Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  “I said mistake,” a woman said, kicking at her escort. “Talk to my brothers. There must be a way—”

  One of the firemen chuckled. “Don’t worry, honey. You’ll be buried in the family cemetery just under your pa.”

  “We own this whole goddamn valley. You can’t do this!”

  “Guess you were too young to remember your folks being taken away. You remember the night your aunt Sinthee was taken away? You bet it can happen to you.”

  “The Old Man’s mad about how things went down in Beckley.”

  “Then get the fire chief in handcuffs. I’ve got nothing to do with security.”

  “Your production and disposition people screwed up on the cookware. That was what started the riot.”

  The Kurians were taking a gamble with this purge. The Maynes clan had weapons, command of its own security forces, a communications network; if, somehow, the revolt could spread with its assistance, the world might be astonished at what this flinty patch of earth might mean to the future.

  The Kurians were being careful in their culling, however. Had they removed the Maynes clan in its entirety, the plan might have worked. But the Kurians wanted the management network that was represented by the White Palace. In my opinion they thought they would be crushing two snakes with one heel—they would cull so heavily from the Maynes family that the rump portion left would be shocked into meek obedience, and the Coal Country population would see their aristocracy pay heavily for the bloodshed that started at Beckley.

  Now they were bringing lines of people, handcuffed or tied together in a sort of daisy chain, and marching them into the hills. I wondered if I should follow. It would be an escape route few would choose, and perhaps the world would need a witness someday to what went on up there.

  I saw my employer stagger out of one of the back entrances of the White Palace, wearing pajama bottoms and a sport coat thrown over his bare torso. He had blood splashed on him.

  “Aunt Pen escaped you, you numbnuts. Slashed her wrists, soon as she saw the motorcade coming. Poor old Aunt Pen,” Maynes said to an officer brandishing a pistol.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” a woman cried, tied to a teenage girl in front and an elderly man behind. The youngster was clinging closer to her than any knot could achieve.

  “‘For days of auld lang syne, my dears,’” Maynes sang. Perhaps he didn’t care. He seemed drunk enough.

  A man whom I knew only as one of the senior sergeants in the White Palace security office approached me. “You’d better look after your man,” he said, pointing at Maynes. “Quick-quick. Take him into his room or the barn—anywhere but the back door—and sit on him for a couple of hours.”

  I put my heels together and gave a knuckle-to-forehead salute. “Yes, sir.”

  Maynes had sat down to watch the people being dragged out. The first soldiers were already returning from the ridgeline with empty handcuffs and cordage. I recognized Georgia Control insignia. Evidently the principal customer of the Coal Country’s product was behind this purge.

  I picked him up. “Pickers. My whole family. Bunch of pickers. You stoops keep family? What happens when you get mad—you eat ’em?”

  “No family,” I said, able to tell the truth for once.

  “Telling me how to run this country. Why the hell should they care, as long as the coal keeps moving and we toss ’em a StR* once in a while? I bet the old man went along with this. I’m on the road all the time. I log more hours than the rest of the family put together.”

  “We work now?” I asked, seeing a glimmer of a chance. I was ready to risk anything rather than endure the sound of one more family extracted from the White Palace. Why didn’t the Order tell them they were being relocated and put them on a bus? Everyone would know it was a lie, but the trappings of normalcy made the transition easier.

  Maynes shrugged. “Yeah, why the hell not? See what’s on the trouble sheet.”

  I supported him in a walk through the crunchy late-summer grass and back into the White Palace.

  He had an office in what used to be the catering sales center when the White Palace had been a resort hotel. A few shots showing the history of the resort featuring polished-looking brides and relaxed golfers always seemed like something out of another world. Especially tonight. A single gunshot echoed from a floor or two above.

  “That’s the ticket,” Maynes yelled at the roof. “Don’t give ’em the satisfaction!”

  Finding anything in Maynes’s office at this time could be compared to digging a buckle out of the Augean stables. He had a beautiful desk and hutch combination, bird’s-eye maple with burls in the delicate strokes of a Chinese watercolor. Such a pity it lay under a layer of greasy paper plates, empty bottles, and an orgy of copulating binders filled with dog-eared, yellowing paper.

