Valentine's Exile (31 page)

“And keeping the nose up?”

“It's got a balancing organ kind of like your ear in the top of its front end. A little jerk makes it feel like it's out of balance, so it'll stick its head straight forward until the organ feels back in equilibrium. But if they're fed regularly they don't graze all the time. They don't need all that much if it's fair-quality feed. All the dirt they pull up in the wild is a lot of wasted effort.”

“How does it breathe?”

“That's something. Here.” Zak's leathers creaked as he squatted next to it. “Look underneath. That lighter flesh? We call that the ‘membrane' but it's actually a good two feet thick. That thing gets oxygen into its bloodstream. Water don't make much of a difference, but they get sluggish as hell and try to find high ground—though sometimes swamp water will kill them.”

“I've never seen one this close.”

“Where you from?”

“Iowa. Got out young. My dad worked for, you know—”

Zak nodded. “Me too. Indiana. Practically grew up under a tower. The P worked electricity. Cool stuff, but not if you're reporting to one of those pale-assed jumpers twice a day.”

“I left home at eleven,” Valentine said. “Ugly scene.”

“So what does the flea-ranch over there want with the Bulletproof?”

“I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.”

“We'll be at camp a little after sundown. Don't fall off.” Gib drove the legworm a little faster through open country. After a few unheeded yawlps, the mule trotted behind to avoid being dragged. The rolling blue hills left off and they climbed onto the beginning of a plateau, where they gave man, grog, and mule a breather. Valentine saw wooded mountaintops in the distance.

“Keep your guns handy,” Zak warned as night fell, looking over the landscape with a monocular. “There are guerillas in those mountains.”

They struck a road and followed it to a waypoint town of a dozen empty homes, unless you counted barn owls and mice, a couple of hollow corner bars, and an overgrown gas station and market once dependent on the farm clientele.

Valentine marked fresh legworm furrows everywhere. Some ran right up to the road surface before bouncing off like a ricocheting bullet.

They passed up a rise, and a boy standing guard over the road and his bicycle waved them toward a commanding-looking barn. A pile of weedy rubble that might once have been a house stood close to the road, and a crisscross of torn earth emanated from it. Valentine guessed that from a low-flying plane the landscape would look like an irregular spiderweb. Legworms stood everywhere, pale blue billboards in the moonshine.

“Who's that with you, Zak?” a man afoot called.

“Visitors looking for the Dispatcher. I'm vouching, and I'll bring 'em in. Where is he?”

“Up in the barn.”

Zak turned around, an easy operation on the wide back of the legworm. “We're here, folks. You'll have to leave your guns, of course.”

“Um, how do we . . . ?” Duvalier asked.

“Get a newbie pole, Royd,” Cookie called down.

“No, I'll help,” Ahn-Kha said, sliding down the tapered tail. He lifted an arm to Duvalier. “Here.”

Valentine jumped down, as did Bee and Price.

“Why not just jump?” Valentine asked Duvalier quietly. “I've seen you dive headfirst from two stories.”

“Just a helpless lil' ol' thing without a big man around, Val,” Duvalier said. “No harm in having them think that, anyway.”

They got out of the lane and made a pile of their weapons and packs.

“Coffee's by the fire pit. Toilet holes are up in the old house,” Zak said. “There's a lime barrel, so send down a chaser. Let me know when you're ready to see the Dispatcher. ”

“Bee—guard!” Price said to his assistant.

“Doesn't she have to use the toilet pits?” Duvalier asked.

“She's not shy,” Price said. “And she always buries.”

“I would just as soon not scoot my hindquarters on the grass,” Ahn-Kha said.

Cookie stretched. “There's plenty of New Universal Church
Improved Testaments
up there. Help yourself.”

Valentine wanted coffee more than anything. Duvalier took her walking stick and headed for the rubbled house.

They'd missed dinner, but a line of stretchers propped up on barrels still held bread and roast squash. Sweating teenage girls washed utensils in boiling water as a gray-haired old couple supervised from behind glowing pipes.

