Valentine's Rising (46 page)

“There's still hope,” he said.

“You tell yourself that? Or just the rest of us?”

“They haven't whipped us. They aren't even close.”

“That's not an answer.”

He didn't supply one.

She pressed his shoulder with hers in the darkness. “You're an odd duck, sir. You look so . . .”

“So what?”

“Never mind.”

“I'd like to know what you think. Might as well talk about something.”

“How about that bacon we had yesterday? Talk about the bottom of the lot,” she said.

“You've got me curious. I look so what?”

“Well, you look so soft, I was going to say. You've got really gentle eyes. They're scared, too. Sometimes. Like that night they dropped the sappers.”

“I was scared. Till I saw you with that bow. You looked like you were at target practice.”

She didn't say anything. He broke the silence. “Speaking of setting an example—I should go up those stairs and see—”

“No. Give it another minute. We're here, it's dark, and you smell . . . comforting.”

“Is that a soft smell?”

“See, you are hurt.”

“No. Interesting to see yourself through another's eyes. What another person thinks.”

“I want it to be over. I'm down here in the dark pretending there's no fighting, no Crocodile. No memories of Martinez and his gang. You can't imagine how good it feels, to have all that gone.”

Actually he could. Valentine had sought oblivion in lust in the past . . .

They sat in the dark, feeding off each other's warmth, conducted through her hard-muscled shoulder.

“Sir, why are you what you are?” Styachowski asked.

“You mean a Cat? And it's ‘David' or ‘Val' when I'm off my feet.”

“Okay, Val. Why?”

“Why don't you go first?”

“I took up soldiering because I knew I could fight. When I was little, about six, I got into a scrap with a boy two years older than me. I beat him. When I say ‘beat him' I really mean ‘beat'—he ended up in the hospital. After that my mom told me about my dad. He'd been a Bear, in a column marching back from some fight in Oklahoma. Caught Mom's eye somehow, and they had a night before he moved on. She said she wasn't thinking—just doing patriotic duty she called it; I showed up nine months later. She said the hunting-men were like wild animals and I had to control myself and never lose my temper. The doc said that was superstition, but I dunno.”

“Your mom may have been right. My father was a Bear, too.”

“So you joined to be like him?”

“Something like that. I think it was my way of knowing him. He was dead by that time.”

She sniffed. “Oh, I'm sorry.”

“So the Bears didn't want you?”

“No. But I still want to be one. It's like this monster inside that wants to get out, wants to fight. I'm afraid that if the monster doesn't get to take it out on the enemy, it'll get out another way.”

Valentine had never met someone with the same dilemma before. After a moment, he said: “You worried that you're a threat to others?”

“I meant myself.”

Valentine brushed dirt off his kneecaps. “I wondered what my father's life was like fighting for the Cause, what made him give up and go live in the Northwoods. Now the only thing I wonder is how he lasted so long. There were other reasons. I believe in the Cause. I've got no time for the ‘it's over, we've lost, let's just weather the storm, fighting makes everything worse' crowd. The Cause is no less just for being lost. Then again, being special appealed to me—meeting with the Lifeweavers, learning about other worlds.”

He wanted to go on, to tell her that he worried that the Lifeweavers had also unlocked the cage of a demon somewhere inside him, to use her metaphor—even more, fed and prodded the demon so it was good and roused when it came time to fight their joined war. The demon, not under his bed but sharing his pillow, was a conscienceless killer who exulted in the death of his enemies at night and then reverted to a bookish, quiet young man when the fighting was over. He worried that the David Valentine who agonized his way through the emotional hangovers afterward, who sometimes stopped the killing, was vanishing. He could look at corpses now, even corpses he'd created—felling men like stands of timber—with no more emotion than when he saw cord-wood stacked on a back porch. It made him feel hollow, or dead, or bestial. Or all three at once.

A voice from above: “Clear from here on . . .”

Valentine saw the flicker of a flashlight beam and got to his feet, reaching up into the dark to feel for the stairs above.

