Valentine's Rising (49 page)

Valentine, his vision a red mist, brought both of his hands up, uncoiling with his body and helping the blade travel the last few inches. The Reaper's head went up and off in a gristly
pop-snap
.

The Reaper's body staggered off sideways, clawing at the air. The ambulatory corpse did a U-turn, crashed into the wall, and flopped over. There was shooting coming from the far end of the tunnel.

“Your hands!” Valentine barked, as Styachowski was about to wipe her sweating face. She froze.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. Reaper blood was poisonous, whether swallowed or taken in through a mucous membrane. Even the best Hunters sometimes forgot in the midst of a fight. The tunnel was filling with smoke from the grenade, and the fight elsewhere.

Footsteps. Another Reaper charged out of the smoke, robes torn, one arm gone, its body riddled with bullet wounds. Valentine and Styachowski threw themselves against the passageway and it passed without noticing them.

“Fucker!” Valentine heard Lost&Found shout, spraying bullets up the corridor after it.

“Cease fire, Bear! You're shooting at us,” Valentine shouted.

The bullets stopped.

“Sir! Sir! We got two of 'em. Two blue bat-winged bastards!”

Valentine could hardly see them through the smoke. He made his way toward the sound of the voices with Styachowski in tow.

“Reapers?” Valentine asked.

“We got two down. One got away from us.”

“He got away from us, too. But I think he was running wild,” Styachowski said, meaning its Kurian had been killed.

Valentine could better make out the haggard four now. They'd almost passed through the smoke. The Bears were missing Brass and Groschen.

“Where are the other two?” Valentine asked. He felt nervous somehow.

Nail jerked his chin up the tunnel the way the Bears had come. “A Reaper popped Brass's head off. Sorry, sir, couldn't be helped. Groschen is keeping an eye on the other end of the tunnel. The old headquarters had been converted to some kind of communications center. Lots of field phones and printing machines. We took it out.”

Valentine didn't listen. There was a problem with the smoke. It didn't smell like anything. Smoke also didn't make noise as it crawled along the ceiling.

“One got away,” Valentine hissed. “A Kurian. It's heading back down the tunnel.”

Without further explanation he threw himself down the tunnel. In the distance he saw a faint figure, running for its immortal life. The Kurian could move. Not as fast as a Reaper. Nothing that wasn't engine-powered moved as fast as a Reaper.

It dashed through the door of the utility subbasement, Valentine almost on its heels. Its skin was the color of blue ice and it gave off a sickly sweet odor like marigolds. So intent on the chase was he that he bounced off the chest of the Reaper, which stepped out from behind the steaming boiler like a sliding steel door. The Kurian was safely behind it. The Kurian turned, looked at Valentine with red-black eyes, and then disappeared upstairs.

Valentine rolled backward and came to his feet.

The one-armed Reaper's eyes wandered. It extended its remaining clawed hand and pulled one of the boiler pipes free of its mount. Valentine heard the Reaper's skin sizzle against the hot metal, but the thing didn't even wince. It yanked the pipe out, so a firehose of steam flooded the passageway and the stairway behind it.

Then it advanced on Valentine.

“i know you,”
it hissed.
“our false friend from louisiana.”

“Valentine!” Nail shouted from behind him.

Valentine dropped to the ground. A hail of bullets filled the tunnel. The Reaper's face vanished in the tight pattern of a buckshot blast. It roared, and charged down the tunnel toward the sound of gunfire. With its eyes gone, it didn't see Valentine wriggling forward after Mu-Kur-Ri.

He heard fighting behind. Styachowski and Nail should be able to handle a one-armed, blind Reaper without him. He wanted Mu-Kur-Ri.

But the hissing steam blocked his way. There was nothing to do but . . . do it.

Valentine lifted his combat vest and got his head and arms tucked into as much of the material as he could, and held it closed over his face.

“This is for you, Hank,” he muttered to himself. He took a deep breath; it wouldn't be pleasant to breathe in hot steam.

Later, when he'd forgotten the pain, he examined the burn marks in detail using a pair of mirrors. His lower back took the worst of it, from beneath his rib cage—where the combat vest ended—to the line of his camp shorts. That part must have been hit by steam shooting from the hose, and it turned into a girdle of scar tissue. The back of his legs got it badly enough that the hair only regrew irregularly, but there was less scarring there than above the line of his shorts. The thick cotton of the shorts and combat vest kept the rest of the damage to first- and second-degree burns. Painful enough, but they healed.

The pain drove him on instinct through the steam and up the stairs. He caught up to the Kurian and fell on it like a rabid dog. It squealed rabbitlike as he tore into the slippery mass with fists and teeth. Cartilage crunched under his knees, a pulpy mass of digestive organs slipped wetly through his fingers, then its rubbery skull finally gave out as he slammed it again and again and again into the concrete landing, still shrouded in green smoke. Then he collapsed atop the spongy corpse of Mu-Kur-Ri.

As he passed out he thought of Caroline Smalls.

The next thing he saw was Styachowski's face, gently rocking as it floated above him. A pleasant warmth gave way to pain, agonizing pain, pain like he'd never felt and would shoot himself to keep from feeling again. It was so bad he couldn't summon the energy to do more than whimper, his body paralyzed, living only in the endless moment of the burn's agony.

“They think of a name for you?” Valentine croaked.

“Not yet,” Styachowski said. She'd shoved expended cartridge cases into her nostrils to stop the flow of blood.

