AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The Coal Country people believed in some sense of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence sense. I heard the phrase “You can’t do this to me” several times during my years there. There was a sense that as long as you stayed out of trouble, you were safe. In some of the more remote areas, they perhaps even felt free to start trouble with the knowledge that the Order would not spend the resources to hunt them down.
I have spent time in Kurian Zones where everyone acted, and often looked, like a convict with a noose around his neck waiting for the trapdoor to be pulled. In the Coal Country, the people walked with something of the swagger I recognized from the freeholds west of the Mississippi.
For example, once while waiting for Maynes to return from some grotty room above a bar with one of his press-gang victims of the day, I watched two women walking arm in arm along the sidewalk back from the market, lightly laden. A pair of firemen coming in the other direction made room for the ladies. Both very pointedly spat on the sidewalk in front of the firemen. They were good-sized, burly men. An insult such as that could have been met with violence; it would have in New Orleans (in Atlanta at the very least they would have been arrested and had their friends and family investigated).
Minor vandalism sometimes hampered, or just irritated, the firemen, troopers, and Maynes security forces. Tires would be flattened or punctured; locks would be disabled. The New Universal Church rarely had such difficulties; either the locals believed they were an innocuous part of the regime—they might have felt differently had they known that the Church kept more detailed records of the individuals in a community than the security services—or they saw the churchmen as being of some benefit to the community.
Of course, in the Coal Country, the Kurian Order ruled with a lighter hand. Which leads to a chicken-or-the-egg argument over whether the obstinacy and, at times, violence of the people forced the Order to tread lightly, or the easy treatment by the rules gave the average person a little more courage in asserting himself.
From what I have been able to learn, the people of Virginia, home to so many political philosophers of the United States’ founding, were much like those in every other Kurian Zone.
I suppose I should outline the larger situation in the eastern half of North America in the 2070s. Living memory is brief, after all, and I suspect I do not have many years left as I recompile this diary.
The most powerful faction of the Kurian Order in Eastern North America was the Georgia Control. It had a skilled and creative populace, a professional technocratic class acting as intermediaries between the Kurian overlords and the populace, and an ecclesiastical hierarchy that was constantly nudged to improve its social role. They had an arms industry unmatched in North America, and one of the best equipped military forces in the world at the time.* The broad seacoast allowed trade. There were even flights out of the old Atlanta airport to South America, Europe, and Africa for the desultory trade and diplomacy the Kurians practiced when the mood struck.
Its strength was also its weakness: so much of its power flowed through channels of long use that it had become calcified and cirrhotic, lacking the ability to imagine consequences that could threaten its position.
On paper, the Northwest Ordnance looked powerful, stretching from Pennsylvan
ia to the borders of friendly Chicago, with trade coming in from the Great Lakes and the New England patchwork of principalities, but it was actually a rather ramshackle construct, a poor imitation of the Georgia Control.
The eastern seaboard had a similar network of Kurian fiefdoms, but without even the appearance of a unified political structure, only the Church and a few able administrators kept the jealous and grasping Kurians from executing their endless vendettas and feuds in a manner that was too harmful to the populace. I never made it to the formerly great metropolis-states of Boston or New York or Philadelphia, but I am told that the humans there showed an amazing resilience, with little neighborhoods getting on with their lives and ignoring the Kurians as best as they could. From what I heard from those who’d grown up there and left for the green of the Coal Country mountains, your loyalty toward those of your neighborhood was absolute, with outsiders picked out and turned over so the rest of the neighborhood remained untroubled. In that region there was a very lucrative trade in “substitutions”—dealers in warm bodies who would trade one aura for another if a family had the money to redeem a member picked up by the Order for a minor offense. West Virginia, like much of the Appalachian Trail, was hunting ground for those who supplied the substitutions.
In this environment, the oddities of the east were Kentucky and the Coal Country. Kentucky was ranching country for the fleshy legworms that provided ample, if unappetizing, protein that was ground up, flavored, and packaged into any number of premade meals (WHAM! being the most famous, still available for those who’ve developed a taste for its rather chewy blend of protein and fiber), and the Coal Country made energy. Of the two, the Kentucky legworm clans were the more independent; the nature of their herds meant they had a certain amount of independence, as they had to follow their voracious beasts, chewing up sod at one long end and depositing a rich mixture of fertilized, aerated soil at the other.
The Coal Country was, as you’ve read, for the most part left in the hands of the Maynes clan and the Church. Trouble with the other Kurian Zones started only once the coal shipments began to fail.
There were dozens of smaller Kurian states east of the Mississippi, of course. Many in the border areas, Memphis for example, were under constant attack from the Free Territory to one side, and attentively watched by larger predatory Kurian Zones at the other, like a lion watching a herd of gazelle in the hope of detecting a limp.
• • •
The employment I was given had one of the three things I needed to make an escape: access to a vehicle.
The second was some familiarity with the area. That would come, in time, driving around with the Maynes bodyguard.
The third required more judgment. I needed an opportunity—an event that diverted the security forces’ attention or made it harder for them to operate. Ideally, a new Kurian arriving or an old one departing would create enough of a shake-up atmosphere that escape would be easier, if for no other reason than that men nervous about being eliminated would be trying to make it to a new territory before they could be selected for destruction.
The payoff for patience would be the opportunity for a clean getaway and knowledge that would make escape more certain.
There was danger in patience, however. Kurian Zones did not communicate much with one another about sappers and guerillas. While they sought them within their own territory, if they happened to move to a neighboring zone, the Kurians saw it as a win-win. They would be causing trouble for a rival, upsetting whatever designs were no doubt being drawn against their neighbor. Their neighbor might also kill the enemy. The elimination of a threat with no effort had its own kind of sweetness, too.
• • •
I finally met my employer during my brief stint of vehicular training. I stood in the Maynes motor pool, a sort of evolutionary chart of a graveled lot, with the functioning automobiles and trucks at one end, lines of machines either being worked on or stripped behind, and then component parts, tires, and glass stacked about rusting racks with blackbirds hanging about as though it were a graveyard.
A motor pool mechanic was taking half the morning briefing me about gasoline pumps and how to get a gas cap off—to tell the truth, I found it a little insulting and tried to cut it short with my “Know how! I do!” routine, but he would not be dissuaded from repeating three times that the gas cap spun one way to take it off, and (“This is very important, son”) turns a different way to put it back on!
Two junkyard dogs added a comical note by chasing after and trying to mount a third, all three of them snapping out their sexual frustration at one another in brief, snarling quarrels. The Maynes family guarded everything, even its garbage heap.
My schoolmarmish instructor went silent as I put the cap back on for the third time. I smelled a burning cigarette.
“So, this is my new block and tackle?” said a voice like a bow saw drawn through soft wood, as if it were the result of too much tobacco on not enough sleep.
“Sure is, Mr. Maynes,” my instructor said, anxiously eyeing the lighted butt. “He’s still being oriented to the White Palace.”
“What’s his name?”
“King, Mr. Maynes.”
