Ahoy! Pirates of Appalachia is an epic absurdist satire releasing as a weekly serial. Think 2 parts Huck Finn, 1 part Slaughterhouse-Five, served with a punch to the face by A Boy Named Sue. This is a completed novel—not a work in progress. Learn more or start from the beginning via the buttons below. Happy pirating!
Previously on Pirates of Appalachia… Candidate Adam Patterson was diagnosed with cancer by his mysterious mute golden retriever, Chelsea. He then has a religious calling and begins to see visions after taking a paddle-shot to the head during the gubernatorial debate.
Camboro Oil & Asbestos Healthcare Park
Independent City of Pittsburgh
Friday, October 25, 0026 P.C., 1:14 P.M.
~ 14 days to the conclusion of election season
“I’m sorry, sir or madam. There’s simply nothing we can do.”
Gubernatorial Candidate Adam Patterson had received that same answer word-for-word for the last thirteen questions he’d asked. How do I schedule an appointment? What does my universal healthcare cover? If it’s universal, shouldn’t it cover everything? How do I get diagnosed to start the ‘Right to Life’ clock? What about my right to life? Are porcupines rude for pointing? The young woman—more squishy seat-cover than receptionist, with a bowl of curly black hair and a dazzling pink aura—bunkered behind a laminated script that contained pre-approved responses to customer inquiries. It was a masterful stroke of “lean” management, but as far as Adam could tell, it contained only one response—there’s nothing we can do. Still, it was hard to be mad at her; besides the sparkly aura, she smelled of cinnamon and laughter. It was a strange but delightful side-effect of the Divine Paddling:
Adam could now see, taste, hear, smell—even feel—people’s auras.
And being within five feet of the receptionist made him giggly.
He took a step back. Flexed a pec to steel his resolve. “There has to be something you can do. My dog diagnosed me with cancer.”
She flipped the script over, ran a finger down one column, then another. Adam’s breath caught—had he found a question it didn’t include?
Her finger stopped. “I’m sure your dog is a very good boy and/or girl, but I’m sorry. There’s simply nothing we can do.”
He knew this was going to be hard. Maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done. Navigating the healthcare system was like solving a riddle that had never been asked. It was a remarkable way to keep costs down and ensure ROI; one other service industries had emulated to varying degrees of success. But restaurants that didn’t serve food went out of business. Internet outages led to riots. And tardy therapists triggered hashtags. No, only healthcare and insurance agencies had managed to be so useless yet so profitable that they became too big to fail. By conditioning people to expect less while simultaneously sinking their retirements into their businesses, they managed to make it in everyone’s best and worst interests for the companies to be as grossly profitable as possible.
If you charge for a service but never provide it, does it make a sound?
After the pandemics of the Croaking Twenties paralyzed and threatened to bankrupt the healthcare system, the Heel Party seized on an ingenious gambit: disease had as much a right to life as the next guy. The industry and precious microscopic life could be saved by simply not treating—i.e., killing—disease. It worked, perhaps too well. Cemeteries overflowed, and Human Waste Dumps were soon established. Debt reapers were commissioned to fetch corpses and pass unpaid fees (with interest) onto the next of kin. Finally, lawmakers connected human death with the death of the disease they were trying to save. A balance needed to be struck. Enter Title Nineteen, the law that turned the unspoken riddle into a holy book. It mandated that disease had the right to life for three years after diagnosis. At which point it could be treated, thus ensuring it had an opportunity at life, liberty, and the pursuit of sniffles, while preventing the extinction of mankind. But it was so contradictory and convoluted it created an almost impenetrable bureaucracy. Within weeks, even making an appointment had transformed into a Sisyphean quest.
So Adam knew he was battling history, policy, a hellish combo of bureaucracy and weaponized apathy, and layers of self-interest. But he’d had a religious calling. Surely with Mother and Father on his side he could book an appointment.
The receptionist’s aura undulated like the declining smoke from a campfire, giddy chatter transforming pastel pink to neon. Adam imagined her somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains, gossiping and giggling with her friends. He remembered stories of “church retreats” where the congregation would vacation together, building community and memories. Suddenly, he very much wanted that for her, and himself. “It’s the queer enigma,” he said, his voice unconsciously taking on the self-important air he’d used when delivering a sermon—“how can Mother and Father be separate beings and the Holy Oneness at the same time? And how can someone be diagnosed with a disease without being able to book an appointment?”
