Valentine's Exile (9 page)

“Mystery's their business,” Valentine said.

She emptied her mug. “Want to blow this bash?”

The beer worked fast. Valentine already felt like listening to music and discussing the nurses' legs with Post. But he couldn't leave Duvalier tipsy and doubtful.

“Yes,” he lied.

Her shoulders went a little farther back, and more of the red bra appeared beneath her vest. “Lead on, Mc-Gruff, ” she said.

Valentine was pretty sure it was MacDuff—Father Max made his classes perform two Shakespeare plays a year— but couldn't prick her newly improved mood with something as trivial as, well, trivia.

The men were setting up some sort of chariot race involving wheelchairs, Narcisse, and a Razor with his leg in a cast from ankle to midthigh. By the looks of the clothesline traces and wobbly wheels on the chairs, the soldier's other leg would be in a cast by morning, but Valentine and Duvalier hollered out their hurrahs and stayed to watch. Narcisse's wheelchair overturned at the third turn—she didn't have enough weight to throw leftward to keep both wheels of the chair down in the turn—but she gamely hung on and was dragged through the freshly trimmed parking lot meadow to victory, garlanded by a dandelion leaf in her rag turban.

Duvalier pressed herself up against him as they jumped and cheered her on. As they wandered away from the race, she was on his arm.

“Seems like a staff appointment deserves a special celebration, ” she slurred as they left the crowd and passed under the Accolade's bunting.

“Careful, now,” Valentine said as they made a right turn toward his quarters. “You're evil, teasing me like that.”

She looked around and saw that the hall was empty. Then she kissed him, with the same fierce intensity that he remembered from the bloody murder in the Nebraska caboose.

“Let's. Now.
Right
now.” She extracted a half-empty flask from within her vest and took a swig.

Valentine had desired her for years, and they'd come close to making love out of sheer boredom once or twice while serving together in the KZ. But the half joking, half flirting they'd done in the past had always been passed back and forth around a shield of professionalism, like two prisoners swapping notes around a cell wall.

“I wanna see what that little Husker cowgirl thought was so special,” she said with a facial spasm that might have been a flirtatious eyebrow lift that suddenly decided to become a wink.

He pulled her into his room and shut the door behind them.

“Not drunk and not with us about to—” he began, fighting off her fingers as they sought his belt.

“Now who's the tease, huh?” she asked, falling back onto the bed as though he'd kicked her there. “You're a lot of talk and fancy words. Ahn-Kha's got bigger balls than you—”

That struck Valentine as a curious—and stipulatable— argument. They'd both seen Ahn-Kha any number of times, and the Golden One had a testicular sack the size of a ripe cantaloupe.

“Ali, I—”

“It's always
I
with you, Val. Ever notice that? I don't even want us to be a
we,
I just want one fuck, one goddamn, sweaty fuck with a guy I halfway care about. I spent eight months on my back for those grunting Quislings. Wasn't like blowing some eighteen-year-old sentry to get through a checkpoint 'cause I had a story about how I gotta get medicine to my sick aunt—I had to eat breakfast with those greasy shits and talk about how great they were and just once I'd like—”

And with that it was like all the air had left her lungs. She leaned over with her mouth open for a moment, a surprised look on her face—then she fled to the bathroom.

Valentine pulled his lengthening hair back from his eyes, listened to the mixture of sobs and retching sounds echoing off the tiles in the washroom, and let out a long breath. At the moment he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't rather face another air pirate raid than go into that room.

But he did so.

The mess was about what he expected. A horrible beery-liquor smell wove itself above and around the sharper odor of her bile, and she was crying into the crook of a vomit-smeared arm at the edge of the toilet.

He picked her up. After a quick struggle he set her in bed and took off her shoes and socks, and gave each rough foot one gentle squeeze.

“No, not now,” she said.

“I wasn't.”

“I got puke on my good bra.”

“I'll rinse it out and hang it up.”

“Thanks.”

Her freckles looked like wildflowers in a field of golden wheat.

By the time he'd used a washcloth on her face and arm, rinsed out her clothes—and her socks for good measure— she was murmuring at some level of sleep. He put a thin blanket over her and cleaned up the toilet area, using a bowl as a wash bucket.

When that was done she was truly asleep, rolled into the blanket like a softly snoring sausage.

That night Valentine sat in his musty room with its vomit-disinfectant-and-tobacco smell and quieted his mind by laying out the three pieces of paper bearing Gail Foster's name. Black Lightning was still pounding away, the amplified music much reduced by the bulk of the intervening hotel.

He took a yellowed blank sheet of paper from his order book and drew a cross in the center, dividing the paper into four squares. He labeled the top left “Goal” and the top right “Known Known.” The bottom left became “Known Unknown.” Another scrape or two from his pencil and the bottom right box had the label “Unknown Unknown.”

While it seemed like gibberish, the formula had been taught to him in his youth by the old Jesuit, Father Max, the teacher who'd raised him after the murder of his family. Father Max had told him (a couple of times—when Father Max was in his cups he sometimes forgot what he said) that the analytic tool came from a woman who used to work at the old United States Department of Defense intelligence agency.

It divided one's knowledge of a subject into facts you knew, facts you knew you didn't know, and the possibility of important pieces of knowledge out there that you weren't aware of until they rose up and bit you. But by diligent pursuit of the questions in the other two squares you slowly accomplished the goal, and sometimes found out about the third in time to act.

And when an Unknown Unknown showed up you had to be mentally prepared to erase even your Known Knowns.

