The Survivors from the Strippings

By Frederick Rustam

Inspired by the Painting "Survivors" by Daniel Hanequand

Mickey's keen nose sampled the air, and he ran ahead to investigate. She didn't call him back. So far, the Green Man hadn't jumped out and grabbed her. Maybe he didn't really live in here, as she feared he might.

The light from the hissing lamp showed the corridor widening, ahead. It was a chamber. In it, was something horrid.

She saw a huge pile of tamped brown clay. Mickey was sniffing it. He looked at her and wagged his tail, as if he'd found it for her. A lot of old trash and bones and were stuck in the pile. Some of the bones were probably from animals, others might not be. And there was something else. She stood on her tiptoes to see what it was.

"Oh!..." There were two heads stuck in the pile!

("They must be dead people.") she thought. ("This is real bad.")

Jean Ann was only nine but she'd seen enough television to know there was something evil about this spooky place. That clay pile looked like some kind of, um... exhibit. Her curiosity overrode her fears, though. She gathered her courage and tested the pile with a foot. It held her weight without crumbling. It had dried almost brick-hard.

Mickey left the chamber and wandered farther down the corridor in search of new smells.

She pulled herself slowly up the slope of the rounded pile, until she was face to face with the two heads in the top. They looked just awful. It seemed like two bald men were buried up to their necks in the brown clay, facing each other and surrounded by bones and junk.

They opened their eyes and blinked in the light of her lamp.

("Oh Lordy! They're alive!") She jumped back and contemplated the two heads from a greater distance. They had been crudely shaved, and bore the marks of it. She spoke to them as if their situation were an everyday one.

"Are y'all takin' a mud bath... or somethin' like that?"

They feebly moved their bluish lips, trying to speak. But even as she was asking her question, Jean Ann knew that couldn't be so. She listened anxiously for their reply. When it came, she could hardly hear it. They were two very weak heads.

"Help us.... Help us...." they whispered. They didn't seem to have the strength to say anything more.

Jean Ann felt bad. What could she do for these two heads?... Their bodies were stuck way down in the pile, and she didn't have anything to even try to dig them out. For the umpteenth time, she regretted being just a little girl.

"I'll get help. Y'all wait. I'll be right back." She skittered down the pile and turned to run from the cave.

Standing in the corridor, blocking her way, stood a big hairy thing.

It was the Green Man! This *was* his place!

Her scream echoed loudly off the rocky walls and lingered for a bit, even after she ran out of breath.

"Stay in the house while we're gone, Jean Ann. Don't you wander off nowhere. You stay inside and watch TV. Your Aunt Gladys'll come over and look after you when she gets off work." Aunt Gladys worked a half-day on Saturday at the paper mill.

Gram and Gramp had to comfort a sick friend at the hospital. Gram decided not to take Jean Ann with her. The girl was old enough now to stay by herself for a little while, and Gram didn't think she'd like the atmosphere of the hospital.

"We'll be back on toward evening." Gram paused at the threshold. "And you stay away from the Strippin's."

"Uh huh." Jean Ann was engrossed in a Saturday morning cartoon. Now that they had a satellite dish, TV was a lot better than the snowy pictures they got over top the stubborn green mountains of their West Virginia homeland. Jean Ann could now watch exciting, realistic cartoons that seemed more for grownups than for children her age.

Her grandparents told her to stay away from the Strippings so often that she wondered if they knew she was going up there, anyway. But no matter. They were fairly indulgent parent-substitutes. They never whupped her for being bad; they just shamed her.

The Strippings was a shelf cut in the ridge on the south side of the farm by a mining company. They'd paid Gramp some money for the privilege of stripping off low-grade coal. Gramp, who was a retired coal miner, said the company mixed the low-grade coal from the Strippings with better stuff, and sold the mix as the better.

When the coal pretty much ran out, the company planted lespedeza bushes in the Strippings as a gesture of restoration, and left. The bushes had "growed up" now, and from down below it was hard to tell that the hillside had ever been gouged out for its black treasure. The shelf they'd bulldozed remained, though, and it beckoned to Jean Ann as an unnatural, magical kind of place.

>From up at the Strippings, everything in her world looked small. She liked that. Being up there was a way of pushing familiar things away for little while, turning the farm into a picturebook fairyland. But when Jean Ann took with her the big binoculars her Uncle Clifford liberated in the war, she could bring distant things up close.

Gramp had dug into the hill at the Strippings, and had mined his own coal for their range and potbellied stoves until he was getting more shale than coal. While digging his mine, he broke through into an unknown cave system. He'd explored it a little, but it was a barren place. It didn't have the kind of underground scenery that commercial caverns charged people to see. So he kept it within the family.

