Tale of the Thunderbolt (46 page)

“Away, David, away!” Ahn-Kha shouted, waving at the approaching troops.

“The quickwood,” Valentine said.

“No choice! The smoke is blowing this way — it will cover us.”

A bullet hit the limp horse, its impact causing still-warm muscles to twitch. Horses dragging a wagon came around the shattered front of the column. A Jamaican lay in the bed of the wagon, working the reins from the shelter of the bed. Ahn-Kha dropped his gun. The Grog pulled Valentine to his feet — grabbing him by the collar like a disobedient child — and ran in pursuit of the wagon.

Bullets zipped through the air all around: insects buzzing in their ears for a split second and then fleeing. Ahn-Kha caught the back of the wagon with one long arm as he hauled Valentine in tow with iron fingers. He swung up in an apish leap. A bullet caught the Grog at the apex of his jump. He dropped Valentine as he tumbled into the wagon. The wounding of his friend brought Valentine out of his mental maze.

Valentine felt something pull at his sleeve. The bullet that cut through his clothing hit the back of the wagon with a splintering
thwak
. He locked eyes with Ahn-Kha as the Grog's ear flaps fell limp. His friend toppled into the back of the wagon.

He ran. He jumped into the wagon just as one of the team was cut down by gunfire. Ahn-Kha lay groaning in his native tongue, hand pressed against his buttock.

“Sir! Sir!” the wounded Jamaican said, pushing a machine gun lying at the bottom of the wagon at Valentine with a bloody foot. “It's still got bullets.”

Valentine took up the weapon. He rested it on the side of the wagon and turned it against Murphy's turncoats still burning and killing among the other wagons. The chatter of the weapon attracted bullets from all directions. Valentine waited for the inevitable impact. He would die with his mission, with the men he'd misled. Another flare landed by the wagon, spewing more purple mist. Mortar shells dropped, seeking his position.

Valentine heard hooves approach through the smoke, and turned the gun. Only a short length of bullets dangled from the belt.

“David!” Valentine heard a familiar voice call. “Captain Valentine! Men, find Captain Valentine.”

Post came out of the purple haze, leading two horses. His clothes were in rags, and his eyes were bright in bruised sockets. Blood ran from a cut on his thigh. Another mortar shell exploded and the horses danced in terror, but Post dragged them on.

“Take Ahn-Kha with the other horse. He's hurt. I'm staying with the men.”

“No use!” Post said, bringing the animals beside the wagon.

“Can't — ,” Valentine began, but Ahn-Kha's bloody fingers wrapped themselves around the snakeskin bandolier and pulled him bodily out of the wagon.

“My David, we go. I shall run. There's nothing else to do.”

“No!”

The Grog hauled Valentine to a horse. He hopped on one leg, supporting himself with his other tree-trunk arm as though using a crutch. Post handed over the reins and helped the Jamaican into one of the saddles, then held the horse for Valentine to mount. Valentine saw blood running from Post's ear.

“No,” Valentine said tightly, slinging his empty PPD and grabbing the horse by the throat latch. “You're hurt, you ride.”

Post and the wounded Jamaican rode hard for the woods. A handful of others, including Ahn-Kha and Valentine, followed the two riders.

As they fled, a shell found the wagon. More oily smoke rose into the winter sky. Valentine ran with the rest, half-hoping his heart would burst from the effort. He ran from his enemies, from defeat, from his dead and wounded men. He wished he could run from his failure, but it stayed with him all the way to the trees and beyond.

Behind him, the quickwood burned.

This ends the third volume following the career of David Valentine. His return to what had been the Ozark Free Territory is chronicled in the fourth,
Valentine's Rising.
For more information on it and other tales of Vampire Earth, please visit the author's Web site at http://www.
vampireearth.com
.

Read on
for an excerpt from the
next exciting tale of E. E. Knight's
Vampire Earth . . .
VALENTINE' S
RISING
Coming soon from Roc!

Valentine half dozed in front of the field pack with the headset on. Like most Quisling military equipment, it was ruggedly functional and almost aggressively ugly. Late at night, the Quisling operators were more social, keeping each other company in the after-midnight hours of the quiet watches. Someone had just finished giving instructions on how to clear a gummed condensation tube on a still. Valentine twisted the dial back to a scratchier conversation about a pregnant washerwoman.

