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I visited Lexington by a slow and bumpy route, my injuries were sorry to say.
The only light shining into the gloom of my captivity came from the busy flurry of radio traffic squelching over the vehicular and personal radios. That the search was continuing, reinforced by more forces from Ohio, was a sign that my David had made it away.
They put me in a badly sprung vehicle with a Truck 2Go logo somewhat visible under rust streaks and a thin coat of flaking green Ordnance paint.
I saw a quick glimpse of the Ordnance field headquarters as the truck carrying me passed through it: lines of men and horses and vehicles being fed and serviced, dispatched and received. The truck carrying me was metal sided, but someone had punched a peephole; though the tiny opening was at a tiresome height for me, I couldn’t resist making use of it despite the cramping. A few legworm ranchers even wandered through camp, as did an assortment of ill-favored individuals with the fresh-from-the-rat-pit look of the bounty hunters we’d met on the banks of the Tennessee earlier that year.
They studied a new set of wanted posters pasted on the bowed side of a collapsing wooden barn with patient, hungry eyes.
The continuation of the search assured me that my David, Gail Post, and the quick little Alessa Duvalier had vanished into the Kentucky thickets. If they had not been taken in three days, I counted them safe. Still, it was strange that there were this many called out into the field for such a small party of escapees. Or had the Ordnance lost something of exceptional value?
Frisky picked up a boy with a face like a field of red wildflowers to help him in handling me. The teen, who still hadn’t grown into his Ordnance uniform, fed and watered me and allowed me to wash with a bucket of water and a rag. For the first leg of the journey, the truck carried search dogs to some quarter of grazing land where the search had flared up again. We were delayed half a day because of the dogs, but apparently once they’d been dropped off in a field near a spaghetti-like mass of wintering legworms, we were on our own at last.
It was amusing to hear Frisky sounding like Polonius advising his young associate.
“Any time you get a chance to operate here in the Kantuck, you jump on it quick as hot skeet. All sorts of chances to pick stuff up. The legworm clans leave you alone, long as you leave them alone. Don’t mess with their women or their worms and you’ll be fine.”
During the drive to Lexington, a zigzag along an old highway with cuts to fords circumventing ruined bridges, with only rudimentary signage remaining to mark the way, I considered again how attractive this land could be. Lush but open, defensible but still livable, mild and well-watered, it seemed to have Nebraska beat by many horizons. Perhaps the legworm ranchers chafed among themselves, even fought over grazing rights and ownership of new-hatched worms, but they kept their land bandit-free. Here we were, riding in an undefended truck loaded with valuable fuel and spares, with every expectation of being able to cross sixty or seventy miles of country unmolested. On the plains and in parts of Missouri, unless the Kurians rule an area, travel in this manner is most unwise. You’re almost sure to be bushwhacked. But here was this Frisky, moaning only about the number of detours he had to take around blockages in the road.
Still, Frisky kept his carbine handy next to him in the cabin, and his ruddy assistant had a heavy pistol and a drum-fed shotgun. When I gently explored the limits of the ringbolt chaining me, he had the boy point the weapon at me.
“Relax,” Frisky called through the grate separating me and the smell of soggy dog from the driver’s cabin.
“Me drive. Me drive good. Yes?” I asked, miming working a steering wheel.
“Not this trip, strawberry,” Frisky said.
The roads suddenly improved, the truck picked up speed, and moments later we were entering Lexington. I knew little of it, save that it was the sole Kurian-controlled city in the heart of Kentucky.
I saw little of it through my peephole, except for a tall burned-out building the locals called “the chimney,” now home only to hawks and civil-defense loudspeakers. Kurian carbuncles topped a couple of the others, some formed into elegant spires and minarets, whelks clinging to others thickly formed, like bulges of clamshell growing along a building’s side, glistening wet no matter how fine the weather. One was black and dead, a little shriveled like a rotting berry. I could hear trains coupling and uncoupling as we passed a rail yard.
Upon arriving in town, the first thing Frisky did was go to a Grog outfitter and purchase a laborer’s belt. It’s a fairly simple girdle of leather with rings for the attachment of securing hardware, tool pouches, or safety line snap-rings. He studied the injury on my neck and decided it was healing well enough that it could be passed off as a minor work injury.
I made whimpering noises and plucked at my waist, but Frisky ignored me. The dressing at my waist really could have used a replacement and a fresh dusting of iodoform powder, but that would have added to his expenses. He even denied his companion the tiny amount it would cost to go to an eatery and enjoy a hot meal.
I decided that if it came down to an auction, I’d look as sickly and dispirited as possible, both to hear Frisky’s explanations and to chop the price intended to be shared among mine enemies.
Frisky stopped and questioned some doubtful-looking boys standing on the street corner, swathed in voluminous clothing that concealed who-knew-what in various pockets. I heard him inquire after someone called “the Young Turk” and another individual called “Blue Yo-Yo.”
He eventually located this “Blue Yo-Yo,” so the Turk missed his chance, but that’s no one’s business but the Turk’s.
Blue Yo-Yo, who had no toy in evidence but wore a gleaming, diamond-studded ring on every finger along with a few extras pierced into one shaved eyebrow, took a look at me. He held a scented handkerchief over his nose, keeping five feet of airspace between himself and the back door of the truck.
“He’s fucking big, yo. How the fuck old is he?”
“Just turned twenty, according to these papers,” Frisky said, waving some Ordnance forms full of lies holding hands in block print. “He can drive, too.”
“Drive? Are you fucking kidding, yo?” Blue Yo-Yo said.
I put on my best accommodating Grog grin, pulling back my lips. If this Yo-Yo knew anything about my kind, he’d know how to age me by gum line and the length of my pointed prominents and dishonor Frisky as a liar. And forger. When he found time to create documentation on me I do not know; we weren’t at that headquarters more than the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to load the dogs. “No, it’s true.”
Blue Yo-Yo waggled his key-studded fingers. “Let’s fucking see it, then.”
/> Frisky gave me the fucking keys and I put on a fucking exhibition with the fucking truck. Blue Yo-Yo must have been fucking impressed, because he managed to put a subject and verb together without an expletive.
“Leather Hog needs new wheel man, but he won’t cog Grogs. Take him to the Trapdoor, ducks. Shanghai Mike’s always looking for strong backs for the mines in the Coal Country. I’ll expect a cut out of both of you. I’m not a free fucking church dinner–and-lecture, yo.”
Some humans have a tendency to talk among themselves as though any of my kind nearby are statuary. I sat cross-legged and sniffed at an empty snack-food bag left under the truck’s seat.
