Crowley's Ridge, Arkansas: Running southwest-northeast through the eastern part of the state, straight as though drawn on the map with a ruler, Crowley's Ridge varies from about two hundred to five hundred feet high, up to a dozen miles wide, and several hundred miles long. Once the next thing to terra incognita in Southern Command, with only a few precariously placed settlements hugging the Saint Francis, it is now considered the "civilized" eastern border for the defenders of the freehold.
The northeastern part of the state suffered literally earth-shattering devastation in the New Madrid quake and never recovered. Now the expanse between the Ridge and Memphis is a tangled floodplain for the newly feral Mississippi and its tributaries, like the Saint Francis, briefly bridged by a few pieces of road and a railroad line during Solon's tenure in the Ozarks.
Solon intended for Crowley's Ridge to be his eastern border and set up the outposts, along with a road and rail network to serve them. Southern Command's Guards were only too happy to assume their upkeep when Valentine's Rising and Archangel put Solon's incorporations into receivership. Now this series of Guard Outposts holds the line here, supplying smaller Hunter formations that explore the flat lands extending to the Mississippi and beyond.
Perhaps no area is more patrolled and contested than the corridor that runs along the old interstate that once linked Memphis and Little Rock. A few Kurians maintain their towers on the west side of the river within sight of Memphis, sending their Reapers into the wilderness to hunt refugees, smugglers, or out-and-out brigands, while Southern Command sends Cats and Wolves into the corridor to hunt the Reapers.
* * * *
You're not doing this in order to see her, David Valentine told himself for the umpteenth time. She's smart, a good observer. Perhaps Molly even knew Gail.
No, her letters trickled off and you want to know why, a more honest part of Valentine said.
Shut up the both of you, someone whose name might be Superego interjected.
Valentine got the feeling he was being watched as he walked up the road running along the western side of Crowley's Ridge. Molly Carlson Stockard's name had turned up as residing at a military camp called Quapaw Post, and a quick message to the CO-Valentine justified it as a joint inquiry with the Miskatonic-revealed that she lived at the Post as a "Class A" dependant, which meant she didn't just live on post, but worked there as well.
A forty-mile train ride, ten-mile wagon hitch, and a two-mile hike brought him to this quiet corner of Southern Command, well north of the corridor.
He bore a full set of arms, as any serving officer in Southern Command did, even on leave. The Atlanta Gunworks assault rifle formerly shouldered by the Razors bumped against his back inside an oiled leather sheath to keep the wet and dirt off. The freehold had learned long ago that the more people trained to carry guns there were traipsing around the rear areas, the less likely they were to have to use them, whether threatened by the lawless or by the emissaries of the awful law that was the Kurian Zone.
He had to stop himself from jogging or falling into his old Wolf lope. He wanted to arrive more or less composed, not sweaty and bedraggled. He regretted that he didn't already have his staff crossbar, or he'd probably have been able to requisition a trap or even a motorcycle.
Quapaw Post didn't look like much; one thick concrete shell that probably enclosed a generator, armory, and fuel supply. A pair of identical, cavernous barns and a few wooden barracks, with a tower at the center for fresh water and sentries, rounded out the station. Miles of fencing stood along either side of the road and extended up into the oak-and-hickory-thick hills of the ridge and west into the alluvial flats, where the fields were subdivided into pasture and hay fields. Horses grazed and swished each other in the gauzy sun, and nearer to the road insects harvested the nectar of butterfly weed and wild bellflowers.
Evidently Quapaw Post supported Southern Command horseflesh. Horses on active duty needed a break as often-probably more often-as the men they carried.
Quapaw Post's CO, a captain by the name of Valdez, met him personally at the gate. Valdez varied his Guard uniform in that he wore camp shorts and leather sandals. Valentine got the impression this corner of Southern Command was not frequently inspected.
"A walking major?" Valentine heard the sentry ask his captain.
"Ex-Wolf. I checked him out; he's a good man on leave," Valdez said. "Oh, he can probably hear you by now, Crew."
"Long as it ain't a Bear, is all."
The Captain hallooed a greeting with Valentine a few strides away.
"Welcome to the Quapaw, Major," Valdez said. "You're welcome to my room, as I've got a cot in my office, or there's all kinds of space in the barns."
