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"I took care of that, Val," Duvalier said. "You're Stu Jacksonville, a new pimp on the Gulf Coast. We know the area from our time as husband and wife, so there'll only be a minimal amount of bullshitting."
"You sure you want to play a whore?" Valentine asked.
"Not whore. Bodyguard. Comrade in arms."
"Gay caballero?" Valentine asked.
"Lesbian, if you want to get technical."
ower Mississippi, July: The river has reverted to feral since the cataclysm of 2022, a continent-crossing monster unleashed. The carefully sculpted and controlled banks of the twentieth and early twenty-first century are gone, or survive as tree-lined islands surrounded by some combination of marsh, lake, and river.
Even on the best and sunniest days, the Mississippi can only manage a rather lackluster blue between banks lined with opportunistic shell-bark hickory, willow, and river birch. It is more frequently a dull navy, muddy brown at the edges, striped in the center by wind and broken by swirls or flats created by snags, shallows, and sandbars. Below the Missouri and Ohio joins, the flooded river is sometimes three miles wide, and moves at a steady four miles an hour toward the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with it rich loads of silt-some insignificant fraction of which will be dredged up and placed into the vast rice paddies around the partially flooded Crescent City. The rest accumulates here and there, gradually changing the course and shape of the Father of Waters.
The days of tugs churning up-or downriver with a quarter mile of linked barges are gone, along with many of the navigational aids. Barge traffic now looks more like a truck convoy, with various sizes of small craft and tugs pushing a few barges along the river in a long, thin column, led and flanked by small powerboats checking the navigability of the ever-changing river. The Memphis-New Orleans corridor is especially well guarded against quick strikes or artillery attacks by the roving forces of Southern Command, always on the lookout for a chance to seize a few bargeloads of grain, rice, or beans. If they are very lucky, sometimes they free a load of human currency from the Kurian trade system.
Of course the Kurians fight back, in a manner. Booby-trapped barges, or "Q-craft," loaded with mercenaries give the raiders an occasional unpleasant surprise.
There is one long stretch of river, flanked by a northward bend on one end and a southward hook downriver, that causes the barge captains to press close to the unfriendly western side. This is the "Tunica Sands," a stretch of river between Tunica and Memphis avoided by all the river rats as though it was cursed ground. Ten great, weed-choked casino barges on the eastern bank are now landlocked thanks to silt deposits all around their keels. Like a latter-day leper colony, the entire area is surrounded by fencing and watch posts.
Only the sick, under Reaper escort, go in. Only the Reapers come out again.
* * * *
The big Cat hadn't changed much in the eight years since Valentine had last seen him. A little less hair perhaps, a little more waistline certainly, but he was still the big, half-aquatic athlete of the Yazoo swamps with a satchel full of apples. Everready had taught Valentine how to lower lifesign and move without being noticed over the course of one impossibly hot summer, and the fact that he'd survived to return proved the effectiveness of his tutor's methods.
The New Orleans Saints ball cap was gone, though. Now he wore a black, broad-brimmed hat that made him look like a missionary. Strung Reaper teeth rattled at his neck, and layers of bullet-stopping Reaper robe hung off his body in an oversized tunic that no sane man dared call a dress.
Finding him had been surprisingly easy. While casting about for a way to get across the Mississippi they came upon a "summer out" Wolf patrol in charge of monitoring river traffic. The Wolf patrol relied on Everready for information on the opposite bank in the Yazoo Delta between Vicksburg and Memphis, and the trio crossed the river in a birch-bark canoe with a guide who rested and camped with them at the rendezvous until the legendary Cat appeared to trade supplies for data.
Everready had no young Wolves to train this year, further evidence of the still-echoing disruption of Solon's occupation, and the continuing absence of the Lifeweavers. "Good to have you back, David," he said, upon greeting them. "Even an old swamp-hound gets lonely now and then."
So he was willing, after concluding his exchange with their Wolf guide, to take Valentine and company into Memphis.
"Only four ways into that town, barring being brought in in handcuffs and bite-guard," Everready said in their first camp on the trip north.
They looked like four spirits around their Yazoo swamp campfire, the humans under individual shrouds of mosquito netting, while Ahn-Kha followed the Grog manner by pasting his sensitive face and ears under a layer of mud.
"There's the river," Everready explained. "They check everybody at the river, and they're damn good at spotting fake documents, and most visitors are kept to the Riverfront anyway. Then there's the wall. There are gaps at the rock wall, of course, but the smugglers have gone to a lot of trouble to open them and watch 'em, and they won't let you through for free. Then there are the road gates, but it's the same problem, another document check. Most people who come to trade do it at Little City around Memphis, then the middlemen the Memphis authorities know and trust go through the gates with their goods."
"That's three ways in," Ahn-Kha said.
Everready shifted an apple stem to the other side of his mouth. "Yes, sir, Mister Grog, that's only three ways. The fourth is a bit tricky-it's up along the Tunica Run. Tunica's a dumping ground for those that got the ravies bug-Memphis buys 'em cheap off their fellow Kurians and dumps them in Tunica so there's always a feed on for their Reapers. Every now and then they release a batch on the west side of the river to give the Free Territory folks a little trouble, too."
Everready cracked his knuckles. "If you're careful, really careful, you can move north through the ravies colony. It's really just a big wall there, and one gate. They watch the gate and patrol the wall, but not too heavily. Ravies types aren't into engineering ways over or under the wall. Too busy chasing their own tails."
"So what's in Memphis that's worth all that security?" Duvalier asked. Valentine thought she looked like a silent-film starlet, with face glowing in the firelight behind the layer of netting.
"The banks," Everready said.
Her voice rose a notch. "Banks? There aren't banks any more."
"Yes, there are," Everready said. "Only kind of banks that matter to the Kurians. Big marshaling yards for the transhipment of humans."
"Tell her why," Valentine said.
"Logistics," Everready said. "Memphis is only a day's rail from every big city on the eastern seaboard, plus parts of the Midwest and Texas-the parts your boys haven't took yet, that is. It's why oP FedEx was headquartered there, too. Some Kurian in Kansas buys tractors from Michigan; he sends authorization to the bank in Memphis to ship up three hundred folk or whatever the price was. They're on the next train to Detroit. Those yards are a sight to see. Let me ask you the same question. What's so important in Memphis that you're willing to risk going in?"
"We're looking for someone," Valentine said.
