Duvalier hugged her and whispered something in her ear that Valentine did not even try to hear. Sometimes using his "hard ears" just depressed him, giving him glimpses into others' private lives he wished he had not heard.
"You two take the horses, and mine besides. I'm going west to Denver with the dogs. Make myself useful in a hospital or stable. Been out there so long, it'll be nice to be among people, even if you're living under a set of rules long enough to choke a horse." The tears were in her voice, but not in her eyes.
They held a final meeting with the colonel and his adjutant. The colonel had requested a briefing about the Twisted Cross for all his officers, but Duvalier demurred, wishing to keep a low profile in camp. They told all they knew of the General, speaking on the record as Cats "A" and "Z" of Southern Command as Major Zwiecki took notes. As far as everyone else in the Denver Free Colorado Corps was concerned, they wanted to be known as just a pair of concerned relatives looking for one of their dead at Fort Rowling. That they also were remembered as some drifters who inexplicably had their horses shoed, were given a pack saddle, canteens, food, fuel, and a pass allowing them on Denver Protective Zone Territory at DFCC expense, Valentine never learned.
They followed the Republican River east out of Colorado, traveling slowly and carefully. Avoiding contact with farm, camp, or town, they worked their way back up into Nebraska. Valentine changed back into his Private Rice attire when Duvalier judged it safe enough, and they worked out yet another cover story to explain their presence. But this corner of Nebraska, so close to the Colorado border, was empty enough to allow them to move without being noticed. And so they came to the river Platte and its adjoining roads and tracks. After looking for their faces on wanted posters at station offices and finding none, they traded the horses for travel warrants from a corrupt rail-yard chief. Soon they rode again on the railroad, this time working for their passage-riding in and cleaning out eastbound cattle cars.
They were inside an empty cattle car on a siding outside their original pseudo-destination of Grand Island, sharing a bag of corn bread, when a train approached from the west. It moved with a mile-eating speed as the powerful engines pulled it. When the train roared by, Valentine counted an extra guard-car, thirty nondescript freights, and another heavily armored guard-car before the steel-colored caboose passed by. Whipped by speed and wind, two flags fluttered next to each other on the caboose: black with a spiderish design centered on the standard.
It was the white swastika of the Twisted Cross.
igh Plains of Eastern Colorado, August: A better name for this upland might be the Dry Plains, as running water is scarce much of the year. The pumps and sprinklers that fed circular patches of crops, which had dotted the flats like some giant variety of lily pad, are now nothing but rusting empty skeletons and dry as marrowless bone. A little more rainfall, and the high plains would be a lush paradise: the sun shines three hundred days a year, and the winters are comparatively mild.
Perhaps it is the sun that keeps the Kur away, or just the lack of sustainable population for their feeding. The inhabitants of Denver and the Eastern Slope might also have something to do with it. Their outpost garrisons scattered in this empty land imitate the forts of the Old West, with wooden walls high enough to prevent a Reaper's leaping over them.
The few souls living in this expanse hide their paths and habits from both the vigorous Denver Freehold in the West and the Kurians to the East. The Denverites have been known to "relocate to safety" anyone found on their borders, confiscating property too large to move at the point of a gun. As for the Kurians, it is the old story. Any group larger than a family is too hard to feed, and too big a risk of becoming a lifesign lure for a roaming Reaper.
So only the occasional house is inhabited, though the isolation can be as hard to live under as the Kurian avatars.
* * *
Valentine did not know whether to call it a sod house or a cave. The House of Cortez had none of the scope and glitter its conquering namesake inspired. The front of the structure protruded from the side of a grassy hill, as if it had been fired from a gigantic cannon and embedded there. An overhang sheltered the wide porch, with rough wooden trunks holding up the dirt-and-grass-covered roof. Flowers in hanging baskets and planters added a splash of color to the weather-beaten wood and straw-colored grasses covering the hillside and the crown of the house.
They drew near the house to a crescendo of barking. Valentine guessed three dogs, and he and Duvalier approached empty-handed.
"At least we know we have the right house. We haven't seen another one for five miles," Duvalier said.
"I've got a gun," a female but not very feminine voice called from the shadows of the house. "You're welcome to water from the pump, but there's no food or roof here for strangers."
"We're here to speak to Tommy Cortez," Valentine called over the barking.
"No one here by that name. You're lost, sounds like."
"We have some messages from Mr. Victor. We got the directions from him."
The unseen figure contemplated the news for a moment, and even the dogs went silent. "My husband's not home. Your business is with him. If you want to wait, just tell me where you'll be, and I'll tell him when he returns."
"Ma'am," Duvalier said, "we've come clear across Kansas, and we're heading farther west. We've lugged this case all the way from the railhead, hoping for some help when we got here. Food and horses, in other words."
"Horses? You see a barn here?"
Valentine put a restraining hand on Duvalier's shoulder.
"Mrs. Cortez, we're here to help if we can. Is your husband missing?"
Valentine felt the hard casing of the unseen woman's manner break inside the shadowy interior. "Three weeks and two days," a much smaller voice said from the shadows. The door opened, and a short raisin of a woman in a denim smock stepped out onto the porch, gripping a rabbit gun. Years of dusty Colorado summers were written on her face in vertical lines. "Never been gone this long. I'm about out of my head with worry. It wasn't even much of a trip, just up to Fort Rowling."
They ate a meal of corn bread and drippings and drank prairie tea under the low ceiling of the Cortez home. Like a rabbit warren built for humans, the house behind the half-buried facade was a series of rooms and passages, mostly filled with cobwebbed relics as a sort of indoor junkyard. A generator chattered away; judging from the piping, it burned local natural gas to light and ventilate the house. The musty smell was offset, to Valentine's mind, by the welcoming, earth-insulated coolness of the interior after the hot August sun.
"My husband brought me out of Garden City, Kansas, almost thirty years ago, now," Mrs. Cortez explained while moving about the tiny kitchen. She had grown garrulous after letting them in. "He always was a traveler. Tall and handsome, he was. Still is, even with the mileage. Just his size made most of the varmints in Kansas avoid him. He made money getting messages into Denver, New Mexico, wherever. The New Order had just got itself worked out by then, everything all organized to suit them. After years of fighting and starvation, lots of folks were happy to stay put where they were told and do what was ordered. But I saw there was no future in it, and when Tommy asked me to go, I went. He had found this place in the middle of a whole lotta nowhere and had been slowly fixing it up. We were happier than we had a right to be, considering what was going on beyond the horizon." She removed a pistol from her apron and sat down to her own meal.
"It's always been just the two of you?" Duvalier asked.
"Yes, we couldn't have children. Something wrong with one of us, I expect, but no way of knowing these days. Not that we failed on account of trying," she said, a shy smile creeping across her face. "There was Karl, an orphan boy
Tommy picked up on one of his trips. He stayed with us about three years, but moved on to Denver when he was seventeen. Nobody around here-he was lonely, poor boy. Or I should say nobody around here worth knowing. These lands get all sorts of trash passing through, and I'm not as brave as I once was. I get scared if I'm left alone. That's why we've got the dogs."
The curs in question snored in a companionable heap on an old sofa. They sported the curled tails and short-haired, irregular coloring of mongrels, and as soon as their mistress had dropped her suspicions, they turned into a tail-wagging, tongue-lolling trio of family pets.