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Maynes couldn’t locate his clipboard with personnel matters requiring his attention, or he had forgotten why he had returned to his office in the first place. I subtly called attention to it by knocking it on the floor with my elbow.
He was rooting around in the liquor cabinet, sadly.
He extracted a gun, a heavy-framed revolver, and a holster and put them on. After a moment’s thought, he also took a box of ammunition.
“That’d be funny if I came to it and forgot the bullets!”
Given my employer’s sense of humor, “funny” could mean about anything, but at the back of my mind there was the idea of suicide. At least he didn’t attempt to load the gun. A little more alcohol and he might not be able to fit a bullet into the cylinder.
“He’s in no condition to—”
My footing slipped and I almost dropped Maynes. As I shifted my grip, my elbow rose, regrettably catching the nighttime security man under the chin. His teeth met with a clack like a window shutter slamming. His eyes rolled over in their sockets and he folded at the knees.
“Whaddya think you’re doing, Mr. Maynes?” one of the White Palace security staff said. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“He should be out in the quarry with the rest of them,” another put in. “Damn pervert.”
“I’m working,” Maynes slurred. “Working harder than you pickers, anyway.”
We made it to the Trekker. There were two men in charge of the lot. One of them spoke on a radio and waved me over to the bus. I was following orders after all, getting Maynes out of the way.
I pulled out of the lot. I passed the lined-up Georgia Control security vehicles pulled half off the approaches to the White Palace, sleeping wolves ready to be roused for pursuit, and took what I hoped would be my last look at the White Palace. It looked dingy in the moonlight. I wondered if the new, reduced Maynes clan would bother to keep the windows and paint trim so bright and fresh.
Maynes fell asleep for a while in the back of the Trekker. I consulted a map and the latest information I could find about the roads over the Appalachians. We gassed up on the Maynes account, and I filled thirty more gallons’ worth in extra cans just in case.
I had logged forty-odd miles of westward crawling, the speedometer falling exasperatingly lower and lower as the roads grew narrower and worse. We were approaching the western borders of Coal Country when Maynes awoke. He visited the inboard toilet, then joined me up by the driver’s semi-enclosure.
“Hey, Hick, when do we get there?”
“Many hours yet.”
Maynes yawned. He took a big swig from a three-quarters empty bottle that had been nearly full in his office. “That’s too bad. Where are we going?”
“You told me—go east. Straight for Ken-tuck.”
“So I did.” Maynes blinked blearily and rubbed his eyes. “Goddamn right. Let’s go west, old Grog.” He chuckled. “West! West! West! Not fast enough! You’re relieved, old cock.”
Maynes took the wheel.
“Think again, picker,” Maynes yelled at the windshield.
My life seemed to be repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, and this time as a farce. I braced for impact.
/> Maynes, addled by alcohol, crashed through the checkpoint when all he would have had to do was show his ID on the off chance the troopers wouldn’t recognize him at once. But fate had not placed me in the employ of a man who could drink and be rational at the same time.
The reinforced front of the Trekker struck the Trooper car hard enough to spin it one hundred eighty degrees.
It was an appropriate end for Joshua Maynes the Third, I suppose. He looked as though he were trying to perform a sex act on the steering column of the Trekker. He was still alive.
Good Grog that I was, I’d certainly try to go for help, especially since the radio had been destroyed in the accident. Or that was how I made it look, since it wasn’t a portable model.
• • •
Two miles west something flashed across the road. At first I thought it was a bounding albino deer.
I did not get a good look at the death. My impression was that of a stumbling, pale figure running through the woods. A ragged, ever-shifting arc of men and women armed with various weapons, from revolvers to assault rifles, pausing to fire or reload, then moving again to keep the quarry in sight.
It turned its face only once. It was slight, clearly a youngish Reaper, as these things are reckoned. Its pale face had been wounded at the outer edge of the jaw; naked bone could be seen with black tar clinging around the wound—Reaper blood goes gummy and as black as an old human scab almost instantly. The yellow eyes were wide with fear and I felt empathy for it. It had probably been penned most of its life, fed old dogs and cats or rabbits, emotionally at a four-or five-year-old’s level—and that was a four- or five-year-old woefully mistreated by everyone it knew.
