Winter Duty

The Storm, January, the fifty-sixth year of the Kurian Order: Though rare, heavy winter weather sometimes burdens Kentucky. Blizzards have been known to dump enough snow to form formidable, chin-high drifts where the snow is pushed and channeled by wind and terrain, and once in place, the snow is surprisingly tenacious when protected by hill or tree from the sun.



The storm that winter of 2076 became a byword for bad conditions for generations after. To anyone who survived it, nothing that hit Kentucky in the future could compare to those wild weeks in January when the sky seemed determined to alternately freeze and bury the state.



The Moondagger prophet from the houseboat on the Kentucky River might have smiled in satisfaction as white judgment fell. Some said the real reason for the bad weather was the Kurian desire to see Kentucky's populace gathered together yet isolated, the better to be stationary targets for what bloomed like Christmas cactus in the thick of storm and gloom.



The storm and the night dragged on.



The snow waxed so heavy that night that they couldn't see more than fifteen or twenty feet in front of Rover. The headlights reflected back so much light from the snow they did more harm than good, so they drove using the service red guide lights. The motorcycles were useless in this weather, so Stuck and Longshot stopped and hung them up on the side of the Bushmaster. Fortunately, Thursday had put them on the right road for once, and all the driver in the cramped Rover had to do was stay on it.



With the storm raging outside, reaching Grand Junction became not just a matter of convenience but a necessity. If they pulled off and camped, everything would take three times as long thanks to the weather, and no one would have a comfortable night.



"Still can't believe about the Coonskins," Thursday said. "They were good men. Had many a meal with them when we all rode for Karas. The Moondaggers must have threatened them with something awful."



"Haw," Habanero said. "I'll bet every head in my share that no one threatened them with anything more than having to come home to six wives."



"That's how the Kurians get you," Longshot said. "Giveaways. That's how they took over in the first place, my old man always said. They showed up-and, sure, they offered food and fuel, but there was more than that. They offered structure and freedom from having to think for yourself."



"I'm sure that's just what people in an earthquake-hit city wanted," Thursday said. "What the hell you talking about, Habby?"



"It's like that story about how to trap swamp pigs. Ever heard it?"



"No," Thursday said.



Valentine had. Habanero had all of five parables, and the pig one wasn't nearly as good as his story about the frog and the scorpion. Mostly because that one was shorter.



Mrs. O'Coombe read her Bible by map light.



"Well, seems that down in the Congaree swamp in South Carolina there was a whole passel of pigs running wild. Now, pigs are smart. Every now and then a hunter would go in and try to get one, but most came back empty-handed, the pigs were so wary and wild.



"Well, a stranger feller came into town and said he was going to get them pigs. Of course all the locals about laughed him out of town, but he ignored them. Instead he went and bought himself a couple fifty-pound bags of corn.



"Every day he went into the swamp and poured some corn on one of the pig trails in a nice woodsy spot. Well, of course the pigs came along and ate the corn. It was free, after all. Easier than rooting up grubs and tubers.



"After a few days, with the pigs showing up regular for their feed, he put a few beams down in front of the corn, and he watched them eat from a distance. Just wood on the ground, easy for a pig to hop over, and none of them minded making that jump to get at that corn. Then he started building a fence for a stockyard. He always made sure there were plenty of ways in and out for the pigs. They were a little nervous of the construction-one or two hightailed it right back into the swamp-but the rest were getting really used to that corn, so they went in.



"Now gradually he shut off the entrances and exits, kept watching them from nearer and nearer, and made it tougher and tougher for the pigs to go in and get the corn, till all they had was a little gap to squeeze through. But darned if they didn't squeeze through and gobble till every last bit of the corn was eaten.



"Only one time, when they were done, the pigs saw that there was no way back out of the pen. He'd blocked it up.



"They got their free grain still. 'Nother day or two, anyway, before a big ol' livestock trailer pulled up, and they used sticks and dogs to herd them pigs right into the trailer. Didn't cost him much: a few big bags of corn to convince them pigs there was such a thing as a free lunch."



"So that's what they're doing to us Kentuckians, you think?" Thursday asked.



