March in Country (2 page)

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Authors: EE Knight

BOOK: March in Country
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If there’s one thing I hate,
John Macon thought to himself,
it’s grocery shopping
.
The trick, of course, was not to let on to the groceries that they were being selected. He had driven ahead, alone in his not-quite-unmarked Pooter, so the flotsam at Wayside Number Two wouldn’t become alarmed at the sight of the heavier armored car holding the Reapers. Once he established there were suitable pickings at the Wayside—a quick glance through the door’s glass confirmed a collection of warm bodies, none of whom looked important enough for Tennessee to miss—he’d called up the Transporter.
He strode into the dining room. They’d taught him in the Youth Vanguard how to walk authoritatively: chin up, shoulders back, a little extra strike on the bootheel. He glanced across the counter and the booths. Six hanging fluorescent fixtures containing three bulbs, two of which still managed to produce light, illuminated the sparse condiments and a desiccated piece of pie on the counter and a cash register with drawer wide open revealing only a few bills, coins, and rows of loose cigarettes, as if advertising the poor pickings a holdup would bring.
The remaining lights had a lot of work to do, despite the light of afternoon outside. What had once been enormous glass windows were filled with old sheets of aluminum siding wired together into overlapping blinds. They alternately locked and rattled in the spring wind, at least the ones that didn’t have old rags stuffed into the gaps to stave off chilly drafts.
The linoleum floor interested him for a moment: there were so many cigarette burns in it one might mistake the marks for a pattern.
Macon could have described the decor on the walls without even walking in the door: the owner’s business license and good conduct certificates, a tin sign proclaiming the establishment’s pride in serving OneSource Foods, a glass mirror with beautiful artwork: Ringgold Beer’s famous hop-picking brunette smiling over her overflowing basket, and the inevitable Royal Pep Cola sign. Probably more than one. Never mind the plates, the glasses, and a generous supply of the famous long plastic siphon-droppers for “fixing up” your beverage with flavored syrups—promising everything from eight straight hours of mental alertness to an end to anxiety to a weekend’s worth of hard-ons—with the establishment’s name printed on the side.
He didn’t know if the English still drank their tea or the French their champagne or the Jamaicans their rum, but the people of the Georgia Control guzzled Royal Pep Cola from dawn to dusk, with the “thousand and then some” flavor variations the Royal Pep Cola company claimed could be created from six flavorings and nine additives.
As wily market-goer, Macon calculated each purchase on a cost-versus-benefit analysis. He didn’t enjoy this part of the job at all—though there were worse duties. His least favorite were his rare ventures into the dripping confines of the boss’s home carbuncle—but if one wanted to rise in the Control one did the Unpleasant, for no other reason than to avoid the More Unpleasant that was the lot of the groceries.
He exchanged a glance with the angular young tough behind the counter. Muscles bulged under what was once a white T-shirt, tattooing on his right hand indicated he’d done a prison term as an adolescent. Macon gave him a friendly nod.
“Water, and a menu,” Macon said, taking a seat at the end of the counter where he could scan the room.
Water appeared, in battered plastic, slightly green—the water, not the plastic—no ice.
“There’s the menu,” the counterman said, pointing to a painted and repainted stretch of wall over the kitchen window.
If you want to rise, do the difficult
, his mentor in the Youth Vanguard used to say. The old pederast had his faults, but he’d built a comfortable, and damn near inviolable, niche in the Control.
Unlike the rest of the Advancing World, the Georgia Control had humans do all the selecting of groceries. Not just the usual disposal of the inconvenient and abrasive by the top dogs in the hierarchy. Not some, not much, but all. The Directors argued to the Kurians that humans possessed a keener instinct for sniffing out weakness, wrongdoing, and rebellion. The Kurians weren’t particular. As long as the vital aura of culled humans flowed, and the rest of the population remained placid and breeding, they were inclined to let their human assistants put check marks and figures into spreadsheets determining who contributed to society and who ended up a net loss at the bottom line.
Macon approved of the system. It gave the humans running the Control a little bit of leverage. There were even rumors that a Kurian or two who’d been problematic in its demands had been removed thanks to subtle hints and pressure from the Directors.
Outside the well-patrolled borders of the Georgia Control—an area a good deal larger than the old state, and growing, its Directors were proud to report—you didn’t have neat little lists and the quiet nightly pickup squads. One had to use judgement, and Macon had observed only a few excursions and the requisite grocery-selecting.
Someone had to do the difficult and nasty business of finding fodder for the Kurians. Few wanted the job, and usually the ones who wanted it sought the authority for all the wrong reasons. What sort of diseased character would want to do such a thing? Macon thought of himself as a white blood cell, keeping the system healthy and functioning. When he had to attach to and gobble up pathogens, the rest of the bloodstream was the better for it. A white blood cell that acted out of emotion, self-aggrandizement, or plain cruelty would do harm to the system.
As a junior sibling where his eldest sister was helping their father run middle Georgia’s greatest city as heir-apparent urban director, he’d have to make his own way and rise on his own merit, rather in the manner of following sons in the old aristocracies.
So when a new group of Kurians sent out word that they were seeking seed-staff for expansion into Kentucky, he volunteered for the position of “Ghoul Wrangler” as the less-ambitious liked to style it. His actual title in the Control’s orgbase managed to include the words “Staff” and “Facilitator” along with only a single phrasing period—if he rose to the vice-director level they’d start using commas, an elegant touch for those at that exalted level. Of course, there was that dreadful word “unincorporated” and the orgbase inactive rolls were filled with listings of ambitious Youth Vanguard souls who’d gambled their lives in unincorporated regions.
