Valentine's Exile (12 page)

“Have you looked into the family background of your mule list? Do they come from Hunter parents?”

“A few,” Arnham said. “Not enough for a real correlation.”

“What is the test?”

“Don't know. They take a small amount of blood. Like an iron check when you donate.”

Valentine had given enough blood in Southern Command's medical units to know what that meant. A drop or two squeezed from a finger cut. “And then?”

“They drop it in a test tube. We know the negatives stay clear.”

“How many show up as positives?”

“Less than one percent,” Arnham answered.

“About one out of a hundred and fifty or so, looks like,” Zhin said, checking another paper.

Valentine wondered if any of his known unknowns were filled in, or if this just represented a new unknown popping up. “But these women present a danger to the Kurians?”

Arnham's lips tightened. “I didn't say that. I said they were treated that way. Look, we're in the dark about as much as you. We're laying it all out there.”

He rooted around in his folios and passed a binder to Valentine. Inside were six tabs. Each had a list from a testing station similar to the one he sent Post.

“Your girl's in the yellow-tabbed one,” Arnham said.

Valentine nodded and flipped to the list. The sheets were the same as the others, a bare list of negatives. Female names, no particular ethnic background to them.

Valentine's heart thudded before his brain knew why.

Melissa Carlson.

The rest of the room faded away for a second as the name held his attention. Melissa . . . Molly . . . the woman whose family had helped him in his trip across Wisconsin, who he'd gone to the Zoo in Chicago to save when she caught the eye of a sexually avaricious Quisling
nomenklatura
and murdered him. . . .

“You okay there, Val?” Zhin asked.

No result next to Molly's name. She hadn't been put on a train. Molly's sister Mary was just below her on the list; she'd been tested too, also no
X
in the result column.

But she had been tested. She'd been tested at the same location as Gail Foster. Why was she listed as Molly Carlson? She'd married her Guard lieutenant . . .
What was his name . . . Stockton, no, Stockard. Graf Stockard.

“Fine. You keep the big directories here, right? The Southern Command Military Census?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Can I have a browse?”

“Sure. A name ring a bell?” Zhin guessed.

CHAPTER FOUR

You're not doing this in order to see her,
David Valentine told himself for the umpteenth time. She's smart, a good observer. Perhaps Molly even knew Gail.

No, her letters trickled off and you want to know why,
a more honest part of Valentine said.

Shut up the both of you,
someone whose name might be Superego interjected.

Valentine got the feeling he was being watched as he walked up the road running along the western side of Crowley's Ridge. Molly Carlson Stockard's name had turned up as residing at a military camp called Quapaw Post, and a quick message to the CO—Valentine justified it as a joint inquiry with the Miskatonic—revealed that she lived at the Post as a “Class A” dependant, which meant she didn't just live on post, but worked there as well.

A forty-mile train ride, ten-mile wagon hitch, and a two-mile hike brought him to this quiet corner of Southern Command, well north of the corridor.

He bore a full set of arms, as any serving officer in Southern Command did, even on leave. The Atlanta Gunworks assault rifle formerly shouldered by the Razors bumped against his back inside an oiled leather sheath to keep the wet and dirt off. The freehold had learned long ago that the more people trained to carry guns there were traipsing around the rear areas, the less likely they were to have to use them, whether threatened by the lawless or by the emissaries of the awful law that was the Kurian Zone.

He had to stop himself from jogging or falling into his old Wolf lope. He wanted to arrive more or less composed, not sweaty and bedraggled. He regretted that he didn't already have his staff crossbar, or he'd probably have been able to requisition a trap or even a motorcycle.

Quapaw Post didn't look like much; one thick concrete shell that probably enclosed a generator, armory, and fuel supply. A pair of identical, cavernous barns and a few wooden barracks, with a tower at the center for fresh water and sentries, rounded out the station. Miles of fencing stood along either side of the road and extended up into the oak-and-hickory-thick hills of the ridge and west into the alluvial flats, where the fields were subdivided into pasture and hay fields. Horses grazed and swished each other in the gauzy sun, and nearer to the road insects harvested the nectar of butterfly weed and wild bellflowers.

Evidently Quapaw Post supported Southern Command horseflesh. Horses on active duty needed a break as often—probably more often—as the men they carried.

Quapaw Post's CO, a captain by the name of Valdez, met him personally at the gate. Valdez varied his Guard uniform in that he wore camp shorts and leather sandals. Valentine got the impression this corner of Southern Command was not frequently inspected.

“A walking major?” Valentine heard the sentry ask his captain.

"Ex-Wolf. I checked him out; he's a good man on leave,” Valdez said. “Oh, he can probably hear you by now, Crew.”

“Long as it ain't a Bear, is all.”

The Captain hallooed a greeting with Valentine a few strides away.

“Welcome to the Quapaw, Major,” Valdez said. “You're welcome to my room, as I've got a cot in my office, or there's all kinds of space in the barns.”

“If you don't mind flies and horseshi—” the sentry started.

