St. Louis, Missouri: The mighty river-flanked city has again grown to be one of the most crowded civic centers in the Midwest, second only to Kurian-held Chicago, almost bursting at the bluffs when set against the mile-high vistas of the thinly populated Denver Freehold.
Except that the population is mostly nonhuman.
The Missouri River valley from St. Louis to Omaha belongs to the sentient bipeds - "Grogs" in the highly unspecific vernacular. In some of the Zones, they still serve their original purpose, acting as a military caste between the Kurian overlords and the human populace. Other Grog clans and tribes took land grants after their twelve-years service (Grog tradition holds that there are five twelve-year periods to a full life, and the Grog who makes it past his fifth age is revered indeed). The Kurians settled them as bulwarks against the few areas not under their control.
The reason the Kurians left such backwaters held by enemies or unreliable transplants is still a subject of no little debate.
Grog custom makes warfare a way of life and a path to status; theft entrepreneurship and slave-taking are the twenty-first-century version of human resource management. While the "Gray One" clans and tribes that inhabit the valley consider herding a noble and respectable duty, the dirt digging of agricultural work is left to their slaves of the human caste, not quite despised, but only rarely admitted into Grog homes on an equal basis.
Tree humans live among the Grogs, wearing hatbands or wrist tokens that serve as proof that "foot pass" (as the term is translated) has been paid to the admitting tribe. "Looie" is a refuge from both the terror of the Reapers and the justice of the embattled United Free Republic to the south, and
humanity there has carved out niches that many would consider enviable. They perform for Grog audiences under the Oriental decor of the Fox Theatre, sweep the streets of the Hill, operate specialized workshops, breweries, and distilleries in Carondelet, or keep trading posts stocked with goods imported from both Kurian Zone and Freehold. A small cadre of experienced arms men even teaches at the old City Museum. The best of the Grog child warriors are sent there by their tribes to improve their warcraftiness and learn from others.
Churches educate, heal, and minister to both human and the rare Grog desperate enough to seek succor outside his clan, under generous land grants from tribal leaders who otherwise would have fewer men to serve them. An entire human ghetto has grown up around the Basilica of St. Louis, catering to human needs, including that of a surprisingly well-equipped hospital and small school. The orderlies drink and the students study nearby at that eternal mark of urban culture: a cafe looking out on the sugar-beet gardens of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
But everyone is careful to always have afoot-pass token on display: a red wooden bracelet with copper pennies inlaid for the Headstriker Tribe, a decoupage of old postage stamps set on a wooden tongue depressor for the Sharpeyes, a battered bit of embossed black leather with white stitching for the Startold...
David Valentine stepped out of the confessional, still able to sense the anxious sweat on the priest who remained in his stuffy little booth. The cathedral, lit by candles, arched overhead like a vast cave and echoed the noises of the few who remained after evening services. Janitors were putting out the oil lamps.
"Father Dahl might need a moment", he told the three people waiting. It had been a long and busy year since he'd last knelt next to a priest. The ritual always made him feel better, thanks to its tiny, tenuous connection to his upbringing in the schoolhouse of Father Max.
The priests and nuns also liked you to set an example. He'd happily swallow his doubts and buy some new rosary beads and show up for a few masses for Blake's sake.
He checked his tribal city pass as he left the church by the public side door. He wore it around his neck on a shoelace tether: a cardboard emblem the size of a bar coaster emblazoned with a two-color circle of blue and white copied from the BMW logo. The Grogs of the Waterway Guides had a knack for picking up on designs of deep spiritual significance. He shared a hobbyist's enthusiasm for fishing with a clan chief and they gave him his Looie foot pass at a steep discount.
The well-maintained shotgun formerly of F. A. James greased the transaction, of course. Offering up the weapons of a killed enemy transferred spiritual power to the Waterway. Valentine had been glad to be rid of its weight and associate memories.
Just across the corner from the cathedral was the dormitory and school. Even his limp became a little less pronounced as he bounced up the steps and signed in with the desk warden. She wore her foot pass in the form of an oversized earring, which swung as she pulled on a bell cord.