"I don't know if the Kurians are smart as that man down Congaree way. But the Kurians are big on advertising their wares as free, aren't they? Sometimes I think the scariest words in the American idiom are 'no obligation.' Of course, sometimes they stick in an 'absolutely' 'cause that one more lie just pushes people right over the edge into stupid."



They only knew they entered Grand Junction once buildings appeared on either side of the road.



"I know just where you should park, Habby," Thursday said to the wagon master at the wheel. "There's a grain mill just the other side of town. Not one of those claptrap corrugated iron things-real stonework. Abandoned now because of the lack of juice. We grind grain with a couple oxen these days, the old-fashioned way."



Valentine looked out the window. He was used to seeing gutted storefronts, but one of the buildings that had a hole in the front looked like it had received recent damaged-the splinters in the door were white and fresh.



"I wonder how long we'll be snowed in here," Duvalier said from the bench she had to herself at the very back of Rover. "Charmingly dead."



"What's that?" Habanero said suddenly into his mike.



Valentine plugged his own headset in, uneasy. "What happened?" Mrs. O'Coombe said.



"Ma in Chuckwagon says she just hit a person."



"Good God," Mrs. O'Coombe said.



Valentine's earphone crackled: "-maybe it was just a big dog. But he came leaping, trying to get on the back of Bushmaster, and slipped. Under my wheels before I knew it. We bumped over him."



"We should stop," Mrs. O'Coombe said.



"What kind of fool runs into a line of trucks in this weather?" Thursday said, his face unholy in the dim light of the console.



"Must have been a dog," Habanero said. "Shadows are weird with all the reflections."



"Here's the mill," Thursday said. "I'll get it open for you, and then I'll check in with our sheriff and let him know you've arrived. As long as that wasn't him Ma ran over."



He laughed at his own joke, but no one else did.



The mill looked like a staggered tower, in levels going back from the street rising to a sloped roof on the top floor like an old ski jump.



"Always thought this building would be great to live in if you could gut and rebuild like they used to. Left just here, Habby," Thursday said. "Don't think you can get more than the first two vehicles parked inside. The loading dock's only made for one truck, really. There's plenty of space around the side with the train tracks."



Habanero turned on Rover's lights. A metal gate broke the pattern in the stone sides of the mill. Thursday climbed out and met his dancing shadow at a crank handle.



Turning the handle, he raised what had probably once been an electric door.



Thursday lost his footing. Mrs. O'Coombe took a sudden breath at his fall.



Or not a fall. Thursday disappeared under the half-raised gate with a scream.



"What the hell!" Habanero said.



"Wagon master, get ready to reverse and get out of here," Valentine said.



Habanero began to speak into his microphone.



Valentine grabbed his rifle out of its seat-back clip and stepped outside.



"Valen-" Duvalier began, but he slammed the door.



He ducked down, looking into the dark of the old grain elevator. Rover's lights cast beams through that were cut off by the half-closed door. A pair of hands, Thursday's, were reaching out of the darkness and clawing in an effort to crawl back to Rover-but something was holding him back.



And hurting him. Thursday was screaming like a man being slowly dismembered.



Valentine wished he had a light clipped to the barrel of the gun. He looked around at the column but could see nothing but the whirling flakes and the columns lights.



The Type Three pointed from his hip at the gate, he went to the crank for the door gate. He extended his arm and gripped the freezing-cold metal. Tendons tight, he managed to turn the wheel with one hand while he kept the barrel of his rifle pointed at the growing gap between tracked door and ground.



Thursday's hands were twitching spasmodically now, and as more and more light bled into the mill, the rest of him was revealed.



A piercing shriek in his ear. Ali was out of the car, a pistol in hand and a sword stick under her arm. Valentine had never heard her shriek like that-the noise must be coming from another.



Ragged two-legged forms appeared in the white bath of the headlights. Gore-smeared mouths testified to a recent, messy feast.



Ravies!



Valentine had encountered the disease on his first independent command in the Kurian Zone.



Ravies was a disease of multiple strains, first used in 2022 to help break down the old order, and used here and there since whenever the Kurians needed to stir up a little chaos. On his trip into Louisiana as junior lieutenant of Zulu Company in the Wolves, the Kurians reacted by gathering up some of the indigenous swamp folk and infecting them with the latest strain.



Valentine took them down with four quick shots. Red carnations blossomed on their chests and they staggered in confusion before crashing to the ground, dead.



