He laughed at his own joke, but no one else did.
The mill looked like a staggered tower, in levels going back from the street rising to a sloped roof on the top floor like an old ski jump.
"Always thought this building would be great to live in if you could gut and rebuild like they used to. Left just here, Habby," Thursday said. "Don't think you can get more than the first two vehicles parked inside. The loading dock's only made for one truck, really. There's plenty of space around the side with the train tracks."
Habanero turned on Rover's lights. A metal gate broke the pattern in the stone sides of the mill. Thursday climbed out and met his dancing shadow at a crank handle.
Turning the handle, he raised what had probably once been an electric door.
Thursday lost his footing. Mrs. O'Coombe took a sudden breath at his fall.
Or not a fall. Thursday disappeared under the half-raised gate with a scream.
"What the hell!" Habanero said.
"Wagon master, get ready to reverse and get out of here," Valentine said.
Habanero began to speak into his microphone.
Valentine grabbed his rifle out of its seat-back clip and stepped outside.
"Valen-" Duvalier began, but he slammed the door.
He ducked down, looking into the dark of the old grain elevator. Rover's lights cast beams through that were cut off by the half-closed door. A pair of hands, Thursday's, were reaching out of the darkness and clawing in an effort to crawl back to Rover-but something was holding him back.
And hurting him. Thursday was screaming like a man being slowly dismembered.
Valentine wished he had a light clipped to the barrel of the gun. He looked around at the column but could see nothing but the whirling flakes and the columns lights.
The Type Three pointed from his hip at the gate, he went to the crank for the door gate. He extended his arm and gripped the freezing-cold metal. Tendons tight, he managed to turn the wheel with one hand while he kept the barrel of his rifle pointed at the growing gap between tracked door and ground.
Thursday's hands were twitching spasmodically now, and as more and more light bled into the mill, the rest of him was revealed.
A piercing shriek in his ear. Ali was out of the car, a pistol in hand and a sword stick under her arm. Valentine had never heard her shriek like that-the noise must be coming from another.
Ragged two-legged forms appeared in the white bath of the headlights. Gore-smeared mouths testified to a recent, messy feast.
Ravies!
Valentine had encountered the disease on his first independent command in the Kurian Zone.
Ravies was a disease of multiple strains, first used in 2022 to help break down the old order, and used here and there since whenever the Kurians needed to stir up a little chaos. On his trip into Louisiana as junior lieutenant of Zulu Company in the Wolves, the Kurians reacted by gathering up some of the indigenous swamp folk and infecting them with the latest strain.
Valentine took them down with four quick shots. Red carnations blossomed on their chests and they staggered in confusion before crashing to the ground, dead.
As a member of Southern Command, he'd been inoculated against the disease, but you never knew how current your booster was. Valentine had a theory that they were sometimes injected with nothing but some colored saline solution to give them confidence before going into the Kurian Zone, so they wouldn't panic if faced with the disease, spread by bite and gouge and gush of arterial blood.
It didn't take a special shot to the brain or anything like that to kill a ravies sufferer, as some people thought-though if you wanted to live to go home and kiss your sweetheart again, you made damn sure you put some lead into center mass, for a ravies sufferer felt no pain. Indeed, he or she felt nothing but a desire to rend and tear.
Valentine realized Duvalier's scream had been answered, in a muffled and echoed manner, from farther up the street in town.
Hopefully those who shrieked the responsorial were confused by the muffling effects of the snow as to where exactly Valentine's column was.
Valentine fiddled with his Type Three, took out the bayonet, and fixed it at the front of the rifle. He worked the slide in the hilt, extending the blade to its full length.
He pounded on Habanero's window. "Alert everyone: There's ravies in this town and God knows where else," Valentine said. "Get Rover and the Chuckwagon inside. We can block the main door with the Boneyard and stuff the Bushmaster in the truck entryway. Toss me a flashlight."
Valentine took a green plastic tube handed to him and clicked on the prism of long-lasting LED light. A beam one-tenth as powerful as Rover's, but much more flexible, played around the inside of the grain mill. Nothing else was drawn out of the shadows by the bouncing light, so Valentine satisfied himself that the grain elevator was empty of everything but corpses.