"That came later. G.o.d, 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 n.a.z.i movies. Creatures from outer s.p.a.ce.

Turned out the truth was even weirder than the rumors, of course.

"Seems to me we were trying to make for this Mount Omega-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 Mount Omega was. And then we came across the Padre.

"The Padre was working for someone named Rho. Not that he'd given up on Holy Mother Church, 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 s.h.i.t 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 Round Spring Cave."

"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. "d.a.m.n, 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 a.s.s 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 ma.s.saging 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 h.e.l.luva 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 a.s.s, 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-a.s.s. 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 sh.e.l.l on its back, began to cover the rising moon.

"I think he'd take a bullet for you though, Jess."

"d.a.m.n 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 Round Spring Cave. It was a road-hardened group that was welcomed by the officers in charge of training new blood in the Ozark Free Territory.

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 cl.u.s.ter 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 cla.s.s. 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 ma.s.ses 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.