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The explosion had blown out the gravel in the roadbed, leaving a deep, meter-wide trench between the two lengths of asphalt. The armed SUV struck it and flipped nose-over, putting a quick end to the gunner. The first bus had better luck; it crashed to a halt of blown tires. The bus behind managed to avoid hitting the lead, but it went off the side of the road and ended up on its side, a great gray elephant felled by nothing more than a soft shoulder leading to a deceptively overgrown ditch.
The troopers tried to deploy out of their vehicles, but under our guns and advantage in height, it only meant more bodies scattered on the road and shoulder.
My companions were the most careful shots I have ever served with. They aimed—but did not fire—more often than not. The exception seemed to be the Neale brothers, who employed their shotguns as if they were noisemakers just as much as weapons, whooping and shooting in the air when no target offered itself.
I struck the fuses on two satchel charges I’d made out of old coal sacks and sent them whirling down to the stricken buses, where they exploded in a more satisfying blast of destruction than my failed mine strip.
At an order from MacTierney, we pulled out. I stayed behind with my long rifle to discourage pursuit, but my thirty minutes of lead time for the Hollow Men presented me with only one target, one of the survivors from the bus who attempted to get to the SUV’s machine gun. I missed with the first shot, but I was close enough to encourage him to return to the safety of the bus’s bulk.
As darkness fell, I picked up my rifle, casings, and bedroll that I’d been using as a chin rest, and I departed for the green hills, feeling a little too satisfied with the day’s work. We’d soon be matching ourselves against a far greater threat than the poor half-trained troopers.
THE DREADCOATS ARE COMING
I believe our raids changed the balance on both sides. Ordinary townspeople turned into overnight guerillas, knowing that violence could be blamed on us. The description of men in long coats with a hulking Grog among them, appearing out of nowhere, striking, and retreating again, was an easy-enough image to describe such that the troopers and churchmen had witnesses lined up, ready to provide alibis for their own and blame the violent acts on us. We would have needed helicopters and doubles to be everywhere our attacks were reported to occur.
Where we did strike, we always seemed to have local teenagers showing up to cover our tracks, collect our shell casings, and warn us where there were patrols and stillwatches placed on the roads and trails. I was constantly amazed at what they could accomplish. There’s something about youths of eleven, twelve, or thirteen that makes authorities hesitate to clap them in handcuffs and run them in, I believe.
The Maynes family warmed up their photocopier again. Now we had a new name, the “Dreadcoats.” It was modified by the phrase “so-called.” The long riding coats of the MacTierney brothers and Jeb Bilstrith had inspired the name.
REWARD REWARD REWARD
$50,000
For information leading to the CAPTURE or provable KILLING of enemies of our peace and prosperity, the so-called Dreadcoats.
Among these is the yellow-haired Grog known as Hickory
whose reward will be included as a bonus
for his CAPTURE or provable KILLING.
“How come old Hickory here gets a special mention?” Mallow asked. “I’ve killed more’n he has.”
“They’re still mad at him for Number Four,” Old Leslie said.
“The Dreadcoats are coming! The Dreadcoats are coming!” Glassy said.
Amused at our growing notoriety, we experienced endless examples of “aid and comfort” from the Coal Country people. Fathers, sons, and not a few grandfathers and grandsons dug up and restored weapons that had long been hidden for this moment. At first, the acts of resistance were similar to the kinds of things that had been going on since the massacre at Beckley: tires slashed; fires set; graffiti scrawled on church buildings, Maynes Conglomerate businesses, and fire stations. With the Dreadcoats (and their increasingly notorious “Yaller Grog”) ambushing collection vans and shooting up the firemen and Coal Country troopers, organs of the regime could scarcely enter some of the smaller mountain towns without being met with gunfire from hedges and attic windows.
I am not sure when the exaggerations began about the size of “my” army. It wasn’t an army, and it certainly wasn’t mine. It could be that the Maynes family, in explaining to its creditors the reasons for the slowdown in coal, lied about our size and the scope of our attacks. It could have been wishful thinking by the rumormongers, who were eager for good news and hope. If a wild-haired Grog was
leading a dozen men, no doubt it would soon be a hundred. With a hundred practically in existence, a thousand was not out of the question. And so on. If the rebellion wasn’t waxing strong, why the Moondaggers? Why the Tarheel Rangers?
So the news of a rebel army in the Coal Country began being broadcast on the Resistance radio, and common knowledge became historical fact. To this day there are histories of the war for liberation that put the strength of the Coal Country rebels at seven to nine thousand.
That incident kicked off what became known in the Coal Country as the Bloody October. Violence was met with reprisal, which begat more violence, murder in compound interest.
The Moondaggers carried out most of the killings. It was highly unusual for the Kurian Order to just kill without harvesting the aura, but the Moondaggers seemed exempt from having to conserve the energies the Kurians needed.
Worse, they carried out the executions in public. They beheaded their enemies using an axe in the time-honored fashion. To say this was strange to the Coal Country people would not even begin to describe it.
We witnessed the end of one in a little crossroad town just south of Charlotte. Four bodies, looking like unfinished mannequins waiting for a missing piece, lay on a flatbed tow truck. A second tow rig had a sport utility vehicle painted with the Moondagger logo, with four very flat, cut-up tires.
A local boy who’d found us on a dirt bike explained: “They came through, two motorcycles and this big car. Stopped at the bakery and just cleaned them out—not just the finished stuff but also the flour and butter and eggs and lard and whatnot. Couple of us threw eggs at the motorcycle riders, since they wanted eggs badly enough to just open up a door and take them. They took off after the kids, and that was when Mr. Dalgren—that’s his body there, in the checkered shirt—took out his buck knife and went to work on their tires.
“They were dragging Pem O’Dowd out of the bakeshop by the hair and arm, taking her to the car, when they saw the damage. Their captain or whatever got so mad when he saw the tires that they sat poor Pem in the gutter and just shot her in the back of the neck.
“Now they’re hauling Robbie Gaines up to the axe,” the kid said. “He doesn’t even live in the town. Must have come in to visit, and look where it got him.”
