Way of the Wolf

Chapter Two

Northern Minnesota, the thirty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: He grew up in a pastoral setting among the lakes of upper Minnesota. David Stuart Valentine was born during one of the interminable winters in a sturdy brick house on LakeCarver. The scattered settlements of that area owed their survival not so much to resistance as to inaccessibility. The Kurians dislike cold weather, leaving the periodic sweeps and patrols of this area to their Quislings. The Reapers come only in the summer in a macabre imitation of the fishermen and campers who once visited the lakes between May and September.
In the first few years after the Overthrow, myriad refugees supported themselves amid the abundant lakes and woods of what had been known as the Boundary Waters. They exterminated the remaining disease-infested Ravies hotzones, but the settlers refused aid to would-be guerrilla bands, as most of them had already tasted Reaper reprisals elsewhere. They wished nothing more than to be left alone. The Boundary Waters people were ruled only by the weather. A frantic period of food storage marked each fall, and when snow came, the families settled in for winter, ice-fishing for survival, not sport. In summer they retreated into the deep woods far from the roads, returning to their houses after the Reapers were again driven south by the cold.
Young David's family reflected the diaspora that found refuge in the region. He had a collection of Scandinavian, American Indian, and even Asian ancestors in a family tree whose roots stretched from Quebec to San Francisco. His mother was a beautiful and athletic Sioux from Manitoba, his father a former navy pilot.
His father's stories made the world a bigger place for David than it was for most of the children his age. He dreamed of flying across the Pacific Ocean the way some boys dream of being a pirate or building a raft and drifting down the Mississippi.
His early life came to an abrupt stop at the age of eleven, on a cool September day that saw the first frost of the northern fall. The family had just returned from summer retreat to their home, but a Quisling patrol or two still lingered. Judging from the tire tracks that David found later, two trucks- probably the slow, alcohol-burning kind favored by rural patrols-had pulled up to the house. Perhaps the occupants were also liquor fueled. The patrol emptied the larder and then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon raping David's mother. Attracted by the sound of the vehicles, his father had died in a hail of gunfire as he came up from the lakeshore. David heard the shots while gathering wild corn. He hurried home, accompanied by a growing fear that the shots had come from his house.
David explored the too-silent house. The smell of tomatoes, which his mother had been stewing, filled the four-room cabin. He found his mother first, her body violated, her throat slit. Out of spite or habit, the intruders had also killed his little brother, who had just learned to write his own name, and then his baby sister. He did not cry-eleven-year-old men don't cry, his dad said. He circled the house to find his father lying dead in the backyard. A crow was perched on the former pilot's shoulder, pecking at the brains exposed by a baseball-size hole blown out of the back of his skull.
He walked to the Padre's. Putting one foot in front of the other came hard; for some reason he just wanted to lie down and sleep. Then the Padre's familiar lane appeared. The priest's home served as school, church, and public library for the locals. David appeared out of the chilly night air and told the cleric what he had heard and seen, and then offered to walk with the Padre all the way back to his house. The saddened priest put the boy to bed in his basement. The room became David's home for the remainder of his adolescence.
A common grave received the four victims of old sins loosed by the New Order. David threw the first soil onto the burial shrouds that masked the violence of their deaths. After the funeral, as little groups of neighbors broke up, David walked away with the Padre's hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder. David looked up at the priest and decided to ask the question that had been troubling him.
"Father Max, did anyone eat their souls?"
Every day at school they had to memorize a Bible verse, proverb, or saying. Often there was a lot of writing down and not much memorizing. Sometimes the lines had something to do with the day's lesson, sometimes not. The quotation prescribed for the rainy last day of classes had an extra significance to the older students who stayed on for a week after the grade-schoolers escaped the humid classroom for the summer. Their special lessons might have been called the "Facts of Death." The Padre hoped to correct some of the misinformation born of rumor and legend, then fill in the gaps about what had happened since the Overthrow, when Homo sapiens lost its position at the top of the food chain. The material was too grim for some of the younger students, and the parents of others objected, so this final week of class was sparsely attended.
The Padre pointed to the quotation again as he began the afternoon's discussion. Father Maximillian Argent was made to point, with his long graceful arms and still-muscular shoulders. Sixty-three years and many long miles from the place of his birth in Puerto Rico, the Padre's hair was only now beginning to reflect the salt-and-pepper coloring of age. He was the sort of pillar a community could rest on, and when he spoke at meetings, the residents listened to his rich, melodious, and impeccably enunciated voice as attentively as his students did.
The classroom blackboard that day had fourteen words written on it. In Father Max's neat, scripted handwriting, the words THE FARTHER BACKWARD YOU CAN LOOK, THE FARTHER FORWARD YOU CAN SEE.-WINSTON CHURCHILL Were written with Euclidean levelness on the chalkboard. Normally Valentine would have been interested in the lecture, as he liked history. But his eye was drawn out the window, where the rain still showed no sign of letting up. He had even used the leaky roof as an excuse to shift his desk to the left so that it pressed right against the wall under the window, and the chipped white basin where his desk usually sat was now full enough with rainwater falling from the ceiling to add a plop every now and then as punctuation to the Padre's lesson. Valentine searched the sky for a lessening of the drizzle. Today was the final day of the Field Games, and that meant the Crosscountry Run. If the Councilmen canceled the games because of weather, he would finish where he now stood in the ranking: third.
The youths came from all over the Central Boundary Waters to compete against others in their age group each spring as part of the general festivities that ended the winter and began the great Hideout. This year Valentine had a shot at winning first prize. Second and third place got you a hearty handshake and an up-close look at the trophy as whoever came in first received it. The prize for boys aged sixteen to eighteen was a real over-under shotgun, not a hunting musket, and fifty bird-shot shells. A good gun meant a bountiful hunting season. The Padre and David needed all the help they could get. The Padre taught more or less for free, and Valentine didn't earn much at his job chopping endless cords of firewood for the neighbors. If Valentine won, he and Father Max would be dining on goose, duck, and pheasant until well after the snow flew.
"Mr. Valentine," Father Max said, interrupting David's mental meal. "Please rejoin the class. We're talking about a very important subject... your heritage."
"Funny," whispered Doyle from a desk behind. "I don't remember him saying anything about what a stupid son of a bitch you are."
Plop, added the basin to his right.
The Padre cracked his knuckles in a callused fist; profane jokes out of Doyle were as natural as water dripping into the classroom when it rained. He evidently chose to ignore both, keeping his eyes fixed on David.
"Sorry, Father," Valentine said with as much contrition as a seventeen-year-old boy could summon.
"You can apologize to the class by reviewing what you know about the Pre-entities."
Another whisper from behind: "This'U be short."
The Padre shifted his gaze. "Thank you for volunteering two hours of your free time to school maintenance, Mr. Doyle. The roof and I are grateful. Your summary, Mr. Valentine?"
