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If you want to rise, do the difficult.
It took a long time to grow a new Reaper to useful size and learn to survive on its own during breaks in contact with its master Kurian. Maybe ten years or so, though that was only a guess. No one he knew could say for certain. Only a select few were involved in that process. Maybe he could achieve something that would allow the Green Prince to control Western Kentucky with however many Reapers he had left. Couldn't be more than nine or ten, he'd never heard of a Kurian who had more than a dozen or so.
He cocked the revolver and came around the Transporter, firing as he advanced. He made it to the driver's seat, put the transmission in reverse, and backed away from the Pooter.
The figures rose, watching him. The redhead made an obscene gesture. The Indian stared. Maybe he mouthed something.
John Macon pointed at them, then drew his finger across his throat. Silent promise.
The Indian didn't react.
This isn't over, zealots. If I have to crawl and beg, sleep in the rain, and dine on raw rat, I'll make it my mission in life to figure out who you two are. I'll find your holes or your family or your clan and bring the full forest-burning heat of the Georgia Control down on you like the fist of an angry god. Before this summer's over, I'll have you both skinned and made into an awning, drink Long Islands out of your skulls, and wash my ass with your scalps.
h County Wayside Number Two, the Kentucky-Tennessee border, February of the Fifty-sixth year of the Kurian Order: the recent violent winter, the worst in living memory for even the tough locals, has ebbed at last. Nothing that might be called spring warms the sky; rather, it is a quiet between-season pause, like the lassitude between the break in a life-threatening fever and recovery.
One winter can do only so much damage. At an old intersection between two neglected county highways, with only one route showing even some signs of maintenance-the northbound stretch has been reduced to little more than a horse track-the Wayside squats behind a lattice of young fir. It might be a monument to entropy.
It is an enclave that could best be described as lumpy. No two structures match. The central building used to be a gas station and convenience store, still identifiable by a few chipped logos as a BP for connoisseurs of pre-22 corporate branding. It stands out from the others in that all the verticals and horizontals are square. The other structures lean as though tired: relocated sheds, prefabricated housing, a fire-gutted strip whose gap-toothed storefronts serve as an improvised garage and junkyard. A double layer of barbed-wire fencing, no two posts standing quite the same, surrounds all, pulled this way and that by the growing pines. The more observant may notice dog feces among the dropped needles between the layers of wire.
Farther off, crowds of trees and brush and brown kudzu envelop what had once been a little two-street town of houses and a barn or two.
Everything in the Wayside, from crumbling brick and trailer home to boarded-up window, is painted a formerly bright shade of orange, now faded and dirtied into a rotting pumpkin color.
Wayside Number Two looks as though it would be improved by a return of the short-lived snow. You wouldn't see the mud, for a start. The garbage mound out behind the prefabs could be camouflaged into and inviting, snowy hill. The dog litter couldn't be seen-or smelled-and white would hide the slime molds coating the bricks of the gutted strip.
For all its forlorn appearance, the gas pump and parking lot in front ticked with vehicular life.
One pair of vehicles stand out. A shining new red compact truck-or oversized, high-clearance car with a lighted roll bar and stumpy cargo bed, depending how precise one's definitions-and the bulldog shape of a heavier, ten-wheeled armored car are parked so as to block the roadside gap in the wire. A tall, muscular, alert-looking black man stands beside the compact truck, radio crackling inside. The uniformed men in the armored car are more casually disposed as they wait. They blow smoke out of their lowered windows as they play cards, using the dashboard as a table. The pitiful collection of rust buckets, motorcycles, a bike, and horse wagon nearer the Wayside's main entrance look like sheep penned by a pair of wolves.
A brown truck slows as it approaches, but the bearded driver, getting a glimpse of the Georgia Control circle-and-bar logo on the doors of both vehicles-huge on the armored car, discreet on the red compact truck-thinks better of stopping. His worn tires kick up a shower of grit as he changes up after making the turn south, suddenly eager for the horizon. ...
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.
