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“A cease-fire is in effect,” the fire truck yowled again, a little more shrilly. We allowed a couple of medical armbands with a stretcher out to get the fireman I’d shot.
“Jeez, what a way to treat a thirty-year man,” Sikorsky said.
“Only thing big about him was his belly. He was even small in his corruptions.”
“I’d say they’re done negotiating with us,” Pelloponensis said. “They’ll just keep at us until we’re all dead.”
“There’s movement behind the fire trucks,” Rage shouted from his vantage in the mine offices. “They’re backing and filling. Can’t make up their minds.”
“I’m tired of this. Let’s give up. I don’t care if they kill us, as long as I can get some sleep.”
“Here they come again!”
If they gained control of the mine entrance and the ventilators, we would only last a few hours, if that. They could pump in old-fashioned poisoned gas (the Georgia Control was known to use it in its brushes with the amphibians of the Florida Everglades). So to control the mine entrance, we had to control the above-ground office, the junkyard with its array of heavy equipment, and the giant beetle and daddy longlegs conveyor rigs for loading coal onto the railroad cars and sorted and dumped slag. Then, of course, we somehow had to control some of the mountainside above, or they could just shoot down on both. With our handful, it would be an impossible task once they mustered enough forces to overrun us.
It is my belief that the Coal Country was trying to handle the problem at Number Four quietly. The troopers, firemen, and other reliable armed groups were stretched very thin trying to prevent sabotage of the rail lines, and the Maynes family and its mystery Kurian must have feared that if word of further disorder leaked out, there would be an intervention and takeover, probably by either the Ordnance or Georgia Control.
The Kurian Order always had a hard time finding troops who could be trusted with firearms. I heard innumerable stories of men who passed through all their training, scored excellently on all the po
litical reliability and psychological exams, and then, within a few months of being issued arms and ammunition, gunned down a major or colonel and his staff at a checkpoint to avenge a beloved grandparent or aunt who had been taken away.
Word was getting out, at least to others in the Coal Country, through bus-stop and back-fence networks. Though we did not know it at the time, the Coal Country was already arming itself and intervening on our behalf. Some inventive garage mechanic was producing tire-destroying strips that could be rolled and unrolled on the roads. I got a look at one of these during the fighting—it was regular chain-link fencing with nails and machine screws bent into barbed fishhooks. Tires were another weak point in the Kurian Order; there were always rubber shortages and most tires on transport vehicles were “recycles” made out of shredded rubber and nylon cable. The strips created by this unnamed genius shredded such tires into walnut-sized chunks, leaving cargo idling until replacement tires could be found. For transports on the more lonely roads, their cargoes were salvaged and distributed as quickly as army ants could strip the bones of a fallen horse.
• • •
“A cease-fire is in effect,” that speaker wailed again. For a moment I thought I was dreaming about the death of Bleecher.
Murphy from the dormitory was walking out, holding a white handkerchief in one hand and a manila envelope in the other.
“There’s an offer of a deal in here,” Murphy shouted. “Nobody shoot.”
The loudspeaker continued its message about a cease-fire.
“Fellas, they gave me a message for you. No weird moves now; they got a gun on me,” Murphy said. “C’mon out. I can’t get any closer to the mine or they’ll shoot.”
The men at the bullet-riddled, half-collapsed mine office and junkyard shrugged and made “all clear” signals.
I volunteered to go out and talk to him. Pelloponensis disliked Murphy; I think he went just to finally tell him what he really thought. Sikorsky and a kid named Queever rounded out the group.
“Why do you always step up for this crap, Sikorsky?” Pelloponensis asked as we walked out.
“My grandfather came from Poland,” he said. “I remember the last time we saw him. He told me: ‘We Poles, sometimes the only weapon we have is courage.’ I think he joined the resistance a little while after that, or at least that was what he told my father.”
“Where’s Poland? By New York?” Pelloponensis asked.
We approached the dorm supervisor. He was standing in the hunched-over manner of a man who’d recently been punched in the gut. Perhaps he feared a bullet in the back.
“They told me to give you this envelope,” Murphy said, handing over the manila envelope while the loudspeaker continued to call out the cease-fire message. I promised myself that someday I’d find the fireman in charge of the siege at Number Four and stuff him through the bell of the loudspeaker. “You’re supposed to read it and send me back with the answer. They say you have exactly two minutes to read it and decide.”
I noticed that the end Murphy had been holding was wet with perspiration.
Murphy was sweating . . . melting, rather, so much water seemed to be running out of him. Greasy sweat, too; it glistened like the leavings of a frying pan that had been used to cook bacon.
Oddly, I thought, his chest and armpits were dry. I’ve seen men sweat from the Caribbean to the Dakotas, and they always sweat most profusely from the armpits, followed by the back, brow, and chest. Why would his brow be covered in beady, greasy sweat but not his armpits? Was something thick blocking it?
“Run!” I told my compatriots.
Thanks to my reach, I knocked them back and away from Murphy. Just as we were going down, a strong wave seemed to strike, a remorseless hand shoving us to the earth and a wall of noise and heat licking over us and leaving us dazed with a foggy, underwater sensation. I dragged my companions back toward the mine, feeling blood run from my nostrils.
