Valentine felt his face go hot. "I'm sorry. I should be grateful. Not my place to criticize unless I'm in your shoes."

"Live and learn. Emphasis on live."

eastern Nebraska, July: The Great Plains Gulag produces the wheat and corn of the Kurian Order. Collective farming settlements, managed under discipline that would make Stalin envious, dot the flat expanses of the Plains. Good farmland is divided into roughly fifty-mile-diameter regions from the main railheads with their towering grain elevators. At the center of the circle, like the spider in the middle of its web, is the well-guarded fortress of the local Kurian Lord. His eyes and ears and appetites are in his Reapers. The Reapers pass the Master's orders to the Marshals and Managers below them, making sure they attend to duty with the devotion expected of ones absolved from any chance of providing auric fodder for the Kurian Overlord.

The trade in this part of the country is a tragic exchange. Boxcars full of grain and corn leave the Gulag to feed the urban population elsewhere and return with a few dozen assorted captives, criminals, and disposables as payment. The Marshals then unload the unfortunates from the boxcars and route the prisoners to their doom with the knowledge that each unknown fed to the hungry Kurian Lord means one less friend or neighbor selected and sacrificed in the dead of night. Rumor has it that in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle there are trading pits, run with the same frantic energy of the Old World, and devoted to buying and selling wheat, corn, soy, barley, and legumes with human lives. The trades are administered and run by the accountants and dealers for their Kurian Lords, seeking the best deal in living bodies per ton in what might be called a futures market for those who have no future.

Lincoln, formerly the capital of Nebraska, is a good example of the Kurian Order in the Gulag. The Dark Lord lives, appropriately enough, in the fourteen-story stone tower that looms over the reduced city skyline. Its solid construction, commanding view, and numerous carvings and statues appeal to the megalomaniac temperament within. Though one valuable statue from the pre-Kur days is missing: the Daniel Chester French study of a pensive, standing Lincoln. Some say that the Kur destroyed it as they did the larger, more famous seated one at the memorial in Washington, D.C, but others maintain it was spirited out of the city and now resides in one of the Western Freeholds, a hidden icon of liberty.

The people within his realm call the Kurian Lord "Number One," and nothing gets the local Quislings' attention like someone walking in a room and announcing, "Orders from Number One." Just across from the dreaded tower is the old City-County Building, now just referred to as the Hold. The local Marshals are quartered here, and the ample prison space is the last stop for those on the way to the Reapers. The city is now home to artisans and technicians in the employ of the Kurian Order, as well as being a main depot of the Troop. Their armored cars and trucks are maintained in a huge garage, once the Pershing Auditorium. The Regional Director, a Quisling in charge of the thick belts of farmland within the Kurian's realm, lives (at the pleasure of Number One) in the Colonial-Georgian governors mansion. The house has a sad history: assassination and suicide, as well as the occasional Reaper-led housecleaning, have plagued the series of Regional Directors and their families. The suicides especially drive the Kurian to distraction-he sees it as a tragic waste of aura.

The Lincoln Lord has six Reapers. One or two are usually at the Capitol Tower serving as bodyguards and mouthpieces. Another is circulating in the city, checking up on the doings in Lincoln, and another will almost always be on tour in the farmland with a dreaded retinue of Marshals, spreading fear wherever he goes. Finally two more hunt in the unclaimed buffer zone between the Kurian principalities, looking for threats to the realm and feeding their lord with drifters, runaways, and the occasional sleeping-on-duty Trooper.

"Why'd it do that?" Valentine asked, peering through the empty window of the parked patrol car.

It was a ridiculous-looking vehicle, an old police cruiser on a jacked-up suspension, sitting on fat on-and-off-road performance tires and missing its trunk hood. Camouflage greens and browns replaced the old state-trooper markings.

"Haven't you ever seen a Reaper hole?" Duvalier said, looking at the grisly scene within. Bronze-colored flies clustered around a ragged wound. "They poke their tongues in right above the collarbone. Pretty good chance at hitting the heart or a big blood vessel."

"This just happened." Valentine's hair was standing on end from something other than cold river water hitting his nethers. The Reaper must have been just over the hill when they crossed.

"Lucky for us he was here." Duvalier grabbed a key ring off the body's belt. "Crap-no codes."

"But what I meant was, why would a Reaper take out one of his own militia?"

Duvalier touched the corpse. "Not quite cold. Either it was a Reaper from down Kansas way poaching-which is pretty unlikely, they might grab some farm boy but not a soldier-or the Hood caught him sleeping on the job."

"Kurian justice is efficient, I'll give them that."

"Solves one problem. You were talking about scrounging a uniform. Here's your chance."

Valentine ignored her buttocks as best as he could as she rooted in the car through the window.

"The vest you mean? We'll have to clean it. We'd also better take the whole body."

"Why, you want to give him a Christian burial?" She summoned a tongue full of spittle and let it drop on the Trooper's forehead.

"No, they're going to be a little suspicious if they find a body missing a vest and identity papers."

"Your idea. You carry him, then. Better get him over the shoulder. Rigor will be setting in," she said, putting on her claws.

"Why the metal? Think the Reaper is coming back for seconds?"

"Nope. Omaha is Grog country. We're near enough to make it look like they made off with the body."

"Would they touch a man in uniform?"

"They're kind of freebooters. I've heard that they don't take orders from the Quislings to the east or the Kurians to the west. As long as they don't interfere with the rails or roads, they do as they please. Maybe a few Harpies smelled the blood and came down for the body."

She scratched the paintwork on the roof and hood with the claws, a sound painful to Valentine's sensitive ears. She looked inside. "I'd put marks in the upholstery, but I don't think anyone would notice. Three generations of corn-fed Troopers have done their worst."

Valentine searched the car, but was disappointed at the results. A little bit of food, some tools, a pump-action shotgun, and a box of shells were the extent of the booty. He also carried a fist-sized key ring, which had a number of varicolored disks threaded on it like beads on a string. Duvalier explained that the disks served as money, useful enough in Lincoln itself but no good in another Kurian's territory. He pocketed it nevertheless. Grogs would definitely take the shotgun, for trade if nothing else, so he took it and the shells. "Not even a radio. Kind of primitive up here, huh?" he said, shouldering the body.

Duvalier erased their footprints as they moved off the road and to the west.

They weighted the body with rocks and sank it in some swampy water along the shallow river they'd been following when they came upon the car. In the distance they saw a few lights, the first they had seen since Missouri.

"We're on the outskirts of Number One's land around Lincoln. If we keep heading north, we should hit the rail line between Lincoln and Omaha. Then it's just a matter of catching the first westbound."

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