“I’m sorry, sir or madam,” she said, pursing her lips and flashing an indignant expression to her selfie drone.
“Did I mention I’m a candidate for guber?”
“You have.” Her aura grew so bright Adam had to shield his eyes. “I’ve watched the reel of the sense being paddled out of you six times since you’ve been standing here.”
“So can I be seen by the machine?”
She smiled at him, her aura throbbing as if strummed by a violin bow. “I’m sorry, sir or madam,” she said, laughter perfuming the space. “There’s simply nothing we can do.”
He giggled despite himself. “Can you at least tell me which way to the bathroom?”
After consulting her laminated bible, she huffed. “I’m sorry. You know the deal.”
“I’m pretty sure you read the wrong answer that time.”
She cocked an eyebrow, the laughter quieting and colors dimming. She’d bored of him.
Taking a final, longing look at the closed doors behind her, he said, “I’ll just look for the signs.” Then he stepped away with his religious calling tucked between his legs.
Luckily, he stumbled upon a bathroom near the first-level concession stands and was able to relieve himself before making the trek back to his seat. There weren’t any hospitals in the city big enough to accommodate the crowds seeking medical attention, so outdated stadiums were used for scheduling and diagnostic appointments. As Adam entered the auditorium, he was blinded by the wildfire of thirty thousand auras rippling atop each other. The sights, sounds, and aromas were so overwhelming he retched, and for an anxious moment he thought he was going to hurl. He closed his eyes and waited for the nausea and dizziness to subside, then started up the stairs, brushing through the clammy shoulders of auras and the noxious perfume of body odor tinged with despair. Unlike at a sporting event or political match, the pervasive sounds weren’t that of chanting and cheering; they were coughing, wheezing, and the occasional thud of the newly dead falling to the floor. After about fifty rows, he stopped and took a deep breath, a disastrous mistake. He inhaled a peanut-sized fruit fly of aura so sour he could no longer contain himself. He lost his lunch, leaving a chunky yellow Slip ‘n Slide down the center of the stairway. But due to his limited jaw-opening capacity, he wasn’t able to lose his lunch all at once; instead, when he wasn’t re-swallowing chicken parm slush, it was sputtering out of his mouth like smoke from the tailpipe of an old Vespa. His only saving grace was that the experience was singularly vile it blocked out the rest of the sensory chaos until at long last he pushed the bile-boulder to the top of Mount Shit Show, section 524, row LL, seat 6, where Harv sat swinging his legs like a toddler on a school bus. Chelsea lay at his feet, playing dead as if she’d just diagnosed the entire crowd with cancer.
Daring not take a deep breath, Adam put his hands on his knees and his head between his legs, breathing through his nose. He could feel the warmth of Chelsea’s soul radiating over him, warming his molding like a heated towel after a neck massage. For a second, he forgot about the absurdity of the situation and wished only to feel her aura against his skin—his real skin, not his political plaster. Did he dare? Could he bear his darkest secret? Now, this late in election season? It wasn’t what was beneath that would cancel him—it was the cover-up, the years of burying who he was in the name of political advantage. Surgery after surgery crafting a vision of himself so unrecognizable that he dared not acknowledge what had come before even it to himself. Hell, not even Harv knew his true identity, though he’d wanted to tell him every time the valiant Crispy confessed his misplaced faith in him.
“What took so damn long?” Harv grumbled. He had a wispy black aura that left swooshes in the air as he swung his legs. “Take yer mare with ya next time, would ya? That promiscuous nose of hers is probably what gave you the cancer it so conveniently diagnosed.”
Adam couldn’t help but ask, “Why are you doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Swinging your legs like that?”
Harv’s aura grew hard as granite. “Blood flow to the limbs. Absolutely vital, champ. You can’t have a career as a politician without a robust blood-to-limb ratio. That’s why Mike Hawk is ahead in votes. He walks around with so much blood flow his primary limb could be used to joust.”
Of course he does—he’s a prophet, Adam thought, though he could never tell Harv that. He gazed out at the crowd: thirty thousand souls, and not a single one with a halo like his presumed nemesis.
“What do you want me to do, touch myself before taking stage?”
“Abso-fuckin-tutely. Real leaders get hard stepping onstage! You have to be so voyeuristic and self-diluted that the only thing that gets you off is adulation. Adulation, or seething contempt!” Harv dug his hand into his camo pants and vigorously itched himself, then rubbed his nose, leaving a black smear down the bridge. “Why are you slathered in vomit?”