"He's still downstairs?" Valentine asked when Monsignor Cutcher welcomed him back.
"And thriving like a mushroom", the bristle-haired Jesuit said. He spoke with a faint accent, indefinite but distinctly European when compared with the usual Midwestern drawl of the Looies, and sometimes chose odd similes. Cutcher was the most well-traveled man Valentine had ever met, and had come all the way from Malta to assist with Blake, though he spoke of Cape Town and Kyushu with equal ease.
Cutcher took him to an alcove with a discreetly placed, heavy wooden door. "He gets the playground all to himself every night", Cutcher said. "We had a dark episode with a squirrel he'd been offering tidy-bits. He gained its trust and then attacked the poor rodent. Just like with the pigeons. He always obeys a warning for a few minutes but forgets unless frequently reminded. Tiresome".
"We may have to move him", Valentine said.
Cutcher paused at the bottom of the stairs. "Oh?"
"I've been informed that they are hunting him. The Freehold is going to fake his death in the documents. I'd like to make sure the trail dead-ends here at the same time".
"There is a small mission in La Crosse. But it may perhaps be easier to hide him somewhere else in this city. Strangers are noticed here... someone snooping around is sure to draw attention of the tribes".
They descended to what had probably once been preparation and scullery rooms for kitchens, judging from the number of sinks. Wooden partitions filled one whole wall, storage space and dormitories for the worst of the summer heat. Valentine's odds and ends filled one; the more permanent trunks of the Bloch brothers rested open in another. Behavioral biologists from the Miskatonic in Pine Bluff, they studied Blake's every intake and excrete, and gave him an occasional medical examination - and then only under supervision Valentine trusted. Getting Narcisse out of Southern Command had been easier than he'd thought: They'd put her to make-work in a convalescent home and treated her more like a patient than a skilled nurse or cook. Will Post had presented her with his offer and arranged to relocate her to a border town where they could be reunited.
Valentine looked forward to giving the Miskatonic fellows their walking papers. Their faces would drop lower than the muddy bottom of the nearby Mississippi.
Valentine smelled food cooking. The Blochs were probably at breakfast. Blake was mostly nocturnal, and they'd adapted their schedules to his.
A squeak of rubber turning on linoleum sounded from the darkness of a corridor ahead.
"I heard your step on the stairs, Daveed", Narcisse said, coming into the dim light reflected from the dirty tile.
Valentine's old guide from Haiti smiled up at him from beneath one of her colorful bandannas. Her face had a few more lines, a few more liver-colored blotches.
"Hello, Sissy".
"You look tired. Rest and eat. Let me pour a bowl of soup for you. There is bread. Olive oil too, from some raid or other. It gives the gray folk the runs something terrible, so they give it to us".
"I'd like to see Blake first".
"Of course".
"I'll say good-bye to you two", Cutcher said. "Feel free to hop up and talk, David, if you have any concerns regarding Blake".
"Will do, Monsignor".
She led him down the hall. They'd mounted a first-aid kit the size of a briefcase on the wall since he'd last been there; Valentine wondered if there'd been worse trouble than with squirrels and pigeons. They entered the incinerator room that now served as the young Reaper's bedroom.
An aged nun with a face like a raisin watched him as he slept, a crack in the basement window admitting a shaft of sleep light.
"David Valentine, we see you again at last", she whispered as she hugged him. "Such a blessing".
Blake had grown like Iowa corn in a hot, thundery summer. Valentine felt the old pain, looked at his wrists, both of which still bore a faint track or two, like needle marks on the addicts he'd seen in Chicago's Zoo. He remembered the exhausting first months with Blake, shuffling him from Nomansland hole to Nomansland hole under cover of darkness, feeding him when there wasn't livestock to be had. He'd looked in a mirror once and thought he was staring at his own ghost.
"Blake", Valentine said from across the room. He could sometimes lash out like a wild animal if he was touched in sleep.
Yellow, slit-pupil eyes opened. The small figure sat up, wearing an old pajama top with characters that Valentine recognized as Ernie and Bert.
"papa", Blake said in his tiny, breathy voice. He sprang out of bed, crossing a meter or more in a clumsy jump.
