Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  “The homily was about pre–Kurian Organized Deprivation. You know, starving the world so a few could live fat.”

  “They might shut the whole mine down. We’re goners then.”

  “Nah, they’d just send us around the other mines.”

  • • •

  They worked the next shifts so hard, half of the miners were ready to be thrown into a collection van just so they could sleep for a couple of hours before the last dance with the Reaper. As bad as the exhaustion was, the dirt was worse. I began to feel I would never get the grit out of my fur, and I began to itch as though infested with hellpit mites.

  “Yeah, every couple of years we go through this,” an old hand named Barnesworth told me. He usually worked a different shift, but he had put in for overtime this week just to show that he could still produce at a double-shift rate. He had an extraordinary physique for a man who had just turned sixty; if he was wearing a hat and you saw him from behind, you would take an oath that he was a man in his midtwenties.

  I paced myself as best as I could, but I soon came up hard against my limits. I had taken over for two others, and I let them sleep while I extracted coal. As long as our shift’s quota was met, who cares how we managed it (too often by shoveling more slag into the conveyor, but mistakes will be made when you drive men in this manner).

  They started calling me John Henry, who, I understand, is a folk hero. I was happy to earn their respect, but it is easier for a “Grog” to apply strength in such a stooped-over fashion.

  My own examination was simple enough. The doctor, after startling at my entrance, said, “I don’t know enough about this kind of Grog to even tell how old he is. He looks fit enough.”

  He had me kneel. He looked into my eyes, ears, and at my tongue. If you ever want to look as though you know a good deal about Golden Ones, my reader, examine their knuckles. A sick one of my kind will spend more time going about on all fours, which will be indicated if there are fresh calluses and a rubbed-raw look.

  And as we age, we go white above the eyes, a washed-out, almost clear white very different from that on the face or belly.

  My file for my mine work consisted of two sheets of paper and a big blue tag—which I suppose referenced my work as Maynes’s bodyguard.

  “He hasn’t been here long, but he’s a strong worker. Never causes trouble. Stubborn, though.” He looked up at me. “You stubborn?”

  “Stub-burn?” I asked. “Not know stub-burn.”

  “Stiff-necked,” the doc said, pointing to his neck.

  “I don’t think pantomime is needed with this one. Says he’s unusually smart, almost as smart as a man.”

  “I work hard. I dig coal. I get along. No laziness,” I said. “No laziness, no never.”

  “That’s quite a speech.”

  “He drives, too.”

  “There’s nothing like him around here.”

  “The vet at the White Mansion says they live out in Omaha. Very independent. They’ve caused some trouble to the rail lines, I suppose.”

  “No touch railroad,” I said. “No trouble.”

  • • •

  On my way to the half day of work Saturday, the group of men walking up the road to the mine discussed who had been taken away on Friday night. We’d lost Grimm, a handyman who did odd jobs around the dormitory. The mine office staff had two of theirs go, but one of them was promoted out of Number Four to replace a petty thief at another mine.

  “No one from the dark crew?” Rage asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard,” Sikorsky said.

  Foreman Bleecher met us at the elevator exit in the central run. He usually scowled, but today the lug nuts at either edge of his mouth were screwed down even more tightly.

  “We only lost one, boys,” Bleecher said. “Aym.”

  I tried not to show emotion, but my knees wobbled on me and I went down on all fours. No one in the shocked shift noticed. According to my reading, humans go through five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I believe I faltered at the gap between Anger and Bargaining. I felt my blood pound, the fur atop my head rise, and my ears go hot and flat against my head.

  I’d already privately resolved to take Aym out with me, when eventually I escaped. She’d helped to bring me out of the funk that steady, exhausting work had allowed me to sink into, like a swamp, where thrashing seemed only to make more tendrils of futility cling to my fur. I would have led her across the Appalachians, carrying her on my back if nothing else. Strange, for I hardly knew her. I wondered at the agony of some of my human friends who’d had loved ones just disappear.

