Valentine's Exile (10 page)

Except fight.

They presented the triangular folded flag to Meadows, who accepted it as he would a baby.

Valentine looked at the rows of men for what was probably the last time. They looked hard in their battle dress, hard in the relaxed way that only men who'd seen bloodshed could manage. But Valentine didn't see them as iron-thewed heroes. They were more like blown-glass sculptures, beautiful in their irregularity, their variety of colors, heights, and shapes. And just like the glass vessels, tiny shards of fast-flying shrapnel could convert them into a shattered ruin of gristle, blood, and half-digested food in an eyeblink. He'd seen it more than once, and once was enough for any sane man.

Their delicacy made them all the more precious.

Then he and Meadows turned and walked to the generals. Valentine knew each one by name, but only one from experience.

General Martinez.

The man who'd executed two of his Grogs, and would have killed Ahn-Kha right before Valentine's eyes, was the second-highest-ranking officer gathered at the ceremony, subordinate only to MacCallister, who'd supervised the drive on Dallas-Fort Worth. Valentine knew that he held some rear-area post as a reward for his resistance—such as it was—during Solon's brief reign over the Ozarks.

Old and very bad blood linked Valentine and Martinez. As the crowning irony, Valentine's whole rising in Little Rock and his defense of Big Rock Mountain had taken place under Martinez's command. But only technically— Martinez hadn't moved a man to his assistance when he was most needed.

There were salutes, and when the salutes were done, handshakes.

“Congratulations on your staff appointment, Major Valentine,” MacCallister said from beneath a white mustache that mostly hid a missing incisor when he spoke.

“Richly deserved,” Meadows put in.

They sidestepped.

Valentine gave Martinez a formal salute, returned equally formally.

“General,” Valentine said.

“Major,” General Martinez returned. He still looked like a turtle, even in his green-and-brown dress uniform. He didn't offer his hand.

Meadows led Valentine to a chair behind and to the right of the generals. He passed Valentine the Razors' flag.

“You deserve this more than anyone,” Meadows said quietly. “They always were yours.”

“Co—”

“Shut up, Major. That's an order.”

MacCallister said a few words thanking the men for their bravery, devotion, and sacrifice. He read out the Razors' list of regimental achievements and citations, and explained that skilled men were desperately needed elsewhere, and it was his sad duty to order the dissolution of the battered regiment.

“A grateful Free Republic thanks you,” General MacCallister said as he dismissed the men. Evidently progress had been made in the governance of the bits of four states that comprised the Freehold.

The soldiers had heard it all before. All of them knew about the Claw, and that the Claw couldn't be questioned. Even if they didn't call it that.

When it was done Valentine was expected at a late lunch with the generals. But there was something he had to do first. He went over to the line of wounded and spoke to each one. He ended at Post's elevated bed. Post looked better by exponents.

“Which nurse did you end up with?” Valentine asked.

“Which didn't he?” one of the men snickered.

“Sort of all of them and none of them, if you follow me, Dave,” Post said.

Valentine handed him the folded flag. “I want you to hang onto this until you're better and we link up again.”

“Hear you're going to be kind of busy on staff training. Maybe the higher-ups aren't nuts after all.” As executive officer for the Razors, Post had spent endless hours in the Byzantine bowels of Southern Command procedures, trying to keep the Razors better supplied and better equipped than a half-forgotten rear-area reserve. “But why me? It's Meadows' flag.”

“It's our flag,” he said, and hoped Duvalier was lurking somewhere near—perhaps beneath the bandstand. “You're keeping it until I come back from leave. There's a few questions to be asked and a promise to keep.”

Post's smile matched the Texas sun in brightness, and exceeded it in size.

“Thank you, sir.”

CHAPTER THREE

David Valentine stepped off the train even before it came to a full stop and landed neatly on his good leg. He checked in at the Guard Station and reacquainted himself with the modest sights of the hill-encircled town, enjoying the sensation of being off the rickety train.

It had been a long trip up from Texarkana, thanks to the stop-and-start nature of nonmilitary travel. He spent a night in Hope, and learned that the famous unification of Texas and Arkansas forces had actually taken place in the nearby crossroads of Fouke. Southern Command, perhaps with an eye toward history, or realism about the soldier's eagerness to say they were present at the famous Texas-Arkansas-Fouke, had broadcast the news to the world from a minor general's temporary headquarters in Hope. Valentine spent ten dollars on an afternoon outing from Hope to the spot of the linkup (sandwich lunch included!) and saw the two state flags waving on a small hill next to a creek where beer and whiskey bottles from the celebration were still in evidence.

He wandered up and down Pine Bluff's main streets. Occupation seemed to have leeched all the cheery color from the town he remembered from his early days as a Wolf, studying at the academy. Vanished flower boxes, missing chalkwork advertisements on the brickwork, empty display windows where once mannequins had stood displaying everything from rugged smocks to ruffled wedding gowns, even the tired-looking berry bushes and picked-clean fruit trees filling every vacant lot related the occupation's story.

