Fall with Honor (Vampire Earth #7) - Page 5
The wilderness of eastern Kentucky, New Years Eve, the Fifty-fourth Year of the Kurian Order: With the sun an orange-and-purple bruise along the western skyline, harpy country wakes up.
There's something odd about this particular Grog territory. Bird and animal life seems more furtive, the insects tougher and more numerous-even in the winter chill big black flies drone by like thrown pebbles. The kudzu on old utility poles and lines grows thick on every sunstruck prominence in a twisted-tendril game of king of the hill that dares you to contest its ownership. Thicker stands of wood have a bat-cave smell with nothing thriving in the shade but thistle and thorn and tree-hugging fungus looking like suppurating wounds.
The few highways cutting through harpy lands are barely open, the vegetation kept back only by big machines clawing through the potholed roads. The devastation from the New Madrid quake has never been repaired. Whole communities are nothing but heaps of rubble with a vine-covered wall or chimney still standing.
Binoculars just made the warehouse and truck yard look worse. In the dark from a distance, Valentine could see the armory was only three buildings, two of cinder block linked by a nicer brick office forming an uneven U lit at the doors by tired bulbs that looked like they wanted to surrender to the night. With the aid of the binoculars, Valentine's night eyes picked out peeling paint, the tires and blocks holding down plastic sheeting on the roofs, and the plywood nailed over the windows.
Patel and Hoboken, the youngest of Patel's Shepherds, looked at it with him.
The ad-hoc raid had come together as though it were a natural, expected event, like a birth.
When Valentine proposed the operation at a scheduled meeting, he met initial resistance in the form of a frown and a shake of Colonel Seng's head, but Moytana and the Bear lieutenant Gamecock both came to assistance, claiming that their men were fretting, wanting either leave or an operation. They could have both by joining in the raid, as Hunters back from the KZ traditionally enjoyed at least a three-day pass, if not a twenty-one, in Southern Command's vernacular.
Valentine argued that the rest of the brigade might be reassured by a quick successful strike into the Kurian Zone and a return across the Mississippi, and Seng gave his approval.
Valentine turned in his written plan that very evening and started on the orders for the company the next morning.
As Rand organized transport, Valentine received an unexpected visitor. The Bear lieutenant knocked on the open door of the command shack. Dust fell from the ceiling and the spiders hunkered down in their webs.
"Morning, Major," Gamecock said. He had thick hair on the arms projecting from his sleeveless shirt, and wore the first legworm leather pants Valentine had seen since he lost his rig in Pacific Command. Most officers in Southern Command knew better than to lecture Bears on proper attire. He had an ear of roasted corn in hand and a flour sack over his shoulder. He gave Valentine a casual salute with the roasted ear as he looked around the command shack. "Okay to talk about the op?"
"In here," Valentine said. The command shack had a divider now, so Valentine enjoyed the luxury and status of a knothole-windowed office.
They went into the back room.
Gamecock finished off the roasted ear and tossed it in the waste-basket. The basket wobbled briefly. "Sorry about that, suh. Had to eat breakfast on foot this morning. This scheme of yours: You're going to be a Quisling Grog officer."
"Yes," Valentine said.
He tossed the flour sack on Valentine's table-desk. "I was going to trade this to a sorry excuse of a Guard captain for a case of Canadian scotch, but it's turning my stomach to see the guy who held at Big Rock walking around with an old single shot militia rifle.
"Go on, suh," Gamecock said. "Got it off a Quisling lieutenant colonel with matching tooling on his belt, hat, and boots. Even dead, he looked like a show-night fag but he knew his hardware."
Valentine extracted a gleaming submachine gun and a screw-on tube as long as the gun itself. It had odd lines; the barrel was pitched on a bias different from the frame. He picked it up and extended the handle just under the muzzle.
"That's an Atlanta buzzsaw," Gamecock said. "Model 18 Select entry model. Limited production run, elites and officers only. That cockeyed barrel's there for a purpose. The bolt's at an angle so recoil keeps the muzzle from climbing off target. Pretty accurate one handed, even on full auto. No selector switch-you can tap them out single shot with light pulls. Goin'
over to full auto, you just pull the trigger all the way. She'll group under a meter at a hundred paces. That silencer there is something I rigged."
Valentine looked at the magazines-two short and four long-and the twenty- and forty-round boxes. "Nine millimeter Parabellum."
