Valentine's Exile (36 page)

“I could dawdle along the river here for a bit. I never got my vacation in at the Shack. I owe myself some fishing. ”

“Three days' worth?” Valentine asked.

“Three days.”

“Lots of people here on bicycles,” Valentine said. “Price, where do you suppose we can rent some?”

Price treated himself to a motel room. He found one with a distinctly nondiscriminating owner when it came to personal hygiene, Grogs, mules littering the weed-covered parking lot, and where the occupants poured their night soil.

It turned out you couldn't rent bicycles, and no money would buy a bike capable of supporting Ahn-Kha. By parting with yet another gold coin to a bike and moped dealer under a canopy of festive plastic bunting, he and Duvalier each got bicycles with tires, functioning brakes, storage baskets, even clip-on flashlight headlamps that charged by pedaling.

After some exploring with Ahn-Kha they found a house deep in the woods, not quite a cabin and not quite a shack. While it rested at a tilt thanks to the absence of a foundation, there was a functioning well and Ahn-Kha got water flowing into the house again with a little tinkering and a lot of root cutting.

The weather turned fair again and Valentine and Duvalier bicycled together, almost unarmed—he brought the .22 pistol, she her sword-carrying stick—starting at the nearest crossroads to the end-of-the-line station and working their way outward, following roads heavy enough to support trucks.

Valentine kept turning them to the north and east, into hillier and more isolated country. He couldn't say what drove him into this particular notch of Ohio. Perhaps it was a line of three legworms patrolling a ridge, glimpsed as they crept through the trees at a distance. Or it was the one true military convoy that passed them coming out of it; three tractor trailers, with Grog troops in supporting vehicles and venerable five-ton cargo trucks.

They were only questioned once, by a pair of policemen also on bicycles. Valentine showed his card and the warrant for the renegade electrician, explaining that he'd learned she had a cousin who lived out in these woods.

“Don't think so, Ayoob,” one of the patrol said. “Even during deer season most around here know to avoid the point country. You're better off searching the other side of the river.”

So on their third day they risked a predawn ride along the river road to get into the hills early. Other than the good condition of the roads in the region, he couldn't point to anything but a feeling.

“Another feeling. Is it because you can't go back?” Duvalier asked. “Is that why you won't let this go? You need something to do, even a ghost chase?”

Valentine chewed a wild bergamot leaf and tossed its purple-pink flower to Duvalier. “You've been good company. After today you can go find the Lifeweavers. But be sure to tell them about this.”

She nuzzled his cheek. The half quarrel had faded.

“Wish we could find out where that's going,” Valentine said as they breakfasted on bread and cheese. A green-painted military truck turned off from the river road and approached their position. Black smoke belched from its stack as the truck shifted up.

“Can do,” she said, putting the flower between her teeth and picking up her bicycle. “Watch my coat.”

“Ali—”

She pedaled madly in the same direction as the truck, and brought her bike alongside. She reached out and grabbed a tie for the cargo bed's canvas cover.

Valentine watched her disappear.

He had little to do over the next three hours but refill their water bottles and worry. When she came coasting down the hill again she had a huge smile.

“I've got a date for tonight,” she said, pulling up her bike and accepting a water bottle. “Nice guy from New Philadelphia. Lance Corporal Scott Thatcher. He plays the guitar.”

“Thought you were leaving tonight.”

“Don't you want to know what I found?”

The jibe Valentine was working on died half-formed. “You found something?”

“It's big, it's well-guarded, and Thatcher didn't offer to take me to lunch inside, even with a lot of hints. You wanna see?”

Valentine picked up his bike as Duvalier shoved her coat into the basket on the back of her bike.

“What is it?” Valentine asked as they pushed up the hill.

“I'm not sure. It looks kind of like a hospital. There were ambulances out front, military and civilian. Big grounds, double-fenced.”

They topped a hill; another loomed on the other side of a narrow gully. The road took a hairpin turn at a small stream. “I don't suppose your Corporal Thatcher illuminated you?”