The lots made him think of Razors for some reason. Missing faces, dead or gone. He missed Hank most of all, even more than Narcisse or Ahn-Kha. Both could take care of themselves. But Hank had gone off to school with little enthusiasm. Valentine had tried to ease the parting by giving him his snakeskin bandolier, the same one he'd worn the night of the Rising in Little Rock.

“You deserve a medal, Hank, but this is the best I can do.”

Hank ran his good hand across the oversized scales. “For real? For keeps?”

“For exceptional valor,” Valentine said.

Hank hooked a finger in one of the loops. “Take a while to grow more Quickwood,” Hank said.

“Fill it with diplomas.”

At that Hank frowned—the boy saw himself as tried and tested as any of the Razors. In the end Valentine tasked Ahn-Kha with seeing the boy safely seated—and if necessary, handcuffed—at school.

He brought himself back to the present.

Valentine read the lettering next to a white cross painted on a walkway above the street, connecting two buildings at the heart of downtown:

HERE THEY HUNG JAMES ELLINGTON
FOR SPITTING UNDER THE BOOTS OF THE OCCUPIERS AS
THEY MARCHED
THEY SAID HE WAS TO BE AN EXAMPLE
THEY WERE RIGHT

One of Valentine's happier memories was of his time spent in Pine Bluff as a student at the war college. Essays on the qualities of Integrity, Professional Competence, The Courage to Act, and Looking Forward; regulations on the care of dependants and children of his soldiers; sound management principles—Southern Command was nothing if not parsimonious—the multitude of identification badges . . .

Or the cheery efficiency of Cadet “Dots” Lambert, juggling student and instructor schedules with teenage energy. Valentine laid down circuitous paths so he could pass her desk and say hi between his early duties with Zulu Company, class, and meals. He'd never worked up the courage to so much as ask her to a barbecue—he'd been a scruffy young Wolf, a breed apart from the well-tailored guards and cadets who undoubtedly dazzled as they whirled the girl around the floor at military mixers that Valentine, with patched trousers, collarless shirts, and field boots always managed to miss.

He hoped Lambert hadn't been hung from the clock tower at the university. Or shipped off in a cattle car.

Which brought him back to his reason for the trip to Pine Bluff. The Miskatonic.

Valentine refreshed himself with a hotdog in heartroot at the diner, then wandered southward along the tracks to the old SEARK campus, now listed on the town map as the “HPL Agricultural and Technical Resource Center.” The entire SEARK campus was now surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire on either side of the streets surrounding the campus, enclosing as it did the war college, cadet school, and military courthouse.

Valentine showed his ID at the gate, surrendered his weapons, and signed in as a visitor.

“Have a fine one,” the gun-check said, handing him a locker key on a pocket lanyard.

He heard distant gunfire from the other side of the railroad tracks as he entered, the spaced-out popping of a practice range. The cadets probably had a range day—it was a Friday and it would be just as well to stink them up on a day when they'd be a smelly nuisance to friends and family rather than their instructors—as most of the students looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. They looked so young. Elaborate razor-cut sideburns reminiscent of a bull's horns looked to be the new standard with the boys, and the girls were showing tight ringlet curls dangling from their little envelopelike caps.

Valentine, now closer to thirty than twenty, with three long trips into the Kurian Zone behind him that aged a man more than years or mileage, could shrug and disparage them as children. Except that the children had each been more or less handpicked and were studying morning, noon, and night in an effort to win their first brass tracks. Children didn't make PT at four A.M. and fall asleep on a pile of books at midnight.

There wouldn't be any old instructors to visit—frontline officers took a year or two off to teach, sometimes, but only the cadet school had permanent faculty and Valentine had ventured onto that campus only to take qualification tests. He took the sidewalk bordering the inner fence straight to the Miskatonic.

Their new building looked a good three times the size of the old one. Perhaps Southern Command had finally decided to take the scholars seriously. The Miskatonic researched how the Kurians and other dangerous fauna they'd “brought over” interacted and thought, instead of simply cataloging and quantifying threats.

Valentine had visited the “oddballs” inside now and then as a student at the war college, and had constant contact since in the form of debriefings every time he came back from the Kurian Zone. The debriefings were always by a variegated trio; a young student who served as stenographer, an intellectual-looking questioner, and then an older man or woman who silently listened, almost never asking a question him or herself, but sometimes calling the other two off into another room before the trio returned with a new line of questioning. He'd gotten to know a couple of the “oldsters”—by their faces, anyway—enough so that he hoped he could run down Post's mystery letter.

A pair of workmen bent over an addition to the entryway, adding a small brick blister next to the doorway. Valentine passed through a layer of glass doors. A second layer was in place, but the glass was missing.