"I know-a little light for stopping a Reaper in full charge," Gamecock said. "I threw in some boxes of silverpoints. Team Fumarole's had good results with them. They don't flatten out against Reaper cloth so much."
"I don't suppose you've got any Quickwood bullets."
"We got a box of 7.62 for the whole team, suh. One lousy box. Production problems. Wish they'd tell me where the trees were. I'd make myself some friggin' stakes."
"I'll show you one personally when we get back. Assuming some farmer hasn't cut it down for tomato stakes. By the way, where's the accent from?"
"South Carolina born. First name's Scottie, suh."
"Val will do from now on, when things are less formal. Grateful to you, Scottie."
"Grateful to you, suh. My boys are ready to kill each other. Only three things will keep a Bear quiet if there's no fighting going on: sleeping, eating, and . . . well-"
"Screwing," Valentine finished. "Lieutenant Nail in the old Razors put it a little more colorfully."
"Any case, suh, we've all put on ten pounds and everyone's caught up on sack time. I got all I can do to keep the women and chickens round here safe."
Pizzaro at Rally Base greased the entire operation, even setting up an escort by a contingent of the "Skeeter Fleet," Southern Command's own force of low-draft vessels that were employed in riverine combat. The SF's airboats and fast motorboats weren't a match for the bigger, cannon-mounted craft of the Quisling river patrol, but they could cause enough trouble somewhere else to draw off the forces guarding one set of loops in the twisting Mississippi.
Valentine practiced entry drills with the Bears and ran short patrols with the Wolves, always taking a few of the company with him. It did a little for their confidence and it was good to see the men getting over some of their wariness when it came to the Bears. Most of the men thought Bears would just as soon kill a man as look at him, and the day might come when members of the company would have to guide a Bear team to a target.
Valentine expensed three hundred rounds training with the new gun while Bee worked on sawing off the barrels and smoothing down the stocks on the old shotguns she'd been converting to pistol grip. Valentine practiced changing magazines until he could do it without thinking about it. Then he cleaned the weapon and test fired a couple more rounds to make sure he didn't foul something up.
The Bears and most of the Wolves were employed in a strike at a collection of river patrol docks and blockhouses on Island Ten, while a short platoon of Valentine's company, escorted by a striking team of Wolves, made for the armory. The rest of his command remained at either side of the Mississippi under Rand, blowing up rubber boats and improvised rafts called "Ping-Pong ball miracles" in preparation for the trip back.
The trip across and the movement to the armory had gone off well, with the Skeeter Fleet bringing them across just before dawn on New Year's Eve, their camouflage-painted twin-outboard boats growling into the muddy Mississippi waters like dogs giving the angry warning that comes before the leap.
Valentine's picked team of twenty, Bee, and the Wolves paralleled the east-west highway heading into Mayfield, Kentucky, and then turned north into the Grog country, the Wolves out front and behind and flanking, continually restoring contact like sheepdogs with a flock.
They took advantage of a chilling rain to make good time down the road, which had deteriorated into a rutted trail. According to Rollings no one "who counted" lived up this way, in a region of low, sandy hills and scrub forest. River patrol supply trucks and Grog recruiters were all that used the roads meeting at the armory.
They rested, ate, and observed while the skies cleared and the sun went down. Valentine taped a thin commando dagger to his forearm-it never hurt to have something in reserve.
After giving everyone inside a chance to get deep into REM sleep, Valentine decided the time was ripe.
He, Rollings, and Bee approached from the east down the tree-throttled road, three Wolves trailing through cover behind. Valentine carried his 18 Select in a battered leather courier pouch filled with a meaningless assortment of captured paperwork. Valentine smelled harpies on the cold wind blowing down from the northwest.
As they approached the gate, he slipped on the brass ring he'd won in Seattle. He didn't like to wear the thing.
"No Kurian towers around here, right?" he asked Rollings, nervous as he felt the warmth of the ring when it contacted his skin.
The armory had old-fashioned bars around it, linking cement columns. Valentine wondered if something more ostentatious had once stood on the other side of the fence. This was like garlanding a turd.
"No, sir. Well, none that I know about. Never went into the harpy woods, though, or met any Reapers on the river road that way. Is that what I think it is, Major?"
"Yes."
"You take it off a-"
"It's a long story."
A dog barked as they approached, a mud-splattered, hungry-looking thing that seemed to be a mix of a German shepherd and a long-haired camel. It jumped atop its shelter to better sound the alarm.
