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Valentine only remembered the sound of feet hitting the ground. "Let's not leave anything to luck, good or bad," he said.
They caught up to the others at the bottom of the hill, and walked out into the horseshoe-shaped flat with the legworm dogpile roughly in the center. What might have been utility poles at one time could be seen against the horizon, a few miles away. The peak of a funnel-topped silo and a barn roof showed.
Legworm trails crisscrossed the ground everywhere, but none looked or smelled fresh. Maybe their minders were on the other side of the valley.
Gail collapsed, crying. "Legs won't hold me up anymore."
Boothe listened to her heart and breathing with her stethoscope. "She's healthy, just out of condition."
"We can rest for a little," Valentine said.
Then need came, terrible need. Valentine felt them on the towering hill behind, moving like an angry swarm of bees.
Reapers.
They'd home in on the lifesign-he had a pregnant woman, and bitter experience told him that Kurians hungered for newborns like opiate addicts sought refined heroin; he might as well be running with a lit Roman candle-and that would be the end of them.
"We're in trouble," Valentine said.
"What-" Duvalier began.
"No time," he snapped. He handed her his rifle. "You and Thatcher head for those telephone poles. Doc, you and Pepsa go into those woods and find low ground. Lie flat, flat as you can." He tossed her Thatcher's 9mm.
"Reapers?" Duvalier asked.
"Coming down the hill." Boothe went as white as the cloud-hidden moon. "Hurry." He grabbed Gail's wrist. "I'll lead them off. Maybe I can lose them."
You won't. Too long until sunup.
"How?"
"Interference." Price's critter camouflage, writ in sixty-foot letters.
Valentine took Gail's wrist and pulled her to her feet.
"Hate this," she said. "I want to go to my room. Please? This endangers the baby."
He could feel them coming, but caution had slowed them, stalking lions reevaluating as the herd they'd been stalking scattered.
Gail's legs gave out. Valentine picked her up in a fireman's carry, hoping it was safe to carry an expectant woman this way.
"Those chain things sound like wind chimes. I like wind chimes," Gail said. "Are we going back to the Grands soon?"
"Very possible," Valentine said as he ran.
From a hundred feet away the legworm pile looked like a gigantic lemon pie with a lattice-top crust-baked by a cook who was stoned to the gills. The legworms had pushed banks of earth up into walls, forming the pie "tin," and had woven themselves at the top.
Valentine reached the bank and climbed up it, sending dirt spilling. He went down on one knee, set Gail on churned-up ground, and caught his breath.
They were coming again. After him. Fast.
"I don't want to run anymore," Gail said.
"Good. We need to crawl."
He pulled her beneath a smaller legworm's twisted body, back set to the elements, shaggy skin flapping in the wind like an old, torn poster. They descended into the dark tangle, and perceived a faint aqua glow from within.
Valentine felt like he was back in the ruins of Little Rock, negotiating one of the great concrete-and-steel wrecks of a building downtown. Legworms lay on top of each other everywhere, a sleeping pile of yellow-fleshed Pickup Sticks.
