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They were right about the dog. Valentine tried to tempt him out from under the train engine, but the dog bobbed his head and whimpered, tail tucked tightly between his legs.
"I know just how you feel, ol' buddy," one of the company said.
Valentine nodded and reached, opened a Velcro flap on his canvas ammunition harness.
He extracted one of the blue-taped magazines, loaded it, borrowed some camouflage gun tape, and married a regular 9mm magazine to the Quickwood bullets.
Valentine walked up to his foremost pickets. He knelt, sent them creeping back to the main line, relieved in more ways than one.
They were out there. Reapers. Valentine's heart began to hammer.
Use it. Use the fear.
It woke him up with a capital awake. Each insect in the Kentucky night hummed its own little tune with its wings.
Valentine saw brush move. A peaked back, like an oversized cobra hood, rose from the brush.
Valentine felt its gaze. Every fiber, every nerve ending, came alive. He felt as though he could count the blood capillaries in his fingertips and the follicles on his scalp. Individual drops of sweat could be felt on his back. He opened the front grip on the gun, put the machine pistol tight to his shoulder-
The attack came from the hillside. Valentine heard a flap-laundry on a line. The gun went up without Valentine willing it and the muzzle flash lit up a falling, grasping parachute of obsidian-fanged death.
The next one was up to him before he could even turn to face it.
WHAM and the gun was gone, spinning off into darkness. Valentine fell backward, rolled, came up holding his sword protectively in front, noted coldly that the Reaper he'd shot was clawing at its chest, foot-long barbed tongue extended and straining.
The unwounded Reaper advanced at a crouch, a thin sumo wrestler scuttling insect-like in its squat. The inhuman flexibility of its joints unsettled. Your brain locked up in frozen fascination, trying to identify a humanoid shape that moved like a fiddler crab.
Valentine backed up a step, opening his stance and setting the sword behind, ready to uncoil his whole body in a sweeping cut when it leaped.
It sprang, taking off like a rocket.
BLAM! BLAM!
Shotgun blasts struck it, sent it spinning away as unexpectedly as a jack-in-the-box yanked back into its box as Valentine's sword sweep cut the air where it would have been.
Bee rose from some brush clinging to the small gravel swell the tracks ran along, other shotgun now held forward while she broke open the one she'd just fired with her long, strong fingers.
Valentine heard crashing in the brush as the shot-struck Reaper ran away. Valentine's instinct was to pursue. If it was running away, it was damaged and disadvantaged. He forced himself back to his senses and his men, sheathed the unblooded sword.
"Good work, Bee," Valentine said.
"Beee!" Bee agreed.
Officers' whistles cut through the darkness somewhere down the tracks that led toward the pursuing Quislings. Valentine located the sound. It came from the middle of a trio of tall robed figures in the center of the columns. Valentine saw movement all around them in the dim light.
Someone-Glass probably-had the sense to fire an illumination flare. The firework burst high, lighting up the steep-sided cut as it wobbled down.
The railroad cut was full of troops walking their bicycles uphill in two open-order lines up either side of the tracks, carrying their rifles at the ready so that the muzzles were pointed toward their open flanks rather than at their comrades.
Valentine backed up a few steps, fired another flare with his own gun as he retreated toward his line, more to highlight himself to his men. He drew a shot and then another from scouts the Quislings had sent forward. Luckily these troops didn't have nightscopes.
"Check fire, check fire. It's the major," someone shouted.
Valentine made sure Bee was following-she was backing through the brush like a living fortification between him and the advancing troops-and came up to his men. They'd stripped the boxcars of bed frames, thin mattresses, and water barrels and improvised a breastwork, shielding it with cut brush.
"Fire on my order. Single shots only, and take your time," Valentine said. "Pass the word.
Single shots only. We're guerrillas, remember. All we've got are deer rifles and bird guns.
