by E. E. Knight
I believe MacTierney’s father, in his earlier life, erred in some grave manner and believed himself to be on a list for R & R* as soon as all his children were on their own. He perhaps intended his progeny to alter the general opinion by going into the Kurian Order and excelling in their positions. They all tried very hard for places in the Youth Vanguard and half of them made it. MacTierney spoke of having no fewer than three sisters enter the Church (one became a foster womb for one of Maynes’s married cousins; she dwelled in the White Palace and could be seen in her white New Universal Church habit, heavily pregnant—she was always giving MacTierney tidbits from the rich diet she enjoyed during pregnancy).
MacTierney did not much care for his job, but he was levelheaded for his age, not easily riled, and seemed to form an instant sympathy with the locals of all classes. I saw him calm more troublesome situations, and he frequently did Maynes’s job for him, handling the confidential paperwork Maynes did not have time to read. I believe he was assigned to Maynes more to protect the locals from Maynes than to protect Maynes from the locals. He was always stepping in before a situation would get out of control.
For example, we were dispatched to a motorized vehicle scrapyard on a call. The owner of the yard, whose wife had recently run off with a wealthy liquor distributor, had been caught stripping copper wire out and selling it on the black market and his business was being taken away (though he would be allowed to work there as the assistant for the new director for an indeterminate amount of time). The scrapyard had a small gas tank where fuel from wrecks and whatnot was drained and preserved, and he’d climbed up on the tank, opened the cap, and stood there with dynamite shoved in his belt and a butane cigarette lighter, threatening suicide.
We’d driven down a small hill. The scrapyard, covering several acres, yawned beneath.
“Crapaheenie, we’re all going to end up smelling like gas,” Maynes said. “Hickory, better back the van up the hill.”
MacTierney had a word with one of the employees, grabbed the keys to the van, and hurried off to the adjacent town. He returned in less than ten minutes with the director’s children from the care center.
“Clement, your kids need you; you know that. You’re their whole world, and nobody in this yard wants to see them have their whole world go up in a big orange-and-black ball. Mr. Maynes is here, he’ll see to it that these kids don’t lose their father, too.”
• • •
As for Maynes, I could understand why the family didn’t want him lounging around the White Palace. One moment, he was lively and pleasant; an hour later, he could be depressed and despondent. He was often like a depressing philosophical maxim brought to life: if it existed, he could find some fault worthy of complaint.
He believed he had the worst job in all the Coal Country (an interesting claim in a land where about ten to fifteen percent of the men worked underground, choking on coal dust and squinting through eyes swollen from conjunctivitis, particularly from a man being chauffeured around the land in a comfortable converted bus stocked with Kentucky bourbon and Canadian whiskey).
Maynes’s usual transport was known at the White Palace as “the Short Bus,” but Maynes called it the Trekker. It had begun life as one of those smaller people-transports I’ve come across disabled at airports and large convention centers, designed for a driver and perhaps a dozen people comfortably riding in the back.
It had been retrofitted into a rather amazing conveyance for a dignitary and his team. The driver now had a spacious (luckily for me, for I was often behind the wheel) compartment with its own hatch for entering, with the passenger area turned into a comfortable lounge, with a sofa large enough for sleeping, a tiny kitchen cubby, a captain’s chair and three more fold-down models, and a little toilet closet in back. A water tank on the roof fed the hygiene closet’s sink-toilet (which flushed, disgustingly, right onto the road) and kitchen basin.
To cope with the mountainous, indifferently maintained roads, heavy-duty tires and an off-road suspension raised the minibus an extra foot off the ground. What had been storage space beneath the passenger area was expanded slightly and filled with emergency food, water, blankets, and medicines, a small generator and hand-pumped water filter so the vehicle could, if necessary, serve as an ambulance or provide a day’s meals for a few dozen mouths, given an interruption of normal services. There was a standard gun cabinet that could securely store five long-guns and several pistols, plus ammunition, though Maynes personally never showed much interest in the firearms he carried (“I got sick of shooting in my first year with the Youth Vanguard,” he told MacTierney).
I shall describe a typical town in the Coal Country in this era, so you, my reader, will have some idea of the conditions of the average person under the Kurian Order.
Most of the pre-2022 smaller towns were “repurposed” by this time. The Kurians preferred their humans living in moderately sized towns of two or three thousand. At that size, you needed just one of everything, making supervision easier. More than that and the town became a city. There were villages with populations ranging from a few families to several hundred people, usually near a resource site like a mine or an industrial center or other remote-but-important location that required servicing—the “village” that provided staff to the White Palace was an example.
Small family farms existed in the better stretches of bottomland. It was up to their town or village to keep track of activity there.
Then there were the people on the outskirts. These were true hill people. I’m not even sure you could say they were part of the Kurian Order; they were more or less ignored by all concerned. They came down from their remote hollows and scratched up what they couldn’t make for themselves by doing odd jobs or selling the liquor they brewed in concealed stills.
Every town had three institutions staffed by the Kurian Order: the New Universal Church meeting house, school, and residence; the firehouse; and the community center.
