Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  When your shift finished, you crawled back, exhausted, and in my case praying the whole way that you would not meet some laggard late to the relief shift, which would require one of us backing up to a wide spot where we could squeeze by each other.

  To add to the miseries of the travel, there were coal conveyors operating with a deafening clatter. Even with wadded-up bits of New Universal Church bulletins stuffed in your ears, you arrived at the coal face with a headache, or young boys and girls pushing or dragging four-wheeled “barrows” of coal to the nearest working conveyor. The Kurian Order often bragged that it took children off the streets and gave them an education. These children certainly weren’t on the streets, but their education wasn’t all that different from that given a dog or a lab rat: perform simple tasks repetitively and get your treat.

  The work at the face itself was not bad. It was divided into three phases: blasting, breaking, and shoveling, with resets of machinery in between as the coal face advanced and the ceiling was shored up with timber or old scaffolding.

  The blasting provided enough excitement for a lifetime, for one time in twenty the blasting cap or wiring failed and one of the demolition men had to crawl forward and reset the mulish explosives. Not a month went by when there wasn’t an injury or a death.

  You could lose yourself in the monotony of breaking and shoveling. During resets we all worked like mad, for during a reset no coal appeared, and no coal meant no food and reductions in off days when visits to town were arranged.

  Work always seemed to speed up at the end of the month in a rush to overfulfill the quota. There was some grumbling, but nothing that led me to believe a revolt, so soon to come, was brewing.

  • • •

  The highlight in most everyone’s day was Aym—Amiable Fise, our “canteen girl.”

  She was the reward given to “Those Who Work.” If your shift foreman labeled you as a “Prime Worker,” your only benefit was commissary privileges. It meant you had the option of buying your lunch and getting a hot meal made fresh rather than bringing one. The price was quite reasonable, usually twenty dollars or about a half hour’s work—for most. I found myself eating sixty-dollar lunches, mostly because Aym’s food was better than that available down in the dormitory, so her commissary became half my food consumption (for the rest, I paid a small premium to have the wife of one of the workers take the bus to the market stalls for me and fill my simple list). Aym also sold a few necessities: bottles of aspirin and muscle rub, tobacco, gambling tickets for some of the Georgia Control’s attractive-sounding cash-prize lotteries, and of course the inevitable range of Kurian Zone aphrodisiacs and fertility enhancers.

  I first met her when a miner named Raymond Jones introduced me. He and I were often teamed together by our foreman. He was a wiry shaved-bald man with a very low boiling point who fulminated against either the incompetence of the mine office or his own foul fate for placing him in a hole to work out his remaining years. “Rage,” as he was known, needed my help dragging some oxyacetylene tanks that should have been put on wheels. We passed her largish, engineless lunch truck up on blocks and surrounded by a plain, garden-variety security fence stretching from mine floor to ceiling. It stood just past the elevator and lighted shift office. Coal-dusted lawn furniture, no two pieces matching, made an unattended café just outside the window where workers spoke to her and paid for their orders.

  Raymond Jones had a blue poker chip with a casino logo hologram on it. Shoved in his ID pocket, it designated him as one allowed to use the commissary.

  “Wait a sec,” Jones said. “Hey, Aym, customer.”

  A petite woman’s face lighted by unflattering fluorescents appeared at the window. She wore dark sunglasses with oversized lenses and gilded bows that made me think of movie starlets in the old gossip magazines. A smile nearly as wide as the glasses gleamed under her flour-dusted nose.

  In her thirties, she was blind (or nearly so; I never learned if she had any vision), and she was the one sunny spot for us in all that dark. No one would call her a beauty, especially not with fryer grease on her face and her hair hidden under a net cap, but no one seemed to mind looking at her as they killed a break. I thought she had a good jawline and nose. I don’t hold with physiognomy revealing character, but something about the set of her mouth and cheek muscles made me think the big smile was a frequent visitor.