As soon as her grandparents left, Jean Ann turned off the TV set and changed into some already-soiled playclothes from the laundry hamper. She put a chair in front of Gramp's closet, and took down his old miner's lamp. She refilled it with carbide rocks from a can in the basement and water from the pump at the kitchen sink.

"Come on, Mickey," she called to Gramp's cattle dog who sprawled, off-duty, on his front-porch burlaps. "Get up, now."

Mickey was a real smart mongrel who knew the south ridge better than anyone in the family. He was sent up there every day to bring back the milk-cows. All Gramp had to do was point that way and yell, "Go get 'em, Mickey!" That dog'd rush off, and soon you'd hear the cowbells clanking as the four Swiss Browns came down the hillside pasture with old Mickey barking at their heels.

"Let's go to the Strippin's!"

The faithful dog leaped up and led the way.

"Let me go!"

Jean Ann struggled, but the smelly, ragged man held her and kept her from fleeing the chamber that housed his exhibit of souvenirs. He snatched the miner's lamp from her head and held it up to inspect it. The elastic headband dangled below it with her baseball cap still entangled in it, the one her Uncle Harold had brought back from a Redskins football game in Washington, D. C.

"You're mighty well equipped for a little kid," the man remarked in a voice that was hoarse from disuse. "I can use one of these."

"Give that back. It belongs to my grandpaw."

"I know who owns it, girl: that old man who dug out my nice home." He slipped the lampstrap over his head, cap and all.

"He didn't dig it for you. You're a trepsasser." In her excitement, she garbled the big word.

He smiled a little. "This is my land, too, sweetie. It's all mine."

Jean Ann stopped struggling. It was no use. She was caught, and as good as "et." Soon, her bones would be pushed into the clay pile. Or maybe she'd end up as a third head.

"I know who you are," she dared to say. The youngish man stared at her with his cold brown eyes and showed his yellow teeth through a runaway beard that covered most of his face and made him look like that hairy thing on TV that people were always sighting among the big pine trees out west.

"You're the Green Man. You grab people who cut down trees. You're a bad apple. The Sheriff's looking for you."

The Green Man scowled. "I only grab them that kills my trees.... Besides, a man's gotta eat, don't he?"

That remark sent shivers down Jean Ann's spine. What some valley people had been whispering was true: the Green Man was a cannibal. Even the Sheriff didn't believe that. But it was a fact. Why, the evidence for it was right behind her.

"Let those two heads go, you hear." she shouted---so long as the subject had been brought up. "They never done you no harm."

"The hell I will. Them's my winter grub."

That did it. Jean Ann had no intention of ending up as winter food for a damn crazy cannibal.

"Mickey!" she yelled toward the cave's entrance. "Come here, Mickey!"

"Who's Mickey?" asked the Green Man. "Did someone come up here with you?"

Her reply was to whistle for the dog---who had actually gone farther back into the cave---and to begin struggling again to break free.

The Green Man turned around toward Gramp's old coal mine, from where he'd entered the cave. He had to use both hands to hold Jean Ann, and he was undecided whether to free his right one to pull his knife. The girl must have brought that damn cow dog with her.

Grrrrowf!

While he was deciding, Mickey rushed up behind him. The dog saw Jean Ann struggling in the grasp of that stranger who'd chased him off the hillside more'n once by throwing rocks at him. Now, he'd have his revenge. He sank his teeth into the man's ankle.

"Ow! You bastard!"

The Green Man let go of Jean Ann with his right hand, and reached for his knife in its scabbard on his belt. But his coat covered it, so he had to dig for it, and he relaxed his grip on Jean Ann.

She kicked him in the shins and broke free. "Ow!" he repeated. She ran for Gramp's mine. Mickey held on to the Green Man like he was a choice bone someone was trying to take from him.

When Jean Ann reached the mine, she turned and called, "Mickey!" She slapped her thigh and whistled and yelled. The dog needed no encouragement. He released his victim when he saw the flash of the big knifeblade in the light of the miner's lamp askew on the man's bushy head. He sprinted from the chamber.

"Come on boy! Let's make tracks!"

Girl and dog splashed through the acid water in the mine, and ran out across the shelf of the Strippings through the lespedeza bushes. Soon, they were racing down the steep hillside, startling the cows they passed.

Jean Ann led the Sheriff's men up to the Strippings. They entered Gramp's mine with their new Glock automatics drawn, and right away began getting their neat uniforms dirty.

"Are you sure about this, Jean Ann?" asked the Sheriff. "This place has really gone to heck since your grandpaw stopped mining here," She'd interrupted him while he was writing his speech for the Rotary Club's special luncheon on law enforcement.

