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Moondaggers always like to chop a few up and stuff them back into their clothes the wrong way around, feet sticking out of shirtsleeves and heads where a foot should be. For it is the blessed man who obeys the Gods and knows his place, for they are Wise; the man who claims for his head the mantle of godhood is as foolish as one who walks upon his hands and eats with his feet.
"They left three men alive. One with his eyes burned out, one with his ears scrambled with a screwdriver, and one with his tongue ripped out. Just like that trio from the Mammoths.
They did a story on them in the Free Flags. Pretty sad picture to put on the front page. Did you see it? About a year and a half ago."
"I was out west at the time."
"Whole bunch of young women barricaded themselves into one of the New Universal Church buildings and killed themselves with rat poison. I found a note: One kind of freedom or another. Girl looked about fourteen. That Smoke, she cried a good bit. Wasn't a total loss.
We found some kids their parents stuffed up a chimney. Poor little things. I saw pretty much the same story in three other towns. Now they're here."
Valentine, feeling impotent in the face of the river of men snaking south two miles away, picked up a dry branch and snapped it. "Now they're here."
"Yeah. I know what's coming too. They'll just harry us, tire us out, get us used to running away from them. They'll terrorize anyone who even thinks about helping us. Then when we're starved and exhausted, they'll strike. Least they won't get too many candidates for their flocks out of our gals. Southern Command's shoot back."
"That's just one division there. Where do you suppose the other two are?"
"We never marked more than two in Kansas. The other's probably harrying what's left of the Green Mountain Boys."
"How did you find all that out?"
"We picked off one or two stragglers. Some just didn't talk, recited prayers the whole time or killed themselves with grenades at the last second. Some of the NCOs wear these big vests filled with explosives and ball bearings. They'll pretend to be dead and jump up and try to take a few with them. Smoke went and found a boy in Moondagger uniform and took him prisoner.
Couldn't have been more than eleven; his only job was to beat a drum after the prayer singer spoke. He stayed tough for about ten minutes and then broke down and started crying when she sorta mothered him. Heard most of it from him."
Valentine had a hard time picturing Duvalier mothering anything but her assortment of grudges. But then she was a Cat, and it was her job to get information.
They left the hilltop, mounted legworms, and conformed to the line of the Moondagger's march. Scouts found a new wooded ridge with a good view of the highway and they repeated the process for another hour. Moytana took a break and started on a letter. Valentine watched the marchers and the opposing scouts. All Valentine could think was that the Moondaggers were experts at their particular brand of harshness. He wondered how long they could operate somewhere like Kentucky without-
"Sir, scouts have met up with a party of locals," a Wolf reported. "Armed. They saw us riding. One of them asked for you by name and rank, Major Valentine."
"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.