Plop.
Valentine could hear Doyle slump in his seat. "They go back to before the dinosaurs, Father. They made the Gates, those doorways that connect different planets. The Interworld Tree. It's how the Kurians got here, right?"
Father Max held up his hand, palm outward. The thumb was missing from his right hand, and his remaining fingers were misshapen. They always reminded Valentine of tree roots that could not decide which way to grow. "You are getting ahead of yourself, Mr. Valentine. Just by sixty-five million years or so."
The Padre sat down on his desk, facing the eight older students. The classroom should have contained forty or so, had all the teenagers within a long walk attended. But education, like survival, depended on initiative in the disorganized Boundary Waters.
Valentine settled in for a good listen, as he always did when the Padre parked himself on the desk in that fashion. The rest of the class, not having the qualified joys of living with the Padre, did not know as he did that when the Padre perched there, he was imitating another teacher from his own youth, a determined San Jose nun who had woken a hunger for learning in the ganja-smoking teen he still had trouble imagining the Padre had been. His mind insisted on wandering off to the games.
"We know so very little about these beings, the Pre-entities, except that they predate everything else we do know about life on Earth," the Padre began. "I was telling you about the Doors yesterday. No, Mr. Doyle, not the Old World rock-and-roll band. I know we think of these Doors as a terrible curse, the cause of our trouble. Everything we know would be different if they had never been opened. But long ago they were marvelous things, connecting planet after planet in the Milky Way as easily as that door over there connects us with the library. We call the builders of this Interworld Tree the Pre-entities, because we are not even sure if they had bodies-in the sense that you and I have bodies, that is. They probably didn't need our little chemical engines to keep going. But if they did have bodies, they were big. Some of the Doors are said to be as big as a barn.
"We know they existed because they left the Interworld Tree and the Touchstones. A Touchstone is like a book that you can readjust by laying your hand on it. They don't always work correctly on our human minds, however; there are always a few who touch them and go insane from the experience, which I find easy to believe. But a person with the right kind of mind who touches one has what we might call a revelation. Like the downloads I was telling you about when we were talking about the Old World's computer technology."
The Padre looked down and shook his head. Valentine knew the Padre had a love-hate relationship with the past; when he was in his cups, he would sometimes rave about the injustices in the Old World, which had the ability to feed and clothe all of its children but had chosen not to. This might lead to tears over missing something called McDonald's fries dipped into a chocolate shake, or overpriced souvenir T-shirts.
"The Pre-entities existed by absorbing energy; a very special kind of energy, produced by living things. Plants make it at a very low level. All animals, us included, possess it to a greater extent. This energy, which we call a 'vital aura' for lack of a better term, is determined by two factors in an organism: size and intelligence. The latter predominates. A cow, despite its size, gives off a smaller vital aura than a monkey. A monkey being the 'brighter' of the two in more ways than one, if you understand."
A student held up her hand, and the Padre stopped.
"You talked about this before, but I never got if the aura was your soul or not. Is it, I mean?" Elaine Cowell was a thirteen-year-old, but so bright she stayed for all the lessons with the older teens.
The Padre smiled at her. "Good question, Miss Cowell. I wish I had an absolute answer. My gut feeling is that a vital aura is not your soul. I think your soul is something that belongs to you and God, and no one else can interfere with it. I know some people say it is your soul that gets fed on, but there is no way we can ever know that. I think of the vital aura as being another special kind of energy you give off, just as you give off heat and an electromagnetic field."
Elaine fixed her gaze at an invisible point sixteen inches in front of her face, and Valentine sympathized. She was also an orphan; the Reapers had taken her parents five years ago in Wisconsin. She now lived with an aunt who scratched out a living weaving blankets and repairing coats. The others sat in; silence. Whenever the Padre discussed the Facts of Death with the older students, their normal restlessness vanished.
"So why aren't they still around? I thought that energy stuff was what made the Kurians immortal?" another student asked.
"Evidently our Creator decided that no race can live forever, no matter how advanced their science. When they started to die, we think it caused a terrible panic. I wonder if beings who are nearly immortal are more afraid of death, or less? They needed more and more vital aura to keep going, and they cleaned out whole planets in their final years, trying to stave off the inevitable. They probably absorbed all the dinosaurs; the two events seem to have happened at the same time. In their last extremity, they ate each other, but it was all for nothing. They still died. With no one to maintain their portals, the doorways began to shut down over the thousands and thousands of years that followed. But pieces of their knowledge, and the Interworld Tree itself, survived for a new intelligence to find later on."
Thunder rumbled outside, and the rattling of the rain increased.
"So we call the Pre-entities Kurians now?" a young woman asked.
"No. The Kurians come from a race called the Lifeweavers. They found the remnants of the Pre-entity civilization. They pieced some of their history and technology back together and made use of what they could understand, like the barbarians who moved into Rome. We get the word Lifeweaver from their own language; it refers to those of the race who visit other worlds and interpopulate them. Just as man takes his livestock, crops, and orchards with him when he migrates, but is willing to adapt if something better is found, so did the Lifeweavers in their colonization of the Interworld Tree. Lifeweavers live a long, long time... many thousands of years. Some believe they were created by the Pre-entities as builders, but it seems strange that beings with a vital aura as strong as theirs would have survived the extinction throes of the Pre-entities.
"These Lifeweavers reopened the portals to our Earth about the time we were discovering that food tasted better if it was cooked first. Our ancestors worshiped them. Most of them were content to be teachers, but it seems a few wanted to be more. A Lifeweaver can appear to us as a man or woman, or an elephant or a turtle if it wants, so they must have seemed as gods to our poor forefathers. They can put on a new shape as easily as we can change clothes. Maybe they threw thunderbolts for good measure. I think they inspired many of our oldest myths and legends.
"They adopted us in a way. As we grew more and more advanced, they took a few of us to other worlds. I've been told humans are living on other planets even now. If so, I pray their fortune has been better than ours. The Lifeweavers could do anything they wanted with DNA. They could make useful creatures to suit themselves, or modify a species as they required. We know they liked making beautiful birds and fish to decorate their homes; some of these still live on our planet today."
The Padre smiled at them. "Ever seen a picture of a parrot? I think they tinkered with them a little bit." He paused in thought.
Valentine had seen pictures of parrots. Right now the only birds in his mind were pheasants, tender young pheasants rising in a flutter of wings. He could see them in his newly won shotgun sight. He'd heard the Kolchuks' lab-pointer pair had had another litter; maybe he could still get a puppy.
The Padre droned on.
Doyle held up his hand, serious for once. "Sir, why tell us all this now? We've known about vampirism and so on since we were kids. Okay, maybe some of the hows and whys were wrong. What difference does it make how any of it got started? We still have to hike out every summer-and every fall, a couple of families don't come back."
