Valentine's Exile (21 page)

“Goddamn!” Everready swore as yet another grabbed her.

Though mad, though they felt no pain, her attackers weren't Reapers. She pushed one off, kicked another, punched a third, pale limbs and coat a whirling blur of motion. Everready shot a fourth with his carbine.

Valentine dropped back through the hole.

“No!” Everready shouted.

Valentine picked up her sword cane and used it as a club, swinging at the heads and arms coming around the fryer.

“Jump!” Valentine yelled as Everready shot another one down. Valentine struck a ravie on the floor as it clawed at her ankle; his kick broke its jaw.

Duvalier crouched and jumped, and went up through the hole like a missile.

Valentine drew the blade from Duvalier's sword stick. Using the wooden tube in his other hand, he battered his way back toward the office. He felt hands clutch at his canvas boots and broke the grip—if they were snakeproof they'd probably be ravies-resistant—then cracked one across the jaw.

“Val, where are you going?” Duvalier shouted.

“Lemme at that bite, girl!” he heard Everready say.

“Diversion!” he shouted.

Screaming his own head off, Valentine rushed into the office. The back wall had bloody splatters and buckshot holes. A staggered ravie, holding himself up on the desk, received Valentine's boot to his chest, throwing him back onto one coming through the door. Valentine pinned the fresher one like a bug on a piece of Styrofoam with the sword point and vaulted through the door, running.

“Olly olly oxen free!” Valentine shouted, banging a Dumpster with the wooden half of Duvalier's sword cane. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. London Bridge is falling down!” He hurried around into the next parking lot, banging on empty car hoods.

Ravies turned and began to run toward him, screaming.
Fine, better the oxygen flowing out of their pipes than into their bloodstreams
.

“Meet me by the casinos tonight!” Valentine shouted to the pair on the roof. He saw Everready applying a dressing and the iodine bottle to Duvalier's shoulder.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Valentine called again. “Hey diddle diddle, the freak and the fiddle—”

The doughnut shop began to empty, and other ravies hurried up from the direction of the riverfront.

“Ring around the rosy!”

The last few around the doughnut shop turned toward him.

“Warriors, come out to play-yay!” Valentine didn't know what childhood game the last one signified, but an old Wolf in Foxtrot Company used to employ the taunt on hidden Grogs, clinking a pair of whiskey bottles together.

He ran.

The ravies followed, screaming.

Ten minutes later and a mile away . . .

His bad leg ached, but he had to ignore it. Ignore everything but the staggered line of ravies running behind him. Valentine turned another corner, his third right through the suburban streets in a row. The pursuers were screaming less, growing weaker—which was just as well; he didn't know how long he could hold out.

Two more blocks, one more
. He summoned the energy for one final sprint to the last turn, running with the sword cane like a baton in a relay race. His speed came at the cost of a deep, deep burn in his legs and lungs—

And there they were, a few stumbling ravies in a line, following the ones ahead of them, emitting an occasional strangled yelp. The very end of the long file of pursuers, formed into a wagon-train-like circle around six square blocks of Tunica suburbs.

Valentine marked the crash scene he'd seen the first time he ran down this street, impossibly compact cars piled into each other in a rear-end collision, looking like the skeletons of two mating turtles. He staggered behind the cars and sank to his knees, desperately trying to control his panting.

He peered between the cars, looking for his pursuers.

They followed his path onto the tree-limb-littered street, caught sight of their fellows, and ran to catch up to them.

Valentine was too tired to smile.

He crept through the underbrush of a lawn, counted twenty of the pack chasing their own tails. Already some were giving up, dropping to their knees and scratching at the accumulated leaves and pine needles in frustration.

Then he noticed the bite—or was it a cut? Must have happened in the doughnut shop; none of them had been close to him since—but something had made his elbow bleed. He applied his iodine and prayed. Under stress, some men's mouths spewed obscenity, others Sunday-morning verse. In this case, the latter felt more appropriate as the sting of the iodine took hold.

The cut had some angry red swelling around it by the time night fell and he walked, slowly and gently, down to the riverfront.

Two of the defunct casinos had electric light. Several had gigantic red crosses painted on their bargelike hulls, the universal symbol of help to whoever asks. Fire-gutted hotels lined the riverfront road. Valentine could picture the brilliant lighting above and around the multistory parking lots, the banners along the streets, the florid wealth of a gambling haven opening at the side of the Mississippi, beckoning like a Venus flytrap.

He kept out of the masses of somnambulists wandering under the lights, scooping handfuls of meal out of great troughs lining the streets.

