Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  I had seen the liberation of the Ozarks and the Dallas–Fort Worth Zone. Those were raucous affairs, fireworks and bonfires punctuated with horrific sights of vengeance against Quislings and churchmen.

  In the Coal Country, the celebration resembled a vast family reunion under the auspices of some fantastic boon. Old differences were forgotten and the division between those who worked for the Kurian Order and those who suffered from it blurred and vanished. Of course, some churchmen fled, and there were directors and managers of the Maynes holdings who decided to “get while the getting was possible” and escape with every portable valuable they could wrap their hands around.

  “Good riddance,” more than one Coal Country native shouted into the burned-oil exhaust of a stressed, departing engine. “Don’t come back now, y’hear?”

  One beret-wearing grandfather, seventy if he was a day, led a little procession of family west.

  “Where’re you headed, old man?”

  “Hope it’s not far!”

  “Kentucky. My father’s there.”

  “Your father. Hooooly shit.”

  “We’re a long-lived family. Hale and hearty, as you can see. I fully intend to walk eleven more miles today, and we’ve already put four behind us. See that brat back there?” He winked.

  “Why now, just when life’s good?”

  “They might let Arkansas go, but not the Coal Country.”

  “They’ll take their revenge. The Kurians prefer a knife in the dark to a Guernica.”

  • • •

  The old man’s worlds circled over me like turkey vultures.

  They could celebrate in the towns, but there was still fighting to do. The Georgia Control still had garrisons at the largest mines and rail depots. Coal still flowed south and east to the Kurian Order power plants.

  If the Coal Country controlled its own mines, they might just be able to negotiate a neutrality, as Kentucky did, selling a certain amount of legworm meat in exchange for its independence.

  THE CURTAIN FALLS

  We heard of wars and rumors of wars. What exactly happened to the Green Mountain Boys none could say at that time. The Moondaggers claimed that they’d cut them down, forced a surrender, then executed the remainder outside of Harrisburg on the grounds of an old country club golf course near Carlisle. Supposedly five hundred men lie in three sandpits. The Green Mountain Boys said they’d bloodied the Moondaggers’ noses at the Battle of Conodoguinet Creek and then headed back north to winter in their windy mountains.

  In Kentucky, the Moondaggers pursuing the Southern Command forces (who had much farther to go) made the mistake of acting in their usual high-handed fashion with the legworm clans. They rode through the bluegrass in their usual fashion, taking women and girls for breeding purposes. The squabbling Kentuckians, who had cousins and in-laws scattered among the clans, switched over from wary neutrality to active resistance as soon as they heard the news.

  The Moondaggers, more used to slaughtering farming collectives who’ve taken up pitchforks than facing a highly mobile enemy who ride and shoot from their preteen years, began to bleed from a hundred paper cuts. The Kentuckians settled for shooting down scouts and picking off broken-down truck crews from supply convoys, but eventually any army will run out of scouts and logistical drivers if you kill enough of them.

  • • •

  It was a simple ambush, or so we thought. There’s a section of train track on a grade near the Kentucky border, just before it descends again to Big Stone Gap.

  Pulling up railroad track, if you’ve never done it, is taxing but satisfying work. I always felt as though I was ripping the Kurian regime out of the soil by the roots, leaving wounded earth that would soon heal and turn green.

  We were overconfident. A series of single-engine planes had been circling over the Pikeville population. We guessed someone there had seen us—or more probably, me—and reported guerilla action to the Knoxville garrison of the Georgia Control, which was burning precious aviation gas searching for us. The garrison wasn’t having any luck; it widened its pattern and gave up before the morning was over.

  I was still pulling up ties when we heard the train whistle. We hid ourselves. A coal train rattled up the tracks. Easy prey, we thought, except it was moving more slowly than usual, at a marathon runner’s pace, with a couple of engineers riding the nose to examine the tracks for signs of tampering. They spotted our tampering and hit the brakes.