"Jumping", Narcisse warned, and the obsidian-toothed mouth formed a regretful "o".
Valentine took Blake up, turned the child's head up and away from his breast - no sense taking chances, and besides, he wanted a good look at the growing face. He was shocked at the weight gain. At two years and three months, Blake was a good deal heavier than a human child his size, perhaps the weight of a five-or six-year-old. "papa bek. papa bek. see bwaykh!"
"Yes, I'm back". Valentine's wary ears picked up a faint thump from beneath the cot and a little terrier mix appeared, wiggling as it scooted out.
"That's Wobble", Narcisse said. "Blake got heem as a puppy".
"wobbow not for eat", Blake informed Valentine, his blue-veined face going serious.
Wobble had a bare patch on his back and a tiny ridge of scar tissue, and a bit of a limp. Valentine wondered how many close calls Wobble had survived before Blake had finally learned.
"Of course he's not for eating", Valentine said, going down cross-legged - with a twinge from his bad left leg - so he could set Blake's formidable weight down and pet the squirmy dog. Of course when he'd run with Southern Command's Wolves he'd learned to dine on dog and had eaten them innumerable times since, but what was civilization but a lengthy set of agreed-upon tribal taboos?
Despite his change in size, Blake's grip on his arm and shoulder was a good deal more gentle than he remembered. What accidental pains Narcisse had suffered to her shattered body as Blake's nursemaid Valentine couldn't imagine.
Blake began to produce his favorite toys.
Which reminded Valentine. "I had a letter from Will and Gail. Ali tracked me down".
"A letter!" Narcisse said. The St. Louis Grogs weren't on any postal network. "What it said?"
Valentine handed her the grease-stained envelope, spiderwebbed with creases. "You can read it". Valentine went back to helping Blake work a spinning top made out of an old office-chair caster.
William Post, the former Quisling Coastal Marine who'd helped
Valentine while crossing the Caribbean in the old Thunderbolt, had been given a sinecure with Southern Command. With some reading between the lines Valentine determined that Post had made himself indispensable with his usual efficient intelligence. He'd been given a minor position cataloging captured documentation from the Gulf Coast area and the Mississippi River valley, and had started making educated guesses based on everything from shipping manifests to maintenance logs.
His evaluations, thanks to his years of experience in the area, won him a position in the staffs Threat Assessment Bureau. TAB was charged with ensuring that Southern Command wouldn't get surprised again by the kind of coordinated attack that had allowed Consul Solon to roll up Missouri and Arkansas.
The news contained in the letter was good. Post knew that someone working the Kurian Zone would just as soon hear nothing but cheer. He and Gail were settled in Fort Scott, a trolley ride from his air-conditioned office. Hank Smalls was getting good marks in school and had a place as top starting pitcher on the academy's baseball team. His fastball was already attracting local fans.
Valentine could almost recite it word for word, especially one tantalizing paragraph:
I'm breaking security with this, Dave, but it's nothing the KZ isn't aware of anyway. Thought you'd like to know there's been a spike of action up and down the Appalachians, mostly in the Virginias and Kentucky. Only info on it is from secondary sources, but it's all the same story: guerrillas on legworms, popping in and out of valleys, and the Karen't having much luck with their whackja-mole mallets. The coal mines are caught up in it, too. Here's the interesting bit: Supposedly some huge Grog's leading the revolt, bat ears and fur described as being either straw-colored or white. If we weren't SO short, we'd send a mission to help and I'd know for sure. It's been ugly.
Valentine had been tempted to tell Styachowski to let Mr. Adler remain mysterious and take the first slow barge up the Ohio.
Post's mention that Southern Command was short on "Special Operations" - Wolves or Cats and Bears in the latest military parlance - put him back on the leash.
Of course, it wouldn't be above Moira Styachowski to ask Post to slip in a mention from someone Valentine trusted as a clincher. Styachowski and Post were both veterans of Big Rock Hill. She might ask a favor.
And so what if she had? They're your friends, man. Been in the Zone too much. They've given you a taxing but not particularly dangerous job to bring you back into the fold. Be grateful. And stop tallying to yourself.
