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NEW ARRIVALS
We lost two miners in a cave-in. It was for a stupid reason—they were assigned to remove shoring materials in a disused tunnel with a played-out seam and there was a major cave-in. We opened an old disused tunnel that had once reached that seam and dug from the new Number Four as well.
Everyone agreed it was a stupid risk. Even the rawest new miner was worth more than shoring materials, and these men were both experienced.
We pulled them out, mottled and unconscious, and they were unceremoniously loaded onto a fire department ambulance for their trip to “hospital.” We never saw either of them again.
Prapa raged about the lost production in the effort to find the men, and very foolishly declared that future rescues had to be approved. Inspired by Rage, everyone started calling the new policy the “Dead Man’s Stamp”—meaning that by the time Prapa and the rest of the Kurian Order decided to dig someone out and put their stamp of approval on the rescue, the person would have long since ceased caring about earthly endeavors.
One of the young bucks who joined our shift was named Longliner. He did not look cut out for mine work. He was reedy with a sharp beak of a nose under wary eyes, but as it turned out, he had some strength in those flimsy-looking limbs. He was a friendly young man. I liked him, mostly because I was no longer the new miner. Someone else would be in charge of carrying the shit-bucket away from the coal face every afternoon.
He was self-possessed, for all his youth, and tried to make friends with everyone. I find human charm either amusing or annoying—frankly, I’d rather watch a dog roll over and expose its belly for scratches.
• • •
My time in the mines had one amusing diversion. I had a very short-lived career as a prizefighter representing Number Four.
It started on a warm spring day. I’d been at the mine more than six months. The sun blazed, almost unfiltered by lingering upper-atmosphere swirls. You could hear rocks cracking in the mountains when the machinery was quiet.
Prapa, the director of Number Four, was picking through the slag heap, seeing how much coal was being accidentally thrown out with the other mining waste with a couple of men in engineer boots and the jeans-tie-and-corduroy-jacket ensemble under their white hard hats that seemed to be favored by technical professionals in the Coal Country.
I was doing Aym a favor by bringing her empty propane tanks up to the office after my shift, and the visitors stood up when they saw me.
“What is that, a Grog or a white Squatch?” one of the white helmet group said.
“Thunder, look at the size of him!” another technician said.
“According to the White Palace, he took on twenty bounty men in a bar,” Prapa said. “He was part of Bone’s security detail, right up until he drove into that tree.” He inflated his lungs. “Hey, Hickory, come over here. These men have never seen your kind before.”
It has often struck me that stories that would be laughably outrageous if told about a man are given credence when one of the Xenos is the subject, even if the one in question is a slightly (if not ripely, at this writing) aged Golden One.
I put down the empty propane tanks and stepped over to the slag heap. The men descended, carefully. One of them tossed a fist-sized chunk of coal he’d found.
“You like to fight, Hickory?” Prapa asked.
I lowered my face and stuck out my hands, palms up. “No, me no fight. No cause trouble. No. Never.”
“Never heard of a stoop who could talk that good,” one of the engineers said. “You’d think he was human.”
“I’d never mistake that for human,” the other corduroy jacket said.
Prapa ignored the byplay. “No, no—you’re misunderstanding. Fight when it’s your job.”
One of the men stroked the fur on my upper arm—a bit too sensually for my taste. “He could go all the way, representing your mine.”
“What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine,” the other engineer said. I didn’t understand the reference. Was the mine under some sort of pressure to produce more?
I didn’t care to become a fighter, even a part-time one. Were I to succeed, I might attract the interest of another Kurian Zone, the Ordnance, for example. And who knows what rules set up these fights, or how they were arranged to make the contests even? Or what might happen to me in the pursuit of seeing me lose—or win, I guess. The Kurians are supposed to have some combat drugs that make you unbeatable right up to the moment when a blood vessel bursts in your brain. I might be injured or crippled.
“We’ll give him a try,” Prapa said. His tanned face smiled widely enough that I thought of an orange being squeezed until it spits sweet juice. “Don’t worry, Hickory, just a game. Not like your job before. Contest. Boom-boom-boom,” he said, pantomiming punches.
• • •
Saturdays and Sundays the Number Four ran only one shift each day, and it was a short-handed shift at that. There was coal piling up all over the Coal Country because of transport “accidents” as they were now being openly called.
Prapa and the mine’s senior foreman, Castaway, came to collect me at the dorm. Castaway said it was time for my “contest.” If I won, I’d have three days off with all I could eat. If I lost, I’d still get two days off to recover.
“Hope you’re hungry,” Prapa said. The gold bracelets on his wrist jangled as he continually tapped his knee.
