Choice of the Cat (Vampire Earth 2)

The rail terminus turned out to be a treasure trove of equipment abandoned by the hastily departed Twisted Cross. Valentine found the Troopers' pickup truck, a heavy-framed conglomeration of dirty windows under wire grids, wooden cargo dividers in the bed of rusting bodywork over a double axle. But the mechanical heartbeat within the diesel cylinders was still strong. He examined the engine, added motor oil, and loaded the bed with food and fuel, all the while keeping his ears open for approaching patrols.

The Jacks had either stolen from or been equipped by the Twisted Cross. There were stenciled crates everywhere. He read the labels using the light from Ryu's stone. It fit easily in his palm, allowing him to shine it this way and that. He found a case of grenades and another of thermite bombs. The aluminum-ferric oxide mix, when ignited, burned hot enough to weld metal, and was a favorite incendiary device of the more destructive-minded Quislings. He loaded up with maps, guns, and ammunition from the dead "garrison" and got behind the wheel-looking through a newly cleaned windscreen and the armored wire grid over it.

As he drove-not very well at first, he was inexperienced with such contraptions-he tried to get to know the ancient truck as he would a horse.

Valentine would never know it, but his slow drive through Northeast Nebraska became the stuff of local legend. He wanted to avoid any chance of encountering either patrols or hunting Reapers, so he stayed well clear of the Number One's territory north of Lincoln. He crawled along on the backest of back roads through an area claimed by Kurian, Grog, and Man. He stopped at the occasional lonely homestead, trading guns and boxes of ammunition for a meal and a night's rest.

The residents at each stop asked no questions of him, but were eager to tell him about their problems. He cleared out a nest of Harpies that were plaguing a little bottomland settlement from the old college at Wayne by burning their roost, and ambushed some armed ex-Trooper thugs who prowled in a two-vehicle convoy as they camped at night.

He killed one of the deserters as he went to relieve himself in a gully and returned in his hat and shot the others before they could rise.

He finally gave away the truck from Broken Bow to a co-op of families in the picturesque country north of Blair. On his legs again, he proceeded afoot into the ruins of Omaha.

Omaha was a burnt-out husk. The outskirts of the city were falling apart, the inner regions a charred and collapsed wreck, and everything south of the city between Council Bluffs and Papillion flattened by the nuclear air and ground bursts designed to knock out the old Strategic Air Command base at Bellevue. He planned to move around the edge of the ruins, perhaps along the old I-680 line, when Fate decided to lay down one of the face cards that She sometimes used to change his life.

and Dunes, September: Stretching north from the Platte River is the rolling, empty expanse of Nebraska's dunes. Sitting above one of the great aquifers of the world, the coarse, dark brown soil is not suited for crops, but supports some of the world's best ranching country. It is the Sahara transformed into a grassy garden. The Dunes, a beautiful green ocean in the spring before being burnt into straw by the summer's heat, cover an area larger than the state of Connecticut. They start to the west, and like the ocean, the great rollers are found the farthest out, thousand-foot-high, wind-rounded ridges a mile across and ten miles long, almost all running east-west according to the prevailing winds. East from the great ridges are smaller hills of varying squiggled shapes but still mostly long and thin. These gradually fade off into tiny steep hillocks, as the great rollers of the Atlantic turn into the chop of the English Channel. So like little waves are these hills that the residents use a nautical term for them: choppers.

While much of the soil is too dry to easily grow crops, the area is anything but a desert. It is ideal ranching country and supports more than horses and cattle. The little valleys between the hills are thickly wooded: lakes and ponds, marshes and soggy meadow can be found among the teeming cottonwoods and box elms. Trout streams and lakes filled with pike are dotted with beaver homes and dams, and a newcomer is sometimes startled to see a pelican fishing after descending from one of the high, dry ridges as seagulls ride the breeze overhead. Game is plentiful, mule deer bound through the long grass like giant jackrabbits, and antelope herds graze while the younger males at the edges keep watch for coyotes. Bird hunters come home with everything from waterfowl to wild turkey, pheasant to sharp-tailed grouse. But the residents of the Dunes ride with rifles for reasons other than shooting game. They hunt the minions ofKur.