  “I hear someone big behind you, Rage, but he steps soft,” she said. “Something weird about his feet.”

  “It’s the Grog. Heard of him?”

  “Someone said there was a big, really furry one here. Even talks. I thought they were talking about Pelloponensis.”

  “I think he’s got a rung on Pellers on the old evolutionary ladder. Cleans his ass more often, anyway. Say hi, Hickory.”

  I resisted the impulse to say “Hi, Hickory,” and growled out a “Good morning.”

  “Wow. That’s some voice box,” she said. “I felt that in my back teeth.”

  “That’s what she said,” Rage said.

  He was the only one who laughed.

  “You want a drink or something, Hickory? It’s on the Number Four Canteen.”

  I stepped up to the window. “Milk? Choco-milk? Root beer?”

  “Really? I don’t have much call for that, but I’ve got some chocolate syrup, or what passes for it around here. Give me a sec.”

  She felt around in one of the refrigerators and came up with a big brown squeeze bottle and proceeded to make me a chocolate milk. Her workplace was filled with gear, leaving her a zone for movement about the size of a walk-in freezer. She moved about it elegantly; vision didn’t make much of a difference for a person who spent her days in something with the square footage of a dog run.

  “Enjoy,” she said, handing it out the window. I did.

  In my first month working at Number Four, I found that once I was down in the mine, the time passed in a blur. Before I knew it, the fall had grown cold and the farmers were setting up roadside stands. Not that I had much opportunity to visit them, or money, as I was still in the process of buying custom safety equipment from a Maynes subsidiary to fit my frame.

  Still, I won my blue casino chip to wear in the ID pocket with six weeks of hard work. My fellow miners presented me with an oversized bottle of shampoo—I had a tough time getting the coal dust out of my fur—at the informal ceremony where the foreman handed me my chit. I began to visit Aym daily, as did many others. A female voice, even a thin-throated human one, was a wonderful contrast to the blast and bustle of the coal face, especially when it came with a smile. I may have fallen a little in love with her. I suspect I was not the only one.

  • • •

  She could be as sweet as the real sugar she put in the coffee—the source was a mystery, but rumor had it she had a highly placed boyfriend in the Maynes organization—or as foul mouthed as a Mississippi bargeman. She had a memory for humor based on reproductive desire and always had a new joke or two at the ready.

  “Olson, why’s a woman exactly like an investment account with the Church?” she asked my first friend while we stood in line for coffee and a doughnut in the morning.

  “Dunno, Aym,” Olson said, going red in anticipation. Though he was married with several children, Aym’s jokes still embarrassed him.

  “Because the depositor loses interest as soon as he withdraws.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good one,” Olson said, going even redder.

  A cat kept her company in the cubicle. It was cautious of me at first and hid under the prep table she used for sandwiches. The cat’s name was Crumb.

  “Crumb used to be good with the rats and mice, but he’s too old and fat now,” Aym explained the first time I saw her outside the van. I had started early that day in order to leave early for my lunch, which I’d grown to look forward to more and more since earning my commissary privileges. She was changing propane tanks for her grill by touch. It was hard not to be impressed; she performed the action without wasting a
step or reach. “I have to lay down traps where I hear chewing. Sometime’s he’ll eat one of the bodies in the trap—acts like he’s doing me a big favor—but he’d rather have sandwich meat or canned tuna. Crumb, you lazy bugger, stiffen up and meet this big whatever-you-are.”

  “Golden One,” I supplied.

  She returned to the van and took up a knife, slicing the meat and vegetables for the sandwich I had ordered and carefully brushing her knife across a damp towel that smelled faintly of chlorine. She replaced it on a magnetic strip located from memory.

  “Sharp knife dangerous,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it,” she agreed.

  Her face made strange expressions as she worked, piling the ingredients on the bread. Her face seemed now eager, now shocked. It was a bit unsettling at first, but you grew used to it.

