by E. E. Knight
We bumped up mountainsides and bumped down them. The roads improved slightly and I heard the driver say we’d passed out of Kentucky. Finally we arrived at a long, redbrick building.
Consolidated Mines
A Maynes Conglomerate Resource Holding
The words read in two-meter-high letters painted on the brick, and over windows in some cases.
They let us walk and stretch in a big parking lot out back between the office and another building with grinding and tapping noises; a workshop of some kind. While the guard visited the door marked RECRUITING OFFICE, we could pace between the buildings. A cold wind blew out of the north, and we limited our milling to pockets out of the wind. A man with overalls and a tool belt with various cleaning products and implements brought us hearty sandwiches. He was a kindly man, and he gave me three.
“Big boy like you must have a big appetite,” he said.
After a couple hours’ delay, a white-red-and-black bus, layered in color like a cake and bearing the Consolidated Mines logo, pulled into the lot. Four more men shuffled from the workshop. One had healing bruises all over his face.
A man with hair like a brush emerged from the recruiting office, his tie continually flapping over his shoulder in the breeze. The guards formed us into a line and arranged themselves behind us.
“Welcome to Consolidated,” he said. “My name’s Stackworth and I’m the director of requisitioned labor. Most of my men call me Boss. I don’t care where you came from—”
At this, Mr. Vernabie tried to speak up: “Mr. Stackworth, I’m—”
I heard a quick step, a buzz, and I smelled ozone. Mr. Vernabie crumbled to the ground, wetting himself.
“As I said, I don’t care where you came from. You work for Consolidated now, and we keep discipline. You’re lucky you ended up here. As far as we’re concerned, you’re reborn. You’ll find you’ve got a new chance here. We pride ourselves on our fairness and promoting from within. I myself arrived here wearing a pair of handcuffs; now I report directly to the White Palace. We’ll work you hard, but you’ll be paid. Give an extra effort and it’ll be noticed and rewarded. Do your job, obey policy, and let the company take care of you. As your young associate just learned, the first policy is to listen when orders are being given. Are we networking?”
“Yes, sir,” most of the men mumbled.
They gave the men some crisp new overalls—I received a gray woolen blanket that I fashioned into a poncho or tunic, belted with some cording. By the time I was done dressing myself, it was my turn for a brief medical examination. The nurse, who spent the whole examination twitching despite the happy, soothing coos I offered as she did her inspection, finally wrote a few vitals down in a shaking longhand.
“I don’t suppose you know what’s normal for your kind,” she said, taking my temperature by sticking a probe in my ear.
“No injections! No injections,” I said.
“Don’t worry; we’re not injecting you. No injections.”
They put me through some basic cognitive tests. I found it interesting that in this little Kurian Zone, they tried to find out a little about your capabilities. I’d heard of plantations where they worked you, young or old, skilled or not, until your body broke down, and then they handed you over to the Reapers. I sorted a tray full of different-shaped objects into matching slots. Then they had me identify road signs. They watched me load and then use a simple bolt-action .22, and, satisfied with that, gave me an auto-loading pistol, one of the Atlanta Gunworks copies of a Glock, I believe. Luckily it had an oversized trigger guard. A man in a navy blue uniform and shiny black shoes set down a wooden tool carrier filled with rags, gun oil, and muzzle swabs.
“Strip and clean,” he said.
“Strip! Clean!” I repeated, smiling as widely as I could. I examined the weapon for a moment from a variety of angles, set it down, and pretended to think; then I picked it up and checked to make sure it wasn’t loaded. It wasn’t. I broke down the weapon and went to work with the swabs.
“Not bad,” the man who’d given me the pistol said to Stackworth, when he looked in on my progress. The others who had arrived with me had long since been filtered through the system; I had heard them say something about having lunch once they were on the way to their final destinations. . . . “Had a slow start. Grogs keep skills pretty well, as long as they can practice. Their memory’s more or less muscle-based, you might say. Like riding a bicycle, you couldn’t tell me how to do it, at least not so’s I could, but once you get your feet on the pedals, your body remembers the skill. They’re like that with everything.”
