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Maynes’s usual transport was known at the White Palace as “the Short Bus,” but Maynes called it the Trekker. It had begun life as one of those smaller people-transports I’ve come across disabled at airports and large convention centers, designed for a driver and perhaps a dozen people comfortably riding in the back.
It had been retrofitted into a rather amazing conveyance for a dignitary and his team. The driver now had a spacious (luckily for me, for I was often behind the wheel) compartment with its own hatch for entering, with the passenger area turned into a comfortable lounge, with a sofa large enough for sleeping, a tiny kitchen cubby, a captain’s chair and three more fold-down models, and a little toilet closet in back. A water tank on the roof fed the hygiene closet’s sink-toilet (which flushed, disgustingly, right onto the road) and kitchen basin.
To cope with the mountainous, indifferently maintained roads, heavy-duty tires and an off-road suspension raised the minibus an extra foot off the ground. What had been storage space beneath the passenger area was expanded slightly and filled with emergency food, water, blankets, and medicines, a small generator and hand-pumped water filter so the vehicle could, if necessary, serve as an ambulance or provide a day’s meals for a few dozen mouths, given an interruption of normal services. There was a standard gun cabinet that could securely store five long-guns and several pistols, plus ammunition, though Maynes personally never showed much interest in the firearms he carried (“I got sick of shooting in my first year with the Youth Vanguard,” he told MacTierney).
I shall describe a typical town in the Coal Country in this era, so you, my reader, will have some idea of the conditions of the average person under the Kurian Order.
Most of the pre-2022 smaller towns were “repurposed” by this time. The Kurians preferred their humans living in moderately sized towns of two or three thousand. At that size, you needed just one of everything, making supervision easier. More than that and the town became a city. There were villages with populations ranging from a few families to several hundred people, usually near a resource site like a mine or an industrial center or other remote-but-important location that required servicing—the “village” that provided staff to the White Palace was an example.
Small family farms existed in the better stretches of bottomland. It was up to their town or village to keep track of activity there.
Then there were the people on the outskirts. These were true hill people. I’m not even sure you could say they were part of the Kurian Order; they were more or less ignored by all concerned. They came down from their remote hollows and scratched up what they couldn’t make for themselves by doing odd jobs or selling the liquor they brewed in concealed stills.
Every town had three institutions staffed by the Kurian Order: the New Universal Church meeting house, school, and residence; the firehouse; and the community center.
The community center was usually the largest. In older towns, an entire block of buildings would often be renovated, linking all the old storefronts and apartments into one large warren. Children were given basic-skills training. There would be a room devoted to telecommunications, with phones and screens and sometimes even a computer or two. There were areas for exercise and places for small artistic performances, a little health clinic staffed by a nurse and midwife, a cafeteria, and a government office where one updated identification papers and the numerous licenses that went with existing in the Kurian Order. The wealthier towns usually had a public pool or bathhouse.
In larger towns with more people who worked for the Kurian Order, there was often a mirror version of the community center just for Quislings and their families, similar to the main community center but cleaner and better equipped.
As for residences, the Kurian Order preferred that its population lived in communal buildings. The remaining houses, if they were large enough, supported two or three families by subdividing the space. Only the Quislings had the luxury of living alone, but those at the lower levels often chose not to, preferring the safety of being around others or living above a community center or some other place with around-the-clock security. This was a land of old grudges, and Quislings had a high rate of mortality from suspicious accidents. Those at the top of the pile often had guarded estates, miniature versions of the White Palace with full-time, live-in staff, plus the usual guard dogs and gamekeepers wandering outside their fences.
The church was less comfortable but cleaner than the community centers. Unlike the community center, the church was open to overnight travellers who would otherwise be stuck; they might always check in to the local NUC building and be given a cot, sometimes with a privacy screen, a sliver of soap, and a clean towel.
Everything in a church center folded for easy storage, including the staff. Once, when sheltering at an NUC center during a strong thunderstorm, I opened a closet and found a human female cleric in full habit, snoozing on her back with h
er legs sticking up the closet wall.
The Church serves a surprising mix of propaganda into everyday business. Of course, on Sundays there are the homilies, announcements of births (never deaths), and requests for volunteer labor on tasks that make the community a little more livable, from shoveling snow to urban “repurposing”—teardowns of old houses, in other words, after the Church has cleared the dwelling of identifiable family ephemera.
