Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  “Would it change matters if you knew she volunteered to go? She chose to sacrifice herself so none of you would be taken. Now the Order is willing to accept you back into the fold, but you’ll have to select one of your number to pay for your crimes. There have been too many deaths for no price to be paid. The troopers and firemen wouldn’t stand for it.

  “In the Church, we’re always looking for those who can face the arithmetic. The arithmetic becomes too much for some. Even churchmen with years of schooling and the discipline of constant positive reinforcement. Sometimes their bodies sicken; then their minds go. But perhaps five percent of humans have the necessary steel in their constitution to look at the world and not flinch. I think you aren’t the type to flinch.”

  “I’ve never met any of my kind in the uniform of the Church.”

  “Oh, you’d have your choice of clothing. Even the Maynes household wouldn’t be able to offer you what we could.

  “You’ve no doubt interacted with many of mankind. How many are in any way remarkable? How many are missed by anyone beyond a small circle when they die, whether from natural causes or a more methodical end?”

  “Murder with sophistic flourishes,” I said.

  “Don’t give me easy answers. You’re clearly intelligent. Why end up as another body on the pile?

  “Just as monkeys and lab rats and tissue cultures must die so that we can have healthier bodies, we also need to eliminate the human waste to have a healthier society. You could think of yourself as a powerful white blood cell, searching for the unhealthy and necrotic. What would you like? Food? Females? I can assure you, you’d get the best of everything. We’d like to see you produce others similar to yourself. We find that you nonnatives have a more clinical attitude toward humanity.”

  I remember little else of the encounter. I started laughing; I know that. They still thought I must be a strong back with a weak mind, caught up in events beyond my control and looking for an exit. I was still laughing when I returned to the entrance to Number Four.

  “What was that about, King?” Pelleponensis asked.

  “The shepherds of the Church wanted me as a sheepdog.”

  “Hope you peed on his leg, big guy.”

  • • •

  Two more days passed. The strain of the hopeless, cutoff position would be hard enough on trained soldiers. These ordinary men were cracking. It was one thing to die fighting in a hot rush of emotion, a desperate, mass suicide; quite another to go on day after day being whittled down in ones and twos, living off trickles of water or even morning dew sponged off rocks. With food running out, they wouldn’t even have the strength to lift a sharpened shovel against another attack before long.

  Everyone knew it was over. The only question was whether the denouement would be another assault, or a mass surrender that would probably end with all of our bodies in a ditch, waiting for a bulldozer to cover us with slag.

  I was determined to chance an escape into open air while I still had strength.

  • • •

  “There is no point in hiding the truth any longer,” I announced on the morning of the third day.

  “Hey, Big Yellow’s gone all verbose,” Pelloponensis said. “What are they doing now, talking to us through him?”

  “I admire how suspicious you are, but I assure you that’s not the case. I am a Kurian agent out of the Northwest Ordnance,” I said.

  “An agent?”

  “I can’t tell you my mission. This wasn’t part of it, but it may end up helping after all. Should any of you wish to switch to a new region, just give the password ‘lost: sourball’ to any churchman or captain or above in the Ordnance. Don’t forget the ‘lost’ part. ‘Lost: sourball’—they’ll set you up.”

  If any of them ever reached the Ordnance, the password wouldn’t do them any good at all, but they’d probably receive good treatment on the chance that they’d aided an agent from the Ordnance.

  What really mattered was that they believed me; they believed me enough so that even if they were brought before some high official of the Church with Fates-only-know-what powers and abilities, they would be able to have their conscience read as clean.

  “I believe I will be able to cause enough chaos out there for you to either escape or surrender as you see fit. I have certain—abilities—that should allow me to slip away after. I will do my best for you for the next twenty-four hours; then I must continue with my mission.”

  • • •

  When night fell, I took six bombs and, crawling carefully through the wrecks of the junkyard, wired them together to blow. One charge I put under a pair of gasoline cans for some additional flame; another I buried in a mass of taconite pellets inside a piece of concrete sewage line to make sort of an oversized poor-man’s claymore. I rigged everything to a switch I could reach by crawling into a little hollow I scooped out under a defunct crane.

  I covered myself with an old tarp and crept out beyond the junkyard. The first observation post of the enemy was a good hundred yards away over ground covered in bits of slag and brush. I didn’t want to get too far beyond the junkyard; I needed to retreat to it as soon as I started my “commotion.”

  I don’t know if my bombs killed even a single Coal Country fireman, but with a couple of squads pursuing me into the junkyard, I at least scared them enough so they backed out. Mortar shells and illumination rounds began to rain all over the scrap heap. Their flash was just what I wanted—the light would affect the eyes in the hills no doubt looking down into the cauldron of Number Four.

  I’d marked my escape route early, a muddy notch in the hillside running up the south-side ridge. There were several spots on the hillside providing a good view of the seasonal watercourse, and there would surely be a sentry at at least one. But thanks to the water that came and went with season and rainfall, there was a lot of brush and young tree life flanking it as well.

  • • •

  I watched them strip the miners naked and load them into a van. There was not much doubt about what would happen to them. Other firemen were laying charges; they would blow all the mine shafts of Number Four, even the abandoned ones.

