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I took control of the wheel and gearshift and wrapped my toes around the clutch and accelerator. I took the van down the first turnoff trail I could find and pulled it out of sight. There was enough brush displaced to make it obvious to a searcher, but traffic coming down the road not looking for a missing van probably would not notice it.
The nine naked miners flinched when I opened the door.
“You’re about fifteen miles from the mine down the access road,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t do more for you, but I wish you luck. I think there are some clothes for the Church in those lockers. You can have the shotgun in the mount and the driver’s pistol, if you think those will help.”
Pelloponensis cleared his throat. “Hey, Hickory, sorry for all—”
The apology wasn’t really necessary for either of us. “I have other matters to attend to. I’d keep off the roads if I were you. At night, try to find livestock and bed down as close to them as you can. It’ll confuse the Reapers. Perhaps the dogs as well.”
“I’m not running like some kid who just saw his first Hood,” Pelloponensis said. “They started a fight with the miners. If there’s anyone ordinary in the Coal Country who isn’t at least cousin to someone working coal, I’ll dig a hundredweight holding my pick with my ass cheeks. We’re going to finish this fight.”
PART THREE
CONQUEST AND CLEANSING
On my own, my chances of making it out of the Coal Country and into the western slopes of the Appalachians were better than even. I could cause enough chaos to set things in an uproar that would give the other escaping miners a chance.
Walking away from a land where men I considered friends died in a fight we shared would be dishonorable. It would be understandable—anyone who’d ever fought against the Kurian Order covertly might even say just getting away alive was a kind of victory—but dishonorable nonetheless. If I ran, I would taste the bitterness of the act for the rest of my life.
So my staying was the easier choice. One might even say it was the default, to a Golden One, since the sense of keeping one’s honor clean lightened any burden.
What a laughable way to start a war—dirty, tired, and almost unarmed. I needed a serious weapon.
A successful guerilla blends into the local population, living invisibly until he chooses the right moment to strike, like one of the praying mantis species that has developed to look like a dead leaf.
I, however, looked like exactly no one in all of Coal Country. A local would comment less on an oak growing up through the center of a highway intersection than he would on me.
A guerilla also needs knowledge of the land and the disposition of his enemies. My time with Maynes had given me that. A guerilla also needs a feel for the locals. Will they aid him, or turn him over to the authorities? Except for a very few favored by Maynes Consolidated, the locals held a long-simmering grudge against the Order. They were already in revolt, even if it was a slow-motion, dead-of-night sort of resistance.
Third, a guerilla needs motivation. I was sick of this stinking principality, rotten to the core and painful as an infected tooth. But I could not just leave. Once you’ve witnessed a certain amount of kindness and cruelty, you’re bound to a place, and if I fled without trying to make it better, I would regret it for whatever days and years I have left in this life.
I had a pretty good idea of where to get weapons.
I thought the shadows were playing tricks on me, turning the black, blasted form into one of those multilimbed god-statues from across the Pacific.
Had such a god descended on this quarter of the Americas, I could not have been more shocked, once my brain interpreted what had come shambling out of the hills.
It was one of the Reapers, sent into Number Four—or rather a pair of them. One was terribly injured, its torso having been severed in the area of the pelvis and turned into a tarry stump. The other carried it, lashed on its chest with webbing belts. The Reaper still in possession of its legs dragged a third, reduced to a head and most of one shoulder.
The head on the tied-on torso searched. Its eyes shone against the black mask of smoke, soot, and the dried blood both wore. The Reaper with the legs had a terribly disfigured face. One eye was a black mess like a roasted mushroom.
It occurred to me that the Kurian Order must be pressed if it had its members searching the hills around the mine with such a contraption. Whichever Kurian was animating these must have been down to his last Reaper, or very nearly so. A Kurian without his Reapers might not starve to death per se, but without infusions of the vital aura from his victims, he will wither like a drought-afflicted tomato.
I had no sure weapon for killing one of these murderous machines. Bullets would only slow it, unless I was very fortunate in placing the rounds.
Sensing my uncertainty and an advantage with predatory instinct, it stalked me, the head with intact vision clacking its teeth together. Could the piece of brother Reaper have meant something to it? Or did it just want to unnerve me with the unsettling sight of the living puppet?
I removed my belt and wrapped by left hand in it so that the buckle lay across my knuckles, and I snapped a branch off with the other.
I waved the branch, testing its reaction. Both heads followed it, the head on the legless one slightly faster. I stepped to the side; it imitated me.
I could run, perhaps outrun it for a while. I would weaken before it did. No, it would be better to fight it here.
All those thoughts, and others, circled my mind in the time it took us to execute this brief dance. I surveyed the ground, looking for some sort of advantage.
I feinted forward and it sidestepped. I ran to a tree with a dead branch and began to crack the limb off with the idea of using it as a club.
With my back turned, the Reaper team charged.
