"If you don't mind." She turned and checked a clipboard again.
Valentine hated to do it, but he took out the horse tranquilizer. With one quick step, he got behind her and jammed it into her neck. He pulled her down, one hand on her mouth, and waited until her legs quit kicking.
"You certainly got her cooperation," Gail said.
"Let's not have any attitude tonight, okay, Gail?" Valentine asked as he pulled the nurse into a file room. He found a length of surgical tubing and tied the door shut.
Gail offered a wheeeee as he raced her down the hall to the elevator. On the ride down he stripped off his scrubs.
"I've never been here before," Gail observed as they entered the basement corridor. Ahn-Kha helped her get dressed. "Oh, pretty," she remarked, as Valentine slipped a feathered mask on her.
They walked her out to the Lincoln, Ahn-Kha half carrying her across the road. The Golden One climbed in the back cargo area where his disassembled puddler waited, along with Valentine's weapons.
"Keep her quiet back there, and out of sight," Valentine said.
He drove the Lincoln around the building perimeter to the veterinary office. "Glad you remembered the heavy coat," Valentine said as Dr. Boothe slipped into the passenger seat.
"You give good instruction. Is this Paoli's rig?"
"I like to make an exit," Valentine said.
Pepsa's eyes widened as she saw Ahn-Kha in back.
Valentine passed out masks to Dr. Boothe and Pepsa. "Just on our way to a party, okay? Once we're past the gate, you'll be driving."
As they rolled around the hospital the headlights illuminated a figure at the roadside in harsh black and white, gleam and shadow. A pale face, exaggerated and immobile as a theatrical mask, held them like a spotlight.
A Reaper.
Boothe sucked breath in through her teeth. Valentine's heart gave a triple thump. The Reaper could upend the Lincoln as easily as it might lift a wheelbarrow. Then what chance would they have, still within Xanadu's walls. If it moved he'd have to-
But it didn't.
After they passed it crossed the road behind them. How could it not know they had an expectant mother inside the SUV? Of all forms of lifesign, a pregnant woman's was the strongest, and Valentine had one experience involving a Kurian and an infant's lifesign that he'd rather die than repeat. Perhaps the Kurian animating it was sick, or sated, or . . . someone was letting them go.
The gate warden hardly looked at them as they followed a bus full of Halloween partygoers out of Xanadu. Ahn-Kha lay flat in the back cargo space, holding down Gail Foster. "Have a good time, Dr. Paoli," the sergeant said. Valentine nodded and Boothe waved in return.
Pepsa tapped her hands against the leather seats as Valentine pulled away from the gate. "We've done it!" Boothe said.
"We've done it, alright," Valentine demurred. "Now what are they going to do about it?"
u, October: Summer lingered that year between the Great hakes and the Appalachians. In eastern Russia and Mongolia the bitter winter of '72 came hard and fast, leading to starvation in the Permafrost Freehold. In the Aztlan Southwest El Nino blew hot, making a certain group of aerial daredevils licking their wounds in the desert outside Phoenix ration water. Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas drowned under torrential tropical storms hurtling out of the mid-Atlantic one after another, ushering in what came to be known as the mud fall.
Ohio could not have been more idyllic, with cloudless days reaching into the midseventies and cool nights in the high fifties, perfect weather for sleeping under a light blanket. There was plenty of time for apple picking and blueberry gathering, and the turkeys had grown extra large in that year of plenty.
David Valentine always remembered that first fall of his exile as a grim, disturbing business under a kindly sky. Perhaps if he'd been lazier, or argumentative, or a thief, he and Ahn-Kha would have been thrown out of Xanadu with the Golden One's sutures still weeping. But after his first day in the fields he found the bio warfare scare story implausible, and became determined to find out what lay behind the neatly tuck-pointed facade of those reddish bricks.
* * * *
The job offer didn't come as much of a surprise. It happened over dinner in the "field house"-a small apartment building that reminded Valentine of Price's motel, essentially a line of tiny rooms, two sharing one bath, that housed the lowest of the low of Xanadu's laborers: the "hands."
Up one step from the hands were the service workers, who mixed with the hands at their shared recreation center just behind the hospital. The fixtures made Valentine think it had originally been built to be a large-vehicle garage, but now it held Ping-Pong tables, a video screen and library (full of dull-as-distilled-water New Universal Church productions), and a jukebox ("Authentic Vintage MCDs").
The service workers performed cafeteria and janitorial duties inside the main buildings. Valentine learned his first night there that they expected the hands to do the same for them. He learned how to cook "factory food,"-washtub-sized trays of pastas, vegetables, and sweet puddings. Every other night there was meat from the Xanadu livestock. Beef predominated, which Valentine found remarkable. Even during his hitch as a Coastal Marine he'd only been fed chicken; beef was saved for feasts before and after a cruise.
A step above the service workers was the security. There weren't many of them, considering the evident importance of the facility. Enough to man the two gates (there was a smaller one to the east) and the towers, and to keep guard at all the main building doors. Valentine could have stormed the place with a single company of Wolves, had he been able to get the company that deep into the Kurian Zone.
And made it past the cordon of Reapers.