Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  Maynes showed the good grace to buy his visitor a drink.

  “Mr. Maynes,” Zihu said in his flatland drawl, “I feed my captives. If they’re hurt, I bandage them up. I have nothing to reproach myself about their treatment.” He let his voice rise to a level that could be heard throughout the barroom, and his men quieted. “What happens once I get rid of them is not my concern. I don’t let my men touch them. If you want to take her off my hands, we can talk price; otherwise we will seek another route to Baltimore.”

  “Or,” Maynes said, “we could impound all your vehicles and confiscate your weapons while we call in the churchmen to verify your bond status. In fact—”

  Zihu zipped up the red leather jacket.

  The little rat of a man lashed out. Metal glinted on his knuckles, and Maynes caught it across the teeth. I reached out to block the blow but wasn’t fast enough. Though I couldn’t connect, I could still get my fingers around his throat.

  A pair of hands attached to powerful arms grabbed my arm as I reached and thrust it down to the tabletop in an iron grip, like a man pinning a rattler before cutting off its head.

  It never ceases to amaze me how matters among humans can turn so sour so fast. Even a dogfight is signaled by a few seconds of raised hackles and growls. Among humans, a mild disagreement can often escalate to violence, leaping by intermediate steps. I wonder if emotions were more under control when men fought duels and had an established protocol of offense, challenge, and answer.

  “King, shut that door!” Maynes shouted through his split lip. The bloody ribbon of flesh wagged like a second tongue. Home had drawn a gun but hadn’t fired it yet, keeping a group of Zihu’s men away from Maynes’s other flank.

  I needed my hands free to close the door. I dispensed with the biker in my hands by lofting him up. The wood in the high ceiling must have been a fair ways rotted, because he punched through, leaving a hole and a shower of dust behind.

  They tell me he was in fact retrieved from the third-floor attic, having also penetrated the second-floor ceiling, but tall tales go with tall mountains.

  I needed to block the door. The heaviest timber available was the bar, but I couldn’t bring myself to destroy such fine finishing to the wood grain—the bar had carved-in grape vines and no fewer than three beautiful figures at the corners. Instead, I pried up one of the booth tables. The support came away with some nasty-looking four-inch wooden screws in the base, so I held that end toward those outside and stepped to the door. The glass would have gone eventually in a fight like this, so I didn’t overly regret wrecking it as I thrust the support through.

  The biker rushing the door gave a squawk as one of the twisted wooden screws bit.

  Two bullets made it through the wood before others yelled at the fools to stop firing—“Zihu’s still in there!”

  Home had a bottle thrown at him and flinched, giving one of the throng a chance to knock the gun from his hand with a collapsible club. Maynes was doing well but swinging wildly. Still, his windmill blows had felled one man and backed Zihu up to the bar. Zihu circled and made for the back door. Maynes fell on his leg as he passed and bit down like a savage dog.

  It occurred to me, braced there with my shoulder hard against the doorjamb, that in the movies my David and I would sometimes enjoy, the fights between leaders of the respective heroes and villains of a story were always the most spectacular. Zihu and Maynes were pawing at each other on the floor like a pair of teenagers fumbling through their first bout of lovemaking.

  The brief oncoming roar of a motorcycle sounded, thunderously echoing off buildings outside; then the window and wall next to the door split with a crash. A black motorcycle with a massive shield at the front, reared up on its oversized hind wheel like a fighting stallion, crushed floor and furniture before it settled on its side, shedding two men and knocking over Home and his remaining opponent and staving out a panel in that glorious bar. The riders, wearing a mix of leather and chain mail, tumbled off the bike, goggles askew from the crash, and each drew a heavy automatic pistol.

  I did my best to follow orders. If I couldn’t hold the door, I could try to throw them out as fast as they came in. Taking a position a little back from the door and the hole in the wall, I picked up one of Zihu’s mob and sent him spinning like a bowling ball at some others rushing in from outside. I achieved what’s known in bowling as a “cocked hat” split, leaving two to one side and one to the other.