As a member of Southern Command, he'd been inoculated against the disease, but you never knew how current your booster was. Valentine had a theory that they were sometimes injected with nothing but some colored saline solution to give them confidence before going into the Kurian Zone, so they wouldn't panic if faced with the disease, spread by bite and gouge and gush of arterial blood.



It didn't take a special shot to the brain or anything like that to kill a ravies sufferer, as some people thought-though if you wanted to live to go home and kiss your sweetheart again, you made damn sure you put some lead into center mass, for a ravies sufferer felt no pain. Indeed, he or she felt nothing but a desire to rend and tear.



Valentine realized Duvalier's scream had been answered, in a muffled and echoed manner, from farther up the street in town.



Hopefully those who shrieked the responsorial were confused by the muffling effects of the snow as to where exactly Valentine's column was.



Valentine fiddled with his Type Three, took out the bayonet, and fixed it at the front of the rifle. He worked the slide in the hilt, extending the blade to its full length.



He pounded on Habanero's window. "Alert everyone: There's ravies in this town and God knows where else," Valentine said. "Get Rover and the Chuckwagon inside. We can block the main door with the Boneyard and stuff the Bushmaster in the truck entryway. Toss me a flashlight."



Valentine took a green plastic tube handed to him and clicked on the prism of long-lasting LED light. A beam one-tenth as powerful as Rover's, but much more flexible, played around the inside of the grain mill. Nothing else was drawn out of the shadows by the bouncing light, so Valentine satisfied himself that the grain elevator was empty of everything but corpses.



For now.



Judging from the smell, the locals used part of the old grain tower as a smokehouse.



Grain mills always reminded Valentine a little of churches. They had the same shadowy, steeplelike towers, tiny staircases up to balconies and antechambers, and of course the important platform at one end. In mills, that was where grain could be ground into feed or flour.



With blood and pieces of Thursday scattered on the floor, the phrase "dark Satanic Mills" from Blake's Jerusalem floated through Valentine's mind. Valentine pulled the corpses out of the path of the vehicles and waved the Rover in.



Thursday had done them one favor before his untimely death. He had guided them to a well-built structure. Limestone gave decent insulation, and it was as strong or stronger than brick.



Mrs. O'Coombe jumped out of Rover. "Mister Valentine. If there is the ravies virus in town, shouldn't we drive on-"



"If the weather were clear, that would be my choice," Valentine said.



Habanero nodded from the window. "He's right; we're lucky to have gotten this far."



Frat and his Wolves needed something to do. Valentine sent them up a short set of steps and into the mill's office to look for messages from the town's inhabitants.



"No noise," Valentine said.



"Put Rover over there," Valentine told the wagon master, indicating a corner by the old loader equipment. "Get Chuckwagon in here."



"The medical wagon is more valuable," Mrs. O'Coombe said.



"Right now the fuel in Chuckwagon's trailer is the most important thing," Valentine said. "And we can all get a hot meal. We can refuel Rover, Chuckwagon, and Bushmaster, and then put Chuckwagon outside and bring Boneyard in."



Mrs. O'Coombe blinked. "Very well. You are thoughtful under stress, Mister Valentine. I admire that. But I still think we should hurry on, weather or no weather."



"You could make yourself useful by refueling Rover," Valentine said to Mrs. O'Coombe, urgency consuming his usual polite phrasing with the great lady.



"Snow's killing the sound," Stuck said, entering the mill. He had a skullcap of snow already. "Ravies are drawn to motion and sound. They won't see us or hear us even if the town's full of them. As long as there's no shooting."



Habanero spoke into his comm link. Valentine heard the Chuckwagon backing outside.



Bee, who was riding in the Chuckwagon to give her two-ax-handle-wide frame elbow room, hopped out and trotted to Valentine's side, sniffing the blood in the air.



"Easy now, Bee. It's okay," Valentine said. How much she got from syntax and how much from tone he didn't know, but she went to work arranging the bodies neatly head to toe. She put Thursday one way and the ravies victims Valentine had shot the other.



Stuck was at the gate entrance, a big gun in a sling across his chest. Valentine had to look twice, but he recognized it as an automatic shotgun. He wondered where Stuck had acquired it and where it had stayed hidden in their travels-the weapon in his arms was easily worth its weight in solid silver. It was one of the few weapons that didn't require a tripod and that could kill a Reaper with a single burst of fire.



