Appalachian Overthrow

by E. E. Knight

  At the height of summer, there was the Appalachian Horse Show, a Saturday-to-Saturday gathering the first week of July. Many members of Coal Country society raised horses, for their own pleasure and sometimes transport—though they were the one class wealthy enough to have reliable personal transportation in the form of cars and small trucks.

  There would be polo matches and drag hunts during the day and barbecues and pig roasts in the afternoon and evening, with Coal Country society members showing off their horseflesh, apparel, and eligible sons and daughters. Young couples would ride out together. Theatricals, fire-balloons, and concerts filled the night air with cries of excitement, music, and laughter. We Grogs worked with a will handling all the horses.

  While informal buying and selling of horses and associated gear would happen throughout the week, celebration would end with a “charity” auction featuring horses and saddles to benefit the New Universal Church and a fund for Injured Miner’s Relief and Retirement.

  I helped in one of the drag hunts by acting as a search target, a semiserious game of hide-and-seek between me and roughly two dozen young women and men on horseback. Many of them rode with pistols and even rifles in saddle holsters, which caused me a little worry in case one of them became overzealous when closing in for the “kill.” As it turned out, my worries were groundless.

  I’m afraid I did not make for much sport, as I was exhausted from taking care of horseflesh from the predawn until midnight over the course of the week. They brought me to bay against a limestone wall on a steep hillside, dismounting for the kill. Had it been an actual pursuit, I would have risked the climb, but I settled for holding up my hands and being pelted with fruit taken from the remains of their saddlebag lunches. They led me back, loosely tied behind the hunt captain’s horse, to the picnic grounds where I received a round of applause.

  By the time it was over and the horses had been packed back into their transports or ridden off the White Palace grounds on a string, the other Grogs and I were so exhausted, we slept for three days.

  A second summer party, “Labor Day,” was a holiday carried over from pre-Kurian times. Unlike the Appalachian Horse Show, there were events all over the Coal Country celebrating the day, and Maynes barnstormed the country in his bus, visiting as many picnics and market-fairs as he could fit in. One way or another, almost every family in the Coal Country managed to procure beef for barbecuing or burgers—I suspect the Maynes clan made arrangements for a massive import of cattle, either on the hoof or already cut into sides.

  We never saw the White Palace events, being busy in the smaller towns, but I learned they put on an opera or a musical play in the natural amphitheater in the hills.

  The Winter Carnival is the longest running, a season of gatherings that stretches from the traditional Thanksgiving time of late November to the New Year. Typically, the White Palace swirled with activity throughout the season with many small parties, culminating in the biggest celebration of the year to welcome the new calendar.

  The New Year’s party, unlike the others, was an occasion for the regular workers and small businessmen to attend and even stay as guests of the Maynes family. Maynes showed the most animation at the New Year’s party. He enjoyed mixing with “his people” as he styled them.

  The staff, even the Grogs, joined in the celebration. Even the poor cooks had the night off, the celebrants made do with premade soups and wrapped sandwiches and pickled offerings to go with their winter beers, vintage wines, bourbons, and other spirits.

  Why this digression? I wished to give an idea of the lifestyle and pursuits of the privileged “Quisling” class, if you will, and also show that society in this part of the Kurian Order was not so sharply divided. Again, there is a natural impulse for diarists of their own life under the Kurians to make the Quislings more evil than most actually were and their own histories free of any taint of collaboration beyond the minimum required for survival. In the Coal Country, the Quislings had, for the most part, good relations with those under them, even admitting them to their most exclusive streets and homes at times.

  Now we shall turn to the opening of the great rift that would bring down the Kurian Order in these rugged hills.

  • • •

  About a quarter of Maynes’s “appointments” never happened. Before his final interview and adjudication of their case, they disappeared into the hills—though on one occasion while I was with him there was a suicide reported.

  Maynes reacted nonchalantly to the evidence that information about his schedule was leaking out of the White Palace. “Just as well; didn’t want to talk to that son of a bitch anyway”; “They’ll run him to ground and he’ll be sorry”; or even, “This is a small patch of ground, taller than it is wide. Everybody knows somebody and word gets around.”

  From a man who drove around in an armored bus that rattled like a hailstorm when birdshot bounced off it or flaked on the inside where it had absorbed a bullet from a deer rifle, such an attitude showed courage, or perhaps fatalism. The Coal Country was a long, long way away from any organized freehold. The Green Mountain boys were closest and had the best path in, but they were busy in New England and on the Great Lakes. Southern Command was the next closest, but that would have meant a long and difficult trek across Kentucky or Tennessee.

  I remember only one time when Maynes seemed to have doubts about the Kurian Order. The town constables caught a man at the hospital incinerator in Charleston.

  No one could say where the Kurian who ran the Coal Country resided. There was no obvious Kurian tower, and there were not many Reapers, perhaps because the mineral-rich mountains interfered with the link between the Kurian and his avatars. I have no idea of the actual number, but it must have been low. If the Coal Country was not the Kurian Zone with the highest human-to-Reaper ratio, I would like to know which zone was. I only saw one, the same one several times, thanks to a distinctive injury to its lip. But back to the incident in Charleston.

