by E. E. Knight
“So the more default settings you avoid, the better an education you can get. Youth Vanguard helps a lot, of course, but in some KZs, only Quisling kids make it in. Funny how geniture aristocracy grows in any society like a weed.
“Then when you’re working, the default is to keep you at whatever job you started, have you get married, and have you be a member of the same church, in the same town, with the same neighbors, until you fear change more than you fear them. Then, once you’re older and have had all the children you’re likely to have, slowing down a bit and not so much able to put in the fifty-five-hour weeks, the default setting of the Order comes with teeth and yellow eyes.
“The Order’s default is always to keep you in whatever little sorting tray where you were first placed, like one of those puzzles kids get where they have to put the moon in the moon slot and the hexagon in the hex slot. It takes a mighty effort to make it out of one of those slots. That’s why you find so many of the more driven types on the fringes of the Kurian Order, where there’s room to widen the slots so they fit in a lot of different ways.”
Will Post was a pretty good man even when he was a drunk. Once he came over to the free territories, he became a better one. Sadly, he was badly injured in an air raid near Dallas, and at the time of this memoir had headquarters desk duty from a wheelchair.
In the Coal Country, the default was ore work in one form or another, either extracting it, transporting it, or keeping the men and machines doing those two other tasks running.
So some men in the White Palace security uniforms explained to me, like a teacher with a problem child, that I’d be living somewhere else for a while and working with train carts and shovels.
“Yes, work hard!”
“Good! Work hard, and you’ll get honey doughnuts and chocolate.”
The honey doughnuts weren’t bad; in fact they were tastier than the service pastries I’d had with Southern Command, but the chocolate they sold in the ordinary stores was crumbly, bitter stuff that tasted like chalk.
They escorted me to a bus shelter and the low man on the roster waited with me until a rather dirty bus wheezed up the hill toward the White Palace. I’d encountered coal dust before; it was hard to spend much time in this Kurian Zone without being acquainted with it here and there, but this was the first time it looked like no effort had been made to rid either the exterior or interior of it.
I risked a quick glance at the sign above the missing entry door.
ALL CONSOLIDATED MINES AND LIVING CAMPUS
“Make sure he gets off at Number Four,” my escort said.
“Poor bastard,” said the driver. He looked like he should be standing beside the road with his thumb out rather than at the wheel. “No luggage?”
I held up my bag.
“You’re a regular genie-us,” the driver said. “What you throwing him in the hole for?”
“Not my decision.”
“Hey, buddy, do me a favor. Talk to your boss about getting me out of this pickle-chiller and getting me chauffeur work. I’ve kept this thing out of the potholes, so I should be able to take one of the Maynes family to the golf course and back. Do that and I’ll make sure he’s properly ear-tagged at Number Four.”
My ears flicked involuntarily back.
“You firearm qualified?”
“It’s in the works. The vetting’s done and my picture’s turned in.”
My escort smiled and raised his chin, a duke getting ready to grant a favor to a peasant while looking down his nose at the request. “Sure, pal. Write down your name and locator number.”
The driver extracted an old envelope and carefully spelled out his name in block capitals and added a nine-digit series of letters and numbers, tongue poking at the side of his mouth in concentration. He handed it over. “Don’t forget me now.”
“Whether I forget or not depends on the big boy arriving.”
The other passengers—spouses of miners by the look of them, a couple carrying babies in baskets—didn’t seem to object to the driver taking his time with the security man.
The driver indicated that I should sit all the way at the back of the bus. He opened a box under his seat and took out a length of heavy dog chain. He proceeded to belt me into my seat by throwing a figure eight of chain around my chest, then fastening it with a keyed padlock.
I accepted the chains and made a show of sniffing his hands as he checked the lock.
“Hope you went potty before you got on my bus,” he said.
