by E. E. Knight
“They were dragging Pem O’Dowd out of the bakeshop by the hair and arm, taking her to the car, when they saw the damage. Their captain or whatever got so mad when he saw the tires that they sat poor Pem in the gutter and just shot her in the back of the neck.
“Now they’re hauling Robbie Gaines up to the axe,” the kid said. “He doesn’t even live in the town. Must have come in to visit, and look where it got him.”
“Do you have a shot?” Deed MacTierney asked.
I had a Moondagger who was issuing orders to the others in the sights of my long gun. His beard was cut into a sharp triangular shape, giving me a nice sighting post at the center of his chest. “Do you want me to take it?” I asked.
“No,” MacTierney said. “They’ll just take it out on the locals. We’ll have to think this through.”
• • •
We learned a good deal about the Moondaggers that terrible October. We learned that they didn’t care for women, except as mobile, laundry-scrubbing uteruses ready to produce the next generation. They saw themselves as favored by the NUC and the Kurians, and therefore it was their duty to reproduce themselves with increased numbers by whatever method available.
Even worse than the murders in these hills were the outrages against women. They would not touch virginal girls; everyone else was reservation game.
The families started hiding their daughters if they happened to be in Moondagger territory. This led to further outrages, for if there were no women about, the men made do with whatever they could get their hands on, “whatever” being teenage boys.
These outrages only heightened the rebellion. We had more and more Coal Country troopers acting as informants about Moondagger patrols and operations. The main fireman armory in Charleston was opened and looted in an overnight operation that netted our rebellion hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, explosives, and machine guns fresh from the factories of the Georgia Control. For the first time, we were able to fight on something like equal terms.
ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
The Moondagger patrol died well.
We caught them in the crossfire of two captured machine guns after simple wire-control charges took out the first and last vehicles in a five-car column moving into the mountains out of Charleston.
I cut the machine-gun fire and picked up my heavy “Grog gun.” One Moondagger had taken cover behind the armored side door of the gray-green-painted transport. I put a shell through the door and the gunner.
We called on them to surrender, but they roared defiance out of their barrel chests and heavy beards. We held the high ground and the fire lanes. They fell one by one to single shots.
We laid them out in a neat row together and covered their faces with plastic sheeting and packing material. The Dreadcoats and a few part-time guerillas divided weapons and ammunition into “carry off” and “destroy” piles.
There was a recoilless rifle tube in one of the transports, and three wooden boxes of .75 mm shells with close-quarter and enclosed space charging. It could destroy anything short of a freight train or tank, or open an access point in a fortified building. I tested the weight and wondered if I could rig it for fire from the shoulder. It did not seem like a difficult job; here was already a shoulder-pad notch for the gunner aiming the weapon.
“Wait! Wait!”
I paused.
“Thank you. You have no idea how expensive these interfaces are to replace, especially since that purge in Ohio.”*
“You misunderstand the position of the Maynes family. It’s bread and circuses in these hills, my Golden One. The Maynes clan forms a convenient locus of interest and discontent.
“That’s one of the reasons we tolerated Joshua’s erratic behavior. It made for hot gossip. If the people were busy hating him, wondering how he could get away with all he did, they weren’t thinking at the level above the Maynes clan.”
“You’re from outside. You don’t care about the people here.”
“You do? A Kurian?”
“I don’t see why a Kurian couldn’t become fond of a particular people. It may surprise you to know, however, that I was once as human as . . . the next fellow. I was about to say you, strangely. Talking to you, it is easy to forget your species. You sound like a very large man, probably a bass baritone singer, with a bit of a head cold.”
“You’re the elder Maynes.”
“Give that ape a Kewpie doll! What gave it away? Me giving it away? Are all your kind so slow?”
“This is not the most pleasant conversation I’ve ever had.”
“I’m smart, not pleasant. The two have nothing to do with each other. The pleasant ones most all died in ’twenty-two.”
“May I make a modest proposal?”
“If you can do it without twitching so much as a claw.”
“We could arrange for a truce, of sorts. Between you people and the legitimate government of the Coal Country. I don’t care for the Tarheel Rangers crawling all over the mines, looking for excuses to send miners off to the Control, and the Moondaggers the Ordnance has introduced are even more loathsome.”
“On that we are agreed,” I said.
“How does this sound: I will provide you with Maynes family security vehicles, uniforms, even identification. Weapons, ammunition, even explosives. In return, you will let the coal flow freely and limit your attacks to the Moondaggers and Tarheels.”
“Then we go back to killing each other once this is all over?”
“From the inside, the Kurian Order is anything but, buck. It’s a mess. The only truly successful ones are either so small a single Kurian runs it, or a place like the Georgia Control, where they’ve subcontracted running the show out to a few trusted humans. I believe they’re doomed. A few have fled your planet already, assuming this final effort to work an understanding out with the Lifeweavers comes to nothing.”
“You would switch sides that easily?”
“I don’t love them. I just didn’t see the point in dying, and they relieved me of that burden. Again, I didn’t have to like them.”