Narcisse waited until Blake was lost in the spinning, clattering, multicolored wheel from the old Life game to speak again.
"If Ali found you, that means they needed you to be found. Are you going off again?"
"Afraid so, Sissy", Valentine said. The wheel spun again and Blake pointed to the new number. Wobble chased his tail, imitating the whirling toy.
"You have so little time. He misses you, you know. He's human enough to pine. Too young to understand".
Valentine wondered how Narcisse had tipped to that. Of course he'd been interested in the challenge of the journey. But what was his absence doing to Blake? Was he cocking this up, along with everything else in his life? Wait, Val, you made a bargain with the past four years ago. Let it be. "Ten days. I'll stay here ten days. I need to fatten up on your cooking".
The wheel came off its mount. Blake picked up the wheel and offered it to Valentine, "papa help bwaykhl"
"You can do it yourself. See? Circle in the circle?"
Blake's bony features screwed up in thought. He put the spinner back in the little green dish of plastic. But he didn't align it and settle it on the pin. Valentine reached, but Blake gave it an experimental spin and sent it skittering across the floor.
"bwokel" Blake said, smashing his fist onto the green cradle. The green plastic shattered and Wobble froze. Blake made a gurgling sound.
"Now it is", Valentine said. Narcisse stroked the back of Blake's neck with her intact hand.
"sowwy", Blake said in his faint, breathy voice, "vewy sowwy, papa".
Valentine picked him up again. "We'll make a new one". A piece of planking and a small, dulled nail would do. "Together".
Blake liked the sound of that. He showed all his fangs.
The days passed like the cars of a speed freight. Valentine contrived to take Blake on a fishing trip. Sufficient dirt, an oversized droopy boat hat, and some baggy clothes made him into a lean boy whose arms and legs were finishing up a growth spurt. The fish were biting, but any sort of motion, from a frog's leap to a rabbit's careful hop, made him drop his rod and investigate.
On his own, Valentine visited a little shrine near the old arch that he'd found on his first trip to the city. Years ago his father had eliminated the Kurians from St. Louis - he learned this not from his father but from some men who had served with him - and the Grogs set up their form of memorial in the lobby of what had been an elevator to the top of the monument. Some bits and pieces laid out in an arch of parachute "silk" that imitated the one above - bullet casings, a canteen, a K-bar-style knife, a climbing glove, and some nylon rope he understood, but there was also a fox tail, a bunch of oddly shaped dice in a clear plastic tube, and a stoppered bottle of what looked like salad oil.
The mementos were meticulously dusted. Maybe at festivals a storyteller hopped up on the display (did the Grogs believe that putting the items behind glass detracted from their power?) and used the props. Or perhaps there were bodies buried behind the access door the heavy case blocked; the Grogs often put mementos outside grave sites. It wasn't even taboo for a Grog to take them up for a moment's examination or obeisance, provided they were returned when the task was done.
He was tempted to take the glove. Though it was larger than his own hand it still seemed small when compared with his memories of his father's huge, capable ones, but the aging Grogs clustered at the doorstep were already snorting and huffing when he bent too close to the display.
Cutcher took him up to the riverbank bluffs and showed him a house with a rambling basement cut into the limestone, lately occupied by a river trader who owned a wharf-side sawmill and a bone-wracking tubercular cough. In a fit of anxiety about his approaching death, he'd donated the property entire and its furnishings to the church.
"One last trade, this time with God", Cutcher chuckled. "May his bargain pay off".
They planned to move Blake as soon as the researchers from the Miskatonic did their last set of visual-acuity tests. He'd have room to explore up there, in the moonless darkness under the trees. Cutcher said that keeping up with him would be good for his cardiovascular health.
It felt wrong to say good-bye in a basement. Good-byes were for front yards, garden gates, train platforms, and bus pick-up corners, not shuttered basements that smelled like soaking diapers.
"If you need more money...", Valentine said to Narcisse.
"Monsignor Cutcher has ample sources. We want for nothing".
"Except the sight of one of those big palms".
