"If it had just been another battle, would anyone have remembered it?" Molly asked.
"That's a good question. Maybe not. I think Gandhi, you know who he is, right? I think he suggested that the Jews should have done something like that when the Nazis were exterminating them. To me, that's just doing the enemy's job for them. Maybe some of you should try to sell your lives a little more expensively."
"That's easy for you to say. You have guns, friends, other soldiers to rely on. About all we have is a broken-down old phone system and a set of code words. "John really needs a haircut' for 'We have a family at our place that is trying to go north." Not much help when the vampires come knocking."
Strange how her thoughts mirror mine. I was thinking the same thing the night I got here, Valentine mused.
"Maybe we can't all commit suicide," she continued. "But for God's sake, we should quit helping them. We feed the patrols, work the railroads, keep the roads repaired. Then when we get old and sick, they gather us up like our cattle. They got it pretty good just because it's human nature to ask for another fifteen minutes when you're told you have an hour to live."
"Brave words," Valentine said.
"Brave? Me?" She sat down in the grass and plucked at the burrs clinging to her jeans. "I'm so scared at night I can barely breathe. I dread going to sleep. It's the dream."
"You have nightmares?"
"No, not nightmares. A nightmare. It's only one, but it's a doozy. Wait, I should tell this properly. We have to go back to Gramma Flanagan again. She told me a story about when the Triumvirate had first got things organized in Madison. I think it was in 2024, in the middle of summer. They had a group of men-well, some of them were Reapers, too-called the Committee for Public Safety. About two hundred people were working for this committee, in charge of everything from where you slept to where you went to the bathroom. The three vampires on the committee were kind of the eyes and ears of these Kurians who were dug into the State Capitol building. I don't know how much you know about the Kurian Lords, but they sure love to live in big empty monument-type buildings. I bet a bunch of them are in Washington. But back to the story my Gramma Katie told me. There was this woman, Sheila Something-or-other, who got caught with a big supply of guns: rifles, pistols, bullets, equipment for reloading, all kinds of stuff. I think even explosives. One of the vampires said her punishment was up to the people who worked for the Committee, and if it wasn't to their liking, they'd kill every last one of them and get a new bunch.
"So with that incentive, the whole committee goes over to where she's being held. And they tore her to bits. With their bare hands. They took the pieces and stuck them onto sticks. Gramma said the sticks looked like pool cues, or those little flagpoles from school classrooms, stuff like that. They put her head on one, her heart on another, her liver, her breasts, even her... you know... sex parts. They made streamers out of her intestines, and painted their faces with her blood. Then they paraded back to the basketball court at the university where the Committee met and showed what they did to her to the vampires. Some of them were drunk, I guess. The Reapers looked at it all and told them to eat the bits, or they'd be killed. Gramma said there were fistfights over her liver."
She sat silent for a moment. "Maybe I was too young to be told that story. It gave me a nightmare that night, and pretty often ever since. I'm always dreaming that I've done something wrong, and the crowd is coming for me. They're all around, and they grab me and start pulling me apart. That's when I wake up, cold and sweaty. Mary says I sometimes say 'no, no' in my sleep. She calls it the 'no-no' dream. It seems silly in the daylight, but try waking up from it at two in the morning on a windy night."
"I have a dream, or nightmare, I guess, that keeps coming back," Valentine began. "Never told anyone about it, not even Father Max. My mom and dad and little brother and sister got killed by a patrol when I was just a kid. I come into the house-I remember it smelled like tomatoes in the kitchen that day, but that's not in the dream-and there's my mother, lying in the living room, dead. Her legs were... Well, I guess they had raped her, or started to anyway. They shot my dad in the head. But in my dream, it's like they're still alive, and I can save them if I just could fix the bullet wounds. I press my hands against the blood that's coming out of my mom's throat, but it just keeps pulsing and pulsing out, while my little brother is crying and screaming. But I can't save them. Can't..." he said, voice trailing off. He looked up at the clouds to try to get the tears to go away. High white cirrus clouds painted the blue sky with icy white brushstrokes.
"I guess everyone has their own set of nightmares," Molly said.
"Well, we're getting plenty of help. Whatever happened to your grandmother?"
Molly Carlson wiped tears from her own eyes with the back of her hand. "Oh, she injured her back and got taken away. The vampires got her in the end, I'm sure. She got driven away by my uncle Mike. Her son. Her own fucking son."
