Page 88 of Choice of the Cat (Vampire Earth 2)
They cut a few trails of Wolf patrols, but these grew more and more rare as they approached the old Kansas City-St. Louis corridor. If there was a danger point on the first leg of their journey, this was it. They took turns leading the mule, with one of the pair on point a hundred yards ahead, looking and listening, and the other guiding the mule. As Valentine peered down onto the area around the old interstate that the Grogs frequented, the mule decided to bellow into the night. He swore he'd dine on a mule steak for breakfast. Either nothing heard the animal, or whatever did hear it did not want to bother to investigate the source. In any case, they crossed the corridor without seeing anything but tire tracks and footprints.
Valentine was on point when he scented them. Three Grogs, sleeping upright back to back like Buddhist statues, rested on a thickly forested knoll.
He drew his sword and waved Duvalier forward.
"Pistols or blades?" he whispered.
"Neither."
"They're snoring."
"Of course we could kill them. But ten would come looking for them. You're good; we would probably kill those, too. But then a hundred would close in from either side."
"In the Wolves-"
"Don't ever want to hear that again. You're a Cat now, and it's all about the mission. Killing a Grog patrol has nothing to do with that."
By dawn they were miles off the corridor and pushing northwest. The land began to flatten out with the beginning of the Great Plains. They supplemented their dwindling supplies with, and fed the animals on, the wild corn and beans common to the area. They set small game snares on likely ground, two or three every morning, and it was a rare day when they could not come away with at least one animal for the stew pot. Even if it was only a wild rat.
Valentine and Duvalier began to know each other's minds. They approached abandoned buildings communicating through hand gestures and learned to rely on each other more and more as the days passed. When Duvalier spent a day in the cramped agony of dysentery-she would devour meats the new Cat wouldn't even touch-Valentine gathered a shirt full of elm bark and poured boiling water over the strips, then picked out the floating parts once it had cooled. He made her drink the infusion three times over the course of a day, and the symptoms subsided.
They released the mule and horses at the Missouri River. Valentine gave the mule its freedom with a kind of sadness; he would miss their combative companion. Like parents with a rebellious child, dealing with the bloody-minded beast together cemented the relationship between the two Cats. They left the beasts grazing in a grassy field thick with white clover-heads, shouldered their newly heavy packs, and crossed into the Gulag.
Southeastern Nebraska, July: The Great Plains Gulag produces the wheat and corn of the Kurian Order. Collective farming settlements, managed under discipline that would make Stalin envious, dot the flat expanses of the Plains. Good farmland is divided into roughly fifty-mile-diameter regions from the main railheads with their towering grain elevators. At the center of the circle, like the spider in the middle of its web, is the well-guarded fortress of the local Kurian Lord. His eyes and ears and appetites are in his Reapers. The Reapers pass the Master's orders to the Marshals and Managers below them, making sure they attend to duty with the devotion expected of ones absolved from any chance of providing auric fodder for the Kurian Overlord.
The trade in this part of the country is a tragic exchange. Boxcars full of grain and corn leave the Gulag to feed the urban population elsewhere and return with a few dozen assorted captives, criminals, and disposables as payment. The Marshals then unload the unfortunates from the boxcars and route the prisoners to their doom with the knowledge that each unknown fed to the hungry Kurian Lord means one less friend or neighbor selected and sacrificed in the dead of night. Rumor has it that in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Seattle there are trading pits, run with the same frantic energy of the Old World, and devoted to buying and selling wheat, corn, soy, barley, and legumes with human lives. The trades are administered and run by the accountants and dealers for their Kurian Lords, seeking the best deal in living bodies per ton in what might be called a futures market for those who have no future.
Lincoln, formerly the capital of Nebraska, is a good example of the Kurian Order in the Gulag. The Dark Lord lives, appropriately enough, in the fourteen-story stone tower that looms over the reduced city skyline. Its solid construction, commanding view, and numerous carvings and statues appeal to the megalomaniac temperament within. Though one valuable statue from the pre-Kur days is missing: the Daniel Chester French study of a pensive, standing Lincoln. Some say that the Kur destroyed it as they did the larger, more famous seated one at the memorial in Washington, D.C, but others maintain it was spirited out of the city and now resides in one of the Western Freeholds, a hidden icon of liberty.
The people within his realm call the Kurian Lord "Number One," and nothing gets the local Quislings' attention like someone walking in a room and announcing, "Orders from Number One." Just across from the dreaded tower is the old City-County Building, now just referred to as the Hold. The local Marshals are quartered here, and the ample prison space is the last stop for those on the way to the Reapers. The city is now home to artisans and technicians in the employ of the Kurian Order, as well as being a main depot of the Troop. Their armored cars and trucks are maintained in a huge garage, once the Pershing Auditorium. The Regional Director, a Quisling in charge of the thick belts of farmland within the Kurian's realm, lives (at the pleasure of Number One) in the Colonial-Georgian governors mansion. The house has a sad history: assassination and suicide, as well as the occasional Reaper-led housecleaning, have plagued the series of Regional Directors and their families. The suicides especially drive the Kurian to distraction-he sees it as a tragic waste of aura.
The Lincoln Lord has six Reapers. One or two are usually at the Capitol Tower serving as bodyguards and mouthpieces. Another is circulating in the city, checking up on the doings in Lincoln, and another will almost always be on tour in the farmland with a dreaded retinue of Marshals, spreading fear wherever he goes. Finally two more hunt in the unclaimed buffer zone between the Kurian principalities, looking for threats to the realm and feeding their lord with drifters, runaways, and the occasional sleeping-on-duty Trooper.
"Why'd it do that?" Valentine asked, peering through the empty window of the parked patrol car.
It was a ridiculous-looking vehicle, an old police cruiser on a jacked-up suspension, sitting on fat on-and-off-road performance tires and missing its trunk hood. Camouflage greens and browns replaced the old state-trooper markings.
"Haven't you ever seen a Reaper hole?" Duvalier said, looking at the grisly scene within. Bronze-colored flies clustered around a ragged wound. "They poke their tongues in right above the collarbone. Pretty good chance at hitting the heart or a big blood vessel."
"This just happened." Valentine's hair was standing on end from something other than cold river water hitting his nethers. The Reaper must have been just over the hill when they crossed.
"Lucky for us he was here." Duvalier grabbed a key ring off the body's belt. "Crap-no codes."
"But what I meant was, why would a Reaper take out one of his own militia?"
Duvalier touched the corpse. "Not quite cold. Either it was a Reaper from down Kansas way poaching-which is pretty unlikely, they might grab some farm boy but not a soldier-or the Hood caught him sleeping on the job."
"Kurian justice is efficient, I'll give them that."
"Solves one problem. You were talking about scrounging a uniform. Here's your chance."
Valentine ignored her buttocks as best as he could as she rooted in the car through the window.
"The vest you mean? We'll have to clean it. We'd also better take the whole body."
"Why, you want to give him a Christian burial?" She summoned a tongue full of spittle and let it drop on the Trooper's forehead.
"No, they're going to be a little suspicious if they find a body missing a vest and identity papers."
