Valentine's Exile (19 page)

The big Cat hadn't changed much in the eight years since Valentine had last seen him. A little less hair perhaps, a little more waistline certainly, but he was still the big, half-aquatic athlete of the Yazoo swamps with a satchel full of apples. Everready had taught Valentine how to lower lifesign and move without being noticed over the course of one impossibly hot summer, and the fact that he'd survived to return proved the effectiveness of his tutor's methods.

The New Orleans Saints ball cap was gone, though. Now he wore a black, broad-brimmed hat that made him look like a missionary. Strung Reaper teeth rattled at his neck, and layers of bullet-stopping Reaper robe hung off his body in an oversized tunic that no sane man dared call a dress.

Finding him had been surprisingly easy. While casting about for a way to get across the Mississippi they came upon a “summer out” Wolf patrol in charge of monitoring river traffic. The Wolf patrol relied on Everready for information on the opposite bank in the Yazoo Delta between Vicksburg and Memphis, and the trio crossed the river in a birch-bark canoe with a guide who rested and camped with them at the rendezvous until the legendary Cat appeared to trade supplies for data.

Everready had no young Wolves to train this year, further evidence of the still-echoing disruption of Solon's occupation, and the continuing absence of the Lifeweavers. “Good to have you back, David,” he said, upon greeting them. “Even an old swamp-hound gets lonely now and then.”

So he was willing, after concluding his exchange with their Wolf guide, to take Valentine and company into Memphis.

“Only four ways into that town, barring being brought in in handcuffs and bite-guard,” Everready said in their first camp on the trip north.

They looked like four spirits around their Yazoo swamp campfire, the humans under individual shrouds of mosquito netting, while Ahn-Kha followed the Grog manner by pasting his sensitive face and ears under a layer of mud.

“There's the river,” Everready explained. “They check everybody at the river, and they're damn good at spotting fake documents, and most visitors are kept to the Riverfront anyway. Then there's the wall. There are gaps at the rock wall, of course, but the smugglers have gone to a lot of trouble to open them and watch 'em, and they won't let you through for free. Then there are the road gates, but it's the same problem, another document check. Most people who come to trade do it at Little City around Memphis, then the middlemen the Memphis authorities know and trust go through the gates with their goods.”

“That's three ways in,” Ahn-Kha said.

Everready shifted an apple stem to the other side of his mouth. “Yes, sir, Mister Grog, that's only three ways. The fourth is a bit tricky—it's up along the Tunica Run. Tunica's a dumping ground for those that got the ravies bug—Memphis buys 'em cheap off their fellow Kurians and dumps them in Tunica so there's always a feed on for their Reapers. Every now and then they release a batch on the west side of the river to give the Free Territory folks a little trouble, too.”

Everready cracked his knuckles. “If you're careful, really careful, you can move north through the ravies colony. It's really just a big wall there, and one gate. They watch the gate and patrol the wall, but not too heavily. Ravies types aren't into engineering ways over or under the wall. Too busy chasing their own tails.”

“So what's in Memphis that's worth all that security?” Duvalier asked. Valentine thought she looked like a silent-film starlet, with face glowing in the firelight behind the layer of netting.

“The banks,” Everready said.

Her voice rose a notch. “Banks? There aren't banks any more.”

“Yes, there are,” Everready said. “Only kind of banks that matter to the Kurians. Big marshaling yards for the transhipment of humans.”

“Tell her why,” Valentine said.

“Logistics,” Everready said. “Memphis is only a day's rail from every big city on the eastern seaboard, plus parts of the Midwest and Texas—the parts your boys haven't took yet, that is. It's why ol' FedEx was headquartered there, too. Some Kurian in Kansas buys tractors from Michigan; he sends authorization to the bank in Memphis to ship up three hundred folk or whatever the price was. They're on the next train to Detroit. Those yards are a sight to see. Let me ask you the same question. What's so important in Memphis that you're willing to risk going in?”

“We're looking for someone,” Valentine said.