“Why don’t you think you’ll fall with the rest of the Kurian Order if it does go?”
“I know people. I used to be one, after all. Everything’s negotiable; you just need something of value to the face across the table.”
“I have one condition.”
“Name it.”
“This interface as you call it comes with us. A Reaper in the party might prove useful if our identity is ever questioned. I also might need to communicate with you. The phone service around here is terrible.”
He nodded in assent, and I found myself an ally of a vampire.
COAL COUNTRY CALLS FOR HELP
I requested, and received, Joshua Maynes Vee Three’s converted bus for the Dreadcoats. We also requested an SUV with a couple of light motorcycles attached (they rode on the back, roof, and fenders like saddlebags) and an armed pickup with a recoilless rifle for some extra firepower.
Mallow and Bilstrith were both against a truce with the Old Man. Mallow believed it to be a trap; Bilstrith thought that the Dreadcoats were just being used to carry out the dirty work the Coal Country couldn’t manage to do on its own.
We checked the vehicles for explosives, received our passwords and some identity papers—MacTierney was our liaison with the Maynes clan, so perhaps there was some communication between the hill people and the White Palace even before the massacre at Beckley and the Coal Revolt began.
“A curious fellow came through. Ex-churchman. He’s working with the resistance now. Said he sensed that the Kurians were worried about things here.”
“Sensed? Sounds worse than the snake handler from Old Leslie’s story,” Rod Neale said.
“He speaks and you believe him. You wouldn’t think a man as old as he could be traipsing around the backwoods on his own and still look neat as a pin, but he managed it. He must have incredible health.”
“Or he’s not who he says he is.”
“Occam’s razor: the
simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”
• • •
“I sent out word. We need anything they can send us. Guns, men, even valuables we could trade.”
“We’ll get a few radio messages of support. If we’re real lucky, we’ll make the resistance shortwave news broadcast from those guys with the accents in the Baltic. First language of freedom . . . yeah, but it sure sounds like a second language when you use it.”
“Yeah. But we won’t see a bullet or hand grenade.”
“Crossing Kentucky isn’t the easiest thing, you know. Or running down the mountains across Pennsylvania. You ever done it?”
“I crossed Kentucky,” I said. “You are right. It would not be easy. The Kurians are very possessive of that railroad and the area around Lexington.”
Perhaps support from Southern Command or the Green Mountain Boys would appear. Perhaps even both, as a Lifeweaver-guided balance to the Moondaggers and the Tarheel Rangers.
“Well, the fact of the matter is that unless they show up right soon, it won’t matter. At the rate the Moondaggers are killing people or dragging off girls, the Coal Country is going to be a few mines and their workers guarded by the Tarheels, and a bunch of empty little towns.”
“If we don’t have an army to fight them . . .”
“Perhaps we do not need one. It seems to me we already have all we need. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that when two opposing armies are in close proximity, a dogfight will start a battle?”
White is a popular color in West Virginia. I am told one of the best eateries in Charleston is a floating, white-painted bar and restaurant called the Float.
It was popular with both the Moondaggers and Tarheel forces. Even when they were in civilian clothes, it was easy to tell the difference between the forces by their facial hair. The Moondaggers wore full beards for the most part; the Tarheels elaborate sideburns and mustaches.
Word had gone around that there had been a fight at the Float a few nights ago, when the Moondaggers, who maintained all-male forces, accosted a pair of female Tarheel helicopter pilots.
“Which of the two is the more volatile?”
“Hard to say. Those men from the Carolinas will get into a brawl quickly enough, but the Moondaggers will kill at the drop of a hat.”
“Then it’s the Moondaggers.”
Glassy went into the bar to try to buy cigarettes, and she came out with a Tarheel beret hidden up her skirt.
We found one of their trucks parked outside the bar, and Glassy kept watch while Mancrete and I went to work on it. By the time we’d finished, it looked like it had passed through a robotic digestive system. We left a Tarheel beret sitting on the dashboard.
Two Moondaggers appeared, one helping the other, who was ill. I decided that a refreshing swim in the Kanawha River was in order.
MYTHIC ARMY
The destruction the Moondaggers and the Tarheel Rangers inflicted on each other was minor but very real. The local commanders knew what was happening and did their best to dial down the emotions of their men.
Dealing with the reality on the ground in the Coal Country was one matter; reporting to their respective superiors in the Ordnance and the Control was another. They might be blamed, or worse, they might be ordered to start carrying out full-scale warfare against their opposite numbers.* They explained the murders and losses as being the work of guerillas.
Operations analysts on both sides worked the numbers and arrived at a guerilla army close to five-thousand strong. My best estimate of our numbers in the field at that point was between two hundred and seven hundred.
The other freeholds had their own agents in both headquarters, so they saw the same assessments the Kurian Order compiled.
The Dreadcoats deserved every line of their mistaken reputation. For their numbers, they did damage beyond anything you could expect that a squad-sized (later a company) team short of a mob of Southern Command’s Bears might accomplish.
We had more volunteers than we could handle. We armed the best ones with captured weapons and sent them to the mountains to be trained by clans like the MacTierneys; the others we asked only to pass information about enemy strength, movement, and intentions.
