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“Rage” Jones was always letting arguments spill over into physical aggression. Usually he settled for a headlock, but every now and then it escalated into punches and he lost his Prime chit for a month. For all the trouble in the mine he caused, I understand he had an unimpeachable reputation at the dorm. He spent most of his time cleaning his body, his clothes, or his room, never drank, and liked to help out with upkeep projects.
There was Pelloponensis, who never had a kind word to say about anything or anyone. He had a sixth sense, which some men who go underground develop, for when and where a collapse will take place. When Pelloponensis said it was time to shore up a tunnel, everyone dropped what he was doing and ran for light and lumber. New workers learned the job from him.
He liked to tell a story of witnessing a Reaper kill a man. He told it to me while leaning against the conveyor that took the coal to the surface, me and a couple other kids new to the mine put on shoveling.
It happened up at an old quarry on the Maynes estate. He’d snuck in to steal from the extensive Maynes orchards one summer night, got hot, and thought he’d take a dip in the pond that had accumulated at the deep end of the old quarry. He wasn’t the only stranger on the Maynes grounds that night; a woman was lurking there. Thin and scruffy she was, with the twitchiness of someone addicted to some artificial stimulant or depressant.
“I was having a swim—warm day, but the water was really cold from the previous night—when I saw a flash of white. Thought it was a ghost for a second. Just out of the corner of my eye. Made me hunker down in the water a bit like a startled turtle diving. I peeked up and I saw her, this girl, all scratched up, walking barefoot through the quarry. She didn’t seem harmful, so I came up out of the water. Strange thing, though; once I got out, I saw her feet were really clean. I noticed that right off.
“She looked like death already,” Pelloponensis continued. “There I was, stripped down, with my clothes thrown over the pears. She gave kind of a giggle. I didn’t have much in the way of body hair then—made up for it since. By the time I hit sixty I’ll look like Hickory there.”
“‘You can’t be the old guy,’ she said. I think.” He shrugged.
“Then I saw it rise up behind her. Yellow eyes, staring at her. Seemed
fifteen feet tall compared to her. How didn’t she hear it? I backpedaled, tripped, splashed into the water as if I’d cannonballed off the cliff.”
He paused the story to judge the effect on me and the other youths.
Pelloponensis smirked. “None of you have ever seen one just ten feet away, I guess. Well, I have, and I’m happy to put off the day it happens again for as long as possible. Worst thing is, it wasn’t over quick, like the churchmen say if you get them talking about such things. It dangled her by her frigging hair, batted her about a bit with two fingers of one hand. Just a poke from two fingers sent her swinging at the end of its arm like a, oh, what’s them things that hang off the bottom of a grandfather clock. The ticker or whatever. Well, whatever they are, she swung around for a bit like one.
“Then I realized there was something else about that monster’s face—he was missing his upper lip.
“I think she fainted from all the screaming. Her head sort of lolled back, and that was when he—when he went into her. It was like he unhinged his jaw and an eel emerged—a black, barbed, slimy eel that hit her right here.” He tapped his fingers hard at the notch atop his manubrium between the clavicles. Both the boys touched themselves just below the throat.
“I’d always heard they got all sluggish and sleepy after feeding, but not this one. He took her body—beyond pale now, like a piece of chalk—and hurled it in the air like a ballplayer tossing his cap at the end of the game. She splashed down no farther from me than I am to you.
“One of those doll eyes was staring at me while I waited for that bloodsucker to depart. It danced around a bit.
“I waded through the pond, stepping the whole way on sunken logs. At least I hope they were sunken logs—my imagination was running wild. But dead men float, right?”
The boys nodded dumbly. “She had to die sometime,” one of them said.
“Kur’s got a plan for us,” the other said.
Pelloponensis shrugged. “The farmer’s got a plan for his chickens, too. Just because you’ve got a goal in mind, it don’t make wrong right.”
Once he was safe at home, it had occurred to him that the Reaper had followed him, and not the woman, into the quarry. The thought made him shudder.
Strangely, it seemed like I was learning more about the Maynes Empire off its property than I ever did on it. I’d heard whispers of a quarry and wondered if that was where the Maynes secrets were buried.
Others I frequently worked beside included Galloway, who had a magnificent voice. You could hear him singing in the tunnels for hundreds of meters as though in a concert hall if the equipment was silent. Sikorsky, the mechanic-electrician who had some sort of nasal condition that made him sound as though he had a permanent cold, did his job with just seven fingers and one thumb. Another was my first friend, the easily embarrassed Olson, the strongest of the group and an enthusiastic wrestler—he pulled me off my feet with a clever move the first time we tested our strength against each other.
As with every other gathering away from the ears of the Order in the Coal Country, the conversation frequently turned to the troubles.
I did not participate in these discussions, of course. They took place at breaks for meals. Sometimes I feigned a nap, or if I had heard repeated opinions, I played helpful Grog and refilled one of the water jugs or took away the old rags and towels everyone used to get the worst of the dust off his lips and hands before eating.
The old-timers said that “bad blood” tended to build up every fifteen or twenty years, leading to some kind of fighting against the regime. A few firehouses burned down; there were some disappearances that might be blamed on either vengeance or a Kurian-directed purge; a stick of dynamite might be thrown under a porch or down a chimney. Eventually, the Coal Country “would settle down again with the screws tightened in some parts, loosened up in others, so the coal machine could start production again.”
The old-timers admitted that since the massacre, it was the worst they’d ever seen. “And if it doesn’t stop, something or somebody’s going to come down hard. Then God help us.”
Most of the workers thought that it would die down after a while. “It’s already chilling out.”
Then firebrands like Jones said that snipped telephone wires and slashed tires and derailed coal cars weren’t much more than pranks, enraging in the moment, then quickly forgotten. “If we really wanted to put a hurting on the Kurian Order and show them they can’t shoot kids down in the street, all we’d have to do is kill coal production through a general strike and occupation of the mines. What else are they going to burn? Church bulletins?”
“Big talk,” an old hand countered. “If the coal quit, they’d just have their pastors give the sermons by candlelight. Reapers don’t need electricity to find us. They want us cold and in the dark, believe me. They don’t need a technological society; something out of the Dark Age would suit them just fine. One more thing to blame on the Resistance.”
“I heard the Resistance is giving up. Ever since they got Texas and that chunk of Oklahoma, they’ve got food and oil. They’re fat and happy now,” the old-timer named Sikorsky said.