“Unless he got a job in one of the camps—”

“She,” Duvalier corrected.

Everready shrugged. “Unless she got a job in one of the camps—wait, is she a looker?”

“She's attractive enough, but there's more to it,” Valentine said.

“What do you mean, more?”

Valentine tried to explain the mule list to Everready as concisely as possible. The old Cat thought it worth another apple; he carved off slices for the other three and then gnawed at the remaining wedge himself.

The fruit tasted like candy to Valentine.

“There's this big ol' boy named Moyo who runs all the girls inside the wall. Always has his men checking inbound shipments for beauty. He's got a regular harem; half the large-scale pimps south of the Ohio buy from him. He employs bounty hunters to comb the hills east of here to bring in folks to swap out when one of his men spots a pretty girl. Kurians don't really care—what's the difference between one dollar coin and another? Moyo does a lot of high-priority transshipping. He'd be the first place I'd look for more on this mule list of yours, if it really is all women.”

After that he and Valentine spent a few minutes looking at maps—Everready chuckled that he hardly used the maps anymore, he knew the ground between Memphis and Vicksburg so well—and planning the hike north.

“We should jog east a bit at the Coldwater. I got a store of captured gear you three can draw from.” Everready flicked his fingers at Valentine's disintegrating guard shoes, and Valentine wondered if he was going to get the old lecture about how there's no reissue on feet.

“How's Trudy?” Valentine asked, jerking a netting-shrouded chin at Everready's ancient carbine. The well-oiled stock glowed in the firelight.

“Still saving my life.”

“And the Reaper-teeth collection?”

“Seventy-one and counting.”

“All from fair fights, right?”

Everready made a move to box his ears. “Valentine, how you think I got this old? Only time I even get into a scrap with a Reaper is when they's so disadvantaged it's hardly a fight a'tall.”

Valentine woke to the smell of chickory coffee.

Everready and Duvalier were the only ones up. Ahn-Kha lay in a snoring heap, wrapped around his gun like a snake that had swallowed a bullock before retiring to a too-small tree.

He listened to the conversation as he shifted around, feeling for creepy-crawlies. He missed his old hammock.

“I didn't know Cats got as old as you. I thought we were all done by thirty.”

“For a start, I stay in territory I know better than they do. I don't make a lot of trouble, I'd rather let my eyes and ears do the work.”

“Don't the Lifeweavers ever have you—”

“I think they've forgotten about ol' Everready. But that's fine with me. I like to fight with my own set of priorities. I suppose that's how I ended up in this swamp.”

“Seems lonely. Do you go into Memphis often?” she asked.

“No, they know my face there. Not that I wouldn't mind visiting the pros down at the Pyramid. Your pretty face makes me feel twenty years younger.”

“Wish I could help—but . . .”

Valentine wondered what the silence portended.

“You're lucky. He's a good man. But be careful working with someone you got that kind of feeling for. The moment will come, maybe you'll have just a split second to move, and you'll move wrong 'cause of your feelings. You'll both wind up dead.”

Valentine kept absolutely still.

Everready went on: “Don't look like that. Just one ol' hound's opinion. If I knew what I was talking about I'd have some hardware on my collar and be giving orders, right?”

“Let's see about breakfast.”

“I'll check the crawfish traps. Better use the big pot. That Grog can eat.”

Valentine waited to open his eyes until he felt the tip of Duvalier's boot. “You can wake up Ahn-Kha,” she said. “When he stretches in the morning his gas drops the birds.”

Everready's cache showed his usual craftiness. He kept medical supplies, preserved food, and weapons in several spots between the Yazoo and the Mississippi; the problem was keeping the gear away from scavengers. Humans could use tools and animals could smell food through almost any obstacle. In the Coldwater Creek cache he had solved the problem by burying his supplies behind a house and then placing a wheelless, stripped pickup body over it.

Ahn-Kha stood watch in a high pine while they excavated the cache.