"If you don't mind flies and horseshi-" the sentry started.
"The barn is fine, Captain," Valentine said. The captain shook his hand and led him past some weedy sandbags to the official starting point of the base, a line of painted rocks. Valentine looked around. "Do you train the mounts here, or just feed them?"
"Both. That widow you asked about, Molly, she's one of our civilian trainers."
"Widow?"
"MIA technically, over six months, so that makes her a widow on the books."
"Does she know I'm coming?"
"I kept my mouth shut. But you know a small post."
"No sense wasting time. I'd like to see her."
"You're invited to a dinner with the other officers. Unless you'll be umm, otherwise occupied." Valdez made a point of nudging a path-bordering rock back into line, where it guarded some fragrant tomato vines.
"Tell your officers to dress down, this isn't an official visit. If they'd rather play cards over beer-"
Valdez brightened. "Your credit's good here, if you want to get in on a game. My kebabs are very popular if you like finger food."
"Sick horses have to go sometime. Glad to see border station duty's still the same." They turned up a little row of what looked like trailers with the wheels removed.
"You will want to get back to the electricity soon enough, I'm sure. Here we are."
Valentine recognized the bunkhouses. Known as "twenty by eights"-though a screened-in porch that could be opened on one end gave them dimensions closer to thirty feet in length-the easily constructed prefab bunkhouses were the backbone of Southern Command's dependant housing.
This one had the screened porch, and a thriving band of hostas living in the semishade under the floor, set a foot off the ground by concrete blocks.
Molly stood on the other side of the screen door. She seemed to shimmer a bit. Perhaps it was the water in his eyes.
A tiny, dark-haired figure clung to one of her legs. A tabby cat watched the drama from the tar-shingle roof.
"David?" she said.
"Hello, Molly." Say something else! "How are you?"
"I'll take your rig over to the barn," Valdez put in.
Valentine released his pack, grateful for something to do with his body.
When he'd had the barn office pointed out and said good-bye to the captain, Molly had the screen door open. She stood a few pounds heavier, her eyes were a little more tired perhaps, but her hair shone with its same golden glory. If anything, it was a little longer and fuller, drawn back from her cheekbones into a single braid. Some of the wariness that he'd come to know all too well on their trip back to the Free Territory still haunted her. She wore a civvied version of the old female Labor Regiment top, cheered up by a set of silver buttons, and a simple jean skirt with a built-in apron-pouch. She smelled like lavender.
The child had her creamy skin, or maybe it just looked light set against the boy's dark hair and eyes. If he and Molly had had a child the boy might have ended up looking like that.
"I'm sorry about Graf," Valentine said.
"Thank you. I'm adapting." Her eyes kept striking the scar on his face, then circling away, then coming back to it, alighting just for a flash before looking away.
Valentine was used to the reaction. In an hour or two, or tomorrow, it would just be another part of his face.
"You never told me-"
"This is Edward," Molly said, picking the boy up with an easy grace that suggested that she did it a hundred times a day.
"Edwid," the child agreed.
"Edward, say 'hi' to David."
The child didn't want to say hi and buried his face in his mother's neck.
"I smell like a long trip," Valentine said.
"Is that why you're limping?"
"I fell badly," Valentine sort of lied, leaving out the bullet entering his leg that precipitated the fall.
"He's two and he's got his own mind about people. Six months ago he giggled at strangers and grabbed their fingers."
Valentine did some mental math. If Molly had given birth about two years ago, the baby had been conceived at the end of his summer as a Quisling Coastal Marine in the Thunderbolt. Tripping over Post's square liquor bottles in the cabin they shared. The phony marriage to Duvalier. Had Molly's stomach quivered that August night the way it had when-
Stop that insanity. . . .
"I want to get cleaned up. Can I do that, and then we'll talk?"
"The only water in here is for the sink. We share flush toilets and showers at the end of the street. There's a hose that works at the stable, too; the vet room has a sluice in the center. Sometimes I'll just hook the hose in the ceiling there after work and shower."
"I'll do that. Back in an hour?"
"Do you want dinner with us?"
"Yes," Valentine said. Probably too eagerly. "If it's not trouble for you and Edward."
"You changed my whole definition of trouble," Molly said, but she smiled when she said it. "No, an extra plate is no trouble at all."