With the Chuckwagon parked, its trailer well inside, Valentine had Habanero tell the driver of the Bushmaster to back up the APC through the gate and into truck dock. It would fill it, perhaps not as tight as the Dutch boy's finger in the proverbial dike, but close.



Backing up the Bushmaster was no easy matter-the driver didn't have the usual rearview mirrors. Rockaway was at the top forward hatch, passing instructions to the driver.



Figures flashed out of the darkness, barefoot in the snow.



"Get inside, get inside, get inside!" Valentine shouted to Stuck. "Habanero, Bushmaster needs to clear the gate and get in the loading dock. Have Boneyard pull forward and wait, buttoned up tight."



Valentine heard a scream. Rockaway lit up the night with his pistol, firing at the ravies running for the Bushmaster.



Another charged out of the snow on his blind side. Valentine swung to aim, but the ravie jumped right out of his sights and landed on Rockaway, biting and pulling.



"Keve," Mrs. O'Coombe screamed from the doorway.



Rockaway emptied his gun blind and over his shoulder into the thing biting him.



Chaos. Everyone shouted at once, mostly to get the gate down.



"How the hell do you shut this door?" Stuck hollered.



"Inside!" Valentine yelled to Stuck. He was fumbling around with the wheel Thursday had used to raise the gate.



The Bushmaster rumbled through the gate.



A flash of brown and Duvalier was up on the gate rails. Duvalier had leaped nine feet in the air and now hung from a manual handle, trying to bring it down with her slight weight.



Valentine finally thought to look on the side of the wall opposite the crank and saw a pawl in the teeth of a wheel. There was a simple lever to remove it.



The compressed thunder that was the fire of the automatic shotgun licked out into the night, turning snowfall orange.



"Cease fire," Valentine shouted. If the Bushmaster opened up with its cannon, it would draw every ravie for a mile. "You'll just attract more. Habanero, tell the people in Boneyard and Bushmaster to turn off lights and engines-don't fire. Don't fire!"



Habanero repeated the orders.



The smaller door on the back of the Bushmaster opened, and Boelnitz jumped out, pulling a bloody-shirted Rockaway out, and the two ran for the mill.



Panicky fool! The fear of ravies caused just as much damage as the sufferers.



A shirtless figure tore out of the darkness. It didn't so much as tackle Boelnitz as run over him. It pulled up, as though shocked he'd gone down so easily.



Rockaway fell on his own.



Stuck took a quick step from the door crank and swung with his rifle butt, cracking the ravie across the back of the neck. It turned on him, swinging an arm that sprawled Stuck.



Valentine aimed the Type Three and put two into the ravie's back. It went down on its knees. Boelnitz, stunned, crawled toward the door and the safety of the mill's interior, lit by the headlights of Rover and Chuckwagon. Stuck picked Rockaway up by his belt and almost threw him through the door like a bowler trying for a strike.



"The hell's the matter with you?" Stuck said, kicking Boelnitz toward the mill. "Why didn't you stay in the APC?"



Valentine let loose the lever on the pawl, and the door, still with Duvalier hanging on it as she tried to force it with her leg, descended. Valentine stopped it high enough so a man could still enter at a crouch.



Stuck rolled in and sighted his gun to cover Bushmaster.



Valentine dragged Boelnitz in.



"Dumbshit didn't shut the door on Bushmaster," Stuck said, swinging the barrel of the auto-shotgun and pressing it to the thick, soft hair on Boelnitz's head.



Mrs. O'Coombe hugged her bloody son. "My God, my God . . . ," she kept repeating.



Valentine kicked up the gun barrel, and Stuck head-butted him in the gut.



Duvalier dropped from above, landing on Stuck's shoulders, and wrapped her legs around his back. She put her sword stick across his throat.



"Okay, okay," Stuck said. "Get 'er off!"



"Close the door, somebody," Valentine gasped as they untangled themselves.



Mrs. O'Coombe worked the lever and the door rattled down at last.



A pair of hands thrust themselves under the gate. Mrs. O'Coombe pushed the pawl back in, held it there.



