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We piled into a charter bus from the Coal Country transport line. It smelled like unwashed humans and the scented sawdust used in bars to clean up vomit. A contingent of our own miners came along, paying Prapa a small fee for the ride and admission.
Prapa, drinking the whole ride, announced that he’d bet heavily on me. It seemed as though the whole mine had bet on me. According to Rage, who loved watching punches being thrown almost as much as he loved throwing them himself, even Aym had placed one hundred dollars on me, which made me feel like a traitor to the rest. I did not feel guilty for the other miners. I am aware that a fool will lose his money one way or another. At least losing a bet doesn’t poison the liver in the manner of the cheap liquor a won bet would have otherwise gone to purchase. But Aym had put up that cash out of regard.
We pulled up in front of a ruin of an old beige-colored hotel near Charleston. It had a vast atrium running six or seven floors—it was hard to tell with temporary lighting—and it smelled of damp ruin. A low roar of voices inside—men struggling to be heard without outright shouting—sounded like surf on a ship’s hull all around.
They’d set up portable lights run by a noisy generator, illuminating the sanded tile floor of the atrium into a glow that hurt the eyes. The atrium was square, and on the balconies running up into the darkness, spectators hung over the rail like idling sailors on a ship.
They hustled me off to the stripped kitchen, where I changed into a red knit scarf that I wrapped around myself as a sort of loincloth. Prapa painted the number 4 on my back in red barn paint, as though I were some kind of advertisement, clearly not giving a whit how sticky it would become as it dried. This steeled my resolve, and I hoped Prapa hadn’t been engaging in his usual bragging about how much money he’d bet.
I never learned the names of my “trainers.” One was bald and short; the other muscular, save for an enormous, drum-tight belly. The trainers didn’t really know what to do with me. I got the impression they didn’t do much training; their equipment looked limited to stitching pugilists back together after a bout.
The boxing ring had no ropes or corners, just a circle about thirty feet across. I was told being pushed out of the circle was an automatic defeat, but it appears they changed this rule at the last minute when they saw me.
There appeared to be an argument about my competing. The fight rules for the Coal Country bouts were in a small three-page pamphlet, and I saw Prapa arguing with the referee and some of the other mine directors and fight officials (the officials wore little red-white-and-blue boutonnieres of the Sports and Recreation Club, one of the few times I’ve seen the colors of the old American flag combined in the Kurian Zone).
There was a good deal of muttering about my size and reach. I looked up, but the figures on the balconies were all shadow and outline, like crows lining a wire on a gloomy night.
The referee wore a black version of hospital scrubs, save that the shirt hung down to his midthigh, with a red sash wound about his waist. He had scarred skin as dark as the coal we dug. Despite his gray hair, he looked as fit as any of the waiting fighters. No one told me directly at the time, but the red sash was for when he would oversee a duel. He would unwrap the sash and tie the duelists’ left arms together (or right arms, if the left arms were dominant).
My opponent was small, even for a man, and as he warmed up, he did an elaborate back-and-forth with his bare feet that reminded me of a dance move.
My trainers made “fighting” gestures with their fists, a comical pantomime of “Put your dukes up, for God’s sake.” I flattened my ears and raised my fists.
The other fighter didn’t like the look of them. He came inside my reach and gave an experimental duck-and-punch to my stomach. I let out a whoof! and covered up, backing away.
“No, no, stay in the ring! Fight!” I heard Prapa scream.
My opponent, after a moment dancing away from the counterblow that never came, stood flat-footed, perhaps not believing his luck.
“Yellow as his fur.”
“Wasn’t he a bodyguard for Maynes?”
“Winner!” the referee shouted.
Director Prapa looked like a man on his way to his execution the whole ride back. Or perhaps all the
alcohol had rendered him somnambular.
• • •
When I told Aym the story during our second real conversation, she tilted her head back and laughed. “Weird thing is, the man’s so sure of himself. He takes himself more seriously than anyone else takes him, director title and all. It’s never occurred to him that there’s a reason he’s at Number Four, too.”
I had been longing to learn more about the Coal Country and how the arrangement with the Maynes clan got started, and I finally had my chance, but I was even more curious about the firemen. They had been on my mind since the massacre at Beckley. Most Kurian Zones had low-level toughs to keep order, close enough to the locals to know who the troublemakers were, but not so well armed and trained that they could cause trouble if they turned their weapons against their masters. The firemen of the Coal Country seemed an imprudent mix of heavily armed and badly trained. As far as I knew, the fire department arrangement here was unique in the Kurian Order.
“How did the firemen get started?” I asked.
“First fire marshal, it was. Bear Torril. He believed himself the perfect revolutionary. Pure intellect and all that. No emotion, no conscience, no regrets. He hated rich people like you couldn’t believe. Until you saw the bodies.
“He rode around here after the collapse, the ravies—there were little groups of survivors here and there. He’d be very helpful, offer a ride, ask them about their lives before. When he found someone who he decided had too much money, or too nice a house, he’d find some excuse to stop and get everyone out and kill the ones he’d chosen.
“Of course, most of what they owned was only on paper, so they’d lost it in the collapse.
“That brought him to the attention of the Kurians. They didn’t like him killing people, but they admired his efforts to remake the world in a different image.
“Imagine that. You survive everything. Civilization’s gone, the ravies kills and scatters everyone you know, and along comes a college dropout who decides you used to have too much and he sticks a knife in your back.
“The Kurians put him to work rounding up people he thinks might give them problems. He starts working out of a fire station because you can live there twenty-four hours easily enough, maintain your vehicles.