“The barn is fine, Captain,” Valentine said. The captain shook his hand and led him past some weedy sandbags to the official starting point of the base, a line of painted rocks. Valentine looked around. “Do you train the mounts here, or just feed them?”

“Both. That widow you asked about, Molly, she's one of our civilian trainers.”

“Widow?”

“MIA technically, over six months, so that makes her a widow on the books.”

“Does she know I'm coming?”

“I kept my mouth shut. But you know a small post.”

“No sense wasting time. I'd like to see her.”

“You're invited to a dinner with the other officers. Unless you'll be umm, otherwise occupied.” Valdez made a point of nudging a path-bordering rock back into line, where it guarded some fragrant tomato vines.

“Tell your officers to dress down, this isn't an official visit. If they'd rather play cards over beer—”

Valdez brightened. “Your credit's good here, if you want to get in on a game. My kebabs are very popular if you like finger food.”

“Sick horses have to go sometime. Glad to see border station duty's still the same.” They turned up a little row of what looked like trailers with the wheels removed.

“You will want to get back to the electricity soon enough, I'm sure. Here we are.”

Valentine recognized the bunkhouses. Known as “twenty by eights”—though a screened-in porch that could be opened on one end gave them dimensions closer to thirty feet in length—the easily constructed prefab bunkhouses were the backbone of Southern Command's dependant housing.

This one had the screened porch, and a thriving band of hostas living in the semishade under the floor, set a foot off the ground by concrete blocks.

Molly stood on the other side of the screen door. She seemed to shimmer a bit. Perhaps it was the water in his eyes.

A tiny, dark-haired figure clung to one of her legs. A tabby cat watched the drama from the tar-shingle roof.

“David?” she said.

“Hello, Molly.”
Say something else!
“How are you?”

“I'll take your rig over to the barn,” Valdez put in.

Valentine released his pack, grateful for something to do with his body.

When he'd had the barn office pointed out and said good-bye to the captain, Molly had the screen door open. She stood a few pounds heavier, her eyes were a little more tired perhaps, but her hair shone with its same golden glory. If anything, it was a little longer and fuller, drawn back from her cheekbones into a single braid. Some of the wariness that he'd come to know all too well on their trip back to the Free Territory still haunted her. She wore a civvied version of the old female Labor Regiment top, cheered up by a set of silver buttons, and a simple jean skirt with a built-in apron-pouch. She smelled like lavender.

The child had her creamy skin, or maybe it just looked light set against the boy's dark hair and eyes. If he and Molly had had a child the boy might have ended up looking like that.

“I'm sorry about Graf,” Valentine said.

“Thank you. I'm adapting.” Her eyes kept striking the scar on his face, then circling away, then coming back to it, alighting just for a flash before looking away.

Valentine was used to the reaction. In an hour or two, or tomorrow, it would just be another part of his face.

“You never told me—”

“This is Edward,” Molly said, picking the boy up with an easy grace that suggested that she did it a hundred times a day.

“Edwid,” the child agreed.

“Edward, say ‘hi' to David.”

The child didn't want to say hi and buried his face in his mother's neck.

“I smell like a long trip,” Valentine said.

“Is that why you're limping?”

“I fell badly,” Valentine sort of lied, leaving out the bullet entering his leg that precipitated the fall.

“He's two and he's got his own mind about people. Six months ago he giggled at strangers and grabbed their fingers.”

Valentine did some mental math. If Molly had given birth about two years ago, the baby had been conceived at the end of his summer as a Quisling Coastal Marine in the
Thunderbolt
. Tripping over Post's square liquor bottles in the cabin they shared. The phony marriage to Duvalier. Had Molly's stomach quivered that August night the way it had when—

“I want to get cleaned up. Can I do that, and then we'll talk?”

“The only water in here is for the sink. We share flush toilets and showers at the end of the street. There's a hose that works at the stable, too; the vet room has a sluice in the center. Sometimes I'll just hook the hose in the ceiling there after work and shower.”

“I'll do that. Back in an hour?”

“Do you want dinner with us?”

“Yes,” Valentine said. Probably too eagerly. “If it's not trouble for you and Edward.”

“You changed my whole definition of trouble,” Molly said, but she smiled when she said it. “No, an extra plate is no trouble at all.”

Dinner that night passed in uncomfortable small talk.

The bunkhouse had a tiny folding table that just fit the child's high chair and the two adults. A propane stove— natural gas was obtainable in the Ozarks, almost plentiful compared to some parts of the country—with two burners and an oven made up a tiny kitchen annex. A bead curtain partition separated a couple of twin beds that sat under a few pictures and a black-framed set of military ribbons and decorations.

Molly described, in broad strokes, her marriage to Graf Stockard, and life at home for her father and sister—her mother had finally succumbed to the illness that the doctors described only as “malignant cancer” (
Are there any nonmalignant varieties?
Valentine wondered) while he had been crossing the Great Plains Gulag with Duvalier. She largely skipped over “the occupation,” and somehow Valentine couldn't ask her about the testing as the horsemeat stew changed place with a strawberry cobbler on the table, if not in the smears on Edward's face.
Are you keeping your promise to Post or trying to get back into her bed?