  All through the fighting at Number Four, perhaps from the moment they’d taken Aym away, a resolve had been building within me. This slipshod Kurian Zone known as the Coal Country was as rotten as a termite-riddled house with sawdust falling at the slightest rap on the planking. It wouldn’t take much for it to come crashing down. Aym, and thousands like her over the years, couldn’t be retrieved, but they could be avenged.

  Few knew better than I the state of the roads in the Coal Country; I’d picked my way across them often enough. The truck carrying the naked, captive miners wouldn’t make very good time, and there was only one road out of Number Four to take. I picked up my weapons, including my sharpened shovel, and set off quickly, keeping just below the ridgeline.

  • • •

  I found what I was looking for: a boulder above a notch in the road and a downed tree I could use as a lever. It took some small effort to properly position the tree and pile up a few stones against a larger rock outcropping to use as a fulcrum.

  The kidney-shaped boulder, about the size of a children’s plastic play-pool, careened down the hillside in a satisfyingly destructive manner. Unfortunately, while some of the debris that it brought in its wake wound up on the road, the boulder itself bounced off the bank opposite and came to rest in the drainage ditch along the shoulder. I extracted my tree-limb lever and hurried down the slope. My pick-exercised muscles were able to work it back onto the road with just a few minutes’ work. I decided I had the time to perfect the positioning, so I moved it to the side of the road where it would come into view at the last possible moment from a driver descending the track from the mine. I didn’t put it square in the middle of the road—another vehicle might precede the truck and the drivers might take the initiative to get out and remove the obstacle. Instead, I filled one side, so a careful driver could go around it us
ing the very soft shoulder at a crawl.

  Then I concealed myself next to the drainage ditch under a layer of hacked-off redbud and waited.

  They must have kept the transport at the mine an extra hour in case anyone else gave himself up before the charges were detonated. A pickup truck with fireman markings was the first vehicle I saw. The driver went around the landslide just as cautiously as I would have had I been behind the wheel, and took no more notice of it than he would the other three or four bad sections of road he’d probably encounter that day.

  The collection van waggled into view, rocking on its worn-out suspension. It was a boxy, utilitarian vehicle. I’m told most of them were converted parcel-delivery trucks—they got better gas mileage than armored cars, which had better uses. Kurian Zone mechanics never seemed to get around to working on those accursed vans.

  Like the pickup truck, it slowed to negotiate the boulder. Unlike the pickup, when the right-hand wheels spun up and out of the shoulder drainage, it had the Coal Country’s sole Golden One clinging to the door and rusty running board.

  My sharpened shovel opened the passenger side window before the guard riding next to the driver had time to do much more than throw up his arm against the spiderwebbed safety glass.

  I reached in and extracted the passenger. He didn’t quite fit out the window, but I made him do so, a little noisily and messily for him. It was an object lesson in always wearing one’s restraint harness when driving. I threw the Church’s collector into the woods, where he left a provocative red trail for the scavengers to follow.

  Inside, the guard was fumbling for his pistol. He was wearing his seat belt, and it was caught over his holster.

  “‘This day’s black fate on more days doth depend; this but begins the woe others must end,’” I said.

  The muddy and somewhat bloody apparition speaking to him made him pause long enough in his fumbling for his sidearm that he was probably still processing the quote from Romeo and Juliet when the point of my shovel caught him under his chin and the New Universal Church was down one more collection driver.

  I took control of the wheel and gearshift and wrapped my toes around the clutch and accelerator. I took the van down the first turnoff trail I could find and pulled it out of sight. There was enough brush displaced to make it obvious to a searcher, but traffic coming down the road not looking for a missing van probably would not notice it.

  The nine naked miners flinched when I opened the door.

  “You’re about fifteen miles from the mine down the access road,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t do more for you, but I wish you luck. I think there are some clothes for the Church in those lockers. You can have the shotgun in the mount and the driver’s pistol, if you think those will help.”

  Pelloponensis cleared his throat. “Hey, Hickory, sorry for all—”

  The apology wasn’t really necessary for either of us. “I have other matters to attend to. I’d keep off the roads if I were you. At night, try to find livestock and bed down as close to them as you can. It’ll confuse the Reapers. Perhaps the dogs as well.”

  “I’m not running like some kid who just saw his first Hood,” Pelloponensis said. “They started a fight with the miners. If there’s anyone ordinary in the Coal Country who isn’t at least cousin to someone working coal, I’ll dig a hundredweight holding my pick with my ass cheeks. We’re going to finish this fight.”

  PART THREE

  CONQUEST AND CLEANSING

  On my own, my chances of making it out of the Coal Country and into the western slopes of the Appalachians were better than even. I could cause enough chaos to set things in an uproar that would give the other escaping miners a chance.

  Walking away from a land where men I considered friends died in a fight we shared would be dishonorable. It would be understandable—anyone who’d ever fought against the Kurian Order covertly might even say just getting away alive was a kind of victory—but dishonorable nonetheless. If I ran, I would taste the bitterness of the act for the rest of my life.