The following Saturday, Molly taught Valentine how to drive the four-wheeled topless buggy. The thicker reins felt funny in his left hand, the buggy whip held up in his right. Valentine was used to riding English-style with split reins, although he mostly used his legs to control the horse while riding. Driving was a completely different skill.
"You're doing great, David, really great," Molly said, beaming for a change. They were driving well ahead of the family cart, which held the rest of the Carlson clan as well as the Breitlings. "Of course, normally we drive the buggy tandem, which is tougher to manage, but they need the two horses for the big cart. And remember, if you ever have a load to carry in back, to place it evenly in the bed and secure it if you can. An unbalanced load will exhaust a horse faster than anything."
The combined families of the Carlson farm were on their way to Monroe. Mr. Carlson explained that there was a speaker in town, a visitor up from Chicago to give a lecture for the New Universal Church. A Kurian organization, the New Universal Church did not demand weekly assemblies but rather encouraged people in the Kurian Order to come to the occasional meeting to catch up on new laws and policies. But now and then a true "revival" took place, and attending them was a way of keeping in the Order's good graces.
The clouds piled up and darkened, threatening rain. Carlson opined that some would use it as an excuse not to attend, but this made him all the more determined to go. Showing up in spite of precipitation would just make their presence all the more notable, considering the long round trip to and from Monroe. "If we're going to play their game, we should really play it," he added, stowing tarps in the two horse-drawn vehicles and reminding everyone to bring rain slickers and hats.
Only Gonzalez-much improved but still not up to a long trip in the wet-and Frat stayed behind. The young man wanted to keep an eye on the stock and said he felt like he stuck out like a sore thumb in a sea of white faces.
So it turned out that Molly and Valentine ended up together in the buggy, bearing four baskets full of lunch, dinner, and gifts of food for Mrs. Carlson's brother, with the rest following in the larger wagon. Valentine's Morgan trotted along behind the buggy, brought along as the equine equivalent of a spare tire.
At lunch, a few miles outside of Monroe, the first sprinkles of rain came. When they climbed back into the buggy, Valentine draped the tarp over himself and Molly and drove on, the heavy raindrops playing a tattoo on the musty-smelling oiled canvas. They used the buggy whip as an improvised tent pole and peered out from a cavelike opening, their faces wet with rain. Valentine felt the warmth of her body against his right side, her left arm in his right, helping him hold up the tarp. The rich, seductive smell of femininity filled his nostrils without his even using his hard senses. She also had a faint, flowery smell of lavender.
"You smell good today," Valentine said, then felt himself go red. "Not that you smell bad normally... I just mean the flowery stuff. What is that, toilet water?"
"No, just a soap. Mrs. Partridge, the blacksmith's wife, she's a wonder at making it. Puts herbs and stuff in some of them. I think she started doing it in self-defense; her husband picks up animals that have died of disease or whatever, turns them into pig and chicken feed. Dog meat, too. I guess he smelled so bad after working with the offal, she went into scented soaps as a last resort."
"It's nice. Hope I'm not too bad. This tarp kind of reeks."
"No. For a guy who traipses around in the hills, you're really clean. Some of the county men could take a lesson." Valentine felt a stab, remembering Cho's near-identical joke. "A lot of them are going to use this rainstorm as an excuse to skip their Saturday bath." She turned her face and pressed her nose to his chest. "You just smell kind of tanned and musky. Like the saddle from a lathered horse. I like it."
Valentine suddenly felt awkward. "So who exactly is this we're going to hear?"
"My dad says he's a speaker from Illinois, someone affiliated with their church. Kind of a bigwig. This church the Kurians run, it's not like you worship anything. The Triumvirate doesn't discourage the old churches, but they do listen to what gets said. As long as the ministers stick to the joys of the afterlife, and God's love in troubled times, they're fine. Anyone who speaks out against the Order is gone real fast. Most of them get the hint. No, this New Universal Church is more designed to get you to like the Kurian Order. They are always trying to recruit people into the patrols, or to come away and work their machinery, railroads, factories, and stuff. The real slick ones try to convince you that the Kurians came as the answer to man's problems. Some answer."
"So we just sit and listen, then go home?"
"That's about it. They try to recruit people right then and there. Take them up on stage, and everyone is supposed to applaud. Just clap when everyone else claps, and don't fall asleep. You'll be fine. I've got a feeling today's topic is going to be the importance of motherhood. They want more babies in Wisconsin."