Winter Duty (23 page)

The heavy round struck the Reaper squarely on the butt. Valentine doubted the bullet penetrated more than one layer of the strong, unearthly weave the Reapers used in their robes.

Reapers can scream when they want to. It’s a high-pitched sound reminiscent of sheet metal tearing. The men at the crew-served gun, seeing Valentine shoot, opened up with their weapon as well.

Their target, probably frightened by the sudden light, pain, and noise, flattened itself under the fire and scuttled north like a crab and sprang off the bridge with an uncanny jump.

The men with the machine gun tracked it, spraying tracer off into the night. It cleared nine feet of Indiana-side fence topped by three foot loops of razor wire, landed, and disappeared into the darkness.

Leaving behind a heel from its boot.

“You’re in a helluva lot of trouble, buddy!” Valentine yelled at the gunner. “I was about to put a round down its throat when you startled the bastard into fleeing.”

“Thing was going nuts. What—”

“Now I have to chase it down in the goddamn woods. You know how dangerous that is, going into the woods after a wounded, pissed-off rogue like that?”

The green light began to pulse as the flare drifted down.

“You want us to sic the dogs on—” a corporal began.

“No, they’ll just scare it. I’ll have to hope it calms down enough so I can get a decent shot. And for Kur’s sake, keep your men out of those woods. We’ve had enough bled for one night.”

“Yes, er—”

“Get that gate. Unlike Jumpin’ Jack Slash, I can’t drop sixty feet and take off running. Is that a box of defensive grenades? Give me two. There’s a good man. You never know.”

Valentine hung the grenades on the Moondagger cummerbund and trotted off down the road. A pair of Ordnance medics went to work on the human wreckage left behind.

“Keep those dogs out of the woods,” Valentine yelled at the officer, pointing.

He confused the officer just enough to get him to turn, and in that moment Valentine hopped over the rail of the bridge and dropped the twenty feet to the riverbank. Valentine took off into the Indiana woods.

He felt strange pity for the Reaper. What it remembered of its existence as a puppet of the master Kurian, Valentine didn’t know. Would it be worse to awaken, confused and pained as a newborn, to a world of bullets and explosions all around and instinctive hunger that needed feeding, or to suddenly have control over your body again? Or was it something in between, where the Kurian gave his avatar ideas, needs, and desires, and let it carry them out with a little nudge now and then or a few words bubbling up out of the subconscious?

Valentine and Brother Mark rowed back across the river, fighting the downstream current that threatened to carry them within sight of the bridge. It would be light soon. There was a little highway stop with a good roof that the Wolves used to keep an eye on the bridge. They could warm themselves there and have a hot meal that would refresh them for the slow, bumpy ride home.

“What’s that?” Brother Mark asked, pointing behind them.

Valentine put the oar across his thighs and looked over his shoulder. Something like a turtle’s back was cutting through the current. Valentine saw a face come up for air.

“That,” Valentine said, “is a Reaper head.”

It wasn’t swimming hard to intercept them; it was just following.

Valentine put his oar in the water and took six vigorous strokes while he thought. Then he set the oar in the bottom of the canoe and carefully turned around.

He took up one of the Ordnance hand grenades. It was the more powerful of the two used by their military, designed to be thrown from cover at an advancing enemy. Javelin had captured plenty from the Moondaggers, who used them to clear buildings.

“Hold up for a moment,” Valentine said.

After a quick read of the yellow letters on the side to double-check the instructions, Valentine stripped off the red safety tape and pulled the fuse pin. The grenade whispered like a snake.

He knew better than to stand up in a canoe, so, kneeling and bracing as best as he could, he hurled the grenade at the following head.

It was a poor throw. It plopped short and detonated in a fountain of water with a rumbling roar that sounded like an oversized toilet flushing.

“Well done, my man,” Brother Mark said.

“We’ll see,” Valentine said.

The last of the water fell and the head was still there, though it had halted and drifted with the current. It took a cautious stroke or two toward them again, letting the current put more distance between them.

“Not easily discouraged,” Brother Mark said.

“Row hard,” Valentine said.

Paddling hard enough to froth the river, with Valentine steering and Brother Mark puffing with the effort of providing power, they beached the canoe on the little brush-overgrown spit that they’d used to cautiously launch it a few hours before.

The Reaper scuttled up and out of the water sideways, like the crabs Valentine had seen on the Gulf Coast.

“Lord, oh lord, the thing’s stalking us,” Brother Mark said.

It had killed before but not fed. Valentine saw the yellow eyes, bright with something that was probably hunger in this cold, fixed on the slower-moving Brother Mark.

Valentine no longer felt sorry for the creature. The easy sympathy that came when he pictured it wandering the woods, confused and hungry, had been replaced by pale-skinned, black-fanged reality.

“Anything in your bag of tricks that lets you suggest something to a Reaper? Like going back across the river and trying the hunting in Indiana?”

Brother Mark closed his eyes, opened them, and then closed them again, this time firmly. “No, Major, nothing, I’m afraid. I get no sense of a mind there, not even a human one.”

Valentine put his sights on it and it froze. It retained enough knowledge, then, to know what a pointed gun meant.

That made it more dangerous.

It slipped behind a tree with a swift step that cut the air like the sound of an arrow in flight.

“Shit,” Valentine said.

He had one hope left.

A predator has a stronger survival instinct than most people credit it with. To the hunting cat or the pursuing wolf, serious injury is synonymous with death. If not defending young or scrapping with a challenger for territory, a predator will usually shy away from an aggressive display, especially if you can overawe it in size and noise.

Of course this isn’t the case with all meat eaters. A wolverine or a bear will often welcome a fight.

