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"Like Bee?" Valentine asked. "You sure they didn't mean scared of them or something like that, but 'big'?"
"I think they might mean even bigger."
"You think they mean a legworm? What's bigger than Bee?" Frat asked.
"We're going down there to find out," Valentine said.
As the Wolves came in the front the guards ran out the back. Valentine decided to let them go. They were ordinary security types, by the look of them, not soldiers. None ran off with anything larger than a pistol. They wouldn't even give the Gunslingers any trouble if they decided to turn and fight.
The prison had only one wing cleared for human habitation, the rest still had much of its moldering infestation, with thick slimes growing in all the drainage fixtures, revived by the recently repaired water system.
A few of the cells were occupied with backwoods Kentucky folk, probably rounded up by patrols while hunting for their families. Valentine felt a wash of achievement. There was nothing like the look on a man's face when he stepped out of a cage.
The "other" was not in a cell. In fact, he startled Bee into an excited yelp as he emerged from a dank stairwell.
Seven feet tall without even drawing himself up to his full height. Golden faun-colored fur, darker on the back and lighter toward the belly and beneath his manhole-cover pectorals. Well-scarred, crudely stitched, missing a piece of ear, with fur patchy over his wounds and fresh blood, sticky and spiky, about his muzzle.
He carried a short aluminum pole threaded to take a variety of tools. In this case, the handle was capped by a small shovel blade, bright at the edges where it had been recently sharpened and so bloody and covered in dripping shards of viscera it looked as though it had been used to stir a vat of grue.
"Well, my David," Ahn-Kha said. "This saves much explaining in both directions. Could you offer me a detachment? A few skulkers fled into the woods, and there may be one or two more in the basements. I might need some assistance in rounding them up."
escuer and his Vendetta: If Major David Stuart Valentine has a reputation in Southern Command shared by both his subordinates and superiors, it is probably as a retrieval specialist.
On his first true command in the Kurian Zone, while trekking across Wisconsin, he and a wounded comrade were aided by the family of Molly Carlson. She ran afoul of a high-ranking Quisling and Valentine pursued her all the way to the living cesspool of the Zoo in Chicago to bring her back.
His first major mission for Southern Command involved bringing a legendary plant similar to an olive tree out from Hispaniola in the Caribbean. The tree, known as Quickwood, was lethal to the Reapers and caused a deadly catalytic reaction in their systems. Though his mission to return a large quantity failed because of Consul Solon's conquest of the Ozark Free Territory, he had a chance to have a say in the ownership of Arkansas at Big Rock Hill, where he and a handful stood against everything Solon could throw at them.
He found a friend's wife who'd vanished into the Kurian Order, at a medical facility where certain women who were immune to a physiological reaction were used for their wombs to create Reaper after Reaper. He brought a pair of captured Lifeweavers back from the Pacific Northwest. One of the reasons he was so eager to come along on Operation Javelin, the failed bid to establish a freehold linking the free territories in the Northeast with the Transmississippi, was that he had learned there was a large guerilla army operating in the Appalachians led by his old friend Ahn-Kha.
Now, in this grim spring, comes one more extraction of a couple of dozen tool-pushers. As it turned out, the rescue turned out to be a key event determining the future of Kentucky and its resistance against the powerful Georgia Control.
Tension throbbed from the back of his neck, up his skull, and over his ears to his temples. It was always the day before leaving that was the worst.
Valentine walked in the door of the little Evansville house, enjoying a minor dereliction of duty. He'd met Major Grace that morning and answered a series of questions. Hard to believe a man who wore a major's cluster with Southern Command's General Headquarters didn't understand that sometimes you went into the enemy's territory just to rumble, so to speak.
Valentine explained that a weaker force could be effective only if it could choose the time and place for a fight. Waiting until the enemy brings the fight to you might ensure that your men were well rested and fed, but livestock pens were full of animals both well rested and fed.
It was in a handy neighborhood, on a nice little rise close to the west side market and the riverfront, but the home itself badly needed paint, screens, and gutters. Plastic and bricks were keeping out the bugs in one window. Most of the nearby homes had similar improvised repairs. Wild dogs and a few desperate hookers wandered the fringe of the neighborhood, concentrating at a little pawnshop/bar/tinker's at the corner. It was a part of the city in constant flux, people who'd escaped other Kurian Zones tended to set up squats there. A few who found one way or another to rise a little in the city's social strata mostly moved out, but some stayed to aid, or prey on, the newcomers.
He was an hour late, he'd told Caral six thirty.
The house smelled like herbs. It always did. Apart from some poultry, Caral picked up a little money by making herb mixtures, labeling them in old Kurian pill bottles and selling them at Evansville's market days. Her house was always smelling of basil or oregano or garlic. With spring in full bloom there was a little extra in the air. Wildflowers that would go in iced tea in the summer were hanging upside down in masses from the ceiling over the big tiled living room that had been converted into her workroom.
"Home, babe," he called, dropping on her big wooden table a cloth sack of new potatoes and asparagus he'd picked up.
"You're late, hubbs," Caral said, emerging from her basement and removing her thick roasting apron. She'd appealed to Valentine from the first, shapely, using a few strategic dibs and dabs of makeup, but with a tomboy's taste in clothes.
Like now, for example. Beneath the apron, nothing but cutoff shorts and slippers made of old carpet. Her breasts had always intrigued him-she had the widest aureolas he'd ever seen. They were the size of a dessert plate.
She smelled like woodsmoke and accepted a kiss on the cheek.
"Thanks for taking a bath, David," she said in his ear. "My sweet, clean-living old man."
"Hot shower. Privileges of the headquarters building at Fort Seng."
She poked around in a nearly empty cupboard. Twentieth-century kitchens had overmuch room for late twenty-first century lifestyles, especially in a frontline city like Evansville.
"We missed your birthday."