“Coffee?” Valentine asked.

“That pot, stranger,” one of the girls said, tucking stray hair into a babushka. Valentine took a tin cup out of the hot wash water, choosing a mild scalding over the used cups tossed on the litters and plywood panels, and shook it dry.

It was real coffee. Not the Jamaican variety he'd grown regrettably used to while with Malia at Jayport, but real beans nonetheless. He liked the Bulletproofs even better.

The surge of caffeine brought its own requirements. He remembered to chase it down the hole leading to the unimaginable basement chamber with a ladle of lime.

McDonald R. Dalian, Dispatcher for the Bulletproof, was viewing babies he hadn't met yet when the Price-Valentine mission entered his barn.

The barn was a modern, cavernous structure that had survived its half century of inattention in remarkably good shape, thanks to its concrete foundation and aluminum construction. Small chemical lightsticks Valentine had heard called Threedayers in the Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps hung from the rafter network above.

Men, women, and children of the Bulletproof, most in their black leathers or denim, sat atop defunct, stripped farm machinery to watch Dispatcher Dalian hold court.

A half-dozen guitars, two banjos, and a dulcimer provided music from one corner. Another end of the bar had been turned into a food storage area; shelves had been cleared of odds and ends and replaced by sacks of corn and barrels of flour. A laundry also seemed to be in operation, with clothes and diapers drying on lines strung between stripped combines and the wall.

The Dispatcher had indeterminate features—a little Asian, and maybe a dash of Irish or African for curly hair, and a great high prow of a nose. Except for the curly hair, he reminded Valentine of his father, especially around the protruding ears and out-thrust jaw. He cooed over a sleeping baby as the proud mother and father looked on.

“She's grabbing my finger even while she's sleeping,” the Dispatcher said. “Don't tell me she won't be a lead high rider some day.”

The Dispatcher and the father of the child bumped their fists, knuckle to knuckle.

The flying buttress nose went up and turned. “Air strike! Only one living thing on the planet smells like that.” He handed the baby back and turned. “Hoffman Z. Price has returned.”

Price had his usual six-foot circle of solitude around him, even in the busy barn. “And grateful for the generosity of the Bulletproof, Dispatcher.”

The Dispatcher opened a tin. “Tobacco?”

Price extracted his pipe and the Dispatcher took a pinch. “You picked your moment. We've got the better part of the tribe together.”

“Is worm meat still profitable in Lexington?” Price asked.

“You're innocent of the ways of the trading pits as well as soap, brother. That den of moneychangers and Pharisees takes my meat and my belief in human goodness. I kid, I kid. But if it weren't for the Grogs in Saint Louis I'd be bankrupt. So I hope you're feeling generous. If I have another fugitive in my tribe I'll drive a harder bargain.”

Valentine found himself liking the Dispatcher, even if he could be categorized as a Quisling and had a touch of tentpole-revivalist singsong to his words. There was no “step into my office,” and as far as he could tell no retinue of subordinates and bodyguards one might expect of a feudal lord. The man carried out his business in the center of his people; any interested eye or curious ear could hear the latest.

A boy brought a spittoon made from an old motorcycle helmet.

Price pointed to Valentine. “I'm looking for a ride to the Ohio for five. We need food for same. Myself, Bee, David here, his friend Ali, and another Grog, an emissary from the Omaha area named Ahn-Kha.”

Ahn-Kha didn't claim any titles, though in Valentine's opinion he deserved many. Valentine had to hand it to Price for adding a lot of sizzle to what was probably a very unappetizing steak.

“What does the job pay?”

“Two gold justices. Fort Knox mint.”

“Hard currency. Lovely. But it won't pay for the kind of numbers you'd need to get up there safely. There are towers along the Ohio. That could be a dangerous trip, and the Bulletproof have no friends north of Lexington. I'll have to see if I can find you a lead rider willing to hazard a one-worm excursion.”

“You seem to have most of them here. That man Zak seems capable.”

“He is. I'll speak to him after tomorrow's challenge. He's a bit distracted at the moment. His sister was the lead rider for the legworm that started all this.”

