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Bullfrog nodded. "Sure, Captain."
"Anything overnight?"
"Another train, pulling south; men returning to Texas and Louisiana, looked like," Frum said.
"The Ozarks seem good and pacified," Meadows said. "We're beat and they know it."
"Always interesting times, the pause between conquest and exploitation. I wonder if they're as organized as they think they are," Styachowski said. Valentine's selection of documentation from Bullfrog's files had given her quick mind enough to make a guess as to what the column's next move would be.
"Or if we're as beat as they think we are," Valentine added.
* * * *
Valentine stood at one of the glassless windows above the entrance to the office building, on the second floor. Bullfrog hadn't gotten around to reclaiming this floor of the building yet. Birds flitted in one side of the building and out the other, zipping over low cubicles and around offices.
Creeper and broken glass crunched underfoot as he tottered to the window, glad that the men hadn't seen Ahn-Kha half carry him upstairs. The men and women who had followed him out of General Martinez's camp sat around the door of the lot and in the notch leading toward the main entrance; unformed, unranked, a mass of faces and variegated uniforms-some still damp, Valentine noted, from a quick wash. Some elbowed others at Valentine's appearance, and faces turned up toward them. The chatter stilled.
The silence of their anticipation made Valentine oddly uncomfortable.
Valentine inflated his lungs, ignored the pain in his rib. "You all know about the Cats, am I right?"
"Yes, sir," a few answered back. Valentine thought about making them all holler a response back at him, but he wanted an honest conversation with the men, not an oration filled with theatrical tricks.
"They work behind the Kurian line," Valentine said. "Sometimes in their uniform. I've done it on more than one occasion."
He let that sink in for a moment before continuing. "We're making for what's left of Southern Command in the Boston Mountains. But if we keep going as we are, snaking back and forth, backtracking and sidestepping, we'll only show up sick, hungry, unarmed and tired-if we make it at all. If you men are willing, I know a way we can ride instead of walk, and join our comrades with rifles in our hands and ammunition in our cartridge cases."
They perked up at this. Even the jokers and snoozers in every informal assembly of personnel shut their mouths and fixed eyes on him.
"There'll be risks," Valentine continued. "But the risk of getting across the Arkansas River and through the lines with an unarmed column this big is about the same, by my calculations.
"So we have to balance the likely risks with the possible rewards. Anyone who isn't up for it, anyone who wants out of the game, can stay here with Colonel Meadows and Lieutenant Frum. Guerrilla service is just as honorable, just as important. But I have to make it to the Boston Mountains for reasons of my own. Anyone who wants to follow me, meet at the hollow where Lieutenant Post and and the Wolves are guarding the wagons."
"Then what?" Styachowski asked from among the audience. Just as they'd arranged when Valentine went over his prepared speech with her.
"Then we shave, strip and sew."
astern Ouachitas, Arkansas, February: In the decade before the Overthrow, the interstate between Little Rock and Hot Springs enjoyed a high-tech growth spurt. With key computer networks in prominent cities worldwide challenged by everything from terrorism to extended power outages, backup locations became the focus of a substantial slice of investment. In Americas heartland, in the basements of nondescript office parks, fiberoptic lines connected servers waiting to cut into action should the need arise without the slightest interruption in dataflow; "transparent redundancy, " in the phrase of the times.
Southwest of the blasted ruins of Little Rock, off of one of the feeder highways to the old interstate, a chocolate-colored three-story with bands of black windows once housed claim and policy-holder records for one of the world's top ten insurance companies. In 2022 the building nestled in the Ouachita foothills looked a little like a giant slice of devil's food cake amidst its landscaping and parking lots. Now the lots are meadows, and saplings grow on its roof as birds fly in and out of paneless top-story windows; just another unraveled piece of the commercial fabric of a rich nation. The lowest floor shows some sign of recent renovation. Plywood has been nailed up over broken windows and horses graze behind the building in a paddock made from downed power-line towers. A few camouflage-painted pickups sit parked outside a barbed-wire festooned gas station between the highway and the office building. The battered office building looks peaceful behind a sign reading STATION 26.
Except for the three bodies rotting in the noonday sun.
All male, all naked and all covered in a black mixture of rotting flesh and pitch, visited only by crows, they swing from a pylon that once held four lights above the parking lot next to the gas station. An uprooted stop sign stands in the parking-lot meadow between the bodies and the entrance road, redone in whitewash and black lettering-the two colors have run together in the hasty paint job -reading SABOTER S REWARD.
* * * *
"Bullfrog's been at it again," Finner said. "Sumbitch never could spell." He and Valentine crouched in the thick bush bordering the improvised horse pasture, examining the bodies from a stand of wintering lilac bushes, the western wind blowing the stench the other way. The rest of the column sheltered in the deeper woods a kilometer away, eating the midday meal out of their packs. The screening Wolves had been exploring the more open ground around the old office park and came across what looked like an inhabited office building. When they found the bodies they had summoned Valentine.
"Bullfrog?" Valentine asked.
"Sergeant Bill Frum. Top sergeant in the Guards, or so the men in his old unit say."
"A guerilla?"
"In a manner. He and his men joined up with Solon's crew in Little Rock and they gave him a commission. Only he's playing double agent or whatever you want to call it. He's got twenty or thirty diehards, twice that in part-time guerillas in the farms east of here, and about two hundred men scattered around who are supposed to be hunting guerillas. What they mostly do is look the other way."
Valentine reread the block letters on the sign. "So what about the bodies?"