Adam flexed his pectorals—left, right, left two times. It was a code they’d come up with to reference the Divine Paddling’s afterglow.
“Rainbow sparkles made you throw up?”
Adam shrugged. “It’s not just the sight of the… the auras… it’s the smells and tastes and… tickles. It’s overwhelming.”
“Christ,” Harv cursed. “You’d think you’d never been to a gentleman’s club. Try having Sparkles grinding atop you after a bucket of wings. A few nights of that will give ya a stomach of steel. What did the doctor say?”
“I didn’t see the doctor. I couldn’t get past the script.”
Harv squinted his eyes, which had the peculiar effect of making his nose bulge, the smear growing like an oil leak. “Past the script—what in tarnation does that mean?”
“There’s this huge”—Adam attempted to illustrate the size with his hands—“paper with every question imaginable, and the woman at the front desk only reads from the pre-approved answers on it.”
“So…?”
Harv’s terseness made Adam feel silly and inept, especially considering he was a man with a divine calling who needed to be treated for cancer to fulfill said calling but was complaining about being unable to pass the ostensibly insurmountable obstacle of an FAQ. “And it’s—it’s laminated.” What else? “And she’s very curt. And, uh, all the answers say there’s nothing she can do.”
Harv looked at him expectantly, but there weren’t any other complications Adam could think of.
“So what are we doing now?” asked Harv.
“Well, I’m considered a walk-in patient, so if someone misses their scheduled time, we can, you know, maybe go in.”
“And see the doctor?”
“No.” Adam couldn’t help but snicker—Harv really has no clue about this sort of thing. “Then we can get in line to be seen by the machine.”
“The machine?”
“Yeah, the Disease Sleuth 3000. It will determine how likely I am to have a disease. If I’m over eighty percent, I’m entitled to a tribunal hearing. Depending on the outcome of the hearing, then I can be processed by the Cancer Screener. That’s when the Right to Life period kicks in. Three years later, I can see a doctor.”
“That’s some confusing bullshit right there.”
Adam looked out at the sea of auras, shimmering, swaying, fading. “I know—hence the forbidden hashtag. Haven’t you ever been here before?”
“Me, been here?” Harv’s face crinkled and a gob of black goo dripped off his nose like a viscous tear. “Crispies don’t get viruses and hemorrhoids and gingivitis like you uppity Northerners. Only things that can trouble us are venereal disease and the Growth.” Crispies were always afraid of the “Growth”; Adam figured fear of growing is probably why they stayed so short. “Did ya tell her about the freak lights you’re seeing everywhere? That should get ya in straightaway—Northerners love a freak show.”
“Northerner” was a pejorative Crispies used during the Small Wars for average-heighted people. Adam figured it had to do with them being vertically more “north,” but everything about the history of the Small Wars was too mindboggling for him to bother learning.
Another oily tear fell to Harv’s butt chin, and Adam couldn’t take it anymore—“What is that black stuff on your nose?”
With a finger, Harv scooped it off his nose and examined it. “Tar,” he said, rubbing it over his gums.
“How did you get tar on your nose?”
He reached into his crotch and withdrew a black ball the size of a grapefruit. “It’s Chewin’ Tar. Keeps ya alert. Focused. Virile as a gay rooster. It’s a little trick we learned during the War of Northern Aggression.”
“War of Northern Aggression? You mean, the Small Wars?”
“History is bent by dimwits with power pecs. Anyone with a functioning brain cell knows it should be called the War of Northern Aggression.”
A toxic whiff of tar entered Adam’s airspace. “Maybe smelling that on your breath is what gave me cancer.” He covered his prosthetic nose, which did nothing to blunt the smell. “It’s okay, Harv. You don’t have to wait with me. Why don’t you go home to Brown? I’ll wait here and see if an appointment opens up.”
“Go home—to the encampment?” Harv scoffed. “That’s no home. And that harlette is busy working. Besides, you’re more important, champ.”
Adam’s selfie drone buzzed, then produced a holographic projection screen with 102-character messages from his Community. Most were random notifications—commentary on the Xioddarm War; pictures of boba milk teas; “Throwback Thursday” selfies of mankini swimwear. A pod of cyber sirens told him to kill himself. And one from The Hawk advised him to sell his testicles as earplugs. The Hawk’s message had a thousand likes and over four hundred social credits. Adam sighed—why did the words of prophets have to be so mysterious? Testicle earplugs? Is he trying to tell me to stop listening to the outside world and go with my gut? Or is he saying to stop listening with my dick?