Metal bent at the bottom of the gate as though a forklift were being used to pull it up instead of a pair of hands. The bottom of the gate groaned and began to bend.



Duvalier's sword flashed and sparked as it ran along the gate bottom, leaving severed fingertips lying about like dropped peanuts.



"The pawl, ma'am," Valentine shouted. Rockaway reached for it. Mrs. O'Coombe broke out of her reverie and extracted it.



Valentine stomped the handle hard. The door slammed shut.



"You better?" he asked Stuck.



The ex-Bear nodded.



"I'd forgotten how much I enjoy noise and danger," Mrs. O'Coombe said to no one in particular. "Very little, to be precise."



"You wouldn't have really shot me, would you?" Boelnitz said, picking himself up.



Stuck took a deep breath. "Maybe not me, but the Bear sure as hell was about to."



Boelnitz looked at Valentine. "Thank you. I owe you."



"Valentine, what the hell was that?" Stuck said, pointing at the fingers on the ground.



Valentine ignored him, tore open his own tiny first-aid kit, opened the little three-ounce flask of iodine, and poured and dabbed it into Rockaway's bites and scratches.



"Doc says they're nervous in Boneyard," Habanero reported as Valentine's heartbeat began to return to normal. "It's not exactly an armored car."



"Get Doc in here at once," Mrs. O'Coombe said. "My son's been bitten."



"I'm not opening the door until things quiet down out there," Valentine said. "This is the best we can do."



"What the hell was that?" Stuck continued, shaking his head. "Have you ever seen a ravies case like that?"



"They were . . . like Bears," Duvalier said. "I've never seen anyone bend steel like that, except a Bear."



"Maybe it wasn't human. Maybe they've got a more human-looking Reaper," Valentine said, looking at the fingers.



"A Reaper would have just torn through it," Duvalier said. "Trying to lift it is a dumb way to get in. Reapers are smarter than that."



"Everyone needs to eat as much garlic as possible," Ma said from the Chuckwagon as she sorted through her stock. "I'll make a poultice for Keve."



"That's an old wives' tale," Stuck said.



"Well, I got to be an old wife by following old wives' tales, so you'll eat your garlic."



Valentine had heard dozens of folk remedies supposed to ward off ravies. Eating asparagus was one of the stranger ones.



Getting iodine into a ravies bite right away was the only one the Miskatonic people said worked. Iodine and a quick broad-spectrum antibiotic within a few minutes. The latter was a good deal less easy to come by in the Kurian Zone.



Instead of reminiscing, he should be refueling Rover and getting the Boneyard in, and then they could take care of Bushmaster. Everyone should get a hot meal and catch some rest too, and he'd better see how the Wolves were doing battening down the office in front.



So much for the responsibility-free tour of central Kentucky.



As it turned out, Doc snuck in the front door with his bag, moving extremely quietly. He cleaned Rockaway's wounds and gave him two injections, one for the pain, the other an antibiotic.



"Contact with Fort Seng," reported Habanero, who hadn't quit listening to Rover's radio since pulling it into the mill.



They'd rigged lanterns in the mill. Valentine had considered running the tiny portable generator to spare the vehicles' batteries but decided against it. A storm this intense couldn't last much longer, not in Kentucky.



He took a deep breath to wake himself up and put on the second headset.



"Major, we're getting reports of ravies outbreaks all across the Mississippi plateau," Lambert's voice crackled at the other end of the radio. "Report position and status, please."



"Grand Junction. We've just had a brush with them, sir."



"Repeat, please."



"We've fought a skirmish. Two casualties." Technically they'd just lost Thursday, but Rockaway had been bitten. . . .



"Major, I'm hearing strange reports about this strain. The infected cases are unusually strong and ferocious."



"I won't vouch for the ferocious, but they are strong, exceptionally strong. Like Bears."



"Are there other outbreaks in Kentucky you know of?"



"No, sir. This is the first we've seen of it. How are things at base?"



"Quiet. No sign of it. A new patrol has just gone out to check Owensboro. We've lost contact with the town."



"Orders?" Valentine asked.



"Get back as quickly as you can. The underground has informed us that that armored column has moved south from Bloomington and is now outside Owensboro. They've been shelling the city."



"We'll be mobile as soon as the weather lets up," Valentine said.



"Good luck," Lambert said. "Report when you're moving again."



