I was tempted to take the driver’s seat and floor the Trekker into the big fire truck with the two machine guns and unused fire hoses. The insanity of having such equipment available and ready without using it was incredible. Wouldn’t it have been better for the regime to have water running in the streets instead of blood?
“Someone’s going to catch hell over this,” Maynes muttered.
“Better not be us,” Home said. “Think we should get gone?”
“The family is going to infarc face-first into the soup course tonight when someone mentions it at dinner. That I was around for it, too. They hate it when the family name gets associated with real rough stuff.”
“Me help fight? Me help fight? Mehelpfight?” I asked, tugging at Maynes’s sleeve until he had to shift his feet to keep from falling over.
MacTierney handed me a first aid kit. “Go drag one of those kids out of the street.”
I tossed an ammo belt up into the eyes of the gunner. He had the sense to let go of the gun as he fell sideways; otherwise he might have sprayed the barricade with machine-gun fire.
A few bottles and rocks clattered off the parked emergency vehicles or crashed behind us. Foolish, but understandable. Another wave of gunfire from the Quisling forces ripped across the street in answer. I kept my ears tightly closed against the noise—both the rifle reports and the screams from the injured and dying.
“You’ll go through your whole wad, shooting like that,” the old sergeant told the Vanguard Auxiliary
blasting away. For all the emotion in his voice, they might have been kneeling on a rifle range, instead of shooting into a public street cluttered with bodies and two tipped-sideways strollers. A baby still cried in one.
“Wicked good shooting, everyone,” the young captain called. “Law and order will be upheld.”
Whose law? What order? I wished to ask. I counted more than twenty still bodies in the street and a few wounded, wide-eyed in disbelief at the damage a few grams of lead could wreak in mere flesh.
A song written a decade after the events in the Coal Country had a line saying Beckley’s streets ran with blood. That might be a bit too poetic—blood tends to pool when exposed to air, and the poor-quality asphalt soaked up the dreadful liquid. I wish I could claim, as the song does, that the blood flowed like an accusing finger toward the parked fire trucks, but it didn’t.
• • •
So, what does this bloody, unfortunate incident have to do with a major uprising a year later?
This began a period of troubles in the Coal Country. The blood on the streets of Beckley wasn’t poetic, but its effect cannot be underestimated. Grievances aren’t forgotten in these thickly wooded mountains. These slopes are the scene of America’s most famous feuds and the largest armed uprising between the 1861 Civil War and the advent of the Kurians. The people of this country, once they start a feud, see it through.
After the Beckley Blood, the Kurian Order saw the first of its difficulties in getting coal out of the country, and heads gathered for the Kurians. Oddly enough, the locals had not opposed the order in any major fashion, other than failing to meet plan after plan for the increase in coal production. The Kurian Order had laid down rules, explained by the New Universal Church, and as long as it did its selecting and gathering and head-hunting in an orderly fashion with a minimal amount of corruption, they hunkered down and took it. Who knows what was being planned and gathered for years, waiting for the moment weapons could be dug up and passwords exchanged at lonely fords.
The Beckley Blood meant train derailments and transformer-station fires. It meant police cars with engines fouled by sodium silicate and run until the pistons melted and fused. It even meant house-burnings for higher-ranking Quislings.
Even the White Palace wasn’t inviolate. The Maynes clan, although running a relatively gentle version of the Kurian Order, had the blood of Beckley on its hands and became, perhaps for the first time, synonymous with the rest of the Kurian Order. Before Beckley, I overheard plenty of conversations—humans think we’re intelligent dogs, understanding our names and a few commands—where any complaint about the regime was qualified with a statement such as “Of course, those poor bastards in the Ordnance have it worse.” I’m not about to rock the boat. Some noted that even the Maynes family wasn’t immune to Kurian reprisals, citing several from the generation of my employer’s parents who disappeared, never to be heard from again. After the massacre, it was as though we’d be better off if we thrashed the whole bunch off east, not stopping till we were neck-deep in the Atlantic.
News of the massacre spread quickly, and just as quickly, the Coal Country began to bite back. The reaction was so fast and so widespread, it could not have been ordered and organized by a formal movement, let alone other freeholds, which some have suggested.
Three days after Beckley, I swept caltrops out of the roadway approaching it and helped replace and patch tire after tire. Maynes could no longer park any of his cars and leave it unattended without a headlight being smashed or a tire punctured. Some of the pranks were disgustingly juvenile—food and drink brought to the White Palace had to be checked for pubic hairs and dog feces. Maynes family dogs and horses were poisoned.
Even Maynes began to take his security detail more seriously. Sometimes a second vehicle loaded with police led or followed our own, especially if we were going into the mountains.
The first train derailing happened within the week. Diesel engines had their air filters removed, coolant drained, and water—or perhaps urine—poured into their fuel tanks, requiring a major overhaul on the precious engines. Switches were rewired. Diesel oil stocks were sabotaged. Bridges were a special target: rails were loosened so that coal trains would derail on the bridge itself, terrifying the crew and causing damage to the bridges.
Man-hours that would have been better used elsewhere had to be put into making repairs and guarding vital rail installations. Trains had to travel through the Coal Country at a crawl so that sabotage might more easily be detected before an accident.
The Kurian Order might ignore the odd dead dog and flat tire, but derailed trains filled with coal bound for the Georgia Control woke the sleeping ogre. It did not take long for the first scapegoat to be bled.
• • •
Within a scarce few months, Beckley went from a regrettable incident to something the Kurian Order considered a minor disaster. The Coal Country refused to quiet down. The Kurian Order came down “soft”—issuing new rules about travel, curfews, changing identity card format so forgeries would be more difficult. It increased the protein, fat, and sugar rations for families with one or more members doing manual labor and did a purge of middle management, often a popular move. The disturbances continued.
Then the Kurian Order came down hard. Church-trained informants and agitators were inserted into some of the mines and rail installations—I overheard Maynes and MacTierney discussing the chances of the saboteurs being discovered—and a few arrests came about through their information.
It backfired, and badly. Popular opinion said that the informers simply hurled accusations to prove they were doing their jobs.
As it turned out, there was a sacrifice in the Maynes family: Joshua “Bone” Maynes’s beloved sister, Elaine.