* * * *
Dinner that night passed in uncomfortable small talk.
The bunkhouse had a tiny folding table that just fit the child's high chair and the two adults. A propane stove-natural gas was obtainable in the Ozarks, almost plentiful compared to some parts of the country-with two burners and an oven made up a tiny kitchen annex. A bead curtain partition separated a couple of twin beds that sat under a few pictures and a black-framed set of military ribbons and decorations.
Molly described, in broad strokes, her marriage to Graf Stockard, and life at home for her father and sister-her mother had finally succumbed to the illness that the doctors described only as "malignant cancer" (were there any nonmalignant varieties, Valentine wondered) while he had been crossing the Great Plains Gulag with Duvalier. She largely skipped over "the occupation," and somehow Valentine couldn't ask her about the testing as the horsemeat stew changed place with a strawberry cobbler on the table, if not in the smears on Edward's face. Are you keeping your promise to Post or trying to get back into her bed?
Of course conversing without really talking was an old habit of his and Molly's. They'd been that way ever since the zoo. She grew more animated when she described her duties as a civilian horse trainer.
When they said good night under a moth-shrouded lamp, both bled relief into the chill spring night.
Valentine spent the next day with Valdez, who wanted an opinion on some beadwork one of his men had found in a bush. On the way there he expounded on the virtues of sandals for soldiers, waxing eloquent on both their hygiene and durability benefits. They examined the site where the piece had been found, but neither Valentine nor any of the men could find tracks, and they returned to Valdez's office in the cool of the concrete redoubt.
"It's pretty dirty," Valentine said, evaluating what he supposed was a bracelet. "The leather's dried. Looks like Grog work, but I'm thinking a crow spotted it somewhere and decided to add it to his collection. Weren't the Grogs in this area during the occupation?"
"Fighting with the TMCC," the sergeant who brought it to Captain Valdez's attention added, referring to the Trans-Mississippi Combat Corps. Valentine had worn their uniform during his ruse in Little Rock.
"How'd it go with the Carlson girl?" Valdez asked after the sergeant had left, with an order to pass news of the find up to the brigade headquarters in Forrest City. He filled two glass tumblers with water and added a splash of something that smelled like it was trying to be gin.
"Why isn't she the 'Stockard girl'?"
"That chulo gave up on his family when he ran." Valdez opened an envelope resting in his in box, tossed it back like a fish too small to be kept, and sat down. He waved to a chair against the wall. Valentine pulled it up and thanked him for the drink by raising his glass halfway across the ring-stained desk.
"Ran?"
"Yes. I heard he and a few other cowards ran north into Grog land. He left a note saying that he'd send for her once he was established. I understand the Grogs sometimes employ men as mechanics and so on."
"She told you this?"
"No. As I said, it is a small post."
"Then what do you know about me?"
"From gossip? Nothing. But I've been around enough men to know when one is thinking about losing himself in a woman. You should do whatever you came here to do and leave again."
Valentine at once liked and disliked his temporary host. He liked the open way Valdez offered what could be construed as criticism, and disliked him because the criticism was so near the mark.
That afternoon he kept Molly company while she worked, cooling and calming the horses down after they'd been trotted on a long lead. Edward spent his days in the company of a B-dependant, an older woman who'd lost her husband and two sons to Southern Command's Cause.
They quit early when an afternoon drizzle started up.
Afterward, Molly hung the traces up in the tack room to dry.
"Is Mary still horse crazy?" Valentine asked, smelling the rich, oiled leather and remembering the preteen's currycomb obsession in Wisconsin.
"She discovered boys just before . . . everything."
"Where is she now?"
"They took her away."
"I thought she tested negative," Valentine said, and realized the implications of his words.
"Tested negative? What does that have to do with it?"
"A gang of soldiers saw a fourteen-year-old girl they liked in a bread line and just took her." Valentine heard a fly futilely buzzing in a spider's web from the tack room's corner; in the stalls a horse nickered to an associate. Only human ears had the capacity to appreciate the grief in Molly's voice. "They killed her for the fun of it. According to our mouthpiece, they did get a trial and one of them was convicted for murder. Who knows what really happened."
"They do, for a start. I wouldn't mind talking it over with one of them."
"They're probably dead, Dave. Was it always like this in the Free Territory? When you talked about it with me in Wisconsin ... seems like everyone's either dead or has dead family."