The Padre's face crumbled. He looked ten years older to Valentine.
"No difference, no difference at all. I wish everyday of my life something could make a difference. Mr. Doyle, class, you are young, you've lived with it your whole lives, and it is not such a weight for you. But I remember a different world. People complained a lot about it, but in hindsight it was something like Eden. Why talk about this now? Look at the quotation on the board. Churchill was right. By looking back, we may often see the future. I tell you this because nothing lasts forever, not even those who will do anything to become immortal. They're not. The Kurians will eventually die, just like the Pre-entities. Once an old king paid to have a piece of knowledge carved deep in the side of a monument, something that would always be true. The wisest man of the age told him to carve the words "This, too, shall pass." But who shall pass first, us or them?
"We will not live to see it, but one day the Kurians will be gone, and the Earth will be clean again. If nothing else, I want you to take that certain knowledge from me and carry it with you wherever you go."
The rain left shortly after the rest of Valentine's schoolmates did. He hurried to empty the various bowls, basins, and pails brimming with rainwater from the leaky roof, then headed for the kitchen. Father Max sat at the battered table, staring at the bottom of an empty glass. He was already recorking the jug.
"David, telling that story always makes me need a drink. But the drink I have always wants another to keep it company, and I should not do that. At least not too often." He replaced the jug in its familiar spot on the shelf.
"That stuff's poison, Father. I wouldn't use it to kill rats; it'd be too cruel."
The old man looked up at David, who poured himself the last of the cow's vintage from the morning milking. "Isn't the race today?"
Valentine, now dressed in faded denim shorts and a leather vest, bolted a piece of bread and washed it down with mouthfuls of milk. "Yeah, at four or thereabouts. I'm glad the rain stopped. In fact, I better get moving if I'm going to walk the trail before the race."
"You've been running that trail since April. I'd think you'd know it by now."
"All the rain is going to make the footing different. Might be muddy going up the big hill."
Father Max nodded sagely. "David, did I ever tell you that your parents would have been proud of you?"
Valentine paused for a second as he laced his high moccasins. "Yes. Mostly after you've had a drink. It always makes you soft."
"You're a bit of the best of both of them. You've got his quick thinking and dedication, and enough of your mother's looks and humor and heart to soften his edges. I wish he- they-could see you today. We used to call the last day of school graduation, you know that?"
"Yup. I've seen pictures and everything. A funny hat and a piece of paper that says you know stuff. That would be great, but I want to get us that gun." He moved to the door. "You going to be in the public tent?"
"Yes, blessing the food and watching you collect first prize. Good luck, David."
He opened the patched, squeaky screen door and saw two bearded men coming up the path from the road. They were strangers to him. They looked as though they had spent every moment of their adult years in the elements. They wore buckskin top to bottom, except for battered, broad-brimmed felt hats on their heads. They bore rifles in leather sheaths, but they did not have the shifty, bullying air that the soldiers of the patrols did. Unlike the soldiers charged by the Kurians with keeping order in the Boundary Waters, these men moved with a cautious, quiet manner. There was something to their eyes that suggested wary wild animals.
"Father Max," Valentine called into the house without taking his eyes off the men. "Strangers coming."
The men paused, smiling with tobacco-stained teeth. The taller of the two spoke: "Don't let the guns scare you, boy. I know your people."
Father Max emerged from the house and stepped out into the rain-soaked yard with arms outstretched. "Paul Samuels," he half shouted, walking out to embrace the tall man in his gangly arms. "You haven't come this way in years! Who is this with you?"
"My name's Jess Finner, sir. I've sure heard about you, sir."
The Padre smiled. "That could be good or bad, Mr. Finner. I'd like you both to meet my ward, David. He's the son of Lee Valentine and Helen Saint Croix."
"I knew your father, David," said the one named Samuels. Valentine saw memories lurking in the brown pools beneath his wrinkled brow. "Bad business, that day at his place. I saw you after the funeral. Took us four months, but we got the men that-"
"Let's not dredge up old history," the Padre interrupted.
Valentine caught the looks exchanged between the men and suddenly lost interest in the race and the shotgun.
The Padre patted his shoulder. "We'll talk later, David- that's a promise. Get going! But give my regrets to the Council at the public tent, and get back here as soon as you can. We're going to crack the seal on one of the bottles from the woodpile, and then you may have to put me to bed."
"Not likely," Samuels guffawed.
The Padre gave David his "I mean it, now" look, and Valentine headed off down the road. He still had time to look over the two-mile course if he hurried. Behind him, the three men watched him go, then turned and walked into the house.
The smell of cooking food greeted him at the campgrounds. The public tent, a behemoth, six-pole structure that saw weddings, baptisms, auctions, and meetings at the start of every summer, was hidden in a little glade surrounded by lakes and hills, miles from the nearest road and out of sight from any patrol in vehicles. The Hideout Festival featured sports and contests for the children and teenagers. A wedding or two always added to the celebratory atmosphere. The adults learned crafts; held riding, shooting, and archery competitions; and then feasted on barbecue each evening. Families brought their special dishes for all to share, for in a region of dreadful, cold winters and summers spent in hiding, there were few chances for large gatherings. With the festival's conclusion, the people would scatter into the woods and lakes to wait out the summer heat, hoping that the Reapers would comb some other portion of the Boundary Waters in search of prey.
The race felt less a sport and more of a chore to Valentine by the time he reached the crowd. The people, horses, wagons, and traders' stalls normally fascinated him, but the arrival of the two strangers held his thoughts in a grip that startled him. His desire for a ribbon and a shotgun in front of an applauding crowd seemed meaningless when compared with meeting a man who had known his father.
He resigned himself to running the race anyway. The course looped out in a horseshoe shape around BirchLake. Usually a mud-rimmed half-swamp by mid-May, BirchLake had swollen with the heavy rains until its fingers reached up almost to the public tent.
Valentine greeted Doyle and a few other acquaintances from school. He had many acquaintances but no close friends. As the Padre's live-in student, responsibilities in keeping the house and school running prevented him from forming attachments, and if that weren't enough, his bookish habits made him a natural outsider on the occasions when he did mix with the boisterous teenagers. He wandered off into the woods along the two-mile trail. He wanted time to be alone and to think. He had guessed right; the ground on the big hill to the west of BirchLake was slick with clay-colored mud. He stood on the hill and looked out across the rippled surface of the lake toward the public tent. A thought sprang from the mysterious garden in his mind where his best ideas grew.
Fifteen boys participated in the race, though only a handful had enough points from the other Field Game events to have a chance at the prize. They were dressed in everything from overalls to leather loincloths, all tan and thin, tangle haired and wire muscled.
"One to be steady," invoked Councilman Gaffley to the rocking assortment of racers. "Two to be ready, and you're off!"
