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“collecting an excise,” Screech said. It stepped forward, and the Zihu men gave it at least twice its reach in space. It occurred to me that a mathematically minded person could come up with a neat little algorithm to describe the velocity of humans and how it varied with proximity to a Reaper.
“That’s all I tried to do,” Maynes said.
“we did not elevate the Maynes family just to satisfy your need for sorry little cumboxes.”
The Coal Country Kurian operating the Screech-Reaper must have picked up an odd vocabulary in his time.
“i will take over the negotiations with mr. zihu. you may retrieve your men and take your vehicle to the next brothel on your list.”
Screech took Zihu over to a corner of the bar and began to speak to him. Zihu put on a brave face, but his body language read as “cringe.”
The bartender gave Maynes an iced towel to press to his lip, and I helped MacTierney and Home out of their bonds. Unfortunately for Zihu’s bounty hunters, I ruined the restraints in the process.
“What happened to Bronson?” one of the bikers asked.
All eyes rose to the hole made in the ceiling by the biker I’d tossed. It looked like a splintery stick figure.
Another whistled. “Never seen anything like that outside a cartoon.”
“I see the name Maynes everywhere in the Coal Country,” said a dirt-encrusted scout who looked as if he’d lived for a year on top of a motorcycle. “What did he do?”
“Created the craziest family between here and Salt Lake,” the bartender said quietly.
“But they run everything here, right? The Kurians put them in charge?”
“Ya-huh,” the bartender said. “The family was important before the big breakdown. The grandfather had money and land and owned some radio, TV, netfoss, all that. Meant he had senators and judges lining up to kiss his hairy ring. After it all went to shit, he somehow kept his radio station running. The flying umbrellas dealt with him, made him the conduit for food, vaccines against the ravies virus; you wanted lights back on or fuel oil, you talked to one of the Old Man’s people. The Kurians liked how he ran things around here, so they gave him every coal mine worth having hereabouts.
“That’s the real power, the coal. The Northeast needs it to keep from freezing to death in the winter, and the Georgia Control needs it to power its factories in the Carolinas. Take a word of advice and make a copy for your boss: tread a little lightly in these mountains. There’s more power here than you think.”
• • •
Maynes knew the country better than any of his closest family. Sometimes he had to give tours to visitors from other Kurian Zones. His usual detail of MacTierney, Home, and me came along. Maynes and Home put on suits and neckcloths that were the local workingman’s variant on a tie.
Maynes, who made a convincing bon vivant with the average Coal Country functionary, treated a tour like an unpleasant rash. He itched for it to end when he wasn’t medicating with bourbon. His drinking wasn’t so much an attempt to get through the night as to ensure that his charge would call an early night.
The first visitor I saw Maynes escort was up from Georgia, studying coal production. He was involved in turpentine farms and had come to see how the Maynes Conglomerate treated its miners.
He was an ugly little fellow who looked like he’d exchanged blows from an early age. He had a blotchy, mottled face, a crooked nose, a heavy, callous brow, and two missing teeth. I silently thanked the Fates that I’d ended up with Maynes instead of with an unpleasant-looking man like him. Most of his conversation was complaints about the weather, the lack of light on the valley roads, and the state of the highways and bridges.
After a couple of drinks, Maynes roundly damned his family for sticking him with “jumped up pickers.” A picker, to Maynes, was a person fit only for the roughest manual labor in the coal mines. I noticed that he rarely used the epithet on some of his citizenry who probably came from “picker” stock—it was usually reserved for Quislings and churchmen.
Whenever we ran out of liquor, we went to the Maynes store.
The Maynes Coal Company Store always impressed. Called the Red Hen Pantry and Sundry, it had an appealing painting of a red hen on a nest of wildflowers. After the grim industrial spew of the slag heaps and extraction conveyors, the bright hues were a welcome relief.
It disabused me of the belief that company stores were designed to extract as much of the worker’s paycheck as possible and return it to the corporation. The food was plentiful, nicely displayed, and at a price substantially lower than noncompany stores, from what I’d seen of Coal Country barrows and supermarkets.
There was even a more exclusive store within the store that you could visit with the right kind of ID. Church officials, management, labor committee heads, firemen . . . the apparat of the New Order could get luxuries, at luxurious prices, of course: soaps from the south of France, Jamaican rum, Cuban cigars.
“It’s Elaine’s work, these stores,” Maynes always said proudly. “Quite an achievement. The way she explains it, cheap necessities cut down on a host of other problems. Theft and pilfering of company property, black market trading, attitude, even industrial sabotage, can all be prevented by a good supply chain at on-the-square pricing.”
It was not long before I met Elaine.
NIGHT RIDE TO MARYLAND
On a very few occasions, Maynes left the White Palace with only me accompanying him.
You could be forgiven for thinking that he took only the Grog out on his hunts for teenage girls, but I believe Home went with him on those nights. He and I ventured out alone only when he had a chance of meeting his sister on one of her business trips. She was the one member of the family whose company he sought.