"You're not saying it was better back there?"
"No, not better. Easier. You always had the option of believing all the lies, too. Why are you here, David? It's not the sort of place soldiers spend their leave."
"Let's find somewhere to sit."
"I'll take you to my spot," she said, and extended her hand.
Valentine took it, wondering.
She took him out of the barn and to a portion offence that projected from a side door. Extra hay bales sat here on wooden pallets, under a wooden awning to keep the rain off, a sort of ramshackle add-on to the aluminum structure that a pair of carpenters had probably put up in a day.
She scooted up onto one of the bales and sat looking at the springtime green of Crowley's Ridge, rising less than a mile away. "I like the view," she said. "Normally I eat with Edward and the other kids, but sometimes Carla takes the kids out for the day to the duck pond. Then I just eat my lunch here."
"Remember that day we sat on the hill and talked about your dad's setup for us?"
She tilted her head back with eyes closed. "Yes. God, I was young."
"You're still young."
"You're not," she said, startling Valentine a little. "Afraid of a little honesty? You're not that earnest young lieutenant anymore. You used to look at me. It gave me-kind of a tickle. Now you stare through me. Through that ridge, as a matter of fact."
"I'm here because your name came up in something we're looking into. A test that you-and your sister-took involving a blood draw."
"That's it?" she asked.
Valentine nodded.
"This has nothing to do with Graf?"
"Should I be asking you about him?"
"He's a good man. Was a good man. Guard duty was his world. When that went away he had nothing."
"He had you and a child."
"A prison camp's not much of a place for either. Don't you want to know about the boob test?"
Valentine wasn't so sure any more. "Why do you call it that?"
"That's what we called it in Wisconsin. They gave all the girls the same thing at about thirteen or fourteen. Just when you got your boobs so we called it the boob test."
"How do you know it's the same?" Valentine asked.
Molly twisted a piece of straw around her finger. "They did the same thing both times. Line up all the girls-well, it was all the women in Pine Bluff, I suppose, since they were just getting us organized. Usual health check with a tongue depressor and thermometer and listening to your heart and lungs."
"Okay."
"At the end they took a little wooden stick, smaller than a knitting needle, and scratched you with the end. Some gals got a big welt from it. To get released from the exam you had to show your arm. Most of us got a red mark, on some it raised a welt-it didn't on me or my sister-then, for those who didn't react, the nurse drew some blood and dropped it in a test tube."
"I don't suppose you asked-"
"Both times. They said it checked for infection."
"What happened when they put the blood in the test tube?"
"Nothing. It just dissolved."
"Do you remember if there was anyone who had it do anything else?"
Molly's face scrunched up. "Not in Wisconsin, but they only checked about eight of us. They plucked out some women from the group in Pine Bluff, I recall. A bunch of others kind of kicked up at that, and the women taken were yelling out messages to friends, but the soldiers said something like, 'They've got it made, they're going to Memphis priority style,' or something like that. Maybe it was just to calm everyone down."
"Memphis?" Valentine said.
"Yes, I'm sure about Memphis. Memphis in style."
"Wait here a moment, okay?"
"Sure."
Valentine trotted up to his pack and extracted Post's flyer. He returned to Molly and showed her the picture.
"Did you see her there?"
"That wasn't the woman I saw taken away. She was sorta black." She looked more closely at the picture. "She's pretty."
"She's my friend's wife. He wants to know what happened to her."
She yanked some more straw out of the bale and tossed it piece by piece into the breeze. "When they take you away it's never good. Never. That guard was just talking for the sake of talk."
"I don't suppose you saw the train leave or the uniforms of the men who took her."
"No. You know how they are with that stuff. Someone disappears through a door or behind a curtain and then they're just gone."
She stood up with a little hop. "Now. Your question's been answered. You can go."
"I wasn't the one who got married and quit writing," Valentine said. He saw her eyes go wet.
"Go join one of the nightly card games with Valdez and the corporals, David. Go and learn about a bad hand. We were a bad hand, that's all. You played it well back in Wisconsin, you did right by me and my family, but it was still a bad hand. Leave me-us-alone."
