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the Rangers.”
    â€œCareful now, Jefferson,” Post said. “It might be playing possum.”
    Jefferson approached it, pick raised high. Valentine stood aside with his Quickwood stake. Jefferson needed this, after his fright earlier.
    â€œOkay, dickless. Time to see what happens when you steal a Texan’s horses.”
    â€œDamn, that fella right. That bomba doesn’t have one,” Botun said over the sights on his rifle.
    Jefferson grunted, and swung the pick down. The Reaper brought up a limb to ward off the blow but the pick went home through its face and into the ground beneath. It stiffened into immobility.
    Valentine turned to the marines at the windows. “Thank you, Post. Good shooting, men. Six shots, four hits. That’s outstanding for a running Reaper.” Valentine hoped the light-hearted tone didn’t sound forced.
    â€œOn Jamaica bullets are rare, sir,” a marine named Andree said.
    He turned to look at the private. “In the Ozarks, men who can shoot like you are even rarer.”

Chapter Three
    Magazine Mountain, Arkansas, January of the forty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: A Southern Command Station Post once stood here, huts and wooden cabins placed to take advantage of folds in the ground and the canopy of trees for concealment and defensibilty.
    Servicemen walking about on their duties added life and color to the camouflaged buildings. The Guards, the common soldiers in their neat charcoal gray uniforms and regimental kepis, would march past files of scarecrow-lean Wolves in fringed buckskins. The Wolves, rifles cradled in tanned fingers, assorted pistols and knives shoved in belts and boots, and no two hats alike, struck one as sloppy-looking when compared to the disciplined Guards. A Cat might be sleeping beneath an oak, head pillowed on rolled coat and Reaper-killing sword, exhausted after two months spying in the Kurian Zone, but still coming to full wakefulness at a gentle tap. Everyone from cur dog to colonel of the Guards would make room when teams of Bears entered the post. Southern Command’s shock troops, wearing uniforms of patched-together Grog hide and bullet-ablative Reaper cloak, the latter’s black teeth hanging from neck or ear, were people one instinctively avoided. Perhaps it was the forbidding war paint, or the scalps of Grogs and even Quislings dangling from belt and rifle sheath, or the thousand-yard stare, but whatever the source the Bears had an aura about them demanding a wide berth. Then there were the others in camp, the logistics commandos: scroungers who went into the Kurian Zone to steal or trade for what Southern Command couldn’t make for itself, driving their wagons to the commissary yards and yelling at women to get their children out of their mule team’s path. There were always civilians in camp, families of the soldiery or refugees waiting on transportation to other parts of the Freehold. There would be pack traders and mail-riders, gunsmiths, charcoal sellers with black hands, hunters trading in game for more bullets and farmers selling vegetables for government buckchits. It was chaos, but chaos that somehow kept the soldiery fed and equipped, the civilians prosperous (by the standards of the Free Territory) and, most importantly, the Ozarks free of the Reapers.
    But that was before.
    By that dark, wet winter of ’71, the base of Magazine Mountain had only rats and raccoons standing sentry over burned huts or nosing through old field kitchens that smelled of rancid cooking oil. Bats huddled together for warmth in SCPO mailboxes, and the carts and pickup trucks rested wheelless on the ground, stripped like slaughtered cattle.
    Heavy equipment rendered inoperable had a large red X painted on it. The same might be done with maps depicting the Ozark Free Territory.
    Â 
    â€œGoddammit, another fallen tree ahead,” Post called from a rise in the road. He turned his horse and looked at Valentine for