Winter Duty (19 page)

“I understand that,” Valentine said.

“What ifs—you know. What if I could have been stronger, or figured out something was wrong with me. Does it make you not crazy if you recognize that you’re sick in the head? I remember knowing I felt different. I thought I was just cracking under the strain.”

“You did better than anyone would have expected.”

“It was beautiful for a minute, wasn’t it? When we showed up and found the Green Mountain Boys there. Colonel Lambert, you know you did all that. Too bad you couldn’t have seen it. Oh, that was a good day.”

Lambert turned back to face Bloom. “They fooled me just as much as they fooled you. Wish I’d been a little more careful.”

Valentine wondered if his repeated requests to Southern Command for assistance to be sent to Ahn-Kha’s coal-country guerrillas figured into Lambert’s calculus when she’d decided on Javelin as Southern Command’s next venture into the Kurian Zone. She knew Valentine, trusted him. Had he let her down? Maybe that’s why she’d been so formal of late.

“I think the Green Mountain Boys were happy to see Southern Command arrive too,” Lambert added.

“It’s still the spot Javelin landed, as far as I’m concerned. I think we’ll be back, one day.” Bloom focused on Valentine. “I’m sorry, Val.”

“Not your doing. I know you’d have stuck.”

Bloom took a deep breath, brightened. “At least everyone’s rested and refit. We’ll make it the rest of the way . . .”

“Easy,” Valentine said.

“I’d settle for hard. One twist away from impossible, even, just so long as I get them home.”

Valentine stood flanking Lambert, watching the brigade walk out of camp under an iron gray sky. The soldiers moved in step—a rarity for the men of Southern Command, unless they were moving as part of a graduation class or parade review or under a general’s nose.

Valentine expected the Kurians would let them return across the Mississippi. The Kurians liked to see defeated men live to tell their tales. It was the ones who’d beaten them they went after.

Men like his father.

It was hard watching the men he’d come to know on the long advance and the longer retreat file off down the road.

Of course, the few volunteers stayed on: some technical staff, communications people, and trainers helping transform the Quislings into something that could stand up to the Kurian Order. Even Galloby, the agronomist, had remained, waxing enthusiastic about learning more about legworm husbandry. He had some kind of idea about putting a special bacteria in the legworm’s digestive tract and getting concentrated fertilizer from the other end. But while he put droplets into petri dishes and ran chemical tests, he advised Evansville on how they could do a better job growing their own food without the rest of Indiana to rely on.

Pencil Boelnitz also stayed, and Valentine wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

The supply train left, and then some of the artillery Southern Command had brought in and were now towing out, and finally the rear guard departed, pushing burdened bicycles. Red Dog dodged in and out of their wheels to the turn into woods leading to the gate, then plopped down in the sun to pant.

“You ready for this, Dots?” Valentine asked Lambert, using her old military college nickname in an effort to lighten the mood.

“No,” she said, looking around as if she were seeing the tree lines of Fort Seng for the first time.

Valentine chuckled. “Too bad.”

“You’re helpful.”

“I’d be a lot more worried if you were more confident. What’s my first order, sir?” Valentine asked.

Bloom’s command car came roaring back into Fort Seng. Bloom hopped out before it even came to a stop, hauling with her a Kentucky “vol”—short for volunteer: a local who served in the loosest, most disorganized militia imaginable. Their only common element was a dark blue band around their baseball-style caps. Valentine smelled blood on him.

“The Kurians moved already. They didn’t waste time. We aren’t even out of camp yet,” Bloom said. “I’m sorry I’ve got to leave passing you bad news. Evansville just hauled this guy out of his boat.”

“Where?” Lambert said.

The vol spoke up. “It’s lights-out for Evansville and Owensboro. A bunch of flying whatsits have taken over the power plant, and some Reapers and Moondaggers are holding the technical guys hostage.”

The river is much changed since 2022. First called by the French-men who explored it
“La Belle Rivière,”
its banks are now coated with arteriosclerosis of trash and industrial waste. In more prosperous days the river carried a weight of cargo equal to that which passed through the Panama Canal: coal barges, oil, mounds of chemicals white or gray or sulfur-colored, grain, corn, soy, tobacco, and of course steel returning from the coal-fired furnaces of Pittsburgh.

