Valentine's Exile (38 page)

Pepsa professionally dressed Valentine's wound without saying a word. By the time she was done the doctor had a light down close to Ahn-Kha's stomach, injecting him just above the wound.

“You've got a lot of muscle in the midsection, my friend,” Dr. Boothe said. She probed a little farther and Ahn-Kha sucked wind. “Uh-huh. I think we can forget about peritonitis. I don't want to dig around without an X-RAY. ”

Xanadu had no shortage of medical equipment.

“Is Pepsa a nickname?” Valentine asked as the nurse gave him his hand back. She nodded.

“Pepsa's mute, Tar. You done there, girl? Get him the forms. Put down whatever bullshit you want, Bulletproof, then we'll talk.”

Valentine liked the doctor. Her careful handling of Ahn-Kha impressed him. That, and the fact that apparently she gave a mute a valuable job in a land where disabilities usually meant a trip to the Reapers.

Pepsa led Valentine to a lunchroom. A quarter pot of coffee—real coffee according to Valentine's nose— steamed on a counter in a brewer. Above the poster a placard read “FALL BLOOD DRIVE!
They bleed for you—now you can bleed for them!
Liter donors are entered in a drawing for an all-expense-paid trip to Niagara Falls.” Valentine filled out the forms, leaving most of the blocks empty—like the eleven-digit Ordnance Security ID, which occupied a bigger area on the form than name.

The vet dropped in and sat down, rubbing her eyes. “Calving last night, now your Grog. He'll be fine, but I will have to operate.”

“Will it be a hard operation?”

“Toughest part will be opening up those layers of muscle. But no. Kentucky, since you're not Ordnance you'll have to pay for these services, cheap though they are. What do you have on you?”

“Not much.”

She stared at him. “I know there are a lot of rumors about this place. That it's some kind of Babylon for high Ordnance officials. Or that strings of happy pills get passed out like Mardi Gras beads. I've heard the stories. I'm not saying you two jokers tried to get in here by doing something as stupid as putting some small-caliber bullets into each other. But Xanadu's no place you want to be.

“What it is, in fact, is a hospital for treating cases with dangerous infectious conditions. Anti-Kurian terrorists got it in their heads to try a few designer diseases lethal to the Guardians, and there's been some weird and very dangerous mutations as a result. That's why we've got all this ground and livestock, the less that passes in and out of those gates, the better. Just in case. Do you know how diseases work, microorganisms?”

“Yes, little creatures that can fit in a drop of water. They make you sick.”

“Uh-huh. So every breath you take behind these walls is a risk, and the closer you get to the main buildings, the more danger. So you should thank your lucky stars you were treated out here.”

Valentine nodded.
Interesting. Is it all a cover? Or is there a project I don't know about?

“After I operate we're going to keep your friend here for three days of observation. Don't worry, you'll have a bed, but you'll work for it. Consider it paying off your debt for your partner's medical treatment. Once you're out of here, go back to Kentucky and tell your buddies. This isn't a drugstore, it's not a brothel, and it's not a place to come get cured of the clap with the Ordnance picking up the tab. It's a scary lab full of death you can't even see coming. You understand, or should we start writing it on the sides of the legworms you sell us?”

“I understand,” Valentine said. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The job offer didn't come as much of a surprise. It happened over dinner in the “field house”—a small apartment building that reminded Valentine of Price's motel, essentially a line of tiny rooms, two sharing one bath, that housed the lowest of the low of Xanadu's laborers: the “hands.”

Up one step from the hands were the service workers, who mixed with the hands at their shared recreation center just behind the hospital. The fixtures made Valentine think it had originally been built to be a large-vehicle garage, but now it held Ping-Pong tables, a video screen and library (full of dull-as-distilled-water New Universal Church productions), and a jukebox (“Authentic Vintage MCDs”).

The service workers performed cafeteria and janitorial duties inside the main buildings. Valentine learned his first night there that they expected the hands to do the same for them. He learned how to cook “factory food,”—washtubsized trays of pastas, vegetables, and sweet puddings. Every other night there was meat from the Xanadu livestock. Beef predominated, which Valentine found remarkable. Even during his hitch as a Coastal Marine he'd only been fed chicken; beef was saved for feasts before and after a cruise.

A step above the service workers was the security. There weren't many of them, considering the evident importance of the facility. Enough to man the two gates (there was a smaller one to the east) and the towers, and to keep guard at all the main building doors. Valentine could have stormed the place with a single company of Wolves, had he been able to get the company that deep into the Kurian Zone.

And made it past the cordon of Reapers.

The security forces lived and worked from the long building almost connecting the hospital with the salmon-colored apartment blocks.

That was all Valentine could learn about the self-contained community in his off hours. During the day he worked on the plumbing for a fourth barn, stripped to the waist and digging the ditch for the piping. He recognized make-work when he saw it; a backhoe could have completed the digging in a day.

“You ever think of joining the Ordnance, Tar?” Michiver, the chief hand, asked him over his plate of stew at one of the long cafeteria tables in the rec center. Michiver had a nose that looked like an overgrown wart and ate slowly and stiffly and with a bit of a wince, like an old dog.