As we pulled away, my escort made a great show of pocketing the envelope with the driver’s name. When the White Palace was out of sight, I spent a few moments reading the advertising running above the windows of the bus. There was a shiny new placard exhorting the reader to REPORT SABOTAGE! and featuring some steely, feminine eyes looking out of the darkness. An older paper advertised a new fertility enhancer and aphrodisiac:
Increases desire! Enhances pleasure! Assures result!—three effects in just ONE DOSE!
A disclaimer beneath counseled those interested in becoming pregnant to check with their New Universal Church family coordinator to determine the best time for procreative activity.
The oldest and most dilapidated one was for that staple of budget-cutting cooks and food service pros looking for a cheap dish that, with a bit of English on the verbal cue ball, could be called meat: WHAM!—“PURE, POWER-PACKED PROTEIN.”
NOW IN EXTRA BOLD MESQUITE
The new packaging was red, white, and green. Same great price!
Same big bug, I thought to myself. I was told by the legworm ranchers, who usually just ate the fleshier, lobster-like meat running down the millipede-like claws, that everything save the hide from a legworm went into a wood-chipper about the dimensions of a missile silo, and came out the other end as gooey pink foam. I’m thankful I’ve never seen the process from beginning to end, because over the years I’ve eaten enough cans of the stuff to fill a trailer.
We bounced over the bottom land roads, stopped at a yawning strip mine that looked as though one of the Coal Country Mountains had been extracted like a dentist pulling a tooth, then puttered through a small redeveloped town called Gardenia. The driver lost all his other passengers there, and it was just the two of us bouncing up a crudely patched road that was an amalgam of asphalt and gravel running beside a set of rail and power lines.
He hadn’t lied about his skill in avoiding potholes, but this road defeated him. Every few minutes the bus gave a bang-lurch-curse-from-the-driver combination that felt and sounded as though he’d run over a motorcyclist.
We pulled up in front of some brick buildings that looked as though they might have once been an industrial garage and what had clearly been a motel next to a bridge over a small river. The rail line divided here, with the less-used tracks and the power line running up the mountainside.
“Number Four. This is you, big boy. Thanks for not shitting up my back bench.”
I looped a finger in his key lock and gave it a good pull. The padlock gave a brief, musical ting! as it fell to pieces and I extracted myself from the chains.
“Thank you for ride,” I said.
“Hey, that lock cost me four dollars!”
A trio of men holding their ID cards and travel tickets waited at the bus kiosk. An impressive mound of garbage lay in the ravine between the former garage and motel, waiting for the end of days or the next convict-scooper garbage train, whichever would come first.
Leaving so soon? someone had scrawled in permanent marker on the wall of the shelter. Lucky bastard, someone else had added in a different hand of slightly smaller letters.
I noticed that one part of the roof of the hotel had a blue plastic sheet covering a hole, held down by what looked like some old manholes.
“Be a minute, fellas,” the driver said. He took me to a little corner office of the garage with coal-dusted windows that looked out at the motel. A flower box with a surprisingly robust set of yellow flowers next to the door added
a cheerful note to the general sense of quiet entropy.
“Got a new worker for you, Murphy,” the driver said. “A Grog. Taller and hairier than most.”
A man the general shape and specific color of a fireplug extracted a cigar plug from his mouth and set it carefully on a stained corner of his aluminum desk. He’d been gripping it dead center in his mouth, like a baby’s pacifier.
A fleshy girl with eyeglasses rather creatively laced with wire peeked through the doorway of the office’s back room. “Hoo-boys, he’ll go through the groceries,” she said.
“Fuck me,” Murphy said. “How many times do I have to tell ’em, Grogs are more trouble than they’re worth.”
“This one’s smart,” the driver said. “He talks. Anyway, he’s your problem now. I’m due back northeast.”
“Look, you want to get along in your lodgings, helps to grease old uncle Murphy. Cat-piss ‘grease,’ you ape?”