“The engine block's still in this so she's a heavy SOB,” Everready explained, retrieving a wire-cored rope from the house's chimney. The rope he fixed to the trailer hitch. Then he tied his Reaper-robe top around the base of a tree, looped the rope around it, and fixed it.

“Here you go, young lady,” he said, handing the line to Duvalier.

She hardly had to lean as she applied a transverse pull to the center of the rope. The truck pivoted a few feet, exposing some of the dirt and a few hardy creepers beneath the pickup bed. Everready tightened it again and she slid the pickup body another meter toward the tree.

“Why the material around the tree?” Valentine asked.

Everready checked under the dashboard on the passenger side and then pulled out a folding shovel with a gloved hand. “So the bark doesn't strip. You'd be surprised how clever some scavengers are.”

The heavy-duty garbage bags within had further items wrapped up inside them: a few guns thick with protective grease, boxes of ammunition, a large box of red pepper— ideal for throwing off tracking dogs—and a pair of shin-top-high camouflage-pattern boots.

“You and I have about the same size foot, I think,” Everready said as Valentine grabbed up the snakeproof boots like a miner spotting a golden nugget. “There are some good socks rolled up in that coffee tin. An extra pair should make up the difference.” Valentine smiled when he looked in the tin. It also contained a half-dozen old “life-time” batteries with a logo of a lightning-bolt-like cat jumping through a red circle. Everready liked to leave the twelve-volt calling cards in the mouths of his kills.

He brought up a cardboard box full of a dozen familiar blue tins.

“Spam?” Valentine asked.

“Naw. This was part of a larger shipment going to the resistance farther east. I took a small expeditor's fee for getting the pony train there. There's plastic explosive inside the cans, you just got to pop the lid—there's even a layer of pork at the top.” He passed up another bag. “Three kinds of detonators. One looks like a wind-up alarm clock, one's in this watch but you have to hook it to the batteries in this flashlight, and the others are straight fuses made to look like shoelaces, while the detonators are made to look like nine-volt batteries. Your armorers are clever.”

Everready unrolled a chamois and handed a 9mm Beretta up to Duvalier. “This is a nice little gun, young lady.”

“I'll take that Mossberg twelve-gauge,” she said, pointing at a cluster of long guns. “Folding stock. Dreamy.”

“Don't you think you'll stand out a bit in Memphis?”

“Not after I rope it up inside my coat.”

“Your duster's going to look strange in this heat,” Valentine said.

“Not if I'm mostly naked under it.”

“Hope you're not looking for trouble in Memphis. Hard to get into. Harder to get out of. Valentine, since you're going to be posing as a reel looking to add a few new faces to his line, you'll want something with a little flash. I took this off a wandering guitar man in a swap meet card game.”

He picked up a sizeable clear plastic food-storage container and broke the seal. A long, silver-barreled automatic pistol rested inside with a shoulder holster and spare magazines. The gun was nickel-plated and would reflect light from miles away—no wonder Everready stuck it in a hole. “You don't mind .22, do you?”

“For this kind of job I'd prefer it. It's quiet.”

“Only took you four years and some to add that word to your vocabulary,” Duvalier observed.

“And what else?” Everready said in his old talking-with-milk-chinned-young-Wolves tone.

“It's light so you can carry a lot, and it's a nice varmint round for when you get hungry.”

“Exacto! Now let's get you a longarm. Where did I put that sumbitch?” He rooted through the guns and found a zipped-up case. “Here we are.”

He extracted a gleaming bullpup battle rifle. “This here is real US Army Issue,” he said, as another man might speak of a Rothschild vintage or a Cuban cigar. “Took this off some half-assed commandos outta Jackson eight years back. Called a Tacsys U-gun—'U' for universal. There's four interchangeable barrels and actions so she can shoot 9mm, 5.56, 7.62 with a sniper barrel, or you can open her up and feed her shotgun shells. Used to have a silencer, but I rigged it to a rifle I lost. Sorry. Nice little four-power scope up top. Wish I could give you the grenade launcher for it.”