  With those thoughts running through my head, I turned my attention back to the rest of the shift.

  “Aym?” several miners said in angry tones. I could smell the anger on them.* “Why?”

  “She practically lived in her cage,” Rage said. “There’s not one of us here who wouldn’t have gone in her place.”

  “That so, Raymond,” Foreman Bleecher said. “Well, they only took her at midnight. Go on up and volunteer to go in her stead.”

  “Could we do something about it?” Olsen asked. “Sign a petition or something? Bring it to the Church? Nobody at the mine would claim that she’s a useless mouth.”

  “Petition? What did they put in your breakfast kibble this morning?” Pelloponensis asked.

  “Want Aym back,” I put in. “We need our food.”

  “Hey, even the stoop’s pissed,” Rage said. “We got a united front here.”

  “A united front and three bucks will get you a ride into town,” Sikorsky said.

  “We could ask to see the paperwork, I suppose,” Bleecher said. “Maybe there’s a cock-up between the three reviewers.”

  “What’s done is done; let it go,” another miner put in.

  “Just be glad there weren’t more.”

  “We’ll just see about that!” Rage said. “C’mon, Sikorsky, Pelloponensis.”

  “What’s up? You going to volunteer to take her place?” Olsen asked.

  “Hey, Hickory, you come, too?” Rage asked me.

  “Time for work,” I said. I wanted to think. I’d learned only a little about the victims of the Kurian Order and where they went after pickup even during my time with Maynes.

  “The firemen are on their way!”

  “Jesus, Rage, what have you done?”

  “They won’t do shit. Not while we have the mine. Prapa, too.”

  “There’s more coal where that came from, numbnuts. We’re not even ten percent of production. All they have to do is add another shift at Fourteen and it’ll more than make up for us.”

  “They called the firemen? On us?”

  “We should send a messenger. Offer.”

  “Yeah, and get shot in the leg for it.”

  “I know,” Pelloponensis said. “We could tie a message around the Grog’s neck and send him out. Not like one of us getting shot.” He didn’t bother to lower his voice or speak as an aside, as an older sibling might when proposing a trick on his uncomprehending younger sibling.

  They had the fire trucks parked blocking the road down to the housing.

  I counted fifteen rifles pointed at me. If something went wrong, I’d be dead before I heard the sound of the shots.

  “Me messenger,” I said.

  “Bring it. Slowly.”

  I took robotic steps forward, pausing every time a foot touched or left the ground.

  A fireman with captain’s bars read the note. “They have Prapa. They want one of their workers back. Taken last night.”

  The firemen were no more afraid to talk in front of me than the miners inside. The thought flashed across my mind that dogs understand a lot more than they let on; they just think it’s politic not to react.

  Number Four mine is on strike. We protest the removal of our break attendant, Aym Swanson.

  We have Director Prapa and Foreman Bleecher under guard. No harm will come to them for the duration of the st
rike. We retain them only to prevent a seizure of the mine by force.

  The mine, equipment, and supporting buildings have been wired with explosives. Any attempt to remove us by force will result in the destruction of the mine, machinery, buildings, and, of course, ourselves.

  Our only demand is the return of Aym Swanson to her duties.

  • • •

  • • •

  The next day it rained, hard, turning most of the open ground at Number Four to mud.

  “Ahh. Listen, you. I’m . . . coming. Coming in to talk over your demands.”

  It was Murphy’s voice, cracking and hesitant, over the bullhorn.

  Murphy was shaking all over and greasy with sweat. Something was wrong beyond the exertion of crossing Number Four’s front yard.

  A figure in one of the standard firemen’s black-and-yellow raincoats stepped carefully across the mud.

  “That’s Fatty, all right.”

  “I’ll go out and check him,” Barnesworth said. “I know him better than any of you.”

  “Bleecher, go out and cover him.”

  “I can do it just fine from in here,” Bleecher said from his rifle sight. “Something about this stinks. Murphy would make us come to him in this piss.”

