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Valentine wondered if any of his known unknowns were filled in, or if this just represented a new unknown popping up. "But these women present a danger to the Kurians?"
Arnham's lips tightened. "I didn't say that. I said they were treated that way. Look, we're in the dark about as much as you. We're laying it all out there."
He rooted around in his folios and passed a binder to Valentine. Inside were six tabs. Each had a list from a testing station similar to the one he sent Post.
"Your girl's in the yellow-tabbed one," Arnham said.
Valentine nodded and flipped to the list. The sheets were the same as the others, a bare list of negatives. Female names, no particular ethnic background to them
Valentine's heart thudded before his brain knew why.
Melissa Carlson.
The rest of the room faded away for a second as the name held his attention. Melissa . . . Molly . . . the woman whose family had helped him in his trip across Wisconsin, who he'd gone to the Zoo in Chicago to save when she caught the eye of a sexually avaricious Quisling nomenklatura and murdered him. . . .
"You okay there, Val?" Zhin asked.
No result next to Molly's name. She hadn't been put on a train. Molly's sister Mary was just below her on the list; she'd been tested too, also no X in the result column.
But she had been tested. She'd been tested at the same location as Gail Foster. Why was she listed as Molly Carson? She'd married her Guard lieutenant . . . What was his name . . . Stockton, no, Stockard. Graf Stockard.
"Fine. You keep the big directories here, right? The Southern Command Military Census?"
"Yes, of course."
"Can I have a browse?"
"Sure. A name ring a bell?" Zhin guessed.
Not just a bell. A gong and clattering cymbals.
Crowley's Ridge, Arkansas: Running southwest-northeast through the eastern part of the state, straight as though drawn on the map with a ruler, Crowley's Ridge varies from about two hundred to five hundred feet high, up to a dozen miles wide, and several hundred miles long. Once the next thing to terra incognita in Southern Command, with only a few precariously placed settlements hugging the Saint Francis, it is now considered the "civilized" eastern border for the defenders of the freehold.
The northeastern part of the state suffered literally earth-shattering devastation in the New Madrid quake and never recovered. Now the expanse between the Ridge and Memphis is a tangled floodplain for the newly feral Mississippi and its tributaries, like the Saint Francis, briefly bridged by a few pieces of road and a railroad line during Solon's tenure in the Ozarks.
Solon intended for Crowley's Ridge to be his eastern border and set up the outposts, along with a road and rail network to serve them. Southern Command's Guards were only too happy to assume their upkeep when Valentine's Rising and Archangel put Solon's incorporations into receivership. Now this series of Guard Outposts holds the line here, supplying smaller Hunter formations that explore the flat lands extending to the Mississippi and beyond.
Perhaps no area is more patrolled and contested than the corridor that runs along the old interstate that once linked Memphis and Little Rock. A few Kurians maintain their towers on the west side of the river within sight of Memphis, sending their Reapers into the wilderness to hunt refugees, smugglers, or out-and-out brigands, while Southern Command sends Cats and Wolves into the corridor to hunt the Reapers.
* * * *
You're not doing this in order to see her, David Valentine told himself for the umpteenth time. She's smart, a good observer. Perhaps Molly even knew Gail.
No, her letters trickled off and you want to know why, a more honest part of Valentine said.
Shut up the both of you, someone whose name might be Superego interjected.
Valentine got the feeling he was being watched as he walked up the road running along the western side of Crowley's Ridge. Molly Carlson Stockard's name had turned up as residing at a military camp called Quapaw Post, and a quick message to the CO-Valentine justified it as a joint inquiry with the Miskatonic-revealed that she lived at the Post as a "Class A" dependant, which meant she didn't just live on post, but worked there as well.
A forty-mile train ride, ten-mile wagon hitch, and a two-mile hike brought him to this quiet corner of Southern Command, well north of the corridor.
He bore a full set of arms, as any serving officer in Southern Command did, even on leave. The Atlanta Gunworks assault rifle formerly shouldered by the Razors bumped against his back inside an oiled leather sheath to keep the wet and dirt off. The freehold had learned long ago that the more people trained to carry guns there were traipsing around the rear areas, the less likely they were to have to use them, whether threatened by the lawless or by the emissaries of the awful law that was the Kurian Zone.
He had to stop himself from jogging or falling into his old Wolf lope. He wanted to arrive more or less composed, not sweaty and bedraggled. He regretted that he didn't already have his staff crossbar, or he'd probably have been able to requisition a trap or even a motorcycle.
Quapaw Post didn't look like much; one thick concrete shell that probably enclosed a generator, armory, and fuel supply. A pair of identical, cavernous barns and a few wooden barracks, with a tower at the center for fresh water and sentries, rounded out the station. Miles of fencing stood along either side of the road and extended up into the oak-and-hickory-thick hills of the ridge and west into the alluvial flats, where the fields were subdivided into pasture and hay fields. Horses grazed and swished each other in the gauzy sun, and nearer to the road insects harvested the nectar of butterfly weed and wild bellflowers.
Evidently Quapaw Post supported Southern Command horseflesh. Horses on active duty needed a break as often-probably more often-as the men they carried.