“So she goes to your CO. So what? She should be happy. She's safe for a couple years now. Over,” the advice giver said.

“She wants housing with the NCO wives,” the advice seeker explained. “She's already got a three-year-old. She wants me to marry her so they can move in. Over.”

“That's an old story. She's in it for the ration book, bro. Look, if a piece of ass pisses you off, threaten to have her tossed off-post. That'll shut her up. Better yet, just do it. Sounds to me like she's — ”

Valentine turned the dial again.

“. . . fight in Pine Bluff. Put me down for twenty coin on Jebro. He'll take Meredith like a sapper popping an old woman. Over.”

“Sure thing. You want any of the prefight action? Couple of convicts. It's a blood match — the loser goes to the Slits. Over.”

Valentine had heard the term “Slits” on the Mississippi. It referred to the Reapers' slit-pupil eyes, or perhaps the narrow wound their stabbing tongue left above the breastbone.

“No, haven't seen 'em. I'd be wasting my money. Over.”

Valentine heard a horse snort and stamp outside the cracked window. The sound brought him awake in a flash. A pair of alarmed whinnies cut the night air.

“Arms! Quietly now, arms!” Valentine said to the sleeping men huddled against the walls in the warm room where they had enjoyed dinner. He snatched up his pistol and worked the slide.

Ahn-Kha appeared at his elbow. How so much mass moved with such speed and stealth —

“What is it, my David?” Ahn-Kha breathed, his rubbery lips barely forming the words.

“Something is spooking the horses. Watch the front with your Grogs. Post,” Valentine said to his lieutenant, who appeared in his trousers and boots, pulling on a jacket, “get the Smalls and M'Daw into the cellar, please. Stay down there with them.”

Valentine waved to the wagon sentry Jefferson, but the man's eyes searched elsewhere. Jefferson had his rifle up and ready. Two of the horses reared, and he stood to see over them.

They came out of the snow, bounding on spring-steel legs. Three of them. He and all his people would be dead inside two minutes.

“Reapers!” Valentine bellowed, bringing up his pistol in a two-handed grip. As he centered the front sight on one he noticed it was naked but so dirt-covered that it looked clothed. A torn cloth collar was all that remained of whatever it had been wearing. He fired three times; the .45 barked deafeningly in the enclosed space.

At the sound of his shots his men moved even faster. Two marines scrambled to the window and stuck their rifles out of the loophole-sized slats in the shutters.

A Reaper leapt toward Jefferson, whose gun snapped impotently, and Valentine reached for his machete as he braced himself for the sight of the Texan's disassembly. Perhaps he could get the Reaper in the back as it killed Jefferson. But it didn't land on the sentry. The naked avatar came down on top of a horse on the balls of its feet like a circus rider. It reached for the animal's neck, snake-hinged jaw opening wide. The fangs tore into the muscle of the screaming horse's shoulder. The horse dropped as the piercing tongue hit the beast's heart.

The other two, robeless and running naked in the snowstorm like the first, also ignored Jefferson, chasing the horses instead. The Jamaicans' rifles fired in unison when one Reaper came around the cart and into the open, but the only effect Valentine saw was a bullet strike into a mount's rump. The horse dropped sideways with a Reaper on top of it. Some instinct made the wounded animal roll. It turned its heavy body across the spider-thin form and came to its feet, kicking. As the Reaper knelt a pair of hooves caught it across the back, sending it flying against the cart.

The third disappeared into the snowstorm, chasing a terrified bay.

“Stay at the front of the house with the others,” he said to Ahn-Kha, who stood ready with a quickwood spearpoint. He threw open the door — and held up his hands when Jefferson whirled and pointed the rifle at him, muzzle seemingly aimed right between his eyes. The gun snapped again.

Valentine almost flew to the broken-backed Reaper. It got to its feet somehow, swaying on the pivot-point of its shattered spine. It lashed out. Valentine slipped under the raking claw. The momentum of the Reaper's strike tipped it again, and Valentine buried his blade in it as it sprawled facedown in the snow. He ground the machete into the Reaper, pinned like a bug on mounting Styrofoam. It tried once to shrug him off, but with its back broken, its inhumanly strong muscles were useless. The Reaper twitched as the blade worked its way through cablelike nerve tissue. In five seconds it was limp.