  “Here you are, Old Hickory.” She handed me the sandwich. I ate it using my pick-rake (I had just been at the face) as an improvised seat, propping the handle’s end in the nook and sitting on the metal. It was extraordinary—the sandwich, not the improvised seat.

  “Thank you,” I said. “So good.” I had thought that the Kurian Order did away with the blind in the same manner as they did with the crippled and difficult cognitive defects.

  No wonder so many of the men picked up their lunches here.

  “How long you in mine?” I asked.

  “Six years in this one. Before, I was in another. I worked a phone, taking messages and handling shift schedules. I can read a little if I hold it real close to my eyes. This is better. I’m my own boss. I have the wire between me and the men. Up in the office I always had the feeling my boss was looking down my blouse or up my skirt.”

  “Yes, boss always watch,” I said. “Eyes no good?”

  “Eyes no good. Since I was eight. Bus accident.”

  I wondered if she was an informant of the Kurian Order. David Valentine once told me that the Kurians tended to put informant women in working with large groups of men. Maybe she wasn’t as blind as she claimed, just fuzzy-visioned. But what would she have to spy on down here? There weren’t enough workers on any one shift to count as a threat, even if they improvised weapons out of their gear, and they certainly didn’t have access to sensitive sights deep in the earth.

  “My life no good,” I said, deciding to probe. “Stuck in dark and dust in hair.”

  “You’re one smart Grog,” she said. With an effort, she kept her eyes pointed at the air blowing out of my nostrils. “But that sandwich won’t be enough. I had to do a platter for the shift office staff this morning. Want the leftovers to take back?”

  “You have gratitude from me,” I said. I crooked my pick in the corner of my arm and helped myself to boiled bread, cheese, and dried ersatz fruit.

  • • •

  Number Four deserved its reputation as one of the worst in all of Coal Country. The ore was in thin seams that made it difficult to extract and of an average grade. I thought most of the miners were doing marginally useful make-work, paying for their small wages and third-hand, improvised equipment, electricity, and not much else. In a differently run Kurian Zone, most of these men would have been on a collection van. Whatever else you wanted to say about the Maynes version of the Kurian Order, they weren’t particularly bloodthirsty.

  Each mine face had one power drill. The rest of the five or so workers (once two were assigned to fire and support the drill) at the face did what they could not to attract the eye of the supervisor.

  My fellow workers at Number Four could best be described with the palliative word “oddballs.” Their former employers would probably use worse phrases. They’d been transferred from other mines or businesses or camps where they’d been irritants, and Number Four was the Kurian Order’s way of coating that irritant into a black pearl.

  This, of course, raised the question of whether the locals considered me an oddball as well. But of course they did. To them I was a stranger of a foreign species, and bad luck seemed to follow me. It was strange that they didn’t trade me off to another Kurian Zone or sell me to a bounty hunter or something equally painless to the system that found me a piece of grit in its oil. But again, the Maynes filter didn’t strain as fine as most.

  One shift foreman, the one who gave me my blue chip, Bleecher, disliked the underground’s cold and had developed a strange diet in response. He ate beans and spicy sauce at breakfast, lunch, and dinner (he carried his own supply) and claimed that his constant farting served as a gaseous form of climate control, heating his jumpsuit, which he’d waxed into tin cloth. I was of the opinion that all the paraffin in his clothes simply did a better job of trapping body heat, but even in the oily air underground, you knew when you were coming up on a team with Bleecher in it.

  He always silenced idle chatter. Even if we were hard at work with shovels, exchanging a few words, he’d slap his yellow leather work gloves across his palm to attract our attention, then issue an emphatic order to work our backs, not our mouths.

