The Great Plains Gulag, March of the forty-fifth year of the Kurian Order: Only the bones of a civilization remain, monuments to mankind's apogee. Nature and time gnaw away the rest. Derricks still stand in this corner of oil country, giant iron insects surveying the countryside. Beneath them, the pumps rust, scattered in the long yellowish grass like metal herbivores, snouts thrust into the earth. The former wheat fields, fallow for generations and returned to native forest or prairie, feed longhorns, deer, and canny wild pigs. It is a land of receding horizons, a stopped watch, timeless.
The soil under cultivation bears the turned over, trampled look of spring plowing. The tools and methods used on the stretches of farmland would make a twentieth-century resident either stare in wonder or spit in disgust. Horse-drawn plows, some with just a single blade, sit at the edges of the fields, where they were abandoned at quitting time, plots fertilized only by what comes out of the back end of an animal.
The agricultural settlements at the center of the remaining fields, always near a road or rail line, look more like chain-gang camps than family farms. Surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, the clapboard barracks that house the workers and their families cry out for a coat of paint and a new roof to replace the flapping plastic tarps covering assorted holes. Trash heaps and pit toilets decorate the compounds among pitiful vegetable gardens. The children playing amid the tight-packed buildings flirt with nudity, so worn away are their clothes.
Near the gate of these camps a more substantial building usually stands at a respectful distance from the barracks, avoiding contact like a visitor to a leper colony. Often a sturdy pre-22 brick construct; the windows hold glass behind bars or shutters, and curtains behind the glass.
A few miles north of Oologah Lake along old State Route 60, one of these collective farms, known to its residents as the Rigyard, is nestled between gently rolling hills. Two rows of tall wire fencing encircle the camp. Barracks laid out foursquare sit in the shadow of two watchtowers, dwarfed in turn by two cavernous garages like enormous Quonset huts. The garages are patchworks of earthen wall, structural iron, and corrugated aluminum. On the other side of them, in a commanding position near the gate, an L-shaped cinder-block building dating to the 1950s folds itself protectively around a set of gasoline pumps. A water tower-a recent addition, judging from the new shine to the steel-leans slightly askew above, adding a jaunty top hat to the guardhouse. Behind the cinder-block building, a fine two-story house stands in splendid isolation at the farthest point upwind from the barracks, circled first by a porch and then a set of razor-wire fencing with padlocked gate.
Each watchtower contains a single sentinel dressed in green-brown-mottle camouflage fatigues and black leather hunting cap. The sentry to the south is the more alert; he occasionally crosses his little crow's nest to glance up and down the highway bordering the camp's southern fence. The one to the north chews a series of toothpicks in appropriately beaverish front teeth. He watches a trio of smock-clad women wash clothing in the community sink set between the barracks.
Were the other guard equipped with an excellent pair of binoculars (unlikely, but possible), perfect eyesight (still less likely, as guarding farmers and mechanics is reserved for older members of the Territorials), and intelligent initiative in carrying out his duty (the phrase "cold day in hell" springs to mind) he would have paid attention to the gully winding up the hill that shelters the Rigyard from the prevailing winds. The wooded cut in the hill offers ample concealment and a commanding view, whether for simple observation or an organized attack.
A figure possessing all those qualities lies on that hill, surrounded by the white and yellow and red wildflowers of an Oklahoma spring. He is a muscular, long-limbed young man with coppery skin and wary brown eyes. Dressed not so differently from his ancestors on the Sioux side of his family, he wears a uniform of buckskin, save for a thicker cowhide equipment belt and boots. Lustrous black hair is drawn back from his face into a pony tail, giving him the illusion of closely cropped hair from every direction but behind, where it dangles to his shoulders. He wears an intent expression as he examines the camp. A young cheetah watching a watering hole might exhibit such wariness, unsure whether the vegetation contains game or a lion ready to pounce. His eyes wander from point to point in the camp with the aid of a pair of black binoculars, lingering here and there while his forearm acts as a monopod. Like the bucktoothed guard in the southern tower, his mouth is also working, thoughtfully nibbling on the tender end of a blade of seed-topped grass.
