by E. E. Knight
A shot passed close enough for me to feel the air pressure change as it passed through my fur. It is a unique experience, the brief touch of a bullet’s path. I wrapped my legs around my burden and started to roll down the hill.
I fetched up against the mine office. The troopers were popping up and down like a line of prairie dogs, getting off shots. I retrieved one of the carbines from the roll, checked to see that it was loaded, adjusted the sights, and returned fire. Ineffectually, I might add, but I was shooting uphill with a rifle I’d never used before.
Had the troopers been a little more aggressive, they might have taken the office by a quick assault, if they’d been able to get by me. But things were still at a standoff and no one was eager to overstep their orders.
They were still plinking away, and I hugged the hill so they could no longer see me from their position. I picked up the machine gun—it had a convenient handle on the barrel and a pistol grip—and rose up to give them a real taste of fire, but they’d either gone to ground or backed off. Perhaps the bodies of their fellow troopers had given them something to think about. Were they up there, wondering what would have happened had their lieutenant selected them to man the gun?
Time and Chance happeneth to them all.
• • •
The mine buildings now had a “grazing line” of dirt and debris showing where the machine guns of the firemen could cover. We scuttled from room to room like crabs, keeping heads below the bullet holes. Where there were no buildings or parked heavy equipment, we’d dug trenches so we could crawl from point to point in safety.
It seemed as though there were fewer vehicles surrounding Number Four after that first week. Rumors flew, that other mines had joined in our “strike” (if all-out battle could still be called a strike) or that the regime was trying to hide the fact that fighting was even going on by only keeping small contingents around to starve us into surrender.
I suspect it was just the Kurian Order being economical. They knew we would wear down eventually (they didn’t know the callused toughness of miners) and surrender.
They tried dropping mortar shells on us, but it was too easy to escape back underground.
Unbelievably, we were smuggled fresh food, firearms, ammunition (but not enough). The runs were carried out by boys who snuck up the mountainside. They usually came at dawn or twilight, wiggling through the underbrush.
Explosives—those we had plenty of. We rigged bombs and flung them into the parked armored cars and fire trucks of the firemen and troopers through a simple counterweighted arm that turned a collection of hammered-together bracing wood and plastic conduit into a trebuchet fired up and out of a ventilator that had the fans removed. Once we fired it a few times, we were amazingly accurate with it.
Rage, dirty fighter that he was, had the idea of rigging one of the bombs to look like the detonator had fallen off. A pair of firemen went to retrieve it, perhaps to launch it back at us. The real detonator was activated by radio signal. It turned one of the firemen into scraps of dog meat and struck the other hard enough that he had to be taken away in an ambulance.
We started off with about seventy men and women. By the first week we were cut in half. Some of those were casualties; these weren’t trained soldiers and we lost many to surprisingly accurate sniper fire. There must have been at least one among the troopers or firemen who was an expert shot. The rest simply slipped away from their posts and either surrendered or tried to get away into the wilderness.
We were all on edge. At least we could sleep by going deep into the mine where the lights and noise couldn’t penetrate, though there were persistent threats from the Conglomerate that they’d helicopter in something called a fuel-air bomb powerful enough to blow the mine up entirely.
BLEECHER’S TRY AT A RESOLUTION
We ended up with two prisoners. A trooper patrol on the slope west of the mine stumbled across a fireman machine gun position, which panicked and opened fire on their allies. The two trooper survivors ran blindly right into a couple of our miners who were creeping forward to throw explosives at the machine gun and were taken underground.
Rage suggested using them as decoys against snipers during relief of the men guarding the motor pool and ruins of the mine office.
Bleecher saw it as an opportunity to try to negotiate a settlement.
“I hope that means you’re volunteering to sit down at a table across from a damn Hood,” Pelloponensis said.
“Just because I was foreman doesn’t mean I don’t side just as strong as you about the demands,” Bleecher said.
After a little more bickering at an informal council of war (I missed the bickering because I was at the mine entrance with the machine gun), Bleecher walked out, waving a white flag and escorting the prisoners.
“A cease-fire is in effect,” a loudspeaker atop one of the fire trucks boomed. “A cease-fire is in effect.”
We watched Bleecher stand with a couple of firemen, tiredly talking and pointing. He turned over the prisoners and the discussion continued. Bleecher seemed to be begging at one point. Finally, two firemen grabbed him and a third emptied a ten-gallon jerry can of what was obviously gasoline on him.
Then the group of firemen released him and began poking at him with those little butane torches used for lighting fires in kindling and fireplaces and so on, the ones that produce a flame at the end of a six-inch tube. Bleecher frantically backpedaled toward the mine entrance until one of them tired of the game and set him alight at the waist. To our horror, he was soon engulfed in flame.
“A cease-fire is in effect,” the fire truck boomed.
I fired a burst with my machine gun into the man who’d set Bleecher alight. The others raced for their trenches.
Bleecher staggered toward us, a living pillar of fire. I fired a second burst into the kindly supervisor who’d bought me countless root beers at the end of an overtime shift, and he fell. So much for all his attention to duty as foreman.