  I used the leverage from a thick post to kick out at another, who dodged under it. My fist connected with the head of a man in a heavy Kevlar vest coming through the door behind a shotgun barrel. He and his gun hit the floor with a satisfying clatter.

  Matters behind me had gone from bad to worse. Both packs had instinctively rushed to the defense of their dominant wolf; the Zihu pack was just larger. Maynes had been pinned against the bar, with the diminutive Zihu poking a knife up into his throat from one side and a nickel-plated revolver pressed against his temple from the other. Both Home and MacTierney were on the ground and Zihu’s men were efficiently hog-tying them with cordage and cuffs designed for the purpose.

  A deafening shotgun blast made all of us duck. Fortunately, my ears had been flattened against my head, offering me some protection from the noise.

  “Fellas, you kill a Maynes, you have his blood after you’rn,” the bartender shouted, sounding to my outraged ears as though he were underwater. “It’s not bullshit. He’s the grandson of old King Coal. He’s Coal Country royalty, with friends all up and down the East right into the Control.”

  I took three quick steps toward Maynes. Some of Zihu’s bully boys closed around the bar, but I shouldered through without undue difficulty by dislocating their shoulders.

  Zihu lowered the knife. “Admit you’re beat.”

  Maynes thrashed. “Road trash can’t whip me.” Blood splattered from his split lip and Zihu winced in disgust.

  “We’re beat!” MacTierney shouted. “Admit it, Mr. Maynes. Please!”

  Maynes thought it over. He laughed. “Yeah, we’re beat. But you fellas threw the first punch. The blood’s on you. In more ways than one.”

  Zihu nodded and released Maynes’s jacket.

  “I think Three-King Jake’s got a broke neck,” one of Zihu’s men reported from the Kevlar-wearing gunner I’d struck.

  “We’ll let the Church sort it out,” Zihu said. “Maybe we can just be bygones over this?” He extended his hand to shake.

  Maynes brought up his knee and caught Zihu in the crux. It was just the sort of move I had come to expect from this specimen of mankind.

  “No!” Zihu gasped, but a gathering throng pressed toward us. I pulled Maynes over the bar and followed him. The heavy oak would buy us a few moments of protection—

  “stop this nonsense!” A voice like a broken steam pipe cut through the gloomy, freshly aerated bar.

  Those of you who live in these happier days have probably only seen waxworks or leftovers of the Reapers, though I know some lurk in the more remote jungles and deserts of the world. I will spare you the dangers of the journey and meeting.

  They are of average Golden One height, which is to say about two heads above most male humans. Pale, fleshless, and stretched-looking, with a mouth full of black fangs, they’re just human-enough in expression to give sane humans a case of the horrors. To me, they look like a mad and depressed painter’s portrait of a human corpse. Their muscles are like steel cables, tied directly to long, grasping fingers I’ve seen push through viscera and muscle as easily as you might thrust your hand through a layer cake. It could throw me through the wall as easily as I’d lofted that unfortunate biker. Only a Bear with his blood fully up has a chance hand-to-hand with one.

  One of the Coal Country troopers stood behind it. The trooper pointed at Zihu and whispered something.

  This Reaper was the most scarred I’d ever seen. Its face bore white lines running every which way, like a pad of paper that had been reused for tic-tac-toe. Its up
per lip was missing, giving it a rather maniacal grin. The usual black fangs had been plated over with stainless steel and reinforced with wires near the root like some kind of disastrous experiment in orthodontia. The label “Frankenstinian” is often used in describing the Reapers, though the lurching image evoked mischaracterized their lethal precision of movement—but on this specimen its use would be more apt than most.

  Home and MacTierney averted their eyes. I believe MacTierney muttered a prayer, but the bar and one of Zihu’s men absorbed any distinct words.

  “What are you doing here, Screech?” Maynes said, breaking the intimidating silence. I’d never heard a Reaper called by a proper name.

  “collecting an excise,” Screech said. It stepped forward, and the Zihu men gave it at least twice its reach in space. It occurred to me that a mathematically minded person could come up with a neat little algorithm to describe the velocity of humans and how it varied with proximity to a Reaper.

