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I remember only one time when Maynes seemed to have doubts about the Kurian Order. The town constables caught a man at the hospital incinerator in Charleston.
No one could say where the Kurian who ran the Coal Country resided. There was no obvious Kurian tower, and there were not many Reapers, perhaps because the mineral-rich mountains interfered with the link between the Kurian and his avatars. I have no idea of the actual number, but it must have been low. If the Coal Country was not the Kurian Zone with the highest human-to-Reaper ratio, I would like to know which zone was. I only saw one, the same one several times, thanks to a distinctive injury to its lip. But back to the incident in Charleston.
They’d caught a man named Hollis, who’d climbed a wall in an effort to get at the incinerator. In the Coal Country, bodies were disposed of by cremation. The New Universal Church mortuary would place those unfortunates consumed by the Reapers in special body bags that could not be opened again without breaking a very obvious seal and releasing a dye, a method similar to that used to thwart bank robbers, I understand. The Kurians did not care for photos of Reaper-punctured victims to be distributed, at least not in the areas organized by the Georgia Control.
Hollis sat in the hospital security cells. I never think of a hospital as needing cells, but this one had six, all painted a shade of green so light it could be mistaken for white. MacTierney said he was a woodworker. He looked like one, or perhaps a toymaker out of a children’s book—he had the same kindly eyes and tiny spectacles worn at the end of his nose that you’d expect to see on someone who constructed Pinocchio. He had no weapons, no camera or other recording devices. It was a mystery.
“What kind of game were you playing?”
“No game. I was looking for my daughter. Nine years old,” he said by way of clarifying.
“You thought she’d climbed over a twelve-foot wall?”
“No, she was taken away by you all,” Hollis said. “God will damn you for it. I believe there’s justice, you see.”
“Why was she taken?”
“Genetic deficient, they said. She had the Down syn-der-roam.”
“And she made it to nine? You hid her, I suppose?”
“Yes. Until that bastard Dwight David Metcalf found out his fool son had been arrested for stealing from the Maynes motor pool. He thought turning her in would save his worthless heap of oily haired dirt.”
“Law’s the law,” Home said. “You and your wife could have saved yourselves a heap of heartache by letting the hospital take care of it when she was born.”
“Why take lives like that?” Hollis asked. “She gave nothing but love.”
Maynes intervened. “Children with that syndro
me—they absorb too much schooling and medical attention. The state can’t afford children like that.”
Hollis jumped up so suddenly, his glasses flew off. “The state didn’t spend a dollar on her. We taught her ourselves. We kept her in our home. Of course, I never dared bring her to a hospital, so what medical care did she receive? Who did she ever trouble, that she had to die for it?” Somewhere in that speech his glasses landed with a clatter.
Maynes looked as though he’d been struck across the bridge of the nose.
“We can’t have mouths that eat or hands that don’t produce,” he said, sounding as though he were reading off a card someone had handed him at the last second.
“That’s a churchman’s reply,” Hollis said. “Strange to hear it from someone like Bone Maynes. You and the New Church never got on.” Locals in the Coal Country always dropped the “Universal” part of the New Universal Church.
Maynes remained silent for a moment. Home patted his holstered pistol as if trying to draw Hollis’s attention to the symbol of authority.
Maynes finally bent, picked up the spectacles, and handed them to Hollis.
“Give him a couple of handfuls of ashes and let him go.”
“What about the police—,” MacTierney said.
“Have them send the paperwork to my office. Hollis, I’ll give you a ride home. I expect you’ll never say anything about what you saw here.”
Hollis shrugged. “I didn’t see much except a few pitiful figures sealed up like tinned WHAM! If you all think it’s a big secret what’s going on in here . . . well, it ain’t.”
“By rights he should be the next one into the incinerator,” Home said. “All this does is free up a slot for someone else. What’s the point of all this if we’re just going to let guilty men go free? No justice in it for anyone.”
“Let’s hope not, Home,” MacTierney said.
“Let’s hope not what?”
“That there’s justice. I have a feeling we might not like the taste. Speaking of taste, let’s get out of this ash heap before I breathe any more people.”