“A cease-fire is in effect,” the fire truck yowled again, a little more shrilly. We allowed a couple of medical armbands with a stretcher out to get the fireman I’d shot.
“Jeez, what a way to treat a thirty-year man,” Sikorsky said.
“Only thing big about him was his belly. He was even small in his corruptions.”
“I’d say they’re done negotiating with us,” Pelloponensis said. “They’ll just keep at us until we’re all dead.”
“There’s movement behind the fire trucks,” Rage shouted from his vantage in the mine offices. “They’re backing and filling. Can’t make up their minds.”
“I’m tired of this. Let’s give up. I don’t care if they kill us, as long as I can get some sleep.”
“Here they come again!”
If they gained control of the mine entrance and the ventilators, we would only last a few hours, if that. They could pump in old-fashioned poisoned gas (the Georgia Control was known to use it in its brushes with the amphibians of the Florida Everglades). So to control the mine entrance, we had to control the above-ground office, the junkyard with its array of heavy equipment, and the giant beetle and daddy longlegs conveyor rigs for loading coal onto the railroad cars and sorted and dumped slag. Then, of course, we somehow had to control some of the mountainside above, or they could just shoot down on both. With our handful, it would be an impossible task once they mustered enough forces to overrun us.
It is my belief that the Coal Country was trying to handle the problem at Number Four quietly. The troopers, firemen, and other reliable armed groups were stretched very thin trying to prevent sabotage of the rail lines, and the Maynes family and its mystery Kurian must have feared that if word of further disorder leaked out, there would be an intervention and takeover, probably by either the Ordnance or Georgia Control.
The Kurian Order always had a hard time finding troops who could be trusted with firearms. I heard innumerable stories of men who passed through all their training, scored excellently on all the po
litical reliability and psychological exams, and then, within a few months of being issued arms and ammunition, gunned down a major or colonel and his staff at a checkpoint to avenge a beloved grandparent or aunt who had been taken away.
Word was getting out, at least to others in the Coal Country, through bus-stop and back-fence networks. Though we did not know it at the time, the Coal Country was already arming itself and intervening on our behalf. Some inventive garage mechanic was producing tire-destroying strips that could be rolled and unrolled on the roads. I got a look at one of these during the fighting—it was regular chain-link fencing with nails and machine screws bent into barbed fishhooks. Tires were another weak point in the Kurian Order; there were always rubber shortages and most tires on transport vehicles were “recycles” made out of shredded rubber and nylon cable. The strips created by this unnamed genius shredded such tires into walnut-sized chunks, leaving cargo idling until replacement tires could be found. For transports on the more lonely roads, their cargoes were salvaged and distributed as quickly as army ants could strip the bones of a fallen horse.
• • •
“A cease-fire is in effect,” that speaker wailed again. For a moment I thought I was dreaming about the death of Bleecher.
Murphy from the dormitory was walking out, holding a white handkerchief in one hand and a manila envelope in the other.
“There’s an offer of a deal in here,” Murphy shouted. “Nobody shoot.”
The loudspeaker continued its message about a cease-fire.
“Fellas, they gave me a message for you. No weird moves now; they got a gun on me,” Murphy said. “C’mon out. I can’t get any closer to the mine or they’ll shoot.”
The men at the bullet-riddled, half-collapsed mine office and junkyard shrugged and made “all clear” signals.
I volunteered to go out and talk to him. Pelloponensis disliked Murphy; I think he went just to finally tell him what he really thought. Sikorsky and a kid named Queever rounded out the group.
“Why do you always step up for this crap, Sikorsky?” Pelloponensis asked as we walked out.
“My grandfather came from Poland,” he said. “I remember the last time we saw him. He told me: ‘We Poles, sometimes the only weapon we have is courage.’ I think he joined the resistance a little while after that, or at least that was what he told my father.”
“Where’s Poland? By New York?” Pelloponensis asked.
We approached the dorm supervisor. He was standing in the hunched-over manner of a man who’d recently been punched in the gut. Perhaps he feared a bullet in the back.
“They told me to give you this envelope,” Murphy said, handing over the manila envelope while the loudspeaker continued to call out the cease-fire message. I promised myself that someday I’d find the fireman in charge of the siege at Number Four and stuff him through the bell of the loudspeaker. “You’re supposed to read it and send me back with the answer. They say you have exactly two minutes to read it and decide.”
I noticed that the end Murphy had been holding was wet with perspiration.
Murphy was sweating . . . melting, rather, so much water seemed to be running out of him. Greasy sweat, too; it glistened like the leavings of a frying pan that had been used to cook bacon.
Oddly, I thought, his chest and armpits were dry. I’ve seen men sweat from the Caribbean to the Dakotas, and they always sweat most profusely from the armpits, followed by the back, brow, and chest. Why would his brow be covered in beady, greasy sweat but not his armpits? Was something thick blocking it?
“Run!” I told my compatriots.
Thanks to my reach, I knocked them back and away from Murphy. Just as we were going down, a strong wave seemed to strike, a remorseless hand shoving us to the earth and a wall of noise and heat licking over us and leaving us dazed with a foggy, underwater sensation. I dragged my companions back toward the mine, feeling blood run from my nostrils.