The other one lifted its blood-smeared face from the twitching horse and lumbered off into the night, its belly swollen like a starvation victim's. Valentine heard the annoying snap of Jefferson's rifle again, followed by curses as he worked the bolt.

“Jefferson, calm down. You might try loading your weapon. Don't kill any of us once you do.”

“Sorry, Captain. Sorry — ”

Valentine ignored him and listened with hard ears all around the woods, but all he could hear were the Reaper's fading footfalls. They had attacked alone and hit the biggest-warmest targets they could see. Evidently they were masterless; their Kurian had probably been killed or had fled out of control range, and they were acting on pure instinct. He looked at the broken-backed one.

“Lucky. So so lucky,” Valentine said.

“And horsemeat for breakfast,” Jefferson agreed.

“Get inside, Jefferson. Don't worry about the horses for now.”

The Texan wasted no time getting out of the wagon. Valentine put a new magazine in his gun and backed toward the house, still listening and smelling. Nothing. Not even the cold feeling he usually got when Reapers were around, but his ears were still ringing from the gunshots inside, and the snow was killing odors.

He rapped on the door and backed into the house, still covering the quickwood.

“Anything out front?” he called, eyes never leaving the trees.

“Nothing, sir,” Ahn-Kha said.

He heard a horse scream in the distance. The Reaper had caught up with the bay.

“Post,” Valentine shouted.

“Sir?” he heard through the cellar floor.

“I'm going out after them. Two blasts on my whistle when I come back in. Don't let anyone shoot me.” Valentine caught Jefferson's eye and winked. The red on his face faded and the Texan smiled back.

“Yessir,” Post answered.

Valentine tore off a peeling strip of wallpaper and wiped the resinlike Reaper blood off his machete. He considered bringing a quickwood spear, but decided to hunt the Reaper with just the blade: it would be vulnerable after a feed. He nodded to the Jamaicans and opened the front door. After a long listen, he dashed past a tree and into the brush of the forest.

A nervous horse from the other team nickered at him. He moved from tree to tree, following the tracks, smelling the dribbled horse blood.

Valentine dried his hand on his pant leg and took a better grip on his machete. He sniffed the ground with his Wolf's nose, picking up the horse blood. He instinctively broke into his old loping run, broken like a horse's canter by his stiff leg, following the scent.

He didn't have far to travel. A half mile later, after a run that verged on a climb up a steep incline, he came to the Reaper's resting spot. Water flowing down the limestone had created a crevice-cave under the rocky overhang. An old Cat named Everready used to say that Reapers got “dopey” after a feed; with a belly full of blood they often slept like drunkards. This one had hardly gotten out of sight of the house before succumbing to the need for sleep. He saw its pale foot, black toenails sharp against the ash-colored skin, sticking out of a pile of leaves.

Valentine heard whistling respiration. He put his hand on his pistol and decided to risk a single shot. He drew and sighted on the source of the breathing.

The shot tossed leaves into the air. The Reaper came to its feet, crashing its skull against the overhang. A black wound crossed its scraggly hairline. It went down to its hands and knees. Valentine sighted on a slit pupil in a bilious yellow iris.

“Anyone at the other end?” Valentine asked, looking into the eye. The thing looked back, animal pain and confusion in its eye — a badger with a limb crushed in a trap. It scuttled to the side. Valentine tracked the pupil with his gun. “What are you doing out here?”

harrrruk!
it spat.

It exploded out of the leaves.

Valentine fired, catching it in the chest. The bullet's impact rolled it back into the cave, but it came out again in its inhuman, crabwise crawl.

It moved fast. As fast as a wide-awake Reaper, despite its recent feeding.

Valentine shot again . . . again . . . again. Black flowers blossomed on the thing's skin at the wet slap of each slug's impact. It shot out from the crevice, slithering like a snake. Valentine pounced, machete ready. He pinned it, driving the knee of his good leg into the small of its back, wishing he hadn't been so cocksure, that he'd brought quickwood to finish it. He raised the blade high and brought it down on the back of the Reaper's neck, the power of the blow driving it into the thing's spine. He tried to pull it back for another blow, but the black blood had already sealed the blade into the wound.