  It shut most of us up, except for Raymond “Rage” Jones, of course. Rage was a bit of a sea lawyer, as they used to say on the Gulf Coast in the Coastal Marines. He wasn’t afraid to speak against the Kurian Order, which made him a rare character. He hated lice and bedbugs and ticks, to the point where he kept himself completely shaved, head to toe. He believed I was riddled with parasitic insects. He gave me a wide path whenever we passed, and he always rubbed himself down with turpentine or kerosene upon leaving a shift. I wished I could have told him the story of Hoffman Price, the man who survived years in the wilderness by supporting as many parasites on his body as possible to camouflage the natural human aura the Reapers read. Better a small bloodsucker on your skin than a big one on your throat.

  “Rage” Jones was always letting arguments spill over into physical aggression. Usually he settled for a headlock, but every now and then it escalated into punches and he lost his Prime chit for a month. For all the trouble in the mine he caused, I understand he had an unimpeachable reputation at the dorm. He spent most of his time cleaning his body, his clothes, or his room, never drank, and liked to help out with upkeep projects.

  There was Pelloponensis, who never had a kind word to say about anything or anyone. He had a sixth sense, which some men who go underground develop, for when and where a collapse will take place. When Pelloponensis said it was time to shore up a tunnel, everyone dropped what he was doing and ran for light and lumber. New workers learned the job from him.

  He liked to tell a story of witnessing a Reaper kill a man. He told it to me while leaning against the conveyor that took the coal to the surface, me and a couple other kids new to the mine put on shoveling.

  It happened up at an old quarry on the Maynes estate. He’d snuck in to steal from the extensive Maynes orchards one summer night, got hot, and thought he’d take a dip in the pond that had accumulated at the deep end of the old quarry. He wasn’t the only stranger on the Maynes grounds that night; a woman was lurking there. Thin and scruffy she was, with the twitchiness of someone addicted to some artificial stimulant or depressant.

  “I was having a swim—warm day, but the water was really cold from the previous night—when I saw a flash of white. Thought it was a ghost for a second. Just out of the corner of my eye. Made me hunker down in the water a bit like a startled turtle diving. I peeked up and I saw her, this girl, all scratched up, walking barefoot through the quarry. She didn’t seem harmful, so I came up out of the water. Strange thing, though; once I got out, I saw her feet were really clean. I noticed that right off.

  “She looked like death already,” Pelloponensis continued. “There I was, stripped down, with my clothes thrown over the pears. She gave kind of a giggle. I didn’t have much in the way of body hair then—made up for it since. By the time I hit sixty I’ll look like Hickory there.”

  “‘You can’t be the old guy,’ she said. I think.” He shrugged.

  “Then I saw it rise up behind her. Yellow eyes, staring at her. Seemed
fifteen feet tall compared to her. How didn’t she hear it? I backpedaled, tripped, splashed into the water as if I’d cannonballed off the cliff.”

  He paused the story to judge the effect on me and the other youths.

  Pelloponensis smirked. “None of you have ever seen one just ten feet away, I guess. Well, I have, and I’m happy to put off the day it happens again for as long as possible. Worst thing is, it wasn’t over quick, like the churchmen say if you get them talking about such things. It dangled her by her frigging hair, batted her about a bit with two fingers of one hand. Just a poke from two fingers sent her swinging at the end of its arm like a, oh, what’s them things that hang off the bottom of a grandfather clock. The ticker or whatever. Well, whatever they are, she swung around for a bit like one.

  “Then I realized there was something else about that monster’s face—he was missing his upper lip.

  “I think she fainted from all the screaming. Her head sort of lolled back, and that was when he—when he went into her. It was like he unhinged his jaw and an eel emerged—a black, barbed, slimy eel that hit her right here.” He tapped his fingers hard at the notch atop his manubrium between the clavicles. Both the boys touched themselves just below the throat.

  “I’d always heard they got all sluggish and sleepy after feeding, but not this one. He took her body—beyond pale now, like a piece of chalk—and hurled it in the air like a ballplayer tossing his cap at the end of the game. She splashed down no farther from me than I am to you.