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"Sir, where did you come from?"
"New Universal Church School, Utica," Valentine said, giving the name of one of Brother Mark's alma maters. "When I point up, fire the flare."
"Who are you to be-"
Valentine whipped off his glove and flashed his brass ring.
"If you want to try to corral it, be my guest," Valentine said.
"After you," the captain said. The wild Reaper was carrying around the unfortunate driver's head, hissing at it like Hamlet speaking to the jester of most excellent fancy.
"Where the hell did he come from?" an NCO asked a lieutenant in an undertone that Valentine heard easily as he walked toward the Reaper.
"I hate these special operation types," the captain said. "They never let us know anything until we start catching hell."
Valentine trotted up the side of the bridge toward the north side, which was like a disturbed anthill as the Ordnance soldiers ran this way and that. Only three men stayed at their station: a group at a machine gun covering the roadblock on the bridge. They swiveled the muzzle of their weapon to aim it at the Reaper.
Valentine put his Type Three to his shoulder. He knelt and braced against a pedestrian rail between the bridge side and the traffic lanes.
He raised his left hand and waved his pointed finger skyward.
When the flare exploded into a green glow, the Reaper froze in its activities for a second, startled. Valentine, positioned so that even if he missed he wouldn't strike one of the few remaining Ordnance troopers on the other side of the bridge, squeezed the trigger.
The heavy round struck the Reaper squarely on the butt. Valentine doubted the bullet penetrated more than one layer of the strong, unearthly weave the Reapers used in their robes.
Reapers can scream when they want to. It's a high-pitched sound reminiscent of sheet metal tearing. The men at the crew-served gun, seeing Valentine shoot, opened up with their weapon as well.
Their target, probably frightened by the sudden light, pain, and noise, flattened itself under the fire and scuttled north like a crab and sprang off the bridge with an uncanny jump.
The men with the machine gun tracked it, spraying tracer off into the night. It cleared nine feet of Indiana-side fence topped by three foot loops of razor wire, landed, and disappeared into the darkness.
Leaving behind a heel from its boot.
"You're in a helluva lot of trouble, buddy!" Valentine yelled at the gunner. "I was about to put a round down its throat when you startled the bastard into fleeing."
"Thing was going nuts. What-"
"Now I have to chase it down in the goddamn woods. You know how dangerous that is, going into the woods after a wounded, pissed-off rogue like that?"
The green light began to pulse as the flare drifted down.
"You want us to sic the dogs on-" a corporal began.
"No, they'll just scare it. I'll have to hope it calms down enough so I can get a decent shot. And for Kur's sake, keep your men out of those woods. We've had enough bled for one night."
"Yes, er-"
"Get that gate. Unlike Jumpin' Jack Slash, I can't drop sixty feet and take off running. Is that a box of defensive grenades? Give me two. There's a good man. You never know."
Valentine hung the grenades on the Moondagger cummerbund and trotted off down the road. A pair of Ordnance medics went to work on the human wreckage left behind.
"Keep those dogs out of the woods," Valentine yelled at the officer, pointing.
He confused the officer just enough to get him to turn, and in that moment Valentine hopped over the rail of the bridge and dropped the twenty feet to the riverbank. Valentine took off into the Indiana woods.
He felt strange pity for the Reaper. What it remembered of its existence as a puppet of the master Kurian, Valentine didn't know. Would it be worse to awaken, confused and pained as a newborn, to a world of bullets and explosions all around and instinctive hunger that needed feeding, or to suddenly have control over your body again? Or was it something in between, where the Kurian gave his avatar ideas, needs, and desires, and let it carry them out with a little nudge now and then or a few words bubbling up out of the subconscious?
Valentine and Brother Mark rowed back across the river, fighting the downstream current that threatened to carry them within sight of the bridge. It would be light soon. There was a little highway stop with a good roof that the Wolves used to keep an eye on the bridge. They could warm themselves there and have a hot meal that would refresh them for the slow, bumpy ride home.
