by E. E. Knight
Maynes had MacTierney wait with the Trekker while he took Home and me into the administration building. He learned that something called the “Crisis Committee” was meeting, or whatever elements of it were available that day in downtown Beckley. He left us waiting in an upstairs hall while he went into the meeting. Home and I watched a couple of trooper patrol cars pull in, and the now-armed Youth Vanguard file off to the east. I counted seventy-four grouped into three platoons, each with a magazine-fed carbine.
Maynes stormed out of the meeting room, and we hurried downstairs to the sound of unanswered phones buzzing from all the offices.
“Half of the county management’s run; the other half has grabbed its guns and headed to the riot.”
By the time we arrived, the Youth Vanguard Armed Auxiliary had blocked the streets leading to the city downtown with police and fire vehicles. Two off-road trucks and a motorcycle, all with just-fitted light machine guns in the permanent mounts that stood empty save for drills, were covering a road running west. The firemen had rigged their hoses to push the crowd back with water, but the curly-haired seventeen-year-old and the veteran retired sergeant commanding the Auxiliary ignored the firefighters.
Maynes tried to find someone in command. A senior trooper had his few uniformed men behind their nose-to-nose patrol cars, but he couldn’t speak for the firemen. The Youth Vanguard had a veteran “military trainer” but was under the command of a curly-haired seventeen-year-old with a buttercream complexion; his eyes were shining with excitement and his combat vest was stuffed with magazines for his carbine. The boy looked to his trainer for guidance in placing his forces, and the trainer was clearly trying to win favor with the boy. The firemen had both guns and water cannon. All three groups were ignoring one another, though they’d coordinated enough to block the street with their fire trucks, squad cars, and a school bus.
Smoke rose from the burning store and the sound of windows being broken was audible off to the east.
“Anyone think to send a couple uniformed officers off to calm everyone down?” Maynes asked the fire chief.
“You want us on the firing line, too?” Home asked. “There’s a good view down the sidewalk.”
“God no,” Maynes said.
The firemen ignored him, as did the deploying Youth Vanguard. “You’ve no military authority in this situation,” the curly-haired youth said from within his two-sizes-too-big uniform, prompted by his grizzled old training sergeant walking with the aid of a cane. He had a set of captain’s bars that looked as though they’d been taken out of their jeweler’s case that morning.
“Your funeral, kid,” Maynes said. “Sarge, you sure you want the Virgin Hairy here? Doesn’t seem the right man to run this show.”
“He’s got the rank at the college,” the sergeant said. “He’s a big rail baron’s kid. I’m just here to amplify and clarify.”
One of the firemen, sitting in the cab of his vehicle, stuck his head out the window. “Crisis Committee says that if they head downtown, they have to be dispersed.”
“Dispersed how?” Maynes asked him.
“They didn’t say.”
“No one wants responsibility,” Maynes said.
“I do,” the Youth Vanguard leader said.
The entire line of armed figures behind the cars on the street nearest to us stiffened. I drew myself up to my full height and looked down the street.
A motley collection of old women, mothers with kids in tow, and a smattering of teenagers who probably should have been in the church schoolrooms was proceeding down the street in two distinct throngs clustered to each sidewalk. The younger were nearer to us and the Youth Vanguard, the older ones facing the troopers. Some were banging the tiny saucepans together like miniature cymbals—at the time, none of us knew that a missing cookware delivery was at the heart of the disturbance. No one on the Crisis Committee, or anywhere else at the Administration Center, knew anything beyond the mob attacking and looting the flea market before moving on to the biggest store in town.
The Youth Vanguard, now sighting down their carbines, exchanged comments up and down the line. Beckley was not a big city; no doubt the students recognized a face or two.
“The Crisis Committee is in session. You are all subject to the military discipline under the Riot Protocol,” the curly-haired teen with his honorary captain’s bars called through the megaphone.
“The Crisis Committee,” Maynes said. “That’s a word to strike fear in the heart of the desperate.”
