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“Big boy like you must have a big appetite,” he said.
After a couple hours’ delay, a white-red-and-black bus, layered in color like a cake and bearing the Consolidated Mines logo, pulled into the lot. Four more men shuffled from the workshop. One had healing bruises all over his face.
A man with hair like a brush emerged from the recruiting office, his tie continually flapping over his shoulder in the breeze. The guards formed us into a line and arranged themselves behind us.
“Welcome to Consolidated,” he said. “My name’s Stackworth and I’m the director of requisitioned labor. Most of my men call me Boss. I don’t care where you came from—”
At this, Mr. Vernabie tried to speak up: “Mr. Stackworth, I’m—”
I heard a quick step, a buzz, and I smelled ozone. Mr. Vernabie crumbled to the ground, wetting himself.
“As I said, I don’t care where you came from. You work for Consolidated now, and we keep discipline. You’re lucky you ended up here. As far as we’re concerned, you’re reborn. You’ll find you’ve got a new chance here. We pride ourselves on our fairness and promoting from within. I myself arrived here wearing a pair of handcuffs; now I report directly to the White Palace. We’ll work you hard, but you’ll be paid. Give an extra effort and it’ll be noticed and rewarded. Do your job, obey policy, and let the company take care of you. As your young associate just learned, the first policy is to listen when orders are being given. Are we networking?”
“Yes, sir,” most of the men mumbled.
They gave the men some crisp new overalls—I received a gray woolen blanket that I fashioned into a poncho or tunic, belted with some cording. By the time I was done dressing myself, it was my turn for a brief medical examination. The nurse, who spent the whole examination twitching despite the happy, soothing coos I offered as she did her inspection, finally wrote a few vitals down in a shaking longhand.
“I don’t suppose you know what’s normal for your kind,” she said, taking my temperature by sticking a probe in my ear.
“No injections! No injections,” I said.
“Don’t worry; we’re not injecting you. No injections.”
They put me through some basic cognitive tests. I found it interesting that in this little Kurian Zone, they tried to find out a little about your capabilities. I’d heard of plantations where they worked you, young or old, skilled or not, until your body broke down, and then they handed you over to the Reapers. I sorted a tray full of different-shaped objects into matching slots. Then they had me identify road signs. They watched me load and then use a simple bolt-action .22, and, satisfied with that, gave me an auto-loading pistol, one of the Atlanta Gunworks copies of a Glock, I believe. Luckily it had an oversized trigger guard. A man in a navy blue uniform and shiny black shoes set down a wooden tool carrier filled with rags, gun oil, and muzzle swabs.
“Strip and clean,” he said.
“Strip! Clean!” I repeated, smiling as widely as I could. I examined the weapon for a moment from a variety of angles, set it down, and pretended to think; then I picked it up and checked to make sure it wasn’t loaded. It wasn’t. I broke down the weapon and went to work with the swabs.
“Not bad,” the man who’d given me the pistol said to Stackworth, when he looked in on my progress. The others who had arrived with me had long since been filtered through the system; I had heard them say something about having lunch once they were on the way to their final destinations. . . . “Had a slow start. Grogs keep skills pretty well, as long as they can practice. Their memory’s more or less muscle-based, you might say. Like riding a bicycle, you couldn’t tell me how to do it, at least not so’s I could, but once you get your feet on the pedals, your body remembers the skill. They’re like that with everything.”
While I will admit that is a serviceable description of how the Gray Ones build and retain skills, my kind work at a higher level of thought and retention. Though even I appreciate mnemonics. Anything from a matchbook to a day-pass to revisiting a bit of road will bring back memories that were lost to me—which is one of the reasons much of this was written contemporaneously in Golden One notation.
• • •
After the physical and mental tests, Stackworth came around and clipped a blue plastic tag to my improvised covering. He had an assistant with him bearing a ledgerlike book, much wider than it was high. “You’re just right for bodyguard work, Groggie. Impressive size and muscle mass. Mechanical skills. They say you can drive and if you don’t, we can teach you. You got a name?”
I thumped my chest. “King.”
Stackworth looked at the assistant’s clipboard. “What do you think? Might do for muscle in Bone’s detail. They told me to keep an eye out for someone unusually big and eager. Furry here exceeds specifications by miles.”
“Yeah,” the assistant said. “An ape’s just the wheel that won’t squeak. Won’t mind Bone’s habits. He’d clean up unpleasant leftovers.”
Stackworth took a deep breath. “Okay, ship him to the White Palace.” Then he carefully rested his hand on my back, judging my reaction. “You’re in luck—King. You’re heading for the garden spot of the coal pits. Good food sitting on clean dishes. Work hard and make me look good, now.”
“Who’s going to take him over?” the assistant asked.
“I will,” Stackworth said. “It’s an excuse. I might even get some family liquor out of it. Order us something from the motor pool to haul him.”
THE BLACK PRINCE OF THE WHITE PALACE
The roads in the Appalachian Virginias are not maintained particularly well, so officials get around in high-clearance vehicles. Pickups and sport utilities converted into passenger carriers called shuttles are common sights, all painted a gray-black color the locals call “company shale” where they will be heard and “pissant primer” where they’re sure of their company. The Maynes Conglomerate does not issue personal transport to any but its highest functionaries. Ordinary workers take a bus. Foremen and other low-level supervisors typically travel about in a shuttle. Should you pass out of the perdition of lower management and graduate to middle grades, you have use of a driver pool, but you still have to justify each trip. Then should you reach the executive level, you are issued your own vehicle, driver, and assistant.
Being a Grog, and a sizable one at that, I was put into a company shale pickup, open to the elements, for my trip away from the mine headquarters. I made myself as comfortable as I could on a spool of electrical cable and hung on with some cargo netting clipped into the bed. A man in a subdued, vertically patterned forest camouflage uniform rode with me. I would learn it was the uniform of the Coal Country Troopers, sort of a state police. He had a racking cough that brought up phlegm, and he seemed to take pride in timing his expectorations for aerial distance, launching them off the side on turns and out the back on lengths of good-road straightaway.
“That was a good one, stoop,” he’d say whenever one hung in the air for several seconds before landing, or travelled an unusually long parabola. Rather than the more common term “Grog,” “stoop” seemed to be in use to refer to my kind in the Virginias, when they did not use the more offensiv
e “ape.” They did not appear to differentiate me from the wider, shorter Gray Ones, and I had no reason to correct anyone—yet.
