by E. E. Knight
“Forty percent for me,” the lieutenant said.
“And thirty for me,” the shotgun-wielding Top added.
“You’ll take ten,” the lieutenant said. “Eager to please, muscles like that. And can drive, too. Ought to be worth four or five thou if he speaks and savvies and is intact below the belt. Schmuck.” He took a breath, looking at the anxious dogs, still running back and forth sniffing for scent fifteen miles behind. “This night’s going to suck hard, and six gets you a Kewpie doll that the damn legworm ranchers will be peeing in the wells before we use them. Might as well take a bonus.”
“That’s being on the righteous side, sir,” Frisky said.
“I’ll want a receipt, Frisky. I don’t want any of my forty rolled up some whore’s ass so her pimp don’t find it. Buy him a decent labor-belt to hide those bandages.”
“Sir yes sir,” Frisky said.
Frisky went to work securing the detail’s investment in me. They didn’t have handcuffs big enough for my wrists, so they settled for leg irons.
If I’d known what was to be endured over the next few months, I might have been tempted to rush the top sergeant. A shotgun blast, a brief caress of hot air and lead before the end of this trying world; that would be nothing compared to the evil awaiting me in the Coal Country.
• • •
I visited Lexington by a slow and bumpy route, my injuries were sorry to say.
The only light shining into the gloom of my captivity came from the busy flurry of radio traffic squelching over the vehicular and personal radios. That the search was continuing, reinforced by more forces from Ohio, was a sign that my David had made it away.
They put me in a badly sprung vehicle with a Truck 2Go logo somewhat visible under rust streaks and a thin coat of flaking green Ordnance paint.
I saw a quick glimpse of the Ordnance field headquarters as the truck carrying me passed through it: lines of men and horses and vehicles being fed and serviced, dispatched and received. The truck carrying me was metal sided, but someone had punched a peephole; though the tiny opening was at a tiresome height for me, I couldn’t resist making use of it despite the cramping. A few legworm ranchers even wandered through camp, as did an assortment of ill-favored individuals with the fresh-from-the-rat-pit look of the bounty hunters we’d met on the banks of the Tennessee earlier that year.
They studied a new set of wanted posters pasted on the bowed side of a collapsing wooden barn with patient, hungry eyes.
The continuation of the search assured me that my David, Gail Post, and the quick little Alessa Duvalier had vanished into the Kentucky thickets. If they had not been taken in three days, I counted them safe. Still, it was strange that there were this many called out into the field for such a small party of escapees. Or had the Ordnance lost something of exceptional value?
Frisky picked up a boy with a face like a field of red wildflowers to help him in handling me. The teen, who still hadn’t grown into his Ordnance uniform, fed and watered me and allowed me to wash with a bucket of water and a rag. For the first leg of the journey, the truck carried search dogs to some quarter of grazing land where the search had flared up again. We were delayed half a day because of the dogs, but apparently once they’d been dropped off in a field near a spaghetti-like mass of wintering legworms, we were on our own at last.
It was amusing to hear Frisky sounding like Polonius advising his young associate.
“Any time you get a chance to operate here in the Kantuck, you jump on it quick as hot skeet. All sorts of chances to pick stuff up. The legworm clans leave you alone, long as you leave them alone. Don’t mess with their women or their worms and you’ll be fine.”
During the drive to Lexington, a zigzag along an old highway with cuts to fords circumventing ruined bridges, with only rudimentary signage remaining to mark the way, I considered again how attractive this land could be. Lush but open, defensible but still livable, mild and well-watered, it seemed to have Nebraska beat by many horizons. Perhaps the legworm ranchers chafed among themselves, even fought over grazing rights and ownership of new-hatched worms, but they kept their land bandit-free. Here we were, riding in an undefended truck loaded with valuable fuel and spares, with every expectation of being able to cross sixty or seventy miles of country unmolested. On the plains and in parts of Missouri, unless the Kurians rule an area, travel in this manner is most unwise. You’re almost sure to be bushwhacked. But here was this Frisky, moaning only about the number of detours he had to take around blockages in the road.