  By fully extending my ears and concentrating, I could just hear Murphy. “Barnesworth, you have to help me,” Murphy said. “Everyone’s got to come out of the mine. Today, within the hour.”

  Barnesworth said something in return, but it was lost in the drizzle. He was facing the other way.

  “He’s wired! Explosives!”

  “No, let—,” Murphy began.

  Barnesworth made it two steps before disappearing in a boiling mist of fire and fleshy debris. The concussion shattered windows already pierced and spiderwebbed by bullets.

  A messy trail of pieces of Barnesworth lay on a path to the mine.

  • • •

  “We should send Prapa out,” Longliner said.

  “Are you nuts?”

  “Prapa?”

  “You were the one who wanted to take him hostage in the first place.”

  “No, the kid’s got a point,” Bleecher said, eye still aligned on his sight. “It’s the mine that’s important. Prapa’s just a functionary. He’ll sound every gong in hell to get us working again. It’s his position on the line, too.”

  Jones stood behind Prapa with hands on the ropes around his wrists. “Okay, Mr. Director Prapa, we have two demands. First, back to the understanding that nobody who works in the mine gets repurposed. We understand accident and injury and all that, but working in the dark and the dust ought to earn us some privileges. Second, we want Aym back if she’s still alive. Everything goes back to normal.”

  “How about no more Grogs doing mine work?” Pelloponensis said.

  “Best thing to do is walk out behind me quietly,” Prapa said. “That’s your only chance of resolving this and getting things back to normal. Right now, it’s a Coal Country matter. I bet no one outside the White Palace knows about it. But if word of this strike spreads out of Number Four . . . your lives won’t be worth spit. No repurposing—they’ll just come in and kill you.”

  “This is Boss Murphy, guys. Let’s stop this nonsense now. Prapa is a jackoff—you know it; I know it; the folks at the White Palace know it. He’s done.”

  “We’re dead men,” Sikorsky said. “Sure as shit.”

  “Old thumbs there is right,” Pelloponensis said.

  “Let’s not give them the satisfaction. Let’s blow this mine to hell and all of us with it,” Sikorsky said.

  “Just how will you do that, wiseass?” Pelloponensis said.

  “Easy. Mess a little with the ventilators and kick up enough coal dust to fill Broadway. Touch it off with naked flame or some blasting caps.”

  “Let’s not go crazy here. Like the man said, this is still fixable,” Longliner said.

  “Says the man who said we need fast, direct action.”

  “He was taking hemorrhoid cures, I bet,” Pelloponensis said.

  “Anyone going to ask the stoop’s opinion?”

  “No fight. Work hard,” I said.

  “Anyone who trusts these jackholes, feel free to walk out behind Prapa,” Sikorsky said. “I’m not going to be around when the music stops. Let the Hoods yank some pieces off you. I’m staying put.”

  “Hey, guys, it’s me,” Galloway said through the megaphone. “Prapa—he’s . . . he’s gone. Yeah, they took care of him permanently. A—a representative from on high is here, and he’s saying that he’s done with these games. The mine needs to go back up, right now. All we have to do is say that it was a big misunderstanding, that we weren’t on strike or anything, that it was a broken shaft elevator and power loss. We say that on the radio and everything’s good. No more Prapa, either.”

  Nobody moved, but they still listened intently.

  “They’re treating us right,” Galloway continued. “I just had a big steak dinner. With sauce and steak fries. Still sputtering when they brought it to me on the plate. The . . . representative says that nobody else is going to die, provided we go back to work. I’m not reading a prepared statement or anything, just telling you like it is. Hope you come on out. Air must be getting pretty bad down there if Bleecher is eating nothing but beans and WHAM!”

  • • •

  I found this exchange humorous enough to record verbatim, but I do not remember the speakers: “We can’t just skulk in the mine like bats. If I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be in Number Four.”

  “You know why it’s called Number Four, right?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Two number twos.”

  • • •

  “You need weapons? I get weapons,” I said, picking up an old tarp used by the mechanics to stay off the wet ground when working on the mine machinery.

