoo Delta who got a couple of teenage girls pregnant. Women make better Cats, generally, just like men make better Bears. It turns out that when a woman is carrying a Hunter's baby, sometimes it has an effect on the mother, since she and the baby sort of exchange blood while she's carrying. That's the Dulcimet effect".

"So the idea is, I get you pregnant, maybe you turn Cat, and Southern Command gets another potential Hunter in nine months. What do they do with the baby?"

"Secret. They have to guard them from the Kurians".

Valentine sighed. At least he'd had a choice when he became a Wolf. Or had he?

"Anyway", she continued. "There are only a couple of male Cats. They've been looking for you for a while now, hoping that you'd get one of the volunteers pregnant".

She laid the tiniest extra stress on the word "volunteer".

"Was it real volunteering, or are you being a good soldier?" Valentine asked.

"Oh, it was real. Ali had me meet Stykes ... er, Major Styachowski. She painted quite a picture. Also, your rendezvous here was right for my cycle. They're keeping close track of that".

"I suppose they have to", Valentine said, feeling a bit like the butt of a cosmic joke.

"It's been almost a day. Maybe we should give it another go. The more sperm, the better".

They tried again. But Duvalier had been right: Knowing took a lot of the fun out of it.

Duvalier returned two days later with Styachowski and another fit-looking young woman wearing Southern Command Labor Corps fatigues and teardrop sunglasses. The last served as driver for a post-'22 flatbed, a high-axled transport vehicle made out of the odds and ends of other heavy-duty diesels. They were bringing a new generator and another radio set to replace equipment smashed in the Reaper raid.

A footlocker strapped to the rear seat held the gear Valentine requested. Styachowski carried a waterproof file folder with maps and basic information about his destination.

Duvalier hopped down from the webbing holding the generator, where she'd ridden, using the straps as a combination hammock and harness. She looked like a hungry, road-weary hitchhiker, but her eyes were as bright as ever.

"Heard about the trouble", she said.

"Jules and I came through for the team", Valentine said. In other circumstances he would have added an exaggerated wink, but Nancy's was almost a ghost town now. Many of the survivors of the raid had fled east after the dead were buried in their common grave. Some of those buried had been decorated Quislings, killed in some final fit of pique from the almost-vanquished Kurians of Tulsa.

Styachowski slicked back her moon white hair, impatient.

Duvalier twirled her sword-stick on its leather thong. "They think they've got it tracked down to central Tulsa. Storm sewers maybe. I'm going to go poke around a little. Be nice to get at least one before it has a chance to bolt".

The Kurians were near-legendary escape artists.

"When are you heading west, Val?" Styachowski asked.

"When the right convoy comes through".

"Spare me a couple more days?" Sure.

"Val, this is Darlene", Styachowski said, introducing the slim-hipped, curly-haired driver. "She's been selected as a potential, an

aspirant for either Wolf or Cat. We were hoping you could find time to take her into the field for a couple of days, up toward the Zone but not in it. Teach her a little. Then we'd like your opinion".

" 'Lina' for short", Darlene said.

Valentine wondered what kind of eyes waited behind the driver's sunglasses, and if she'd been counting the days since the beginning of her last menstrual cycle. "Glad to be of service. As a favor to you and AH".