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"Oh, it was real. Ali had me meet Stykes ... er, Major Styachowski. She painted quite a picture. Also, your rendezvous here was right for my cycle. They're keeping close track of that".
"I suppose they have to", Valentine said, feeling a bit like the butt of a cosmic joke.
"It's been almost a day. Maybe we should give it another go. The more sperm, the better".
They tried again. But Duvalier had been right: Knowing took a lot of the fun out of it.
* * *
Duvalier returned two days later with Styachowski and another fit-looking young woman wearing Southern Command Labor Corps fatigues and teardrop sunglasses. The last served as driver for a post-'22 flatbed, a high-axled transport vehicle made out of the odds and ends of other heavy-duty diesels. They were bringing a new generator and another radio set to replace equipment smashed in the Reaper raid.
A footlocker strapped to the rear seat held the gear Valentine requested. Styachowski carried a waterproof file folder with maps and basic information about his destination.
Duvalier hopped down from the webbing holding the generator, where she'd ridden, using the straps as a combination hammock and harness. She looked like a hungry, road-weary hitchhiker, but her eyes were as bright as ever.
"Heard about the trouble", she said.
"Jules and I came through for the team", Valentine said. In other circumstances he would have added an exaggerated wink, but Nancy's was almost a ghost town now. Many of the survivors of the raid had fled east after the dead were buried in their common grave. Some of those buried had been decorated Quislings, killed in some final fit of pique from the almost-vanquished Kurians of Tulsa.
Styachowski slicked back her moon white hair, impatient.
Duvalier twirled her sword-stick on its leather thong. "They think they've got it tracked down to central Tulsa. Storm sewers maybe. I'm going to go poke around a little. Be nice to get at least one before it has a chance to bolt".
The Kurians were near-legendary escape artists.
"When are you heading west, Val?" Styachowski asked.
"When the right convoy comes through".
"Spare me a couple more days?" Sure.
"Val, this is Darlene", Styachowski said, introducing the slim-hipped, curly-haired driver. "She's been selected as a potential, an
aspirant for either Wolf or Cat. We were hoping you could find time to take her into the field for a couple of days, up toward the Zone but not in it. Teach her a little. Then we'd like your opinion".
" 'Lina' for short", Darlene said.
Valentine wondered what kind of eyes waited behind the driver's sunglasses, and if she'd been counting the days since the beginning of her last menstrual cycle. "Glad to be of service. As a favor to you and AH".
's, March: David Valentine first learned of Nancy's from his old tent mate Lieutenant Caltagirone of Foxtrot Company.
Nancy's had been a retirement home for Tulsa's well-to-do who were unwilling to quit the rolling hill-country of eastern Oklahoma. Its single-story, vaguely Prairie-school architecture was spread out over several acres, with a central hub and an outbuilding or two. In the Kurian Zone people were "retired" in much the same manner as an old, worn-out tire, with the Reapers serving as mechanics, but its layout made it a convenient rehabilitation center for Quisling veterans. Nancy herself was something of a legend in the Nebraska Guard for her devotion to the maimed and shattered.
She kept her charges busy with arts and crafts, which she sold in Tulsa at Kurian patriotic festivals to buy a few luxuries. The "Nancy's" sticker became so famous that an art colony of sorts had sprung up in the area, with workers of metal, leather, wood, ceramics, and paint adding to the trade.
Nancy's also had the best food in three states. Kurian Order and New Universal Church dignitaries often spent long weekends visiting the "home" and enjoying the cuisine as they got their picture taken shaking hands with the more photogenic of the wounded.
It seemed the last place one would expect to be a warehouse for the resistance. When the Kurians heard the occasional whisper or screamed confession that Nancy's had been the place guerrillas got their explosives, they assumed that their prisoners had been coached into fingering the establishment in the hope that the whole staff would be swept up in a purge. The routine searches revealed nothing.
Of course, they didn't remove the wounded from their thick, comfortable, bleach-scented bedding, pillowcases lined with gleaming rows of decorations. Only the laundry staff, under careful supervision of senior nurses, ever changed the bedding.
* * *
Nancy's had grown since the last time Valentine visited, as a tired and hungry lieutenant trying to supply his men scouting the Kurian Zone.
The "Kurian Pillar" he remembered, breaking the horizon like a white needle, now had a cross openly displayed upon it, and the trees had spread their shade over the windows and doors. The vegetable gardens and stands of tomato vines had multiplied and spread to both sides of the road that met the old interstate a couple of miles south. New houses, mostly two-or three-room shotgun shacks built around a common well pump, circled the grounds like campers keeping warm at a fire. A red-painted market that Valentine had remembered being a livestock barn, promised fuel * food * lodging thanks to a blue and white sign salvaged from the interstate. To the southwest, behind a small hill, birds circled the community trash heap. No distance seemed too great for gulls to travel in search of garbage.
A few hardy souls were out on the blustery day, mostly working in the vegetable patches or trying to dry laundry under the eaves. Some muddy kids and dogs chased one another through the culverts at the roadside.