  I took a short, flat shovel I’d been sharpening at the edges and climbed up into the attic of the mine office to a chorus of creaking framing. I had to negotiate a weeping willow of phone and power wiring, none of it tacked down, just running from the roof peak down to the offices and so on. What a fire trap, but typical for the Kurian Order.

  I found a ventilator, removed it, and climbed up onto the roof. From there it was a fairly easy jump onto the hillside. I climbed with the tarp over one arm and the short-handled shovel in the other.

  If I was having trouble with Number Four, I’d post some people on the ridgeline above, just to make sure we had the place surrounded.

  The footing on the hillside was bad, with many loose leaves and dirt. I found a solitary tree and, climbing it so that it was between me and the fire trucks blocking the road, I surveyed the hillside carefully.

  Yes, there it was. They’d even bothered with sandbags.

  It was a small gun emplacement, with a machine gun aimed so it was covering the area between the mine office and the underground entrance, plus the scattered vehicles parked on the flat. The soldiers wore trooper camouflage; they were probably mobilized off their regular patrol routes and put into battle dress until the crisis passed.

  The gun itself had another two-man team covering it from the gunner’s blind side.

  I descended the tree and unrolled the oily tarp. I covered it with some loose bits of bracken and grasses, then wormed under it. I inched my way up the hillside, crawling using my elbows, with legs limp.

  It was exhausting work and I had to take frequent rests. The insects were noisy that night and covered the steady crunching—deafeningly loud even to my flat ears—of my crawl.

  Grogs and humans have similar night vision in that we’re both more sensitive to motion when the light level is low. At last, I judged myself close enough for a rush. I surveyed the four-man detail one more time. The gun crew was still concentrating on the mine entrance and vehicle park below. The gunner must have seen something, because he was looking down the sights of the weapon, ready to tracer-snipe. As for the flank guards, they were sharing a tin
of tobacco and talking, too softly for me to pick up anything but the watermelon-watermelon-watermelon of background stage dialogue.

  Behind a patch of bramble within a few meters of the troopers, I ever so slowly gathered myself into a ball, set my feet—

  I rose up out of the grass and sent the tarp sailing at the flank guards. Ideally, a nervous trigger would fire at that rather than my own form rushing at them with sharpened shovel raised.

  My appearance, rising from nowhere as though I’d been magically transported by a djinni, froze them both for the three seconds it took me to cover the distance. They reacted too late. I stuck one with the shovel just as he was raising his rifle to his shoulder and swept the other up in my arm like a long-lost friend.

  Shovel-wound had a look of dull amazement in his eyes with his skull almost cut in two, the unicorn horn of the shovel handle sticking out and forward.

  The one I’d swept up I raised over my head. I hurled him at the machine-gun crew.

  I retrieved my shovel from the trooper’s head and waded into the trio, swinging.

  One managed to draw a pistol and fire. The light and the noise of the shot startled me for a moment before I finished the three men.

  Sloppy. I must be slowing in my age. Once I would have taken all four of these third-rate draftees before any could get a shot off.

  I didn’t feel the bite of lead, but sometimes you don’t know you’ve been shot until you see the blood or after the fight.

  I retrieved the tarp, spread it out, and tossed their guns and spare ammunition magazines on it. I listened uphill for sounds of investigation and heard nothing. With the extra moment allowed, I took the crew-served weapon off its tripod and laid it on the tarp, folded the tripod, and added the belt they’d loaded and extra ammunition cases. Now we would have a surprise for the besiegers if they tried to storm the mine in a rush.

  I rolled the tarp up and carried it as carefully as the bearer who carried the rug-wrapped Cleopatra into Caesar’s Roman Alexandrian headquarters. I shouldered it and moved downhill.

  A shout and a shot pursued me. I sped up, dropping the shovel in my haste.

  Like a Father Christmas wearing a coat of blood and brains, I bounded down the hill by threes, with the weapons collected in the tarp bouncing on my shoulder.