by E. E. Knight
My thought was that they hoped some outraged father would get hold of a firearm or a vehicle big enough to cause a fatal collision with Bone’s bus.
We’d leave well after everyone was up and working in the morning, drive to some town where Maynes would sign off on a change of management or a denial of appeal, and then we’d prowl the back streets looking for desperate women. Most had a sad story they wanted to tell someone in the Maynes clan, but Home would cut the talk off with some combination of threat or nasty joke: “Meat’s supposed to be going into your mouth, not words coming out, sweetie.”
They did pay. Sometimes Maynes even threw in bonus rations or appliance coupons that were supposed to be saved for the most productive workers in the Maynes Conglomerate. I expect word did get out now and then that the bonus washing machine that some shift foreman had sweated all year to earn ended up shoved into the bra of a prostitute.
So at night we’d return to the White Palace. Maynes and Home were often in the back, rattling around with the empties, drunk and swapping miseries or discussing the highlights of their latest sexual conquest like athletes relaxing in the locker room post-match. I’d never been so grateful that I was expected to stay up front and watch the road.
“Bet that old whore could have taken Hickory,” Home said.
Maynes sucked down the backwash of a beer and dropped the empty. “Wouldn’t mind seeing that. Her eyes popped just a little at every stroke. Bet they’d bug out with him.”
“Never seems interested in human women,” Home said. “I heard in Chicago they got a Grog show. So some of them must know what to do.”
“Coal Country girls probably not hairy enough. We should try Jersey.”
“That or he’s as queer as he is big.”
“Maybe he’s a eunuch. There was talk of fixing him if he got into fights with the others, but he’s been quiet.”
• • •
When thinking over my anecdotes of my time in the White Palace, few of them are humorous. There has to be a certain amount of relaxation and camaraderie for humor to take root, and for me, the White Palace held neither. Living in the stables no doubt cut me off from many routines and friendships that might have developed. This was just as well, because I might have had to do some harm in engineering my eventual escape.
Embarrassing moments may be funny, and my most embarrassing one came shortly after the lecture at the Youth Vanguard College. It was shortly after the presentation to the Youth Vanguard that someone on high decided to get a reproductive semen sample from me. So I was returned to the vet with the nervous ticks. This time, he had a young woman assisting him. She had the look of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors.
I have spent enough time around cattle and horses to know as soon as I saw the rack of test tubes and the artificial cow vagina what was expected of me.
“We have to get a semen sample out of him. Orders from on high,” the vet said.
“How do we do that?”
“That’s why I brought you in. Don’t you handle that at the stud farm?”
“With horses, yes. I don’t know anything about stoops.”
“I’m more of an ear mite and broken-bone man myself. They say he’s gentle with women.”
“I’m sure he is, right up until when I grab his kickstand. Then he’ll toss me through the window. It would help to have a female in estrus, don’t you know that?”
“Not to be had with his species. You’ll have to serve.”
“What?”
“I have it on good authority that Grogs aren’t that discriminating. One of the Maynes boys told me about a show in Chicago he saw—”
“I am not about to do a bump and grind for a Grog, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
I felt sorry for her and had sympathy for the vet. Orders had come down. . . .
The vet smeared some kind of clear jelly on his rubber glove and approached me from behind the cart with the loaf-sized artificial vagina. I noticed it had a little tap in it, like a hot-water bottle. I hoped they’d had enough sense to fill it with warm water rather than cold—or worse, hot.
“Don’t worry, sport.”
“Hick-ree,” I said.
“Oh yes, Hickory, that’s what they call you, isn’t it? Don’t worry, Hickory. This won’t hurt a bit.”
It occurred to me that I could wreck the office as soon as they touched me, but that wouldn’t fit in with the helpful and enthusiastic persona I used in my White Palace duties.
“Can’t you just send him into a bathroom with some pictures of a bunch of shaved female Grogs?” the woman said.
“While I wouldn’t doubt such things exist, I have no idea how to obtain them,” the vet said.
I can growl deep in my throat. The sound doesn’t carry very far, but if you are close enough to hear it, I understand it sounds menacing to a human.
The vet looked up at me.
“I told you. A woman is needed.”
She approached me and gave a becoming smile. “We both could use a couple beers to loosen us up, I think.”
I let her touch me, apply the gelatin, and did my best to indicate complacency by yawning.
The woman sighed. “You know, when they said I was needed at the White Palace, I had another kind of day pictured entirely. Maybe something involving a nice lunch?”
At least they had remembered to put warm water in the artificial vagina. She began to work the tube on me in the time-honored fashion.
“You know, he’s supposed to thrust into this. Bounce it around too much and we’ll lose the test tube,” she said. She smiled and blushed a little.
There are women—very few, but they know where to go for it—who enjoy our kind as sexual partners as a kinky thrill. And I have heard of human males copulating with Grog females—I believe it was an initiating rite for the men training to be officers of Grog units at the KZ War College in Jackson. There are men who enjoy seeing women, their own partners, even. It’s odd to be a living fetish totem. This woman didn’t seem the type; perhaps she was noting details for relating the story to friends when she returned to her horse farm.
