So the happy reunion wasn't quite so happy, at least as far as Mrs. O'Coombe and her son were concerned.
Brother Mark needed a ride back to Fort Seng. A wounded Gunslinger named Thursday was also going that way, as he wanted to recover over the winter at home with his family in a town called Grand Junction on the road back. His brother-in-law was supposed to drive out to the Gunslingers and pick him up, but his brother-in-law had flaked. Again. O'Coombe and Valentine's command had passed near it on the way up, and Thursday promised it was just over a ridge from their route home, on an old federal route in reasonably good condition.
They packed up the four vehicles. Valentine made sure Bee had all her odds and ends. Traveling with a Grog was a little like taking a child or a pet on a journey: You needed to make sure you remembered favorite toys, snacks, and clothing.
Thursday wasn't much of a guide. He spent a lot of time examining map, compass, and map again before giving instructions that proved to be guesswork. Valentine could have done just as well with an old road atlas. Thursday's wound was a piece of shrap nel to the buttock, or so he said, and he rode on a special pillow. Valentine wondered if he wasn't really suffering from aggravated hemorrhoids.
His instincts improved once they crossed a small river and he claimed to be in home territory.
"Grand Junction's not even an hour away, now. Three more big ridges and we're there. We could use a garrison of you Southern Command boys, now. There's a marketplace and even a bank that trades Karas' old currency for the new government scrip. Some riders came in a while back and tried to rob the town, but we shooed them off."
Valentine said, "Most of Southern Command's back across the river. All that's left are some training and technical personnel."
"That's Southern Command all over. They claim they swing the biggest dicks but always come up short when belts hit the floor."
A flake struck the windshield like a bug. A big piece of almost-sleet, it sledded down on its own melt.
"I guess winter's here," Valentine said, by way of breaking the tense silence.
In his winters south of central Missouri, Valentine had softened in his attitude toward cold weather. Winters weren't a matter of life-or-death survival, with desperate, predawn to post-dusk fall efforts to stock up on enough fuel, food, and fodder to get yourself and the livestock through to spring-an almost unimaginable span of time away. Winter was a season of rest, refit, and relaxation.
The horizon closed in as the real snow started, following behind the big flakes like a wall of Napoleonic infantry advancing behind their pickets.
Valentine didn't like the look of the big, soft flakes. When they first appeared they fell idly, spinning and drifting in the wind, but minute by minute they thickened, aligning themselves in a single, southeasterly direction.
"Better slow down," he told the driver. "Turn on the running lights. I think we can quit worrying about aerial observation."
"Hope we don't have to do too much off-roading in this," the driver said. "Wish the locals took better care of the roads."
"Legworms make their own roads," Thursday said. "We like it nice and run-down. The Ordnance doesn't risk their axles bothering us." He chuckled. "This is Kentucky. We just don't get that hard weather. Even the sky takes it easy here. This'll blow over in no time."
al Kentucky, January: The locals have a saying: "You have to come here on purpose." This is the fastness of Kentucky, the region that stretches southeast from Louisville to the Tennessee Valley. It is a bewildering maze of knobs, gullies, streams, ridges, choked at the swampy bottoms and backwaters, breezy and cool and clear atop the region's many ridges.
The meadows, breathing in the shadows of the ridges, are the gut of the country. So rich in blackberry bramble and cherry, with grasses that grow indefatigably in summer and only a little less lushly in the brief winters, the meadows support dairy cattle for the landholders and such an abundance of deer that even the region's skilled hunters hardly trim the population.
Winters here pass mild; snow blows across several times a year but melts quickly. Even the songbirds seem to be resting between mid-December and February; all the greens and browns fade and blend together and everything looks washed-out and dull.
The water is the same, winter or summer. The hills are rich in wells and springs, all flowing with clean, crisp, limestone-filtered water tastier than any city tap could produce. Underground flows and seeps have worn away the region's limestone, honeycombing it with sinks and caves famous, dangerous, and unknown.
The people are clannish in the best sense of the word. Interlocking circles of families spread news, offer support, celebrate marriages, and mourn deaths at the many little churches dotting the region. They are fiercely independent, even from their fellow Kentuckians: the city folk outside Cincinnati and Louisville, the flatlanders of the more gentle hills to the west (not that they don't range their legworms there and maintain good relations with the Jackson Purchase locals), or the Appalachian mountain folk. In past decades some were moonshiners and marijuana growers; later they ran Internet start-ups and were artisans. They were the first in Kentucky to learn how to wrangle legworms, to study their herds and breeding cycles, unafraid to learn from even the smattering of Grogs in southern Indiana, becoming elderly veterans of the battles following the cataclysm in 2022 in worm riding and harvesting.
They use the many caves and holes to hide their weapons, their precious machine tools, their spare radios, and even explosives.
This is the heartland of the old Kentucky Alliance that accompanied Southern Command's Javelin into West Virginia. Now what's left of that fellowship is reorganizing itself into the Army of Kentucky-at least that's the formal name on the documents coming out of the government. The worm riders, wintering their mounts in the protective heaps they form around each year's eggs, are now a group called the Line Rifles and organized into three troops: the Gunslingers, the Bulletproof, and the Mammoth.
Men like to have something or someone to follow. Sometimes it's nothing but a favorite song; other times a bullet-torn flag. In the case of the Mounted Rifles of the Army of Kentucky, their standard is a warrior queen.
Young and beautiful in her full bloom, with a mane of hair flowing and alive as a galloping horse's tail, she wears her authority the way another woman might wear a favorite hat, only taking it out for special occasions and drawing all the more eyes because of it. She's a natural atop a legworm or a horse, and she designs and sews her own uniform from egg skins she's harvested herself, bearing a pistol that belonged to her father and a pair of binoculars presented to her by the old Bulletproof clan chief she grew up calling her leader.
Her words were the ones the Kentucky Alliance listened to on the long retreat back from the Appalachians, when many were discouraged and wished to go home. Her voice gave the order for the counterattack on the banks of the Ohio that sent the Moondaggers running. Under her leadership they chased the bearded invaders all the way to Bowling Green.
She has her hands full at the moment. There's a white-hot blood feud with the old Coonskin clan, who betrayed the Kentucky Alliance on the long retreat, dividing cousin against cousin, uncle against niece. What's left of the Coonskins have taken on the Moondagger faith, and members of the Mammoth troop are forever disappearing for weeks at a time while they avenge some sister or cousin.
As if that's not enough, the newly constituted government of Kentucky is still getting itself organized. Volunteers come in unequipped, untrained, and irregularly, hungry and in shoes with old pieces of tire serving as soles, adding to the food supply problem even while they wait for a rifle.
Valentine's luck was in. As it happened, Brother Mark was also in the Karas' Kentucky Alliance heartland. They managed to get a fix on each other over the radio and agreed to meet on Gunslinger clan ground.
What was left of the old alliance welcomed them into the Gunslinger camp squatting for the winter in the ruins of a megachurch near a group of their worm piles outside of Danville. If not cheering, exactly, there were shouted halloos and greetings and excited children rolling around and bumping like marbles.