A few of the boys almost stopped a hundred yards into the race when Valentine made a sharp right turn off the trail, heading for Birch Lake. He sprinted out onto a long spit of land and thrashed his way into the water.
Valentine swam with lusty, powerful strokes, sighting on a tall oak on the other side. This neck of the lake was 150 yards or so across, and he figured he would be back on the trail about the time the rest of the boys skidded down the muddy hill.
And he was right, lunging dripping wet from the lake and pounding up the trail before the lead boy, Bobby Royce, could be seen emerging from the woods. David broke the string at the finish line with a muddy chest to a mixture of cheers and boos. Most of the boos came from families who had their boys in the race. A frowning Councilman grabbed it off him as if it were a sacred icon being defiled and not a piece of ratty twine.
The other boys hit the finish line two minutes later, and the debate began. A few maintained that the important thing was to race from point A to point B as quickly as possible, and the exact route, land or water, didn't matter. The majority argued that the purpose of the race was a two-mile run cross-country, not a swim, which would be a different sport altogether. Each side increased its volume under the assumption that whoever made the most noise would win the argument. Two old men found the whole fracas hilarious, and they pressed a bottle of beer into David's palm, slapping him on the back and pronouncing him a first-rate sport for getting Councilman Gaffley so huffy he looked like a hen with her feathers up.
A hasty, three-councilmen panel pronounced Valentine disqualified from the race, but the winner of a special award in recognition for his "initiative and originality." Valentine watched Bobby Royce receive the shotgun and shells and wandered out of the tent. The barbecue smell made him hungry all over again. He grabbed a tin tray and loaded it from the ample spread outside. The homemade beer tasted vile. Had beer been this bad in the Old World? he wondered. But somehow it complemented the smoky-tasting meat. He found a dry patch of ground under a nearby tree and went to work on the food.
One of the backslapping oldsters approached him holding a varnished wooden case and dangling two more bottles of beer from experienced fingers.
"Hey there, kid. Mind if I sit with you a bit?"
Valentine smiled and shrugged.
Almost seventy years of creaky bones eased themselves up against the trunk of the tree. "Don't have much of an appetite anymore, kid. When I was your age, give or take, I could put away half that steer. Beer tastes just as good, though," he said, taking a pull from one of the open bottles and handing the other to Valentine.
"Listen, son, don't let 'em get you down. Gaffley and the rest are good men, in their way; they just don't like the unexpected. We've seen too much unexpected in our days to want any more."
Valentine nodded to the old man, mouth working on the food, and took a companionable pull from the fresh beer.
"My name's Quincy. We were neighbors, once. You were a squirt then. Your ma used to visit, especially when my Dawn was in her last illness."
Valentine's tenacious memory, jogged, came to his rescue. "I remember you, Mr. Quincy. You had that bicycle. You used to let me ride it."
"Yeah, and you did good, considering it didn't have any tires. I gave it away with everything else when she passed on. Moved in with my son-in-law. But I remember your mother; she used to sit with her. Talk with her. Tell jokes. Get her to eat up. You know, I don't think I ever thanked her, even the day we put my wife in the ground..."
The old man took a long pull at the beer.
"But that's water under the bridge, we used to say. Ever seen a real bridge, boy? Oh, of course you have, the one on old Highway Two is still up, isn't it. Anyhow, I'm here to give you something. Seeing you with your hair all wet and shiny made me think of your mom, and since those old dorks won't award you the prize you deserve, I thought I'd give you one."
He fumbled with the greenish latch on the case and raised the lid. Inside, nestled on formed blue velvet, rested a gleaming pistol.
Valentine gasped. "Wow! Are you kidding? That gun would be worth something at the wagons."
The old man shook his head. "It was mine. Your daddy probably had one just like it at some time or other. It's an automatic pistol, an old United States gun. I've kept it clean and oiled. No bullets, though, but it's a nine millimeter, which ain't too hard to find ammo for. I was going to give it to my son-in-law, but he's a putz. He'd just swap it for liquor, most likely. So I brought it here, figuring I'd trade it for some books or something. All at once I wanted to give it to you, where maybe it would do the most good. It's not too handy for hunting, but plenty comforting on a lonely road."
"What do you mean, Mr. Quincy?"
"Look, kid, er-David, right? I'm old, but not particularly wise. But I got old by being able to read people. You've got that look in you; I can tell you're hungry for something besides your food. Your dad was that way, too. You know he used to be in what we called the navy, and they went all over the world, which just suited him. After that, after all the shit came down, he did other things. He fought for the Cause just like the Padre. Did things he maybe even didn't tell your mother. You are a rolling stone, too, and all you need is a little push. What that push is gonna be, I can't say."
Valentine wondered if he had been pushed already. He wanted to talk to Paul Samuels, wanted to talk to him alone. He might as well admit it to himself, he had been thinking about asking to go with the men when they left the Padre's.
"This world is so cocked up I sometimes can't believe I'm still in it. You can do two things when something's wrong: fix it or live with it. All of us here in the Boundary Waters, we're trying to live with it, or hide from it, more like. We've gotten good at it. Maybe we should never have gotten used to it, I don't know, but there were always hungry kids to feed and clothe. Seemed better to hide, not rock the boat. But that's me, not you. You're a smart kid; that little stunt at the lake proved it. You know that the ones really in charge don't bother with us because we're not worth the trouble. Living with the Padre, you probably know that more than most. It's only a matter of time before they get around to us, no matter how deep in the woods we go. It's them or us. Us meaning human beings. Getting rid of them is work for the Cause."
David swallowed his food, but swallowing his mixed emotions was a much tougher proposition. Could he just take off? His vague plans for living in a lakeshore cabin in the company of books and fishing poles no longer applied or appealed, ever since Samuels and Finner had mentioned killing the patrollers who had turned the only world he'd known into piles of butchered meat. Odd that this old neighbor spoke as though he were privy to secret, half-formed thoughts. "Are you saying I should leave, join the resistance, take up the Cause?"
"A few of the boys your age are. It happens every year. Folks are quiet about it. If word of a son or daughter leaving got to the patrols, there'd be trouble. So it's usually 'Joe got married and is living with his wife's folks near Brainerd," or some such. The councilmen discourage it, but Gaffley's own daughter ran away two years ago. Letters arrive every year, but he won't show them to anyone."
In a fit of contrariness, perhaps to show Quincy that he wasn't as astute a judge of human nature as the old man credited himself for being, David shrugged. "I can't say what I'll do, Mr. Quincy. I was thinking of going up to Lake of the Woods, building a boat... I love fishing, and they say next to no one lives there."
"Sure, son. And maybe twenty years from now, a patrol will come through, just like-"
"Hey," Valentine flashed, "that's not... fair."
"But it keeps happening. Just this spring, out by Grand Rapids. Eight people, that one. The way I hear it, it's a lot worse down south. Especially in the cities, where there's nowhere to hide."