With our ranks swelled with volunteers from the hill people and town, we forced the members of the Kurian Order back into their garrisons. We also received a few deserters into our ranks; even a Moondagger shaved off his beard and joined us. Some left as quietly as they came, after a few weeks of rough living on poor food. As I recall, the Moondagger stuck, and became quite the connoisseur of MacTierney White Whiskey.
We didn’t have the ability to train them. All we could do was pair the new recruits with a veteran and hope that the elder could keep the younger alive until he learned how to shoot from cover and find food on the march.
Still, there were many deaths. The Tarheel Rangers knew how to fight guerillas; they spotted us with their aircraft, pummeled us with light artillery, then brought in helicopters full of men to mop us up. All we could do was try to bring down a helicopter here and there with machine guns.
One thing was certain. Only a trickle of coal was leaving this section of mountains, mostly by truck. Now that we had some real explosives, we were bringing train traffic out of the mines to a standstill. They simply didn’t have enough manpower to guard the lines and fix what we wrecked.
We were always very careful with enemy bodies. We arranged them, neatly, covered at roadsides of major thoroughfares with whatever identification and documentation we could find intact.
Our own dead were treated with a little less reverence. I passed through towns where they were hanging from traffic lights at the main intersection. Sometimes they weren’t even our own dead. The Moondaggers would lose six and then grab the first eighteen Coal Country men they could find and execute them, using the ratio that one Moondagger equaled three ordinary men.
We baited a trap for the Moondaggers, expecting just such a raid. We had some of our new men pepper a Moondagger patrol—a lucky shot killed one of theirs.
The nearest village was a five-building-wide spot in the road that didn’t even qualify for a community center, just a roadside market with an emergency reserve of twenty gallons of gas and twenty gallons of diesel under lock and key.
The Moondaggers liked to travel in groups of SUVs, roaring up the little roads in fast-moving, almost bumper-to-bumper convoys. Sometimes they would drive two or three abreast when they could, filling the road with radiator grille and tire. The sight was as terrifying as a charge of Cossacks with drawn sabers, I’m here to tell.
• • •
We did our best to wreak havoc in the wake of the Moondaggers pursuing the Southern Command forces over the mountains and into Kentucky.
I fear we made things difficult for the legworm clans, because we heard from civilians that the Moondaggers were outraged by our little pokes and jabs and blamed the Kentuckians for them. The standard Moondagger reprisal was three deaths for every one inflicted, and though we were inflicting the deaths, the Kentuckians were paying for our actions.
I did manage to catch up with my friend David Valentine before he disappeared into the bluegrass. It was good to see him alive, although he’d obviously seen many miles and endured further privations and injuries since our good-bye beside the big black Lincoln from Xanadu. As that conversation was recorded better elsewhere,* all I will add is that I returned to the Coal Country doubly sure of the justness of our cause and our ultimate victory. Military formations like the Moondaggers never last for long; they make more enemies than they can destroy in their temporary victories.
A SUSPICIOUS CEASE-FIRE
The Tarheels quit the Coal Country in the winter of 2074–75. The trickle of coal flowing out of West Virginia had been replaced by some fresh surface mines in Tennessee, so there was no longer a point to the loss of life. If the Moondaggers wanted to keep their hand in the beehive for a few trains of coal a month, they were welcome to it.
&nbs
p; We were bringing fresh horseflesh up into the mountains when I heard of the approach of forces from Southern Command and the Green Mountains. At first I had difficulty believing that anyone would have the nerve for such a high-risk, potentially low-reward operation.
There was an oddity to their arrival, though. The ex-churchman whom I’d been told about at the Hollow never showed up again. Either he’d finally fallen to bad chance or, for some unknown reason, he’d been removed from his duties of communicating with the Coal Country.
Later, I learned that a simple trick had been played on the freeholds that were coming to our aid. The Moondaggers got a hold of a Golden One and set up a fake resistance camp near the border with Kentucky.
By the time we learned of the ruse, the Green Mountain Boys and Southern Command were already the victims of one nasty surprise when an alleged welcoming barbecue turned into a slaughter of their senior officers.
The Moondaggers executed their operation admirably. They even went so far as to get a Golden One to pose as me, as the Coal Country guerilla army was known to have a Xeno in it, though whether I was the commander or a lucky mascot was a matter of opinion.
The assisting forces guessed the ruse and executed an admirable midnight withdrawal.
• • •
With the forces of Southern Command and the Green Mountain Boys departed, the Coal Country enjoyed a glorious fall season of celebration. Men shook hands and backslapped on the street; young people just walking in the same direction stopped, kissed, and proceeded for a few blocks holding hands before parting on their separate business; everywhere there was music and dancing. Spontaneous parties would form where two or three musicians found a comfortable public place to sit with their instruments. In a few minutes others would gather to listen or dance and some old-timer would extract a flask from his back pocket or her purse and libations would be passed around.
Usually fall is a season of dull wools and nylon shells, but not during that brief, happy spell.