While I will admit that is a serviceable description of how the Gray Ones build and retain skills, my kind work at a higher level of thought and retention. Though even I appreciate mnemonics. Anything from a matchbook to a day-pass to revisiting a bit of road will bring back memories that were lost to me—which is one of the reasons much of this was written contemporaneously in Golden One notation.
• • •
After the physical and mental tests, Stackworth came around and clipped a blue plastic tag to my improvised covering. He had an assistant with him bearing a ledgerlike book, much wider than it was high. “You’re just right for bodyguard work, Groggie. Impressive size and muscle mass. Mechanical skills. They say you can drive and if you don’t, we can teach you. You got a name?”
I thumped my chest. “King.”
Stackworth looked at the assistant’s clipboard. “What do you think? Might do for muscle in Bone’s detail. They told me to keep an eye out for someone unusually big and eager. Furry here exceeds specifications by miles.”
“Yeah,” the assistant said. “An ape’s just the wheel that won’t squeak. Won’t mind Bone’s habits. He’d clean up unpleasant leftovers.”
Stackworth took a deep breath. “Okay, ship him to the White Palace.” Then he carefully rested his hand on my back, judging my reaction. “You’re in luck—King. You’re heading for the garden spot of the coal pits. Good food sitting on clean dishes. Work hard and make me look good, now.”
“Who’s going to take him over?” the assistant asked.
“I will,” Stackworth said. “It’s an excuse. I might even get some family liquor out of it. Order us something from the motor pool to haul him.”
THE BLACK PRINCE OF THE WHITE PALACE
The roads in the Appalachian Virginias are not maintained particularly well, so officials get around in high-clearance vehicles. Pickups and sport utilities converted into passenger carriers called shuttles are common sights, all painted a gray-black color the locals call “company shale” where they will be heard and “pissant primer” where they’re sure of their company. The Maynes Conglomerate does not issue personal transport to any but its highest functionaries. Ordinary workers take a bus. Foremen and other low-level supervisors typically travel about in a shuttle. Should you pass out of the perdition of lower management and graduate to middle grades, you have use of a driver pool, but you still have to justify each trip. Then should you reach the executive level, you are issued your own vehicle, driver, and assistant.
Being a Grog, and a sizable one at that, I was put into a company shale pickup, open to the elements, for my trip away from the mine headquarters. I made myself as comfortable as I could on a spool of electrical cable and hung on with some cargo netting clipped into the bed. A man in a subdued, vertically patterned forest camouflage uniform rode with me. I would learn it was the uniform of the Coal Country Troopers, sort of a state police. He had a racking cough that brought up phlegm, and he seemed to take pride in timing his expectorations for aerial distance, launching them off the side on turns and out the back on lengths of good-road straightaway.
“That was a good one, stoop,” he’d say whenever one hung in the air for several seconds before landing, or travelled an unusually long parabola. Rather than the more common term “Grog,” “stoop” seemed to be in use to refer to my kind in the Virginias, when they did not use the more offensiv
e “ape.” They did not appear to differentiate me from the wider, shorter Gray Ones, and I had no reason to correct anyone—yet.
The driver bounced us all the way to one of the Maynes family holdings, a monumental white edifice that I learned was a pre-Kurian hotel outside White Sulphur Springs. Stackworth reknotted his tie and checked his zipper after stepping out of the transport.
It was a rambling, multistory structure in a clean Federal style, white as a solitary cumulous cloud on a fair summer day. Gardens, a golf course, and bridle trails surrounded it, with encompassing picturesque, thickly forested blue hills. In layout, it was staggered with several similarly styled buildings linked together over the vast grounds, not very different from the buzzing human hives in the bigger cities.
“Welcome to the White Palace,” the shuttle driver said as we pulled up.
Stackworth spent a few moments talking to a man in a granite uniform with large, shining black buttons and a captain’s bars. “This is the Grog I called about. For Maynes.”