“He said he was just a delivery boy.”

A truck blatted through the trees. They pulled their bikes off the road and watched it negotiate the gulley. It was an open-backed truck, filled with an assortment of uniformed men, some in bandages, some just weary-looking.

“Okay, it is a hospital,” Valentine said as they remounted their bikes. “Why all the security, then?”

They finally saw it from the top of the next hill.

“This is probably as far as we should go,” Duvalier said. “There's a watch post at the end of the trees.”

Valentine couldn't see much through the trees, just a few salmon-colored building tops, at least a dozen stories tall. The ground leveled out past the hill, flat ground and a straight road to a guarded gate beyond a half mile or so of open ground. Valentine looked through his minibinoculars. Yes, there was a little watch station, about the size of a life-guard's house at a beach, near the break in the trees.

“Three layers of fencing, with a road between,” Duvalier said. “Outer layer is electrified. Innermost layer is just a polite six feet of glorified chicken wire. He dropped me off at the gate. The gatehouse looks normal enough, but ten yards out to either side there's tenting over something. I'm guessing heavy weapons.”

Valentine did some mental math. This place was perhaps twenty minutes from the train tracks, in trucks driving forty miles an hour.

“Oh, Thatcher gave it a name.”

“He did?”

“He called it ‘Zan-ado.' ”

“Xanadu?” Valentine asked.

“Yeah. Mean anything to you?”

“I've heard the word. I don't know what it means. A fairyland or some such. You hanging around for your date?”

“I'm meeting him in Ironton.”

“Ahn-Kha and I will check this out. Tonight.”

They said good-bye to Price while Duvalier biked off to keep her appointment. Valentine decided he could trust Price with a message to Southern Command. Someone needed to know about Xanadu.

If Price was willing to act as courier.

Valentine insisted on a farewell drink. Their supply of Bulletproof had been much reduced in trading, but they still had a few stoppered bottles.

They drank it inside the filthy motel room, windows and doors wide open to admit a little air.

“Price, you ever run into any guerillas?”

“I avoid them if I can. I've had my guns commandeered off me. They've threatened to shoot Bee, too.”

“If you could get a message through to the Resistance, you'd really help the Cause.”

“
The Cause
. Not that shit again.”

“It's the only—”

“No! You don't tell me about the Cause, boy.” Price took a drink. “I know your Cause. I know Everready's Cause.”

“How did you come to know Everready? What happened with those teeth?”

Price took another long swallow. “Don't suppose you ever heard of a place called Coon County?”

“No.”

“Won't find it on your old maps. Nice little spot, up in the mountains near Chattanooga, north of Mount Eagle. Called it Coon County because of Tom Coon, roughest son of a bitch you ever met. I bet he killed near as many Reapers as Everready. Ol' Everready was our liaison officer with Southern Command. Got radio gear and explosives through him.

“We had a bad scrape and lost twenty-six men, captive. Colonel Coon, he had some Quisling prisoners of his own. We kept them around pulling plows or cutting wood, that kind of stuff. He went in, alone, to negotiate. We figured they hung him, since he vanished for a month. But wouldn't you know, he came back with twenty-four. Said two had been killed before he could get there, and he exchanged the survivors for twenty-four of our prisoners.

“A few weeks later this big operation got under way, Rattlesnake I think it was called. Lots of guerillas involved. I missed it because I had Lyme disease. Tick bite. Put me on antibiotics and finally got a transfusion from old Everready.

“Then Colonel Coon came back. He looked tired, but he took the time.”

He stared out the window, looking at his mule grazing in the field across the road. Valentine wondered what visions he really saw.

“Coon sat by each bed in the hospital, told a few jokes. He asked me how my wife was doing, if the baby had come. He had that kind of memory.

“Then the Reaper showed up.

