AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"I won't vouch for the ferocious, but they are strong, exceptionally strong. Like Bears."
"Are there other outbreaks in Kentucky you know of?"
"No, sir. This is the first we've seen of it. How are things at base?"
"Quiet. No sign of it. A new patrol has just gone out to check Owensboro. We've lost contact with the town."
"Orders?" Valentine asked.
"Get back as quickly as you can. The underground has informed us that that armored column has moved south from Bloomington and is now outside Owensboro. They've been shelling the city."
"We'll be mobile as soon as the weather lets up," Valentine said.
"Good luck," Lambert said. "Report when you're moving again."
"Wilco. Signing off."
"Signing off."
"We were lucky, I think," Stuck said. "I'll bet there is only a handful of ravies left in this town-mostly ones who were torn up in scrapes with them and succumbed to the infection."
"Lucky?" Boelnitz said, looking at Rockaway, who was being tended to at the far end of the mill by Doc.
"I said we," Stuck said. "Not him."
With time to think and a hot cup of Mrs. O'Coombe's tea inside him, Valentine realized the Kurians had played a brilliant double cross in Kentucky.
Or perhaps it was a triple cross, if you considered the attack on the Kentucky River position a double cross. He almost had to admire the genius of it. If the attack on the A-o-K had routed the principal body of armed and organized men in central Kentucky, the Kurians would have been in the position to act as saviors when the ravies virus hit. The New Universal Church could show up en masse, ready to inject the populace with either a real antiserum or a saline solution, all the while persuading the populace of the advantages of returning to their semiprotected status in the Kurian Order.
As it turned out, the attack failed, but it also served to concentrate their enemies. With the storm raging, they wouldn't be able to spread out and contain the virus to a few hot spots. Instead, the A-o-K would suffer the agonies of men knowing their families were threatened and unable to do a damn thing about it. Given the brief existence of the A-o-K, it might dissolve entirely, like salt in a rainstorm, fragmenting into bands of men desperate to return home.
The one patch of light in the snowy, howling gloom was that Kentucky wasn't the earthquake-and-volcano-ravaged populace of 2022. The legworm clans were armed to the teeth-man, woman, and child-and were used to living and working within the confines of armed camps organized for defense. Ravies bands fought dumb. They didn't coordinate, concentrate properly, or pick a weak spot in their target's defenses-except by accident.
Valentine didn't like the look of Boelnitz. He had been pale and quiet ever since the madness between Bushmaster and the gate.
Worried that the journalist might be going into shock from stress alone, Valentine squatted down next to him.
"Something for your notebook at last," Valentine said, noticing that the paper under his pencil was empty. "Don't let it bother you."
"The wounded in Bushmaster. They saw O'Coombe's boy was bitten. They said he had to go out, or they'd shoot him. I think they meant it."
Boelnitz looked at his notebook. "When I said I owe you, I meant it. I owe you the truth," Boelnitz said. "I've been flying under false colors, I'm afraid. Here."
He handed Valentine the leather notebook with a trembling hand and opened it to a creased clipping.
"It's one thing to write about wars and warriors and strategy," Boelnitz said. "It looks very different when you're looking down the barrel of a gun. Or up one."
Valentine read a few paragraphs.
It was always a strange sensation to parse another's depiction of oneself, like hearing someone describe the rooms in one's own home, bare facts attached to memories and emotions but as artificial and obvious as plastic tags in the ears of livestock. Valentine took in the words in the Clarion's familiar, sententious style and typeface with the unsettling feeling of reading his own obituary:
The terror of Little Rock during the late rising against Consul Solon, David Valentine has created a career that makes for exciting, if disturbing, reading. Trailed by a hulking, hairy-handed killer bodyguard named Ahn-Kha, Valentine is a man of desperate gambits and vicious enmities without remorse or regret. The corpses of gutted, strung-up POWs and murder to followers like the Smalls . . .
Valentine couldn't read any more.
"I only showed that to you because I can't reconcile the figure described in Southern Command's archives, at least the ones I was given clearance to see, and Clarion's articles with the person in the flesh. I just thought it was time for a little honesty. Pencil Boelnitz is a fiction; it's the name of my first editor, the English teacher who helped us run the school newspaper. My real name is Llewellyn. Cooper Llewellyn."
"You thought . . . you thought that if I knew you were from the Clarion . . . what? I'd run you off base?"