  They’d caught a man named Hollis, who’d climbed a wall in an effort to get at the incinerator. In the Coal Country, bodies were disposed of by cremation. The New Universal Church mortuary would place those unfortunates consumed by the Reapers in special body bags that could not be opened again without breaking a very obvious seal and releasing a dye, a method similar to that used to thwart bank robbers, I understand. The Kurians did not care for photos of Reaper-punctured victims to be distributed, at least not in the areas organized by the Georgia Control.

  Hollis sat in the hospital security cells. I never think of a hospital as needing cells, but this one had six, all painted a shade of green so light it could be mistaken for white. MacTierney said he was a woodworker. He looked like one, or perhaps a toymaker out of a children’s book—he had the same kindly eyes and tiny spectacles worn at the end of his nose that you’d expect to see on someone who constructed Pinocchio. He had no weapons, no camera or other recording devices. It was a mystery.

  “What kind of game were you playing?”

  “No game. I was looking for my daughter. Nine years old,” he said by way of clarifying.

  “You thought she’d climbed over a twelve-foot wall?”

  “No, she was taken away by you all,” Hollis said. “God will damn you for it. I believe there’s justice, you see.”

  “Why was she taken?”

  “Genetic deficient, they said. She had the Down syn-der-roam.”

  “And she made it to nine? You hid her, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Until that bastard Dwight David Metcalf found out his fool son had been arrested for stealing from the Maynes motor pool. He thought turning her in would save his worthless heap of oily haired dirt.”

  “Law’s the law,” Home said. “You and your wife could have saved yourselves a heap of heartache by letting the hospital take care of it when she was born.”

  “Why take lives like that?” Hollis asked. “She gave nothing but love.”

  Maynes intervened. “Children with that syndro
me—they absorb too much schooling and medical attention. The state can’t afford children like that.”

  Hollis jumped up so suddenly, his glasses flew off. “The state didn’t spend a dollar on her. We taught her ourselves. We kept her in our home. Of course, I never dared bring her to a hospital, so what medical care did she receive? Who did she ever trouble, that she had to die for it?” Somewhere in that speech his glasses landed with a clatter.

  Maynes looked as though he’d been struck across the bridge of the nose.

  “We can’t have mouths that eat or hands that don’t produce,” he said, sounding as though he were reading off a card someone had handed him at the last second.

  “That’s a churchman’s reply,” Hollis said. “Strange to hear it from someone like Bone Maynes. You and the New Church never got on.” Locals in the Coal Country always dropped the “Universal” part of the New Universal Church.

  Maynes remained silent for a moment. Home patted his holstered pistol as if trying to draw Hollis’s attention to the symbol of authority.

  Maynes finally bent, picked up the spectacles, and handed them to Hollis.

  “Give him a couple of handfuls of ashes and let him go.”

  “What about the police—,” MacTierney said.

  “Have them send the paperwork to my office. Hollis, I’ll give you a ride home. I expect you’ll never say anything about what you saw here.”

  Hollis shrugged. “I didn’t see much except a few pitiful figures sealed up like tinned WHAM! If you all think it’s a big secret what’s going on in here . . . well, it ain’t.”

  “By rights he should be the next one into the incinerator,” Home said. “All this does is free up a slot for someone else. What’s the point of all this if we’re just going to let guilty men go free? No justice in it for anyone.”

  “Let’s hope not, Home,” MacTierney said.

  “Let’s hope not what?”

  “That there’s justice. I have a feeling we might not like the taste. Speaking of taste, let’s get out of this ash heap before I breathe any more people.”

  “Hollis, I’m truly sorry about your daughter,” Maynes said as we left. Hollis had his hand in his pocket with the little bag of ash he’d been given. I wondered how often that splinter-bitten hand had held his daughter’s.

  “Then you’re working for the wrong people, Mr. Maynes. The wrong people.”

  Maynes was sullen until we returned to the White Palace. He had one large drink of bourbon and, much to Home’s dismay, didn’t scrounge around for a girl before turning the Trekker home.

  THE BECKLEY BLOOD

  The Coal Country Revolt is only sometimes mentioned, and rarely described in the histories of the Kurian Order. Those that do describe it all have the beginning wrong. They place the start of hostilities with the mine revolts.

  I saw the genesis with my own eyes. This witness insists that the revolt started over cookware.

  You might say the long slide for the Kurians east of the Mississippi began because someone miscommunicated, or loaded the wrong boxes in the wrong railcars, or mislaid a piece of paperwork or attached the wrong boxcar to an outbound train. An unknown depot clerk on some siding ended up with a shipment of Pennsylvania iron and enamel cookware, which they no doubt quietly sold off as soon as the pickup could be arranged. For my own curiosity, I would like to know where the error occurred, but I fear the information is forever lost (though if a reader of this account knows anything about the issue, I would welcome a letter).