Behind its house was a line of trucks and a wrecker. The trucks looked rusted and worn, though they had hedge-cutting blades fixed below the front bumper and iron bars welded across the windshield and windows.
Valentine approached the buzz box on the post outside the gate and opened the dirty glass door covering the buttons.
"Anything here indicate there's more men here than usual?" Valentine asked.
"No, sir."
Rollings nodded and Valentine hit the button marked "call."
When Valentine didn't get a response in ten seconds, he pressed again, long and hard, the way an impatient Quisling ringwearer would when he wasn't getting service to his liking.
It took a full minute for a crackly voice to answer.
"Yes?" the voice crackled through the tarnished, oil-smeared speaker.
"This is Colonel Sanity Marks, Combat Tech Service. I've got a wiring team broken down three miles west of here and I need transport. I'll require one of your trucks and a motorcycle for at least forty-eight hours."
"Tell it to the Coastal Marines, sapper."
Valentine raised his eyebrows to Rollings.
"Is Sergeant Nelson in there?" Rollings said.
"Who wants to know?"
"Tell him it's Rollings, late of the River Road Light. This colonel is steamed, I shit you not, and he's got a brass ring and a crapped-out truck full of guys with computers and fiberoptic line."
"Someone will be out in a moment."
Valentine snapped: "I had a harpy swoop overhead not five minutes ago. Get out here before the damn thing comes back and shits on me. I hate those fucking things."
A corporal and a private appeared, looking like they'd just yanked their uniform shirts off of hangers: The shoulders were riding ridged and high.
"Sir," the corporal said. "I'm going to need to see some orders and identification."
Valentine shoved his ring fist through the bars. "I've got a broken-down truck and a wiring team that's six hours late now. Get us the hell inside."
The corporal bussed the ring with his lips. Valentine had made the obeisance often enough during his sojourn as a Coastal Marine in the Gulf. On a ring belonging to the proper wearer, it gave off a slight tingle.
"Not the Grog," the corporal protested.
If he folded once, he'd fold again. Valentine turned his gaze to the silent armsman.
"Private, you want to speed things up for me? You can have this corporal's stripes. I think by the time I've written my evaluation, he won't need them anymore."
"Sir, no disrespect, but I'll get into more trouble by not following procedures than you could ever bring down."
"I wonder. You know anything about distributed secure networks?"
"Uh-no, sir."
Which was just as well. Valentine didn't know anything about it either. The corporal silently allowed the group inside.
uGas up two trucks. Put batteries in or whatever you have to do to get them going."
"Thought you said-"
"I'm going to listen to the engines of both," Valentine said. "I'll take the truck that sounds healthier."
Valentine didn't wait for an answer and headed toward the main office door between the two bigger buildings. Bee trailed behind.
He opened the door and wiped his feet. Two men in undershirts were lacing boots up.
There was a duty desk, a mail sorter, and a long bureau with an electric coffeepot and pieces of weaponry, lighting, and com gear wearing yellow toe tags atop it beneath silvery letters reading:
Happy New Year
-Look Alive In 'Fifty-Five
"Where's Sergeant Nelson?"
"Celebrating in Paclucah, sir."
"They're having fireworks," the other added, gaping at Bee. She sniffed the warm, stale air.
Valentine smelled a grilled cheese sandwich and coffee.
"Rollings!" Valentine called over his shoulder. He used the opportunity to scan the little office. There was a sort of wooden loft above with a water tank and boxes of supplies. He had a moment's startle-a shadow above pointed at him with an accusing finger. . . .
It turned out to be a mannequin of a nude female with a feather boa.
"Right here, Major."
Valentine thought quickly. "That's 'Colonel,' son. I'm not your old CO. You keep forgetting."
"Sorry, Colonel."
"You know any of these fellas? Who's in charge?"
"That would be me," a gruff voice came from the doorway to what looked like a residence room. A sergeant with a beer gut partially covering a pistol belt stood in the doorway. "What's the emergency, Colonel?"
"Worse than you know, Sergeant," Valentine said. He reached into his attache and began extracting paperwork and placing it on the duty desk. He took out the gun and pointed it at the NCO.
"I'm sorry to inform you all that you're my prisoners. Rollings, that's a nice looking .45 the sergeant has on his belt. Relive him of it."
Bee stiffened and drew her own shotguns from her waistband. "Watch the door, Bee.