  “That’s all I tried to do,” Maynes said.

  “we did not elevate the Maynes family just to satisfy your need for sorry little cumboxes.”

  The Coal Country Kurian operating the Screech-Reaper must have picked up an odd vocabulary in his time.

  “i will take over the negotiations with mr. zihu. you may retrieve your men and take your vehicle to the next brothel on your list.”

  Screech took Zihu over to a corner of the bar and began to speak to him. Zihu put on a brave face, but his body language read as “cringe.”

  The bartender gave Maynes an iced towel to press to his lip, and I helped MacTierney and Home out of their bonds. Unfortunately for Zihu’s bounty hunters, I ruined the restraints in the process.

  “What happened to Bronson?” one of the bikers asked.

  All eyes rose to the hole made in the ceiling by the biker I’d tossed. It looked like a splintery stick figure.

  Another whistled. “Never seen anything like that outside a cartoon.”

  “I see the name Maynes everywhere in the Coal Country,” said a dirt-encrusted scout who looked as if he’d lived for a year on top of a motorcycle. “What did he do?”

  “Created the craziest family between here and Salt Lake,” the bartender said quietly.

  “But they run everything here, right? The Kurians put them in charge?”

  “Ya-huh,” the bartender said. “The family was important before the big breakdown. The grandfather had money and land and owned some radio, TV, netfoss, all that. Meant he had senators and judges lining up to kiss his hairy ring. After it all went to shit, he somehow kept his radio station running. The flying umbrellas dealt with him, made him the conduit for food, vaccines against the ravies virus; you wanted lights back on or fuel oil, you talked to one of the Old Man’s people. The Kurians liked how he ran things around here, so they gave him every coal mine worth having hereabouts.

  “That’s the real power, the coal. The Northeast needs it to keep from freezing to death in the winter, and the Georgia Control needs it to power its factories in the Carolinas. Take a word of advice and make a copy for your boss: tread a little lightly in these mountains. There’s more power here than you think.”

  • • •

  Maynes knew the country better than any of his closest family. Sometimes he had to give tours to visitors from other Kurian Zones. His usual detail of MacTierney, Home, and me came along. Maynes and Home put on suits and neckcloths that were the local workingman’s variant on a tie.

  Maynes, who made a convincing bon vivant with the average Coal Country functionary, treated a tour like an unpleasant rash. He itched for it to end when he wasn’t medicating with bourbon. His drinking wasn’t so much an attempt to get through the night as to ensure that his charge would call an early night.

  The first visitor I saw Maynes escort was up from Georgia, studying coal production. He was involved in turpentine farms and had come to see how the Maynes Conglomerate treated its miners.

  He was an ugly little fellow who looked like he’d exchanged blows from an early age. He had a blotchy, mottled face, a crooked nose, a heavy, callous brow, and two missing teeth. I silently thanked the Fates that I’d ended up with Maynes instead of with an unpleasant-looking man like him. Most of his conversation was complaints about the weather, the lack of light on the valley roads, and the state of the highways and bridges.

  After a couple of drinks, Maynes roundly damned his family for sticking him with “jumped up pickers.” A picker, to Maynes, was a person fit only for the roughest manual labor in the coal mines. I noticed that he rarely used the epithet on some of his citizenry who probably came from “picker” stock—it was usually reserved for Quislings and churchmen.

  Whenever we ran out of liquor, we went to the Maynes store.

  The Maynes Coal Company Store always impressed. Called the Red Hen Pantry and Sundry, it had an appealing painting of a red hen on a nest of wildflowers. After the grim industrial spew of the slag heaps and extraction conveyors, the bright hues were a welcome relief.

  It disabused me of the belief that company stores were designed to extract as much of the worker’s paycheck as possible and return it to the corporation. The food was plentiful, nicely displayed, and at a price substantially lower than noncompany stores, from what I’d seen of Coal Country barrows and supermarkets.

