He did.
Duvalier lifted the eggplant she'd been working between Rooster's buttocks, sniffed the smeared end, and made a face. The teens giggled.
"There, you've helped yourself out of a jam, Rooster," Valentine said. "Sorry about your dog, but we'll have to keep you here a few months. Once we've checked your destination out, we'll let you go free."
Rooster sagged in his bonds.
"What do they do with the women there?" Valentine asked.
Rooster, his nose planted on 11 Black, said: "I dunno. It's just very important that they arrive healthy. A doctor accompanies each train."
"How many trains?"
"One or two a year. Maybe a hundred total bodies."
Duvalier and Ahn-Kha exchanged shrugs.
Valentine picked up the bowl of cat guts and sent it spinning into the darkness. "Girls, watch Rooster for a moment. Don't take advantage of a pantsless man."
They went to a stairwell where a candle burned. "Everready, you think you can take care of those girls and keep an eye on that prisoner for the summer?"
Everready nodded. "Be a nice switch from fresh Wolves with the milk still on their chins."
"If we're not back by New Year's, I'll leave it to your discretion," Valentine said.
"Everready's home for wayward girls," the old Cat said. "I kind of like the sound of that. Maybe this old Cat should retire and take up a new line of work."
"In your dreams, Gramps," Duvalier said.
"Looks like I'm Ohio-bound. You two want to go back?"
"Never," Ahn-Kha said. "Will Post is counting on us."
"It does occur to you that you're looking for a needle in a haystack," Duvalier added. "Maybe a haystack that's been blown across half the country."
"You're going back, then?" Ahn-Kha asked.
"Maybe the ravies is finally kicking in," she said. "I'm game. But next time, Val, you're squatting under Ahn-Kha's junk and holding the vegetable, okay?"
is: The dwindling number of old-time residents of this good-times city divide Memphis history into prequake and postquake. The destruction, the starvation, the Kurian arrival, the appearance of Grogs; all are linguistically bound together and organized by that single cataclysmic event.
When the New Madrid fault went, most of the city went with it. One of the few substantial buildings to survive the quake was the St. Jude Children's Hospital, whose grave granite now houses many of the city's Kurian rulers behind concentric circles of barracks and fencing.
The rubble left behind was pushing into piles. Eventually those piles were redistributed about the city, forming a fourteen-mile Great Wall of Junk in a blister based at the river that eventually had dirt piled on top of it to turn it into a true barrier. Now a precarious jeep trail circumnavigates the city atop the wall, except for three gaps to the north, east, and south.
The south gap is a subcarbuncle of its own, a fenced-in stretch of land between Memphis and Tunica full of livestock pens and grain silos, barge docks and coal piles, a supplemental reserve of food and fuel for the city in case events of war or nature cut it off from the rest of the Kurian Order.
Inside the wall, around the heart of the city, are the great bank camps, a temporary concentration of identical, wire-divided cantonments that stretch in some cases for miles. Once a tent city for those left homeless after the quake, the tents have given way to fifty foot barracks, now wooden-sided, with windows and cooking stoves. Rail lines, sidings, and spurs stretch into the camp like the arteries, veins, and capillaries feeding the liver.
The residents go out of their way not to think about those in the camps.
Memphis still has some of its pre-2022 culture along Beale Street and in the "commons," the stretch of city bordering the waterfront. The commons are dominated by the ravaged and only partially glassed superstructure of the Pyramid. This mighty sports arena and convention center has canvas stretched over the missing panes, to admit air without the heat of the sun, giving it the appearance of an impossibly huge sailing ship squatting at the edge of the Mississippi, the trees of Mud Island separating its inlet from the main river.
The area around the Pyramid rivals Chicago's famous zoo as a center of dubious entertainments, though it is a good deal more exclusive, limiting its clientele to the River Rats, the men who work the barges and patrol craft of the great rivers of middle North America, and those brave enough to go slumming. The Pyramid itself sees a higher order of customer with appetites just as base. As a den where flesh is exchanged for goods or services, temporarily or permanently, the Pyramid has no rival on the continent.
While the city has any number of competing factions, captains of war and industry, mouthpieces both civil and Kurian, the commons and the Pyramid look to only one man for leadership. The great auctioneer Moyo has bought and sold more slaves in his forty years than many of the tyrants of old. Always to an advantage.
If anyone has gotten the better of him and lived to tell of it, even the old-timers of Memphis cannot say.