“Word to the wise,” Harv said, grimacing at an auto-selfie on Adam’s feed, “leave that bot at home the next time yer puking all over yerself.”
Adam sloshed back and forth in his leotard, scorning himself for wearing a one-piece. It was moisture-resistant, at least, but was it vomit-resistant? He flicked off a gob of chicken parm and regarded the selfie drone buzzing around him. Without an aura, it looked cold, hard, even otherworldly, like a spy satellite from another dimension. The pupil of its cyclopic eye narrowed and widened as it examined him, and despite the fact that he could easily crush it in his palm, there was something so foreboding, so menacing about it that he shivered. It’s like a mechanical alligator, he thought, gazing out into the watering hole teeming with its kin. It’s like we’re being stalked by mechanical predators, and it’s just a matter of time until we’re locked in death rolls and torn apart. He closed his eyes and struggled to escape the thought. “It’s cute,” he tried, knowing he had no hope of winning the election or saving the city without it.
“With ample blood flow you’d stop referring to things as cute.” Harv leaped up onto the seat. “Alright, champ. This is your moment!”
“Did they call my name?”
“Ah, hell,” said Harv, placing a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Yer like the son Brown and me are not allowed to have. I’m not going to sit here while ya die of canine cancer.” Prying his fingers into the ball of tar, he dug out a pinch and smeared it onto his cheek. A hard but satisfied smile set on his lips as he kneaded the gunk over his face, leaving untouched only a strip down the right side in the shape of the business-end of a broadsword.
Adam cringed beneath his plaster, though outwardly his appearance remained as implacable as ever. He was touched that Harv would think of him as a son. No one else ever had, as evidenced by the fact that he was orphaned as a newborn. It made Adam think that maybe he could open up to him and reveal the truth about who he was. But presently it looked like Harv was trying to don blackface by rubbing his face in mud.
“This old vet has one more battle left in him,” Harv said, then clapped—“Giddyup!”
Chelsea circled in front of him, her back straight and neck high, aura pulsing rays of heat so warm Adam feared it might melt his plaster. Harv hopped on her back, and she reared like a stallion preparing for battle. Adam deflated. His feet already ached from the walk up, and now he was going to have to make the return journey while navigating the ghost of chicken parm’s past. Talk about a Sisyphus Complex. But rather than down, Chelsea trotted across the aisle and into a hallway. Adam followed and to his relief found his companions standing in an elevator.
“Hurry up, would ya? You’d think you Northerners would move faster with them long legs.”
Adam hurried inside the elevator, peeved that his iAm’s GPS hadn’t given him directions to it in the first place.
The elevator descended, and when the door opened, Chelsea trotted to the front of the line and paced before the counter. With every turn, Harv whipped his head around imperiously, keeping the receptionist firmly in his sights. The display was so intimidating that even though Adam had only known Chelsea and Harv to be kind, he suddenly imagined them tearing the receptionist apart, like a pack of coyotes fighting over a bag of chips. Still, it took more than five minutes for her to notice the spectacle, consult her script, and ask, “May I help you?”
“Aye,” Harv said, his raspy voice taking on a Scottish brogue. “Ye kin hulp me.”
She looked at him, her eyes as empty as an incel’s DMs. Rather than laughter, Adam thought he now heard her aura… snoring.
Chelsea turned, and Harv’s neck swung around, his thinning grey hair flailing. “Ne’er seen a dwarf mount a dog afore?”
“All the time. It’s what my husband does to my sister.”
“Aye,” Harv bayed, clicking his heels so Chelsea would pace faster. Adam had never seen him so driven, so in command, so bravehearted. “And if yer husband wur here, he’d ride yer sister tae Sizzler, sloch fried shrimp from her belly ‘n’ shoot steak oot his arse. I am yer husband!”
Adam had no idea what Harv was saying, but he was riveted. He hoisted his iAm to record the encounter.
“No,” the receptionist said, lifting her script, “you’re not my—”
“And if ye read from that script, ye will keep yer job. And years from now, when yer dying in a stadium ‘n’ there’s no script tae follow, would ye trade every day, from this day tae that, for one chance—just one chance—tae come back here ‘n’ tell yer bosses that they can give ye a script, but they could ne’er script a dwarf oan a horse!”
Adam’s heart AMRAPed against his ribcage, and his pecs popped so furiously he felt like he was charging into battle against an army of bureaucrats. And watching Chelsea, her neck outstretched, eyes focused, aura as vibrant as a superscreen—was it possible she could be useful for more than looking cute in pics and detecting the occasional terminal illness?
