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The soldiers fresh from the Dallas battlefield feel the same way. Fresh food, sunshine, and sleep are all that are required for blissful, if not purring, contentment.

* * * *

The attenuated Razors' brief period of excited anticipation, carried since getting off the Dallas train and hearing about their billet, ended as soon as they saw the "hotel."

Even in its heyday no one would have called the roadside Accolade Inn worthy of a special trip. The subsequent years had not been kind to the blue-and-white block, four stories of stucco-sided accommodations thick with kudzu and bird droppings. Someone had put in screens and plywood doors, and each room's toilet worked, though the sink fixtures were still in the process of retrofit, having been stripped and not replaced. Neat cots, six to a room, sat against water-stained walls.

"Not bad," a goateed Razor said when Valentine heard him test the John's flush after washing his hands in the toilet tank. "Better than the sisters have at home."

Sadly, the attenuated regiment fit in the hotel with beds to spare. A third of their number were dead or in either a Fort Worth or Texarkana hospital.

The latter was Valentine's first stop after getting the men to the hotel. A First Response Charity tambourine-and-saxophone duo just outside the hospital door accepted a few crumpled pieces of Southern Command scrip with the usual "God Blesses you."

"Continually," Valentine agreed, though over the past year it had been a decidedly mixed blessing. The pair stood a little straighter in their orange-and-white uniforms and reached for pamphlets, but Valentine passed on and into the green-peppermint tiles of the hospital.

He made it a point to visit every man of his command; the routine and their requests were so grimly regular that he began entering with a tumbler of ice-he made a mental note to steal and fill a trashcan with ice before heading back to the Accolade- to spare himself the inevitable back-and-forth trip. But his mind wasn't at ease until he visited the last name on his list, Captain William Post.

Visiting hours were over by the time he made it to the breezy top floor, where Post shared a room with a blinded artillery officer.

"Well, just remember to be quiet," the head nurse said when Valentine showed his ID and signed in on the surgery-recovery floor. Dark crests like bruises hung beneath her eyes.

"Tell it to the FIRCs downstairs," Valentine said, as they started up again with the umpteenth rendition of "Onward Christian Soldiers," one of their supply of three hymns.

Post looked horrible. His cheeks had shrunken in, and the nurse had done a poor job shaving him. A little tent stood over the stump of his left leg and a tube ran from the region of his appendix to a red-filled bottle on the floor. A bottle on a hook attached to the bed dripped clear liquid into a tube in his arm, as though to balance output with input. Post's eyes were bright and alert, though.

His friend even managed a wink when Valentine rattled the plastic, metered hospital tumbler full of ice.

"How's it going?" Valentine asked in a small voice, as if to emphasize the words' inadequacy.

"They got the shrapnel out. Some small intestine came with it. So they say." Post took his time speaking. "No infection." He took a breath. "No infection. That was the real worry."

"God blesses you," the FIRCs chorused downstairs. Valentine agreed again, this time with more enthusiasm.

"You know what? They pulled maggots out of my eyes," Post's roommate said, as though it were the funniest thing to ever happen to anyone. "Got to hand it to flies-they go to work right away. I wasn't laying in the pit but three hours before the medics found me. Flies beat 'em."

"He'll be out tomorrow," Post said quietly, as though he had to apologize for the interruption.

"How much leg is left?" Valentine asked.

"Midthigh," Post said. "At first I thought it was a raw deal. Then I decided the shrapnel could have gone six inches higher and to the right. It's all perspective."

"We'll make a good pair, limping up and down the tent lines," Valentine said.

"You got to admire maggots," the man in the next bed said. "They know they only got one thing to do and they do it."

"I think I'll be spending the rest of the war in the first-class cabin," Post said, using old Coastal Marine slang for a retirement on a wound pension. "I've got to be careful about my diet now. So they say. There's a leaflet around here somewhere."

"Anything I can do for you?"

Later on Valentine spent hours that accumulated into days and weeks thinking back on his offer, and the strange turns his life took from the moment he said the phrase. He made the offer in earnest. If Post had asked him to go back to Louisiana and get a case of Hickory Pit barbecue sauce, he would have done his best to bring back the distinctive blend.

"Get my green duffel from under the bed," Post said.

There were only two items under the wheeled cot, a scuffed service pack and the oversized green duffel. Each had at least three kinds of tagging on it.

Valentine pulled up the bag, wondering.

"There's a leather case inside, little gold fittings."


Tags: E.E. Knight Vampire Earth Fantasy