AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There is no point in hiding the truth any longer,” I announced on the morning of the third day.
“Hey, Big Yellow’s gone all verbose,” Pelloponensis said. “What are they doing now, talking to us through him?”
“I admire how suspicious you are, but I assure you that’s not the case. I am a Kurian agent out of the Northwest Ordnance,” I said.
“An agent?”
“I can’t tell you my mission. This wasn’t part of it, but it may end up helping after all. Should any of you wish to switch to a new region, just give the password ‘lost: sourball’ to any churchman or captain or above in the Ordnance. Don’t forget the ‘lost’ part. ‘Lost: sourball’—they’ll set you up.”
If any of them ever reached the Ordnance, the password wouldn’t do them any good at all, but they’d probably receive good treatment on the chance that they’d aided an agent from the Ordnance.
What really mattered was that they believed me; they believed me enough so that even if they were brought before some high official of the Church with Fates-only-know-what powers and abilities, they would be able to have their conscience read as clean.
“I believe I will be able to cause enough chaos out there for you to either escape or surrender as you see fit. I have certain—abilities—that should allow me to slip away after. I will do my best for you for the next twenty-four hours; then I must continue with my mission.”
• • •
When night fell, I took six bombs and, crawling carefully through the wrecks of the junkyard, wired them together to blow. One charge I put under a pair of gasoline cans for some additional flame; another I buried in a mass of taconite pellets inside a piece of concrete sewage line to make sort of an oversized poor-man’s claymore. I rigged everything to a switch I could reach by crawling into a little hollow I scooped out under a defunct crane.
I covered myself with an old tarp and crept out beyond the junkyard. The first observation post of the enemy was a good hundred yards away over ground covered in bits of slag and brush. I didn’t want to get too far beyond the junkyard; I needed to retreat to it as soon as I started my “commotion.”
I don’t know if my bombs killed even a single Coal Country fireman, but with a couple of squads pursuing me into the junkyard, I at least scared them enough so they backed out. Mortar shells and illumination rounds began to rain all over the scrap heap. Their flash was just what I wanted—the light would affect the eyes in the hills no doubt looking down into the cauldron of Number Four.
I’d marked my escape route early, a muddy notch in the hillside running up the south-side ridge. There were several spots on the hillside providing a good view of the seasonal watercourse, and there would surely be a sentry at at least one. But thanks to the water that came and went with season and rainfall, there was a lot of brush and young tree life flanking it as well.
• • •
I watched them strip the miners naked and load them into a van. There was not much doubt about what would happen to them. Other firemen were laying charges; they would blow all the mine shafts of Number Four, even the abandoned ones.
All through the fighting at Number Four, perhaps from the moment they’d taken Aym away, a resolve had been building within me. This slipshod Kurian Zone known as the Coal Country was as rotten as a termite-riddled house with sawdust falling at the slightest rap on the planking. It wouldn’t take much for it to come crashing down. Aym, and thousands like her over the years, couldn’t be retrieved, but they could be avenged.
Few knew better than I the state of the roads in the Coal Country; I’d picked my way across them often enough. The truck carrying the naked, captive miners wouldn’t make very good time, and there was only one road out of Number Four to take. I picked up my weapons, including my sharpened shovel, and set off quickly, keeping just below the ridgeline.
• • •
I found what I was looking for: a boulder above a notch in the road and a downed tree I could use as a lever. It took some small effort to properly position the tree and pile up a few stones against a larger rock outcropping to use as a fulcrum.
The kidney-shaped boulder, about the size of a children’s plastic play-pool, careened down the hillside in a satisfyingly destructive manner. Unfortunately, while some of the debris that it brought in its wake wound up on the road, the boulder itself bounced off the bank opposite and came to rest in the drainage ditch along the shoulder. I extracted my tree-limb lever and hurried down the slope. My pick-exercised muscles were able to work it back onto the road with just a few minutes’ work. I decided I had the time to perfect the positioning, so I moved it to the side of the road where it would come into view at the last possible moment from a driver descending the track from the mine. I didn’t put it square in the middle of the road—another vehicle might precede the truck and the drivers might take the initiative to get out and remove the obstacle. Instead, I filled one side, so a careful driver could go around it us
ing the very soft shoulder at a crawl.
Then I concealed myself next to the drainage ditch under a layer of hacked-off redbud and waited.
They must have kept the transport at the mine an extra hour in case anyone else gave himself up before the charges were detonated. A pickup truck with fireman markings was the first vehicle I saw. The driver went around the landslide just as cautiously as I would have had I been behind the wheel, and took no more notice of it than he would the other three or four bad sections of road he’d probably encounter that day.
The collection van waggled into view, rocking on its worn-out suspension. It was a boxy, utilitarian vehicle. I’m told most of them were converted parcel-delivery trucks—they got better gas mileage than armored cars, which had better uses. Kurian Zone mechanics never seemed to get around to working on those accursed vans.
Like the pickup truck, it slowed to negotiate the boulder. Unlike the pickup, when the right-hand wheels spun up and out of the shoulder drainage, it had the Coal Country’s sole Golden One clinging to the door and rusty running board.
My sharpened shovel opened the passenger side window before the guard riding next to the driver had time to do much more than throw up his arm against the spiderwebbed safety glass.
I reached in and extracted the passenger. He didn’t quite fit out the window, but I made him do so, a little noisily and messily for him. It was an object lesson in always wearing one’s restraint harness when driving. I threw the Church’s collector into the woods, where he left a provocative red trail for the scavengers to follow.
Inside, the guard was fumbling for his pistol. He was wearing his seat belt, and it was caught over his holster.
“‘This day’s black fate on more days doth depend; this but begins the woe others must end,’” I said.
The muddy and somewhat bloody apparition speaking to him made him pause long enough in his fumbling for his sidearm that he was probably still processing the quote from Romeo and Juliet when the point of my shovel caught him under his chin and the New Universal Church was down one more collection driver.
