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I’d learned rather too much about how the Twisted Cross operated near Omaha. They needed their isolation tanks for animating their Reapers, and that was very heavy equipment, like moving around six or seven soaking bathtubs at the very least. The roads of the Coal Country were in no condition for such a heavy rig, unless it was a tracked tank, so they must have moved by rail, as they had in the Midwest.
I managed to find the train. It was too well guarded, waiting on a siding with machine-gun positions all around and a flatbed-mounted antiaircraft gun (not that the rebels had any aircraft, but it would make short work of any kind of improvised armored vehicle that might be used to approach the train) for a lone Golden One. There were dog handlers and motorcycles and ATVs waiting to deploy against guerillas.
Still, I had a small supply of explosives—my own double-sized suicide harness, which I’d never bothered to wire onto myself. Keeping to wooded cover and off the road flanking the rail line, I travelled a couple of miles up the track and placed my explosives in a cut, wiring the switch under one of the rails where it was sure to be pressed. A very close examination would discover the mine, of course, but disabling the engine would mean some kind of blow had been struck by the Coal Country against those who’d selected us for eradication.
• • •
The rest of the story has become a legend of the wars. I’ve heard the song written about our little Coal Country army and the ravies outbreak. About how, in our last extreme, the men placed explosives on themselves rigged to a timer that they had to reset daily (or, more simply, unlock or break the harness holding the explosives to their bodies) to keep the bomb from going off. If you went out of your head with ravies, you had at most twenty-four hours of racing around and shrieking before it blew you to bits, assuming you didn’t thrash your way out of the harness.*
The song is more popular west of the Mississippi than in the Appalachians. I believe no one in the area cares to be reminded of the outbreak.
I left the Vulcan Stand, alone again. For a while I moved south, thinking that if the disease were to take me, I’d rather it did so in an area where the Georgia Control was setting up operations. Twelve hours passed, and I had no signs of trembling in the muscles or headache (beyond a low-level foggy one caused by fatigue). I slept for six or seven hours with my head against a fallen log on a bed of pine branches, and I was surprised to wake up again in control of my faculties. I recited a few lines from the Rhapsodies, and they came out at the volume I expected, my voice steady and clear.
There’s no question I was bitten and scratched, both pretty badly. As we’d learned that others had caught the virus from bites and fingernail scratches,* and I looked like I’d been through a threshing machine, the only conclusions were either that I was immune, at least to this strain of ravies, or that the virus took much longer to present in a Xeno.
The stillness of the Coal Country disturbed me. The only living things I met were livestock—mostly chickens and nimble-looking goats—and household pets, and they stayed well shy of me. Once I thought I heard an observation plane, but it never appeared over the ridgeline that obscured the sound. It may have just been an ATV or motorcycle in the distance with the acoustics of the hills playing tricks.
TO THE WHITE PALACE
When those who experienced it describe this kind of devastation, it’s common to see “I passed through dead lands” or similar constructions. The land wasn’t dead; the people had been destroyed. The land would continue to thrive, to cover its scarred mountains until a new generation came to collect the coal waiting beneath these hills.
I did not feel any more alone than I usually did; I am almost always among those who regard me as a stranger. The usual birds and squirrels inspected me from the surrounding trees. The jays shrieked and the squirrels chattered angrily.
The bites and scratches could still kill me. They’d become infected, and eventually the discomfort roused me out of my grim trudge, my last trip east to the White Palace, so that I walked into an empty New Universal Church building in search of iodine and dressings.
In the last extreme of the ravies outbreak, some of the locals had sought shelter there, by the look of it. They’d made a good, if desperate, guess—if a vaccine against the strain were to arrive, it would be distributed by the church dispensaries. Nothing brings folks home to their Kurian god-kings like the threat of violent, insensate death, I suppose some in the Order believed.
They’d waited, and they’d died, waiting, probably unable to believe that the Kurian Order would just abandon the Coal Country. Of course, they’d done nothing like abandoning it. They’d just burned off a diseased crop, the way a farmer would burn a field full of scabby wheat.
I found a few corpses in there, a mixture of wounded and a suicide scattered here and there in the corners. Why the suicides chose corners I couldn’t imagine—some last human impulse for safety?—but that was where the bodies were resting. There were no churchmen, just a single woman in a pewter-colored New Universal Church nurse’s habit: “scrubs” with two extra-long scarves to go over the hair and mouth, if necessary.
You could ignore the corpses. They mostly looked like drop piles of laundry, if you just glanced across the pews of the dark meeting hall. The smell wasn’t quite so easy. I made it to the little medical offices, broke open a barred window, and took a deep gasp of fresh air. Rather than remain among the bodies, I grabbed some dressings, alcohol, some scissors and a few other necessities and went out the back door. I disturbed some starved-looking dogs tearing into a pile of corpses laid outside the back next to a two-gallon can of gasoline. They looked like ravies victims, probably euthanized by the nurse inside early in the epidemic during their fruitless wait for an antidote. They’d never got around to burning their dead.
I found a better use for the gasoline. I chased away the dogs, then made a pile of the waiting corpses on the church altar and set fire to them.
Once the church was truly alight, I found a rooftop spot to watch it burn while I rested. The fire brought no one save, I suppose, moths. The windows went first, crashing and splintering noisily; then the roof came down, pulled down by the weight of an ancient air conditioner. For a few dazzling minutes, sparks rose in the sky like souls pulled to the infinite rhapsody.
I dozed after that.
When I awoke, the church was still smoking. Its steeple, or rather a part of it, still stood, a black finger pointing accusingly toward the heavens. I hope it’s still there, to be honest, to remind people that death can fall from the clouds, without warning, changing everything.
• • •
The White Palace was missing a few windows. It, too, had suffered from fire, though the damage was limited to some blackening like misapplied eye shadow rising from the frames.
I observed it from my old bus shelter for thirty minutes. I saw no signs of any patrols, no ravies victims.
The White Palace looming empty affected me more than I would have been willing to admit at the time. Here, at least, the Kurian Order should have had a skeleton crew of key personnel, but it looked as though I would find nothing but skeletons, judging from the bodies I found in the main parking lot—a hasty evacuation had been in progress when the ravies sufferers showed up. There’d been some kind of battle, and it looked as though the diseased had been shot down.
I heard a few ghostly noises from the attic during my quick tour. Perhaps a few of the Maynes clan had concealed th
emselves up there in hopes of a restoration of the old order. That or their spirits were saying hello to an old hireling.
The White Palace had won one of the earlier rounds, then.
Some of the vehicles were still serviceable; in fact, someone had stocked up my former employer’s converted minibus for a long trip. I wondered how far over the Kentucky border it would get me before gas or tires gave out.
To complete my witness to the flow of history changing here in the Coal Country, I still had a question or two. I decided to seek my answers up in the quarry.
