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The implications came-hard and fast. The sweat on his brow made itself felt at the same time-cold and greasy.
Reapers used oxygen like everyone else. Carbon monoxide would build up and kill them. Easier than bullets.
Especially with some fool in the driver's seat redlining the engine.
Just as well he couldn't see the mess inside. Three Reapers, paler than they'd ever been. He could imagine the blue lines in their faces, more distinct than ever. He wondered what those yellow, slit-pupil eyes looked like in death.
Macon understood how it had happened, but would the Green Prince? A new man on the team, a red-ribboned, gift-wrapped, perfumed fuckup like this, and the loss of three qualified lives to a pair of junkyard guerillas.
He'd be lucky to get a job processing corpses for what was left of the Green Prince's Reapers.
For a moment, Macon considered putting the barrel of the gun under his chin and pulling the trigger.
If you want to rise, do the difficult.
It took a long time to grow a new Reaper to useful size and learn to survive on its own during breaks in contact with its master Kurian. Maybe ten years or so, though that was only a guess. No one he knew could say for certain. Only a select few were involved in that process. Maybe he could achieve something that would allow the Green Prince to control Western Kentucky with however many Reapers he had left. Couldn't be more than nine or ten, he'd never heard of a Kurian who had more than a dozen or so.
He cocked the revolver and came around the Transporter, firing as he advanced. He made it to the driver's seat, put the transmission in reverse, and backed away from the Pooter.
The figures rose, watching him. The redhead made an obscene gesture. The Indian stared. Maybe he mouthed something.
John Macon pointed at them, then drew his finger across his throat. Silent promise.
The Indian didn't react.
This isn't over, zealots. If I have to crawl and beg, sleep in the rain, and dine on raw rat, I'll make it my mission in life to figure out who you two are. I'll find your holes or your family or your clan and bring the full forest-burning heat of the Georgia Control down on you like the fist of an angry god. Before this summer's over, I'll have you both skinned and made into an awning, drink Long Islands out of your skulls, and wash my ass with your scalps.
Site Green, the Pennyroyal of Kentucky, February of the Fiftysixth year of the Kurian Order: the violent winter, the worst in living memory for even the outdoorsy locals, has ebbed at last. Nothing that might be called spring warms the sky, rather, it is a quiet between-season pause, like the lassitude between the break in a life-threatening fever and actual recovery.
"Damn near as bad as '76-'7," would, in time, become the new standard for calamity of war or weather, depending on how the individual in question labeled it. Youngsters would later recall the onset of the winter blizzards followed hard by the terrible ravies virus outbreak that blossomed in screams and death. Flight, cold, hunger, fear-everything turned upside down in the deep snow.
While the disease strain was the deadliest yet unleashed on mankind, it did not have nearly the calamitous effect of the original appearance, in that dreadful summer of 2022 when the Kurians first appeared. Then, ravies struck like something dreamed up in an apocalyptic horror movie with terrible effect. The saviors-turned-soulstealers appeared in the wake of a perfect storm of natural disaster and disease, offering aid and comfort that soon transitioned to enslavement and death once they had the half-starved, bewildered population properly under their control.
But Kentucky of 2076 wasn't the civilized world of 2022. From the Bluegrass to the Jackson Purchase, a network of clans who ranched Kurian-introduced legworms-and yes, some horses as well-toughened by years of squabbles with each other and bitter fighting against those who tried to incorporate them into the Kurian Order grazed their herds and preserved their independence. Their wary, well-armed neutrality made this limestone-hilled country the Switzerland of the eastern half of the United States. Yes, they sold the Kurians legworm meat and allowed a few towers along the main rail arteries, but if a Kurian ventured outside the urban centers with their Reapers, they lost enough avatars to make "freeranging" futile in the careful cost/benefit analysis of the Kurian Order.
When Kentucky dropped its guarded neutrality briefly enough to allow rebel forces to cross its territory with the aid of a few clans hungry for real freedom, Kur unleashed its fury-first with the murderous Moondagger fanatics and, when that failed, with a virus designed to wipe the slate clean.
There were losses, whole settlements and clans wiped out, but it was not the cleansing the Kurians had hoped for, especially in the rugged fastness of south-central Kentucky.
However, much of the Western Coal Fields and the axe-handle of Kentucky's Pennyroyal region were emptied as what was left of the locals fled to the protection of Kentucky's military in the heartland or the tiny bastion of Southern Command south of Evansville.
With frost and flurries still washing across the state on cold mornings, the Kurian Order seeks to take advantage of the emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum, the unnature of the vampiric Kurian Order exploits one.
The Georgia Control, a manufacturing center for eastern North America, has the audacity and the organization to swallow such a huge bite of territory. Why the Western Tennessee Kurians, a looser organization called the Nashville Concordance, agreed to support the endeavor that would add so much to the Control's dominance in the region is a matter of some dispute. The various Kurian states are notorious for their plotting and backstabbing. Georgia either offered up a king's ransom in auras or the Concordance Kurians believed that where their northern brethren had bled and failed, southerners would do no better and a weakened Georgia Control would be much to their advantage.
There are other less likely guesses, of course, but those disputes are for the philosophers. Let us return to the beginning of the latest bid for Kentucky's rich hills and bottoms.
Signs that spring might be ready to appear are all around Central City, what used to be a little crossroads town near the old Green River Correctional Complex. Geese and ducks alight in the lakes and swamps northwest of town, drawn north by the warmth to their traditional nesting areas. Yellow coltsfoot blossoms-a local remedy for a lingering winter cough and sore throat-are beginning to open along the old roadsides, as if eager for the sun, though the roads are little better than broken-up streams of pavement filled with scrub growth and mudslide, a jeep trail at best.
The abandoned prison complex now houses birds, bats, and a multitude of hornets' nests at the top and everything from wild pigs to black bears on the bottom floors, with rats running between. For the Kurians, putting the stout concrete buildings in order and installing new glass and flooring can wait. The raccoons and owls will reign for a few weeks more everywhere but one office the engineers cleared in order to complete a survey of what needed to be done to restore the structure.
The future Kurian tower will need holding cells and forced-labor housing.
Noisy activity can be seen and heard around the clock at a construction site outside the defunct prison, on a patch of earth where the ground begins to rise between the prison and Central City. Two small signs identify it as SITE GREEN, one just off old state Route 277 and one off 602, both of which have been cleared of brush and tree growth by hungry-mouthed chippers for easier passage of equipment.
Two wire-fenced camps, one for the uniformed soldiers of elite Nashville Concordance Guard on temporary lease to the Georgia Control and police of the Clarksville Border Troop and another for the worksite proper, snuggle side by side like a pair of pellet-chewing rabbits, both covered by towers, zeroed-in mortars and machine guns and ever-vigilant guarded gates. The military camp is thick with green tents. The construction fencing guards what is currently a deep hole and a few mounds of construction materials and piles of steel reinforcing rods, with a cement-mixing facility blistered out of the side like a growth.
The race to fill the vacuum has begun. It would appear the Kurians were first off their marks.