“Hellooo—” he shoulted as he helped Styachowski up.

“Stay put. On the way,” a male voice called back from above.

Soldiers with flashlights, one carrying a bag with a big red cross on it, came down the stairs.

“Hey, it's Re—Major Valentine,” one called to the other.

“That was fast digging,” Styachowski said.

“There's not much of a blockage,” the one with the medical kit said. “Just a wall collapse and some dirt to climb over. Ol' Solon built his foundations well.”

Styachowski straightened her dust-covered uniform. “We're fine,” she said, reverting to her usual brisk tone.

“Let's get those lights in the generator room and see where the trouble is.”

The last of her warmth left his skin as Valentine nodded. She turned, and he followed her and the soldiers into the generator room.

They had electricity within the hour, but Valentine wasn't sure how much longer he could transmit, so he composed a final report to Southern Command of two bare lines. He walked it down to the radio room himself.

Jimenez had the headset on. Jimenez took it off and threw it on the desk, upending a coffee cup. He didn't bother to wipe up the spill.

“They left Hot Springs yesterday. The official bulletin just went out.”

“Then what's wrong? They're only fifty miles away. There's nothing between us and them.”

“They're turning northwest. Heading for Fort Smith.”

Valentine patted him on the shoulder. “There's a lot of Kurians in Fort Smith. Let's hope they get them.”

“Right. Across mountains.”

He placed his final transmission to Southern Command on the coffee-covered desk.

WE STAYED. WE DIED.

 

The shelling from the Crocodile went on for four more days. It was the closest thing to insanity Valentine had ever known. Nothing had any meaning except where the next shell would land. Styachowski's guns couldn't reach the Crocodile. One by one they were put out of action.

The radio room was buried by a direct hit, and Jimenez with it. The hospital had to go underground when a near miss blew down its southern wall. Beck died on the third day, torn to shreds as he turned the knocked-down remnants of Solon's Residence into a final series of trenches and fire lanes. Styachowski took over for him, pulling back what was left of her mortars and placing them in a tight ring of dug-out basements, along with a few shells they were harboring for the final assault.

They knew it was coming when the Crocodile's fire stopped. Thirty minutes went by, and the men gathered at their firing posts. An hour went by, and they began to transfer wounded.

The single remaining pack radio, kept operating by Post, crackled to life. For the past two days it had been rigged to the generator recovered from the kitchens. Post whistled and shouted for Valentine across the ruins. He hopped over a fallen Doric column, a piece of décor Solon fancied, and climbed down the wooden ladder to Post's dugout. A shell or two pursued him. Just because the Crocodile was silent didn't mean the mortars on Pulaski Heights quit firing.

“Urgent call for you, sir,” Post said. “Scanner picked it up.”

“Le Sain? Are you there, Le Sain?” the radio crackled, on Southern Command's frequency.

“Go ahead; not reading you very well.”

“It's a field radio.” Valentine heard distant gunfire over the speaker. “It's me, Colonel. The Shadowboxer.”

“Go ahead, General. Another surrender demand?”

“It's Scottie to you, Knox. Or whatever. I'm the one that surrendered, using your metaphor. I took a few members of my staff on board the Crocodile. We wanted to see the gun in action, you see. For some reason the Grogs didn't think it was odd that I had a submachine gun with me. I shot the crew and pulled out a hand grenade. Grogs sure can run when they use all their limbs.” He laughed, and it occurred to Valentine that he'd never heard Xray-Tango's laugh before. “Now I'm sitting between the magazine door and a shell. There's a dead Grog loader propping it open. This shell's a monster: it's got to be a fourteen-inch cannon. My driver and a couple of members of my staff are making their way around the other side of the gun through the woods. The Grogs are running for dear life. Regular Cat trick, isn't it? Infiltrate, assassinate. All that's left is the sabotage. I've got a grenade bundle in my lap right now.”

“Scottie, I—” Valentine began. Post had an earpiece in his ear and a confused look on his face.