The protest march-cum-riot stopped. They were close enough so that even those with below-average eyesight (common with humans past the flush of youth) could see the guns arrayed against them.
I did not hear everything the crowd shouted back, but some of the teenagers sporting sledgehammers and crowbars knew him. It seemed curly hair had a local reputation for filching women’s undergarments off the drying line and using them for sexual relief purposes.
He didn’t give them time to do much more than process the implied threat. “Fire!”
Who can say why he gave the order? My own guess is that he wanted to make a name for himself as a decisive leader with the Vanguard, his college, or perhaps his family. A quick, harsh lesson that ends with a few bodies in the street appeals to some of the Kurians who think their brethren and Quislings go too easy on the human herd.
To their credit, about half of the Auxiliary members pointed their guns high enough so that the bullets would land a thousand yards behind the crowd. But enough rifle fire still swept the crowd to make wounds blossom on humble clothing.
The troopers blasted away with their shotguns.
The machine-gun fire from the heavy vehicles was the worst of all. The firemen, each man chosen for his instinct for brutality, handled their weapons well. Whole groups of women tumbled down as though their feet had been rigged with trip wires.
Screams of fear—and aged rage, as it seemed even the old women of the Coal Country were ready to finish a fight once it started—broke out from the crowd.
I expected the crowd to run, especially those in the back, but instead they threw themselves down en masse. Were they instinctively following the example of the falling bodies?
“Shoot above their heads, you fucking idiots!” MacTierney yelled. No one heeded his voice. Home was content to hoist himself up by the rearview mirror on the bus for a better view. Maynes made a couple of notes in the little notebook he kept in his breast pocket. He checked his watch for reference.
I was tempted to take the driver’s seat and floor the Trekker into the big fire truck with the two machine guns and unused fire hoses. The insanity of having such equipment available and ready without using it was incredible. Wouldn’t it have been better for the regime to have water running in the streets instead of blood?
“Someone’s going to catch hell over this,” Maynes muttered.
“Better not be us,” Home said. “Think we should get gone?”
“The family is going to infarc face-first into the soup course tonight when someone mentions it at dinner. That I was around for it, too. They hate it when the family name gets associated with real rough stuff.”
“Me help fight? Me help fight? Mehelpfight?” I asked, tugging at Maynes’s sleeve until he had to shift his feet to keep from falling over.
MacTierney handed me a first aid kit. “Go drag one of those kids out of the street.”
I tossed an ammo belt up into the eyes of the gunner. He had the sense to let go of the gun as he fell sideways; otherwise he might have sprayed the barricade with machine-gun fire.
A few bottles and rocks clattered off the parked emergency vehicles or crashed behind us. Foolish, but understandable. Another wave of gunfire from the Quisling forces ripped across the street in answer. I kept my ears tightly closed against the noise—both the rifle reports and the screams from the injured and dying.
“You’ll go through your whole wad, shooting like that,” the old sergeant told the Vanguard Auxiliary
blasting away. For all the emotion in his voice, they might have been kneeling on a rifle range, instead of shooting into a public street cluttered with bodies and two tipped-sideways strollers. A baby still cried in one.
“Wicked good shooting, everyone,” the young captain called. “Law and order will be upheld.”
Whose law? What order? I wished to ask. I counted more than twenty still bodies in the street and a few wounded, wide-eyed in disbelief at the damage a few grams of lead could wreak in mere flesh.
A song written a decade after the events in the Coal Country had a line saying Beckley’s streets ran with blood. That might be a bit too poetic—blood tends to pool when exposed to air, and the poor-quality asphalt soaked up the dreadful liquid. I wish I could claim, as the song does, that the blood flowed like an accusing finger toward the parked fire trucks, but it didn’t.
• • •
So, what does this bloody, unfortunate incident have to do with a major uprising a year later?
This began a period of troubles in the Coal Country. The blood on the streets of Beckley wasn’t poetic, but its effect cannot be underestimated. Grievances aren’t forgotten in these thickly wooded mountains. These slopes are the scene of America’s most famous feuds and the largest armed uprising between the 1861 Civil War and the advent of the Kurians. The people of this country, once they start a feud, see it through.
