Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  I sat down, at least twenty feet clear of the water. Who knew what might come surging out of that dead pool. The Reaper in a combination of wading and walking came around, passed the dock, and approached.

  “That’s close enough,” I said while it was still out of jumping distance. I wished in vain for a Quickwood stake. “Thank you for speaking to me.”

  “you are the first person i’ve seen in days,” the Reaper said. A little saliva ran out of its mouth when it talked, thanks to the missing lip.

  I tried to summon some of Maynes’s sardonic bravado. “Were you expecting bathers in the middle of winter?”

  “the firemen have not come,” the Reaper said.

  “Have you not kept up on current events? The firemen are mostly dead, fled, or hiding behind as many locked doors as they can manage.”

  “i do understand there’s been fighting. i have not dared send my mouthpiece down to the white palace. has it been occupied yet?”

  “Only by hungry raccoons,” I said.

  “pity. this used to be such a pleasant part of the country.”

  “You are the first Maynes? The judge from the Old World?”

  “i am.”

  “So why are you speaking through a Reaper?”

  “it is a privilege granted to few. i have become an immortal. as an immortal, it’s wisest to deal with mortal man through surrogates.”

  I had been told such things were possible but only half believed it. The general of the Twisted Cross had been far more useful to the Kurian Order than I could believe this living waxwork ever was.

  “Do you sometimes go out and ride horses in the middle of the night?”

  The Reaper blinked and yawned. Had Maynes briefly broken contact? “it’s one way to get around the coal country. safer than you would think. until the troubles started, i rarely saw anyone but trooper cars out. i suppose you saw me during one of my rides.”

  I found myself wishing I’d steered straight into him that night. Maybe that would have just hastened all that had happened since.

  • • •

  I turned and walked away, putting the shotgun over my shoulder. Quick steps followed. I swiveled the gun so it pointed directly behind me and fired, then spun.

  I’d caught the Reaper in the shoulder, but it was still coming. I emptied the shotgun into it. No effect.

  It was on me and crushing, biting. I managed to wiggle one arm up under its chin. The lashing tongue struck me about the face, drawing blood. One eye suddenly went blurry.

  My other arm, around its waist just below the ribs, held it fast as I pushed back, back. I reset my feet to get more leverage. It began to thrash back and forth like a snake.

  With a kraak! the Reaper’s back broke. I dropped it and it flopped around like a fish, the legs working at counter-purpose to the upper torso. It kept folding and opening itself like a living jackknife.

  I kicked it in the ear to get its attention. “You broke the agreement, Maynes. I’m not about to be harvested. Not after everything you’ve put me through.”

  I’d dealt with enough snakes in Nebraska to know what to do with this cripple. I found the biggest boulder I could heft from those littering the quarry and returned it to the spot where it was still thrashing around. It had managed to turn its torso completely around.

  “Speaking as one of the few surviving employees of the Maynes Conglomerate and Mine Holdings, I hereby give notice,” I said, and flung the boulder down on the Reaper’s head. It made a satisfying crunch.

  The elder, or should I say eldritch, Maynes had offered no last words. Perhaps he was already in flight from whatever abode he inhabited near the quarry. I could only hope that one of the remaining ravies sufferers would come across him before starving to death. It would be a nice piece of irony, though I doubted Maynes had anything to do with spreading the virus in his own territory.

  When the rest quit flopping, I rolled the boulder off the corpse.

  Reaper cloth did not breathe and was prone to getting moldy if wetted, but it was warm and stopped bullets admirably for the weight. I disrobed the avatar and rolled up the cloth. I could at least get a nice short-sleeved tunic out of it.

  I probably should have spent the night looking for Maynes. There was the chance that he had a Reaper in reserve—though if he did, he should have been spending his time riding its back for asylum in another Kurian Zone. The Georgia Control and the Ordnance would want yet another scapegoat for the catastrophe in the Coal Country, and this time a few directors and members of the Maynes family wouldn’t do.