“Going to have to cut this short, Colonel.” Valentine heard automatic fire. “My driver almost has an angle on me. Apologies to St. Louis, looks like they aren't getting their gun back. You know what the best part is, Le Sain?”

“What's that?”

“Since I started dreaming up this plan night before last, my face hasn't twitched once. God, what a relief, it's wonderful. Over and out.”

Something lit up the sky to the east and Valentine felt the ground shudder. He counted twenty-two seconds. Then it came, a long, dull boom. Valentine went back up the ladder, and saw the top of a mushroom cloud climbing to the clouds, white flecked with gray at the edges. He watched it rise and spread.

Until the tears came.

 

The shells stopped, but not the attack. On the thirty-fifth day of the siege they came up the north face, like the wind behind a rain of mortar shells. They came up the east ridge; they came up the switchback. They came up everywhere but the quarry cliff.

The Beck Line collapsed.

Valentine's men tumbled backward toward the Residence. What was left of the gun crews dragged the one remaing gun back to Solon's prospective swimming pool and set it up there.

Even the headquarters staff turned out to stanch the attack. Valentine watched it all from a tangle of reinforced concrete, a conical mound of debris looking out over the hilltop beside what was left of Solon's Residence.

“Officer by the switchback road,” Valentine said, looking through some field glasses. He and Ahn-Kha occupied one of the higher heaps of rubble. Ahn-Kha swiveled his Grog gun. His ears leveled and he fired, kicking up concrete dust.

“They'll zero that,” Valentine said. “Let's move.”

They slid off the mound and into the interbuilding trenches. Rats, the only animals that didn't mind shellfire, disappeared into hidey-holes as they picked their way to the headquarters basement.

It still had a roof of sorts on it, three stories of collapsed structural skeleton. Among the cases of food and ammunition, Brough patched up wounds and extracted shrapnel with the help of her remaining medics. Bugs crawled in cut-off clothing, stiff with weeks' worth of sweat and dirt.

Brough didn't even look at the worst cases. After triage, performed by Narcisse, the worst cases were sent to the next basement over, which was only partially covered. There a few of the stronger-stomached women replaced bandages and murmured lies about recovery. That the men called the passageway to the next basement the “death hole” showed the general opinion of a sufferer's chances within.

Styachowski and Post bodily shoved the men into positions in the final series of trenches as the stream from the crestline turned into a trickle. They moved dully, like sleep-walkers, and collapsed on top of their rifles and slept as soon as they were told to stop moving. Soon, what was left of his command had to keep their heads down not just from mortar fire, but from machine-gun fire that swept the heaps of ruins.

Valentine looked around the last redoubt. In a year it would be a weed bed; in five these mounds would be covered by brush and saplings. He wondered if future generations would wander the little hummocks and try to pick out the final line, where the Razorbacks were exterminated in their little, interconnected holes like an infestation of vermin.

Hank was in the death hole. His burns had turned septic despite being dusted with sulfa powder, and Brough was out of antibiotics. The boy lay on the blankets someone else had died in, waiting his turn, keeping the tears out of his eyes.

“We sure stuck a wrench in their gears, didn't we?” Hank asked, when Valentine sat for a visit.

“With your help,” Valentine said. “Wherever your parents are, they're proud of you.”

“You can be honest with me, Major. They're dead; they have been since that night. You can tell me the truth, can't you? I'm tough enough to take it.”

“You're tough enough.”

Hank waited.

“They're dead, Hank. I went after them, and I killed them with the rest of the Quislings. They were telling about the Quickwood. About the ruse.”

“My fault, sir,” Hank said.

Valentine had to harden his ears to make out the tiny voice. “No.”

“It is,” Hank insisted. “I heard them talking after the baby—after you told us she was dead. ‘We won't be sacrificed, ' Pa said, and they started speaking with their heads together. I should have told you or Ahn-Kha or Mr. Post—but I didn't. Just Mister M'Daw and then it was too . . .” The boy faded back into sleep, like a child who has fought to stay awake until the end of an oft-repeated story but lost.