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Of course this isn't the case with all meat eaters. A wolverine or a bear will often welcome a fight.
He handed his remaining grenade to Brother Mark. "If it gets its tongue in me, toss this. They get lost in the act of feeding. You could run up and hang it off its back."
Valentine had lost a comrade in the old Labor Regiment that way near Weening, the night he killed his first Reaper. Weening still had the skull nailed to the town gate. The kids sometimes chalked words under it that appealed to a teenage sense of humor.
Valentine rolled up the Moodagger sleeves and slipped into his old, comfortable Cat claws. He advanced on the Reaper, arms spread wide.
It peeked from around the bole of the tree at him.
"Ha!" Valentine shouted. He swept one outstretched arm against winter-bare branches, stripping bark and crackling twigs.
"Ha!" Valentine shouted again, pantomiming a lunge as he approached.
"HA!" he tried again, stomping hard with his good leg.
If it came at him, he might still live. A good swipe across the nose might blind it.
The Reaper was dripping water from its robes but not moving. Nothing to do but go all in.
Valentine ran at it with a scream, and its eyes widened. It sprang away, running hard to the east up through the riverbank brush.
Valentine pursued it for as long as he could keep up the sprint and then lobbed a rock in its direction. His aim was better this time. The stone struck it in the leg and it jumped, crashing through some low-hanging branches and falling. It picked itself up and kept running.
"Yeah, you do that," Valentine puffed.
Valentine wasn't looking forward to the walk back to the truck. He'd have his rifle up and his sphincter tight the whole way, leading Brother Mark in wide circuits around anything big enough to hide the Reaper.
He had the funny feeling they hadn't seen the last of this fellow. And he'd have to pass the news to the Kentucky volunteers that there was a wild Reaper loose on their side of the river.
Just what the remaining Wolves and Bears would want to hear after the action at the power plant-assuming some catastrophe hadn't left the grounds of the power plant strewn with bodies.
They drove back Fort Seng at a crawl, the vegetable-oil-powered diesel banging away in first and second gear over the broken-down roads. Valentine, exhausted and half-asleep in his seat, had the driver take them to the power plant first.
He was relieved to see a pair of Wolves step out and halt them on the last turn before the plant. They had to carefully go off road and route around a roadblock the Wolves had cut, unsure of the possibilities of a counterattack from the bridge and wanting to hold it up long enough for the Bears and Wolves-and one unpredictable Cat-to escape.
They found the power plant in Southern Command's hands and only lightly damaged in the offices, where explosives had been used to drive out the confused Reapers.
Valentine felt dwarfed by the immense architecture of the power plant and the towering smokestack. It seemed like a monument that would stand forever, like Independence Rock in Wyoming or the great Kurian tower in Seattle.
"Made angel food out of 'em, sir," Chieftain, the senior Bear NCO, said. He liked to decorate his uniform with feathers of various raptors-and a vulture or two.
Silvertip, another Bear who loved Kentucky and had decided to settle there and become a dealer in legworm leather, was partially undressed, sitting in the chill air and carefully scrubbing blood out of his studded leather with an old toothbrush. "Six," Silvertip said. "Don't remember ever taking so many in one day before."
"The Ghost did that," Chieftain said. "Shut down their master. Wolves saw the flare, certain enough, and got word to us. We went in and found the whole place in a tumult."
"Where's Ali?" Valentine asked. There were several leather-winged harpy bodies in a pile near the gate. Not enough for Valentine's taste, but they'd picked off a few.
"The Cat? I think she's sleeping in the kitchen."
There were Wolves near the exterior door, all asleep with bits of a meal scattered across the floor except one sergeant in deerskins quietly putting a freshly cleaned Remington back together. He pointed Valentine in the direction of the cafeteria.
The cafeteria had blood and black Reaper tar on the floor and a good deal of damage to the walls from bullet holes. The windows were broken where the Bears had come in.
Valentine found Duvalier in the kitchen, curled up between a steaming stove and a basket of potatoes. One of his Wolves was opening cans of tomatoes and pouring them into a vast soup pot.
She was sleeping cradling her sword stick, looking like a little girl snuggling with an anorexic doll. Valentine nudged her with a toe.
"Good job," he said as she blinked awake and yawned.