  Blinking as my vision tried to adjust to the mixture of blurry from the damaged orb and clear from the remaining, I could only hope it was a cold, dark winter to the north, and the Georgia Control’s factories were cutting back on production thanks to lack of energy.

  As to the disposition of the Coal Country, had we won anything? To anyone with sense, it was a bloody, gainless shambles. But it did bring the Resistance to the doorstep of the once-placid East. The area between the Georgia Control, the guts of the Kurian Order, if you will, and the brain in the Northeast with all of its New Universal Church colleges and training centers, with the central nervous system around Washington in between, had been thrown into a state of panic such that they’d gone to the extreme of sewing a virulent new strain of ravies to clear the mountains.

  But my sense was that places like Hopkins Hollow would survive. Ravies worked best among defenseless civilians, tightly packed in urban areas. The independent mountain families were self-reliant, well armed, and scattered. Without a series of operations such as the one we suffered at the Vulcan Materials site, even the Georgia Control couldn’t pacify the area without devoting almost all of its known troop strength to the heavily wooded hills, cuts, and valleys.

  I’d come out of it alive. Time would tell if the damaged eye would heal; otherwise I supposed I could easily fashion a Reaper-cloth eye patch.

  My favorite time in the Coal Country woods was the golden hour before sunset. The sun would pierce the woods and run in shafts, turning everything it touched to gold. Wildflowers inclined their faces to it, children eager for a father’s touch. Even the birds seemed to quiet at that hour (unlike the first hour of daylight, when they would try to outdo one another in raucousness). Not only was the sun’s golden beauty pleasantly relaxing—for me it was hygienic. Humans cannot appreciate the cleansing warmth of sun on fur, almost as good as a long hot soak, and certainly better in that you did not have to wait for your fur to dry.

  I did my best thinking in this hour and the twilight thereafter. A quiet walk in the woods would often puzzle out a problem in just this way.

  Had I lived up to my own moral code? A close examination would show that I failed on a number of ideals. But abandoning an ideal just because you fall short is a road back to an animal existence. Having spent time as a Quisling, I could now have a little more sympathy for the men and women who accepted, or even sought, those roles when I fought them in the future.

  I was heartily sick of fighting, but the fight had to go on, or all the deaths of this account become nothing more than a collection of unfortunate incidents, one Xeno memoir of a dreadful time.

  One man would understand. I would go west and see if I couldn’t pick up the trail of my friend David Valentine. Shared burdens felt lighter.

  • • •

  By this time the record of my experiences left little extra room in the old waterproofed bag that served as a pillow. I cannot remember exactly where I acquired it—while rooting through an attic looking for clothing that would fit, I believe—but it served me well and I have it to this day. I believe it was meant for boating or fishing.

  I, like many of my kind, have a poorish memory. However, if I keep a little memento or draw an icon or a few picturesque words to remind me, a great deal of it comes back. Most people have at least heard of the cognitive experiments performed by Shyun on the Gray Ones—cold in conversation, they could not describe a rifle they used daily
for a month, but showing them a bullet for the weapon or a paper target they’d hit with it opened the floodgates: how it shot in bad weather, cleaning routine, sighting quirks. Most educated people these days can identify Shyun along with Pavlov as a famous behaviorist and give a rough description of the experiments.

  My own memory is a little better than that, but if I can aid it with a few words or a memento—I still am in possession of my Number Four work ID—my memory is exponentially improved.

  Originally, these notes were to be presented to the intelligence services of Southern Command to give them a better idea of conditions in the Coal Country. I’m still not convinced they have merit beyond that, but with memories of the Kurian Order beginning to fade, other generations may find them of interest.

  • • •

  Looking back now, most of what is published on the Kurian era divides the Quislings from the Resistance with a thick shining line. Families were either one or the other, and in cases of division, neither camp speaks to the other. It was not so simple, each Quisling and Resistance fighter washed into the other like a salt marsh where a river meets the ocean. The most zealous Resistance fighter wasn’t above doing a little black-market trading with the collaborators. Even Quislings ready to receive a brass ring, certifying them as an ally of Kur and immune from the fear of the Reapers, were known to act to save lives, at risk to themselves.

