"Station 46 had a good larder. Sissy emptied it."
"Wonder what happened to that tall guard," Post said. "He didn't seem a bad sort."
"Not our problem."
"I know that. Can't help thinking about the poor bastard, though. I spent more time under them than you did. The choices are difficult. A lot of them don't cooperate with the regime as willingly as you think. Every other man's got a blind eye that he turns if he can get away with it."
"Yes. Those fellows weren't frontline material." Valentine stared off into the snowfall. "Where do you suppose their good soldiers are?"
"I think there's still fighting here and there."
"We've got one load of Quickwood left. We should try to find it."
Post nodded. "The men can't believe you went back for them, by the way."
"I owed them as much. Stupid of me to drop my guard, just because we were back in what I thought was the Free Territory. The ambush was my fault."
"Done with."
Valentine let it lie. He looked through the narrow windows of the house at the celebrating men. They weren't a fighting force anymore, and wouldn't be for a long time. They were survivors, happy to be warm, fed and resting.
"How's the radio holding up?"
His lieutenant had found a portable radio back at Station 46. "The Grogs love charging it up with the hand crank. I think they like to watch the lights come on. Lots of coded transmissions, or just operators BSing. I've gotten more information out of M'Daw."
"What does he say?"
"The Kurians only sorta run these lands; they're in the hands of a big Quisling Somebody named Consul Solon. Even M'Daw had heard of him. The rest I don't have facts about."
"He know anything about Mountain Home?" Valentine asked. The former capital of the Ozark Free Territory was tucked into the mountains for a reason.
"The president is gone. Don't know if he's dead or hiding. Smalls said the Kurians passed around a rumor mat he joined up with tuem, but he doesn't believe it."
"Can't see Pawls as a turncoat," Valentine said.
"You ever meet him?"
"No. He signed my promotion. Used to be an engineer. He got famous before I even came to the Ozarks, the last time the Kurians let loose a virus. I remember he was lieutenant governor when I came here in '62. He became governor in '65 while I was in Wisconsin."
"Maybe he made a deal. Happened before," Post said. "Like the siege at Jacksonville when I was little."
"I doubt a man who lost his kids to the ravies virus would take to cooperating." Valentine tossed the gnawed pork chop bone to the ground. One of the horses sniffed at it and snorted.
"You coming in for dessert?"
"I'll sit outside a bit. I like the snow. We always had a couple feet by Christmas in the Boundary Waters. Kills the sound, makes everything quiet. I like the peace."
Post shuddered. "You can keep it." His old lieutenant returned to the house.
The Free Territory gone. It was too big an event to get his thoughts around just yet.
The idea of the resourceful, hardworking people having succumbed to the Kurians after all this time was tragic on such a scale that it numbed him. His father had fought to establish this land; Gabriella Cho had died to defend it, hardly knowing the names of thirty of its inhabitants. The risks he ran, his innumerable sins against God and conscience, all were in defense of these hills and mountains-or, more properly, the families living among them.
He kept coming back to the kids. He'd spent enough time on both sides of the unmarked border to know where he was just by a glance at the children. They played differently in the Free Territory, laughed and made faces at soldiers passing through-though they tended to be on the scrawny side. Their better-fed cousins in the plains or on the half-flooded streets of New Orleans or in the cow barns of Wisconsin startled easily and watched strangers, especially those with guns or enclosed vehicles, with anxious eyes.
Valentine preferred laughter and the occasional raspberry. The thought of Hank, turned into one of those painfully quiet adolescents...
All fled, all gone, so lift me on the pyre...