  Still, we could take out the engine. MacTierney gave the order for rocket-propelled grenades. I put a bullet into a machine gunner behind sandbags wired atop the engine.

  The train screeched to a halt before it reached the damaged section of track. Coal dust flew and we heard the hail-like rattle of ore hitting the bottoms of the gondola cars.

  The coal filling every other car was just a thin layer held up by canvas and two-by-fours. The shipment was a sham.

  Hundreds of scratched, filth-smeared ravies victims poured out of the gondola cars as they were tipped sideways, unloading the living cargo heedless of injury—the diseased ones would be mostly dead in a few days anyway, and those with enough faculties to keep themselves alive would spend the rest of their lives like wild animals.

  We fell back, going up the service road that ran parallel to the tracks. The ambush train continued to drop mortar shells on us until we were out of sight. The noise and explosions drew the ravies victims like flies to a corpse.

  “There’s a quarry—open ground to hold them off. For a while, anyway.”

  It seemed the best of nothing but bad choices.

  An old sign read VULCAN MATERIALS—MIDSO. A MAYNES CONGLOMERATE PARTNERSHIP.

  It was a gravel and cement plant, at least it had been recently. There were a couple of big machinery buildings for processing ore and an aluminum-sided office building up on big concrete blocks with about four feet of clearance. There were a couple of rusty and patched trailers near the open-scar quarries, and one heavy yellow loader. A big water tank, intact and full, was the main attraction to the place. It would make a good observation point and would provide us with water, at least.

  Some of the mechanics managed to get the loader going and used it to haul the trailers up to the office, where they were scavenged for food and retrofitted with some of the office building’s aluminum siding for defensive loopholes. We made a little triangular fort like a fat pyramid with an unusually wide base and the two trailers as its sides. We had an endless supply of cinder blocks to plug gaps and put against the outer walls.

  We sent out two scavenging parties to find supplies of food. Ominously, one never returned.

  • • •

  It was a frosty night of horrors.

  We had been expecting a few bands of ravies victims. We were miles from any real population centers and well off the road. Of course, ravies bands did tend to gather, attracted to one another’s calls, but the bands rarely grew very big; they moved at so many different rates, they tended to break and reform and break again, only to be briefly attached to a new one, like oil drops spilled on water.

  The plan was to beat them back with thrown rocks, sharpened poles, and reserve gunfire for emergencies, as gunfire would attract others. On the nearby roads, all we had met were groups of two to four. We should have let the disappearance of the scavenging party be a lesson to us.

  “Screamers, like a swarm of ants!” the lookout at the water tower shouted.

  I used my arms to vault up onto the roof of one of the trailers. The night was dark and it was difficult to see. “Everyone, we need your guns. To the loopholes!”

  We didn’t have any of the usual equipment that would aid in night fighting. Two police spot lamps were it. One flickered on and washed over a blob of pale figures coming across the gravel-bed expanse of the cement plant’s clearing. They were widely spaced and frantically moving, reminding me of the baby turtles I’d watched on the Caribbean beaches hurrying to the surf before the birds and crabs could get them.

 
The first few shots were just blind fire at motion in the darkness. Finally a shot told; a figure caught by the spotlight leaped in an off-balance imitation of a jumping jack, fell, and didn’t rise again.

  I put the battle rifle to my shoulder and joined in the fire.

  We could never have defended against a mix of ravies sufferers and Reapers.

  There must have been some remnants of the Twisted Cross still operational. The general in Omaha had had several working trains filled with men in their isolation tanks who were animating Reapers they had been matched with.

  I’d learned rather too much about how the Twisted Cross operated near Omaha. They needed their isolation tanks for animating their Reapers, and that was very heavy equipment, like moving around six or seven soaking bathtubs at the very least. The roads of the Coal Country were in no condition for such a heavy rig, unless it was a tracked tank, so they must have moved by rail, as they had in the Midwest.

