Winter Duty (41 page)

Habanero turned on Rover’s lights. A metal gate broke the pattern in the stone sides of the mill. Thursday climbed out and met his dancing shadow at a crank handle.

Turning the handle, he raised what had probably once been an electric door.

Thursday lost his footing. Mrs. O’Coombe took a sudden breath at his fall.

Or not a fall. Thursday disappeared under the half-raised gate with a scream.

“What the hell!” Habanero said.

“Wagon master, get ready to reverse and get out of here,” Valentine said.

Habanero began to speak into his microphone.

Valentine grabbed his rifle out of its seat-back clip and stepped outside.

“Valen—” Duvalier began, but he slammed the door.

He ducked down, looking into the dark of the old grain elevator. Rover’s lights cast beams through that were cut off by the half-closed door. A pair of hands, Thursday’s, were reaching out of the darkness and clawing in an effort to crawl back to Rover—but something was holding him back.

And hurting him. Thursday was screaming like a man being slowly dismembered.

Valentine wished he had a light clipped to the barrel of the gun. He looked around at the column but could see nothing but the whirling flakes and the columns lights.

The Type Three pointed from his hip at the gate, he went to the crank for the door gate. He extended his arm and gripped the freezing-cold metal. Tendons tight, he managed to turn the wheel with one hand while he kept the barrel of his rifle pointed at the growing gap between tracked door and ground.

Thursday’s hands were twitching spasmodically now, and as more and more light bled into the mill, the rest of him was revealed.

A piercing shriek in his ear. Ali was out of the car, a pistol in hand and a sword stick under her arm. Valentine had never heard her shriek like that—the noise must be coming from another.

Ragged two-legged forms appeared in the white bath of the headlights. Gore-smeared mouths testified to a recent, messy feast.

Valentine had encountered the disease on his first independent command in the Kurian Zone.

Ravies was a disease of multiple strains, first used in 2022 to help break down the old order, and used here and there since whenever the Kurians needed to stir up a little chaos. On his trip into Louisiana as junior lieutenant of Zulu Company in the Wolves, the Kurians reacted by gathering up some of the indigenous swamp folk and infecting them with the latest strain.

Valentine took them down with four quick shots. Red carnations blossomed on their chests and they staggered in confusion before crashing to the ground, dead.

As a member of Southern Command, he’d been inoculated against the disease, but you never knew how current your booster was. Valentine had a theory that they were sometimes injected with nothing but some colored saline solution to give them confidence before going into the Kurian Zone, so they wouldn’t panic if faced with the disease, spread by bite and gouge and gush of arterial blood.

It didn’t take a special shot to the brain or anything like that to kill a ravies sufferer, as some people thought—though if you wanted to live to go home and kiss your sweetheart again, you made damn sure you put some lead into center mass, for a ravies sufferer felt no pain. Indeed, he or she felt nothing but a desire to rend and tear.

Valentine realized Duvalier’s scream had been answered, in a muffled and echoed manner, from farther up the street in town.

Hopefully those who shrieked the responsorial were confused by the muffling effects of the snow as to where exactly Valentine’s column was.

Valentine fiddled with his Type Three, took out the bayonet, and fixed it at the front of the rifle. He worked the slide in the hilt, extending the blade to its full length.

He pounded on Habanero’s window. “Alert everyone: There’s ravies in this town and God knows where else,” Valentine said. “Get Rover and the Chuckwagon inside. We can block the main door with the Boneyard and stuff the Bushmaster in the truck entryway. Toss me a flashlight.”

Valentine took a green plastic tube handed to him and clicked on the prism of long-lasting LED light. A beam one-tenth as powerful as Rover’s, but much more flexible, played around the inside of the grain mill. Nothing else was drawn out of the shadows by the bouncing light, so Valentine satisfied himself that the grain elevator was empty of everything but corpses.

For now.

Judging from the smell, the locals used part of the old grain tower as a smokehouse.

Grain mills always reminded Valentine a little of churches. They had the same shadowy, steeplelike towers, tiny staircases up to balconies and antechambers, and of course the important platform at one end. In mills, that was where grain could be ground into feed or flour.

With blood and pieces of Thursday scattered on the floor, the phrase “dark Satanic Mills” from Blake’s Jerusalem floated through Valentine’s mind. Valentine pulled the corpses out of the path of the vehicles and waved the Rover in.