He handed his remaining grenade to Brother Mark. “If it gets its tongue in me, toss this. They get lost in the act of feeding. You could run up and hang it off its back.”

Valentine had lost a comrade in the old Labor Regiment that way near Weening, the night he killed his first Reaper. Weening still had the skull nailed to the town gate. The kids sometimes chalked words under it that appealed to a teenage sense of humor.

Valentine rolled up the Moodagger sleeves and slipped into his old, comfortable Cat claws. He advanced on the Reaper, arms spread wide.

It peeked from around the bole of the tree at him.

“Ha!” Valentine shouted. He swept one outstretched arm against winter-bare branches, stripping bark and crackling twigs.

“Ha!” Valentine shouted again, pantomiming a lunge as he approached.

“HA!” he tried again, stomping hard with his good leg.

If it came at him, he might still live. A good swipe across the nose might blind it.

The Reaper was dripping water from its robes but not moving. Nothing to do but go all in.

Valentine ran at it with a scream, and its eyes widened. It sprang away, running hard to the east up through the riverbank brush.

Valentine pursued it for as long as he could keep up the sprint and then lobbed a rock in its direction. His aim was better this time. The stone struck it in the leg and it jumped, crashing through some low-hanging branches and falling. It picked itself up and kept running.

“Yeah, you do that,” Valentine puffed.

Valentine wasn’t looking forward to the walk back to the truck. He’d have his rifle up and his sphincter tight the whole way, leading Brother Mark in wide circuits around anything big enough to hide the Reaper.

He had the funny feeling they hadn’t seen the last of this fellow. And he’d have to pass the news to the Kentucky volunteers that there was a wild Reaper loose on their side of the river.

Just what the remaining Wolves and Bears would want to hear after the action at the power plant—assuming some catastrophe hadn’t left the grounds of the power plant strewn with bodies.

They drove back Fort Seng at a crawl, the vegetable-oil-powered diesel banging away in first and second gear over the broken-down roads. Valentine, exhausted and half-asleep in his seat, had the driver take them to the power plant first.

He was relieved to see a pair of Wolves step out and halt them on the last turn before the plant. They had to carefully go off road and route around a roadblock the Wolves had cut, unsure of the possibilities of a counterattack from the bridge and wanting to hold it up long enough for the Bears and Wolves—and one unpredictable Cat—to escape.

They found the power plant in Southern Command’s hands and only lightly damaged in the offices, where explosives had been used to drive out the confused Reapers.

Valentine felt dwarfed by the immense architecture of the power plant and the towering smokestack. It seemed like a monument that would stand forever, like Independence Rock in Wyoming or the great Kurian tower in Seattle.

“Made angel food out of ’em, sir,” Chieftain, the senior Bear NCO, said. He liked to decorate his uniform with feathers of various raptors—and a vulture or two.

Silvertip, another Bear who loved Kentucky and had decided to settle there and become a dealer in legworm leather, was partially undressed, sitting in the chill air and carefully scrubbing blood out of his studded leather with an old toothbrush. “Six,” Silvertip said. “Don’t remember ever taking so many in one day before.”

“The Ghost did that,” Chieftain said. “Shut down their master. Wolves saw the flare, certain enough, and got word to us. We went in and found the whole place in a tumult.”

“Where’s Ali?” Valentine asked. There were several leather-winged harpy bodies in a pile near the gate. Not enough for Valentine’s taste, but they’d picked off a few.

“The Cat? I think she’s sleeping in the kitchen.”

There were Wolves near the exterior door, all asleep with bits of a meal scattered across the floor except one sergeant in deerskins quietly putting a freshly cleaned Remington back together. He pointed Valentine in the direction of the cafeteria.

The cafeteria had blood and black Reaper tar on the floor and a good deal of damage to the walls from bullet holes. The windows were broken where the Bears had come in.

Valentine found Duvalier in the kitchen, curled up between a steaming stove and a basket of potatoes. One of his Wolves was opening cans of tomatoes and pouring them into a vast soup pot.

She was sleeping cradling her sword stick, looking like a little girl snuggling with an anorexic doll. Valentine nudged her with a toe.

“Good job,” he said as she blinked awake and yawned.

“You found the Kurian.”

“Where we thought he was,” Valentine said. “Just a little one.”

“He was hungry enough.”

“How did you feed him?”

“With the Moondaggers,” Duvalier said, pouring herself some coffee from an urn. “It was like one of those
Noonside Passions
episodes I used to watch in New Orleans. I pretended to be a girl looking for her brother who was being held in the power plant, and this sergeant promised to get him back for me. The name I gave was for a dead man. Lying bastard. So he slobbered on me for a bit and then fobbed me off on a private to take me back to the gate where other family members were waiting, trying to shout messages to the men in the cafeteria.

“I played up to the private a little, the sergeant saw it and got jealous, and the next thing you knew they were fighting. Some officer-priest broke it up, took me away for ‘counseling’ and he started groping me five minutes later. I screamed bloody murder and the next thing you know half the Moondaggers were fighting with each other. I’ll admit, I egged it on a bit by snatching a dagger and sticking it in the priest’s kidney. The Reapers broke it up and killed two of them and hauled the bunch of us into the cafeteria. Then they lost it and started running around like a chickens with their heads off. Next thing I knew the Bears were coming in the windows.”

“Your feminine wiles have lost nothing over the years,” Valentine said.

She snorted. “Dream on, Valentine. I think they put Chope or one of the other Church aphrodisiacs in that syrupy fruit juice they drink. I tell you, Val, there isn’t enough hot water in the world to wash off the grubby fingerprints.”