Valentine was about to say, "That's not my problem," but held his tongue. An orphaned eleven-year-old had not been the Padre's problem that September afternoon so long ago, either. The Padre had faced the problem, took responsibility, because that is what decent people do.
It was an anxious young man who hurried to the Padre's that evening along familiar paths, carrying a burlap bag full of leftovers, an old empty pistol, and a head full of choices. The faces and animals at the public tent, the shores, hills, and trees-all pulled at him with promises of safety and security. The woods are lovely, dark and deep... He went into the backyard, checked on the animals, and began to chop wood. Turning cordwood into kindling always cleared his mind, even if it left his body wet and rubbery. He had been doing this chore for the Padre, and for a number of the neighbors in trade for sugar or flour, since his arrival five years ago. The solid feel of the ax in his hands, the thwock as the blade sank into the dried wood, absorbed the things that bubbled up from the dark corners of his mind.
He stacked the splintered results of his labor and went inside the house. He found the three men sprawled in the smoke-filled library around an empty bottle and a mostly empty jug. A small bag full of letters, including a couple from a young lady named Gaffley, sat on the Padre's nicked-up table, and a much larger bundle of letters lay tucked in one of the men's satchels, ready for the long return trip south. The one called Finner paged raptly through a battered volume titled Classic Nudes through the Photographer's Lens.
"David, you missed some boring catching up. And some even more boring drinking," Father Max said, not bothering to rise from his barely upholstered chair. "Did you win the race?"
"Sort of. It doesn't matter." He told the story. When he got to the part about being disqualified, Firmer blew a raspberry. "I'd like to hear how you knew my father, Mr. Samuels."
Samuels looked at the Padre. "It's always Paul when I'm off my feet, son. When I was a kid about your age, give or take, your dad and I used to come up together from down south, just like me and Jess do now. We liked to keep in touch with the folks up here, and this old fraud. Well-lubricated philosophy sessions, you might say."
Valentine began distributing the bounty from the public tent. The men dug in with the enthusiasm of days spent on the road eating only what the wilderness provided.
"You fight them, right? The Kurians, the Reapers, the things they make? And the patrols, right?"
"Patrols are what we call the Quislings up here nowadays," the Padre interjected.
"Well, not all at once, son," Samuels answered. "In fact, we spend more time running scared from them than we do standing and fighting. We can hit them here and there, where we don't stand too much chance of getting hit back. When we're not doing that, we're trying to keep from starving. Ever drunk water out of a hoof print to wash down a couple handfuls of ground-up ants? Slept outside in the rain without even a tent? Worn the same shirt for a month straight? It really stinks, son. And I don't just mean the shirt."
Valentine stood as tall as he could, trying to add a couple of inches to his six feet one. "I'd like to join up, sir."
Father Max broke loose with a whiskey-fumed laugh. "I knew you could talk him into it!"
* * *
A week later, Father Max saw the party off on a warm, sun-dappled morning. He gave David an old musty-smelling hammock. It had uses other than rest; the Padre showed him how to roll his spare clothing up in it, then tie it across his back. By the time that was finished, other recruits who had collected over the past days began to shoulder their own burdens. Most carried backpacks bulging with preserved food. Valentine found that there were mouthfuls of words to be said, and no time or privacy to say them.
"God be with you, David," the graying old man finally said, tears wetting his eyes.
"I'll write. Don't worry about me. Jacob Christensen said he'd help out around here. He wants to teach the younger kids, too, so you don't have-"
The Padre held out his gnarled hand for a handshake. "Yes, David. I'll be fine. Soon you'll have more important things to worry about than getting the cow milked and the chickens fed. But the day I quit teaching the kids their ABC's is the day I'll be resting in the ground."
Samuels and Finner also shook hands with the Padre. How the men looked so alert was beyond Valentine; they seemed to be up every night drinking and talking, then visiting the trading wagons and surrounding homes in the day. David guided them, leading them on backwoods paths to the households that matched the names on the mail. One visit stood out, when Samuels had called on an old woman to deliver a few personal effects from her dead son, who had been a friend of Samuels's. Some intuition must have revealed her son's fate; she seemed neither surprised or grief stricken, and wasn't even preparing to leave her home for the summer. That night there had been more drinking and less laughter in the library.
Valentine began to learn on the first day of the journey south. He learned just how sore his legs could get. Though he had walked all day many times in his life, he had never done so with better than forty pounds of food, water, and possessions on his back at a pace set by a demanding sergeant. Other volunteers joined the group as they walked, one whom he knew. Gabriella Cho had gone to the Padre's school for a number of years; her rich black hair had fascinated him as he struggled through the awkward rites of puberty. Necessities at home kept her out of school past the age of fifteen. She had blossomed into a woman since Valentine had last seen her two years ago.
"Gabby, so you're coming, too," Valentine said, relieved to be finally taller than the doe-eyed young woman.
She looked at him once, twice. "Davy? Yeah, I'm taking the big trip."
"We missed you. Father Max had to start asking the rest of us the tough questions. It wasn't the same since you left."
"No, nothing's been the same since then," Cho responded. When she replied to further questions with one-word answers and downcast eyes, Valentine ended the conversation.
They spent the first evening at an overgrown crossroads more than a dozen miles south of the Padre's. They made camp and spent the next day talking, waiting, and nursing sore muscles. Another soldier showed up, escorting four more recruits. Two of the men were twin brothers, six-foot-six-inch blond giants. Valentine was surprised to learn their names were Kyle and Pete rather than Thor and Odin.
They repeated the process as they hiked south and west in easy stages-easy, that was, in the estimation of the men who bore the title Wolves. To Valentine, each day proved more exhausting than the last. By the time they reached the outskirts of Minneapolis, the group had swelled to thirty soldiers and over a hundred young men and women.
Lieutenant Skellen met them at a boat they used to cross the Mississippi. The lieutenant wore an eye patch so wide, it could have just as well been labeled an eye scarf, which mostly covered a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of his face. He had a dozens more recruits with him. Like the sergeant's they were in their teens or barely out of them, wide-eyed and homesick among new landscapes and unfamiliar faces. The travelers made a wide loop west around the Twin Cities, into empty lands teeming with prairie plants. One day they skirted a hundred-head herd of mountains of hair and hide, and the Wolves informed Valentine he was looking at his first buffalo.
"Ain't no weather can kill those big shaggies," Finner explained to his charges from the Boundary Waters. "The cows and wild horses gotta find low wooded spots when the snow is blowing out here, but them buffalo just form a big circle and wait it out."
