Valentine's Rising by E.E. Knight Read Free Book Online

formed a theory that the Ozarks were a useful bogeyman for the brutal regimes. Death and deprivation could always be blamed on “terrorists” in the Ozarks, or the other enclaves scattered around what had been North America.
    Had the Free Territory been on the verge of becoming a real threat? A threat that had to be eliminated?
    Did the Kurians know about his Quickwood?
    No. No; if they had, the Bern Woods ambush would have been carried out by swarms of Reapers, not Quisling red-hands.
    Valentine reached into his tunic and put his hand around the little leather pouch hanging from a string about his neck. He felt the peanut-sized seeds of the Quickwood trees, given to him by the Onceler on Haiti, jumbled together with Mali Carrasca’s mahjong pieces. Had his mission on the old Thunderbolt not been so long delayed—first in New Orleans before the voyage and then later among the islands of the Caribbean—he would have gotten back to the Free Territory with a weapon that might have made a difference. Quickwood was lethal to the Reapers. The wood was a biological silver-bullet against the Frankensteinish death machines, aura-transmitting puppets of their Kurian lords.
    Southern Command gone . Better than a hundred thousand men under arms—counting militias—defeated and apparently scattered or destroyed.
    Regrets filled his stomach, writhed in there, like a cluster of wintering rattlesnakes clinging together in a ball. How much did the delay in Jamaica while the Thunderbolt was being repaired cost Southern Command? He could have pushed harder. He could have driven the chief away from his girlfriend; stood at the dry dock day and night, hurrying the work along. Instead he made love to Malia, rode horses across the green Jamaican fields, and played mahjong with her and her father. Malia . . .
    Another if, another snake stirred and bit and he locked his teeth at the inner pain. Perhaps if he hadn’t had his mind on the message from Mali about her pregnancy— I’m going to be a father , he reminded himself. He shoved the thought aside again as though it were a crime he hated to remember; he should have paid more attention to events after crossing back into what he thought was Free Territory, asked more questions, gotten to a radio. He might have avoided the ambush. . . .
    His thoughts were turning in a frustrating circle again. He found he was on the verge of biting the back of his hand like an actor he’d once watched portraying a madman in a New Orleans stage melodrama. He was a fugitive, responsible for a single wagon rather than a train, running for his life with a handful of poorly armed refugees instead of the hundreds who had crossed Texas with him.
    But he still had to see his assignment through. While he had never seen the plans, in his days as a Wolf he had been told that contingencies had been drawn up against the eventuality of a successful invasion. Southern Command had stores of weapons, food and medicines in the Boston Mountains, some the most rugged of the Ozarks. It didn’t amount to anything other than a hope, but if some vestige of Southern Command existed, it was his duty to get the Quickwood into its hands.
    There were obstacles beyond the Kurians. Getting north across the Arkansas River would be difficult. He had his shattered marines, a family with a pregnant woman, a Texas teamster and a Quisling he couldn’t be sure of—and the precious wagonload of Quickwood. They were too many to move quietly and too few to be able to fight their way through even a picket line. He didn’t know whether luck had gotten them this far into the Ouachitas or just Kurian nonchalance. The mountains were empty, almost strangely so; they had cut a few trails of large numbers of men, but only on old roads. If the Free Territory had fallen, he would expect the mountains to be thick with refugees: old Guard outfits, bands of Wolves, or just men determined to get their families