Still, Frisky kept his carbine handy next to him in the cabin, and his ruddy assistant had a heavy pistol and a drum-fed shotgun. When I gently explored the limits of the ringbolt chaining me, he had the boy point the weapon at me.
“Relax,” Frisky called through the grate separating me and the smell of soggy dog from the driver’s cabin.
“Me drive. Me drive good. Yes?” I asked, miming working a steering wheel.
“Not this trip, strawberry,” Frisky said.
The roads suddenly improved, the truck picked up speed, and moments later we were entering Lexington. I knew little of it, save that it was the sole Kurian-controlled city in the heart of Kentucky.
I saw little of it through my peephole, except for a tall burned-out building the locals called “the chimney,” now home only to hawks and civil-defense loudspeakers. Kurian carbuncles topped a couple of the others, some formed into elegant spires and minarets, whelks clinging to others thickly formed, like bulges of clamshell growing along a building’s side, glistening wet no matter how fine the weather. One was black and dead, a little shriveled like a rotting berry. I could hear trains coupling and uncoupling as we passed a rail yard.
Upon arriving in town, the first thing Frisky did was go to a Grog outfitter and purchase a laborer’s belt. It’s a fairly simple girdle of leather with rings for the attachment of securing hardware, tool pouches, or safety line snap-rings. He studied the injury on my neck and decided it was healing well enough that it could be passed off as a minor work injury.
I made whimpering noises and plucked at my waist, but Frisky ignored me. The dressing at my waist really could have used a replacement and a fresh dusting of iodoform powder, but that would have added to his expenses. He even denied his companion the tiny amount it would cost to go to an eatery and enjoy a hot meal.
I decided that if it came down to an auction, I’d look as sickly and dispirited as possible, both to hear Frisky’s explanations and to chop the price intended to be shared among mine enemies.
Frisky stopped and questioned some doubtful-looking boys standing on the street corner, swathed in voluminous clothing that concealed who-knew-what in various pockets. I heard him inquire after someone called “the Young Turk” and another individual called “Blue Yo-Yo.”
He eventually located this “Blue Yo-Yo,” so the Turk missed his chance, but that’s no one’s business but the Turk’s.
Blue Yo-Yo, who had no toy in evidence but wore a gleaming, diamond-studded ring on every finger along with a few extras pierced into one shaved eyebrow, took a look at me. He held a scented handkerchief over his nose, keeping five feet of airspace between himself and the back door of the truck.
“He’s fucking big, yo. How the fuck old is he?”
“Just turned twenty, according to these papers,” Frisky said, waving some Ordnance forms full of lies holding hands in block print. “He can drive, too.”
“Drive? Are you fucking kidding, yo?” Blue Yo-Yo said.
I put on my best accommodating Grog grin, pulling back my lips. If this Yo-Yo knew anything about my kind, he’d know how to age me by gum line and the length of my pointed prominents and dishonor Frisky as a liar. And forger. When he found time to create documentation on me I do not know; we weren’t at that headquarters more than the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to load the dogs. “No, it’s true.”
Blue Yo-Yo waggled his key-studded fingers. “Let’s fucking see it, then.”
“Leather Hog needs new wheel man, but he won’t cog Grogs. Take him to the Trapdoor, ducks. Shanghai Mike’s always looking for strong backs for the mines in the Coal Country. I’ll expect a cut out of both of you. I’m not a free fucking church dinner–and-lecture, yo.”
Some humans have a tendency to talk among themselves as though any of my kind nearby are statuary. I sat cross-legged and sniffed at an empty snack-food bag left under the truck’s seat.
“Crap, I should have thought of that,” Frisky said. “I’ve heard of Shanghai Mike. Mining. He’d be good at mining.”
“It’s that fucking uniform, ducks. Kills brain cells. The old gang isn’t the same without you, you know. Why you left Our Lady of Lexington, I’ll never know.”