  I can think of several Resistance members I loathed and a few Quislings I respected, even admired. Even in the Coal Country I enjoyed the company of some in the White Palace. I encountered intelligence, devotion, and ability in the Kurian Zone—and I would not care to weigh too heavily the difference between their qualities and our own in the Resistance.

  Allow me to end this brief digression by wondering in letters if our need to have the Quislings depicted in the blackest possible terms has anything to do with the treatment of captured Quislings at the end of and after the war.

  The other goal of this memoir is to reclaim my own name. I’ve been labeled “the Grog who led the Coal Country rising” so many times that it galls. My friends in the mine, who stood together when it would have been so easy to walk out, or those citizens of Beckley who just wished for some promised cookware to feed their families, need to be remembered more than one aged, grizzled Golden One with wobbly teeth and a droopy eye. Like all the most persistent untruths, there is a tiny kernel of accuracy—I was in the Coal Country, and I was the most recognizable figure wherever our guerillas were fighting.

  I hope my account has proven to be of value to those, both laymen and professionals, interested in the Kurian Order and events in the second half of the twenty-first century. I now close this portion of my memoirs and ask not for pity or admiration, calumny or honor, but only understanding.

  APPENDIX

  The Coal Country Revolt and the Decline of the Eastern North American Kurians

  The preceding memoir presents a unique, firsthand view of events in the Coal Country in the key years of 2073–2075, written by a skilled observer with no motivation to either cover up certain events or make more of them than history requires.

  The Coal Country revolt was, for decades after the fall of the Kurian Order, a mostly forgotten affair, appearing only tangentially in accounts of the ill-fated Operation Javelin or in Buckman’s substantial War Diary of Green Mountain Boys. Only an analysis of records kept by the Kurian Order functionaries, mostly archived either by the Georgia Control or the Baltimore Kurians who supervised what was left of Washington DC, revealed its importance to the overall Liberation.

  If the reduction in coal production was noted at all in the first wave of histories, it was noted only briefly: “The Kurian-allied Maynes clan’s mishandling of its zone resulted in a brief takeover by forces of the Georgia Control and Church-led Moondagger Paramilitaries. The East and Southeast suffered some electrical shortages over the next decade until other sources of coal were opened up, frequently resulting in blackouts and brownouts in the midday and overnight hours.” So reads the dryly informative (but excitingly titled) Tithe of Blood: The Complete History of the Kurian Order.

  Numerous frantic reports from the Georgia Control and the seaboard between New York and Florida tell a different tale. Coal was widely used to generate electricity, of course, but it also heated apartment buildings with only irregular supplies of other fuels. More important, it was used, rather laboriously, to create gasoline. The gasoline shortages experienced by the Georgia Control make for exemplary reading for anyone anticipating having to shift blame or CYA. The Georgia Control, the manufacturing dynamo for the entire eastern half of the United States, almost ground to a halt without gasoline and diesel for its trucks, much of this gas and diesel being generated using coal.

  The directors of the various energy-dependent concerns complained loudly and in triplicate of the decrease in production, perhaps fearing a visit from the Reapers. Universally, they blamed first the lack of gasoline—it had been in short supply with the loss of the Texas and Oklahoma pumps—and then the cutbacks to electricity that idled what work they could get done without fuel in their tanks.

  The Georgia Control’s military remained effective—briefly. They received their gasoline first, followed by key aircraft at the airports, followed by the police and fire forces (who now and then ran short, sharply limiting their effectiveness). As the fighting ground on in Kentucky and the Transmississippi, their weapons and vehicles began to go idle from lack of spare parts and munitions rather than fuel. The Kurian Order slit its own throat with its prioritization of oil. In desperation, they restarted a couple of the offshore oil pumps in the gulf, but it was still a long, pipeline-free trip up to the Macon and Atlanta hubs from the coast.