  It began on June 17, 2073, a few days before the anniversary of the arrival of the Kurians. In the town of Beckley, there stands a big semicircular market with a sort of triangular crown atop it. It was known as the Beckley Marketplace and was open to the public. Mostly, it sold locally made wares and it had a flea market a good deal more colorful than the bland “company stores” that all carried the same mass-produced shelf-stable foods and necessities. The Beckley Marketplace had advertised a large selection of big enamelware pots, large enough to be used as a Dutch oven or a stewpot for a family full of hungry mouths. Because of endless scrap drives, good iron cookware was hard to find, especially in larger sizes, and these were imports from a well-known Ordnance ironworks near Pittsburgh.

  The locals were long accustomed to procedures for handling scarcities. Grandmothers and aunts would stand in line, often all night, waiting for the doors to be unlocked on the day the stock went on sale (frequently, it didn’t show up until near closing time, leading to more waiting). The oversized enamelware pots were to go on sale June 16, but by closing time at the Beckley Marketplace they still hadn’t arrived, and hundreds of people had been waiting close to fully around the clock without result. Inquiries with the staff were met shiftily.

  I suppose families took turns standing in line, but it presented difficulty, and whatever calluses had been formed by the eternal line-waiting of the Kurian Order had been stripped off and skin rubbed raw by the second day of being in line.

  The next morning, the stock finally appeared. There had been a serious mistake, and the items on sale were tiny little saucepans suitable for melting a small amount of butter (or chocolate, on the rare publicly approved holidays it was made available).

  Knowledge passed, as it tended to in crowds, that the mistake had been known the day before and they’d kept everyone in line in a hopeless attempt to rectify it. So even those who were used to error and fault felt betrayed by the lack of information that would have allowed the wait in the line to be ended rather than extended unnecessarily.

  The crowd, having passed the knowledge from frustrated buyer to buyer, acted with the same collective alacrity. Did they move as a flock of sheep, or a pack of wolves?

  According to two survivors I later talked to during the on-again, off-again “troubles” in the Coal Country, there was talk in the crowd of going to the Beckley city hall to complain. The idea of a mass demonstration may strike most of those who knew something of life under the Kurian Order as more than a little curious, but as this account has tried to show, the Coal Country was an almost unique instance of the Kurian Order in practice.

  They left the Beckley Marketplace and headed east to the old bank at the corner of Main and Old State Route 210, where the private Gateway Store now harbored a few luxuries for the use of the Quisling families with a special needs pass. While the crowd had been right about the problem being known by the Marketplace since the day before, they were wrong in surmising that the Gateway Store had received a shipment of the correct cookware.

  They found it locked and barred. The staff had working telephones; in all likelihood they had heard about the trouble at the Marketplace and locked up as soon as the mob was reported marching in their direction.

  Had the local authorities talked to the frustrated shoppers, admitted and apologized for the foul-up and promised an answer within a day or two posted at the Marketplace, everyone would probably have gone home to await the official notice of when they might expect to be able to buy their pots. Instead, the local authorities panicked and retreated to the city hall or fire station, which was already blasting the emergency call-up siren.

  Maynes, who had been just a half hour away from Beckley by road, arrived right after they set fire to the Gateway Store (it had been broken open in the search for the cookware). The workers ran out the back door, unmolested by anything but shouted insults.

  Sirens were blaring from two tall buildings in the few square blocks of downtown Beckley as we picked up speed on the better-maintained town roads. I was driving the Trekker and Maynes directed me to pull up behind the city hall.

  A mass of youths in green school uniforms and black combat harness vests, unzipped and in a few cases inside out, hurried up the street in a double file toward the stolid toast-colored administration building with its prairie-school clock tower. It was obviously a pre-2022 build, and someone had made an effort to make it look attractive rather than just utilitarian concrete laid square. The vertical architectura
l lines could be called either reassuring or solemn, depending on mood. There were holes where old letters had been pried off the top. I could still make out a weathered halo around the word “judicial.” Tables with guns were being laid out by some hurrying state troopers, and plastic bins filled with boxes of ammunition waited next to the tables.

  “Crapaheenie, they’ve called out the Youth Vanguard,” Maynes said as he directed me to stop.

  “Somebody panicked,” MacTierney said.

  Home unlocked the gun rack. “Ya think?”

  In the older part of Beckley, a former college served as a campus for the Youth Vanguard. The students are often the children of Quisling technocrats, scholarship winners for Youth Vanguard activities, or those who have managed to impress the regime through the standard tests that all children are put through upon entering school and then every four years thereafter. They are the seed corn of the Kurian Order and most receive a basic military education as part of their studies.

  These were students at a small technical college inside the city limits. Those attending hoped to become midlevel management in one Kurian Zone or another, supervising power plants or transport facilities. Thanks to its “backwater” location in the Coal Country, the college was also cheap to attend, a consideration for the less-better-off Quislings who wanted their sons and daughters to improve their standing.

  Having seen them used as a first-response force in Beckley and as a last-ditch defense line (in an action years later in Northern Missouri), I have come to the conclusion that their employment as such shows both the basic depravity and weakness of the Kurian Order. Ordering schoolchildren into combat guarantees a tragedy of one sort or another.

  In the case of Beckley—well, I shall describe it as accurately as I can and allow you, my reader, to form your own conclusions.