Valentine stood up too, and regretted it. He was a good six inches taller than Molly and the last thing he wanted to do was physically intimidate her. "What 'us'? You and me or you and your son? I've got a daughter, Molly. She's a thousand miles away and all I know is that she was born, but she's a piece of me. Just like you." He took a step back.
"A piece, you mean."
"Don't! Molly, just don't. It wasn't that way, not with us, not with Mo-Malita. Don't play with words and think that'll change what happened."
An arch collapsed inside her. "Crap," she said, and sniffled.
"You want me to go?"
"Yes. No-no. Do what you have to. You're built for it."
He spoke softly. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"One of the old hands in Weening used to say you Wolves and whatnot, the aliens came and took out your hearts and put in those of horses and pigs and lions or whatever to make you so you could stand up to them. You weren't human anymore, not on the inside."
"We drank some kind of medicine. That's it."
"You can eat with us tonight if you want. Or just leave-I'll understand. That trail you're on's cold enough." She turned and went quickly into the barn, and Valentine got the distinct feeling she didn't want to be followed.
She didn't want anything from him at all.
* * * *
He borrowed a horse from Valdez-"We've got plenty that need exercise; take one!"-and rode the big quarter horse hard down to Forrest City. He posted a letter summarizing the relevant pieces of his conversation with Molly to the Miskatonic and saw to the feeding and care of his borrowed gelding. A few hundred dollars of back pay disappeared into the stalls and markets the next morning, and a hard afternoon's ride later he was back at Quapaw Post.
"What's all this?" Molly said at her screen door. Edward interposed himself in front of his mother.
Valentine set down canvas mailbags, and the child reached out with both hands. He was sophisticated enough to know what a big bag promised.
"Season's Greetings," Valentine said. "It's customary to give a little something in exchange for valuable information."
He reached in and extracted three bolts of fabric. "Denim, of course, and I hope you like that green. You're the kind of blond who can wear green."
A big bag of buttons came next. "Most of them match. I looked. I figured you could trade any you didn't like."
Shoes in various sizes for Edward came next, a heavy slab of bacon in waxed paper, great loops of sausage like ox yokes, some lemons and limes, candied dates, and a black-and-white ceramic cow that had probably once been a cookie jar.
He'd let Molly discover the cookies inside on her own, if Edward didn't first.
"Thought it looked like the cows in Wisconsin."
"Holsteins," Molly said, her hand at her throat.
Tea, powdered sugar, a bottle of brandy, even elastic-banded socks and underwear-luxuries all, smuggled from the Kurian Zone, no doubt, but it was considered bad taste to ask a trader questions beyond quality-all joined the growing pile on the tiny table.
"And some cans of jelly," Valentine finished.
"Jelly!" Edward said.
"You're too . . . too much, David. They were just words, and I was angry."
"I thought it was kind of refreshing. First time we'd been honest with each other since . . . well, your dad's basement."
Molly blushed, but just a little. "We were just about to have macaroni and ration cheese." The tiniest pause after "macaroni" told Valentine all he needed to know about what she thought of Southern Command's "cheese"-an oily yellow concoction that tasted faintly like axle grease. "I can fill another plate."
"Fine."
They ate on the steps of the porch rather than clear off the table. "It occurred to me on the ride back that I didn't know if you could sew," Valentine said. "I recall you were good with leather."
"Not like my mom. But I'm getting better."
One of Molly's civilian neighbors, a tight-faced, tan woman, walked by and took a second look at Valentine. Then she turned her face straight to home with everything but an audible hmpff.
After Edward went to bed they talked. Looking back on it Valentine realized that he talked and Molly listened. Beck and leaving the Wolves, Duvalier and training as a Cat, the Eagle D Brand in Nebraska's sand hills, the wild night of fire in the General's hangar, Jamaica, Haiti, ratbits, finding out that he'd be a father one rainy day in the Texas pinewoods. The deaths of M'Daw and and the Smalls, Hank. He raised his shirt and she touched the burns on his back.
He couldn't feel whether her fingertips probed or caressed. The surface nerves were mostly dead.
It felt so good to talk about it, maybe because Molly was a piece of his life dating back to before so much of it had happened.
"I can't sit anymore. There's a beautiful moon," Molly said. "You want to take a walk?"
Valentine wasn't sure he did. Or he wasn't sure of the part of himself that did, anyway. "What about Edward?"