Door," Valentine said.
"Turn your backs, gentlemen, and place your hands on the back of your head, fingers interlaced. Kneel."
Valentine made sure they complied, listening for other sounds of life in the dark warehouse next door. Out in the motor yard, he heard a truck turn over. "Now, if you're cooperative for the next hour or so, you'll be taken prisoner and brought back to a Southern Command base. You'll be surprised how nice the day-release POW camps are. If you give us any trouble, I'll leave you tied here for the Reapers. Decision time."
Valentine called the other two in. They gaped at their comrades kneeling with faces to the wall.
"What's with all this?"
That was the kind of quality manpower that pulled duty on New Year's Eve. Only after Valentine prodded the corporal with his barrel did the Quisling realize what was going on.
He made them the same offer he did the others.
They cooperated.
Valentine snipped the telephone wires, hoping that if it activated a trouble alarm, there wouldn't be enough New Year's staff to investigate right away. He and set Rollings to work unscrewing the station's radio from the shelf at the com desk. They did a quick sweep of the building while the Wolves watched both ends of the road, and then started looking through the armory.
The river patrol had good gear, including rocket-propelled grenades that Corporal Glass looked over and selected. Valentine found a case of four Type 3s-that had been the weapon issued to his Razors by Solon, who'd evidently had a bigger budget than the river patrol. The small arms were a little disappointing, mostly cut-down versions of the venerable M16. On the other hand, there was a plentitude of small support machine guns that could be carried or fixed to a boat mount. Most of the weapons were packed in protective lubricant-it would take hours to clean them-so the platoon would have to get back with what they brought.
They ended up filling two truck trailers with boxes of weapons and ammunition and other assorted pieces of lethality, plus as much com gear and medicines as they could find. As Valentine and Patel supervised the loading, the assigned drivers checked the tires and tested the lights and horns on their vehicles.
The men rode in the beds of the camouflaged service trucks with the prisoners secured to floor bolts. They'd even liberated some walkie-talkies so the drivers could communicate with each other. Condensed and dehydrated foodstuffs and extra gear was piled in bags hanging off the back and strapped to the hoods.
They even took the dog. Valentine didn't mind; he liked dogs. Though it was heartbreaking if you had to eat them.
As they pulled out and bumped west, witch fingers of tree branches scratched the sides of the truck.
In the dark, with the roads potholed and washed out, they couldn't go much faster than a man could trot. Patel had the Wolves lope ahead and behind, scouting and checking for pursuit.
All that marked their departure was noise, and that only briefly. A siren started up from the armory as soon as they were out of sight.
"What you figure that signifies, Major?" the man at the wheel asked.
"We'll find out soon enough," Valentine said.
Valentine shifted the machine pistol to his lap and checked the soldier's rifle and the bandolier resting on the dash. He and this version of Southern Command's single shot breechloaders were old, conflicted friends dating back to his days in the Labor Regiment. It was a fine gun, accurate with stopping power sufficient to knock a Reaper off its feet, if you didn't mind having to reload every time you fired a round.
Valentine opened the glass panel between the cabin and the back of the truck.
"Someone ask our prisoners what that noise is," Valentine said over the truck's protesting suspension.
"Alarm, sir."
"Was there someone there they didn't tell us about?"
Valentine waited a moment while Patel asked a few questions.
"Could be a gargoyle, Major. They overfly the area all the time. One might have seen the trucks leave. Could be he flew down to investigate. Gargoyles are smarter than harpies."
They're also smart enough to guide in a few Reapers.
Valentine opened the truck door, checking that he wouldn't be swept off, or worse, by the branches ahead. He searched the night sky.
The glare of the following truck's headlights made it difficult to see.
"Kill the lights," Valentine said to his driver, dropping back into the cab.
"Pass back to the following truck: Kill the lights," Valentine said to Patel. Patel lifted a brand-new walkie-talkie from the armory and spoke into it.
With the lights out on the rear truck, Valentine tried again, duck-ing under a branch that snapped and snipped as it broke along the truck's side.
A shadow hung behind the trucks, following the road. A shadow that closed in on itself, thickening as it followed their vehicles.
Harpies. Dirty, flapping-
Valentine wondered what they were carrying, apart from ugly. He wondered if the theoretical gargoyle had sent them after the trucks. They had enough cunning to know something was wrong and that they'd be rewarded for stopping the trucks.
