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“We have someone on the inside, too. He sends messages to one of the Bilstrith gals who works for the telecom. She gets on the phone, a line they don’t know about that goes across half the county, and passes word.
“We were hoping you’d join us. You’ve dug coal, hiked the hills, risked yourself for us like you were kin—even killed one of those Ghouls I hear. All that’s left is for you to sample our white whiskey.”
I sampled.
I wasn’t their leader, I was more of an interesting (and intimidating, I suppose) addition to the cadre. My knowledge of the land couldn’t match theirs, but I had years of experience in surviving and fighting against the Kurian Order. Nevertheless, the rumor somehow got going that these men were my retinue. I suspect it had something to do with the fact that I was the nonhuman of the bunch. “That hairy yellow Grog and those men” became “that hairy yellow Grog’s men” and so passed into history. But let the record show that the MacTierneys and the Bilstriths were fighting for weeks before I joined them.
GOOD-BYE TO LONGLINER
As a side note, at about the time of the Hopkins Hollow barbecue, Longliner crossed the Ohio River and entered the Northwest Ordnance. Of course, the password I had given him, and the SOD group were both out of my imagination, but he was more than ready to cover his disappointment by relating everything he could about me and the Coal Country to the authorities in the Ordnance.
Those in the Ordnance, who had already suffered some small loss at the hands of David Valentine and me, expected that where I was, my David was also operating.
His arrival may have been akin to the clap that starts the avalanche. The Northwest Ordnance (for those of you who don’t recall, it was a Kurian mix of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and parts of Michigan and Northern Indiana) was already vexed with the difficulties in the Coal Country. The Maynes Conglomerate had bought a good deal of heavy equipment from the Ordnance, and a few new Reapers, arranging to pay off the purchase with a steady stream of coal over a year. The Ordnance had received only a handful of the expected overflowing barrel when the flow slowed to a trickle, far less than the Ordnance would need to keep its factories going and provide electricity for the coming winter.
With the Coal Country badly in arrears, a pleading message arrived from the Maynes family. They needed another loan of equipment to make up for some unexpected losses and accidents. The Maynes financial whiz suggested a “rearrangement of terms” and possibly even the shipment of a certain number of “repurposed” citizens. Without fresh equipment, the Maynes Conglomerate argued as follows:
WE WILL BE UNABLE TO MEET THE NECESSARY COAL SHIPMENTS ARRANGED AT THE PITTSBURGH CONFERENCE. THEREFORE IT IS IN THE INTEREST OF US BOTH TO COME TO AN AGREEMENT AS QUICKLY AS PRACTICABLE. WE ARE READY TO SEND NEGOTIATORS; WE SUGGEST HUNTINGTON AS THE LOCATION FOR NEGOTIATIONS.
The Northwest Ordnance saw an opportunity. With the Maynes team clearly in dire need, and with the Ordnance in a strategically enviable position, bordering the Coal Country to the North and West, they could solve their coal problem, gain control of a vital resource, and establish themselves as a northern rival to the Georgia Control all by striking a single heavy blow. The Coal Country had troops enough to manage their population, but nothing like a military force capable of resisting a major invasion.
They promised the Coal Country a pair of train shipments carrying everything needed. What they received were two trains swarming with Moondagger zealots.
The Ordnance played a rather simple trick on the trusting Coal Country logistics people. After the cargos were verified and loaded onto Ordnance trains, the trains pulled out from their depots. Somewhere near the border, the freight cars filled with mining equipment and transport and gasoline and such were swapped out for freights loaded with the vicious Moondaggers. To guard against anything happening to the trains, the entire rail line had troops stationed along it to hurry the freights along in safety. Moondaggers dressed as ordinary rail guards waved from their cupolas as the invasion trains rocked by.
Longliner even led a team of operatives in to infiltrate Charleston and raise a disturbance that could be conveniently suppressed by the Moondaggers.
Military historians of the Kurian era agree that this was the apogee of the Moondagger skill at arms. But along with the well-executed insertion came the same old brutality to the local populace. It was not unique to the era, sadly, but probably the best remembered.
However, the Georgia Control considered the Coal Country a minor province. They were the Maynes family’s feudal protectors, as things worked in the Kurian Order, and they were an important component in the ticking, self-lubricating machine of the Control. For all the difficulty in getting coal up to the Ordnance, even the Maynes family knew that the Control must be fed black ore first. The Control, having already been called for help in quelling the sporadic acts of violence and industrial sabotage, had troops already shuttling north in the beetle-like, swollen VTOL helicopters familiar from the many press photos of the Georgia Control’s elite Tarheel Rangers. Thanks to their air-mobile capability, while the Ordnance had no difficulty seizing the main population centers and transport network in the north, the coal mines themselves came under the Control.
