"What's on the agenda for tomorrow?" Valentine asked after they had seen to the horses.

"We're a team now, Valentine," she said, lugging her saddle indoors. "We both share the decisions. You're sensible enough."

"That sounded an awful lot like a compliment."

"You cut me off before I could say 'most of the time.' I was thinking we should stop tomorrow at Fort Springfield. That's the last stop before we hit no-man's-land. That old man from the Oklahoma City rail yard, he said the 'Nazis' traveled by train, right?"

"Yes. He also mentioned that new lines were going in west of here."

She set down the saddle and dug out a tin of some kind of tallow from her pack. She worked the tallow into a rag and then used the rag to clean the summer dust off the saddle. Valentine began to put some dinner together using the fresh food they brought with them from Ryu's Hall. The best of the summer vegetables had come in, and he began to peel and pare into a pot of chicken stock.

"There's three sides to a job, Valentine," she said, drawing a triangle in the dirt. She put three letters at the corners. "Fast, safe, and right. You get to pick any two when you're out in the KZ. You can do something fast and right, but you sacrifice safe. Or safe and right, but you won't get it done fast."

"Then there's fast and safe."

"That's how most Cats operate. In and out quick. Me, I like to live around my objective for a while. Then when it comes time to act, I know what I'm doing. Your lead from the old nutcase is the only trail we have, at least in this part of the country. I'd just as soon not go stumbling around in the Smoky Mountains, where I don't know anybody."

"Then you know people in the plains?"

"How does that old song go? 7 got friends in low places...' Sure, Valentine, not everyone in the Gulag is a Quisling."

Valentine covered the little pot hanging over the fire burning in an old stainless-steel sink they had propped up on two cinder blocks.

Duvalier unfolded a map Of the Old United States. "We know the General moves by train, right? They didn't raid into the Free Territory, which I kind of suspected they might do. Could be he doesn't have the muscle for that job yet. They were heading north out of Oklahoma City. The Kur don't have a reliable east-west rail line south of Iowa and Nebraska-your old buddies the Wolves raise too much hell between Kansas City and St. Louis-they don't even try to keep that line repaired anymore. In Kansas or Nebraska, they could have turned west, to hit Denver or one of the Freeholds in the Rockies. I can't believe they turned back east. Why come west in the first place?"

Valentine looked at the map. "North out of Oklahoma, they might have turned west at Wichita, Junction City, or maybe even Lincoln. Lincoln seems like a long shot, but if I were trying to recruit, Iowa might be the place to do it. It sounded like a long time ago, there was a pretty big army under that Twisted Cross banner. Maybe they're trying to do the same thing again. A lot of loyal Quislings have land in Iowa granted to them in exchange for services rendered. We used to draw a two-hundred-mile circle around Des Moines and call it Brass Ringland. I imagine these Quislings are raising families. Could be they want some sons and daughters to join up."

Duvalier looked at the map for a moment and thought. "Funny, I'm just not picturing these guys as leaders of a huge army. They seem secretive, more like a tight elite unit. In a way, if they had a huge army, it would be better for us. We could track-hell, even infiltrate. I feel like they're more the Kur's answer to our Bears: small teams of very serious badasses who crack nuts the Kur don't want to risk their own Reapers on."

"Reaper mercenaries? Okay, you've seen Reapers, I've seen men. Maybe it's their version of a tag team. The men guard the Reapers when they sleep away the day, and the Reapers do the killing at night."

"That system's in place already, Valentine."

"Perhaps they're just perfecting it."

"I still heard Reapers talking on the hill where we met. That means they weren't being operated by the same Master."

A Kurian Lord animated his Reapers through a psychic bond, the same bond that fed him the vital aura of humans killed by the Reaper.

Nothing made sense to Valentine. "How about if a group of Kurian Lords decided to spread the risk in destroying common enemies. They each contribute one Reaper, a flying strike force to .. . No ... damn, that makes no sense. A Kurian's hold gets weaker the farther the Reaper is from him."

Duvalier nodded. "That would mean the Kurians had to travel around the country. To much risk. Nothing, but nothing, gets them out of their little fortresses once they are established. They're the biggest cowards in creation."

"Yes, you're right. Doesn't make sense." His stomach rumbled at the smell of cooking food. "But I can understand my insides. Let's eat."

They turned to their bread and soup and concentrated on the hot food. For dessert they shared a bag of summer plums, seeing who could spit the pit most accurately. Valentine won on distance, but Duvalier expelled hers with bull's-eye control. They laughed at the wine-colored stains left on their faces and turned in, giggling like kids.

"How'd you get to be a Cat? Were you always a troublemaker, or is it just the training?"

"Both, in a way. I grew up under the Kur in Emporia, Kansas. It's a town about halfway between what's left of Topeka and Wichita. My daddy had been shipped off to some work camp God-knows-where. My mom made clothes, mostly for the labor. We call that part of the country the Great Plains Gulag. Gulag: I thought it was some kind of hot dish until someone told me it means concentration camps. My mom was a little too young and pretty, though. Some of the Society used to visit her. Society is what we called the Quislings. She got extra food and stuff out of it, but I hated Society calls."

"You don't have to elaborate."

"I have the high ground on you, Valentine. I've read your Q-file. But you don't know much about me, other than that I saved your ass, then recruited you.

"I started causing trouble, sneaking around, spying on the Society guys. They lorded it over the rest of the Labor, driving around in their cars. God, I hated them. I started lighting fires. A real dynomaniac."

"Pyromaniac," Valentine corrected and instantly regretted it. The habits of growing up in the Padre's schoolroom, where he helped teach the grade-schoolers, died hard.

Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net