Valentine had lived in the Kurian Zone, had even spoken to one directly, and all his experiences had left him with was the unsettling conviction that humanity's place in the universe wasn't much different than that of a
Canis familiaris
—the common dog. There were wild dogs and savage dogs and tamed dogs and trained dogs, and dogs knew all about other dogs, or could learn soon enough, but their guesses about the wider world (cars and phones and other phenomena) and a dog's place in it was limited by the dog's tendency to put everything in dog terms.

If he tried to put himself in the place of the practically immortal Kurians, an endless series of doubts and fears popped up. The Kurians had laid waste to Earth once with a series of natural catastrophes and disease, so what was to stop them from unleashing an apocalyptic horseman or two if mankind became too troublesome? He'd seen on the Ranch in Texas that the Kurians were toying with different forms of life in an effort to find a more pliable source of vital aura than man, in the form of the ratbits. How much time did man have before the Kurians decided to clear off the ranchland that was Earth and raise a different kind of stock? Wouldn't a goatherd who got sick of bites from the billys switch to sheep?

Depressing speculation didn't help find Post's wife. He remembered his promise and picked up the pencil again. Under “Goal” he wrote: “Learn what happened to Gail Foster.” He did some mental math as he transcribed Kurian dates (the years started in 2022, and after a brief attempt at calendar reform had reverted back to old-style months and days).

He checked the list of names on the Miskatonic paper again and wrote:

Why only females tested? (Fertility? Privacy? Expediency? )

The last was guesswork, for all he knew they tested all women, whether of childbearing age or not. There was the chance that they gave men the same test too, and for reasons of their own performed the tests separately—though the Kurians were not known for breaking up families and couples, it made groups of humans easier to handle.

Statistically, being one out of fifty in the Kurian Zone meant bad news for Gail Foster—formerly Gail Post. In his time undercover in the Kurian Zone Valentine had seen dozens—strike that, hundreds—of instances where the Kurians had culled humans into a large group and a small group.

The small groups never lasted long.

Were they checking for a disease or infirmity that meant she only had a short time to live? The Kurians used humans the way banks exchanged currency; perhaps a human only counted as a human if it could be expected to survive more than one year.

Valentine looked at himself in the shard of mirror on the wall. The single bare bulb in the wall cut shadows under his eyes and jawline.
You're a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy, Valentine
.

The other thing he'd learned from Father Max was that the first step in discovering a few Unknown Unknowns was to answer the Known Unknowns.

So much to do. He'd have Ahn-Kha take Hank to a boarding school. He didn't want the boy to become just another camp extra until he enlisted at fifteen. He'd have to arrange for transport for both of them, and for himself to Pine Bluff and the Miskatonic.

He had one promise to keep before starting this new page. Even if it was a page he didn't know that he was up to turning. Just as well Post had given him this. At least he had something to do with his leave other than fret.

Hank brought in breakfast. The boy looked as gray and bleary as a Minnesota October, and Valentine smelled more beer and vomit on him.

“How about a little yogurt, Hank?” Val said, holding up what passed for yogurt in Texarkana to the boy. He lifted a spoonful and let it drop with a plop.

“No, sir, I'm—already ate,” the boy said, putting his burn-scarred hand under his nose. He fled, and Valentine chuckled into his bran mash.

“Are you up early or late?” Duvalier groaned. She rolled over and looked at the window. “Early.”

“No, late. It's almost nine. I think everyone slept in.”

She reached down into her covers. “Water?”

Valentine got up and gave her his plastic tumbler full.

“Val, we didn't . . .”

“Didn't what?”

“You know.”

"You yodel during sex. I never would have guessed that.”

“Dream on, Valentine.” She rolled over on her stomach. “God, gotta pee.”

She got up and dragged herself into the bathroom.

“This would have been a bad time of the month for us to do
that,
” she said from within.

“Do I need to get you anything from supply?”

“No, I mean—fertility and all that.”

Valentine wondered for one awful second what his daughter looked like. She probably had dark eyes and hair; both he and Malia Carrasca were dark.

“I got basic hygiene first week of Labor Regiment,” Valentine said. “Good soldiers don't shoot unless they've taken precautions not to hurt the innocent.”

She laughed and then cut it off. “Ow. My head.”

Someone pounded on the door hard enough that the hinges moved.

“Come in,” Valentine called.

Ahn-Kha stood, blocking ninety-five percent of the light coming through the open door.

“Final review at noon, Major. Colonel's orders. Three generals will be in attendance.”

“Thank you. Eat up—” Valentine said, indicating the tray. Narcisse always issued him three times the breakfast he could consume and there was a pile of sliced ham on the tray the height of a New Universal Church Archon's bible.

Ahn-Kha wedged himself between chair and desk.

“Generals, eh?” Duvalier said. “I'm going to make myself scarce. Striped trousers are for clowns.”

Valentine looked at his row of battle dress and wondered which one could be pressed sufficiently for the occasion.

None of them, really. Whatever the Razors were all about, whatever was dying that afternoon, wasn't about creased trousers.

“I'm sorry, Valentine,” Meadows said out of the side of his mouth as they approached the four generals on the bandstand that last night had barely contained Black Lightning. “He tagged along at the last minute.”

Post and some of the other nonambulatory wounded sat behind them on the stand so they could see. The remaining Razors were drawn up in a great U of six attenuated companies in the open parking-lot space in front of the bandstand. Ahn-Kha stood with the senior NCOs, Hank with a group of Aspirants, and Narcisse watched from high on the shoulder of one of his soldier's husbands. In the center, a color guard of Bears took down the Razors' boar-silhouette flag. They did it badly, and the men coming together as they folded it looked like a mistimed football hike. The Bears did everything badly.