“I like the soap and the flush toilets,” Valentine said, truthfully enough.

“When I saw you pull up with your big Grog in that leather outfit, I thought you were just another Kentucky quirt. But you put in a real day's work and stay sober at night.”

“That's not hard when the nearest liquor store's ten miles away.”

Michiver's eyes puckered as he leaned close. “Ordnance duty is nice, if you put in the hours. Three hot meals a day, good doctors and dentists, Lake Ontario cruises for your vacation.”

“I'm not much on the Church, though.”

Michiver rested his head on rough hands. “It's just one day a week. I've gotten good at sleeping with my eyes open. Heard one lecture about the importance of recycling, heard them all.”

“So are you offering me a job, boss?”

“For you and your Grog, assuming he's willing to work. When that new barn goes in I'll need a supervisor, you could be it.”

“I was thinking of joining up with the Kentucky Legion. ”

“And get your head blown off? Chasing guerillas up and down the hills is alright for some, but you've got character and intelligence. I see it plain. We could use you here.”

“Doc Boothe warned me off about diseases.”

“Hands work outdoors; you're not cleaning up after the patients inside. I've been here fourteen years and I've never seen anything but colds and flu and a bit of pneumonia in the winter. Don't concern yourself with what's going on up at the Grands.”

“You sure seem eager to have me. That means there's a catch.”

“I'm no spring chicken, Tar,” Michiver said, rolling a lock of gray hair between thumb and forefinger. He had an I GAVE MY LITER button on his shirt. “If there's a catch, it hasn't caught me.”

“Do I have to sign a contract or anything?”

“Ohio's booming. Hard to find reliable men these days; everyone wants city work under the lights. You Kentuck aren't so hot for jump joints and dazzle halls. Don't worry about contracts, you can quit whenever you like. Forget about your tribesmen. No one in Kentucky's in a position to say boo to the Ordnance. Stay the weekend at least. Saturday's a half day and we're having a dance in town at the NUC hall. The Church is bringing down some husband-hunters from Cleveland and the beer's all the way from Milwaukee, if you're partial to that poison.” Michiver made his points poking the table, each poke nearer to Valentine as though trying to herd him into saying yes. “Great way to end your week here, either way—what you say?”

“I say fine.”

Ahn-Kha watched him get dressed for the dance—leathers on the bottom, freshly washed blue chambray workshirt up top—and offered only one piece of advice: “Don't drink. Doctor Boothe says Michiver doesn't touch a drop of alcohol. ”

Valentine wished he had something other than work boots to put on his feet. “I'm more interested in getting friendly with the security staff. There's one odd thing about this place; except for the people in charge of the various departments, and that vet's nurse, seems like no one here's worked here longer than a year or two. Except friend Michiver.”

Ahn-Kha gave that a moment's thought. “Perhaps you either get promoted or rotated out.”

“I get the feeling Michiver's offer is a wiggling pink worm inside the mouth of a very big snapping turtle.”

“It gives us time to look down the turtle's throat, my David.”

Valentine waited in front of the staff apartments, a little apart from the crowd of off-duty hands and service workers waiting for the buses into town. A last bottle of sealed Bulletproof was tucked inside a plain paper bag he cradled. He watched those waiting to go to the dance. A few passed around a silver flask, more smoked. The women wore golden metallic eyeshadow and heavy black liner, apparently the current style in Ohio.

A dozen of the security staff all waited together in a line against the wall, like the schoolkids too cool to be out on the playground.

Doctor Boothe rode by in her little four-wheeler—an electric golf cart tricked out for backcountry. She used it to get from animal to animal on Xanadu's horizon-spanning acreage. She stared at Valentine for a moment, then picked up her bags of instruments and turned indoors.

Three buses took them into the riverside town. Valentine managed to take a seat next to one of the security men, but he either stared out the window or spoke to the two of his class in the seats just ahead during the half-hour trip. The church hall turned out to be a quasicathedral with attached school; the dance was set up beneath raised basketball backboards in what had been the gymnasium. A raised stage was built into one end of the gym.

Red and blue streamers formed a canopy overhead and decorated the refreshment tables—provided by the Ohio Young Vanguard, Actualization Team #415, according to a sign and a jar accepting donations. A teenage girl, eyes bright enough to be the result of Benzedrine, thanked him for his five-dollar donation and offered him a four-color pamphlet.

THE ORDNANCE AND NUC THANKS ITS HEALTH SECURITY WORKERS OF XANADU read the banner over the raised platform at one end of the gymnasium. Dusty red curtains half closed off a stage, hiding the lighting gear for the musicians. At the other end folding tables and chairs had a few balloons attached.

A nostalgic hip-hop dj-backed band (“lame” pronounced one of the security staff) laid down a techno beat as they entered, and the chief bandsman started exhorting the crowd to enjoy themselves as soon as the workers trickled in. The music echoed oddly in the high-ceilinged, quarter-lit gym, making Valentine feel as though he'd just stepped inside a huge kettledrum.

Valentine knew a handful of names and a few more faces, and once he'd nodded to those he knew he sat down on the basketball stands and read the tri-fold pamphlet the Young Vanguard girl had given him.