Valentine's Exile Read Free

powder at his feet.
    Valentine took in the HQ air, perhaps ten degrees warmer than the morning chill of the Texas spring outside. The Bear, tobacco, a faint fecal smell, brewing coffee, old sweat, drying laundry, gun oil, and a hint of cabbage stewing in salty broth rolled around in his nostrils.
    â€œMorning, sir,” Lost & Found said, looking out the door beyond Valentine. He prodded the bucket at his foot.
    Valentine dutifully stripped off his combat harness and tossed it in the decontamination barrel. The rest of his clothes followed until he stood naked on the carpet remnant.
    He took a handful of the boric acid from the bucket and gave himself a rubdown, concentrating on his shoulder-length black hair, armpits, and crotch. Rednits liked the warmth and tender apertures around hair follicles, and the battalion wasn’t losing any more men to nit-fever. Colonel Meadows had enough on his hands with twenty percent of the Razorbacks filling field hospital beds or recovery wards, eating leek-and-liver soup twice daily, getting their blood back up to strength.
    Valentine went over to a bank of lockers featuring names written on duct tape plastered on new paint slathered over old rust, and extracted a uniform. Hank had put a fresh one in overnight, while Valentine was forward. Regular soldiers had to make do with the rumpled contents of the slop bins, but the Razorback officers each had a locker for their inside uniforms. When he was properly dressed in the mixed-gray-and-deep-green fatigues of the Razorbacks (Southern Command Mixed Infantry Division, for use of—some said the color scheme was reminiscent of a raccoon’s backside) he put on leather-soled moccasins and followed the smell of coffee with his Wolf’s nose.
    He walked past the headset-wearing HQ radio/field-phone operator, whose gear was swathed in cheesecloth that smelled of kerosene, surrounded by six different NO SMOKING signs in English, Spanish, and French. The kerosene kept the electicks out. The little bastards ate electrical insulation and grew into three-inch sticklike bugs whose metallic chitin inevitably shorted out electrical equipment.
    The boy with the headset, seventeen but scrawny enough to pass for fourteen, studied the flickering needles of the radio set as though divining runes. Valentine raised an eyebrow to the kid, got a head shake in return, and looked at the clipboard with the most recent com-flimsies. There’d been some chatter out of Dallas the previous day that made GHQ-Dallas Corridor suspect a counterattack in the Razorbacks’ area, but nothing had manifested last night.
    Breakfast or a shower?
    Valentine decided to give the boric acid a few more minutes to work and headed for the galley.
    In the five weeks they’d occupied the airfield, Narcisse and her staff had set up sinks, stoves, and even had a pizza oven going. Companies rotating to or from the forward positions always had a pizza party before creeping out to the strongpoints covering the approaches to Dallas. Narcisse wore no uniform, held no rank, and wandered between the battalion’s kitchens and infirmary as the mood struck her, dispensing equal helpings of cheer and food, escorted in her wheelchair by a steadfast rottweilerish mutt who’d wandered into camp on the Razorbacks’ trip south from the Ouachitas. The men and women whose job it was to aid and comfort the frontline soldiers obeyed the old, legless Haitian as though she were a visiting field marshall.
    Valentine said good morning to the potato peelers working under faded paint that once demarked a maintenance workshop, rinsed his hands, and poured himself a mug of water from the hot pot. He plopped in one of Narcisse’s herbal tea bags from a woven basket on a high shelf, then covered his brew up with a plastic lid masquerading as a saucer, and took the stairs down to the subbasement and the hooches.
    He smelled the steeping tea on the way down the stairs. It tasted