After the Beckley Blood, the Kurian Order saw the first of its difficulties in getting coal out of the country, and heads gathered for the Kurians. Oddly enough, the locals had not opposed the order in any major fashion, other than failing to meet plan after plan for the increase in coal production. The Kurian Order had laid down rules, explained by the New Universal Church, and as long as it did its selecting and gathering and head-hunting in an orderly fashion with a minimal amount of corruption, they hunkered down and took it. Who knows what was being planned and gathered for years, waiting for the moment weapons could be dug up and passwords exchanged at lonely fords.
The Beckley Blood meant train derailments and transformer-station fires. It meant police cars with engines fouled by sodium silicate and run until the pistons melted and fused. It even meant house-burnings for higher-ranking Quislings.
Even the White Palace wasn’t inviolate. The Maynes clan, although running a relatively gentle version of the Kurian Order, had the blood of Beckley on its hands and became, perhaps for the first time, synonymous with the rest of the Kurian Order. Before Beckley, I overheard plenty of conversations—humans think we’re intelligent dogs, understanding our names and a few commands—where any complaint about the regime was qualified with a statement such as “Of course, those poor bastards in the Ordnance have it worse.” I’m not about to rock the boat. Some noted that even the Maynes family wasn’t immune to Kurian reprisals, citing several from the generation of my employer’s parents who disappeared, never to be heard from again. After the massacre, it was as though we’d be better off if we thrashed the whole bunch off east, not stopping till we were neck-deep in the Atlantic.
News of the massacre spread quickly, and just as quickly, the Coal Country began to bite back. The reaction was so fast and so widespread, it could not have been ordered and organized by a formal movement, let alone other freeholds, which some have suggested.
Three days after Beckley, I swept caltrops out of the roadway approaching it and helped replace and patch tire after tire. Maynes could no longer park any of his cars and leave it unattended without a headlight being smashed or a tire punctured. Some of the pranks were disgustingly juvenile—food and drink brought to the White Palace had to be checked for pubic hairs and dog feces. Maynes family dogs and horses were poisoned.
Even Maynes began to take his security detail more seriously. Sometimes a second vehicle loaded with police led or followed our own, especially if we were going into the mountains.
The first train derailing happened within the week. Diesel engines had their air filters removed, coolant drained, and water—or perhaps urine—poured into their fuel tanks, requiring a major overhaul on the precious engines. Switches were rewired. Diesel oil stocks were sabotaged. Bridges were a special target: rails were loosened so that coal trains would derail on the bridge itself, terrifying the crew and causing damage to the bridges.
Man-hours that would have been better used elsewhere had to be put into making repairs and guarding vital rail installations. Trains had to travel through the Coal Country at a crawl so that sabotage might more easily be detected before an accident.
The Kurian Order might ignore the odd dead dog and flat tire, but derailed trains filled with coal bound for the Georgia Control woke the sleeping ogre. It did not take long for the first scapegoat to be bled.
• • •
Within a scarce few months, Beckley went from a regrettable incident to something the Kurian Order considered a minor disaster. The Coal Country refused to quiet down. The Kurian Order came down “soft”—issuing new rules about travel, curfews, changing identity card format so forgeries would be more difficult. It increased the protein, fat, and sugar rations for families with one or more members doing manual labor and did a purge of middle management, often a popular move. The disturbances continued.
Then the Kurian Order came down hard. Church-trained informants and agitators were inserted into some of the mines and rail installations—I overheard Maynes and MacTierney discussing the chances of the saboteurs being discovered—and a few arrests came about through their information.
It backfired, and badly. Popular opinion said that the informers simply hurled accusations to prove they were doing their jobs.
As it turned out, there was a sacrifice in the Maynes family: Joshua “Bone” Maynes’s beloved sister, Elaine.