“It wasn't any kind of a fight, any more than pigs in a slaughter pen put up a fight. Doc Swenson tried to get to a gun; he went down first. A nurse ran. I remember Coon wounded her in the leg. Kneecapped her.

“The Reaper took a friend of mine, Grouse, we called him. The woman next to me blew air into her IV and died rather than have the Reaper take her. I just froze up. I couldn't move a muscle. Not even my eyes, hardly. It killed the nurse right at the bottom of my bed.

“It fed and Coon started staggering around. He was speaking so fast—you ever hear someone speaking in tongues, David? Like that, words coming out as fast as voltage. The Reaper started dancing, doing this sorta waltz with the nurse's body as it jumped from bed to bed. Some of her blood and piss got on me as it swung her around, hit me right in the eye.

“That's when Everready came in. He gave it a face full of buckshot and stuck a surgical knife in its ear. Then he drowned Coon in the slop bucket where they emptied the bedpans. He picked me up like I was a six-year-old girl and ran.

“Well, there were Reapers everywhere. Coon had led them right in. They got everyone in Coon County, even— even my wife.”

Price passed the bottle back to Valentine.

“Everready told me about how he'd heard from the Lifeweaver what a seductive thing it was, to feed on another man's spirit like that. He said humans could do it same as the others with the right training—kind of like what the Lifeweavers do to men like Everready. I thought they got to Colonel Coon when he went to bargain about those twenty-six men, but Everready said it was probably even before that. I felt dirty, living when Na—everyone else died.”

“What's Coon County like now?” Valentine asked.

“Just another Kurian Zone, David. I gave up the war then. How are we supposed to win when they can grant a man immortality for joining in? The Kurian Zone ain't so bad. The Reapers feed behind closed doors, it's like it's not even happening. A person gone now and then, like they walked off into the country and never came back.”

Price looked at him sidelong.

“Even the end's not so bad, they tell me. The Reapers, they look into your eyes and you see pretty meadows full of flowers and sunlight, or everyone you know who's dead welcoming you, urgin' you on, like. You don't even feel the tongue going in. That doesn't sound so bad. A good Christian doesn't fear death.”

“He doesn't hasten it, either,” Valentine said.

“Young and idealistic. You want to talk ‘hastening' death—you've been in battles. Who's got the better deal, the man in the Kurian Zone has plenty of food on the table, leisure time to spend, a family if he wants—children, even grandchildren if he keeps his nose clean—compare that to you boys in the Ozarks. Get drafted, what, sixteen is it now? Break your back in labor units until a rifle becomes available, and then you're dead by twenty. How many virgins you buried, David? What kind of life did they have?

“Only people I'm setting myself against are those that want to make other people's tiny slice of life a misery. Murderers, rapists, child touchers, swindlers. That's my cause.”

“You're forgetting the biggest murderers of all.”

“You say. I say all they're doing is making it sensible and orderly. You get an orderly birth, an orderly life, an orderly death. I've come across dozens of folks running from the Kurians. Or at least they started out that way. Two, three days later they're hungry and cold and they ask me to lead them to food and shelter, thank me for putting them back in the Order, even if it's an NUC waystation with a Reaper in the belfry. They want the Order.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Price, if it makes you feel better. Wish I'd known the man Everready saved.”

“You missed him,” Price said. “I don't. Let's talk again in ten years and see if you're still so sure of your Cause.”

Valentine rode his bicycle and Ahn-Kha loped along, his gear tied to Valentine's handlebar and on the back of his bike. A distant whistle sounded curfew as the sun disappeared, and Valentine walked the bike off the road.

They slept for three hours, long enough to give their bodies a break, then moved through the hills more cautiously. Valentine kept his lifesign down, and hoped that his old ability to feel the cold presence of a prowling Reaper hadn't been dulled by disuse. Sure enough, there was one in the gully with the hairpin turn on the road, keeping watch.

They put earth and trees between themselves and the Reaper, threw a wide loop around—

And Valentine sensed another one, a dark star on his mental horizon.