Unincorporated or no, he received a Personal Utility Transport with only 24 kils on the odometer, no visible bullet holes, and a new field-brown paint job with his name stenciled under the Pooter’s driver’s side window/firing slot.
His blue-black Model 18 submachine gun fit that slit quite nicely. The gun, a gift from some connection of his father at the Atlanta Gunworks, rode across his chest like a clinging bat. The counterman eyed it like a thirsty Bedouin gauging an enemy’s waterskin.
He reached into a pocket of his heavy, lined-leather driving coat, and extracted a pair of antacid peppermints from a big plastic bag. He popped the button-sized tablets into his mouth and crunched them down. They tasted like peppermint-dusted chalk, but it was better than feeling that he’d swallowed hot coals. Picking out groceries always gave him a sour stomach. If he was thinking about his gut, his duties would suffer. Never mind that this particular task could be downright dangerous.
The Wayside had about what you’d expect so close to Kentucky. These backwoods Tennessee roads attracted the shady and the skeevy. Well away from the Kurians on the fringes of the Advancing World, but not quite in the limestone-cut tangles filled with suspicious, well-armed legworm ranchers who’d gut you for the half pack of cigarettes in your pocket.
Macon remembered the interview when he’d been taken on by his Kurian. Chizzb or Tschezb or something even tougher on the tongue was its name, but his small human staff called him Prince Green.
They brought him into an old security warehouse at Atlanta’s barely functioning airport, perhaps the most heavily patrolled square miles in Georgia outside of the Kurian City Center downtown. The lower level still served its purpose of temporarily holding people and goods entering from outside the Georgia Control by air. The upper level, accessible only by five flights of metal stairs, looked like a giant honeycomb of ochre papier-mâché.
A Reaper, two meters of solid dreadful, smiled a black-fanged smile when he offered his ID and showed the courier-delivered summons.
Prince Green looked like a cow’s liver with an umbrella top and a couple of greasy mop heads stuck into it. It pulsed as it sat, though whether this was respiration or circulation he didn’t know. He’d never seen one uncloaked, so to speak—usually when a Kurian interacted with men they went out and about under heavy capes, faces hidden behind helmets or veils, sometimes not even bothering to give the illusion of feet beneath the cloak. He’d been told that when they first showed up in 2022, in the wake of planetwide earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, they’d appeared as ethereal, glowing, half-angelic aliens with all the beautiful poise of a cut flower. From such a vision, the soothing words of comfort to a stricken world may have just as well been set to music.
You will excuse the informality
, a decidedly nonmusical voice breathed from an unsettling point between his ears.
Sure as shootin’ I will
, Macon had thought back, sinking into the spongy floor. He felt something wet pull at his ankles, like living mud. He wondered if he stepped in the wrong direction if he’d sink and leave nothing but his Youth Vanguard Leader cap floating on the living floor.
This is true: I will not present myself to you in a guise more pleasing to human eyes,
the inner dialogue continued.
Preparations for the move into Kentucky have left me exhausted
.
Perhaps it is just as well. I see no point in trusting a man who needs such useless reality dressing.
“I’d rather see things as they are,” Macon said, trying to fill his brain with white noise. You could bullshit a Youth Vanguard Leader when he caught you with vodka in your shampoo bottle, but Prince Green had the ability to poke around in his brain.
One old hand, the Atlanta-based director who’d sponsored him in the Youth Vanguard, had told him the worst thing you could do when facing a Kurian was try to remain calm. She’d said he should give in to whatever emotion was at hand—anger, fear, revulsion. Strong human emotions confused them, and a few caused them to flee your head like a cat off a hot stove.
Macon didn’t want to screw up his first real opportunity, so he went with serene competence. It had served him well with the Reapers, and weren’t they just extensions of the Kurians?
This is good: I will dispense with the aphorisms. We are moving into Kentucky shortly. Our foolish cousins north of the Ohio River have thoroughly, what is your colorful expression, shit in their own front yard
.
They turned a minor incursion by the resistance into a full-scale rebellion thanks to the use of a heavy hand where a light stinging slap was required, then released a half-developed and virtually untested virus. They’ve killed half the population and made resolute enemies of the other half. We have an opportunity to pick up the pieces so carelessly broken, if we move quickly but carefully. There are to be three new Control Districts. I will have the westernmost, and you will be on my staff, if you so accept
.
Macon needed to think. Were they really moving against the rebels, or was this some kind of play against their rivals north of the Ohio? They were greedy when it came to engulfing new populations and their human servants were chips thrown on the table in long shot gambles. The Georgia Control was powerful, easily the most powerful south of the old Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi, but for all that they had only a small standing army. It stood as a safeguard against a rebellion from the more numerous police and paramilitary reserve forces and was overstretched.
This is interesting: You’re wondering if we have enough trustworthy forces to operate in three entire new Control Districts. We do not. But we have enough to do a thorough job of taking over one, as we did in Alabama and Florida in the days of your fathers
.
For the others, mercenaries, police, and a certain amount of terror will allow us to maintain our position until control is consolidated
.
“There are guerillas in Kentucky, I’ve heard,” Macon said. He’d heard a lot of talk of one beleaguered Southern Command battalion. Evidently anyone could join up under a false name. They didn’t ask any questions and gave you a new identity, basically. He’d heard some mutterings that if this or that didn’t work out, the person in question would run off and join the rebels.

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