“Ambition, Yo-Yo. Self-improvement. You should try it sometime. There’s more to the world than nose lightning.”
“Tough life is my life, yo.”
“I’ll throw a couple of bills your way if Shanghai meets my price.”
Yo-Yo shrugged. “Ain’t enough money to buy what I want.”
“You just don’t get the right catalogues. See you in a couple hours. We’ll have a slice and a juice, just like old times.”
They exchanged an elaborate set of pats and touches, hands fisting, opening, and hooking too fast for the eye to easily follow. Then we were off again.
The truck paused, with my eyehole revealing nothing but a dirty alley smelling of cats and garbage, for some minutes while Frisky and the boy dragged something out of the way. I tested my bonds once more, but they were secure as ever. I felt rather bloodless and sapped.
The truck inched forward another block, and I felt it bump over an obstruction. Then we were in some kind of empty back lot, with brick buildings of various heights presenting their unadorned backsides to us. We pulled up at a loading dock.
There we waited for some time, Frisky and the boy taking turns going in through a small back door. Once I heard the boy warn off a vagrant asking for a drop of change, then some kittens mewing as they passed under the truck.
Finally, Frisky, flanked by two big men in blue woolen overcoats, opened the truck.
“Good big Grog, right?” one asked me.
I grinned. “Good big Grog. No trouble.”
“That’s the spirit,” Frisky said. “Stand up, King. Check out that thumping pole, guys. You might sell him to the zoo in Chicago.”
I stood, and after some more words they released me, still shackled at the hands, my legs in irons. But it felt good to be out of the truck, even if my only vista was of a dirty back lot in Lexington.
I took care with my footfalls as I was led around to the stairs leading up to the loading dock and back door; it seemed sewage service was sporadic in Lexington. A noisome stream of goo ran down a gutter flanking the building. It washed around a dead cat.
I’m told I really missed something at Shanghai Mike’s, kept to the back “tanks” on my visit. The vintage signage, the art glass, the vast selection of beers and liquors, and the plump, companionable females, the cheerful serving staff with their famously long hair and white teeth. But it was a honey trap, designed to catch young, unwary legworm ranchers and refugees dazzled by the bright lights after a long stretch in open country. All the bar’s well-groomed workers and paraphernalia were there to put unwary customers at ease, and ease likely candidates into one of the bare little “tanks” in back.
A woman with half her hair shaved off, and also missing an eyebrow opposite the shaving, took my temperature (after wiping the thermometer on her dirty plastic apron) and tried to assess my blood pressure, but she did not have the kind of cuff that would go around my arm. I savored the small victory against the system here.
“I’m not sure what’s normal for this color Grog,” she told Shanghai Mike when he came in, followed by Frisky.
Shanghai Mike wore a robe of gleaming silk, elaborately stitched with fantastic-looking creatures, and odd wooden platform shoes that clattered on the floor.
He looked at my neck and pulled back the laborer’s belt. “Fris, Fris. Are you kidding me? What happened to him?”
Nothing shamed Frisky, who snapped his fingers and tugged at an ear. “I was hoping you wouldn’t get close up. Lots of guys are afraid of him. I’m not altogether sure about the injuries, but he’s healthy enough and healing.”
“He’s big all right. I’ve seen a few of his kind over the years but never dealt with one. They’re a cut above. The ones I did see were doing bodyguard work.”
“Tell him, King,” Frisky said. “Tell him what you can do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Me strong. Me smart, obey all. Drive good. Clean good. Make good. Me can some assembly required. All diagram good.”
“Memorize good, more like,” Shangahi Mike said. “What the heck. He looks sound enough, and I’ve heard these guys are good diggers and builders. A thou, and another thou if I can sell him over the phone. I hate greasing up buyers. Get a picture, Tongue.”
The woman with half a head of hair extracted a tiny silvery camera, and the flash popped, lighting up a room better left dark.
“Five thou and spare me the details,” Frisky said.
“For a wounded Grog? Tell it to the Golems, Fris.”