Valentine picked up much more on that journey south. He learned he could make a compass by stropping an old double-edged razor blade against the back of his hand. Charged with static electricity, he suspended it from a string in a preserve jar to shield it from the wind. The little piece of metal found north after wavering indecisively like a bird dog sniffing the breeze. The recruits learned how and where to build a fire, using reflectors made of piled logs to hide the flame and direct the heat back toward the camper. He was taught about trench fires in high wind, and to always roast game skewered on a spit beside a fire, not over it, with a pan underneath to catch every drop of valuable fat. They learned how to make flour not only from wheat, but also with the flowerheads at the end of cattails and even with bark. Valentine pounded masses of bark in a pan of water, removed the fibers, and allowed it to settle, then poured off the water and toasted the pulpy starch on a stick. Even with salt it did not taste like much, but he found himself able to eat just about anything as the long weeks of walking wore on. Even more incredibly, he gained weight-though he was hungry from dawn to dusk.
When their packs emptied, they didn't always have to live off the land. They stopped at isolated farmhouses and tiny, hidden enclaves where the residents fed them. "I can't fight them, no sir, but I can feed them that does the fightin'," one goat-whiskered farmer explained, passing out bags of beans and corn flour to the hundred-odd campers on the banks of his stream.
He practiced with his pistol. The Wolves passed a hat around and collected two dozen bullets from the men with handguns that used the same ammunition as his. Some of the Wolves carried up to three sidearms in order to have a better chance at using bullets acquired from scavenging the deceased after a fight. He plinked away at old paint cans and weathered, paint-stripped road signs. It was during one of these marksmanship sessions in an old barn near camp that Valentine made an effort to talk to Sergeant Samuels. He had just knocked down a row of three aluminum cans, their colored labels illegible with the passage of years, and he was feeling pretty full of himself.
"You should try it with your left hand," the veteran suggested.
That cleaned the self-satisfied smile from Valentine's face in a hurry. "Why, Sergeant?"
"What if your right arm's busted, kid? What if someone just blew your hand off? I know, most instructors say it's a waste of time. Me, I think it's good to use your off hand. Makes your brain and body work different than it's used to."
Valentine set one of the cans back up, the sharp cordite smell tickling his nostrils. Feeling awkward, he raised the gun to eye level, feet shoulder-width apart. He sent the can flying with the second shot.
"May I?" Samuels asked.
Valentine passed him the gun. The sergeant examined it professionally.
"This was your dad's?"
"No, Sergeant. A-I suppose he's a neighbor-he gave it to me."
Samuels whistled. "A gun like this? It's in great shape. He must have thought a lot of you." He handed the gun back to Valentine.
"More like he thought a lot of my parents," Valentine mused. He paused for a moment, not sure how to phrase the question. "You seemed to think a lot of my father, too. I never knew about his life before he met my mother. He just said he traveled."
Samuels glanced out the missing barn doors. The campsite was nearly empty; a heavy patrol was out under the lieutenant, and most of the recruits were taking advantage of the afternoon off to wash clothes and bathe in the nearby river.
"Yeah, David. I knew him. Not from way back, from before the skies filled with ash, that is. We met in Michigan, soon after all this shit started. I was younger than you then, maybe fifteen. Your dad and I were in this outfit; we called ourselves the Band. Fighting sometimes, hiding mostly. Cops, army guys; we had some coast guard sailors from Lake Michigan, even. The uniform was a hat with a piece of camouflage material sewn on it somewhere. God, what a hungry, sorry-looking bunch we were."
He shook his head and continued. "Even when we were blasting away at the Grogs, we couldn't really believe it. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie. No one knew shit about what was going on. I used to cry every damn night, it seemed to me. My parents were in Detroit when the nuke went off, you see. I learned one thing: tears make you feel better, but they don't change anything. You'll still be hungry when they dry up. Still be lonely."
The two men, one mature and weathered, the other a few years past puberty, wandered out of the barn and watched the sun descend into the western haze. Samuels nodded to a couple of the Wolves carrying out camp duties, and sat down on the corpse of an old green tractor. The space where the engine once sat gaped, an open wound with wires dangling.
"So you were both Wolves then?" Valentine omitted the sir, since they were both sitting.
"That came later. God, we didn't know what to think. The rumors we heard. Stuff about government experiments. That the Apocalypse was here and Satan walked the earth. People getting rounded up into camps like in the Nazi movies. Creatures from outer space. Turned out the truth was even weirder than the rumors, of course.
"Seems to me we were trying to make for this MountOmega-there was talk that the vice president was there with what was left of the government and the joint chiefs. Only problem with it was no one knew where MountOmega was. And then we came across the Padre.
"The Padre was working for someone named Rho. Not that he'd given up on Holy MotherChurch, of course. He said this Rho was very special and was advising us on how to fight these things. We weren't interested. He said Rho was holed up in a safe place with food, liquor, women-I can't remember what all he promised us. None of us were interested in that, either. We'd been almost trapped and killed by those kind of promises before; the Quislings were already running us down. Then the Padre said this Rho knew what was going on. That got us. Especially your father. Some of the guys said that it was another trap, but I went with your dad, because he'd done a good job looking after me.
"It turned out this Rho was a Lifeweaver. He looked like a doctor from TV, really distinguished and everything. Guess you know who the Lifeweavers are, living with the Padre as you did. He gave us this speech about doors to other planets and vampires and vital auras and how the Grogs were things cooked up in a lab. We didn't buy any of it. I remember some of the guys started singing 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat," sort of having fun with him. We thought he and the Padre were a couple of fuckin' nuts, you know? He said something to the Padre, and then, I swear to Jesus, he turns into this big gold eagle, with flames for wings. Circled over us like the Hindenburg going up. None of us knew whether to shit or shoot, I can tell you. Your dad told us to quiet down, and it turned back into a man again, or the image of one.
"Believe me, after that we listened. He told us about a group of Lifeweavers on a planet called Kur. They'd learned from some Touchstones the secret of how to live off vital auras. To beings with a life span of thousands of years, the chance to have a life span of millions must have been temptation, too much temptation. They violated the Lifeweaver law, their moral code, and started absorbing aura. They were trying to become immortal. In the interest of science, of progress. According to Rho, what they accomplished instead was to turn their world into a nightmare. They became what we call vampires, beings that are, to us, immortal. They do this through taking the lives of others. These rogue Lifeweavers, the Kurians, became the mortal enemies of the rest of their race.
"The Kurians smashed Lifeweaver society. They'd been transformed from researchers and scientists into something else. Cold. Ruthless. They used their skills to destroy all op-position. Overwhelmed, all the Lifeweavers could do was shut the portals to Kur. I guess it was in an attempt to keep the infection from spreading. But it was too late. A few Kurians had already escaped and were using the Interworld Tree to attack the whole Lifeweaver order. More doors were shut, but that only cut the Lifeweavers off, stopping them from organizing an effective resistance. It was like a houseful of people each hiding from a pack of killers in separate locked rooms instead of banding together to fight."