"Wilco. Signing off."



"Signing off."



"We were lucky, I think," Stuck said. "I'll bet there is only a handful of ravies left in this town-mostly ones who were torn up in scrapes with them and succumbed to the infection."



"Lucky?" Boelnitz said, looking at Rockaway, who was being tended to at the far end of the mill by Doc.



"I said we," Stuck said. "Not him."



With time to think and a hot cup of Mrs. O'Coombe's tea inside him, Valentine realized the Kurians had played a brilliant double cross in Kentucky.



Or perhaps it was a triple cross, if you considered the attack on the Kentucky River position a double cross. He almost had to admire the genius of it. If the attack on the A-o-K had routed the principal body of armed and organized men in central Kentucky, the Kurians would have been in the position to act as saviors when the ravies virus hit. The New Universal Church could show up en masse, ready to inject the populace with either a real antiserum or a saline solution, all the while persuading the populace of the advantages of returning to their semiprotected status in the Kurian Order.



As it turned out, the attack failed, but it also served to concentrate their enemies. With the storm raging, they wouldn't be able to spread out and contain the virus to a few hot spots. Instead, the A-o-K would suffer the agonies of men knowing their families were threatened and unable to do a damn thing about it. Given the brief existence of the A-o-K, it might dissolve entirely, like salt in a rainstorm, fragmenting into bands of men desperate to return home.



The one patch of light in the snowy, howling gloom was that Kentucky wasn't the earthquake-and-volcano-ravaged populace of 2022. The legworm clans were armed to the teeth-man, woman, and child-and were used to living and working within the confines of armed camps organized for defense. Ravies bands fought dumb. They didn't coordinate, concentrate properly, or pick a weak spot in their target's defenses-except by accident.



Valentine didn't like the look of Boelnitz. He had been pale and quiet ever since the madness between Bushmaster and the gate.



Worried that the journalist might be going into shock from stress alone, Valentine squatted down next to him.



"Something for your notebook at last," Valentine said, noticing that the paper under his pencil was empty. "Don't let it bother you."



"The wounded in Bushmaster. They saw O'Coombe's boy was bitten. They said he had to go out, or they'd shoot him. I think they meant it."



Boelnitz looked at his notebook. "When I said I owe you, I meant it. I owe you the truth," Boelnitz said. "I've been flying under false colors, I'm afraid. Here."



He handed Valentine the leather notebook with a trembling hand and opened it to a creased clipping.



"It's one thing to write about wars and warriors and strategy," Boelnitz said. "It looks very different when you're looking down the barrel of a gun. Or up one."



Valentine read a few paragraphs.



It was always a strange sensation to parse another's depiction of oneself, like hearing someone describe the rooms in one's own home, bare facts attached to memories and emotions but as artificial and obvious as plastic tags in the ears of livestock. Valentine took in the words in the Clarion's familiar, sententious style and typeface with the unsettling feeling of reading his own obituary:



The terror of Little Rock during the late rising against Consul Solon, David Valentine has created a career that makes for exciting, if disturbing, reading. Trailed by a hulking, hairy-handed killer bodyguard named Ahn-Kha, Valentine is a man of desperate gambits and vicious enmities without remorse or regret. The corpses of gutted, strung-up POWs and murder to followers like the Smalls . . .



Valentine couldn't read any more.



"I only showed that to you because I can't reconcile the figure described in Southern Command's archives, at least the ones I was given clearance to see, and Clarion's articles with the person in the flesh. I just thought it was time for a little honesty. Pencil Boelnitz is a fiction; it's the name of my first editor, the English teacher who helped us run the school newspaper. My real name is Llewellyn. Cooper Llewellyn."



"You thought . . . you thought that if I knew you were from the Clarion . . . what? I'd run you off base?"



"Something like that."



"I have to say, I like Pencil Boelnitz better. He seemed like the kind of guy who'd observe and relate what he observed without trying to psychoanalyze a man he'd known for only a few weeks."



"You've a right to be mad. But there's a sign up at the Clarion: Anyone can transcribe. A journalist reveals."



Valentine chuckled. "I can't see why your paper is so beloved for its editorial page, if that's the best they can do. It's easy to come up with something like that for any profession. Anyone can disrobe. A stripper profits."