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s Cumberland Plateau, April: It is a land of sandstone bluffs and old coalfields, swimming holes and iron bridges, old loblolly pine plantations run amok and new deciduous forests.
Almost every kind of tree found east of the Mississippi can be found here, mixing among each other and gradually reclaiming land from the pines, each occupying land according to water requirements, with chestnuts and shortleaf pines atop the ridges and poplar, blacky gum, and maples in the bottoms.
For much of the early United States history, the eastern escarpment served as a barrier to the gradual migration west. The tough bluffs running the southeastern border dividing Kentucky from Virginia served as a natural choke. Cherokee and Shawnee hunted the land until passages through the Cumberland Gap were mapped out and opened. Even so, the region remained somewhat wilder than the states north and south until the exploitation of coal and timber resources made the area profitable.
The picturesque sandstone gorges once drew photographers, and protect the homes of cliff swallows and bats, but to David Valentine that spring they were a frustrating maze dotted with dead towns so decrepit they reminded him of his first operations as a Wolf in the run-wild forests of Louisiana. Negotiating ridges and valleys meant weary hours of scouting and camping as the columns wound their way east through the twisting, turning cuts, where one mile of red-shouldered hawk flight meant perhaps three up and down and back and forth.
Luckily, it is a wild region empty of Kurian holds. Kentucky always has gone its own way, even in its uneasy relationship with the Kurian Order.
Self-reliant to what some might call a fault, they saw off the first emissaries of the New Order in the chaos of 2022 with torch and buckshot, demanding to be left alone. Neither at war with the Kurians or cooperative with their Reapers, they bring coal to the surface and legworm grubs to market to trade for the goods they need. Every time a Kurian tries to establish a tower in the Cumberland, he finds his Reapers hunted, his Quisling retainers ambushed and hung, and the alleged rich prospect of Kentucky dissolving into a confusion of legworm tracks and ash.
The tribes have formed a feudal society, quarrelsome when at peace, uneasily united when threatened from outside. Every feudal society needs a king to smooth the former and lead them in the latter.
* * * *
Karas' coins turned out to be only so much shiny dross when it came to bartering with other legworm tribes. Valentine's company went back to trading the crank-powered radios, rifles, and learn-to-read Bibles for butter and eggs.
But the legworm riders did offer spare worms, rigged for hauling cargo. Valentine's company received two, one to carry burdens while the other grazed in its wake, with roles switched the next day. Every third day the column rested now, to give the worms time to feed and recover. For all their size, they could be delicate if mishandled or underfed.
As they passed the more settled central part of Kentucky, the land became a patchwork of small towns and huge, clannish ranches. The towns were controlled by "badges" but rarely saw a Reaper, though Valentine heard fireside tales of bounty hunters and human traffickers who collected criminals and troublemakers.
Contacts with the underground dried up once they reached the ranch lands. Though the soldiers broke into a few locked NUC storage rooms in the dead of night, Valentine scanning for Reapers and his sharpshooters standing by with their blue-striped magazines in the rifles, they rarely returned to Javelin with full carts.
Where no small, easy game were to be had, Valentine felt it necessary to organize a hunt for larger prey.
"This is what's called hitting them where they ain't," Patel said to second platoon.
They were dispersed on a steep hillside overlooking a railroad cut. Valentine stood between Patel and Glass, who had the Grogs' .50 set up within a blind of machete-sculpted brush. Wolf scouts had relayed a report of a lightly guarded cargo train heading north on the Lexington track, and Valentine's company was dispatched to hit it if it looked like it contained anything useful.
Below them, an engine and ten boxcars stood on a single track in front of a blocked bridge.
The engine puffed like an impatient fat man.
Valentine stood above Patel, watching one of his Kentucky recruits talking to the engineer from the cover of a stand of thick redbud. A few other members of first platoon stood, looking at the blocked bridge. Another pair of soldiers, Rutherford and DuSable, who Valentine considered his two coolest heads, stood at the back of the caboose, swapping some captured New Universal Church activity books and Lexington newspapers for cigarettes and what looked like a sheaf of mimeographed crossword puzzles with the guards in the armored caboose.
Whether the engineer wondered why some technical crew just happened to be blocking a bridge where trains were running yesterday, Valentine couldn't say. Crow, the soldier in question, was a good talker and had worked rail crew as a boy and into his early manhood.
The binoculars in Valentine's hands stayed steady on the armored caboose. Patel watched the gunner in the little bubble just behind the engine. They were woefully attentive to duty, experienced enough on the lines to know that any unexpected pause called for extra vigilance.
"Faces. In the boxcars," Patel said. "It's not cargo; it's fodder."
"Another load heading up for Cincinnati," Harmony, a Tennessean, said. "Blood money."
Valentine swiveled his glasses over a few degrees. His vision blurred for a moment as redbud intervened, and then he saw it. A pair of haunted eyes looking out through the bars, knuckles white as the prisoner hefted himself up to the airholes at the top of the car.
He did some quick math. Maybe four hundred human souls behind that puffing engine, bound for destruction.
"No point hitting it now," Glass said. "Nothing we can use."
Valentine ignored him.
"What caused you to get culled, cuz?" Harmony said as if talking to the prisoner. "Heart murmur show up on a health check? Forget to make a payoff? Screwup under the boss's eye on a bad Friday?"
A clean-cut young officer left the caboose. Another railroad guard trailed behind him wearing the harassed look or adjutants everywhere in any army. After a conference with the engineer, they approached Crow, who gestured for them to come and look at the bridge.
They walked out to the edge of the gorge, and Crow pointed to the pilings at the base of the bridge. A couple of the idling workers fiddled with the pile of shovels and picks at the edge of the road; another went back to a captured pickup with a freshly painted logo the platoon had been using, avoiding the officer.
A perfectly natural move.