The community center was usually the largest. In older towns, an entire block of buildings would often be renovated, linking all the old storefronts and apartments into one large warren. Children were given basic-skills training. There would be a room devoted to telecommunications, with phones and screens and sometimes even a computer or two. There were areas for exercise and places for small artistic performances, a little health clinic staffed by a nurse and midwife, a cafeteria, and a government office where one updated identification papers and the numerous licenses that went with existing in the Kurian Order. The wealthier towns usually had a public pool or bathhouse.
In larger towns with more people who worked for the Kurian Order, there was often a mirror version of the community center just for Quislings and their families, similar to the main community center but cleaner and better equipped.
As for residences, the Kurian Order preferred that its population lived in communal buildings. The remaining houses, if they were large enough, supported two or three families by subdividing the space. Only the Quislings had the luxury of living alone, but those at the lower levels often chose not to, preferring the safety of being around others or living above a community center or some other place with around-the-clock security. This was a land of old grudges, and Quislings had a high rate of mortality from suspicious accidents. Those at the top of the pile often had guarded estates, miniature versions of the White Palace with full-time, live-in staff, plus the usual guard dogs and gamekeepers wandering outside their fences.
The church was less comfortable but cleaner than the community centers. Unlike the community center, the church was open to overnight travellers who would otherwise be stuck; they might always check in to the local NUC building and be given a cot, sometimes with a privacy screen, a sliver of soap, and a clean towel.
Everything in a church center folded for easy storage, including the staff. Once, when sheltering at an NUC center during a strong thunderstorm, I opened a closet and found a human female cleric in full habit, snoozing on her back with h
er legs sticking up the closet wall.
The Church serves a surprising mix of propaganda into everyday business. Of course, on Sundays there are the homilies, announcements of births (never deaths), and requests for volunteer labor on tasks that make the community a little more livable, from shoveling snow to urban “repurposing”—teardowns of old houses, in other words, after the Church has cleared the dwelling of identifiable family ephemera.
In larger cities, there are screens in every room running “human improvement” programming. About all you improve is your knowledge of various tragedies in human history and the miraculous arrival of the Kurians the moment before mankind would flutter, dim, and die like a guttering candle. Every half hour they would break for weather and rose-tinted biographical segments about local Quislings. Beyond the constant droning of the screens in every room—including the church proper, unless services were in session—every piece of paper passed out by the Church, every plate full of food or mug of coffee, bore some phrase or piece of iconography expressing the value of the Kurian/Human “symbiosis.”
The closest thing these little towns of the Coal Country had to a newspaper were their local church bulletins, put out—with no small amount of pride—by the senior class of schoolchildren under the supervision of Youth Vanguard leaders going on in their education and senior clergy. They sold advertising space, selected and placed a few photos, and wrote about local events. Usually it was small sports teams and leagues and announcements about events at the community center or outings (there are trips to Washington DC and the Carolina Coast mentioned in an issue I saved and brought out with me). I suspect the hard-to-find paper mostly ended up serving as sanitary tissue or for wiping up spilled grease, though the editorial page of every issue, which reprinted statements from the Archon’s office, always had a helpfully blank reverse side, so letter writers were often forced to send NUC propaganda along with their family news.
Serving three worlds: Earth, Kur, and the Next.
The young of any community spend a great deal of time at the church. In the larger towns, there are multiple day-care centers alongside the school (church education stops at twelve years old for most who are bent on a trade or further technical training; a few intended for higher education stay on until age fourteen or fifteen before being shipped off to boarding school—one of the requirements in most Kurian Zones is that anyone intended for higher education is severed from his family.
The third institution every town has is the firemen in its station. I’ve never encountered the like in any of the other Kurian Zones, where firemen served in much the same fashion as they had pre-2022 or today.
In the Coal Country, the “firemen” served as the first line of defense of the Kurian Order. They put out fires, yes, but they would also speed off in their trucks to resolve barricade situations, set up roadblocks, or turn their hoses on gypsy encampments of day laborers passing through the mountains. A regime needs a body numerous of strong-arm men to swing the clubs that break the heads of its enemies, and in the Coal Country, if you were young, strong, and followed orders well, you could almost always find a berth in the firehouse. After a year of service where you apprenticed on a provisional for your food and bed, any signs of talent for the job were rewarded with a permanent posting. Unlike almost any other Quisling role, you did not have to be familiar with the current New Universal Church opinions and decrees; you just had to follow orders well and stay reasonably healthy by avoiding tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. The pay was twice what you would make on the railroads and three times what you could earn in a coal mine, so it was an attractive prospect for any young man. I suspect that was the lingering influence of the elder Maynes, who first organized the firemen—he was a notorious teetotaler and tobacco hater. The firemen did their drinking and what smoking they could afford out of uniform and out of the public eye.
Like firemen elsewhere, they were called to scenes of fire and accident. Unlike other firemen, rather than take the victims to a hospital, they usually shuttled them off to the Reapers. The Coal Country Kurian’s Reapers would oftentimes spend the daylight hours sheltering in the fire stations somewhere out of the way, waiting for an accident victim to be brought in.
