Choice Of The Cat (the Vampire Earth, Book 2)

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html CHOICE OF THE CAT THE VAMPIRE EARTH 2 E.E. KNIGHT One The Great Plains Gulag, March of the forty-fifth year of the Kurian Order: Only the bones of a civilization remain, monuments to mankind's apogee. Nature and time gnaw away the rest. Derricks still stand in this corner of oil country, giant iron insects surveying the countryside. Beneath them, the pumps rust, scattered in the long yellowish grass like metal herbivores, snouts thrust into the earth. The former wheat fields, fallow for generations and returned to native forest or prairie, feed longhorns, deer, and canny wild pigs. It is a land of receding horizons, a stopped watch, timeless. The soil under cultivation bears the turned over, trampled look of spring plowing. The tools and methods used on the stretches of farmland would make a twentieth-century resident either stare in wonder or spit in disgust. Horse-drawn plows, some with just a single blade, sit at the edges of the fields, where they were abandoned at quitting time, plots fertilized only by what comes out of the back end of an animal. The agricultural settlements at the center of the remaining fields, always near a road or rail line, look more like chain-gang camps than family farms. Surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, the clapboard barracks that house the workers and their families cry out for a coat of paint and a new roof to replace the flapping plastic tarps covering assorted holes. Trash heaps and pit toilets decorate the compounds among pitiful vegetable gardens. The children playing amid the tight-packed buildings flirt with nudity, so worn away are their clothes. Near the gate of these camps a more substantial building usually stands at a respectful distance from the barracks, avoiding contact like a visitor to a leper colony. Often a sturdy pre-22 brick construct; the windows hold glass behind bars or shutters, and curtains behind the glass. A few miles north of Oologah Lake along old State Route 60, one of these collective farms, known to its residents as the Rigyard, is nestled between gently rolling hills. Two rows of tall wire fencing encircle the camp. Barracks laid out foursquare sit in the shadow of two watchtowers, dwarfed in turn by two cavernous garages like enormous Quonset huts. The garages are patchworks of earthen wall, structural iron, and corrugated aluminum. On the other side of them, in a commanding position near the gate, an L-shaped cinder-block building dating to the 1950s folds itself protectively around a set of gasoline pumps. A water tower—a recent addition, judging from the new shine to the steel—leans slightly askew above, adding a jaunty top hat to the guardhouse. Behind the cinder-block building, a fine two-story house stands in splendid isolation at the farthest point upwind from the barracks, circled first by a porch and then a set of razor-wire fencing with padlocked gate. Each watchtower contains a single sentinel dressed in green-brown-mottle camouflage fatigues and black leather hunting cap. The sentry to the south is the more alert; he occasionally crosses his little Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html crow's nest to glance up and down the highway bordering the camp's southern fence. The one to the north chews a series of toothpicks in appropriately beaverish front teeth. He watches a trio of smock-clad women wash clothing in the community sink set between the barracks. Were the other guard equipped with an e