I did my best to get the procedure over with as quickly as possible. It was a relief in several ways when she removed the apparatus.
“Okay, we got . . . Shit. We should have used a bigger test tube.”
“Just drain the excess out of the AV.”
“Hick-ree done now?”
“Yes, all done. Here.”
He presented me with a little tray containing some pseudo-chocolate cookies and juice, as if I were a little boy who’d just returned from school.
“I think you have him confused with a blood donor. He probably wants a cig and a Reboot.*”
“He likes sweets. Given the size difference between us, I want to stay on the best possible terms with this particular patient.”
I slowly ate the nearly tasteless cookies and drank the juice. The juice, at least, was delicious. The sweetness took the edge off the embarrassment. A little.
TINDER
A heat wave struck at the beginning of September that had all of Coal Country angry and sweltering. Perhaps because no one could sleep, resistance to the regime became even more open. Troopers were having their tires punctured in the time it took them to stop for a meal; a New Universal Church cathedral in Charleston had its bell tower dynamited and a good part of the roof blown off. Or perhaps it wasn’t solely the heat; the Maynes Mining Holdings suffered a rash of underground breakdowns. It was plenty cool in those deep tunnels, as I was soon to learn.
Maynes had pulled over behind some truck traffic at a rail intersection where a landslide had blocked both track and road to find out from some loitering troopers whether the blockage was sabotage or weather related—extreme heat and cold did enough damage to the rocky cuts that it wasn’t necessarily the work of the nascent resistance.
The trucks eventually gave up and turned around to find an alternate route. Maynes stayed. Some of his old supervisory f
lair returned as he worked the radio to get more labor transported to help clear the slide.
“Good thing we’re set up for an overnight,” Home said, checking the liquor cabinet.
“It’ll be a lonely night with just the two of us,” Maynes said. I was rarely counted as one of the party.
“I could walk back to the crossroads,” Home offered. “Maybe there’s a girl at that checkpoint coffee stand. . . .”
“More likely a former trooper with a bad knee,” Maynes said. “Checkpoints are plum jobs for line-of-duty injuries. Won’t kill us to be bored one night. Where’s that deck of cards?”
“The nekkid one’s in the glove compartment. The regular deck’s over the sink,” Home said.
“Maybe the regular deck.”
Twilight came, and they broke out some cheese and nuts and crackers Maynes kept for refreshment. One of the troopers made a run for sandwiches (and incidentally confirmed that the crossroads checkpoint a mile back was run by a one-eyed ex-trooper, male). I stretched out on the roof of the Trekker. The bugs did not bother me very much once I wrapped a repellent-spritzed bandanna around my ears.
I did not rest easy. I had the feeling that we were being watched. I wondered if the Resistance might be sighting on me with a rifle. While an ironic end at the trigger finger of a Coal Country sniper had a certain macabre appeal—I’d shot my share of human Quislings from a distance during the siege atop Big Rock Hill and in other encounters—I decided it was in my interest to relocate. I left the roof and managed to squeeze under the high-clearance Trekker. I also took a tire iron to my resting place with me.
“What’s the matter, Hickory?” Home asked as I wiggled beneath the bus.
“Cooler down under,” I said.
A half-awake part of me registered that Home had stepped out of the Trekker to relieve himself at the roadside. I noted the sounds of picks and shovels in the distance at the slide. More labor must have arrived sometime after I took cover beneath the Trekker.
I heard a quick but heavy step behind him and startled. I saw a curious pair of human boots—they were brown, in the style that was sometimes called the “Thousand Milers,” and they resembled a big, heavy, and high oxford shoe. Old Smoke, the frequent companion of David Valentine and me, had once owned a nice pair she’d taken off a dead Quisling. For a moment I thrilled at the thought that it might be her, but the pair was far too large for the petite Cat.
I dared move just enough to get a view and saw a tall figure in a long coat, sort of a cross between a trench coat and a ghillie suit, reach for Home. It picked him up by the ears and spun around.
It was a Reaper. A little light thrown off by the Trekker reflected off its face, giving it the color of bone china.
“call your boss out,” it said.
The Reaper pressed the hands holding Home’s skull ever more tightly together.
“i would have a word with you, maynes.”
“Help!” screamed Home. His face was either bright red or purplish; it was hard to tell in the low light leaking from the van.
“You could have just knocked,” Maynes said. “Home is ugly enough without oversized ears; maybe you can let him go.”
I had to give Maynes grudging respect. Most men go meek when conversing with a Reaper. He was his old sardonic self.
The Reaper adjusted its grip. It pressed either side of Home’s head. Its fingers tapped his eyes, as if to ascertain whether the pressure applied to the skull caused them to bulge.
I tested the point of my tire iron. If I was quick enough, I could come out from under the bus ready to fight. I might even be able to shove the tire iron into something vital around the jaw and crack it off. The claws would still be dangerous, and Reapers were notoriously hard to bleed out, but pain sometimes dampened communication between Reaper and Master Kurian.
