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The Youth Vanguard Paramilitary Auxiliary. Go ahead, blow them out of there. Won't nobody miss them."
He got the nod from Rand.
Valentine had shells from the guns march up Main Street toward the civic center. The last one impacted just inside the barricade. He'd made his point.
Valentine examined the civic center and the pathetic assortment of cars piled up on the sidewalks around it, along with dropped bundles and half-unpacked trunks. Entire families had retreated to the security of the big building. In panic or by design, the Evansville Quislings had assembled a barricade out of the civilian and order-enforcement vehicles, stringing barbed wire through broken windows and between fenders.
Dead bodies hung here and there on the wire. Black birds shame-lessly feasted on the detritus of desperate valor.
He couldn't blow the remaining Quislings out without killing their kids with them.
He couldn't drop 155mm shells on a bunch of kids and fill the approaches to the civic center with a mixture of dead civilians and his company.
That left talking.
One of the mob behind him sneezed and wiped his nose with a onionskin page from a New Universal Church Guidon.
Valentine heard a metallic clang! A string of men emerged antlike from a utility hole mid-street and made a dash for the civic center. Gunfire swept the street. Poor shooting-they only got one. The others made it to the safety of the barbed wire and vehicle necklace around the building.
He lay, groaning.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Valentine shouted, hoping that energy would take the place of training and military discipline. The gunfire died down.
"Go on and get him," Valentine shouted at the civic center. "No-body's shooting. Just let us get to our people too."
"Really?" a voice from the dark maw of the main doors called.
"Absolutely, positively really," Valentine shouted back, feeling a little giddy at the absurdity of the question.
They dragged their man out of the street and the Evansville mob got their own. Some resistance men, pinned down beneath a school bus, took the opportunity to return to their own lines.
"Rand, I'm trusting you to keep things from getting out of hand. If someone takes a pot shot at me, I don't want a sniper duel. We'll be back to trading machine-gun fire in no time."
He unsheathed his sword and gave the blade to Rand. "If they drop me, give this to Smoke."
"Let me go, sir," Patel said.
"You're too slow a target. And Rand, it would be a tragedy if someone put a bullet through your double helping of brains. Colonel Bloom gave her orders to me."
Valentine walked out into the center of the street under a white flag tied to his sword scabbard.
"Could I speak to whoever's in charge in there? I represent the United Free Republics, Kentucky Military Assistance Expedition."
Valentine had been wondering what to call the forces across the river; the improvised name sprang from his lips without involving his brain, evidently.
They answered with a shot. The bullet whizzed by close enough for Valentine to hear it with his right ear and not his left. He was either lucky or the sniper was a bad shot. He forced himself to remain erect.
"Who shot?" a voice yelled from the darkness. "Tell that dumbshit to cut it out. He's got a white flag."
"Killing me won't give you another day of water and power in there," Valentine shouted, advancing toward the barricade. "It'll just start the fighting again. Don't see that's gotten you much so far, and there's artillery being set up across the river. How many shells is it going to take to collapse that big roof?"
Valentine wondered if there'd be an instant's realization of his folly if the marksman decided to put the next one between his eyes. Would that be better than having part of his face torn off, or a bullet through the neck?
The street hit him in the back hard and Valentine felt an ache in his chest. He never heard the shot.
Valentine felt busted ribs, burned a finger in the hot bullet embedded in the woven Reaper cloth on his vest.
It felt like someone had performed exploratory surgery with a jackhammer on his chest.