Fixated by the shadow, Valentine starting to pick out individual wings and short, skinny bowlegs. A branch slapped him out of his trance, and he ducked back into the cabin.
"Harpies," Valentine said. "Pass the world. Honk and bring the Wolves in."
He hated those snaggletoothed bastards. A sort of cold clarity took over as he stifled the urge to get one in his hands and dismember it like a well-cooked chicken.
"We could stop under thick trees, Major."
"No, that'll just give them more time to figure something out. And let them aim."
Valentine looked at the bungees holding the cargo on the roof. He detached a couple of the S hooks and fitted them on to his vest and belt. Testing his grip, he exited the cab, closed the truck door, and hooked another bungee to the bars covering the passenger window.
"Stop a sec and pass me up the gun and bandolier," Valentine said. "And try to keep to the left."
As the truck ground into motion again, Valentine now hanging on the outside with his foot on a fuel tank, he found that the side-view mirror protected him from the bigger branches. All it did for the smaller ones was bend them back to give them a little more energy for a swat.
The Wolf scouts returned and perched on the hood and front hedge cutter. At a turn Valentine saw the following truck also had Wolves atop the driver's cab.
"Pass the word: Wait until I shoot," Valentine ordered.
The shadow broke into individual forms as it neared. Valentine searched the flock for the bigger, longer-legged form of a gargoyle. The harpies darted and zigzagged as they flew; it was how their bodies kept aloft. He placed his foresight on one hurrying to get ahead of the trucks.
Its course was a crazy mix of ups and downs, backs and forths. . . . But between the frantic beats of the wings you could sometimes track them on a glide-
BLAM!
Valentine had been so used to firing guns equipped with flash suppressors he'd forgotten the white-yellow photoflash. And he'd forgotten just how hard you had to press into the stock to absorb the shock.
Valentine worked the lever and ejected the little thimble of the shell casing, his shoulder smarting with the old mule kick.
Missed.
The Wolf on the hood had a combat shotgun, a sensible weapon for brush fighting. He tracked one of harpies above and fired.
Valentine heard a high, inhuman scream.
Time to get down with the sickness.
The sickness. The shadow half. The monster.
Valentine had a few names for it, depending on his mood. He'd learned long ago that a part of him rejoiced in the death of his enemies and his own survival. Whether it was a character flaw or some piece of strange heritage passed down from his Bear father didn't matter. The awful exhilaration he felt when he killed, triumphed, made him wonder whether he wasn't even more deserving of destruction for the good of the world, like some rabid dog.
But for now the sickness had its uses.
Valentine, remembering his early years in the Wolves, made an effort to thank those left behind at the landings and hear their accounts.
He shouldered the gun. One was diving right at the truck. Its feet rubbed together and a plastic strip fell-it had armed some kind of grenade. BLAM!
Damn cranky gun.
Maybe he put a bullet through its wing and spoiled the dive. It flapped off to the left and dropped its explosive.
It detonated, orange and loud, in a stand of brush. Valentine wondered what the birds and critters residing in the undergrowth thought.
Don't get weird now, mate. Job at hand.
Valentine heard canvas tearing. The men in the bed of the truck were hacking off the truck-bed cover to better employ their guns.
Valentine aimed again, but a twiggy smack in the back of the head spoiled his shot.
"Four o'clock!"
A line of harpies were coming in, bright plastic grenade tabs fluttering as they pulled the arming pins. They were flapping hard, each bat form describing a crazy knuckleball course.
"There's a good straightaway ahead, sir," yelled the driver.
"Put on some speed," Valentine said.
He fired, and the men in the trucks fired, and when the orange ball of light cleared there was only one harpy left. It dropped the stick grenade on the road and flapped hard to gain altitude, but someone in the second truck brought it down.
Their luck was in. The device didn't go off.
Another line of harpies had gotten around the front.
"Twelve high!" the Wolf hanging off the brush cutter called.
Now the small, questing branches could whack him on the cheek and bridge of Valentine's nose. A good deal more painfully, as the truck had picked up speed.
He tasted his own blood and felt something sticky on his neck, but he didn't feel anything worse than a scratch or two.
The night smelled like blood, wet leaves, and rotten eggs.
Valentine reloaded as the harpies made their run. He could see their beady eyes reflecting red in the moonlight.