“Grease. Like for cook?” I asked. It still astonishes me, how little evidence the Coal Country apparatchiks needed to think me a half-wit. Even the Gray Ones are clever within the limits of their own tribal civilization, and frequently fought more numerous and better-equipped professional armies to a standstill. If primitive means not being able to lie to yourself properly about the world you live in, then I suppose I am a primitive.
“It does help me pay the market tab. Grease. Yeah, you give me some of what you make; I give you nice things. Good old American business relationship. Understand?”
“Like nice things, honey-buns.”
“He called you ‘honey-buns,’” the office help laughed. She had a fruity smell about her that reminded me of some chewing gum I’d had at Xanadu.
“Never heard a stoop talk so good,” Murphy said. “’Most good as us.”
The workers were housed on a campus of buildings that can best be described as tenement quality. The main building was an old, two-story motel. Everyone ate at the cafeteria, an old family restaurant that now ran twenty-four hours—more or less—to accommodate the shifts at the mine.
I’ve overnighted in swamps that were cleaner. The infestation of biting bugs and cockroaches had to be experienced; words aren’t sufficient. It smelled of clogged toilets and kerosene, and even the ceilings were grimy.
The coal dust was to blame. The miners had showers at Number Four, but they ran only water, cold straight from the well, so only a few bathed there. The rest waited to get home to clean up. But during the wait for the next availability of hot water in the rickety system, they distributed a good deal of black grit.
So their washrooms were filthy with coal dust. With the washrooms black as sin, no one felt it necessary to keep the kitchen spotless, so grease and dropped food accumulated in the omnipresent black dust, attracting vermin. With the rats and cockroaches roaming the kitchen, what was the point of keeping bed linens fresh?
They put me in a clapboard warren of rooms without even a sink or cooking stove.
“Spacious, this. You’ll need it,” the “housing facilitator” told me.
They found two metal-framed single beds and pushed them together, then tied them with wire. A mattress of shredded couch cushions sewn into heavy canvas did not quite cover the bed’s suspension, which bowed into a hammock shape if I did not sleep with my torso uncomfortably across the bar in the center.
I had to take water from a floor tap designed for a hose just outside my “window”—blessed I am to have such long arms—or thread through the partitions to the other side of the building to use a sink. For bathing we filled five-gallon plastic buckets, the sort of thing you see holding potatoes in restaurants, and washed with a rag, then rinsed with another bucketful. But at least it was warm enough to work up a lather.
It’s a minor point of interest to architectural and social historians, but there was really no need for this kind of housing. The chaos of 2022 and the ravies virus depopulated most parts of North America (distance saved a few communities). There were houses ready to be restored and used, waiting behind old and weathered Condemned as Unsafe Property notices. The Kurian Order, given its way, preferred that humans lived in community groups, the larger the better, in fact, so there were more eyes watching and ears listening.
“You start at Number Four in the morning. Just follow the other men out and up the road. It’s only a mile and a half to the mine, and you’ll have fine weather for your first day’s walk, looks like.”
• • •
It was a bright, still morning promising a hot fall day. The workers all left near dawn for their walk. Some kissed wives and children good-bye; most carried plastic coolers filled with their lunches. Their work clothes were mostly dungaree; helmets, gloves, goggles, and hearing gear dangled from their belts. I thought it was strange that the mine didn’t provide protective gear. But then not every man carried each item, so perhaps they were custom bits superior to what the mine offered.
I’d made a bit of a show with the other workers on the way up, asking, “Where me work, where me work?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, stoop,” an older man at the front of the procession said, before going back to grumbling about losing money at cribbage.
A large man fell into step beside me. In fact, he fell into step so easily, I wondered if he’d had some kind of military training, or if close order drill was simply part of everyone’s childhood education.
“I show you, big fella. My name’s Olson. You have a name, I suppose?”
“Hickory,” I said.
“Ticky, more like,” the one who’d called me “stoop” said.
“How you know that?” Olson asked. “You and your mom had a groom through that fur, maybe?”