"Royal palms", Narcisse said, nodding. "I do miss them, and the smell of morning wind off the sea".
"I want to thank you again for..."
She poked him in his good thigh. "Daveed, please. I am old, and have learned the difference between needed and used. Here I am needed. Here I talk long through the nights with our fine priest as we watch. A deep, kind man with the magic of the right hand. I have known only two or three others like him".
"I wish I'd had time to find Blake some blocks. And some early-reader books".
"I will find or paint some Scrabble pieces. Like the ratbits had. He will learn ABC's when he is ready. He learns, but his mind has not yet caught up to his body".
Valentine regretted the lost mah-jongg pieces. Blake would probably enjoy the colors and intricate designs. Valentine's last reminder of the good days with Malia Carrasca were in some prison warehouse deep in the Nut, probably.
Narcisse gave him a bag of dried-meat sticks, a bag of glazed biscuits, and some nuts mixed with oats and corn-bread crumbs - the Grog version of trail mix. He rolled one of the cheroot-sized tubes of meat and sniffed the greasy, peppery coating. Narcisse could make even the spongiest legworm flesh taste like tenderloin medallions in a sauce, but he suspected this was pork.
"You must not leave yet", she said. "I must press one last hug on you.
He knelt down so she could hug him. Those mauled limbs that had first met around his neck on a sunbaked Haitian street pressed at either temple, pressed hard, as though trying to meet somewhere in his corpus callosum. She closed her eyes and spoke in her Creole, sliding the words together so fast and low he didn't have a hope of understanding with his mother's Quebecois French. It went on for some moments and his pressed skin began to tingle.
Finally she stopped.
"What was that all about?" he asked.
"I asked heem to put honeycombs in your path, so your journey is sweet. There is too much bitter in you, Daveed, and it finds its way out".
Narcisse had a talent for cryptic expression that sometimes rivaled that of the Lifeweavers. Valentine wondered if he'd been cross with Blake, or the Bloch brothers from the Miskatonic when he gave them their marching orders. "If only you could add a little molasses to me, the way you do to the spoon bread".
Narcisse pursed her lips, then poked him in the breastbone with her maimed arm. "You already look better. Go now, or I cry some. Maybe I cry some anyway, but I don't want you around for that".
Valentine made Nancy's north of Tulsa in three days of round-the-clock legworm travel, arriving on the eve of the promised rendezvous. He'd made a deal with a driver from the Rabbit's Foot clan whom he silently called "Tic-tac" because the Grog's back-hide scars looked like a couple of drunks had started playing tic-tac-toe on it with hot knives.
Which wasn't out of the realm of possibility. Captured Grogs were sometimes cruelly treated to put the "fear of Man" in them before they were released. Of course captured men were often eaten when not enslaved, so cruelty was a matter of perspective.
They took turns driving the beast through day and night, skirting the UFR. Valentine hoped that the unofficial truce of the Missouri brush that had settled in when he'd first become a Cat was still holding, and that no wide-ranging patrols would risk a flare-up by potting what looked like a human small trader and his driver.
Difficulty showed itself in a six-man patrol. Three challenged him, and three more waited, kneeling in the brush. Five kids and a senior NCO. The kids were too young and the NCO was grizzled right to the hair growing out of his ears.
Valentine felt for the oldster, riding herd on a bunch of downy cheeks too young to know how easily they could die. But the Missouri bushwhack country would lend itself to giving the kids some experience without the risks that went with the swamps around New Orleans, the open plains to the west, or the alley between Crowley's Ridge and Memphis.
Valentine watched the rifles and picked out an escape route through the brush. If things looked bad, he'd topple off the legworm and run like a rabbit, twisting and turning across the mud through first spring flowers of the blackberry bramble.
"Hey, Freebies", Valentine called. "You boys looking for a little joy juice to keep out the nightly chill?"
"Check out that chair. Quite a ride he has on that legworm", one of the kids in the brush remarked to his fellows.