This aided the regime in that there was less pounding on people’s doors in the middle of the night and taking away of one of the elder members of a household deemed past his usefulness. Everyone could understand someone dying in a railway accident or being crushed during logging—it made death more palatable. They would sometimes drum up business for themselves, by travelling pell-mell along the roads in the rain or gloom in the hope of hitting a cyclist or frightening the horse of a rider, causing her to be thrown and injured.
So, bullies, hooligans, and people who enjoyed inflicting violence on others put on the vulcanized black-and-yellow uniform of a fireman.
The firemen enforced a kind of xenophobia on their town. Locals were encouraged to phone the fire department if they saw a stranger without obvious purpose. Vagrants passing through fell into the hands of the firemen more often than not. Smugglers moving goods between Kentucky and the coast knew which highways were farthest from the fire stations, and where they had to travel overland on unmarked paths.
They had only one summer of police-action training, out of state in the wilderness of the old Marine Corps base at Parris Island (complete with one three-day weekend at Folly Island near Charleston with a generous enlistment bonus to spend, of which tales were told in the firehouse years after), but that was enough for the sort of bruising work they were expected to handle.
• • •
In my whole time accompanying Maynes around the Coal Country, I did only one service I am truly proud of.
It was a moment of opportunity, not part of the routine. While on the highway heading west toward Big Stone Gap, we saw a disabled Maynes Lumber truck blocking the road ahead, and another vehicle’s operator—a local milk van driver—waving his arms frantically.
The lumber truck had blown a set of tires, and while the driver was surveying the damage, his load had come loose and come close to crushing him to death. He was trapped from the midthigh down by pine trunks thirty feet long and easily a foot across.
The trapped driver was screaming that his legs were broken.
“Should we just put a bullet in his head and put him out of his misery?” Maynes asked Home.
Luckily, they were clean fractures; there was no visible bleeding, and nothing had rearranged his joints.
Using bits of bracing chain and wooden supporting wedges from the lumber truck’s load, plus no small amount of muscular energy, I opened a large-enough gap in the logs. The milk van driver said he’d have thought it would take a loader to move the logs.
“Leverage, that’s what Hickory does best,” Home said.
“You’ll be driving in no time, Lucky,” MacTierney said.
“My name’s not Lucky,” the driver said. “It’s Escandero.”
“It is from now on,” Home put in. “If you’d been slower by a foot, your pelvis would be in three pieces.” (I have substituted pelvis for what he actually said, because crushing wouldn’t break up the principal feature of male sexual anatomy in that manner.)
We wrapped “Lucky” Escandero in blankets after MacTierney and Home did a professional job of bracing his legs on a hardboard; then we put him in the stretcher brackets in the van, using the rear emergency door.
“You yell out if you’re going to puke from the pain, or anything,” Maynes said. “I don’t want the carpet to smell like puke for the next year.”
“I gave him a shot,” MacTierney said.
It was taking effect. The driver was mumbling something about not wanting to be on the R & R list, that he was a quick healer, could drive using just his arms and a cane, and so forth.
MacTierney, as usual, thought to radio in the disabled vehicle’s information so the local troopers could clear the road and see about reloading the lumber.
As we dropped him of
f at the nearest NUC hospital, I tugged on Maynes’s shoulder. “Lucky heal all proper?”
“All proper,” MacTierney said. Turning to the admitting doctor in the clerical collar, he said, “Mr. Maynes wants the best of care for him. Rehabilitation, everything. He’ll be checking up in a week or so on Escandero’s progress. He’s a good driver; we want him back.”
Maynes had said nothing of the sort, but MacTierney was a decent man.
THE HEADHUNTERS
May is one of the sweetest months in the Coal Country. With the warmer weather, more like summer than late spring, Maynes stepped up his travel schedule. He wasn’t always truck-hood adjudicating or hearing appeals. He’d also stop in for surprise inspections of Maynes Conglomerate holdings, or just spend a day in a rail yard chatting with the workers about diesel fuel supply and signal problems. We were on the road almost every day and frequently didn’t see the palace again for three or four days at a time.
The Appalachians turned a green so bright that a painter depicting it would use a palette full of yellow, too. But driving at this time of year on the chancy, badly maintained mountain roads took skill. There might be a rockslide or downed tree around every bend, and potholes filled with water could be deceptively—and wheel-wreckingly—deep.
Sadly, there were also vast scars in the landscape. Mining coal doesn’t always mean digging tunnels; you can also tear down the side of a mountain to get at the veins. There were dozens of these suppurating wounds on the landscape filled with men and machinery and dust. For every one working, there were two abandoned, or still half used by the locals to scrape a little extra coal for their own use or trade. The abandoned surface mines were only partially reforested; in many places the scars were too deep and there was no soil to support the exploitative early trees and brambles. Black bears and raccoons and bats would move into the caves created or exposed, so the scarring of the landscape was of benefit to a few afterward.