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The soldiers had heard it all before. All of them knew about the Claw, and that the Claw couldn't be questioned. Even if they didn't call it that.
When it was done Valentine was expected at a late lunch with the generals. But there was something he had to do first. He went over to the line of wounded and spoke to each one. He ended at Post's elevated bed. Post looked better by exponents.
"Which nurse did you end up with?" Valentine asked.
"Which didn't he?" one of the men snickered.
"Sort of all of them and none of them, if you follow me, Dave," Post said.
Valentine handed him the folded flag. "I want you to hang onto this until you're better and we link up again."
"Hear you're going to be kind of busy on staff training. Maybe the higher-ups aren't nuts after all." As executive officer for the Razors, Post had spent endless hours in the Byzantine bowels of Southern Command procedures, trying to keep the Razors better supplied and better equipped than a half-forgotten rear-area reserve. "But why me? It's Meadows' flag."
"It's our flag," he said, and hoped Duvalier was lurking somewhere near-perhaps beneath the bandstand. "You're keeping it until I come back from leave. There's a few questions to be asked and a promise to keep."
Post's smile matched the Texas sun in brightness, and exceeded it in size.
"Thank you, sir."
kana, April: The border town has turned into a staging area. Operations in the Texas-Ozark United Free Region move forward as the political leadership convenes in search of a way to govern the aggregation, already being called the TWO-FUR by the willfully dyslexic soldiery.
A new name for the region is in the works.
The city has become one of those chaotic staging areas familiar to those of long service. Units coming off frontline service bump elbows with freshly organized troops. Equipment and personnel swap by means official and unofficial, and creative middlemen set up shop to service needs ranging from new boots to old wine, aging guns to young women.
An old indoor tennis court serves as the local headquarters for the separate commands of the Texas and Ozark forces. There are warehouses and self-storage units nearby to hold gear scraped up by the Logistics Commandos or brought out of the Dallas-Fort Worth corridor. Most importantly of all, a hospital has been upgraded from a bare-bones Kurian health center to a four-hundred-bed unit that can provide care equal to any existing facility outside those patronized by the elite of the Kurian Zone.
Churches and temporary schools operate at the edge of "Texarkana Dumps", the current name for the collection of military facilities. Outside the perimeter of the Southern Command's patrols, a tar-paper and aluminum-siding shantytown has sprung up, accommodating refugees from the Kurian Zone as well as the illicit needs of bored soldiers waiting for orders.
Even the local wildlife seems to be in a state of leisurely flux. Crows and dogs and a few far-ranging seagulls trot or fly from refuse heap to sewage pit, with the local feral cats sunning themselves on wall top and windowsill after a night hunting the thriving rats and mice.
The soldiers fresh from the Dallas battlefield feel the same way. Fresh food, sunshine, and sleep are all that are required for blissful, if not purring, contentment.
* * * *
The attenuated Razors' brief period of excited anticipation, carried since getting off the Dallas train and hearing about their billet, ended as soon as they saw the "hotel."
Even in its heyday no one would have called the roadside Accolade Inn worthy of a special trip. The subsequent years had not been kind to the blue-and-white block, four stories of stucco-sided accommodations thick with kudzu and bird droppings. Someone had put in screens and plywood doors, and each room's toilet worked, though the sink fixtures were still in the process of retrofit, having been stripped and not replaced. Neat cots, six to a room, sat against water-stained walls.
"Not bad," a goateed Razor said when Valentine heard him test the John's flush after washing his hands in the toilet tank. "Better than the sisters have at home."
Sadly, the attenuated regiment fit in the hotel with beds to spare. A third of their number were dead or in either a Fort Worth or Texarkana hospital.
The latter was Valentine's first stop after getting the men to the hotel. A First Response Charity tambourine-and-saxophone duo just outside the hospital door accepted a few crumpled pieces of Southern Command scrip with the usual "God Blesses you."
"Continually," Valentine agreed, though over the past year it had been a decidedly mixed blessing. The pair stood a little straighter in their orange-and-white uniforms and reached for pamphlets, but Valentine passed on and into the green-peppermint tiles of the hospital.
He made it a point to visit every man of his command; the routine and their requests were so grimly regular that he began entering with a tumbler of ice-he made a mental note to steal and fill a trashcan with ice before heading back to the Accolade- to spare himself the inevitable back-and-forth trip. But his mind wasn't at ease until he visited the last name on his list, Captain William Post.
Visiting hours were over by the time he made it to the breezy top floor, where Post shared a room with a blinded artillery officer.
"Well, just remember to be quiet," the head nurse said when Valentine showed his ID and signed in on the surgery-recovery floor. Dark crests like bruises hung beneath her eyes.
"Tell it to the FIRCs downstairs," Valentine said, as they started up again with the umpteenth rendition of "Onward Christian Soldiers," one of their supply of three hymns.
Post looked horrible. His cheeks had shrunken in, and the nurse had done a poor job shaving him. A little tent stood over the stump of his left leg and a tube ran from the region of his appendix to a red-filled bottle on the floor. A bottle on a hook attached to the bed dripped clear liquid into a tube in his arm, as though to balance output with input. Post's eyes were bright and alert, though.
His friend even managed a wink when Valentine rattled the plastic, metered hospital tumbler full of ice.