The NCO's rifle dangled in its sling, but the officer kept his hand hooked casually in his ALICE belt, close to the butt of his sidearm. "Just a friendly warning, Wally", the NCO said, using the Missouri slang for a trader who bartered with the Grogs. Valentine had been called worse. "You're about ten miles out of a UFR settlement. They'll panic at the sight of a worm and open up on you".
"Like a bunch of potato diggers could hit a legworm if it were on top of them", one of the kids in the brush said. The two backing up the NCO knew better than to add comment, but one kept swinging his rifle muzzle back and forth, making little figure eights in the air.
"Where you bound for?" the NCO asked, looking at the packs and accoutrements dangling from both sides of the legworm.
"South of Kansas City, Kansas".
"Top, he's traveling with a stoop - that puts him under suspicion", the twitchy kid said. "Stop and question".
"Question away, I'd like an excuse to get off this damn worm", Valentine said. "It's Tic-tac here who is on tribal-conference business. I just own the worm".
Tic-tac rocked nervously in his saddle, his anxiety evident, but kept his hands away from his long, single-shot varmint gun. Valentine doubted he even had any bullets for it. Instead he had a grip on his sharp-hooked worm goad. Valentine hoped Tic-tac wasn't getting any ideas about the worth of the kid's rifles and hair at the next tribal bragging session. If the kids knew just how quickly a Grog could throw a balanced utility ax like the one dangling from its leather thong on the saddle hook, they'd be back another ten yards or so.
Valentine tried to will the kid into slinging the gun and losing interest in the encounter, but the boy had either imagination or a grudge against men out of the Groglands.
"That's maybe a Kurian agent", the kid insisted. "He should be put under arrest".
"Not another word, Cadet", the NCO said. "If that Grog is a messenger, he'll die before he'll come out of that saddle. Then we'll have a feud with Rabbit's Foot and their allies".
Valentine's stomach sank. The kid was an officer candidate, looking to establish his record for initiative.
"Bury and buckle up, Top. C'mon", one of the kids quietly urged from the brush.
"And if he were a Kurian agent, we'd all be running to check out the sound of seventy legworms passing north of here, or shooting at each other", the NCO added.
Valentine felt a gurgle in his stomach, and took the opportunity to lean to his right and bounce a loud fart off his chair.
"Never could handle those Grog mushrooms", he said.
The NCO chuckled and the quieter of his two charges laughed.
"Pass wind, friend", the NCO said, stepping aside and gesturing with his hand to the west. The cadet glared at him.
"Don't worry, we'll be out of UFR lands by nightfall", Valentine said as they goaded the legworm into its rippling motion again.
The NCO pulled the boys out of the way of the legworm's antennae and nodded to Valentine as they passed. Valentine considered that the peacefully concluded meeting was an example of the differences between the Free Territory and the Kurian Zone. In the Free Territory an NCO could use his judgment. In the KZ they'd be kept waiting while the NCO called his officer, who called a higher officer, who would order them searched and then, when they found nothing of interest, would call a higher officer still, who would ask "Why are you bothering me with this?" and order them released anyway, provided there wasn't a Reaper breathing down his neck with an appetite that made starting a feud with a Grog tribe over a single wanderer's aura worth it.
The kids who were covering from ambush stood up as they passed, and gaped.
There was a time when the whole check in the Nomansland between would have been done by Wolves, who would probably have just observed them from cover and tracked them to see what they were up to, unseen and unheard unless the patrol leader decided they constituted a threat. Then Tic-tac would have been dead and Valentine
roped and cuffed in about the stopwatch time it takes a rodeo champ to bring down a calf.
It was a good thing for the UFR that Missouri was so quiet these days.
On the third day it took both of them together to keep their mount going - legworms had astonishing reserves, but eventually even the digging goads would have no effect.
Valentine let the Grog have his legworm and rig with many thanks and a swapping of Tic-tac's delicately carved ear-grooming stick for a half-empty tin of Valentine's foot powder. He felt no particular sympathy with Tic-tac, but if this wasn't the longest trip the Grog had ever been on, it was close, and he'd want something to point to when telling the story.
Valentine walked into Nancy's oddly peaked roofs - they always reminded him of old Pizza Huts - under his own steam, taking the first of many steps westward.