Thursday had done them one favor before his untimely death. He had guided them to a well-built structure. Limestone gave decent insulation, and it was as strong or stronger than brick.

Mrs. O’Coombe jumped out of Rover. “Mister Valentine. If there is the ravies virus in town, shouldn’t we drive on—”

“If the weather were clear, that would be my choice,” Valentine said.

Habanero nodded from the window. “He’s right; we’re lucky to have gotten this far.”

Frat and his Wolves needed something to do. Valentine sent them up a short set of steps and into the mill’s office to look for messages from the town’s inhabitants.

“No noise,” Valentine said.

“Put Rover over there,” Valentine told the wagon master, indicating a corner by the old loader equipment. “Get Chuckwagon in here.”

“The medical wagon is more valuable,” Mrs. O’Coombe said.

“Right now the fuel in Chuckwagon’s trailer is the most important thing,” Valentine said. “And we can all get a hot meal. We can refuel Rover, Chuckwagon, and Bushmaster, and then put Chuckwagon outside and bring Boneyard in.”

Mrs. O’Coombe blinked. “Very well. You are thoughtful under stress, Mister Valentine. I admire that. But I still think we should hurry on, weather or no weather.”

“You could make yourself useful by refueling Rover,” Valentine said to Mrs. O’Coombe, urgency consuming his usual polite phrasing with the great lady.

“Snow’s killing the sound,” Stuck said, entering the mill. He had a skullcap of snow already. “Ravies are drawn to motion and sound. They won’t see us or hear us even if the town’s full of them. As long as there’s no shooting.”

Habanero spoke into his comm link. Valentine heard the Chuckwagon backing outside.

Bee, who was riding in the Chuckwagon to give her two-ax-handle-wide frame elbow room, hopped out and trotted to Valentine’s side, sniffing the blood in the air.

“Easy now, Bee. It’s okay,” Valentine said. How much she got from syntax and how much from tone he didn’t know, but she went to work arranging the bodies neatly head to toe. She put Thursday one way and the ravies victims Valentine had shot the other.

Stuck was at the gate entrance, a big gun in a sling across his chest. Valentine had to look twice, but he recognized it as an automatic shotgun. He wondered where Stuck had acquired it and where it had stayed hidden in their travels—the weapon in his arms was easily worth its weight in solid silver. It was one of the few weapons that didn’t require a tripod and that could kill a Reaper with a single burst of fire.

With the Chuckwagon parked, its trailer well inside, Valentine had Habanero tell the driver of the Bushmaster to back up the APC through the gate and into truck dock. It would fill it, perhaps not as tight as the Dutch boy’s finger in the proverbial dike, but close.

Backing up the Bushmaster was no easy matter—the driver didn’t have the usual rearview mirrors. Rockaway was at the top forward hatch, passing instructions to the driver.

Figures flashed out of the darkness, barefoot in the snow.

“Get inside, get inside, get inside!” Valentine shouted to Stuck. “Habanero, Bushmaster needs to clear the gate and get in the loading dock. Have Boneyard pull forward and wait, buttoned up tight.”

Valentine heard a scream. Rockaway lit up the night with his pistol, firing at the ravies running for the Bushmaster.

Another charged out of the snow on his blind side. Valentine swung to aim, but the ravie jumped right out of his sights and landed on Rockaway, biting and pulling.

“Keve,” Mrs. O’Coombe screamed from the doorway.

Rockaway emptied his gun blind and over his shoulder into the thing biting him.

Chaos. Everyone shouted at once, mostly to get the gate down.

“How the hell do you shut this door?” Stuck hollered.

“Inside!” Valentine yelled to Stuck. He was fumbling around with the wheel Thursday had used to raise the gate.

The Bushmaster rumbled through the gate.

A flash of brown and Duvalier was up on the gate rails. Duvalier had leaped nine feet in the air and now hung from a manual handle, trying to bring it down with her slight weight.

Valentine finally thought to look on the side of the wall opposite the crank and saw a pawl in the teeth of a wheel. There was a simple lever to remove it.

The compressed thunder that was the fire of the automatic shotgun licked out into the night, turning snowfall orange.