One of his soldiers in misty denim, a big man with bushy sideburns, let loose with a double-barrel, dropped the gun to someone below, and took up a pump action. Valentine aimed and fired. He watched his target plunge, falling loopily as a kite with a cut string, but suspected the man resting his aiming arm on the cab hood had downed the beastie.
The others dropped their explosives. Grenades bounced all over the road. The man hanging off the brush cutter disappeared into flash and smoke, but when they emerged again from the blasts he was still there, blackened and frazzled but evidently intact.
Valentine, with the thick fuzzy head and the muffled hearing of someone who'd been a little too near a blast, saw another harpy fall, brought down by the truck behind. The flock, perhaps not liking the punishment being handed out with little to show for it, turned and gathered to the east, doing a sort of whirling corkscrew aerial conference.
"Eyes on the road," Patel bellowed at the driver.
A pushed-over tree blocked the road.
The driver braked hard, and the truck jumped to a tune of squealing brakes. The Wolf on the front, evidently uninjured but stunned by the explosion, was thrown by the sudden braking, struck the trunk of the downed tree, and went heels-over-head onto the other side of the trunk.
Valentine, more or less secured by the bungees, lost nothing but his dignity as he saw himself swinging, holding on to the bars over the passenger window.
Patel was already out of the truck, running with a first aid kit.
Valentine saw a big, wide-winged shape flapping away low. He raised his gun, aimed, and fired at the big target.
The gargoyle lurched but kept flapping.
Valentine swore. The big, soft-nosed bullet should have brought it down. His old marksmanship trainer in the Labor Regiment had promised the kick in the shoulder was nothing to what the target experienced. He'd seen a round take a softball-sized chunk of flesh out of a wild pig. He must have just clipped it on a limb.
It disappeared behind a line of trees.
Valentine looked at the roadblock.
What kind of super-gargoyle could push over a tree? Nothing short of a Reaper could.
Valentine looked at the tangle of old, weatherworn roots. The tree had been downed some time ago and moved off the road. The gargoyle had simply moved it back. Still, an incredible display of strength. Their flying arms were supposed to be powerful.
Worse, the harpies were heartened by the stationary trucks. They formed a new shadow, and then an arrow, pointed straight at the delayed trucks.
"Get that tree out of the way," Valentine shouted.
The men piled out of the trucks while the other Wolf helped Patel with the injured man.
"Faster," Valentine urged. He raised himself up so he could shout to the truck behind.
"Second squad, deploy. Let's keep those bastards off us."
The men, with their varmint and bird guns mixed in with the militia rifles, spread out.
Valentine fired into the flying mass without picking out a target. Hitting with the wonky old rifle was purely a matter of chance.
"Watch each other's backs-there's more coming around from eight o'clock," Valentine shouted.
The rest began to pepper the harpies with careful shots. One pair, Rutherford and DuSable, shifted position to give better covering fire to the men working on clearing the fallen log.
Valentine made a note of it-the noise and confusion of gunfire short-circuited some and they forgot the bigger picture. A flier spun down; another followed intentionally, coming to its aid.
Perhaps they were a mated pair.
Valentine fired three more times quickly, and then jammed the gun. The ejector had torn off the heat-softened brass rim on the casing. He grabbed the hot barrel at the other end. The ornery weapon would be more lethal as a club anyway. Then he remembered his machine pistol.
He flipped open the stock and extended the foregrip. It did group tightly, and the harpies were closing.
The prisoners in the trucks began to yell. They'd been left handcuffed inside.
The harpies swooped over the vehicles, dropping grenades and plastic arming tabs.
Valentine watched a grenade bounce under the truck, realized that the same bungees that kept him secured to the passenger door were keeping him from jumping off-
All he could do was wait for it. He fired a burst at a harpy coming straight for the cab, watched with satisfaction as the bullets tore it into a blood-rain of gory pieces.
The grenade went off but didn't sound much louder than an overstuffed firecracker. Other explosions rocked the second truck.
Valentine brought down another harpy, who'd suddenly appeared from behind a tree as though he'd popped into existence just to aim a leg claw at Valentine's throat. He reloaded, but the sky had cleared. The harpies had had enough at last and the flock was keeping low.
The soldiers moved the obstacle and got on their way again.
The front truck was leaking coolant, and a couple of the mechanically minded did a bird-droppings-and-bubblegum fix that slowed the leak. They had to stop and refill with water.
They'd destroy the engine before recrossing the Mississippi anyway.
It got them