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I’d dealt with enough snakes in Nebraska to know what to do with this cripple. I found the biggest boulder I could heft from those littering the quarry and returned it to the spot where it was still thrashing around. It had managed to turn its torso completely around.
“Speaking as one of the few surviving employees of the Maynes Conglomerate and Mine Holdings, I hereby give notice,” I said, and flung the boulder down on the Reaper’s head. It made a satisfying crunch.
The elder, or should I say eldritch, Maynes had offered no last words. Perhaps he was already in flight from whatever abode he inhabited near the quarry. I could only hope that one of the remaining ravies sufferers would come across him before starving to death. It would be a nice piece of irony, though I doubted Maynes had anything to do with spreading the virus in his own territory.
When the rest quit flopping, I rolled the boulder off the corpse.
Reaper cloth did not breathe and was prone to getting moldy if wetted, but it was warm and stopped bullets admirably for the weight. I disrobed the avatar and rolled up the cloth. I could at least get a nice short-sleeved tunic out of it.
I probably should have spent the night looking for Maynes. There was the chance that he had a Reaper in reserve—though if he did, he should have been spending his time riding its back for asylum in another Kurian Zone. The Georgia Control and the Ordnance would want yet another scapegoat for the catastrophe in the Coal Country, and this time a few directors and members of the Maynes family wouldn’t do.
Blinking as my vision tried to adjust to the mixture of blurry from the damaged orb and clear from the remaining, I could only hope it was a cold, dark winter to the north, and the Georgia Control’s factories were cutting back on production thanks to lack of energy.
As to the disposition of the Coal Country, had we won anything? To anyone with sense, it was a bloody, gainless shambles. But it did bring the Resistance to the doorstep of the once-placid East. The area between the Georgia Control, the guts of the Kurian Order, if you will, and the brain in the Northeast with all of its New Universal Church colleges and training centers, with the central nervous system around Washington in between, had been thrown into a state of panic such that they’d gone to the extreme of sewing a virulent new strain of ravies to clear the mountains.
But my sense was that places like Hopkins Hollow would survive. Ravies worked best among defenseless civilians, tightly packed in urban areas. The independent mountain families were self-reliant, well armed, and scattered. Without a series of operations such as the one we suffered at the Vulcan Materials site, even the Georgia Control couldn’t pacify the area without devoting almost all of its known troop strength to the heavily wooded hills, cuts, and valleys.
I’d come out of it alive. Time would tell if the damaged eye would heal; otherwise I supposed I could easily fashion a Reaper-cloth eye patch.
My favorite time in the Coal Country woods was the golden hour before sunset. The sun would pierce the woods and run in shafts, turning everything it touched to gold. Wildflowers inclined their faces to it, children eager for a father’s touch. Even the birds seemed to quiet at that hour (unlike the first hour of daylight, when they would try to outdo one another in raucousness). Not only was the sun’s golden beauty pleasantly relaxing—for me it was hygienic. Humans cannot appreciate the cleansing warmth of sun on fur, almost as good as a long hot soak, and certainly better in that you did not have to wait for your fur to dry.
I did my best thinking in this hour and the twilight thereafter. A quiet walk in the woods would often puzzle out a problem in just this way.
Had I lived up to my own moral code? A close examination would show that I failed on a number of ideals. But abandoning an ideal just because you fall short is a road back to an animal existence. Having spent time as a Quisling, I could now have a little more sympathy for the men and women who accepted, or even sought, those roles when I fought them in the future.
I was heartily sick of fighting, but the fight had to go on, or all the deaths of this account become nothing more than a collection of unfortunate incidents, one Xeno memoir of a dreadful time.
One man would understand. I would go west and see if I couldn’t pick up the trail of my friend David Valentine. Shared burdens felt lighter.
• • •
By this time the record of my experiences left little extra room in the old waterproofed bag that served as a pillow. I cannot remember exactly where I acquired it—while rooting through an attic looking for clothing that would fit, I believe—but it served me well and I have it to this day. I believe it was meant for boating or fishing.
I, like many of my kind, have a poorish memory. However, if I keep a little memento or draw an icon or a few picturesque words to remind me, a great deal of it comes back. Most people have at least heard of the cognitive experiments performed by Shyun on the Gray Ones—cold in conversation, they could not describe a rifle they used daily
for a month, but showing them a bullet for the weapon or a paper target they’d hit with it opened the floodgates: how it shot in bad weather, cleaning routine, sighting quirks. Most educated people these days can identify Shyun along with Pavlov as a famous behaviorist and give a rough description of the experiments.
My own memory is a little better than that, but if I can aid it with a few words or a memento—I still am in possession of my Number Four work ID—my memory is exponentially improved.
Originally, these notes were to be presented to the intelligence services of Southern Command to give them a better idea of conditions in the Coal Country. I’m still not convinced they have merit beyond that, but with memories of the Kurian Order beginning to fade, other generations may find them of interest.
• • •
Looking back now, most of what is published on the Kurian era divides the Quislings from the Resistance with a thick shining line. Families were either one or the other, and in cases of division, neither camp speaks to the other. It was not so simple, each Quisling and Resistance fighter washed into the other like a salt marsh where a river meets the ocean. The most zealous Resistance fighter wasn’t above doing a little black-market trading with the collaborators. Even Quislings ready to receive a brass ring, certifying them as an ally of Kur and immune from the fear of the Reapers, were known to act to save lives, at risk to themselves.
I can think of several Resistance members I loathed and a few Quislings I respected, even admired. Even in the Coal Country I enjoyed the company of some in the White Palace. I encountered intelligence, devotion, and ability in the Kurian Zone—and I would not care to weigh too heavily the difference between their qualities and our own in the Resistance.
Allow me to end this brief digression by wondering in letters if our need to have the Quislings depicted in the blackest possible terms has anything to do with the treatment of captured Quislings at the end of and after the war.
The other goal of this memoir is to reclaim my own name. I’ve been labeled “the Grog who led the Coal Country rising” so many times that it galls. My friends in the mine, who stood together when it would have been so easy to walk out, or those citizens of Beckley who just wished for some promised cookware to feed their families, need to be remembered more than one aged, grizzled Golden One with wobbly teeth and a droopy eye. Like all the most persistent untruths, there is a tiny kernel of accuracy—I was in the Coal Country, and I was the most recognizable figure wherever our guerillas were fighting.
I hope my account has proven to be of value to those, both laymen and professionals, interested in the Kurian Order and events in the second half of the twenty-first century. I now close this portion of my memoirs and ask not for pity or admiration, calumny or honor, but only understanding.
APPENDIX
The Coal Country Revolt and the Decline of the Eastern North American Kurians
The preceding memoir presents a unique, firsthand view of events in the Coal Country in the key years of 2073–2075, written by a skilled observer with no motivation to either cover up certain events or make more of them than history requires.
