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"And you?"
She covered her fiery red hair with a fatigue cap. "I'm management. You two look like the all-day lunch-break type. Besides Val, you're the suckiest kind of driver."
"Where do we go?" Ahn-Kha asked. "My people will gladly shelter us at Omaha."
"We'd have to cross half of Southern Command. No, let's go east."
Duvalier climbed into her own overall and zipped it up over freckled shoulders. "East? Nothing there but river and then the Kurians. Until the Piedmont."
"I have an old friend in the Yazoo Delta. And I've got a mind to visit Memphis."
"Memphis? The music's to die for, but the Kurians see to it that you do the dyin'." She sprinkled something that smelled like kerosene out of a bottle onto the clothes and tossed them on the charcoal. They began to burn with admirable vigor.
"Ali, I've got my claws into a job. I'm wondering more and more about Post's wife, Gail."
"She's gotta be dead if she was shipped."
"No, she was some kind of priority cargo. I'll explain later. We need to go to the area around Arkansas Post on the river. Can you manage that?"
"Says the guy who just broke out of a high-security lockup thanks to me!" Duvalier chided.
"Medium security," Valentine said.
She tossed her bundle of traveling clothes and sword stick into the back of the truck; "How do I look?"
"You're better suited singing in the Dome than for the Labor Regiment," Valentine said.
"Gratitude! The man's got a vocablarney like a dictionary and he doesn't know the meaning of the word!"
"Please," Ahn-Kha said. "We had best be going."
* * * *
The truck bumped eastward along the torn-up roads. A substantial piece of Consul Solon's army had been borrowed from the area around Cairo, Illinois, and points east, and they had employed a spikelike mechanism called a paveplow to destroy the roadbeds as they went home.
Patching was still being done, so most vehicles found it easier to drive on the gravel shoulder.
Duvalier drove, Ahn-Kha rode shotgun-with his formidable gun pointing out through the liftable front windscreen to rest on the hood-and Valentine bounced along in the back, feeling every divot the worn-out shock absorbers struck and hanging onto the paint-and-rust frame for safety.
About noon he felt the truck lurch to a stop.
"Just a road check," Duvalier said through the flap separating the driver from the cargo bed. "Rounders."
Valentine's stomach went cold. There was an old riot gun in the back, but he couldn't shoot his fellow citizens, even if it meant being rearrested.
"Afternoon, digger," Valentine heard a voice say from up front. "Transport warrant and vehicle check. Jesus, that's some big Grog. He trained?"
"He's a citizen. Sick relief to Humbolt Crossing," Duvalier said, cool as ever. "There's the medical warrant. We've got an unidentified fever in the back, so you want to keep clear."
"Do we?" another voice said. "We'll have to risk it. Orders to check every vehicle. We had a breakout at the military prison in Mountain Home."
"Someone important, I take it," Duvalier said.
"David Valentine, part-Indian, black hair, scar on right side of face."
Duvalier again: "Never heard of him. He run over a general's dog?"
Valentine heard footsteps approaching the bed. There was nowhere for him to hide inside. He might be able to cut his way onto the roof. He reached for the knife, opened the saw blade . . .