  I managed to find the train. It was too well guarded, waiting on a siding with machine-gun positions all around and a flatbed-mounted antiaircraft gun (not that the rebels had any aircraft, but it would make short work of any kind of improvised armored vehicle that might be used to approach the train) for a lone Golden One. There were dog handlers and motorcycles and ATVs waiting to deploy against guerillas.

  Still, I had a small supply of explosives—my own double-sized suicide harness, which I’d never bothered to wire onto myself. Keeping to wooded cover and off the road flanking the rail line, I travelled a couple of miles up the track and placed my explosives in a cut, wiring the switch under one of the rails where it was sure to be pressed. A very close examination would discover the mine, of course, but disabling the engine would mean some kind of blow had been struck by the Coal Country against those who’d selected us for eradication.

  • • •

  The rest of the story has become a legend of the wars. I’ve heard the song written about our little Coal Country army and the ravies outbreak. About how, in our last extreme, the men placed explosives on themselves rigged to a timer that they had to reset daily (or, more simply, unlock or break the harness holding the explosives to their bodies) to keep the bomb from going off. If you went out of your head with ravies, you had at most twenty-four hours of racing around and shrieking before it blew you to bits, assuming you didn’t thrash your way out of the harness.*

  The song is more popular west of the Mississippi than in the Appalachians. I believe no one in the area cares to be reminded of the outbreak.

  I left the Vulcan Stand, alone again. For a while I moved south, thinking that if the disease were to take me, I’d rather it did so in an area where the Georgia Control was setting up operations. Twelve hours passed, and I had no signs of trembling in the muscles or headache (beyond a low-level foggy one caused by fatigue). I slept for six or seven hours with my head against a fallen log on a bed of pine branches, and I was surprised to wake up again in control of my faculties. I recited a few lines from the Rhapsodies, and they came out at the volume I expected, my voice steady and clear.

  There’s no question I was bitten and scratched, both pretty badly. As we’d learned that others had caught the virus from bites and fingernail scratches,* and I looked like I’d been through a threshing machine, the only conclusions were either that I was immune, at least to this strain of ravies, or that the virus took much longer to present in a Xeno.

  The stillness of the Coal Country disturbed me. The only living things I met were livestock—mostly chickens and nimble-looking goats—and household pets, and they stayed well shy of me. Once I thought I heard an observation plane, but it never appeared over the ridgeline that obscured the sound. It may have just been an ATV or motorcycle in the distance with the acoustics of the hills playing tricks.

  TO THE WHITE PALACE

  When those who experienced it describe this kind of devastation, it’s common to see “I passed through dead lands” or similar constructions. The land wasn’t dead; the people had been destroyed. The land would continue to thrive, to cover its scarred mountains until a new generation came to collect the coal waiting beneath these hills.

  I did not feel any more alone than I usually did; I am almost always among those who regard me as a stranger. The usual birds and squirrels inspected me from the surrounding trees. The jays shrieked and the squirrels chattered angrily.

  The bites and scratches could still kill me. They’d become infected, and eventually the discomfort roused me out of my grim trudge, my last trip east to the White Palace, so that I walked into an empty New Universal Church building in search of iodine and dressings.

  In the last extreme of the ravies outbreak, some of the locals had sought shelter there, by the look of it. They’d made a good, if desperate, guess—if a vaccine against the strain were to arrive, it would be distributed by the church dispensaries. Nothing brings folks home to their Kurian god-kings like the threat of violent, insensate death, I suppose some in the Order believed.

  They’d waited, and they’d died, waiting, probably unable to believe that the Kurian Order would just abandon the Coal Country. Of course, they’d done nothing like abandoning it. They’d just burned off a diseased crop, the way a farmer would burn a field full of scabby wheat.

  I found a few corpses in there, a mixture of wounded and a suicide scattered here and there in the corners. Why the suicides chose corners I couldn’t imagine—some last human impulse for safety?—but that was where the bodies were resting. There were no churchmen, just a single woman in a pewter-colored New Universal Church nurse’s habit: “scrubs” with two extra-long scarves to go over the hair and mouth, if necessary.

