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We heard of wars and rumors of wars. What exactly happened to the Green Mountain Boys none could say at that time. The Moondaggers claimed that they’d cut them down, forced a surrender, then executed the remainder outside of Harrisburg on the grounds of an old country club golf course near Carlisle. Supposedly five hundred men lie in three sandpits. The Green Mountain Boys said they’d bloodied the Moondaggers’ noses at the Battle of Conodoguinet Creek and then headed back north to winter in their windy mountains.
In Kentucky, the Moondaggers pursuing the Southern Command forces (who had much farther to go) made the mistake of acting in their usual high-handed fashion with the legworm clans. They rode through the bluegrass in their usual fashion, taking women and girls for breeding purposes. The squabbling Kentuckians, who had cousins and in-laws scattered among the clans, switched over from wary neutrality to active resistance as soon as they heard the news.
The Moondaggers, more used to slaughtering farming collectives who’ve taken up pitchforks than facing a highly mobile enemy who ride and shoot from their preteen years, began to bleed from a hundred paper cuts. The Kentuckians settled for shooting down scouts and picking off broken-down truck crews from supply convoys, but eventually any army will run out of scouts and logistical drivers if you kill enough of them.
• • •
It was a simple ambush, or so we thought. There’s a section of train track on a grade near the Kentucky border, just before it descends again to Big Stone Gap.
Pulling up railroad track, if you’ve never done it, is taxing but satisfying work. I always felt as though I was ripping the Kurian regime out of the soil by the roots, leaving wounded earth that would soon heal and turn green.
We were overconfident. A series of single-engine planes had been circling over the Pikeville population. We guessed someone there had seen us—or more probably, me—and reported guerilla action to the Knoxville garrison of the Georgia Control, which was burning precious aviation gas searching for us. The garrison wasn’t having any luck; it widened its pattern and gave up before the morning was over.
I was still pulling up ties when we heard the train whistle. We hid ourselves. A coal train rattled up the tracks. Easy prey, we thought, except it was moving more slowly than usual, at a marathon runner’s pace, with a couple of engineers riding the nose to examine the tracks for signs of tampering. They spotted our tampering and hit the brakes.
Still, we could take out the engine. MacTierney gave the order for rocket-propelled grenades. I put a bullet into a machine gunner behind sandbags wired atop the engine.
The train screeched to a halt before it reached the damaged section of track. Coal dust flew and we heard the hail-like rattle of ore hitting the bottoms of the gondola cars.
The coal filling every other car was just a thin layer held up by canvas and two-by-fours. The shipment was a sham.
Hundreds of scratched, filth-smeared ravies victims poured out of the gondola cars as they were tipped sideways, unloading the living cargo heedless of injury—the diseased ones would be mostly dead in a few days anyway, and those with enough faculties to keep themselves alive would spend the rest of their lives like wild animals.
We fell back, going up the service road that ran parallel to the tracks. The ambush train continued to drop mortar shells on us until we were out of sight. The noise and explosions drew the ravies victims like flies to a corpse.
“There’s a quarry—open ground to hold them off. For a while, anyway.”
It seemed the best of nothing but bad choices.
An old sign read VULCAN MATERIALS—MIDSO. A MAYNES CONGLOMERATE PARTNERSHIP.
It was a gravel and cement plant, at least it had been recently. There were a couple of big machinery buildings for processing ore and an aluminum-sided office building up on big concrete blocks with about four feet of clearance. There were a couple of rusty and patched trailers near the open-scar quarries, and one heavy yellow loader. A big water tank, intact and full, was the main attraction to the place. It would make a good observation point and would provide us with water, at least.
Some of the mechanics managed to get the loader going and used it to haul the trailers up to the office, where they were scavenged for food and retrofitted with some of the office building’s aluminum siding for defensive loopholes. We made a little triangular fort like a fat pyramid with an unusually wide base and the two trailers as its sides. We had an endless supply of cinder blocks to plug gaps and put against the outer walls.
We sent out two scavenging parties to find supplies of food. Ominously, one never returned.
• • •
It was a frosty night of horrors.
We had been expecting a few bands of ravies victims. We were miles from any real population centers and well off the road. Of course, ravies bands did tend to gather, attracted to one another’s calls, but the bands rarely grew very big; they moved at so many different rates, they tended to break and reform and break again, only to be briefly attached to a new one, like oil drops spilled on water.
The plan was to beat them back with thrown rocks, sharpened poles, and reserve gunfire for emergencies, as gunfire would attract others. On the nearby roads, all we had met were groups of two to four. We should have let the disappearance of the scavenging party be a lesson to us.
“Screamers, like a swarm of ants!” the lookout at the water tower shouted.
I used my arms to vault up onto the roof of one of the trailers. The night was dark and it was difficult to see. “Everyone, we need your guns. To the loopholes!”
We didn’t have any of the usual equipment that would aid in night fighting. Two police spot lamps were it. One flickered on and washed over a blob of pale figures coming across the gravel-bed expanse of the cement plant’s clearing. They were widely spaced and frantically moving, reminding me of the baby turtles I’d watched on the Caribbean beaches hurrying to the surf before the birds and crabs could get them.
The first few shots were just blind fire at motion in the darkness. Finally a shot told; a figure caught by the spotlight leaped in an off-balance imitation of a jumping jack, fell, and didn’t rise again.
I put the battle rifle to my shoulder and joined in the fire.
We could never have defended against a mix of ravies sufferers and Reapers.
There must have been some remnants of the Twisted Cross still operational. The general in Omaha had had several working trains filled with men in their isolation tanks who were animating Reapers they had been matched with.