“Bubbbbbbb!” Home managed through locked-together jaws.
“I met a salesman once,” Maynes said. “On the road. He tried to sell me batteries. A dog kept sniffing around at his shoes. He got tired of it and kicked the dog to drive it away. What he didn’t know was it was my dog. I didn’t buy any batteries. How about you drop my bodyguard? I might listen a little more carefully to your message if you do so.”
“or i could kill him and we could converse over his silenced corpse.”
“Let him go,” Maynes said. Then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “Please.”
The Reaper dropped Home. His head was mottled red and sallow yellow, depending on where the Reaper’s fingers had pressed.
“Ohhhhhhh,” Home moaned. “Ooooooooh, hurts, hurts.”
The Reaper silenced him with a kick. I found this odd; from what I’d seen, the Reapers, once settled on letting someone go, gave them no more thought than a cat giving up on a mouse hole. They bore humans no more personal animosity than the axe does the tree.
“just because you happen to bear the name maynes does not grant you immunity from managed selection,” the Reaper said.
I’d heard it called many things, but “managed selection” was new to me. It seemed rather clinical for the Coal Country, where just about every human activity and interaction had a localism attached.
Maynes let out a drunken-sounding laugh. “You just take me, if you really think that. The family’s already stirred up.”
The Reaper stepped forward. From my hiding spot, I could not see Maynes’s reaction to the approach, but I didn’t hear any movement in the bus above.
“you are to cease your disgusting depredations and leave the girls alone. it’s long since time you took a wife and produced a new generation. alley catting is one thing for a twenty-year-old; at forty it is pathetic. a marriage will be arranged.”
“Tell ’em I want pearled stephanotis for my bouquet,” Maynes said.
“what did your poet say? ‘what a piece of work is man.’ we gave you an easy assignment. no office routine, no discipline of being on or off the clock. still, you cannot manage even the few decisions a week required of you.”
I saw Maynes’s feet appear. He had sat down on the entry steps to the bus. “You want to be in charge? You do all the work. I’d like to see you come crawling into the office every day, leaving a little snail-trail for the janitor.”
“parasites, all. worse, necrotics, living off the work of your grandfather. there was a time when the maynes clan was thought to be destined to control the east between the pittsburgh mills and pamlico sound. the work of a lifetime, squandered.”
“Then you should have made Elaine director-general of Maynes Consolidated rather than Uncle H.B. She was smarter than the rest of us put together.”
“perhaps. but we had doubts about her loyalty. she produced no children. she should have put her womb to work rather than her mind. consider this your final warning. there will be a purge. we are warning you because you have shown, in the past, some skill at handling the human population. after the purge, when they have seen the maynes clan cut down to size, we believe things will settle down and this pointless violence will subside. we expect you to dispense with frivolities and put the coal country back together when the unpleasantness is over. if you fail, we will remove the maynes clan in its entirety and turn the coal country over to someone more efficient in its management.”
The Reaper stepped on Home’s back as it went off down the road away from the sounds of the slide being cleared. I heard two ribs snap.
“You can come out now, Hickory,” Maynes said. “The big bad wolf is gone. Help me with Home; then we’re off to the Church’s hospital in Charleston.”
If I have a regret about my first months in the Coal Country, it’s that I didn’t take the chance and put a tire iron through that Reaper’s hardened skull. Home and Maynes might have panicked enough to escape to Kentucky—it was near enough, and no one would deny Maynes the gasoline or checkpoint transits he would have needed to make a daylight run across the mountains and into the rough and semi-independent lands of the legworm ranchers.
&nbs
p; PURGE AT THE WHITE PALACE
I never learned if Maynes warned the rest of his family what was coming. I overheard that one or two fled, but they may have sensed what was about to happen or received the information from another source.
They came at night, in a long line of cars and vans with their headlights turned off. I watched them approach, their vehicles moving along the carefully landscaped lane to the White Palace at the speed of a trotting dog. It was a humid night, so moist the moon and many of the security lights had visible halos.
I considered it a provident time to attempt an escape. I’d prepared myself ever since the encounter with the messenger-Reaper. I wouldn’t be the only one fleeing the White Palace, but perhaps I would be the only one physically and mentally prepared for an escape and a few days of rough living, with equipment to extend survival if I needed to.
Of course, a picturesque notch between the two great old national forests was a poor place to set off from, if I intended to go west. The entirety of the Coal Country would have to be crossed before I approached Kentucky and the western slopes of the Appalachians.
I rested my pack on the doorjamb to the barn basement and looked out at the well-tended grounds of the White Palace.
I looked back on the elegant white mass, all its floors of rooms, some with lights still burning, with its murmur of activity even in the earliest predawn hours—this was no pit of evil. There were many good men and women just trying to keep their poor little corner of the world intact and out of more grasping hands.
A party started to cut across the lawn, heading for some parked electric carts. There were firemen, a couple of men in the navy blue of the Maynes family security service, and two Reapers, one at the very front, one bringing up the rear.