“Where should we camp?” Price asked.

“Bed down where you like, but keep clear of the campfires around that farm across the fields to the east. That's the Wildcat camp.”

“May we use your laundry, sir?” Valentine asked. Everything he owned was long overdue for more than just a streamside rinse.

“Of course, umm, David,” the Dispatcher said. “Our soap is yours. Did you hear me, Hoffman?”

As they walked back to collect the others Valentine had one more question for Price.

“I didn't know you could eat legworms. Even in the Ozarks we couldn't stomach it.”

“You have to butcher them fast. The meat can be ground into pig feed. But there are other ways. Didn't you ever have a Ribstrip?”

Valentine remembered the preprocessed barbecued meat from his days masquerading as a Coastal Marine and in Solon's short-lived TMCC. Placed in a hard roll with onions and pickle relish, it was a popular sandwich.

“You don't mean—”

“Yeah. You put enough barbecue sauce on you can hide the taste. Ribstrips are ground and pressed legworm.”

Human instinct is to join a crowd, and Valentine gave in to it the next morning. Everyone in the party save Duvalier came along to watch events.

At breakfast, mixing with the Bulletproofs, he'd learned a good deal about what to expect out of the contest. The challenge was fairly simple, a mixture of lacrosse and one-on-one basketball.

The two sides lined up at either end of an agreed field, roughly a thousand yards apart. At the Bulletproof's side, a line of short construction stakes with red blasting tape stood about ten yards out from the crowd, and the only one at the line was the Dispatcher.

Valentine decided there was probably an interesting story having to do with the rifle range of an experienced marksman behind it, but didn't press the issue. The two contestants each went to the center of the field, carrying only a legworm starting hook. The referee, usually either a medical man or a member of the clergy, would be in the center of the field with a basketball. He or she would toss it high enough in the air to dash out of the way before it came back into crook-swinging distance, and the contest would end when one contestant brought the basketball to his side.

“Why a basketball?” Valentine asked a Bulletproof rider who was also explaining the rules to his young son. Nothing was happening yet. The Dispatcher and some of his riders were meeting their opposite numbers in the Wildcats, presumably negotiating the recompense that would be paid.

“You know the answer, Firk. Tell him,” the father suggested.

The boy shook his head and shrank against his father. Valentine turned away to save the boy embarrassment and looked out across the dew-spangled field, recently hayed. Opportunistic spiders had woven their webs on the stalks, creating tiny pieces of art like cut glass in the lingering summer sunshine. Some operational farms still existed in this part of Kentucky. Valentine wondered how they ran off grazing legworms.

“It's about the size of a worm egg,” the father explained. “That, and basketballs are easy finds.”

“No other rules?” Valentine asked.

“I see where you're going. You can't bring anything but the crook. You're stripped down to your skivvies to make sure. Not even shoes.”

“Does one ever try to just brain the other and then walk back to the home side with the ball?”

“You get that sometimes, but both sides hate a plain old brawl. Slugging's no way to pump up your mojo, or your tribe's.”

A stir of excitement broke out in the crowd when a wandering wild, or unreined, legworm dug a feeding tray toward the challenge field. A pair of legworms with riders hustled out at full speed for a legworm, about the rate of a trotting horse. By judicious use of the mount's bulk, the furrow was redirected.

By the time that ended the two parties had returned from the center of the challenge field. The Dispatcher looked downcast.

Valentine edged closer to the center of the line of people, but many others had the same idea.

He couldn't hear through the babble. “What's up?” people called.

Word passed quickly in ever-expanding circles. “The Wildcat challenger is a Grog! Some kind of import!”

“Ringer!”

“Damn them.”

“Take a knee, everyone!” someone bellowed.

Everyone but the Dispatcher sat down. He looked around, nodded to a few, and spoke out to the squash field of foxtailed heads.

“Yes, you heard right. They've got a big Grog they're using in the challenge. Biggest one I've ever seen—even standing on all fours he's bigger than me.”