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Valentine marked the crash scene he'd seen the first time he ran down this street, impossibly compact cars piled into each other in a rear-end collision, looking like the skeletons of two mating turtles. He staggered behind the cars and sank to his knees, desperately trying to control his panting.
He peered between the cars, looking for his pursuers.
They followed his path onto the tree-limb-littered street, caught sight of their fellows, and ran to catch up to them.
Valentine was too tired to smile.
He crept through the underbrush of a lawn, counted twenty of the pack chasing their own tails. Already some were giving up, dropping to their knees and scratching at the accumulated leaves and pine needles in frustration.
Then he noticed the bite-or was it a cut? Must have happened in the doughnut shop; none of them had been close to him since- but something had made his elbow bleed. He applied his iodine and prayed. Under stress, some men's mouths spewed obscenity, others Sunday-morning verse. In this case, the latter felt more appropriate as the sting of the iodine took hold.
* * * *
The cut had some angry red swelling around it by the time night fell and he walked, slowly and gently, down to the riverfront.
Two of the defunct casinos had electric light. Several had gigantic red crosses painted on their bargelike hulls, the universal symbol of help to whoever asks. Fire-gutted hotels lined the riverfront road. Valentine could picture the brilliant lighting above and around the multistory parking lots, the banners along the streets, the florid wealth of a gambling haven opening at the side of the Mississippi, beckoning like a Venus flytrap.
He kept out of the masses of somnambulists wandering under the lights, scooping handfuls of meal out of great troughs lining the streets.
Naturally, more food meant more piles of feces. And more rats eating the feces. And cats eating the rats.
He found an empty trough and passed a wet finger through it, sniffed the result. It smelled and felt like ground corn-hog-feed-grade corn, at that. Some rice and millet, too.
Valentine would rather eat the ants disposing of the leftovers.
"Val," he heard a hiss.
It came from the second floor of one of the hotels. He saw Duvalier's face in a window.
He floated into the shell of the fire-gutted building, a concrete skeleton.
She met him at the staircase with a hug, and they looked at each other's iodine-smeared wounds.
"Let's hope the vaccinations weren't just water," Valentine said. Rumor had it that ravies vaccine commanded a fantastic price in the Kurian Zone, and Southern Command had its share of the unscrupulous.
They crept upstairs. Cats (of the feline variety) scattered in either direction at their approach.
Duvalier and Everready had his pack and gun. Everready extended a piece of greasy waxed paper. "Cold chicken and a biscuit. From the Missions."
"What's next?" Valentine asked.
Everready threw a bone down the hall. A catfight started almost the second it landed. "I passed word to my contact in the Missions. He's going to get in touch with a trading man in Memphis, one of my sets of eyes in the city. Cotswald. Vic Cotswald. He'll take you in. Not the nicest man in the world, but reliable. He thinks I'm working for the Kurians down south, keeping tabs on things in Memphis. He knows me by the handle Octopus. Can you remember that? Octopus?"
"Great. What's my cover?" Valentine asked.
"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."
Memphis: The dwindling number of old-time residents of this good-times city divide Memphis history into prequake and postquake. The destruction, the starvation, the Kurian arrival, the appearance of Grogs; all are linguistically bound together and organized by that single cataclysmic event.
When the New Madrid fault went, most of the city went with it. One of the few substantial buildings to survive the quake was the St. Jude Children's Hospital, whose grave granite now houses many of the city's Kurian rulers behind concentric circles of barracks and fencing.
