“You could have just knocked,” Maynes said. “Home is ugly enough without oversized ears; maybe you can let him go.”
I had to give Maynes grudging respect. Most men go meek when conversing with a Reaper. He was his old sardonic self.
The Reaper adjusted its grip. It pressed either side of Home’s head. Its fingers tapped his eyes, as if to ascertain whether the pressure applied to the skull caused them to bulge.
I tested the point of my tire iron. If I was quick enough, I could come out from under the bus ready to fight. I might even be able to shove the tire iron into something vital around the jaw and crack it off. The claws would still be dangerous, and Reapers were notoriously hard to bleed out, but pain sometimes dampened communication between Reaper and Master Kurian.
“Bubbbbbbb!” Home managed through locked-together jaws.
“I met a salesman once,” Maynes said. “On the road. He tried to sell me batteries. A dog kept sniffing around at his shoes. He got tired of it and kicked the dog to drive it away. What he didn’t know was it was my dog. I didn’t buy any batteries. How about you drop my bodyguard? I might listen a little more carefully to your message if you do so.”
“or i could kill him and we could converse over his silenced corpse.”
“Let him go,” Maynes said. Then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “Please.”
The Reaper dropped Home. His head was mottled red and sallow yellow, depending on where the Reaper’s fingers had pressed.
“Ohhhhhhh,” Home moaned. “Ooooooooh, hurts, hurts.”
The Reaper silenced him with a kick. I found this odd; from what I’d seen, the Reapers, once settled on letting someone go, gave them no more thought than a cat giving up on a mouse hole. They bore humans no more personal animosity than the axe does the tree.
“just because you happen to bear the name maynes does not grant you immunity from managed selection,” the Reaper said.
I’d heard it called many things, but “managed selection” was new to me. It seemed rather clinical for the Coal Country, where just about every human activity and interaction had a localism attached.
Maynes let out a drunken-sounding laugh. “You just take me, if you really think that. The family’s already stirred up.”
The Reaper stepped forward. From my hiding spot, I could not see Maynes’s reaction to the approach, but I didn’t hear any movement in the bus above.
“you are to cease your disgusting depredations and leave the girls alone. it’s long since time you took a wife and produced a new generation. alley catting is one thing for a twenty-year-old; at forty it is pathetic. a marriage will be arranged.”
“Tell ’em I want pearled stephanotis for my bouquet,” Maynes said.
“what did your poet say? ‘what a piece of work is man.’ we gave you an easy assignment. no office routine, no discipline of being on or off the clock. still, you cannot manage even the few decisions a week required of you.”
I saw Maynes’s feet appear. He had sat down on the entry steps to the bus. “You want to be in charge? You do all the work. I’d like to see you come crawling into the office every day, leaving a little snail-trail for the janitor.”
“parasites, all. worse, necrotics, living off the work of your grandfather. there was a time when the maynes clan was thought to be destined to control the east between the pittsburgh mills and pamlico sound. the work of a lifetime, squandered.”
“Then you should have made Elaine director-general of Maynes Consolidated rather than Uncle H.B. She was smarter than the rest of us put together.”
“perhaps. but we had doubts about her loyalty. she produced no children. she should have put her womb to work rather than her mind. consider this your final warning. there will be a purge. we are warning you because you have shown, in the past, some skill at handling the human population. after the purge, when they have seen the maynes clan cut down to size, we believe things will settle down and this pointless violence will subside. we expect you to dispense with frivolities and put the coal country back together when the unpleasantness is over. if you fail, we will remove the maynes clan in its entirety and turn the coal country over to someone more efficient in its management.”
The Reaper stepped on Home’s back as it went off down the road away from the sounds of the slide being cleared. I heard two ribs snap.
“You can come out now, Hickory,” Maynes said. “The big bad wolf is gone. Help me with Home; then we’re off to the Church’s hospital in Charleston.”
If I have a regret about my first months in the Coal Country, it’s that I didn’t take the chance and put a tire iron through that Reaper’s hardened skull. Home and Maynes might have panicked enough to escape to Kentucky—it was near enough, and no one would deny Maynes the gasoline or checkpoint transits he would have needed to make a daylight run across the mountains and into the rough and semi-independent lands of the legworm ranchers.
&nbs
p; PURGE AT THE WHITE PALACE
I never learned if Maynes warned the rest of his family what was coming. I overheard that one or two fled, but they may have sensed what was about to happen or received the information from another source.
They came at night, in a long line of cars and vans with their headlights turned off. I watched them approach, their vehicles moving along the carefully landscaped lane to the White Palace at the speed of a trotting dog. It was a humid night, so moist the moon and many of the security lights had visible halos.
I considered it a provident time to attempt an escape. I’d prepared myself ever since the encounter with the messenger-Reaper. I wouldn’t be the only one fleeing the White Palace, but perhaps I would be the only one physically and mentally prepared for an escape and a few days of rough living, with equipment to extend survival if I needed to.