Nail patted her shoulder. “You did just fine, you're a Bear to be proud of. How about Ursa? Like the stars?”

“Wildcat?” Valentine said. “No. A woman who can be anything. A Wildcard.”

“I like Wildcard,” Styachowski said.

“No, if you like it, we can't use it. Unwritten law,” Rain said.

Valentine turned painfully to Nail. “Make it an order, Lieutenant.”

The Bear shrugged. “After all this,” Nail said, “it seems we should call you whatever you like, Styachowski. Wildcard it is. The drawn card that turned out to be an ace just when we needed it.”

 

“Wildcard, is he alive?” a voice that might have been Nail's said.

“He's alive.”

It was torture to his skin to be lifted and carried. Sensibly, his consciousness fled.

He later heard about the scattering of troops from the Kurian Tower as Reapers ran amok, and the confusion that allowed Lieutenant Nail to carry him and lead the Bears back to the river, and how Lost&Found swam across with Valentine tied to an empty five-gallon jerrican to keep him afloat. As he heard the tale Valentine felt as though he'd lived it, but couldn't remember much except for vague impressions of floating. He rememberd shelling but no further large-scale attacks, just endless probes. He remembered Post's daily reports of units observed moving east through New Columbia, and the gun resting in the swimming pool running out of ammunition so that all the hilltop forces could do was watch. He remembered walking again, and giving up his bed to another wounded man and sleeping on a blanket on the concrete floor near where Narcisse worked the hospital kitchen and rubbed him with oily-smelling lotion.

Then came sounds of more trains in the distance and vehicular traffic around the base of the hill, and he managed to go outside. He'd meet the inevitable standing, even if he stood in bandages.

“Sir, you're needed on the west side.” One of the pregnant women, in a man's service poncho which gave her belly growing room, reported from her station at the field phone.

Valentine made a stiff-legged journey. His bad leg ached all the time now, throbbing in sympathy with the healing burns. Ahn-Kha helped him up a set of stairs and they reached the observation point, what was left of Solon's grand balcony. Three soldiers knelt, sharing a set of binoculars, staring up the Arkansas River, a blue ribbon between the green Ozark hills.

“What in God's name is that?” Valentine asked.

The river was three deep in beetles. A flotilla of craft, none larger than thirty feet. Many towed everything from rowboats to braces of canoes.

“Reinforcements?”

“Depends on your point of view. Look—the mortars are shooting at them.”

The tubes of Pulaski Heights were dropping shells into the mass of speeding boats, with little effect but wetting those inside.

Styachowski ran along the rubble-strewn base of Solon's Residence beneath them, tripped over a log and sprawled flat. She picked herself up, but didn't bother to wipe the mud from her chin.

“They're pulling back, sir,” she called up, her voice squealing like a schoolgirl's in excitement. “Not the boats, the Quislings. They're coming off the hill.”

“To oppose the landing?”

“They're just running,” Styachowski said. “Running like hell for the bridge. A train just pulled out east, packed with men.”

Valentine looked down the river, caught a familiar pattern. He snatched the binoculars out of the hand of the man next to him without apology, and focused on the boat trailing the leadmost pilot vessel. There was a flagstaff above the outboard motors. The State Flag of Texas flapped in the breeze.

 

The boats were a surprise to the Quislings as well. They abandoned the weapons on the Pulaski Heights and fled with the rest toward Pine Bluff. When Valentine was sure the hilltop was clear he brought up the wounded from their dreadful holes into the fresh air and sunshine. There were the dead to be sorted from the living, and sent on to the swollen, shell-tossed graveyard.

The Texans found him among the corpses, burying his dead.

“That's him. I met him in Texas,” he heard a voice say. Valentine looked up and saw a Ranger he recognized, Colorado. The youth's shoulders had broadened, and what Valentine's nose told him was that motor oil stained the Ranger's uniform.

Colorado brought forward a bearded man. Valentine suspected that when the campaign started the colonel of the Texas Rangers was clean shaven.

“Nice to finally meet the famous Ghost,” the colonel, whose nametag read “Samoza,” said.

The idea of a famous Cat struck Valentine as a bit absurd, and he fought down a laugh. If his nerves gave way now he'd fall on the man, laughing or crying or confessing, and none were appropriate to the moment.

“We've come all the way from Fort Scott for you,” Samoza continued.

The words took their time in coming. Valentine's shocked brain had to inspect each one as it came out.

“Thank you. Southern Command couldn't even make it fifty miles,” Valentine managed, looking out over the graves.

“Southern Command opened the door for us. Archangel was a joint operation from the start. The Kurians sent troops up from Texas to take you boys down. We figured if they didn't want it, we'd like it back. We got more besides.”

It all hit Valentine like a warm wave. Intellect gave way to pent-up emotion like the dike that had swallowed Styachowski, and he found himself shaking, with tears in his eyes. He hoped his brain remembered it all and would be able to sort it out later. “What's that, sir?” he finally said.

“We linked up with Southern Command just outside Hope. Ironic, wouldn't you say? Then it was north into Oklahoma, and down the river to you.”

“What made you come all this way?”

“A Ranger teamster named Jefferson made a lot of noise in East Texas. Claimed we had to go help the man who started it all. He fought alongside us all the way to Fort Scott and lost a leg there to shellfire. Haven't taken it yet but figured it could wait. You couldn't.”

Valentine held out his hand to the colonel.

“You came all this way for a few companies of men?”

“We're from Texas, friend. We remember the Alamo.”