AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Locals?"
"Hard to tell if they're Kentuckian or Virginian. Mountain folk. Careful, sir. I don't like the look of them."
Valentine put a sergeant at the spotting scope and Moytana abandoned his letter. They snaked down the slope to a rock-strewn clearing and Valentine saw five men in black vests waiting around a small spring-fed pond, boiling water. Valentine carried his gun loosely, as though meeting a neighbor while deer hunting.
Valentine approached. The strangers were lean, haggard men with close-cropped beards and camouflaged strips of cloth tying the hair out of their eyes. They had an assortment of 5.56
carbines with homemade flash suppressors and scopes.
Valentine didn't recognize any faces.
What he at first took to be a pile of littered rocks shifted at his approach.
A mass of straw canvas sitting with its back to him rose. It looked like a fat, disproportioned scarecrow made out of odds and ends of Reaper cloth, twigs, twine, netting, and tusklike teeth. A leather cap straight out of a World War One aviator photo topped the ensemble, complete with Coke-bottle goggles on surgical-tubing straps, though there were holes cut in the hat to allow bat-wing ears to project and move this way and that freely.
A face that was mostly sharp teeth yawned and grinned as a tiny tongue licked its lips in anticipation. The muddy apparition carried a strange stovepipe weapon that looked like a recoilless rifle crossed with a bazooka.
Bee let out a sound that was half turkey gobble, half cougar scream.
What? Valentine thought, feeling his knees go weak.
The mountain of odds and ends spoke. "Well, my David. What kind of fix do you have yourself in this time?"
* * * *
When Valentine could see again, blinking the tears out of his eyes, he looked around at the two groups of men, Wolves and Appalachian guerrillas, both eyeing the astonishing sight of a man with Southern Command militia major clusters pinned on to a suit of legworm leathers crying his eyes out against the mud-matted hair of a Grog's chest.
"Our general ain't as bad as he smells," one of the guerrillas told a Wolf. "Talks a midge funny, but by 'n' by your'n gets used to it."
Ahn-Kha and Bee exchanged pats, scratches, and ear-cleanings as he and Valentine spoke.
"Did Hoffman Price turn up again?"
Bee turned miserable at the name and muttered into her palm, thumping her chest and pulling at the corners of her eyes.
Ahn-Kha made more sense of it than Valentine could, though he caught the words for
"death," "lost," and "slave" in the brief story.
"I'm sorry to hear of his passing, my David. It seems to have worked out for Bee. You're her, urn, liberator and dignity restorer. As far as she's concerned, you hung her lucky moon in the sky."
"I can't tell whether she's a bodyguard or governess. She's always about yanking me out of my boots at the sound of gunfire."
"Proving that she has more sense than you."
"Can I hear your story?" Valentine asked.
"Oh, it is a long tale, and only the end matters. I managed to get myself put in command of the Black Flags. I still wonder at it."
Valentine still couldn't resist asking. "Your injuries?"
"Healed, more or less. Though I urinate frequently. I use your old trick of dusting with pepper or peeing into baking soda, otherwise the dogs would probably catch on."
"What happened to the pursuit?"
"They thought they caught a dumb Grog driver. I was sold to a mine operator. There matters turned dark in more ways than the coal face. I did not care for their treatment of someone who was kind to me and began a vedette."
"Vendetta, I think you mean."
