The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Read Online Free PDF Page B

genies.
Like with the lamps.”
    “I thought those were good
luck. Three wishes and all that.”
    He was quiet for awhile,
staring off to a bright star rising on the horizon, “No, that’s just Disney
shit. Over there the Djinni are terrible things. They’re like spirits of
hate made from the elements. Some of them are just like pranksters, the Djinni from the sky. They steal your goats, knock over your piss pot while you sleep.
The ones from underground—” He chuckled. “Well those are the bad ones. They’re
imprisoned underground by the gods, or by God I guess now, and they get loose
and it’s all your asses. They come down from the sky and eat the skin off whole
herds, not one goat, the whole herd. They carry village girls out into the
middle of a field and tear their arms and legs off, then when people come to
help them they tear off their limbs until the whole village is a big pile of
limbless bodies.”
    “Well, I know what I would do
with three wishes,” I offered lamely. Zan didn’t reply.
    Two semis waited at the site.
The drivers had already unloaded the two dozers and two end-loaders, and
Snodgrass had signed for them. After a brief consultation with a surveyor who
showed up in a shiny new Dodge truck, Snodgrass gave us our orders.
    I was put on one of the
end-loaders, a heavy dirt shovel that had seen better days, and dispatched to
the middle of the bowl-shaped expanse that made up the Lindsey mine. Zan
followed me on the E-6, a mammoth dozer, and Eric brought up the tail in a dump
truck. The other crews were dispatched at the back of the five-hundred-acre
mine.
    We went straight to it. Zan
peeled back the topsoil and I scooped it up and put it in the dump. When the
truck was full the spoil was packed off to a pile for later use in reclamation.
Zan and I worked well together. I could anticipate his moves, his strategy, and
before noon we had two trucks packing off our spoil. Zan was good. There were
no wasted moves. He seemed able to predict the material under the brown sage
grass of the field. He knew rocks were there before he hit them, and when a
clean run of clay was found he pushed it hard. We worked like that for the rest
of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that. After a week of
prep, we got into the black.
    The seam was not deep. We cut
through a layer of clay, then shale, and that was it. The run of coal was
around two feet thick and looked good. The crew on top of the ridge had been
pulling coal for two days so we were both anxious to get it out of the ground,
and get it out we did. We had a smaller crew, thinner seam, and older equipment
but, by the second day, Zan and I had already matched the others ton for ton.
    When we kicked off at dark we
busted on the other crews. “How two dozers and two loaders on a four foot seam
can’t keep up with me and Zan can only mean one thing!” I yelled at the ridge
crew.
    “What does it mean?” Zan called
out from the truck bed, shot gunning a beer as he did.
    “Pussyitis!” I cried to a reply
of ‘fuck-yous’ and the high-pitched throat squeals of mute Johnny’s damaged
laughter.
    That’s how it went. For a week,
a month, all the way to spring we cut and busted the ground. Hundreds of tons
became thousands, tens of thousands. The Lindsey mine was rich, unusually rich,
and now so was Mr. Snodgrass. We all got raises. Zan and me both got up to
forty dollars an hour, and I knew we were the highest paid. Zan moved into a
house not far from mine on Green River. I got a new truck. Zan got a
motorcycle. Annie started talking about us having kids. That’s how it goes when
times are good. Slow changes. Nothing good happens fast. It may seem good, but
it’s really just difference playing tricks on you. Abrupt things are hateful to
life. I could not appreciate that until recently, so when Zan and me were on my
porch drinking beer and half watching the grill on a warm March Sunday and he
suggested that we try a new strategy at work, I