What all the parties to this carving up of the Coal Country forgot was that the Maynes family, corrupt and incompetent as it was, was at the very least local, with blood going back generations before the Kurians. While they accepted the relatively bloodless Maynes regime for decades, rule from Atlanta or Columbus would not be suffered for long.
But all this was still to come, within a few weeks of my barbecue in Hopkins Hollow.
• • •
It was my first time out with the Hollow Men. (I’m told this could be interpreted as a literary reference, but it was unintentional—though come to think of it, Eliot’s “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” line applied to Mallow, and when we rode at night, we could be aptly described as “shade without color.” Some of the hill people called us at first “the Hollow Men,” even though a woman and a Golden One rode as part of the company, “violent souls” regardless.)
The Cobra was parked back in Hopkins Hollow. I rode, instead, on a two-wheeled cart pulled by a strong roan thoroughbred that had a knack of kicking up gravel into the driver seat. Old Leslie held the reins, giving me a chance to admire his driving and giving Glassy, who rode beside, a chance to glance at his fine profile. The back of the cart contained our food supply, some white whiskey for anything from antiseptic to amiability to water purification to bribes, and a few improvised land mines.
Even in a party as small as this, there were already groups forming. The MacTierney brothers and Jeb Bilstrith kept to the front and consulted one another on the ride. Behind them came Mallow leading the trio of Neale brothers, and we followed in the cart with Glassy. Mancrete, large enough to be a group himself, rode behind the cart. Glassy joked that he was there to scavenge any apples that rolled out of their basket.
The plan, as I understood it, was for Glassy and Jeb to plant the mines on the road going north from Marlinsburg, which supported a trooper barrack. The troopers, who occupied the surviving half of a demolished high school, had the luxury of a very hard-to-get-at car park in the auto shop surrounded by enough fencing and wire for a prison (much of it pre-2022, the students in this town evidently needing to be kept safe from the residents, or perhaps the reverse).
The rest of us would shoot up a fortified gas station just outside of town, as though raiding gasoline. That would draw the troopers, who would hopefully lose a truck or two to the mines. The hill people also knew that it was easier to fight the machinery of the Kurian Order than the men. So many trooper prowlers, New Universal Church clergy transport, and fireman vans were lost that the remaining had to be pulled into the towns and put in well-guarded motor pools. This meant they couldn’t be deployed quickly to the more rugged areas of the Coal Country, which also meant that, especially at night, we owned the roads and could move at will.
The ambush we executed at Blue Run on old Federal Route 35 was a typical example. The long-coated gunmen deployed atop a vertical limestone cut a good forty feet above the road. To even reach us would mean running along the road for better than a quarter mile in either direction.
We caught a relief convoy on its way to the border trooper station at Point Pleasant. The troopers there stayed in the country for thirty days or so, trying to stop arms and other contraband coming in from the legworm clans in Kentucky, then returned to the urban areas for two months of lighter duty. The longer we could extend their tour at Point Pleasant, the less inclined they’d be to leave their fortified garrison watching the rivers and hunt for guerillas in the mountains.
We’d laid down an explosive strip in a gravel-filled divot in the old road; it was powerful enough to take out an armored car. My work in the mines had qualified me to be the explosives expert of the group. Our detonator was an unreliable relic, so I’d also rigged a trigger, just in case the detonator couldn’t create the voltage to set off the charge on the plastic explosives.
Two armored buses, an armored car, a tow truck, and an SUV with a machine-gun mount provided the main body of the convoy, with a vanguard of two trooper cars and two motorcycles running ahead. It was a typical escort for the period. We hadn’t dared to try a convoy this large before, but the geography of thirty-five in this spot was to our advantage.
Both trooper cars roared over the mine strip. They ground right over the gravel without result. A motorcycle followed, motor blatting. Dust shot up in an instant whirlwind, followed a split second later by the report. The bike spun slowly in the air. The rider, arms gyrating and legs bent up his back, cartwheeled into the roadside trees and was swallowed by the green with hardly a rustle.
The trooper cars put on a burst of speed and raced down the highway to Point Pleasant, perhaps to summon reinforcements or just to escape the fire we were now pouring down the limestone cut.