He'd found her story about heads and winter grub a bit far-fetched, but she did have a reputation for being level-headed. The Sheriff's father and Gramp had worked together in the mines, so he cut Jean Ann some slack. Besides, he was getting antsy about the damn Green Man. Missing-person complaints were piling up in his office, and the damn outside media were beginning to snoop around the county in search of the fabled, elusive ecoterrorist.

"You'll see. It's just ahead."

When they reached the chamber in the cave, the lawmen gaped in amazement at the pile of clay with its bones and two heads.

"Shee-it!" exclaimed one Deputy. "Christamighty. It's like somethin' from the X-Files," said the other.

"I guess you were right, Jean Ann. If this don't beat all," said the Sheriff. He pictured himself on the TV news, explaining the situation to the county, the nation, and probably the Governor.

Jean Ann ran to the pile and scrambled up to check the heads. They began whimpering for help, again.

"They're still alive, Sheriff. See?"

"It's a wonder they are.... Carl," he said to a Deputy. "Go outside and radio for an ambulance and the fire rescue squad. Then go back down the hill and bring 'em up here. They aren't gonna believe this." The Deputy reluctantly left.

"And watch out for that crazy man!" the Sheriff shouted after him. "Tom, go tell Carl to bring the crime-scene camera from the car, too. Then look around outside to see if maybe that nut's hiding somewhere nearby, watching us." The other Deputy left the Sheriff inside the chamber of horrors, holding his pistol at the ready, just in case.

"Help is coming," said Jean Ann, as she stroked one of the heads.

"Don't do that, Jean Ann," advised the Sheriff. "Leave 'em alone. Let the EMS boys take care of 'em." The Sheriff knew all the legal implications of handling the injured. He didn't want to be sued.

When Aunt Gladys showed up at the farm, after visiting a local bar, she found it a whirl of official and unofficial activity. Her niece had become an instant celebrity. Gladys tried to take charge of Jean Ann until her mother could return from North Carolina. When Gram and Gramp returned, there was a big argument about who should advise the young heroine, who was already receiving telephone calls from some television producers who were making lucrative offers for her sensational story.

The two heads and the attached bodies were removed with difficulty from the clay pile in the Green Man's cave. They were taken to the hospital, where they recovered, more or less, from their nightmare. Both gave brave interviews to the press, but neither returned to the business of lumbering. They'd aged prematurely, and now looked like old men.

The Sheriff's efforts to capture the Green Man were interfered-with by an invasion of Federal Authorities with their technological superiority and local insensitivity. A few weeks later, though, the notorious ecoterrorist was jumped while he was spiking trees in a woodlot marked for clearcutting. After the lumbermen beat him senseless, they handed him over to the law. He was tried and almost convicted of many criminal charges. But he was found to be mentally incompetent, and was sent to the state hospital at Weston, where he quickly became the former Green Man.

Jean Ann gained fame for somewhat more than fifteen minutes. Some New York fellow even wrote a book titled, _The Green Man of the Mountains_. Her experience became known, worldwide. And art imitated life as Mulder and Scully had a similar experience on TV. Even old Mickey achieved fame. A TV tabloid crew, desperate for a new angle, filmed him bringing the cows down the hillside.

When school resumed in the fall, Jean Ann was asked to give a speech in the school auditorium about her experience. In it, she emphasized that the Green Man was not a true eco-enthusiast, but just a poor unfortunate "whose mental illness incorporated environmentalism as a pretext for criminal activity." (That got people wondering who had written the speech for her.) Her teachers agreed that she did have scholastic potential, and they got the state technical college at Montgomery to create an Appalachian Ecology scholarship for her.

The next year, Gramp quietly sold off some timber on the north hill. He and Gram claimed they needed the money for home improvements.

Eventually, Gramp's little mine up at the Strippings flooded-out, but this didn't stop sensation-seeking "trepsassers" from visiting it and the big cave beyond. After one spelunker almost drowned, Gramp put a wrought-iron gate over the mine's entrance and charged people a big fee for the privilege of risking their lives. Still they came, from all over. Eventually he made a nice piece of change out of it.

Frederick Rustam is a retired civil servant who writes science fiction for the Web as a hobby. He formerly indexed technical documents for the Department of Defense. He finds constructing imaginary worlds of the future to be more rewarding than indexing the technology of our times.

As to other of his works, he says: "I have no webpage. My Web existence is entirely in ezines, mostly of the SFF&H variety. As a substitute for a webpage, I've been indexed by the Web search engines, and my readers can read some of my other stories by this means. As a former indexer, I find this gratifying."

E-mail:frustam@CapAccess.org

Visit Aphelion's Lettercolumn and voice your opinion of this story. Both the writer and I would love to read your feedback.

Return to the Aphelion main page.