March in Country (28 page)
Authors: EE Knight
Valentine edged closer to Pellwell. “When the fighting starts,” he said out of the side of his mouth, “drop. Get behind one of the Wolves and don’t get up unless you see the rest of us running.”
The Scrubmen dripped with mud and willow tresses. Valentine had seen some atavistic figures before, but the Scrubmen were like something out of early human history. They wore bits and bobs of Grog jewelry—probably tokens of friendship with certain tribes— shell casing necklaces, dog tails, and in one potbellied oldster’s case, an old Kevlar army helmet.
It was their eyes that interested Valentine. Tough, hungry eyes, looking this way and that, these men were of, by, and for their pack. All it would take would be a nose twitch for spears and arrows to start flying.
“Yours guns, nows,” the helmeted leader said.
“Gets good prices, yesses? Sweets-likkers-juices!”
Valentine called out: “Everybody, keep calm now.”
“Guns! Down!”
Ahn-Kha dropped his machine gun directly in front of his long-toed feet, raised his arms in surrender. The Scrubmen had picked the wrong day to point a weapon at Ahn-Kha. The Golden One didn’t let out a battle roar, he simply brought both mighty fists down on the spears in front of him. Wood shattered, knife tips dug into dirt. With his fists planted, he swung out with both long-toed feet and kicked the two Scrubmen facing him toward Iowa.
In later years it was said that they fell just short of Burlington.
Valentine drew his legworm pick and borrowed parang. He jumped back from the extended spears, heard a pellet buzz by. His enemies, off-balance and overextended in their lunge, turned it into a charge.
Valentine heard motion behind and dropped to the ground, rolling. Two ranks of spears clattered against each other. Valentine heard the s
nick
of a blade sinking home as the Scrubmen met.
nick
of a blade sinking home as the Scrubmen met.
He lashed out at an ankle with his parang, pinned a foot to the turf with his pick, let it lie and rose, lifting and twisting a spear.
“Looksee!” “Watch hims!”
A four-armed blur. The Brushmen had never fought Cats before.
He saw a Scrubman go down, weighted by ratbits biting at the tender flesh behind his knee and on the inner thigh. The scratching, pulling furies came away with tendon and other terrible trophies clamped between paired front incisors.
Valentine had read somewhere or other that, given time, rats could gnaw through concrete and some thinner types of conduit. These were a good deal larger and had obviously learned exactly where a man was vulnerable.
The Scrubmen valued survival rather than honor. They took to the brush with alacrity, sending pellets whizzing overhead to cover their retreat.
What the Wolves did with the wounded, Valentine didn’t know and didn’t want to know. The cries were brief, and for that he was thankful.
Frat’s head appeared at the top of the crest of the horseshoe.
“Major, looks like they left a few things behind,” Frat called.
Valentine trotted up to Frat’s position with Ahn-Kha parting prairie grasses like a living snowplow.
Frat led him to a four-foot-deep ripple in the earth, closed over by oak and grasses into a shady tunnel. A line of people, anchored by a Gray One at each end, were linked by neck collars and six-foot wooden poles.
Valentine had rarely seen such ghastly restraints. The leather was filthy and rotted, with flies buzzing around dried blood caked and recaked at the edges.
“Free those people.”
They looked thin and bruised. Valentine guessed the Scrubmen had kept their captives moving with lashes from thin tree limbs and yanks on the collar chain.
“Can you get anything from the Grogs?” Valentine asked.
Ahn-Kha spoke to the pair.
“They say they’re on their way north,” Ahn-Kha translated. “Those two, they’re deserters from the Two-Mouth’s army.”
“Who is Two-Mouth?”
“A great man. Killer of Red-Blanket, chieftain of the Deathring Tribe. Conqueror of the Golden Ones. Ruler of Rails-between-the-Rivers.”
“The Gray Baron,” Valentine said.
“In too many words,” Ahn-Kha said. “But when the Gray Ones get around to talking, talk they will.”
“Why did they desert?”
More burbling words and emphatic gestures.
“They were part of a rail crew. They thought they were supposed to fight, not lay ties and iron,” Ahn-Kha said. “They’re young warrior Grogs, they want a tally of enemies, not a record of track laid. Since they couldn’t fight, they fled. But Two-Mouth has a standing reward for deserters and any and all humans.”
Valentine questioned the humans himself. They were two groups that had met up while fleeing the Great Plains Gulag. They’d struck the Missouri River and followed it southeast, and were planning to turn due south and head for Southern Command’s forces once they dried and smoked some of the Missouri’s famously oversized catfish. But the Scrubmen had smelled the drying fish and taken them prisoner.
“So, the Gray Baron has a taste for human prisoners,” Valentine said.
“We must endeavor to bring him some,” Ahn-Kha said.
“Like the first time we went into Omaha,” Valentine said.
“Only this time, you get the cuffs.”
“You’ll need a woman along,” Duvalier said. “I’m still young enough that they won’t put me to digging ditches.”
“We’ll establish two camps,” Valentine said. “A far one and a close one. Frat, you’ll be in command of the far camp. We’ll probably need to stockpile Grog trade goods to ease the journey across Missouri. Like the Scrubmen said: sweets, liquor, weapons. Some fireworks and matches might not go amiss, either. Grogs love fireworks at their celebrations. A chief that can put on a good fire show has many friends.”
