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The trapped driver was screaming that his legs were broken.
“Should we just put a bullet in his head and put him out of his misery?” Maynes asked Home.
Luckily, they were clean fractures; there was no visible bleeding, and nothing had rearranged his joints.
Using bits of bracing chain and wooden supporting wedges from the lumber truck’s load, plus no small amount of muscular energy, I opened a large-enough gap in the logs. The milk van driver said he’d have thought it would take a loader to move the logs.
“Leverage, that’s what Hickory does best,” Home said.
“You’ll be driving in no time, Lucky,” MacTierney said.
“My name’s not Lucky,” the driver said. “It’s Escandero.”
“It is from now on,” Home put in. “If you’d been slower by a foot, your pelvis would be in three pieces.” (I have substituted pelvis for what he actually said, because crushing wouldn’t break up the principal feature of male sexual anatomy in that manner.)
We wrapped “Lucky” Escandero in blankets after MacTierney and Home did a professional job of bracing his legs on a hardboard; then we put him in the stretcher brackets in the van, using the rear emergency door.
“You yell out if you’re going to puke from the pain, or anything,” Maynes said. “I don’t want the carpet to smell like puke for the next year.”
“I gave him a shot,” MacTierney said.
It was taking effect. The driver was mumbling something about not wanting to be on the R & R list, that he was a quick healer, could drive using just his arms and a cane, and so forth.
MacTierney, as usual, thought to radio in the disabled vehicle’s information so the local troopers could clear the road and see about reloading the lumber.
As we dropped him of
f at the nearest NUC hospital, I tugged on Maynes’s shoulder. “Lucky heal all proper?”
“All proper,” MacTierney said. Turning to the admitting doctor in the clerical collar, he said, “Mr. Maynes wants the best of care for him. Rehabilitation, everything. He’ll be checking up in a week or so on Escandero’s progress. He’s a good driver; we want him back.”
Maynes had said nothing of the sort, but MacTierney was a decent man.
THE HEADHUNTERS
May is one of the sweetest months in the Coal Country. With the warmer weather, more like summer than late spring, Maynes stepped up his travel schedule. He wasn’t always truck-hood adjudicating or hearing appeals. He’d also stop in for surprise inspections of Maynes Conglomerate holdings, or just spend a day in a rail yard chatting with the workers about diesel fuel supply and signal problems. We were on the road almost every day and frequently didn’t see the palace again for three or four days at a time.
The Appalachians turned a green so bright that a painter depicting it would use a palette full of yellow, too. But driving at this time of year on the chancy, badly maintained mountain roads took skill. There might be a rockslide or downed tree around every bend, and potholes filled with water could be deceptively—and wheel-wreckingly—deep.
Sadly, there were also vast scars in the landscape. Mining coal doesn’t always mean digging tunnels; you can also tear down the side of a mountain to get at the veins. There were dozens of these suppurating wounds on the landscape filled with men and machinery and dust. For every one working, there were two abandoned, or still half used by the locals to scrape a little extra coal for their own use or trade. The abandoned surface mines were only partially reforested; in many places the scars were too deep and there was no soil to support the exploitative early trees and brambles. Black bears and raccoons and bats would move into the caves created or exposed, so the scarring of the landscape was of benefit to a few afterward.
Maynes, after his initial suspicion about me, began to treat me as part of the team. Not an important part, I was rather like a big, friendly dog to him. He would reach up and scratch the hair on my cheek or forehead when he greeted me in the morning. I don’t care to be touched, especially not about the snout and ears, and I had to suppress the instinct to return his hand minus a few fingers.
It didn’t stop me from imagining the cartilaginous crunch or the salty, hot surprise of fresh blood.
He learned that I had a taste for nuts and took to tossing me a big brown paper bag of walnuts if he thought we were to be long on the road before reaching our destination. I made a point of carefully collecting the empty shells and returning them to him in the brown bag, as though they were ammunition casings that could be reloaded.
I enjoyed this time, especially when we left the towns behind and negotiated the mountain roads. The hills and trees drew sound and absorbed it like a sponge, so that it seemed I could hardly hear the throaty blat of the exhaust. Home drove, alert and both hands holding the wheel in firm fingers, MacTierney with his lap-folder full of notated maps and communication printouts. I sat in the back, holding either a shotgun clamped to one side of my improvised seat or a battle rifle on the other, ready to grab up either at a threat or a flash of game. Maynes liked to bring home his dinner freshly bled.
Other than some mischievous boys in Logan who startled us by throwing a handful of lighted firecrackers in our wake, the days passed without any danger worse than negotiating a road washout or a flood-damaged bridge.
As one draws closer to the borders of the Coal Country, particularly those parts joining Kentucky or the Southern Appalachians, less so the Virginia border, the country becomes wilder and sparsely settled. The roads degenerate into jeep trails, then paths. Only a single maintained highway links the Northwest Ordnance to the Coal Country, and another extends up toward Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely used for maintenance on power lines and the railroads.
Most of the Kurians like a strip of wilderness that takes a day or two to cross dividing their zones. Escape becomes more hazardous, as the Nomansland between is stalked by bandits and bounty hunters. If you are lucky, the former will only strip you of your possessions and subject you to sexual pawing and penetration. The latter will usually do the same, then haul you and your family to whichever nearby Kurian Zone pays the best for still-breathing humans. Of course, this sort of brigandage has its hazards, for a bigger band will swallow, absorb, and sell off a smaller one. Now and then Kurian Zone Special Forces engage in training in the wilds of the borderlands and are happy to use live targets for their live ammunition. These bandits have been overly romanticized in the past few years; only a very few did anything more than passively resist the Kurian Order. Most aided it by feeding the captive and the kidnapped into the regime’s Molochian maw.
Late one May afternoon, we drove into a border post on the Coal Country side of the border with the Northwest Ordnance, along that lone highway heading over the Ohio River a few dozen miles away. A little roadside town existed there for the benefit of the truckers who would drop a trailer at the border and pick up one to be returned into their zone (at this time, east of the Mississippi there were very few cross-zone drivers; west of the Mississippi convoys under escort could pass through).
The town had a small trooper station representing the Coal Country Order, a little repair facility, and a clapped-together mass of cypress planking that served as a combination hotel, bar, and grill for the benefit of those waiting for a load to show up called the “NbW Roadhouse.”
