Valentine's Exile by E.E. Knight Page A

a tar paper and aluminum-siding shantytown has sprung up, accommodating refugees from the Kurian Zone as well as the illicit needs of bored soldiers waiting for orders.
    Even the local wildlife seems to be in a state of leisurely flux. Crows and dogs and a few far-ranging seagulls trot or fly from refuse heap to sewage pit, with the local feral cats sunning themselves on wall top and windowsill after a night hunting the thriving rats and mice.
    The soldiers fresh from the Dallas battlefield feel the same way. Fresh food, sunshine, and sleep are all that are required for blissful, if not purring, contentment.
    The attenuated Razors’ brief period of excited anticipation, carried since getting off the Dallas train and hearing about their billet, ended as soon as they saw the “hotel.”
    Even in its heyday no one would have called the roadside Accolade Inn worthy of a special trip. The subsequent years had not been kind to the blue-and-white block, four stories of stucco-sided accommodations thick with kudzu and bird droppings. Someone had put in screens and plywood doors, and each room’s toilet worked, though the sink fixtures were still in the process of retrofit, having been stripped and not replaced. Neat cots, six to a room, sat against water-stained walls.
    â€œNot bad,” a goateed Razor said when Valentine heard him test the john’s flush after washing his hands in the toilet tank. “Better than the sisters have at home.”
    Sadly, the attenuated regiment fit in the hotel with beds to spare. A third of their number were dead or in either a Fort Worth or Texarkana hospital.
    The latter was Valentine’s first stop after getting the men to the hotel. A First Response Charity tambourine-and-saxophone duo just outside the hospital door accepted a few crumpled pieces of Southern Command scrip with the usual “God Blesses you.”
    â€œContinually,” Valentine agreed, though over the past year it had been a decidedly mixed blessing. The pair stood a little straighter in their orange-and-white uniforms and reached for pamphlets, but Valentine passed on and into the green-peppermint tiles of the hospital.
    He made it a point to visit every man of his command; the routine and their requests were so grimly regular that he began entering with a tumbler of ice—he made a mental note to steal and fill a trash can with ice before heading back to the Accolade—to spare himself the inevitable back-and-forth trip. But his mind wasn’t at ease until he visited the last name on his list, Captain William Post.
    Visiting hours were over by the time he made it to the breezy top floor, where Post shared a room with a blinded artillery officer.
    â€œWell, just remember to be quiet,” the head nurse said when Valentine showed his ID and signed in on the surgery-recovery floor. Dark crests like bruises hung beneath her eyes.
    "Tell it to the FIRCs downstairs,” Valentine said, as they started up again with the umpteenth rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” one of their supply of three hymns.
    Post looked horrible. His cheeks had shrunken in, and the nurse had done a poor job shaving him. A little tent stood over the stump of his left leg and a tube ran from the region of his appendix to a red-filled bottle on the floor. A bottle on a hook attached to the bed dripped clear liquid into a tube in his arm, as though to balance output with input. Post’s eyes were bright and alert, though.
    His friend even managed a wink when Valentine rattled the plastic, metered hospital tumbler full of ice.
    â€œHow’s it going?” Valentine asked in a small voice, as if to emphasize the words’ inadequacy.
    â€œThey got the shrapnel out. Some small intestine came with it. So they say.” Post took his time speaking. “No infection. ” He took a breath. “No infection. That was the real worry.”
    â€œGod blesses you,” the FIRCs chorused