Frat nodded. “Yes, sir.”
He turned to Duvalier. “Ali, I want you to set up a close-camp. Hopefully Ahn-Kha will be free to do a little roaming. Make contact with him and set up a communication chain back to Frat.”
“Sure.”
“Keep Pellwell and the ratbits with you. I may need them,” Valentine said.
She made the same face she made when he had a bad case of morning gas.“You’re kidding, right? Her? She’ll get us both killed.”
“You’ve had it in for me from the first, Red. What’s that all about?”
“You big-idea college fucks get people like me killed, that’s why. Running down rumors, looking for docs that don’t exist, counting baby legworms when we should be setting charges.”
Ahn-Kha, with his shorn hair and wounds from the fight with the Scrubmen, looked the part of a Grog trader. He wore a pair of saddlebags on each vast shoulder with his most valuable “merchandise.” Valentine, weighted down with simple trade goods on a carrying pole and wearing filthy rags taken from dead Scrubmen, followed. As a token of belonging to Ahn-Kha, Valentine wore an old license plate painted white and hanging from his head vertically. Ahn-Kha had made himself a leather wristband with the letters and numbers burned into it.
“Good to be working with you again, old horse.”
“I could say the same, my David.”
“If this goes to shit, you beat out of here, okay?”
“I’ll run with you on my back to the Missouri River if that happens.”
At first, Valentine thought the distant smear might be a legworm. Then he saw heads bobbing among the brush, appearing and disappearing through the gaps like targets in a carnival shooting gallery.
“Our Baron’s guys, do you think?” Valentine asked.
“Almost certainly,” Ahn-Kha said. “A band of Gray Ones would not stay so tightly in line.”
Valentine watched the bobbing heads for a few more minutes. There were men at the front and the rear of the column, it looked to be no more than two or three, with a hundred Grogs or more in between. Two of the men, presumably the officers, rode horses. Valentine couldn’t tell the breed with certainty at this distance, but they looked like tough, squat mustangs.
The men wore a vertical-striped camouflage, ranging from a buttery tone at the lightest to a rabbitty brown. He’d seen the pattern a few times on his previous trips into Iowa, when he’d wandered as a rather vengeful exile shortly after Blake had been born and relocated to Missouri. It was equally effective in light woods as prairie. Instead of helmets, gray kepis with another band of the camouflage material running around the brim sat on their heads.
The Grogs wore smocks or vests made out of the camouflage as well, probably ponchos or tenting repurposed for oversized Gray Ones’ heads and shoulders. Big, bolt action rifles proportioned like Kentucky squirrel guns with oversized stocks hung by short straps around their necks in the human stock-up, muzzle-down fashion, allowing the Gray Ones to use all fours on the march.
Valentine noted that their rifles had some kind of latch attachment and rest so they didn’t bump and chafe on the march. Good officers, these.
“At least this Baron grants them their stride,” Ahn-Kha said. “Remember in New Orleans, the way men were always trying to make them walk upright when marching? They can do it, but it is not a natural gait and is fatiguing.”
“They cover more ground per minute this way. Those officers are really puffing to keep up. The Baron should put his men on bikes.”
“Perhaps you can suggest that when you meet him,” Ahn-Kha said.
“If we’re lucky, he won’t ever notice us,” Valentine said. “Your call, old horse.”
“I see no signs of wounds or fighting,” Ahn-Kha said. “They seem well fed and well rested. Dirty, looks like. See the pollen crusted into the sweat stains. I would say they have been out a few days. Perhaps they are on their way back in any case.”
That was the real danger in contacting opposing forces. Valentine had heard stories of surrendering men being shot outright, if the opposition didn’t feel like taking the trouble to secure, feed, and transport prisoners.
Ahn-Kha checked his weapons, squatted and stretched, and cleaned each ear with his tiny end finger. “My teeth clean?” he asked Valentine, showing his prominent near-tusks of a well-matured Golden One.
“I remember the dentist visiting the old Razorbacks and saying he needed machine tools to do you,” Valentine said. Ahn-Kha rinsed his mouth with wet sand morning and night, if he could find it, and used baking soda and a brush when it could be had. “Yeah, they look great.”
“Nothing puts my Gray Cousins off like a bad set of teeth,” Ahn-Kha said. “Let us empty tracks.”
“Make tracks,” Valentine corrected. Ahn-Kha was more nervous than he let on, he only flubbed his English when preoccupied.
Ahn-Kha hailed them.
Valentine wondered what they would think. A scarred, bitten Golden One with shorn hair leading an equally scarred human dressed in Scrubman rags.
“Peace, peace, I call peace,” Ahn-Kha said, approaching the soldiers. He carried his rifle by the barrel so that the butt faced the troops, a friendly gesture to Grog eyes.
Valentine waited for the order to deploy or ready weapons, nerving himself for a wild flight, but it didn’t come.
The officer turned up the corner of his mouth under his kepi brim and Valentine relaxed. A little. Perhaps the officer found this an interesting diversion in a dull patrol. Valentine noticed that both he and his sub-officer, and the two human NCOs, all had full beards or mustaches. Strange for Kurian Zone troops. They were usually fit and trim and cleanly cut as a recruiting poster.
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