Part 3 (2/2)
”I think he'd take a bullet for you though, Jess.”
”d.a.m.n straight.”
The lieutenant was not at the rendezvous. The tired recruits and tireless Wolves rested for four hours. At dawn, the sergeant sent Vought on his horse with three Wolves to scout the other side of the two-lane metal bridge spanning the Missouri. The land sloped upward as the wooded hills began beyond. Safety.
One of the rear guard, at a copse of trees half a mile up the highway, waved a yellow bandanna.
Samuels clapped Valentine on the back. ”C'mon, son, you deserve to see this after last night.
Everyone else, get across the bridge.”
He jogged off northward along the edge of what was left of the road, and Valentine followed.
They reached the stand of trees. One of the Wolves had a spotting scope resting in the crotch of a young oak, pointed down the highway. Valentine could make out figures in the distance, but he was unwilling to believe what he saw.
Samuels looked through the scope. ”They must have got wind of us last night. Not sure how many of us there are, so they're going back to report. Take a look at this freak show, Valentine.”
He put his eye to the scope.
The Enemy.
They were apish figures sitting astride a long pencil of flesh. The mount was like a s.h.i.+ny, slug-skinned millipede. Hundreds of tiny legs moved too fast for the eye to follow, re- minding him of a finger running across a piano keyboard. The riders, five in all, had armorlike gray skin that reminded Valentine of a rhinoceros's hide. Their shoulders were wide- almost two ax-handles across. They carried guns that looked like old Kentucky long rifles held pointed into the air like five waving antennae. Valentine wondered if he could even aim one of the six-foot weapons.
”They're even uglier from the front. Those are fifty-caliber single-shot breechloaders, Valentine, and they're handy with them,” Finner elaborated. ”They can blow your head off at a thousand yards if you're fool enough to be visible and not moving.”
”Those are Grogs?” Valentine couldn't tear himself away from the eyepiece.
The sergeant retrieved the scope. ”Those legworms are fun to stop, too. Brain is at the tail end, kind of like Finner here. Nothing up front but a mouth and some taste buds, I guess.
Also like Finner here, come to think of it. Nothing short of a cannon will keep a legworm from coming at you. Good thing they're kinda slow.”
”We try to pick off the riders, but the lead one always has a big riot s.h.i.+eld, thick as tank armor,” another Wolf said. ”We have to get them from the side. One thing you do not want to ever see is about fifty of them coming at you in line abreast.”
”That happened at the Battle of Cedar Hill,” the sergeant put in. ”We lost.”
They made it across the Missouri on a Sunday. The sergeant led them in a prayer of thankfulness that their long journey was almost complete.
The next few days had briefer, harder runs mixed with walks and ten-minute breaks. They stayed away from the roads, and the Grog patrols stayed out of the hills, as each side considered this border region bushwhack ground. Around the campfire one night, Samuels told Valentine a little more about his father, how the Lifeweaver Rho had created a special body of men to fight the Reapers and their allies: the Hunters.
”He told us that these things had come to Earth once before, and some of Rho's people had taught men how to fight them. We'd forgotten it, except maybe as legends and myths garbled over the years. They took certain men and made them a match for what they were up against. Rho said he could do the same now, if we were willing to accept the bargain. But it would change us forever; we'd never be the same people again. Your father was willing.
Soon he had the rest of us convinced. That was the beginning of a lot of hard years, son. But when you get to the Ozarks, you'll see it was worth it.”
The lieutenant was waiting for them at Round Spring Cave. It was a road-hardened group that was welcomed by the officers in charge of training new blood in the Ozark Free Territory.
A welcoming banquet was spread out under the trees. Six weeks' worth of traveling on foot made the feast even more welcome. There was fresh bread, watermelons the size of hogsheads, meat from the fatted calf, the fatted hog, and the fatted chickens under the summer sky. Valentine ate an entire cherry pie at one sitting for the first time in his life.
Another little cl.u.s.ter of would-be soldiers had arrived the day before, youths gathered from the Missouri valley in the Dakotas. They swapped good stories and bad in the pseudo-hard- bitten fas.h.i.+on of youth.
Gabby Cho shared a picnic table with Valentine under a spread of pine trees. The fresh, clean scent reminded him of Christmases before the death of his family. Valentine was experimenting with iced dandelion tea sweetened almost to syrup. The tea, ice (in summer!), and apparently plentiful sugar were all novelties to him.
”We made it, Davy,” Cho said. She looked a little older now to Valentine; she had chopped her long black locks after the second day of hot marching out of the Boundary Waters. ”I wonder what's next. You're in with these Wolf guys. Any idea what's up?”
”Not sure, Gab. I'd like to spend a few days sleeping.”
Cho seemed unsure of herself. ”Why'd you join up?”
Valentine shot her a questioning look. Cho had remained distant on the whole trip south whenever any personal topic arose. She politely rebuffed the other recruits' attempts to get to know her.
He rattled his ice in the pewter mug, enjoying the sound and the cool wet feel. ”You probably think revenge, because of the whole family thing. You know about what happened, right?”
”Yes, David. From some of the guys at cla.s.s. I asked the Padre about it once. He told me to ask you, but I didn't want to do that.” ”Well, it's not that.”
Are you sure? a voice in his head asked.
”I know now my dad was with these Wolves. Maybe he would have wanted me to do it, too.
He must have thought it was worthwhile; he spent a lot of years at it.” He paused at a rustle overhead. Squirrels, attracted by the ma.s.ses of food, were chasing each other around in the tree branches, sending flecks of bark falling onto the pair below. They were cute, but they made a decent stew, too.
”I want to make a difference, Gab. It's obvious, something's not right about the way things are. You know the Jefferson stuff we used to read, about being endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights? It's like those rights of ours have been taken away, even the right to live. We have to do something about it.”
”As simple as that?”
”As simple as that, Gabby.” He finished off the iced tea. ”What about you?”
”Did you know I had a baby?” she blurted.
Valentine absorbed the news in awkward silence, then cleared his throat. ”No, you just disappeared from school. Went north with your family, I thought.”
”We kept it quiet. The father was a patroller...” She read Valentine's eyes. ”No, it wasn't like that. I knew him. His name was Lars. Lars Jorgensen,” she said, giving him the feeling that she had not said the name in a long time.
”He used to give me stuff. Nice clothes, shoes. I never thought to ask where it came from.
Looted stores in Duluth, I figured. One day he gave me a watch, a real working watch. I could tell there had been engraving on it, even though he had tried to scratch it off. I told him not to give me any more presents. He disappeared when I told him about the baby coming.”
”Who's got the kid? Your mom, or-?”
”Scarlet fever got her. Last winter. Remember the outbreak? It hit around where you were living, too. It took...” Her words began to fade.
”Jesus, Gabby, I'm so sorry.”
She wiped her eyes. ”I think about it too much. I talked to the Padre after it happened. I thought maybe I didn't take care of her right, not on purpose, but because of how I feel about the father. I just didn't know. The Padre put it down to a lack of qualified doctors. Or if they're good, they don't have the equipment or medicines.”
She took a cleansing breath of the Ozark air. ”The Padre said that lots of people he knew put this kind of thing behind them by helping others. He gave me a lecture about the need for strong bodies and good minds, got talking about the Cause. Well, you know him.”
”I wonder if I do. He didn't talk like that to me.” ”I think he knew you would go south when the time was right,” she said, smiling her old ”I've got the right answer” smile from school.
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