  So my staying was the easier choice. One might even say it was the default, to a Golden One, since the sense of keeping one’s honor clean lightened any burden.

  What a laughable way to start a war—dirty, tired, and almost unarmed. I needed a serious weapon.

  A successful guerilla blends into the local population, living invisibly until he chooses the right moment to strike, like one of the praying mantis species that has developed to look like a dead leaf.

  I, however, looked like exactly no one in all of Coal Country. A local would comment less on an oak growing up through the center of a highway intersection than he would on me.

  A guerilla also needs knowledge of the land and the disposition of his enemies. My time with Maynes had given me that. A guerilla also needs a feel for the locals. Will they aid him, or turn him over to the authorities? Except for a very few favored by Maynes Consolidated, the locals held a long-simmering grudge against the Order. They were already in revolt, even if it was a slow-motion, dead-of-night sort of resistance.

  Third, a guerilla needs motivation. I was sick of this stinking principality, rotten to the core and painful as an infected tooth. But I could not just leave. Once you’ve witnessed a certain amount of kindness and cruelty, you’re bound to a place, and if I fled without trying to make it better, I would regret it for whatever days and years I have left in this life.

  I had a pretty good idea of where to get weapons.

  I thought the shadows were playing tricks on me, turning the black, blasted form into one of those multilimbed god-statues from across the Pacific.

  Had such a god descended on this quarter of the Americas, I could not have been more shocked, once my brain interpreted what had come shambling out of the hills.

  It was one of the Reapers, sent into Number Four—or rather a pair of them. One was terribly injured, its torso having been severed in the area of the pelvis and turned into a tarry stump. The other carried it, lashed on its chest with webbing belts. The Reaper still in possession of its legs dragged a third, reduced to a head and most of one shoulder.

  The head on the tied-on torso searched. Its eyes shone against the black mask of smoke, soot, and the dried blood both wore. The Reaper with the legs had a terribly disfigured face. One eye was a black mess like a roasted mushroom.

  It occurred to me that the Kurian Order must be pressed if it had its members searching the hills around the mine with such a contraption. Whichever Kurian was animating these must have been down to his last Reaper, or very nearly so. A Kurian without his Reapers might not starve to death per se, but without infusions of the vital aura from his victims, he will wither like a drought-afflicted tomato.

  I had no sure weapon for killing one of these murderous machines. Bullets would only slow it, unless I was very fortunate in placing the rounds.

  Sensing my uncertainty and an advantage with predatory instinct, it stalked me, the head with intact vision clacking its teeth together. Could the piece of brother Reaper have meant something to it? Or did it just want to unnerve me with the unsettling sight of the living puppet?

  I removed my belt and wrapped by left hand in it so that the buckle lay across my knuckles, and I snapped a branch off with the other.

  I waved the branch, testing its reaction. Both heads followed it, the head on the legless one slightly faster. I stepped to the side; it imitated me.

  I could run, perhaps outrun it for a while. I would weaken before it did. No, it would be better to fight it here.

  All those thoughts, and others, circled my mind in the time it took us to execute this brief dance. I surveyed the ground, looking for some sort of advantage.

  I feinted forward and it sidestepped. I ran to a tree with a dead branch and began to crack the limb off with the idea of using it as a club.

  With my back turned, the Reaper team charged.

  As I expected.

  At the last moment I collapsed toward its legs. The Reaper with
the eyes didn’t communicate the move quite fast enough, and they tripped and went headlong into the bole with the dead branch, striking with a resounding thunk.

  Still rising, I tore the Reaper tied on the blinded one’s back. I gripped it by the bottom of the torso and cracked it against the stump of a downed tree, the way some men will kill a snake by grabbing by the tail and cracking it like a whip. It hissed and shrieked and yowled.

  The blinded one followed the sound, and I hurled the torso off into the woods. It spun crazily, its arms thrashing, and it fell with a crunch of leaves and brush. The blinded one ran past, and I struck it with my belt-wrapped fist with all the power I could put into the punch. It sprawled forward, and I leaped on it, got the belt around its neck, and planted my foot on the back of its neck. Then I hauled on the belt, putting my back into it as the bargemen used to say on the Missouri, until I heard cartilage crush and bones break.

  With the legged one dead, it was an easier matter to hunt the other down and do away with it with my sharpened shovel.

  It is strange, but when I take a life, even that of a neck-wrung chicken, I feel a moment’s kinship with the creature. A dead human sets me wondering what his mother once dressed him up in for the wintering ritual of Thanksgiving. Yet dead Reapers evoke nothing of pathos, just relief that there is one less deathdealer supporting the Kurian Order.

  As I looked down at the dead duo, it occurred to me that I might have more in kinship with them than I knew. Neither of us was human. We were both easily recognized, even from a long way away. For the foreseeable future I would have a Reaper’s lifestyle, operating at night and hiding out during the day.

  I started to disrobe it while the body was still limp and easy to manipulate. Reaper cloth was usually a valuable commodity, the first thing stripped off a dead one on the battlefield or ambush point. Usually Southern Command’s bloodthirsty madmen, the Bears, claimed the lion’s share of the substance.