The man half rounded, then thought better of it.
“Awww, you’d just enjoy it if I beat you up some, Ollie,” he grumbled.
“The smaller the man, the bigger the talk,” Olson said, to everyone and no one.
The mining site was set into, appropriately enough, the crotch of a mountain pointing like an arrow toward the southernmost corner of the Coal Country. That was where most of the coal went that we produced: due south to the Georgia Control. A great pile of slag spilled down toward a creek, shale-colored pus running from the mountain’s wound.
Outside the gaping, semicircular mine entrance with its trolley tracks, electrical cabling, and ventilator stacks stood a humble building, the mine office, a ramshackle set of connected trailers with a single two-story red-painted wooden building glowering through windows like filthy glasses over the litter around it. On the other side of the mine-access road were a dumping ground for heavy equipment, some functional, some not, and a scrap heap of pieces of excavating gear.
I could fill pages describing Number Four, an ugly black mouth in the mountainside like a vast skull eye-socket, with
THEY WHO WORK WELL, EAT WELL
painted in letters in reflective yellow such as you see striping roads on the boulders above the mine entrance.
In tiny little felt-pen letters just inside, someone had scrawled:
Nothing to hope for now.
• • •
The stale air, the inadequate lighting, the antiquated machinery that required endless labor with shovels and picks and unpredictable blasting sticks—I could go on for pages describing the noisy activity of a coal mine run on a shoestring budget.
For the purposes of this account, a reader need remember only three things:
First, that the mine stood in a remote location; the single rail line that met it passed over two bridges and innumerable narrow cuts. To drive there, you bumped on railroad ties at the bridges, or took a doubtful jeep trail that challenged even the hardiest four-wheel drive.
Second, that it was sort of a dumping ground for misfits and malcontents, both of the Kurian Order and for Consolidated Mines, where blunder and inefficiency would do less harm. I believe I did not have a reputation for either, but I was put here to find out how I’d adapt to mine work. Perhaps they thought
I’d go insane underground and start in on my fellow workers. If it suited me, the Maynes Conglomerate might have moved me to a more important operation, and if it didn’t, I’d do minimal damage.
Finally, that Amiable Fise (pronounced so it rhymes with “nice”) worked there. I will tell more about her later, but in many ways she was the heart of Number Four.
The Olson fellow was kind enough to take me into the mine office, where I handed over the small amount of documentation the White Palace had given me. They took my picture (they had to do some rearranging of camera, light, and backdrop) and made a plastic identification card. Although it came on a lanyard, the foreman who gave me the tour showed me a little slot on a yellow safety vest where the card would fit. “You don’t need that dangling into machinery.”
I marveled at the picture briefly. There was no sense overplaying things.
I soon accustomed myself to the work. The ten-hour shifts of mining themselves were not so bad. They were good about issuing breaks regularly, and they kept water and hygiene necessities up near the coal face (as a new hand, I was put in charge of excretion, or the “honey bucket,” which went out with the slag); the workers usually spent only about half the day in the noise and dust of the actual coal face, doing the messy work of extracting. The rest was maintaining the rickety old equipment, rigging lighting and ventilation gear, or moving coal from inside to out through the conveyor chutes.
But reaching the coal face required a good deal of “travel”—often more than an hour to reach the spot for the day’s work from the mine entrance above, between waits for the elevator and walk-crawls to the face. Some of the tunnels were big enough to fit two cars abreast, but there were a great many mines that weren’t all that much bigger than the tunnels dug by convicts in prison-escape movies. For a larger figure such as me, it meant almost crawling on all fours through some of the tunnel branches. Neither I nor any of the miners was paid for travel. Idle time for breakdowns did not count, either, even if we were puffing in the unimaginable dark—a coal mine’s dark must be experienced to be believed—while waiting for the electricity to come back on. The foremen who kept track of such things for the management upstairs were generous about “correcting” time cards, though, for especially vexing circumstances.