“You’re on a dog,” the receptionist said.
“A hound, mum!”
She set the script down, her aura snorting as if awoken from a dream. “This is some confusing bullshit right here.”
“Aye,” Harv said with a triumphant nod, “but yer not answering from a script.”
She corked her head and smiled ruefully. “Security!”
Two security guards stepped forward as if they’d materialized from the wall. They wore heroically small black shirts that read “PLEASE GO BACK TO YOUR SEAT” on the scant fabric between exposed navel and plunging V-neck. Crimson auras trailed from their shoulders like capes caught in a breeze. As they made their way towards Harv, they leered into their selfie drones, prosthetic muscles so swollen they couldn’t flex a pec without shooting through the stadium like a popped balloon. And their mustaches were the most glorious thing Adam had ever seen! So bristly and thick they could scrape the rust off a bumper and make the ladies swoon in the polished chrome reflection. The type of machismo-stache that made a guy forget about the mortal danger the attached prosthetic muscles posed to his smallish campaign manager and arthritic dog. The type of machismo-stache that deserved a zoom—that mandated a zoom. A zoom, furry filter, and hashtag!
As Adam zoomed, something black and gold zipped through the frame. Engaged with his iAm, it never occurred to him to look up from the screen to find the source of the movement. Instead, he zoomed out just in time to catch Chelsea galloping towards a guard, Harv hanging from her side with his head aimed like a jousting lance. The guard was so focused on making a duck face into his selfie drone that he never saw the attack coming. With an audible crunch, Harv’s thick head slammed into the bullseye between the guard’s legs. He cried, “Quack!” as he fell to his hands and knees, duck face turned troll pose in the butt of a head.
The quack alerted the other guard, who stopped licking his lips and reached for his taser. But he was already too late. Chelsea used the fallen guard’s back as a springboard and leaped through the air, drool spraying from her black, smiling lips. Unable to bend his elbows or raise his arms above his shoulders, the second guard was defenseless to the attack. Chelsea crashed atop him, and Harv broke into a riverdance of stomps and kicks so vicious and well-choreographed that the guard’s entire torso popped, shooting Harv into the air on a current of helium. Adam had always wondered why the Small Wars had been so hard-fought; now he wondered how the North had ever won.
A wicked, giddy grin swept across the receptionist’s face as Harv and Chelsea circled back to the counter. Her aura was so pink and tickly Adam couldn’t help himself—he giggled uncontrollably like a schoolgirl after Tommy Turner had said hi to her in the quad. “Alright,” the receptionist said with a chuckle. “The machine will see you now.”
The doors swung open, and Harv, Chelsea, and Adam skipped forward as if setting out on the yellow brick road, only stopping momentarily for Chelsea to sniff the crotch of Guard #1. Guard #2, writhing and clutching at his deflated chest, side-crawled for the door, but it closed before he could reach it. “Open the door,” he moaned. “I think I’m bleeding internally.”
The smile drained from the receptionist’s face as finger found script. “I’m sorry, sir or madam,” she droned, “but there’s simply nothing we can do.”
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BEWARE: potential spoilers ahead…
Bonus Blathering
Chapter Notes
Adam’s selfie drone buzzed, then produced a holographic projection screen with 102-character messages from his Community. Most were random notifications—commentary on the Xioddarm War; pictures of boba milk teas; “Throwback Thursday” selfies of mankini swimwear. A pod of cyber sirens[Ma1] told him to kill himself. And one from The Hawk advised him to sell his testicles as earplugs. The Hawk’s message had a thousand likes and over four hundred social credits. Adam sighed—why did the words of prophets have to be so mysterious? Testicle earplugs? Is he trying to tell me to stop listening to the outside world and go with my gut? Or is he saying to stop listening with my dick?
[Ma1]Note on cyber sirens/Cyber Sirens capitalization: for people in the city, this is a general term, so it is not capitalized. For the hillfolk, this is a particular sect of mythological creatures, and they capitalize it.
Adam’s heart AMRAPed[Ma2] against his ribcage, and his pecs popped so furiously he felt like he was charging into battle against an army of bureaucrats. And watching Chelsea, her neck outstretched, eyes focused, aura as vibrant as a superscreen—was it possible she could be useful for more than looking cute in pics and detecting the occasional terminal illness?
[Ma2]Crossfit, “as many reps as possible”
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