In larger cities, there are screens in every room running “human improvement” programming. About all you improve is your knowledge of various tragedies in human history and the miraculous arrival of the Kurians the moment before mankind would flutter, dim, and die like a guttering candle. Every half hour they would break for weather and rose-tinted biographical segments about local Quislings. Beyond the constant droning of the screens in every room—including the church proper, unless services were in session—every piece of paper passed out by the Church, every plate full of food or mug of coffee, bore some phrase or piece of iconography expressing the value of the Kurian/Human “symbiosis.”
The closest thing these little towns of the Coal Country had to a newspaper were their local church bulletins, put out—with no small amount of pride—by the senior class of schoolchildren under the supervision of Youth Vanguard leaders going on in their education and senior clergy. They sold advertising space, selected and placed a few photos, and wrote about local events. Usually it was small sports teams and leagues and announcements about events at the community center or outings (there are trips to Washington DC and the Carolina Coast mentioned in an issue I saved and brought out with me). I suspect the hard-to-find paper mostly ended up serving as sanitary tissue or for wiping up spilled grease, though the editorial page of every issue, which reprinted statements from the Archon’s office, always had a helpfully blank reverse side, so letter writers were often forced to send NUC propaganda along with their family news.
Serving three worlds: Earth, Kur, and the Next.
The young of any community spend a great deal of time at the church. In the larger towns, there are multiple day-care centers alongside the school (church education stops at twelve years old for most who are bent on a trade or further technical training; a few intended for higher education stay on until age fourteen or fifteen before being shipped off to boarding school—one of the requirements in most Kurian Zones is that anyone intended for higher education is severed from his family.
The third institution every town has is the firemen in its station. I’ve never encountered the like in any of the other Kurian Zones, where firemen served in much the same fashion as they had pre-2022 or today.
In the Coal Country, the “firemen” served as the first line of defense of the Kurian Order. They put out fires, yes, but they would also speed off in their trucks to resolve barricade situations, set up roadblocks, or turn their hoses on gypsy encampments of day laborers passing through the mountains. A regime needs a body numerous of strong-arm men to swing the clubs that break the heads of its enemies, and in the Coal Country, if you were young, strong, and followed orders well, you could almost always find a berth in the firehouse. After a year of service where you apprenticed on a provisional for your food and bed, any signs of talent for the job were rewarded with a permanent posting. Unlike almost any other Quisling role, you did not have to be familiar with the current New Universal Church opinions and decrees; you just had to follow orders well and stay reasonably healthy by avoiding tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. The pay was twice what you would make on the railroads and three times what you could earn in a coal mine, so it was an attractive prospect for any young man. I suspect that was the lingering influence of the elder Maynes, who first organized the firemen—he was a notorious teetotaler and tobacco hater. The firemen did their drinking and what smoking they could afford out of uniform and out of the public eye.
Like firemen elsewhere, they were called to scenes of fire and accident. Unlike other firemen, rather than take the victims to a hospital, they usually shuttled them off to the Reapers. The Coal Country Kurian’s Reapers would oftentimes spend the daylight hours sheltering in the fire stations somewhere out of the way, waiting for an accident victim to be brought in.
This aided the regime in that there was less pounding on people’s doors in the middle of the night and taking away of one of the elder members of a household deemed past his usefulness. Everyone could understand someone dying in a railway accident or being crushed during logging—it made death more palatable. They would sometimes drum up business for themselves, by travelling pell-mell along the roads in the rain or gloom in the hope of hitting a cyclist or frightening the horse of a rider, causing her to be thrown and injured.
So, bullies, hooligans, and people who enjoyed inflicting violence on others put on the vulcanized black-and-yellow uniform of a fireman.
The firemen enforced a kind of xenophobia on their town. Locals were encouraged to phone the fire department if they saw a stranger without obvious purpose. Vagrants passing through fell into the hands of the firemen more often than not. Smugglers moving goods between Kentucky and the coast knew which highways were farthest from the fire stations, and where they had to travel overland on unmarked paths.
They had only one summer of police-action training, out of state in the wilderness of the old Marine Corps base at Parris Island (complete with one three-day weekend at Folly Island near Charleston with a generous enlistment bonus to spend, of which tales were told in the firehouse years after), but that was enough for the sort of bruising work they were expected to handle.
• • •
In my whole time accompanying Maynes around the Coal Country, I did only one service I am truly proud of.
It was a moment of opportunity, not part of the routine. While on the highway heading west toward Big Stone Gap, we saw a disabled Maynes Lumber truck blocking the road ahead, and another vehicle’s operator—a local milk van driver—waving his arms frantically.
The lumber truck had blown a set of tires, and while the driver was surveying the damage, his load had come loose and come close to crushing him to death. He was trapped from the midthigh down by pine trunks thirty feet long and easily a foot across.