  Maynes couldn’t locate his clipboard with personnel matters requiring his attention, or he had forgotten why he had returned to his office in the first place. I subtly called attention to it by knocking it on the floor with my elbow.

  He was rooting around in the liquor cabinet, sadly.

  He extracted a gun, a heavy-framed revolver, and a holster and put them on. After a moment’s thought, he also took a box of ammunition.

  “That’d be funny if I came to it and forgot the bullets!”

  Given my employer’s sense of humor, “funny” could mean about anything, but at the back of my mind there was the idea of suicide. At least he didn’t attempt to load the gun. A little more alcohol and he might not be able to fit a bullet into the cylinder.

  “He’s in no condition to—”

  My footing slipped and I almost dropped Maynes. As I shifted my grip, my elbow rose, regrettably catching the nighttime security man under the chin. His teeth met with a clack like a window shutter slamming. His eyes rolled over in their sockets and he folded at the knees.

  “Whaddya think you’re doing, Mr. Maynes?” one of the White Palace security staff said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “He should be out in the quarry with the rest of them,” another put in. “Damn pervert.”

  “I’m working,” Maynes slurred. “Working harder than you pickers, anyway.”

  We made it to the Trekker. There were two men in charge of the lot. One of them spoke on a radio and waved me over to the bus. I was following orders after all, getting Maynes out of the way.

  I pulled out of the lot. I passed the lined-up Georgia Control security vehicles pulled half off the approaches to the White Palace, sleeping wolves ready to be roused for pursuit, and took what I hoped would be my last look at the White Palace. It looked dingy in the moonlight. I wondered if the new, reduced Maynes clan would bother to keep the windows and paint trim so bright and fresh.

  Maynes fell asleep for a while in the back of the Trekker. I consulted a map and the latest information I could find about the roads over the Appalachians. We gassed up on the Maynes account, and I filled thirty more gallons’ worth in extra cans just in case.

  I had logged forty-odd miles of westward crawling, the speedometer falling exasperatingly lower and lower as the roads grew narrower and worse. We were approaching the western borders of Coal Country when Maynes awoke. He visited the inboard toilet, then joined me up by the driver’s semi-enclosure.

  “Hey, Hick, when do we get there?”

  “Many hours yet.”

  Maynes yawned. He took a big swig from a three-quarters empty bottle that had been nearly full in his office. “That’s too bad. Where are we going?”

  “You told me—go east. Straight for Ken-tuck.”

  “So I did.” Maynes blinked blearily and rubbed his eyes. “Goddamn right. Let’s go west, old Grog.” He chuckled. “West! West! West! Not fast enough! You’re relieved, old cock.”

  Maynes took the wheel.

  “Think again, picker,” Maynes yelled at the windshield.

  My life seemed to be repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, and this time as a farce. I braced for impact.

/>   Maynes, addled by alcohol, crashed through the checkpoint when all he would have had to do was show his ID on the off chance the troopers wouldn’t recognize him at once. But fate had not placed me in the employ of a man who could drink and be rational at the same time.

  The reinforced front of the Trekker struck the Trooper car hard enough to spin it one hundred eighty degrees.

  It was an appropriate end for Joshua Maynes the Third, I suppose. He looked as though he were trying to perform a sex act on the steering column of the Trekker. He was still alive.

  Good Grog that I was, I’d certainly try to go for help, especially since the radio had been destroyed in the accident. Or that was how I made it look, since it wasn’t a portable model.

  • • •

  Two miles west something flashed across the road. At first I thought it was a bounding albino deer.

  I did not get a good look at the death. My impression was that of a stumbling, pale figure running through the woods. A ragged, ever-shifting arc of men and women armed with various weapons, from revolvers to assault rifles, pausing to fire or reload, then moving again to keep the quarry in sight.