Naturally, more food meant more piles of feces. And more rats eating the feces. And cats eating the rats.

He found an empty trough and passed a wet finger through it, sniffed the result. It smelled and felt like ground corn—hog-feed-grade corn, at that. Some rice and millet, too.

Valentine would rather eat the ants disposing of the leftovers.

“Val,” he heard a hiss.

It came from the second floor of one of the hotels. He saw Duvalier's face in a window.

He floated into the shell of the fire-gutted building, a concrete skeleton.

She met him at the staircase with a hug, and they looked at each other's iodine-smeared wounds.

“Let's hope the vaccinations weren't just water,” Valentine said. Rumor had it that ravies vaccine commanded a fantastic price in the Kurian Zone, and Southern Command had its share of the unscrupulous.

They crept upstairs. Cats (of the feline variety) scattered in either direction at their approach.

Duvalier and Everready had his pack and gun. Everready extended a piece of greasy waxed paper. “Cold chicken and a biscuit. From the Missions.”

“What's next?” Valentine asked.

Everready threw a bone down the hall. A catfight started almost the second it landed. “I passed word to my contact in the Missions. He's going to get in touch with a trading man in Memphis, one of my sets of eyes in the city. Cotswald. Vic Cotswald. He'll take you in. Not the nicest man in the world, but reliable. He thinks I'm working for the Kurians down south, keeping tabs on things in Memphis. He knows me by the handle Octopus. Can you remember that? Octopus?”

“Great. What's my cover?” Valentine asked.

“I took care of that, Val,” Duvalier said. “You're Stu Jacksonville, a new pimp on the Gulf Coast. We know the area from our time as husband and wife, so there'll only be a minimal amount of bullshitting.”

“You sure you want to play a whore?” Valentine asked.

“Not whore. Bodyguard. Comrade in arms.”

“Gay caballero?” Valentine asked.

“Lesbian, if you want to get technical.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“You want to do what?” Vic Cotswald said.

Cotswald was a heavyset man, and puffed constantly, like an idling steam engine. He took up a substantial portion of the back cabin of his “limo”—a yellow-painted old Hummer.

“Learn about this fellow's setup,” Valentine said. “Everyone's heard of Moyo. Why not do what he did, only somewhere else?”

They'd met at a roadside diner built out of a pair of old trailers fixed together and put up on concrete blocks. Duvalier looked a little wan and not at all herself. Valentine hoped it was just the pain of her wound and not the onset of ravies.

He'd know if she started trembling. That was usually the first sign. It might have been better to leave her with Everready in his casino-barge hideout, but she'd insisted on accompanying him into Memphis.

Valentine was dressed all in black. His costume was, in fact, a cut-down version of a priest's habit—it was the only well-made, matching clothing Everready could easily find at the Missions. Valentine had dyed the snake-boots to match on his own, and after cutting off the sleeves added a red neck cloth and a plastic carnation, scavenged from a discarded kitchen on one of the old gambling barges. He wore the gleaming pistol openly in its leather shoulder holster. The U-gun was zipped back up with the rest of their dunnage.

Cotswald wiped grease from his brow and sweat from his upper lip. “Of course everyone's heard of Moyo. Nobody moves deposits in or out of this town without him. The reason Moyo's still Moyo is that he doesn't let anyone get close to him who hasn't come up through his organization. He doesn't just hire Gulfies up to get a chance at the inventory.”

Valentine had already learned two pieces of Memphis slang: deposits were the individuals in the bank camps waiting for transshipment to their probable doom; inventory was attractive women—and a few men and kids, he imagined—meant for the fleshpots, private and public.

“Octopus is a good guy. Pays well for the little scraps of information that pass my way. What are you offering?”

Valentine reached under his shirt and pulled up a simple lanyard that hung around his neck. A shiny ring turned at the end of the line.

Everready had taken it off a dead general.

“A brass ring? Is it legit?”

“It's mine. You get me in to see Moyo, talk me up, and I'll give it to you. I'm sure you have contacts who can verify its authenticity. If it doesn't check out, you can blow the whistle on me.”

“A coast ring's no good here.”

“But it is good on the coast. Ever think of your retirement? There are worse places than a beach in Florida.”

Cotswald broke into a fresh sweat. “A ring. You better not be doing a bait and switch.”

“A
real
ring and a friend named Jacksonville. The higher-ups are putting me in charge of Port Recreation. Got to keep the plebes happy.”

“When's the end of the rainbow, Jacksonville?”

“I'm rebuilding a hotel down there. Furnishings are on their way. I just want to see about some—inventory.”