His gaze returns to the wire-enclosed yard of the two-story house. In the grassy back lawn of the house, two T-shaped metal posts face each other, missing the clothesline that once joined them. Instead of wash drying in the afternoon sun, three men and a woman are painfully attached to the improvised gibbet. Their wrists are clasped behind them and tied to the metal crossbeam above, tight enough to dislocate a shoulder if they slump in their bonds.
He knows that death awaits the four-not from pained exhaustion or exposure-but from something quicker, more horrible, and as sure as the setting sun.
The senior lieutenant of Foxtrot Company set down his binoculars and focused his eyes a few feet in front of him on a flowering coral bean, its delicate red spindles inclining toward the sun. The diversion failed; though they were a good kilometer away, he could still see me agonized figures in me yard. His shoulders throbbed with sympathetic pain.
After four years' service to the Cause, his sensitivity to suffering had grown more acute, rather than less.
Lt. David Valentine looked back down into the gully. His platoon, numbering thirty-five in all, rested with backs up against leafing trees, using their packs to keep their backsides off the rain-soaked earth. They had covered a lot of ground since skirting the northern edge of Lake Oologah that morning, moving at a steady, mile-eating run. Rifles rested ready in their laps. They wore leather uniforms frilled in variegated styles to taste. Some still wore their winter beards, and no two hats matched. The only accoutrement his three squads shared were their short, broad-bladed machetes, known as parangs-though some wore them on their belts, some across their chests, and some sheathed them in their moccasin-leather puttees.
They didn't look like mixture of legend and alien science, part of a elite caste known as the Hunters.
Valentine signaled with two fingers to the men waiting in the gully, and Sergeant Stafford climbed up the wash to join him in the damp bracken. His platoon sergeant, known as Gator off-duty because of his leathery skin and wide, toothy grin, worked slowly to Valentine's overlook. Wordlessly, the lieutenant passed Stafford his binoculars. Stafford examined the compound as Valentine chewed another inch off the grass stalk clamped in his teeth.
"Looks like that last sprint was for nothing," Valentine said. "The tractor trailer pulled in here. We wouldn't have intercepted anyway-this must be a pretty good stretch of road."
"How do you figure that, sir?" Stafford said, searching the compound in vain for any sign of the tanker truck they'd spotted crawling through the rain that morning. The platoon dashed cross-country in order to ambush the tempting target. Thanks to the state of the roads in this part of the Kurian Zone, the rig couldn't move much faster than the Wolves could run.
"Look at the ruts by the gate, turning off the road. They've got to have been made by an eighteen-wheeler," Valentine said.
"Could have been from yesterday-even the day before, Lieutenant."
Valentine raised an eyebrow. "No puddles. Rain would have filled in something that deep. Those were made since the shower ended-what?-a half hour ago?"
"Err... okay, yeah ... so the truck's in one of those big garages getting worked on. We get in touch with the captain, the rest of the company is here in a day or two, and we burn the compound. I figure fifteen or twenty guarding this place at most. Ten's more likely."
"I'd like nothing better, Staff. Time's a problem, though."
"Val, I know food's short, but what else is new? There's enough game and forage in these woods-"
"Sorry, Gator," Valentine said, taking the binoculars back. "I misspoke. I should have said time's running short for them."
Stafford's eyebrows arched in surprise. "What, mose four tied up down there? Okay, it's ugly, but since when have we gotten dead over the punishments handed out by these little Territorial commandants?"
"I don't think it's just punishment," Valentine said, his eyes now on the two-story house.
"Hell, sir, you know these collaborator creeps. . . . They'll flog a woman for not getting the skid marks out of their skivvies. These four probably were last out of the barracks for roll call or something. God knows."
Valentine waited for a moment, wondering whether to give voice to a feeling. "I think they're breakfast. There's a Reaper in that house, maybe more than one."
Sgt. Tom Stafford blanched. "H-how d-do you figure that, sir?"
Valentine read the sergeant's fear with a species of relief. He wanted a subordinate in mortal fear of the Reapers. Any man who did not tremble at the thought of facing a couple of Hoods was either a fool or inexperienced, and there were far too many inexperienced Wolves in Foxtrot Company. Whemer or not the whole lot, officers included, were fools was a question Valentine sometimes debated with himself on long winter nights.