  It turned its face only once. It was slight, clearly a youngish Reaper, as these things are reckoned. Its pale face had been wounded at the outer edge of the jaw; naked bone could be seen with black tar clinging around the wound—Reaper blood goes gummy and as black as an old human scab almost instantly. The yellow eyes were wide with fear and I felt empathy for it. It had probably been penned most of its life, fed old dogs and cats or rabbits, emotionally at a four-or five-year-old’s level—and that was a four- or five-year-old woefully mistreated by everyone it knew.

  I had seen “wild” Reapers in action before—on the other side of the river from Little Rock, during the siege of Big Rock Hill. Our enemies dropped them as a disruptive and sapping force during a larger attack. The death of a Kurian would also, I understand, turn its Reapers loose.

  It would break through someone’s bedroom window and snatch a child, or slaughter a whole family down to the last bird dog. To see such a menace running around loose and not do anything about it would be a dreadful betrayal of what I believed. The lesser sins I’d committed for my own survival as Maynes’s bodyguard I felt I could answer for, but to leave this thing wandering the hills—

  I checked the heavy old revolver in its holster and followed.

  I lost sight of it frequently, but could still track it with my ears. It made enough noise in its frantic flight—so frantic that it frequently struck trees with a thwack.

  The ground rose more steeply and I had to choose my path carefully. The Reaper seemed to be choosing an easier, longer route up the ridgeline. I saw my chance.

  Using all fours, I swarmed up the steeper hillside at the fastest pace I could manage, the famous Grog charge-gallop that’s so often depicted in paintings of skirmishes in the late Liberation.

  Though I evidently beat it to the limestone-scarred, wooded top, I lost sight and sound of it. After a few moments of looking and waiting, I made my best guess of the path it was taking and descended. Though the woods on the slope were dense, there was a fair amount of moonlight, and I should have been able to pick out a light-colored figure.

  Had it found a cave or hollow tree to crawl into?

  I unholstered the heavy revolver and descended carefully, searching for a hiding spot, eyes following the front sight of the pistol.

  I had an answer delivered to my neck and shoulder. It had been hiding in one of the trees—I hadn’t looked high enough, I suppose, and Reapers are nothing if not slender—and leaped down upon me like a hunting cat.

  The wrestling match was short and furious. I had a painful tearing sensation to my shoulder and felt hot blood upon me. I tried to pin the beast with one hand, but it was like wrestling with a fire escape that had fallen atop me. Feeling a sharp stab at my hairline, I instinctively reached up as you might to swat a biting fly. I found myself with a handful of tongue and yanked, hard.

  The Reaper came loose with its tongue, and I swung it against a tree trunk hard enough to make it rain acorns as I felt around for the pistol with my hurting arm. It staggered, stunned. I managed to pick up the gun, found the trigger, and emptied three chambers into it at negligible range.

  The impact of the bullets knocked it into the tree three times. I managed to get my fingers locked around its throat, braced its stomach with my leg, and yanked hard enough to haul in one of the Gulf marlins we used to fish for off the well deck of the old Thunderbolt. Its neck popped and I shook it, lashing it against rocks and listening to cartilage and bones snapping.

  Finally, it lay still.

  I had wrecked both the young Reaper and my chances for escape. My shoulder hurt every time I moved my arm, and I had blood running from wounds around my neck. I did my best to stanch the flow, but because of their position, I couldn’t get a good look at the wounds to do much about them other than apply pressure with my good arm.

  Baying hounds sounded in the distance and I saw the flicker of a flashlight between the trees.

  Dogs, and I was dribbling blood. They’d find me eventually.

  I let loose with my loudest call. I waved my arms. I capered and kicked up leaves and groundfall, which served to mess up the area and hide where I placed my escape gear and supplies. The commotion drove a pair of bitterns from the fen. The two boomed out their anger as they left.

  The dogs looked a good deal happier to see me than the men, identified by the badges and hats as local constabulary. They did a good deal of pointing and pantomime until I convinced them that I wasn’t just using words in the manner of a parrot.

  I did my best to act cheerfully when they sat me in the back of the van and told me to ride, as if I were a lost dog glad to leap into the family car.