“You should be more specific. We have about sixty of the Maynes name here, not counting wives and first cousins.”
“You know I mean Joshua Maynes the Third,” Stackworth said. “Bone.”
And that is how I learned the name of the most troubling, and troubled, man I ever served.
• • •
We dropped the soldier with the cough at a door with a medical cross on it, then shuttle parked around a lesser projection jutting out of the back of the white wall of the palace. They brought me in what I presume had been the staff entrance. I was met by an attendant with the inevitable clipboard.
“No luggage?” he asked the driver.
“Fresh out of the woods, I’m told,” Stackworth said.
I waited, idle—there is a great deal of idle waiting in any Kurian Zone—while the attendant phoned the security administrative office and they sent someone up to get me. Once again, this woman was incredulous that I had no luggage. I decided to acquire a toothbrush at my first opportunity, just so whatever they needed checked off about my luggage could be checked off.
The security office, or at least the part that handled new employees, was located in the basement. They took me down three flights of stairs, the first having a polished wood balustrade, the second having no-slip utility strips, and the third being just three broken steps down under a sign that read WATCH YOUR HEAD. The hallway my escort took me down was narrow, and I wondered what would happen if we met someone coming the other way. I heard the muted roar of a boiler coming from nowhere in particular. As the sound faded, I was brought into a sort of office with a big whiteboard with a permanent black grid with names and shift information. “Maynes” showed up repeatedly on the grid along with names of those detailed to each.
Two men in granite-colored canvas uniform pants and creased light woolen shirts with silver snaps sat in chairs sorting documents into bins labeled “file” and “shred.” A third, wearing a jacket and tie over a denim shirt, sat at a desk, sipping water out of one of those oversized tumblers you sometimes see bedside in hospitals.
“This is the Wonder Grog,” my escort said, shutting the door behind her. “No sign language or icon books; he talks.”
“Uh-huh,” the man in the suit jacket grunted.
Rather relieved to finally meet someone who wasn’t worried about my luggage, I stared at his water and smacked my lips. I was thirsty after the ride.
“You drive?” he asked. I liked that he didn’t call me a stoop.
“Yes! Drive!” I said, mimicking the operation of a steering wheel and floor shift.
He imitated my syntax. “You fight? Know subdue. Subdue?”
I rubbed my forehead and looked at the floor. “What—who—not—me teach? You me teach? You teach me subdue?”
He nodded. “Mean not kill. Hold.”
“Hold! Wrasslin’!” I said. I hoped they wouldn’t put me on collection runs, or whatever they called them here, gathering victims for the Reapers.
“Yes, wrestling, exactly,” shirt-and-tie said, throwing a look at the men sorting. I noticed he had an orange earplug in his ear. It wasn’t attached to a wire, so communication or a personal sound system was out.
“Wrasslin’, know. Wrasslin’ do,” I said, on my guard now.
“Do now,” he said, nodding at the escort at the door.
The lights went out and the two men who were sorting papers flew at me like aimed arrows. I heard handcuffs open and felt the hard bar of a baton lever against my elbow.
They fought dirty. One stomped my instep, hard, with his bootheel as he worked the baton and the other fired a deafening air horn. I felt the force of it on my fur, but my ears had already closed and twisted back as soon as the lights turned off. Do not be impressed; this was more reflex than intention. Golden One ears go flat during a tooth-and-claw whether we want them to or not.
Wrasslin’ he wanted and wrasslin’ he got. My two attackers, so lively and aggressive in their opening moves, like inexperienced chess players, relaxed considerably once I had the blades of my forearms up against their windpipes. I hugged them tight until they went limp.
The lights went on about the same time that I smelled urine.
“Drop ’em!” the man in the suit and tie shouted, white faced. He reached for a phone on his desk, but he looked a little better as soon as my wrestling partners took deep wheezing breaths.