The sound of galloping hooves interrupted the story. A rider on one of the three horses in the group pulled up in the yard.
"Sarge," the rider said, walking his horse in a circle, "the lieutenant says there's a Grog column out east of here, heading this way. Mounted on legworms. Four legworms, twenty Grogs altogether. Not coming right for us, but definitely looking. You're supposed to gather everyone up and get to the Highway Forty-one bridge. If the lieutenant hasn't shown up by tomorrow, you're supposed to get everyone to RoundSpringCave."
"Got it, Vought. Now ride on down to the river and get the kids in gear. Slowly, don't scare them out of a year's life like you did me." The courier moved his roan off at a more sedate pace. "Damn, but the Grogs are far out from Omaha. Maybe someone saw us outside Des Moines. Lot of Quislings live in this area nowadays."
The sergeant gathered up the six Wolves remaining at the camp and issued orders. He motioned Valentine over.
"Sarge?"
Samuels pulled at the beard sprouting on his chin. "Valentine, we're going to be marching tonight. We're going to stick to an old road because I want to get some miles south of the Grogs, but that means I've got to have scouts and a rear guard.
I'm shorthanded, what with the lieutenant and his group out. That means you're getting what's called a battlefield promotion. I'm going to put you in charge of the ass end of the recruit column. Make sure everyone keeps up. It's going to be six kinds of dark tonight with these clouds, so it won't be easy. Lucky for us, we've been slacking all afternoon. Can you handle that?"
Valentine threw out his chest. "Yes, Sergeant!" But nervous sweat was running down his back.
Already a few recruits were returning to the area around the old barn, some with wet clothes plastered to their bodies. They broke camp. Usually the shouts and curses of the Wolves trying to get their green levy to move faster came from simple habit, but this time the words were in earnest.
They moved off into the deepening night. Before, they had done only night marches when arcing around Des Moines. The Grogs out of eastern Nebraska patrolled this area. They could follow a trail in day or night by sight, by ear, or by smell.
They moved at a forced march with Valentine bringing up the rear. They walked, and walked fast, for fifty minutes, then rested for ten. The sergeant kept up a punishing pace.
Complaints started after the fourth rest. By the sixth, there was trouble. A recruit named Winslow couldn't get to her feet.
"My legs, Val," she groaned, face contorted in pain. "They've cramped up."
"More water, less hooch, Winslow. The sarge warned you. Don't come crying to me."
The column began to move. Gabby Cho, who had been keeping Valentine company at the rear, looked at him won-deringly. Valentine waved her off. "Get going, we'll catch up."
Valentine began massaging Winslow's quadriceps and calves. He tried to stretch one leg, but she moaned and cried something unintelligible into the dirt.
Insects chirped and buzzed all around in the night air.
"Just leave me, Val. When it wears off, I'll jog and catch up."
"Can't do it, Winslow."
He heard the three Wolves of the rear guard approach. It was now or never.
"Up, Winslow. If you can't walk, you can hobble. I'll help you. That's an... order." He reached out a hand, grabbed hers, and tried to pull her up. "But I'm not gonna carry you; you've got to move along as best you can."
The Wolves, rifles out of sheaths, looked at Valentine with raised eyebrows. They thought the situation humorous: a cramp-stricken recruit and would-be noncom trying to get her up by issuing orders with a voice that kept cracking.
"What's going on?" asked Finner, who was in the rear guard. "You two picked a helluva time to hold hands in the moonlight."
"She wants us to leave her," he explained.
"No, she doesn't," one of the Wolves demurred.
"Okay, Winslow," Valentine said, drawing his gun. "I've given you an order." The word still sounds odd, he thought. "And you're not obeying it. I'm not leaving you to get found and... made to talk about us or where we're going." Do people really talk like this? "So I guess I'll have to shoot you." He worked the gun's action and chambered a bullet.
"Val, you've got to be joking."
He looked at Finner, who shrugged.
Laboriously, she got to all fours. "See, Finner, I can barely crawl!"
Valentine's bullet struck the dirt a foot to the left of her ear, sending pebbles flying up into her face.
She ran and he followed, leaving the three Wolves chuckling in the darkness.
Samuels met them at the rear of the column. "Christ, Sarge, he tried to kill me," Winslow said, telling her end of the story. The sergeant planted a boot in her scrawny behind.
"Keep up next time, Winslow. Valentine," he barked, fist and palm crashing together.
The two men waited while the file drew away. "Don't ever use your gun, except as a last resort on the enemy. Not out of consideration to that non-hacker, but 'cause the Grogs can hear like bats. You get me?"
"Sorry, Sergeant. Only thing I could think of to get her moving. Her legs were cramped up, she said."
"Next time, kick 'em in the ass, and if that doesn't work, you come get me."
"I thought you said I was responsible for keeping them moving, sir."
Sergeant Samuels considered this, then fell back on old reliable. "Shut up, smart-ass. I didn't give you permission to pull a gun on anyone. Get back in line. Keep 'em moving."
Finner, drawing near with the rear guard, had a few words with the sergeant. Samuels doubled the column, returning to the front.
"Hey, Valentine," Finner said, jogging up to him. "Don't worry about it. You tried to get her on her feet, when most guys in your spot would've turned to us. Don't let the sarge BS you about the gunshot; a single shot is tough to locate unless you're next to it. Plus, that thing doesn't make all that much noise. I told the sarge that if I thought there was a problem, I wouldn't have let you do it."
"What did he say?"
"He said I shouldn't think too much, it was dangerous for a guy like me. He added a few comments about my mother, too."
A cloud, shaped like a snail with an oversize shell on its back, began to cover the rising moon.
"I think he'd take a bullet for you though, Jess."
"Damn straight."
The lieutenant was not at the rendezvous. The tired recruits and tireless Wolves rested for four hours. At dawn, the sergeant sent Vought on his horse with three Wolves to scout the other side of the two-lane metal bridge spanning the Missouri. The land sloped upward as the wooded hills began beyond. Safety.
One of the rear guard, at a copse of trees half a mile up the highway, waved a yellow bandanna.
Samuels clapped Valentine on the back. "C'mon, son, you deserve to see this after last night. Everyone else, get across the bridge."
He jogged off northward along the edge of what was left of the road, and Valentine followed.
They reached the stand of trees. One of the Wolves had a spotting scope resting in the crotch of a young oak, pointed down the highway. Valentine could make out figures in the distance, but he was unwilling to believe what he saw.
Samuels looked through the scope. "They must have got wind of us last night. Not sure how many of us there are, so they're going back to report. Take a look at this freak show, Valentine."
He put his eye to the scope.
The Enemy.