  You could ignore the corpses. They mostly looked like drop piles of laundry, if you just glanced across the pews of the dark meeting hall. The smell wasn’t quite so easy. I made it to the little medical offices, broke open a barred window, and took a deep gasp of fresh air. Rather than remain among the bodies, I grabbed some dressings, alcohol, some scissors and a few other necessities and went out the back door. I disturbed some starved-looking dogs tearing into a pile of corpses laid outside the back next to a two-gallon can of gasoline. They looked like ravies victims, probably euthanized by the nurse inside early in the epidemic during their fruitless wait for an antidote. They’d never got around to burning their dead.

  I found a better use for the gasoline. I chased away the dogs, then made a pile of the waiting corpses on the church altar and set fire to them.

  Once the church was truly alight, I found a rooftop spot to watch it burn while I rested. The fire brought no one save, I suppose, moths. The windows went first, crashing and splintering noisily; then the roof came down, pulled down by the weight of an ancient air conditioner. For a few dazzling minutes, sparks rose in the sky like souls pulled to the infinite rhapsody.

  I dozed after that.

  When I awoke, the church was still smoking. Its steeple, or rather a part of it, still stood, a black finger pointing accusingly toward the heavens. I hope it’s still there, to be honest, to remind people that death can fall from the clouds, without warning, changing everything.

  • • •

  The White Palace was missing a few windows. It, too, had suffered from fire, though the damage was limited to some blackening like misapplied eye shadow rising from the frames.

  I observed it from my old bus shelter for thirty minutes. I saw no signs of any patrols, no ravies victims.

  The White Palace looming empty affected me more than I would have been willing to admit at the time. Here, at least, the Kurian Order should have had a skeleton crew of key personnel, but it looked as though I would find nothing but skeletons, judging from the bodies I found in the main parking lot—a hasty evacuation had been in progress when the ravies sufferers showed up. There’d been some kind of battle, and it looked as though the diseased had been shot down.

  I heard a few ghostly noises from the attic during my quick tour. Perhaps a few of the Maynes clan had concealed th
emselves up there in hopes of a restoration of the old order. That or their spirits were saying hello to an old hireling.

  The White Palace had won one of the earlier rounds, then.

  Some of the vehicles were still serviceable; in fact, someone had stocked up my former employer’s converted minibus for a long trip. I wondered how far over the Kentucky border it would get me before gas or tires gave out.

  To complete my witness to the flow of history changing here in the Coal Country, I still had a question or two. I decided to seek my answers up in the quarry.

  It was in the hills behind the White Palace, beyond the old golf course and the bridle paths. I’d heard it mentioned now and again as the destination of the Reaper-fodder in the Coal Country. If nothing else, I could mark the location of bodies. I gauged the sun as I approached; I had only a brief time to talk before the early winter twilight descended.

  The quarry was a sort of horseshoe-shaped indentation in the hillside where limestone had been cut at some point. A pond, swollen with the winter weather temporarily into a lake, lay in the center of the horseshoe, lapping up almost to the sheer walls of some parts of the cuts. Mossy boulders with black and dead growth indicating the high-water mark stood like islands in the lake. I wondered if, during the worst of the summer heat, the lake shrank to a mud hole. How many bones were exposed?

  A little dock extended out into the lake not far from the path I used to approach the quarry. A rust-flecked bucket and a tangle of fishing line waited in the cold afternoon breeze. Did someone fish here for a dinner? What sort of Gollumesque* lurker would want corpse-fattened catfish lurking in the lake?

  “Show yourself, Maynes,” I shouted. “I give you my word on the graves of my ancestors and children, that I will not harm you, directly or indirectly. I only want to know.”

  The Reaper with the missing lower lip stepped out from the tumble of rocks on the far side of the lake. It looked even more fleshless than usual.

  “I’ll be more comfortable with my shotgun on my lap, if I’m going to be speaking through that,” I said, extracting my gun. “My promise still stands. I won’t hurt your surrogate, either.”