"You'll be able to justify it."
"How's that?"
"You were doing your job. Recruiting and equipping warm bodies."
Bullfrog scratched his head, and Valentine turned to Meadows.
"Colonel, I think I'm fit enough to talk to the men. Could you get them together, please, sir?"
The men who couldn't fit underground had to be dispersed every night in case of a prowling Reaper, looking for lifesign where it wasn't supposed to be. Once the sun was well up they usually gathered for meals and news. There had been plenty of the first and not much of the latter lately, though everyone was looking better for a few days' rest.
Styachowski popped up, dabbing a coffee mustache from her lips and showing her old snap-to-it briskness. She'd spent the past day combing through Quisling paperwork with the help of a corporal on Bullfrog's quasi-Quisling staff.
"I'll pass word around as soon as the morning patrol comes in," she said.
"Lieutenant Frum, you think you could send out your men as sentry? I'd hate to have a convoy come by for refueling and spot the whole bunch of us."
Bullfrog nodded. "Sure, Captain."
"Anything overnight?"
"Another train, pulling south; men returning to Texas and Louisiana, looked like," Frum said.
"The Ozarks seem good and pacified," Meadows said. "We're beat and they know it."
"Always interesting times, the pause between conquest and exploitation. I wonder if they're as organized as they think they are," Styachowski said. Valentine's selection of documentation from Bullfrog's files had given her quick mind enough to make a guess as to what the column's next move would be.
"Or if we're as beat as they think we are," Valentine added.
* * * *
Valentine stood at one of the glassless windows above the entrance to the office building, on the second floor. Bullfrog hadn't gotten around to reclaiming this floor of the building yet. Birds flitted in one side of the building and out the other, zipping over low cubicles and around offices.
Creeper and broken glass crunched underfoot as he tottered to the window, glad that the men hadn't seen Ahn-Kha half carry him upstairs. The men and women who had followed him out of General Martinez's camp sat around the door of the lot and in the notch leading toward the main entrance; unformed, unranked, a mass of faces and variegated uniforms-some still damp, Valentine noted, from a quick wash. Some elbowed others at Valentine's appearance, and faces turned up toward them. The chatter stilled.
The silence of their anticipation made Valentine oddly uncomfortable.
Valentine inflated his lungs, ignored the pain in his rib. "You all know about the Cats, am I right?"
"Yes, sir," a few answered back. Valentine thought about making them all holler a response back at him, but he wanted an honest conversation with the men, not an oration filled with theatrical tricks.
"They work behind the Kurian line," Valentine said. "Sometimes in their uniform. I've done it on more than one occasion."
He let that sink in for a moment before continuing. "We're making for what's left of Southern Command in the Boston Mountains. But if we keep going as we are, snaking back and forth, backtracking and sidestepping, we'll only show up sick, hungry, unarmed and tired-if we make it at all. If you men are willing, I know a way we can ride instead of walk, and join our comrades with rifles in our hands and ammunition in our cartridge cases."
They perked up at this. Even the jokers and snoozers in every informal assembly of personnel shut their mouths and fixed eyes on him.
"There'll be risks," Valentine continued. "But the risk of getting across the Arkansas River and through the lines with an unarmed column this big is about the same, by my calculations.
"So we have to balance the likely risks with the possible rewards. Anyone who isn't up for it, anyone who wants out of the game, can stay here with Colonel Meadows and Lieutenant Frum. Guerrilla service is just as honorable, just as important. But I have to make it to the Boston Mountains for reasons of my own. Anyone who wants to follow me, meet at the hollow where Lieutenant Post and and the Wolves are guarding the wagons."
"Then what?" Styachowski asked from among the audience. Just as they'd arranged when Valentine went over his prepared speech with her.
"Then we shave, strip and sew."
The Ruins of Little Rock, Arkansas, February: The city never recovered from the nuclear blast inflicted on it in the death throes of the Old World. Though the fires went out and the radiation dispersed, the only life to return permanently was nonhuman. Pine Bluff, closer to the breadbasket of southeastern Arkansas, replaced it as a transportation hub; Mountain Home and Fort Scott surpassed it as government and military centers. At the height of the Ozark Free Territory's progress, it could boast of little more than a dock and a ferry in a cleared-out patch of rubble, though even that was based on the north side of the river; the south-bank heart of the city was avoided as if it were cursed earth.
The new rulers have a grander vision of a rail, road, and river traffic hub built on the decayed remnants of the old. The Rocks, as the locals call them, buzz with activity. The new human constructs have an anthill quality to them; low buildings made out of the blasted components of pre-2022 architecture. Some are already smoothed over by fresh concrete and white paint, and a more traveled eye might think of a little Greek town between hill and Aegean. The pilings and ruined bridges prevent barges from going farther up the river -only small boat traffic goes west to Fort Scott-so Little Rock is an amphibian marshaling yard. Warehouses and tents under the New Order's supply officers support the final mopping up and reorganization of the Ozarks. The river hums with traffic, and trucks and horse wagons fill transport pools as Consul Solon builds his capital.