They were apish figures sitting astride a long pencil of flesh. The mount was like a shiny, slug-skinned millipede. Hundreds of tiny legs moved too fast for the eye to follow, re-minding him of a finger running across a piano keyboard. The riders, five in all, had armorlike gray skin that reminded Valentine of a rhinoceros's hide. Their shoulders were wide- almost two ax-handles across. They carried guns that looked like old Kentucky long rifles held pointed into the air like five waving antennae. Valentine wondered if he could even aim one of the six-foot weapons.
"They're even uglier from the front. Those are fifty-caliber single-shot breechloaders, Valentine, and they're handy with them," Finner elaborated. "They can blow your head off at a thousand yards if you're fool enough to be visible and not moving."
"Those are Grogs?" Valentine couldn't tear himself away from the eyepiece.
The sergeant retrieved the scope. "Those legworms are fun to stop, too. Brain is at the tail end, kind of like Finner here. Nothing up front but a mouth and some taste buds, I guess. Also like Finner here, come to think of it. Nothing short of a cannon will keep a legworm from coming at you. Good thing they're kinda slow."
"We try to pick off the riders, but the lead one always has a big riot shield, thick as tank armor," another Wolf said. "We have to get them from the side. One thing you do not want to ever see is about fifty of them coming at you in line abreast."
"That happened at the Battle of Cedar Hill," the sergeant put in. "We lost."
They made it across the Missouri on a Sunday. The sergeant led them in a prayer of thankfulness that their long journey was almost complete.
The next few days had briefer, harder runs mixed with walks and ten-minute breaks. They stayed away from the roads, and the Grog patrols stayed out of the hills, as each side considered this border region bushwhack ground. Around the campfire one night, Samuels told Valentine a little more about his father, how the Lifeweaver Rho had created a special body of men to fight the Reapers and their allies: the Hunters.
"He told us that these things had come to Earth once before, and some of Rho's people had taught men how to fight them. We'd forgotten it, except maybe as legends and myths garbled over the years. They took certain men and made them a match for what they were up against. Rho said he could do the same now, if we were willing to accept the bargain. But it would change us forever; we'd never be the same people again. Your father was willing. Soon he had the rest of us convinced. That was the beginning of a lot of hard years, son. But when you get to the Ozarks, you'll see it was worth it."
The lieutenant was waiting for them at RoundSpringCave. It was a road-hardened group that was welcomed by the officers in charge of training new blood in the OzarkFreeTerritory.
A welcoming banquet was spread out under the trees. Six weeks' worth of traveling on foot made the feast even more welcome. There was fresh bread, watermelons the size of hogsheads, meat from the fatted calf, the fatted hog, and the fatted chickens under the summer sky. Valentine ate an entire cherry pie at one sitting for the first time in his life. Another little cluster of would-be soldiers had arrived the day before, youths gathered from the Missouri valley in the Dakotas. They swapped good stories and bad in the pseudo-hard-bitten fashion of youth.
Gabby Cho shared a picnic table with Valentine under a spread of pine trees. The fresh, clean scent reminded him of Christmases before the death of his family. Valentine was experimenting with iced dandelion tea sweetened almost to syrup. The tea, ice (in summer!), and apparently plentiful sugar were all novelties to him.
"We made it, Davy," Cho said. She looked a little older now to Valentine; she had chopped her long black locks after the second day of hot marching out of the Boundary Waters. "I wonder what's next. You're in with these Wolf guys. Any idea what's up?"
"Not sure, Gab. I'd like to spend a few days sleeping."
Cho seemed unsure of herself. "Why'd you join up?"
Valentine shot her a questioning look. Cho had remained distant on the whole trip south whenever any personal topic arose. She politely rebuffed the other recruits' attempts to get to know her.
He rattled his ice in the pewter mug, enjoying the sound and the cool wet feel. "You probably think revenge, because of the whole family thing. You know about what happened, right?"
"Yes, David. From some of the guys at class. I asked the Padre about it once. He told me to ask you, but I didn't want to do that."
"Well, it's not that."
Are you sure? a voice in his head asked.
"I know now my dad was with these Wolves. Maybe he would have wanted me to do it, too. He must have thought it was worthwhile; he spent a lot of years at it." He paused at a rustle overhead. Squirrels, attracted by the masses of food, were chasing each other around in the tree branches, sending flecks of bark falling onto the pair below. They were cute, but they made a decent stew, too.
"I want to make a difference, Gab. It's obvious, something's not right about the way things are. You know the Jefferson stuff we used to read, about being endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights? It's like those rights of ours have been taken away, even the right to live. We have to do something about it."
"As simple as that?"
"As simple as that, Gabby." He finished off the iced tea. "What about you?"
"Did you know I had a baby?" she blurted.
Valentine absorbed the news in awkward silence, then cleared his throat. "No, you just disappeared from school. Went north with your family, I thought."
"We kept it quiet. The father was a patroller..." She read Valentine's eyes. "No, it wasn't like that. I knew him. His name was Lars. Lars Jorgensen," she said, giving him the feeling that she had not said the name in a long time.
"He used to give me stuff. Nice clothes, shoes. I never thought to ask where it came from. Looted stores in Duluth, I figured. One day he gave me a watch, a real working watch. I could tell there had been engraving on it, even though he had tried to scratch it off. I told him not to give me any more presents. He disappeared when I told him about the baby coming."
"Who's got the kid? Your mom, or-?"
"Scarlet fever got her. Last winter. Remember the outbreak? It hit around where you were living, too. It took..." Her words began to fade.
"Jesus, Gabby, I'm so sorry."
She wiped her eyes. "I think about it too much. I talked to the Padre after it happened. I thought maybe I didn't take care of her right, not on purpose, but because of how I feel about the father. I just didn't know. The Padre put it down to a lack of qualified doctors. Or if they're good, they don't have the equipment or medicines."
She took a cleansing breath of the Ozark air. "The Padre said that lots of people he knew put this kind of thing behind them by helping others. He gave me a lecture about the need for strong bodies and good minds, got talking about the Cause. Well, you know him."
"I wonder if I do. He didn't talk like that to me." "I think he knew you would go south when the time was right," she said, smiling her old "I've got the right answer" smile from school. "I wanted to tell you all this for some reason. I feel like someone has to know the real me here."
The recruits got the word from Capt. "Steam Engine" Fulton. He gathered them on a little slope in a ring of trees. In this natural amphitheater, he informed the mass of youths from Minnesota, the Dakotas, and a smattering of Great Plains outposts that they would form a reserve regiment for now. They would receive uniforms. They would be armed and taught how to use those weapons. They would be paid. But for not their main duties would be as a disciplined labor force, to be moved about the FreeTerritory helping the residents at harvest, improving roads, and learning about how things were organized on the Ozark Plateau. The harder they worked, the more there would be to eat over the winter.
The bloody minded and the phony tough guys groaned at the news. But Valentine grinned at Cho. A gun, a uniform, and something he had heard about but never seen: a paycheck. He couldn't wait to get started.