They took the vol, who was named with a string of three personal names for first, middle, and last—John Robert Nicholas—into the main building, where members of Valentine’s battalion were lugging boxes and setting up duty stations. Lambert escorted Valentine and the vol into her bare office, where a single box sat on her desk waiting to be unpacked.

“I want you to get them,” Nicholas said, ignoring the bare decor. “You Southern Command people know how to deal with critters like that. We can make the soldiers jump when we have to, but this is beyond anything we can do without tanks and cannon and such-like. Don’t belong on God’s green earth, them things.”

Nicholas shuddered. He raised his eyes to Valentine. “You’ll kill ’em, right?”

“Private, Colonel Lambert’s in command here,” Valentine said. “Tell her how you ended up here.”

Nicholas checked the insignia on their clothing. “That bird outranks that palm tree, right. I forgot. Our big bug is a senior sergeant.”

“She outranks everyone on the base, Private Nicholas, so you’re speaking to the right woman. Tell us what’s going on.”

Valentine went to the coffeepot, an expensive-looking plug-in model with silver handles and gold rings at the top and bottom that had probably been found in the house. Lucky it wasn’t sitting in someone’s knapsack. Or maybe it had been, and Bloom rescued it. In any case, she’d left it full of hot, delicious-smelling coffee for her successor.

The building had a pair of emergency generators, a portable gasoline-powered one and a fixed propane model, but Valentine couldn’t hear either running. The power plant must still be putting out the juice, then.

“I’m to tell you that ya’ll have a safe conduct pass out of Kentucky and back to the Mississippi for the next forty-eight hours, after which the skies themselves will fall on you. Those were the Tallboy’s exact words, sir.”

Valentine and Lambert looked at each other. The corner of her mouth turned up and Valentine shrugged.

“Now that you’ve passed the word,” Valentine said, “tell us what happened at the plant and what exactly attacked you. We need to know as much as you can tell us about what and how many and where they are.”

Lambert called in a young man she’d selected as her clerk to take notes. When he was seated, she let Nicholas begin:

“Six I saw. They came in over the fence like—No, I should start at the beginning. I was part of the ten-man security team. We do three days on, then switch and get four days off, then four days on, you know—”

“Yes,” Lambert said.

“Just there to keep an eye on the river, you know. We had an OP up the smokestack. We could see the Owensboro bypass bridge on one side—only bypass bridge still up west of Louisville, I suppose you know, sir—and Evansville on the other. Luckily it wasn’t my shift to be up in the wind this morning. At dawn everyone got called out to look up because there were these big things, like birds or bats only bigger than any turkey vulture you could even imagine. They were circling around the top of the stack. I think they drove Berk out. He started climbing down the outside ladder and they just harried him and harried him and he fell before he got to the first perch-rest. He fell and made a mess—spun as he came down and hit headfirst. We all ran inside after that and were looking out the windows to see what they were up to when the Tallboys came over the fence.

“Now that the plant’s mostly automated, the people who work it just do maintenance on the machines and watch the load—never as much as the plant was designed to make, at least these days. That, and they work the loaders that keep the coal flowing—several people on that full-time. But those big fellers just came in and killed two of us right off the bat, and another jumped on Sergeant White, who was just trying to get away. The others herded us like dogs into the cafeteria and closed all the shutters. We just crowded in the center of the room while they circled. You ever had one of those things nipping at your heels, ma’am?”

“No,” Lambert said. “All the Reapers I’ve seen have been dead.”

“Let’s hope that record remains unbroken,” Valentine said.

“Then for no reason, one just reached in and grabbed a fuel man. At least I think he was—he was covered in coal dust. It fed on him. Got blood everywhere. I’d seen finished-up bodies a couple times, but this was the first time I’d seen one eaten in the flesh. Horrible sight. Most of us turned away. Figure I owed the poor soul that, you know? Someone said his name was Dewey,” Nicholas added, looking at the clerk who was writing down his words.

“How did you get the message to give us?”

“After the one ate that poor coker, he grabbed me. That’s where these bloodstains come from, his hands. The big pale bastard held me close, like he was going to dance with me.”

The last dance
, some called it.

“So the Reaper looked me in the eye and spoke, splattering flecks of blood on my face. I washed it off in the river, of course. Told me that you had time to quit Kentucky, forty-eight hours to leave with the rest of them. Of course, they had a message for the Evansville folks too. Then he carried me out like I was a toddler and chucked me in one of the commute boats the power plant workers use, and I got to Evansville as fast as the motor would take me.”