  GLOSSARY

  BEARS—The toughest of the Hunter classes, Bears are famously ferocious and the shock troops of Southern Command, working themselves up into a berserker rage that allows them to take on even the Reapers at night. They are also famous for surviving dreadful wounds that would kill an ordinary man, though how completely they heal varies slightly according to the injury and the individual.

  CATS—The spies and saboteurs of the Hunter group, Cats are stealthy individuals with keen eyesight and superb reflexes. Women tend to predominate in this class, though it is a matter of opinion whether this is due to their bodies adapting better to the Lifeweaver changes, or the fact that Cat activities require the ability to blend in and choose a time for acting rather than using more aggressive action.

  GOLDEN ONES—A species of humanoid Grog related to the Gray Ones, Golden Ones are tall bipeds (though they will still sometimes go down on all fours in a sprint) mostly covered with short, faun-colored fur that grows longer about the head-mane. Expressive, batlike ears, a strong snout, and wide-set, calm eyes give them a somewhat ursine appearance, though the mouth is broader. They are considered by most to have a higher culture than their gray relations. Their civilization is organized along more recognizable groups, with a loose caste system rather than the strictly tribal organizations of the Gray Ones.

  GRAY ONES—A species of humanoid Grog related to the Golden Ones, the Gray Ones have hair that is shorter than their relatives, save for longer tufts that grow to warm the forearms and calves/ankles. Their bodies are covered in thick gray hide, which grows into armorlike slabs on some males. They are bipeds in the fashion of gorillas, with much heavier and more powerful forearms than their formidable Golden One relations, wide where their cousins are tall. Unless organized by humans, they tend to group into tribes of extended families, though in a few places (such as St. Louis) there are multitribe paramountcies controlling other tribes in a feudal manner.

  GROGS—A nonspecific word for any kind of life-forms imported or created by the Kurians, unknown to Earth pre-2022. Some say the term “grog” is a version of “grok” since so many of the strange, and sometimes horrific, life-forms cooperate; others maintain that the term arises from the “graaaaawg!” cry of the Gray Ones when wounded or calling for as
sistance in a fight. In most cases among the military of Southern Command, when the word “Grog” is used, it is commonly understood to refer to a Gray One, as they will use other terms for different life-forms.

  HUNTERS—A common term for those humans modified by the Lifeweavers for enhanced abilities of one sort or another. Up until 2070, the Hunters worked closely under the direction of the Lifeweavers in Southern Command, but after so many of them fled or were killed during Consul Solon’s incursion, the Hunter castes were directly managed by Southern Command.

  KURIANS—A faction of the Lifeweavers from the planet Kur who learned how to extend their life span through the harvesting of vital aura, the Kurians invaded Earth once before in our prehistory and formed the basis for many vampire legends. Although physically weak compared to their Reaper avatars, Kurians are masters of disguise, subterfuge, and manipulation. They tend to dwell in high, well-defended towers so as to better maintain mental links with their Reaper avatars. Face-to-face contact with one is rare except for their most trusted Quislings. Some have compared the Kurian need for vital aura with an addict’s need for a drug, especially since the consumption of vital aura sometimes leaves the Kurian in a state of reduced sensibility. Most Kurians live life on simple terms: are they safe, do they have enough sources of vital aura, and how can they gather a large supply and keep it against their hungry and rapacious relatives.

  KURIAN AGENTS—The Kurian answer to the Hunter class, Kurian agents are very trusted humans, often trained from early childhood to use psychic powers similar to those of their masters. There are reports of Kurian agents able to assume the appearance of other races and genders, confuse the minds of their opponents, and even read minds to uncover traitors.

  LIFEWEAVERS—A race thought to have populated some nine worlds, modifying or creating an unknown number of life-forms. They appear to be some form of octopus crossed with a bat, equally at home in the water or gliding between treetops. A faction of Lifeweaver scientists on a planet called Kur created a schism when they began to use the vital aura from other living creatures to extend their life span. Soon open warfare broke out. The Lifeweavers were successful in keeping the Kurians confined to Kur for millennia, but they managed to break out and invaded Earth and an unknown number of other Lifeweaver-populated worlds in 2022, our time.