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“Hollis, I’m truly sorry about your daughter,” Maynes said as we left. Hollis had his hand in his pocket with the little bag of ash he’d been given. I wondered how often that splinter-bitten hand had held his daughter’s.
“Then you’re working for the wrong people, Mr. Maynes. The wrong people.”
Maynes was sullen until we returned to the White Palace. He had one large drink of bourbon and, much to Home’s dismay, didn’t scrounge around for a girl before turning the Trekker home.
THE BECKLEY BLOOD
The Coal Country Revolt is only sometimes mentioned, and rarely described in the histories of the Kurian Order. Those that do describe it all have the beginning wrong. They place the start of hostilities with the mine revolts.
I saw the genesis with my own eyes. This witness insists that the revolt started over cookware.
You might say the long slide for the Kurians east of the Mississippi began because someone miscommunicated, or loaded the wrong boxes in the wrong railcars, or mislaid a piece of paperwork or attached the wrong boxcar to an outbound train. An unknown depot clerk on some siding ended up with a shipment of Pennsylvania iron and enamel cookware, which they no doubt quietly sold off as soon as the pickup could be arranged. For my own curiosity, I would like to know where the error occurred, but I fear the information is forever lost (though if a reader of this account knows anything about the issue, I would welcome a letter).
It began on June 17, 2073, a few days before the anniversary of the arrival of the Kurians. In the town of Beckley, there stands a big semicircular market with a sort of triangular crown atop it. It was known as the Beckley Marketplace and was open to the public. Mostly, it sold locally made wares and it had a flea market a good deal more colorful than the bland “company stores” that all carried the same mass-produced shelf-stable foods and necessities. The Beckley Marketplace had advertised a large selection of big enamelware pots, large enough to be used as a Dutch oven or a stewpot for a family full of hungry mouths. Because of endless scrap drives, good iron cookware was hard to find, especially in larger sizes, and these were imports from a well-known Ordnance ironworks near Pittsburgh.
The locals were long accustomed to procedures for handling scarcities. Grandmothers and aunts would stand in line, often all night, waiting for the doors to be unlocked on the day the stock went on sale (frequently, it didn’t show up until near closing time, leading to more waiting). The oversized enamelware pots were to go on sale June 16, but by closing time at the Beckley Marketplace they still hadn’t arrived, and hundreds of people had been waiting close to fully around the clock without result. Inquiries with the staff were met shiftily.
I suppose families took turns standing in line, but it presented difficulty, and whatever calluses had been formed by the eternal line-waiting of the Kurian Order had been stripped off and skin rubbed raw by the second day of being in line.
The next morning, the stock finally appeared. There had been a serious mistake, and the items on sale were tiny little saucepans suitable for melting a small amount of butter (or chocolate, on the rare publicly approved holidays it was made available).
Knowledge passed, as it tended to in crowds, that the mistake had been known the day before and they’d kept everyone in line in a hopeless attempt to rectify it. So even those who were used to error and fault felt betrayed by the lack of information that would have allowed the wait in the line to be ended rather than extended unnecessarily.
The crowd, having passed the knowledge from frustrated buyer to buyer, acted with the same collective alacrity. Did they move as a flock of sheep, or a pack of wolves?
According to two survivors I later talked to during the on-again, off-again “troubles” in the Coal Country, there was talk in the crowd of going to the Beckley city hall to complain. The idea of a mass demonstration may strike most of those who knew something of life under the Kurian Order as more than a little curious, but as this account has tried to show, the Coal Country was an almost unique instance of the Kurian Order in practice.
They left the Beckley Marketplace and headed east to the old bank at the corner of Main and Old State Route 210, where the private Gateway Store now harbored a few luxuries for the use of the Quisling families with a special needs pass. While the crowd had been right about the problem being known by the Marketplace since the day before, they were wrong in surmising that the Gateway Store had received a shipment of the correct cookware.
They found it locked and barred. The staff had working telephones; in all likelihood they had heard about the trouble at the Marketplace and locked up as soon as the mob was reported marching in their direction.
Had the local authorities talked to the frustrated shoppers, admitted and apologized for the foul-up and promised an answer within a day or two posted at the Marketplace, everyone would probably have gone home to await the official notice of when they might expect to be able to buy their pots. Instead, the local authorities panicked and retreated to the city hall or fire station, which was already blasting the emergency call-up siren.
Maynes, who had been just a half hour away from Beckley by road, arrived right after they set fire to the Gateway Store (it had been broken open in the search for the cookware). The workers ran out the back door, unmolested by anything but shouted insults.
Sirens were blaring from two tall buildings in the few square blocks of downtown Beckley as we picked up speed on the better-maintained town roads. I was driving the Trekker and Maynes directed me to pull up behind the city hall.
A mass of youths in green school uniforms and black combat harness vests, unzipped and in a few cases inside out, hurried up the street in a double file toward the stolid toast-colored administration building with its prairie-school clock tower. It was obviously a pre-2022 build, and someone had made an effort to make it look attractive rather than just utilitarian concrete laid square. The vertical architectura
l lines could be called either reassuring or solemn, depending on mood. There were holes where old letters had been pried off the top. I could still make out a weathered halo around the word “judicial.” Tables with guns were being laid out by some hurrying state troopers, and plastic bins filled with boxes of ammunition waited next to the tables.
“Crapaheenie, they’ve called out the Youth Vanguard,” Maynes said as he directed me to stop.
“Somebody panicked,” MacTierney said.
Home unlocked the gun rack. “Ya think?”
In the older part of Beckley, a former college served as a campus for the Youth Vanguard. The students are often the children of Quisling technocrats, scholarship winners for Youth Vanguard activities, or those who have managed to impress the regime through the standard tests that all children are put through upon entering school and then every four years thereafter. They are the seed corn of the Kurian Order and most receive a basic military education as part of their studies.
These were students at a small technical college inside the city limits. Those attending hoped to become midlevel management in one Kurian Zone or another, supervising power plants or transport facilities. Thanks to its “backwater” location in the Coal Country, the college was also cheap to attend, a consideration for the less-better-off Quislings who wanted their sons and daughters to improve their standing.
Having seen them used as a first-response force in Beckley and as a last-ditch defense line (in an action years later in Northern Missouri), I have come to the conclusion that their employment as such shows both the basic depravity and weakness of the Kurian Order. Ordering schoolchildren into combat guarantees a tragedy of one sort or another.
In the case of Beckley—well, I shall describe it as accurately as I can and allow you, my reader, to form your own conclusions.
Maynes had MacTierney wait with the Trekker while he took Home and me into the administration building. He learned that something called the “Crisis Committee” was meeting, or whatever elements of it were available that day in downtown Beckley. He left us waiting in an upstairs hall while he went into the meeting. Home and I watched a couple of trooper patrol cars pull in, and the now-armed Youth Vanguard file off to the east. I counted seventy-four grouped into three platoons, each with a magazine-fed carbine.
Maynes stormed out of the meeting room, and we hurried downstairs to the sound of unanswered phones buzzing from all the offices.