“Cease fire,” Valentine shouted. If the Bushmaster opened up with its cannon, it would draw every ravie for a mile. “You’ll just attract more. Habanero, tell the people in Boneyard and Bushmaster to turn off lights and engines—don’t fire. Don’t fire!”

Habanero repeated the orders.

The smaller door on the back of the Bushmaster opened, and Boelnitz jumped out, pulling a bloody-shirted Rockaway out, and the two ran for the mill.

Panicky fool! The fear of ravies caused just as much damage as the sufferers.

A shirtless figure tore out of the darkness. It didn’t so much as tackle Boelnitz as run over him. It pulled up, as though shocked he’d gone down so easily.

Rockaway fell on his own.

Stuck took a quick step from the door crank and swung with his rifle butt, cracking the ravie across the back of the neck. It turned on him, swinging an arm that sprawled Stuck.

Valentine aimed the Type Three and put two into the ravie’s back. It went down on its knees. Boelnitz, stunned, crawled toward the door and the safety of the mill’s interior, lit by the headlights of Rover and Chuckwagon. Stuck picked Rockaway up by his belt and almost threw him through the door like a bowler trying for a strike.

“The hell’s the matter with you?” Stuck said, kicking Boelnitz toward the mill. “Why didn’t you stay in the APC?”

Valentine let loose the lever on the pawl, and the door, still with Duvalier hanging on it as she tried to force it with her leg, descended. Valentine stopped it high enough so a man could still enter at a crouch.

Stuck rolled in and sighted his gun to cover Bushmaster.

Valentine dragged Boelnitz in.

“Dumbshit didn’t shut the door on Bushmaster,” Stuck said, swinging the barrel of the auto-shotgun and pressing it to the thick, soft hair on Boelnitz’s head.

Mrs. O’Coombe hugged her bloody son. “My God, my God . . . ,” she kept repeating.

Valentine kicked up the gun barrel, and Stuck head-butted him in the gut.

Duvalier dropped from above, landing on Stuck’s shoulders, and wrapped her legs around his back. She put her sword stick across his throat.

“Okay, okay,” Stuck said. “Get ’er off!”

“Close the door, somebody,” Valentine gasped as they untangled themselves.

Mrs. O’Coombe worked the lever and the door rattled down at last.

A pair of hands thrust themselves under the gate. Mrs. O’Coombe pushed the pawl back in, held it there.

Metal bent at the bottom of the gate as though a forklift were being used to pull it up instead of a pair of hands. The bottom of the gate groaned and began to bend.

Duvalier’s sword flashed and sparked as it ran along the gate bottom, leaving severed fingertips lying about like dropped peanuts.

“The pawl, ma’am,” Valentine shouted. Rockaway reached for it. Mrs. O’Coombe broke out of her reverie and extracted it.

Valentine stomped the handle hard. The door slammed shut.

“You better?” he asked Stuck.

The ex-Bear nodded.

“I’d forgotten how much I enjoy noise and danger,” Mrs. O’Coombe said to no one in particular. “Very little, to be precise.”

“You wouldn’t have really shot me, would you?” Boelnitz said, picking himself up.

Stuck took a deep breath. “Maybe not me, but the Bear sure as hell was about to.”

Boelnitz looked at Valentine. “Thank you. I owe you.”

“Valentine, what the hell was that?” Stuck said, pointing at the fingers on the ground.

Valentine ignored him, tore open his own tiny first-aid kit, opened the little three-ounce flask of iodine, and poured and dabbed it into Rockaway’s bites and scratches.

“Doc says they’re nervous in Boneyard,” Habanero reported as Valentine’s heartbeat began to return to normal. “It’s not exactly an armored car.”

“Get Doc in here at once,” Mrs. O’Coombe said. “My son’s been bitten.”

“I’m not opening the door until things quiet down out there,” Valentine said. “This is the best we can do.”

“What the hell was that?” Stuck continued, shaking his head. “Have you ever seen a ravies case like that?”

“They were . . . like Bears,” Duvalier said. “I’ve never seen anyone bend steel like that, except a Bear.”

“Maybe it wasn’t human. Maybe they’ve got a more human-looking Reaper,” Valentine said, looking at the fingers.

“A Reaper would have just torn through it,” Duvalier said. “Trying to lift it is a dumb way to get in. Reapers are smarter than that.”