Valentine and Duvalier caught up to the Twisted Cross train at the fork where the North Platte and South Platte converged their sandy banks. The town of North Platte no longer existed on the spit between the rivers, having been burned in the chaos almost fifty years ago. A hand-lettered sign announced that they were pulling into Harvard Station.

Their train did not stop, even though they had been assured by the engineer-this being a cattle car, unguarded except for a few rifles in the hands of the railroad men- that it would pause at Harvard Station before moving on to Ogallala and Scottsbluff. As they passed through the station, they saw squads of Troopers milling all over the yard, crates being unloaded and organized, and sentries posted on either side of their track for the express purpose of making sure no one got off. A small, single-engine plane came in for a landing on the old airstrip southeast of town, adding to the panoply of war. He and Duvalier openly stared; in fact, had they not watched the plane, it would have been even more suspicious, flying machines being a rarity even in the Kurian Zone. Valentine looked at it through his binoculars: it was tiny bush hopper, white with red markings. He half expected to see a swastika on the tail, like in pictures in World War II books, but could identify no markings.

"I've been here before," Duvalier told him, "but I've only seen it from the other side."

Another Twisted Cross train was on a siding by a dock with some chutes and pens for livestock. They could see figures lounging in the sunlight, wearing what looked like black jumpsuits, but unlike the men at the other train, they seemed to be in no hurry to unload the contents of closed boxcars. Around the caboose, a team of the most formidable-looking Grogs Valentine had ever seen stood guard, taller than the slab-skinned gray ones he had fought at Little Timber and partially covered with fawn-colored fur.

A concrete blockhouse, surrounded by razor wire and gated, looked out over the ruins of the town and the river below. Men in a sandbagged platform smoked as they stood watch with machine guns. The black-and-white banner fluttered from the blockhouse's flagpole.

"They're setting up shop," Valentine said as their train pulled away westward. "Supplies, men, weapons, a plane. But what's the target? We haven't heard any news of a uprising in the local Gulag."

Duvalier gazed off northward into the rolling, grassy hills. She looked terribly, terribly sad. "If there were, it would be news they'd keep quiet. This isn't even a Kurian center-this is an outpost of the one down in McCook, right on the border."

"Border? Border with what?"

"The Dunes. They must be after the Dunes." She sighed, as she had done one day in Kansas, when they saw a police truck lumbering down the road with human fodder for the Reapers chained in back.

Valentine followed her gaze, not exactly doubting her, but waiting to hear more. "Who or what are the Dunes?" he finally asked. Duvalier liked to make him ask questions for some reason, perhaps as revenge for his occasional corrections to her English.

"It's more of a where, Val. The Dunes are that," she said, pointing. "It runs from here up to the Dakotas. Kurians never really controlled any of it, and every time they've tried, they got their ears pinned back. It's a huge area, maybe half the size of the Ozark Free Territory. I don't even think the Reapers dare hunt there."

"Why is that?"

"The Trekkers. Wanderers. The only way to describe it is big moving ranches that go with their cattle and horses. Everything in their life is packed onto their wagons, they move from winter to summer pasturage and back again, but not always the same spot. Their whole world is their cattle; the herds feed them and buy what they can't make."

"Buy from whom?"

"There are a few outfits that trade with the Quislings, no doubt about it. Oh, they call Quislings 'Jacks' out here. I've asked six different people and got six different stories. Some say its short for 'jackals,' but I'm not even sure what those are."

"They're a sort of scavenger dog-in Africa, I think," Valentine explained.

She ignored the zoology. "Others say it's because they used to be led by a man named Jack. Some more say it's because they run like jackrabbits if someone starts shooting at them. I forget the others. Doesn't matter. They're Jacks to folks out here;"

"You know the people in the Dunes?"

"I do. Good people, damn good people. I got friendly with one of the larger clans, a group of families under the Eagle brand. They identify themselves with the marks they put on their cattle, you see. The brand looks kind of like an old set of air force wings, or an American Indian thunder-bird. I guess it got its start from some Strategy Air Controller people who helped them fight off the Kurians in the worst years."

Valentine wondered if she meant "Strategic Air Command."