• • •
The next morning, as I slowly scraped food into my mouth from my tray in the staff cafeteria, I let my ears play this way and that. The White Palace was buzzing like a beehive opened by a bear.
While I slept, two churchmen, a matron, and four troopers had called on the White Palace with a summons for Elaine Maynes. She was ordered to appear for an examination into corruption and malfeasance somewhere outside the Coal Country. I was unable to find out what authority, exactly, ordered the removal, but it must have been either the Church or one of the security organs of the Georgia Control.
Needless to say, she was never seen in the cool halls of the White Palace again. A nephew of hers moved up and took over her job in distribution, and the Maynes Conglomerate moved on.
Maynes didn’t travel that day, or the next. On the seventh day after her removal, Home brought me up to his room. It smelled like a ferret cage, and liquor bottles in various states of emptiness lined the dresser, floor, and tables, precisely spaced as though about to be toppled in a chain like dominoes.
We succeeded in dragging him into the shower. MacTierney scrubbed while I held him, with Home trying between shouts to force a little instant liquid breakfast into his mouth. I wanted to suggest using a funnel at one end or the other—I’ve been told that the sigmoid colon is capable of rudimentary digestion—but I held my tongue. Not for the last time.
With the loss of his sister, Maynes lost all interest in doing his duties. He affirmed—and increased—the punishments handed out, and word spread quickly that they no longer wished to appeal to the Bone.
When Maynes started prowling the roads as the vocational schools let out, surveying the girls heading home or to their paying jobs, MacTierney quit on him and asked for reassignment.
“I didn’t sign up to chauffeur a pussy patrol,” MacTierney told Home.
I became the official driver. Maynes, of course, would still ride in back, and Home would get out, show his security identification, gun, and the Maynes business card, and offer a ride home to whatever girl Maynes chose.
Word seemed to spread in that mysterious fashion of Coal Country, and within ten days or so, virtually no school-aged girls could be found walking along the roads. They took l
onger, less obvious routes or hitched rides hidden in delivery vehicles or other sanctioned transport. Maynes took to plunging into the larger towns where women selling themselves could be found, always hunting for the freshest-looking specimens he could find.
I sometimes found it difficult to maintain my composure as an indifferent nonhuman, and at night I would lie on my bedding—they still hadn’t managed to find me a bed that fit—and argue with myself over just how much responsibility I bore for Maynes’s depravities. The girls were physically mature enough, biologically speaking, and the live-in physician and nurse the Maynes family employed ensured he wasn’t passing around diseases, but there is more to life than the physical being. The body heals much more easily than the mind and spirit.
I consoled myself that the locals were growing used to seeing me behind the wheel of a Maynes vehicle. At first, they pointed and nudged and gaped. Eventually this turned into shrugs from some and casual waves from others. This would make my escape easier, once the Coal Country folk grew accustomed to seeing me squeezed behind the wheel of one of the Maynes family transports. Soon, I’d be able to pass without remark.
If anything, Maynes’s habits would help my escape. The locals no longer sought to flag him down as he drove through the towns, or to offer him a slice of Mrs. Whoever’s famous rhubarb pie, seeking the powerful man’s intercession on some family or business difficulty. Even the city constables and rural troopers, who formerly wanted Maynes to know their names and their faces, didn’t want to approach close enough to catch a glimpse of what might be going on in the back of the bus.
At the White Palace, a new generation was eager to take charge and grew increasingly contemptuous of Maynes. We would pull around the house, and the family lot attendant and doorman did not exactly jump to attend to the Trekker and team Maynes. The vehicle was washed far less frequently as well. Sometimes I’d find profanities drawn into the dirt on the windows.
Before, there’d been talk of Maynes taking on a trip to Kentucky to visit one of the legworm clans friendlier to the Kurian Order and to set up a more-regular trade arrangement (I understood that the mine owners were clamoring for cheap, plentiful legworm flesh to feed their laborers, and legworm hides made durable and breathable work wear). Home and MacTierney had been talking about the challenges and opportunities of the trip, but all the talk had vanished along with Maynes’s sister.