  There was even a more exclusive store within the store that you could visit with the right kind of ID. Church officials, management, labor committee heads, firemen . . . the apparat of the New Order could get luxuries, at luxurious prices, of course: soaps from the south of France, Jamaican rum, Cuban cigars.

  “It’s Elaine’s work, these stores,” Maynes always said proudly. “Quite an achievement. The way she explains it, cheap necessities cut down on a host of other problems. Theft and pilfering of company property, black market trading, attitude, even industrial sabotage, can all be prevented by a good supply chain at on-the-square pricing.”

  It was not long before I met Elaine.

  NIGHT RIDE TO MARYLAND

  On a very few occasions, Maynes left the White Palace with only me accompanying him.

  You could be forgiven for thinking that he took only the Grog out on his hunts for teenage girls, but I believe Home went with him on those nights. He and I ventured out alone only when he had a chance of meeting his sister on one of her business trips. She was the one member of the family whose company he sought.

  “We have to pick my sister up. She’s out east.”

  Maynes looked unusually good for the early evening.

  It was a three-hour drive on the bad roads to Frederick, Maryland. I had no knowledge of the roads, so Maynes sat up beside me, pointing out landmarks—at least those that could be seen on a night with irregular patches of electricity along the roads.

  I’d already proven to him that I had a decent memory for things I’d seen before. “You’ll have no trouble getting back.”

  “No sir, no trouble. Long way. Need gas?”

  He looked at the gauge. “We’re good. They’ll probably have some at the conference, though, so we’ll get another half tank there, just in case.”

  We were out of the mountains and into open country of green hills. It seemed to be patches of farmland mixed in with returned wilderness. As it was night, I saw little of Frederick itself. We parked outside a hotel (a big bird like a crane figured into the hotel’s logo, but I don’t remember the name) along the highway, glowing like the last bulb in a string, surrounded by darkened, boarded-up structures.

  “Thought I’d surprise you,” Maynes said as his sister walked out in response to a page. “A little birdie told me you’re breaking up early. Any marriage proposals this time?”

  I am not the best judge of human physiognomy. I knew she was female and Maynes was male, and they both had the same sort of hair. She was younger, both in age and in the use of her body—Maynes’s habits had aged him prematurely. “You don’t have to keep tabs on me, Joshua. You know I’m staying at the palace and dy
ing a spinster.”

  “Nay-nay, you’re always welcome here.”

  “Ah, admirable caution. I’m glad your failure elsewhere has taught you something.”

  “You know I’ve never failed at what matters to you.”

  Elaine Maynes returned a sour smile.

  “Ready to leave crab country?”

  This was a side of my employer I hadn’t seen before—thoughtful, easygoing, making an effort to please.

  “I have to say good-bye to a few people from the production working group. The Georgia Control rep invited me to a party, but since it’s not on-site, I can decline. If anything, it’ll enhance my reputation as someone who stands up to the Control. Or as a lady who doesn’t like those sorts of parties.”

  “You’re beautiful when you get political,” Maynes said.

  I noticed through the rearview mirrors that the lights in back were off.

  As we travelled, bumping along the potholed roads and negotiating the odd border-area washout, it occurred to me that this particular transport was vulnerable to anything but someone taking a potshot from the side of the road. Guerillas or gangs of headhunters looking for snatchable aura could seize the three of us easily enough.

  Once we made it back to the Coal Country, Maynes stopped at the first all-night diner (located at the edge of a rail yard that rearranged trains day and night) we came across and descended from the van to get a sack of whatever greasy hash the place offered.

  He brought me a coffee, loaded almost out of its liquid state with saccharine. “Here you go, old cock.”

  Hair disheveled, half-drunk, and smelling of drying sweat and sexual musk, he’d clearly been in a tryst with his sister. I wondered how much of a secret this was with the rest of the family, and if it had anything to do with Maynes’s being in an unimportant sinecure and his sister’s being relegated to production. But again, I had to wonder who was really running the Maynes Conglomerate, since the Maynes family members appeared to spend most of their time throwing elbows, backbiting, and hamstringing their relatives.