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This paper is one of many voices happy to see GREATER COOPERATION BETWEEN MEMPHIS AND
NASHVILLE SECURITY ZONES and looks forward to further SUPPRESSION OF TERRORISM.
The paper had helpfully printed a few blurry pictures on the second page of bodies lying along the edge of a dirt road and a group of men sitting cross-legged, with arms tied behind their backs.
"Skinny Pete showed up again. That boy makes a good living," Ediyak said, glancing at the pictures but not bothering to read the rest.
"Skinny Pete?" Valentine asked.
"That's what we used to call him. He's a little wisp of a thing from Alabama; looks like he's never had more than two mouthfuls of soup at one time in his whole life. He's always sitting there with his collar pulled up around his ears in the prisoner mock-ups, since he looks hungry as sin."
"Doesn't anyone else notice him?"
Ediyak shrugged. "I had to have it pointed out to me. It's not like you'd recognize him unless you're close. Sometimes he's grown in a scruff of beard, sometimes they shave him bald, sometimes he's in a wool watch cap. Anyway, that's his job. Go sit beneath a sign that says
'Clarksville, thirty klicks' and look like you got taken prisoner that morning."
Valentine had to chuckle. "They got the big story right. Just left out a few details."
"KZ papers don't print unpleasant facts. They disappear, like dust swept into a cement crack," Ediyak said.
"Civilizations are won and lost in such cracks," Rand observed.
* * * *
Kentucky's hills exploded into spring colors, fireworks displays of wildflower and dogwood blossoms. Valentine took parties out to show them trees bearing wild legworms. The crawlers would stay in the branches, devouring bark, twig, and leaf alike, until they became so heavy they either snapped the branches or bent them until they were lowered gently to earth.
Then they commenced grazing in their long, crooked furrows.
Valentine changed back into his legworm leathers, adding Velcro strips for Southern Command insignia. He had been dreading the Kurian reaction to their march with every step into Kentucky, waiting to see what shape the reaction would take. But the march covered miles with not much more difficulty than they'd experienced on the practice marches in northern Arkansas and the Missouri bootheel.
Every time he topped a rise, every time they took a bend, every time they broke out of forest or heavy brush and into pasture, Valentine expected to see them, campfires and tents and columns of motor vehicles. But the landscape remained as empty as it had when he followed Hoffman Price across the Tennessee and into Kentucky.
Bee seemed happy to be back. When they cut legworm trails, little rises of plant growth and dirt that looked like planted furrows cut by a drunk plowing farmer, Bee urged him to follow. Some sense of hers allowed her to tell which way the legworm had gone, though unless the marks were very fresh Valentine couldn't make head from tail.
The legworm ranchers were a clannish bunch. Some sat you down and offered pie; others would chase you off with bird shot.
And that was just for a few wanderers crossing their grazing lands. Valentine wondered how they'd react to the appearance of better than two thousand Southern Command soldiers.
* * * *
South of Bowling Green Valentine and a team of his men idled on a running pickup at dawn, keeping warm by sitting either in the cab or atop the engine-warmed hood. They'd been tasked with meeting a pair of Cats who were supposed to guide them into the legworm bluegrass.
The pickup sat beneath a power pylon. Birds, with their usual good judgment, had transformed it into a high-rise condominium.
The men passed around thermoses of sage tea and talked about legworms. Valentine told his story of a battle between two legworm clans he'd witnessed, with the gunmen on each side using their beasts as a cross between World War I entrenchments and eighteenth-century fighting sail.
Valentine left to take a leak. As zipped up and turned from the back of the pickup, he tripped. As he fell, he noticed a binding-twine lasso attaching his ankle to the mufflerless exhaust system on the truck.
He fell face-first into spiky dandelion.
Two men jumped off the front of the truck, coming to his aid.
"You okay, Major?"
A shadow unfolded from the beneath the truck. "He deserves it for splattering me with pee," Alessa Duvalier said. "I taped two grenades under your truck and pegged the pins to come out when you drove away. You clowns are lucky I recognized him."
"It got a distinctive left hook or what, sir?" one of the men laughed.
