Howdy! 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’s trusty dog, Chelsea, and indomitable campaign manager, Harv, created a spectacle, taking down the guards blocking the way to healthcare’s entrance and going viral in the process.
Camboro Oil & Asbestos Healthcare Park
Independent City of Pittsburgh
Friday, October 26, 0026 P.C., 1:11 A.M.
~ 14 days to the conclusion of election season
“This is going to get complicated.”
Guber Oblamo famously echoed those words when describing the recently ratified constitutional amendment overhauling the Independent City of Pittsburgh’s voting process. After rampant voter fraud led to the election of Rat-a-tat-tat “the Gun-Toting” Rat, the legislature decided it was time to act. As tends to happen with “active” legislative bodies, that action took over a decade, yielding Rat-a-tat-tat the distinction of being the longest-tenured guber in history. The big holdup was about how to prevent fraud while safeguarding the right to vote for every eligible citizen. Voter IDs were out of the question—too easily lost, wallets were cumbersome, and the topic too controversial. Mail-in ballots?—the city had disbanded the post office upon its independence. Election Day?—who could keep track?
Enter iAms, the “fruit of knowledge” compromise then-candidate Oblamo brokered to end the stalemate. To ensure every voter could vote, vote often, and vote at their leisure, the amendment entitled each citizen to a government-issued iAm. Election Day transformed into Election Season, and ballots were abolished in favor of casting votes in the way most familiar to the constituency—via social media.
Voting credits, or “voting cred” as it came to be called, are awarded based on a complex accounting of social media activity relative to a candidate. For instance, each verified friend or follower is worth five voting credits; a Like is worth one credit; shares and reposts, three; social credits, which themselves are determined by an algorithm as unpredictable as Mother’s mood, can add or subtract credits in a “Father works in mysterious ways” way. Influencers with rabid followings are deemed “superdelegates,” and voting credits associated with their activity are multiplied by the number of followers. Trending hashtags and Snapchat Streaks also factor into the equation, which can be leveled up based on achievements in Candy Crush, making voters who have attained “double wrapped candy” highly sought after.
There are provisions, of course, totaling 9,625 City Register pages long. Voting credits can be deducted for a multitude of reasons—YinzTube videos with a thumbs down, posts caught in the “fake news” filter, starting a TikTok challenge for charity—all result in various reductions. Each vote associated with a Reddit thread counts for only three-fifths of a credit. And candidates with a Myspace account are subject to random drug testing. In fact, Myspace users were deemed so deplorable that credits are deducted for every new friend; while the loss of a friend—requiring a herculean effort to traverse thirteen screens, ten popup advertisements, and an epic scroll of banner ads—counts for a whopping two hundred voting credits, which can multiply exponentially based on the notoriety of the de-friender. This dichotomy makes Myspace the battleground app most closely watched during election season.
To make sense of it all, the Voting Calculus for Dummies app was created to calculate scores in real time. Candidates watch the rise and fall of their voting credits like traders watch the rise and fall of stocks. It isn’t uncommon for obsessing over scores to lead to failed marriages and mental breakdowns. Guber Emeritus WoMahon froze to death on her back porch while fretting over a trending meme of her opponent, and Rat-a-tat-tat was disemboweled by a cat-like creature minutes before the hashtags #StartTheSteal and #StormTheShithouse would have won him a historic non-consecutive fourth term.
Like the illustrious gubernatorial candidates before him, Adam Patterson obsessed over the holographic chart displaying his voting cred, even while the “minimally invasive” Disease Sleuth 3000 poked, prodded, and dilated his every orifice. Between the line to use the restroom, the line to change into a hospital gown, the line to get his paperwork, the line to confirm he’d changed and been given the correct paperwork, the line to fill out the mandatory customer satisfaction survey, and the line to be seen by the machine, it had taken more than twelve hours to enter the exam room. Ample time for the adrenaline to evaporate and anxiety to pool in his gut, burping to the back of his throat every time the eventuality of his diagnosis occurred to him. In his heart, he knew Chelsea was right and trusted Mother and Father had given him cancer for a higher purpose, but part of him hoped Chelsea was wrong, that the auras and visions were symptoms of a neurological disorder and not a divine calling. He wasn’t diseased. He wasn’t dying. Tomorrow everything would go back to normal, and in a few weeks he’d be oh-for-eighteen and reassigned to another doomed election.
But as his voting credits mounted, there could be no doubt—
He’d witnessed a miracle.
He’d gone viral…
More accurately, Harv and Chelsea had gone viral for their exploits in taking down the stadium guards. But Adam accumulated all the credit!
And being that miracles come in threes—for as the Good Trilogy teaches, a person will ignore the first, rationalize the second, and finally, reluctantly, act on the third—Adam figured he was on Miracle Two, with the first being the Divine Paddling.