The sniper got Queever, the young miner who had proven himself an excellent self-taught shot though he’d never held a weapon until the previous week, but the rest of us made it back to safety.
In talking it over later, we decided Murphy had been forced to wear what he probably thought was a heavy bulletproof vest, but it had turned out to be filled with explosives and a few pieces of tin designed to act as fléchettes. Murphy probably had not realized he was a walking bomb—the sweat was simply from his being in physical danger for the first time in his life. I’m sure some part of him suspected he was a pawn that could be sacrificed.
Pelloponensis had inadvertently escaped with the manila envelope. After testing the closed version for a trap, we decided it either contained nothing but air or a single sheet of thin paper.
You’re fucked, it read, with the seal of the Coal Country Firemen beneath.
I was the only one wounded. I had a few pieces of shrapnel in me. Sikorsky extracted them with a pair of tweezers and stitched me up with fishing line from the office. One sliver was too deep for him to reach. I’ve since seen it on X-rays; it appears to be minding its own business, probably encased in some sort of protective cyst my body formed around it. I tell the doctors it is my “decoration” for the fighting at Number Four.
Sadly, it’s the only one ever issued, at least to my knowledge. I am hoping this memoir might change that.
• • •
THE SECOND RIOT CONTROL—
“No. The hostages go right by the entrance.”
I had little use for Prapa or Murphy.
All the equipment was handy. The trick, as Sikorsky said, was not being around when it went off. It was entirely possible that as soon as the fans began to move the finely ground dust, friction between particles or heat from the motor could set off the explosion, killing all of us.
• • •
Luckily the water mains were all in the mine buildings. Otherwise the fire trucks might have been able to put enough water on us to make shooting back impossible while they stormed Number Four.
• • •
Over the next three days we lost three more. David Valentine, a student of the Civil War that divided the former United States more than two hundred years ago, once told me that General Lee lamented the loss of some key troops in one action or another. Lee noted that troops he lost were gone for good, whereas the enemy seemed to have limitless replacements. We weren’t even doing as well as that other generation of rebels; the last casualties we had inflicted were those in the assault after Bleecher was set on fire.
Just holding out was a form of victory, however. The first evidence that we had that there were repercussions for our “strike” came in the form of a limousine. I had seen one or two in Ohio during our search for Gail Post two years ago. This was the first one I’d seen in the Coal Country. It was not an elongated one, but rather a simple, overlarge sedan with blacked-out windows and shining grillwork.
“What the hell’s that?” an office strongpoint observer asked, looking through a hole in the wall with binoculars. He woke Pelloponensis (we had an informal arrangement that one of us guarding the strongpoint could sleep while the other two kept watch on the approaches and each other) who stared blearily through the glasses as he strapped on his hard hat.
“White stripe across the roof. Church, most likely,” Pelloponensis said.
Again, the fire engine loudspeaker announced that a cease-fire was in effect.
We took advantage of the cease-fire to hurry back to the cave mouth, bringing the accumulation from the rainwater catchers. We’d run out of lives at this rate before the soap ran out, but water for bathing was running short.
A black-suited figure strode out across the gap between trooper and firemen vehicles and the scrap-heap protection in between them and our own shot-up lines. White showed at his collars and cuffs, and he wore a red silk tie. He strode purposefully, as serenely as if he were walking up his home church aisle in a ceremony.
“That’s the Guidon,” one of the regular churchgoers said. “He
’s right below the Archon in Baltimore. He’s out here a couple of times a year for graduations of Youth Vanguard and investments of new clergy.”
“I have an offer,” the churchman called. “Let’s put a stop to this foolishness, my children.”
“That’s what’s always pissed me off about the damn Church,” Sikorsky said. “We’re always children. I’m a fuckin’ grown-up. I can figure out whether to wash before I go to bed or when I get up, I don’t need a church bulletin telling me which saves more soap and water in the long run.”
“I like your nonbathing solution,” Pelloponensis put in. “Saves everything all around.”
“Who wants to go get a face full of this message?”
He looked like a senior churchman. He was heavy, with a red nose that had nothing to do with cold.
“I go,” I said.
“I wonder if he’ll be wired.”
“Hey, Hick, go out and check him for bombs,” Pelloponensis said.
“Watch out for gasoline cans.”
The churchman smiled. “Don’t worry, friend; I’m not covered in explosives.”
“I no afraid,” I said.
“Do you always speak like that? I’ve met several of your kind. They were all brighter than the average human. With such a big head and flexible nasophyrangal cavities, you should be able to speak much more clearly than that.”
“Are we supposed to trust you just because you’re clergy?” Sikorsky asked.
“No, you’re supposed to trust me because I’m powerful,” he intoned.
“Let reward be punishment and punishment be reward.”
• • •
“It was just a blind woman. Are you willing to kill yourself and all your comrades in a war over some girl? She wasn’t even pretty.”
“Pretty means little in a mine and less to a Grog. She was kind to me.”
“Kind. You’re willing to let death loose in this valley again over that?”
“Perhaps if we proved willing to start a war over a single girl, they would give up trying to take them.”