  They drove me back to the White Palace. The summer sun striking the brilliant white glared so brightly, it hurt my eyes to look. I tried not to become too relieved; this might be the soothing moment of relief before the shock of a surprise interrogation.

  As it turned out, I retraced my original steps through the staff entrance.

  The presence of the vet made me nervous. I supposed at the time I might be euthanized like a horse, but I steeled myself to take a few of them with me—sparing the vet, who’d been nothing but kind each time he’d attended to me.

  I had a deep puncture from the Reaper’s tongue, tooth marks that had to be closed with surgical staples, a separated shoulder, some minor scrapes and contusions. All were taken care of with cleanliness and efficiency by the vet and his assistant. They were both uneasy and snapped at each other as they worked. Changes in the power structure often brought that out from those in the middle of the Kurian/human hierarchy.

  The staff director came in and muttered something about the big Grog being back. He scratched at his chin, pulling a phantom goatee. I’d never thought of it until that moment, but all the staff members at the White Palace were clean-shaven. Requirement? Tradition?

  “Well, Groggie, your charge won’t be needing you anymore.” Satisfaction with the assessment poured out of him like syrup.

  “Mr. Maynes is dead?”

  “Might as well be. His brain isn’t up to much except keeping his heart beating and lungs working. Docs say it’s a deep coma and he’ll deteriorate. They might as well prop him up in the topiary between the palms.”

  “I see him soon?”

  “Fix that broken badminton net with him, for all I care.”

  “Enough of that,” the vet said. “I don’t want talk like that getting back to Scrappy. He takes after his great-grandfather a bit much.”

  “I’d rather worry about it getting back to the Old Man,” the staff director said.

  “Don’t tell me you believe that story about his body not being in the family crypt,” the vet said. “Rig on the gardening staff says he’s seen it personally.”

  “Rig’s never been inside the crypt. Nor anyone else on the staff, unless you coun
t . . . well, himself.”

  While this conversation interested me, my helpful Grog persona would concentrate on where his next mug of root beer might be coming from. “Who I work for now?” I asked.

  “You’re due for some R & R,” the staff director said. “I wouldn’t put too much trust in Rig. Damn drunk.”

  “You’d be a drunk too if you found bodies like he does when you’re mowing the golf course and raking sand. They aren’t too particular about what they do with the bodies after they’ve been drained.”

  The nurse hurried out with her tray of bloody gauze.

  “Enough of that horror talk. How’s the big boy’s health? Can he handle hard labor?”

  “Send him to the mines. They always need strong backs,” the vet said.

  “To a point,” the staff director said. “He’s kind of big. They won’t much like feeding all that.”

  “He can eat the other miners for all I care. I’m tired of smelling wet Grog in the morning.”

  PART TWO

  THE BLACK CURRENCY

  THE LAST STOP

  I was an oddly sized part passing through the gears of the Maynes Empire. Had I been a man, they probably would have made me a security guard at a warehouse or fuel depot and made me work my way up from a clean slate. After all, my drunken superior had given me orders, and I hadn’t been clever enough to figure out a way of not following them.

  As I possessed a strong back, the default was to send me to the mines.

  Why do I use the word default? I fought alongside an ex-Quisling who taught me the term, as he saw it. His name was Post, and we’d first met on the Louisiana coast when I served with a Grog labor detachment I had infiltrated. At the time, he was a prematurely aging lieutenant and heavy drinker. Much later, after he’d switched sides, he would sometimes talk about surviving in the Kurian Order. While these aren’t his exact words—my memory is not good enough to recall those without notes—they are faithful to his view.

  “You never wanted the system to ‘default’ when making a choice about you. It started in childhood. The default was to get almost no education at all, just a few years of primary painting horrible pictures about the pre-Kurian past, terrifying propaganda about the guerillas, and reverence for the system and what it was trying to do for mankind. If you defaulted there, you usually ended up apprenticing at eight or eleven to resource work—farming or logging or fishing if you were male; most females ended up diapering or cleaning.