After more haggling, Shanghai Mike finally had a small leather case brought in. He handed it to me with an order to put it together. I opened it and found a musical instrument inside, in four pieces. Luckily it was a fairly obvious vertical horn, and I had little difficulty telling which end the bell went on and where the mouthpiece capped it. It was the sort of test an inexperienced Gray One would spend an hour doing, if he could maintain interest.
“What did I tell you? King’s smart!”
“So he can put together a clarinet. Three thousand five, with a five-hundred bonus for a quick sale.”
“I can’t wait around. Gotta get back to my unit.”
“Go grab a bite in the club. Act like a regular down from Ohio who never misses the joint when visiting Lex and I’ll think about thirty-eight flat, though if he croaks on me, you’d better never come home again.”
It turned out I was sold to a West Virginia company by the time Frisky’s sandwich left the grill.
“And there’s an extra thou for the boy,” Shanghai Mike said as Frisky handed over the key to my chain, as though I were a parked automobile.
So, the kid in the ill-fitting uniform wouldn’t be returning north of the Ohio. Hopefully he’d learn a lesson about trusting Frisky.
“I want a separate receipt for him, okay?”
“Of course,” Mike said, scribbling on a yellow pad.
Frisky looked down the corridor of tanks. “Dumb kid. Deserting on me like that. His CO’s going to be so disappointed. He’ll wise up in that turpentine camp.”
“You did him a big favor, Fris,” Shangahi Mike said. “He’ll come out of it sharper.”
“I like to think I do my part in seasoning the raw. Pleasure doing business with you, Mike. Bye, King. Say hello to the coal for me.”
• • •
So my stay in Lexington was but brief. Evidently my size and weight made a full load for one of the slave transports, and I was bundled along with several other lost souls, protesting or weeping, onto a wire-cage flatbed and put under a canvas cover that reeked of assorted molds and droppings.
I’ve noticed that most of the Kurian Order propaganda posters talk about the dignity and advancement of man. A photo of this transport would make a fine rebuttal if it were attached.
The appeals to authority of my companions provided some mild interest. Those from north of the Ohio mostly threatened some form of official action from the Ordnance. It was just possible. The Ordnance was one of the better-run Kurian organizations stretching across much of what I’m told used to be
called the “rust belt” between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. Those from Tennessee on south vowed a more private or familial revenge. I suspect Shanghai Mike had heard many such threats over the years.
I liked one Ohioan in particular, formerly a young civilian assistant on some general’s staff, his face polished with soap and his soft, full hair that of a human who hadn’t seen his twentieth winter. I shall refer to him for a while as Mr. Vernabie. He seemed to understand his predicament better than most, or perhaps the nature of his captors. He continually shouted to Shanghai Mike’s men that if they would just get in touch with his family, the Vernabies, they would pay double whatever they were getting for his back from our purchaser.
Only once we were bumping up into the mountains did Mr. Vernabie break his cool: “My father and uncle both won brass rings. So did their fathers before them! Pre-’twenty-two service to Kur runs in my family!”
If the drivers even heard him, they showed no sign of it.
One of the other prisoners made a comment about trying Mr. Vernabie’s pinky ring and reached for him. He shifted quickly to the opposite corner and was quiet for the rest of the trip.
I passed up an escape opportunity on the truck ride into the mountains. Our consumptive diesel had to have a tire changed, and they took us out of the cage and shackled us together in a long line. I was sure that if I could get my foot on the chain, the pin holding the chain end to my hands would part easily enough. Instead, I made myself useful by putting stones behind the wheels of the truck so it would not roll as the drivers changed the tire.
“Me cop trucks all same, help!” I told the drivers, grinning and licking my lips while scratching at the earth in front of their feet in the manner of a submissive, pleading Grog. “Help good. Help all time.”
Two men and a muzzled dog watched over the prisoners. Both wore pistols at their belts and one carried a shotgun. If my fellow prisoners had been a little more spirited, we might have taken them and used the tools to free ourselves, but my companions were as conditioned to authority as the truck’s transmission.