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"Killed some Quisling prisoners, they say."
"He use too many bullets?" Duvalier said.
"Whoa, Sarge, we got someone back here."
Light poured into the back of the truck, hurting Valentine's eyes and giving him an instant headache. The hole was only big enough to put his head through.
Valentine heard a harsh whisper from Duvalier.
"Well, well, well," one of the Rounders said.
"He doesn't look too sick," the one with sergeant's tabs agreed. "Wouldn't you say, slick."
That's it. Trapped. Back to trial.
"No."
"This look like our Quisling killer to you?"
The other squinted. "No, Sarge. Five-one and Chinese, three gold teeth; no way this is our man."
"I should get my eyes checked," the sergeant said, writing something down. "I need to erase, because I see a six-six black individual with a big tattoo of Jesus on his chest. Oh, crap, this stop form looks like shit now." He tore a piece of printed paper off his pad, wadded it in one massive hand, and tossed it over his shoulder.
"Anyway, it ain't our killer."
"No, that's not David Valentine," the sergeant said, winking.
"Too bad, in a way," the other said. "Old friend of mine, Ron Ayres, fought under him in Little Rock. I'd buy this Major Valentine a drink, if I could."
"So you've told me. About a hundred times," the sergeant said, closing the back flap.
Valentine listened to the boot steps return to the front of the vehicle.
"Okay, get your sick man outta here before we all catch it," the sergeant said. "I'd turn south for Clarendon about three miles along; there's an old, grounded bus shell with RURAL NETWORK PICKUP J painted on it alongside the road. No roadblocks that way to slow up your sick man, and I think this thing can make it through the wash at Yellow Creek."
"Thank you, Sergeant."
"Thank you for having such a pretty smile. Pleasant journey." And thank you, old friend of Ron Ayres, Valentine thought.
ut, May: The Nut was an Arkansas State Medium Security Correctional Facility known as Pine Ridge before the Kurian Order, and would probably have remained another overgrown jumble of fence and concrete were it not for Mountain Home, the nearby town that fate selected to be the capital of the Ozark Free Territory (2028-2070).
There are any number of legends as to how Mountain Home ("Gateway to the Ozarks") became the seat of the Free Territory and the headquarters of Southern Command. The more colorful legends involve a poker game, a fistfight, a bad map, a general's mistress, or a souvenir shot glass, but the most likely story concerns Colonel "Highball" Holloway and her wayward signals column.
The colonel and her sixteen vehicles were one of hundreds of fragments fleeing the debacle south of Indianapolis that marked the end of the United States government as most Americans recognized it. While topping a hill northeast of Mountain Home two of her trucks collided, and Colonel Holloway established her signals company in the nearby town of Mountain Home. USAF General J. N. Probst, in charge of a substantial shipment of the first ravies vaccine, heard Holloway's test transmissions and rerouted his staff to make use of the army's facilities. Soon the fragments of everything from National Guard formations to a regiment of Green Berets were being inoculated and reorganized around Mountain Home. Civilians flocked to the protection of the military guns and vehicles, and a government had to be established to manage them. Some chafing in the first years as to whether Southern Command ran the Ozark Free Territory or the Ozark civilians ran Southern Command settled into the American tradition of military subordination to civilian authority-provided the civilians abided by the Constitution and held regular elections.
In those chaotic years the only law was martial-unless one counts the occasional lunchtime trial and afternoon hanging of looters and "profiteers" by horse and bike-mounted posses. Military justice required an incarceration facility, and as the only other prison nearby was being used to house ravies sufferers in the hope of finding a cure, Pine Ridge became Fort Allnutt, named for its first commander.
Sometime after his death it became "the Nut."
The Nut is an asterisk-shaped building that might pass as a college dormitory were it not for the bars on the windows. Double lines of fencing separate it from the fields-the prisoners grow their own crops and raise their own livestock and the better behaved they are the more time they get outside the wire-and subsidiary buildings have sprung up around it. Two technical workshops, a health clinic, the guard dorm, and the courthouse that doubles as an administrative center surround the six-story concrete asterisk. Finally there's "the Garage," an aluminum barn that houses a few wrecks used for spare parts. The Garage is where condemned men are hung, traditionally at midnight on their day of execution.
* * * *
Valentine was proud of his memory, but in later years he never recalled his arrival at the Nut with any real clarity. Mostly he remembered a military lawyer reading the charges against him to a gray and grave presiding officer: torture and murder of prisoners under his supervision during the rising in Little Rock the wild night of what was occasionally being called Valentine's Rising.
Six men had died at the hands of the women he'd freed from the Kurian prison camp. They were guards who had used dozens of women under their supervision as sort of a personal harem. Valentine had never known their names and it was strange to hear them read out in court with all the formality that legal proceedings required-one wasn't known by any name other than "Claw."
Southern Command rarely tried its officers for the execution of armed Quislings-men caught fighting for the vampires were disposed of under a procedure informally called "bang-and-bury."