My escort had backed into a corner and held a canister of pepper spray in a shaking hand, pointed at me. I turned my head away, just in case. “Last time they kicked the shit out of that poor ape, Marko.”
“I figured it was just Stackworth trying to snoot another security-hire bonus for himself,” this Marko said.
“What the hell happened?” one of my attackers said, working his jaw experimentally. It was already swelling up a little; he’d have a decentish bruise by dinner.
“Good wrasslin’?” I asked, cringing a little before Marko.
“Have the vet give him the once-over; then send him to the kennels for an evaluation,” Marko said to the woman who’d finally lowered her canister. “If he checks out, we’ll start him off with Maynes Version Three. He’s always complaining that Gus and Lightning look too old to intimidate anyone.”
“Home has peed himself. Still sleeping like a baby.” The guard rubbing his jaw stood up. “You know, we could all save ourselves by just using the big boy here to intimidate Version Three. Maybe if that little cocksucker would tone it down, we wouldn’t be so busy bagging his dumps when he goes out for walkies.”
He toed his partner and the man groaned. To be honest, I was a little relieved, though under most circumstances I don’t pity the regime’s armed lackeys.
“If I want you to have an opinion, I’ll issue you one,” Marko said. “Better get Home to the infirmary. And you, ape, are going to go get your kidneys prodded by the vet.”
“He’s hard as a piece of hickory, that one,” MacTierney said.
• • •
My new master, Joshua Maynes the Third, didn’t greet me on my first day. Or my second. Or even in the course of my first week.
I fell under the supervision of the barn staff, who also oversaw a few Gray Ones who did manual labor with the livestock and helped out whenever the groundskeepers or maintenance people needed strong backs.
I never learned what happened to “the Second,” but Joshua “Version Three” Maynes was an important part of the Maynes family. The Conglomerate still exists in the Coal Country; indeed, I believe it thrives, and I would like to know if the same withered, grasping hand still remains at the nexus of the puppet strings. Few others share my curiosity about just who controls Maynes Consolidated these days; that scarred section of West Virginia is still something of a mountainous backwater.
The Maynes family, unquestionably the most powerful in West Virginia though there were others of import, maintained the White Palace as a combination residence, government center, and citadel near the road and rail line co
ming out of Virginia (and the main highway coming down from Maryland and Pennsylvania).
Though I hid it, I was thrilled with the appointment to the security detail of Joshua Maynes the Third. The assignment entailed everything I desired at that moment: access to weapons, a daily job that involved use of a vehicle, and presumably some sort of uniform or insignia indicating my proximity to those in power.
Those who have never lived within a Kurian Zone rarely appreciate just how far the trappings of power may carry you. The epaulettes and stick of the local patrolman, the overcoat and briefcase of the investigator, the simple black twill and orders of precious-metal clerical collar tabs of the New Universal Church—these and scores of others like them give the power of life and death. And I don’t mean an easy movie death, either, where the villain takes out a small pistol and shoots his powerless victim in the head, clearing an obstacle the way one might brush off a fly.
Officialdom has the weight of documentation. The Kurian Zones were great keepers of records. Like a chicken within a coop, each egg produced is documented. Similarly, a careless phrase or a burst of temper could mark one as a troublemaker, and troublemakers tended to disappear in the night. The ability to place a note in a file, or worse, “card it” so it moved to a different, security-related department (at least in the Atlanta Kurian Zone and those affiliated with its internal policing arrangements, as we had in the Virginias) could change, and perhaps shorten, the course of your life. The ordinary people knew that what went in their file was more important than what went in their bodies; you were your file, to put it to a philosophical point, much more than you were a collection of cells processing proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
If Joshua Maynes Version Three had been a modern product such as a pocket concierge, customers would have wondered why the Version Three did so much less than the first generation. It was his grandfather who put the Coal Country back together after 2022 and got a proud people back into something that resembled a civilization, despite being more than seventy when worldwide disaster struck. But I find that is often the case with the Children of Titans. In the shadow of such monoliths, who can find the sun to grow?