"Mrs. Colbert can listen for him. She hears everything that goes on in the cabin anyway. It's all of eight feet away."
"Anything to help Southern Command's cheese along," Valentine said. "You'd think something that greasy-"
"What is it about soldiers and their bowels?" Molly asked. "You'd think with a woman and a moon and a warm night you'd just-
Horse hooves clip-clopped through the gravel and turned up the little lane running between the rows of bunkhouses.
Four men on horseback leading a fifth saddled horse appeared. One of Valdez's men walked ahead, and pointed toward Molly's cabin.
Valentine could make out the uniforms even in the dim light. The two in back were Wolves; there was no mistaking the trademark soft buckskins and fringed rifle sheaths. The others wore the plain khaki and the round-brimmed "Smokey" hats of the Rounders, Southern Command's law enforcement branch.
Usually veteran Guards, the Rounders patrolled the roads and bridges of Southern Command keeping the population safe from "bummers"-people in the Ozarks without a stake of one kind or another, who were often conduits of everything from black-market antibiotics to military information-and outright criminals.
The Rounders often brought bad news to the harder-to-reach families as well. Rounder on the doorstep was a phrase that meant misfortune to most people living outside the towns.
"Rounders," Molly said, echoing his thoughts.
The horses stopped in front of her cabin and Edward appeared, seeking the comfort of her hem. She picked her son up.
Valentine went to the screen door of the tiny porch.
"You Major Valentine?" a man with jowls spilling over his frayed collar asked as he approached.
The Wolves stayed on their horses. One looked halfway familiar to Valentine-then it came to him; he'd been a Wolf at his Invocation, though the name escaped him. The Wolves' hands were conspicuously off their weapons.
"Could you step outside, sir?" The jowly man's laminated name tag said Goebbert.
"What's this about?"
"Just step outside, please, sir."
They ignored Molly and her wide-eyed child. As Valentine came out the Wolves got off their horses.
"You're a hard guy to find, Valentine," the other Rounder put in. He had cockeyed ears, like a hound listening to a raccoon on the roof. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Goebbert.
"Sir, please turn around and put your hands behind you."
Valentine's heart fired like a triphammer. What the hell?
"What's this about?" Valentine repeated, sounding a lot less like a major this time.
"You're under arrest for murder," Goebbert said.
"Murder?" Valentine felt sweat everywhere.
Goebbert grabbed him firmly by the wrist. "Sorry, Major, orders."
They patted him down. Valentine winced as the hard hands traveled over the old scar tissue on the backs of his legs.
"David, what's going on?" Molly asked from her porch. She held Edward sideways, putting her body in between her son and the four strangers.
"It's got to be a mistake," Valentine said, looking again at the Wolf. Hammond, that was his name. The other young Wolves called him "Lightning" because he had a little tuft of blond hair in his brown.
"Might be," Goebbert said. "But we have to take you to court. Okay, Jim, he's in custody. Make a note of the time."
"Hammond, what is this?" Valentine asked.
Hammond might have smiled-his walrus mustache changed shape-though Valentine wondered why he would look pleased to be recognized by someone being arrested for murder. "We just got orders to make sure you come in. These boys were scared you'd get wind and take to the hills."
Molly had doubt in her eyes; she squinted against it as she might protect herself against dust.
"Molly, I'm not a fugitive. I wasn't hiding with you."
"Enough, Major," Goebbert said. "We've got to get you away. Help him mount, Hammond."
"Put him up backward. Fugitive mount," Uneven Ears said. "They say he's tricky."
The Wolves helped him mount. Sitting backward on the saddle made the night even more surreal. "My gear's in the barn-"
"It'll come along," the other Wolf put in.
"Where are you taking him?" Molly blurted, perhaps too emotionally, for Edward started to cry.
"Crowley Garrison Station, then on to Fort Allnutt, ma'am," Goebbert replied. Valentine craned his neck around and saw Goebbert shaking his head at his fellow Rounder.
David Valentine rode out of Quapaw Post backward. The soldiers came out of their cabins to see the "rogue parade," wondering faces glowing in the moonlight like jack-o'-lanterns.
They showed their paperwork at the gate, and carried out his gear on the Wolves' horses. Valentine, facing backward on his mount, carried only the memory of the fear in Edward Stockton's eyes. And the doubt in Molly's.