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“Just drain the excess out of the AV.”
“Hick-ree done now?”
“Yes, all done. Here.”
He presented me with a little tray containing some pseudo-chocolate cookies and juice, as if I were a little boy who’d just returned from school.
“I think you have him confused with a blood donor. He probably wants a cig and a Reboot.*”
“He likes sweets. Given the size difference between us, I want to stay on the best possible terms with this particular patient.”
I slowly ate the nearly tasteless cookies and drank the juice. The juice, at least, was delicious. The sweetness took the edge off the embarrassment. A little.
TINDER
A heat wave struck at the beginning of September that had all of Coal Country angry and sweltering. Perhaps because no one could sleep, resistance to the regime became even more open. Troopers were having their tires punctured in the time it took them to stop for a meal; a New Universal Church cathedral in Charleston had its bell tower dynamited and a good part of the roof blown off. Or perhaps it wasn’t solely the heat; the Maynes Mining Holdings suffered a rash of underground breakdowns. It was plenty cool in those deep tunnels, as I was soon to learn.
Maynes had pulled over behind some truck traffic at a rail intersection where a landslide had blocked both track and road to find out from some loitering troopers whether the blockage was sabotage or weather related—extreme heat and cold did enough damage to the rocky cuts that it wasn’t necessarily the work of the nascent resistance.
The trucks eventually gave up and turned around to find an alternate route. Maynes stayed. Some of his old supervisory f
lair returned as he worked the radio to get more labor transported to help clear the slide.
“Good thing we’re set up for an overnight,” Home said, checking the liquor cabinet.
“It’ll be a lonely night with just the two of us,” Maynes said. I was rarely counted as one of the party.
“I could walk back to the crossroads,” Home offered. “Maybe there’s a girl at that checkpoint coffee stand. . . .”
“More likely a former trooper with a bad knee,” Maynes said. “Checkpoints are plum jobs for line-of-duty injuries. Won’t kill us to be bored one night. Where’s that deck of cards?”
“The nekkid one’s in the glove compartment. The regular deck’s over the sink,” Home said.
“Maybe the regular deck.”
Twilight came, and they broke out some cheese and nuts and crackers Maynes kept for refreshment. One of the troopers made a run for sandwiches (and incidentally confirmed that the crossroads checkpoint a mile back was run by a one-eyed ex-trooper, male). I stretched out on the roof of the Trekker. The bugs did not bother me very much once I wrapped a repellent-spritzed bandanna around my ears.
I did not rest easy. I had the feeling that we were being watched. I wondered if the Resistance might be sighting on me with a rifle. While an ironic end at the trigger finger of a Coal Country sniper had a certain macabre appeal—I’d shot my share of human Quislings from a distance during the siege atop Big Rock Hill and in other encounters—I decided it was in my interest to relocate. I left the roof and managed to squeeze under the high-clearance Trekker. I also took a tire iron to my resting place with me.
“What’s the matter, Hickory?” Home asked as I wiggled beneath the bus.
“Cooler down under,” I said.
A half-awake part of me registered that Home had stepped out of the Trekker to relieve himself at the roadside. I noted the sounds of picks and shovels in the distance at the slide. More labor must have arrived sometime after I took cover beneath the Trekker.
I heard a quick but heavy step behind him and startled. I saw a curious pair of human boots—they were brown, in the style that was sometimes called the “Thousand Milers,” and they resembled a big, heavy, and high oxford shoe. Old Smoke, the frequent companion of David Valentine and me, had once owned a nice pair she’d taken off a dead Quisling. For a moment I thrilled at the thought that it might be her, but the pair was far too large for the petite Cat.
I dared move just enough to get a view and saw a tall figure in a long coat, sort of a cross between a trench coat and a ghillie suit, reach for Home. It picked him up by the ears and spun around.
It was a Reaper. A little light thrown off by the Trekker reflected off its face, giving it the color of bone china.
“call your boss out,” it said.
The Reaper pressed the hands holding Home’s skull ever more tightly together.
“i would have a word with you, maynes.”
“Help!” screamed Home. His face was either bright red or purplish; it was hard to tell in the low light leaking from the van.