“I’m in the lead,” he mumbled as his holographic shaft grew so impressive it made The Hawk’s look tiny.
The machine inserted an egg plant-thick apparatus so deep into his left ear he feared it would snap his jaw. It felt like the ghost of Shaquille O’Neal was fisting his earhole, the pain radiating through his skull in waves. Whoever heard of a miracle resulting in concussion-like symptoms?!? Of course getting smacked over the head wasn’t a miracle—it was a longstanding political custom. And trending after Harv whipped the Goliaths? Harv is tough as steel, and Crispy antics had evolved into a subgenre of TikTok. And there was nothing holy about the Disease Sleuth 3000. Hanging from the ceiling, it was an intimidating, black, vaguely phallic-shaped behemoth with instruments of various shapes and sheens sticking out from its shaft like piercings. And it was utterly silent—no whirls, whooshes, ticks, or beeps. Adam could hardly stand to look at it, not for fear of being titillated, but because he feared it would suck him into a spiritual black hole. It was a fate worse than an ignominious reincarnation—your journey ending with your soul being swallowed by the cold, indifferent dark.
The machine abruptly stopped fingering his ear, and the exam chair rotated, flipping him onto his side and giving him a clear view of Chelsea lounging in the corner. She was staring at the door and avoiding eye contact with him as if offended they’d spent the entire day waiting for a machine to repeat what she’d already told him. Her aura crackled like a campfire, the smell of dog biscuits and grumpy harrumphing wafting from it. Next to her, Harv was swinging his legs, his wispy black aura swirling like the dying smoke from a doused fire.
A different instrument, this one wedge-shaped and ribbed, blew a frigid puff of air into his right ear, then pressed firmly into the canal. It could have at least bought me dinner first. Adam’s stomach groaned as the machine probed impossibly deep within him, the base growing wider until he was sure it would crack open his sculpting and spill him and his dark little secret out like a newborn calf. The machine knew his secret, of course. The paperwork knew. The “system” knew. But did any of it understand? Would Harv understand that rather than keeping his identity a secret, Adam had, over time, forgotten who he was?
The bar graph representing his voting cred rose into the ceiling next to the machine. His popularity had literally gone “through the roof.” There was no way he could tell anyone now. He would be betraying Harv—and on the off chance he was experiencing miracles, he’d be betraying Mother and Father, as well. No, he couldn’t let the façade crumble now.
Your body is a temple, and on his, the Babyface Party had built the grandest, palest of them all.
Besides, forbidden hashtags were one thing. Cancel Crimes another, and he’d made a career out of the highest crime of them all—
Cultural piracy.
“I never believed this would happen,” he said, a knot of guilt and relief, hope and stress, nerves and chicken parm, tangled in his stomach. Come to think of it, maybe it’s stomach cancer? “We’re trending. That was a pec pop for the ages.”
“Just imagine what I could’ve done with a good bitch between my legs during the war,” Harv said, climbing a chair next to Adam and fiddling with a spoon-shaped instrument sticking out of a groove in the Disease Sleuth 3000. “This thing looks like a Swiss Army Dildo, only black and humongous.”
“Is there any other size?” Adam asked as the exam chair swiveled and the dildo entered his nostril.
“Ah, that’s my boy—cracking quasi-racist jokes like a true politician. Getting a lead has done wonders for ya.”
The instrument snaked so far into Adam’s sinuses that it felt like he was deep-throating a Vlasic through his nose. His eyes watered, blurring Harv and Chelsea’s auras into a Picasso of cheerful screaming. He knew the One Rule, emphasized ad nauseam during the mandatory hour-long orientation video, was to not move. But did that count sneezing? He tried to hold it in, but the machine’s incessant drilling made it impossible. The sneeze erupted from the center of his skull, but with one nostril blocked, half of the blast ricocheted into the back of his cranium and the other half shot out of his face with a sickening CRACK!
Terror and pain sizzled through his nerves—the machine had blown his fucking nose off!
Frantic, he felt his face, then let out a relieved breath when he found his immaculately crafted, never haughtily-posed nose still attached. Hairline fractures stretched out from the base and across his cheeks, but at least he didn’t look like the pasty stepchild of the Sphinx. I’m due for another round of cement-tox anyway, he thought. Finally, the instrument withdrew from his nose, pulling out what felt like an important chunk of grey matter with it.
Was the Disease Sleuth 3000 checking him for disease or mummifying him?
The exam chair dipped right, then left, then jerked forward as if he were about to plunge down Condemned Splash Mountain. His stomach swam—he’d always hated rollercoasters. When the chair finally stopped gyrating like it was chugging along invisible tracks, he was face-to-tip with the machine. The tip opened, and a long pink instrument resembling an unnecessarily large meat thermometer thrust out. Adam gulped, then opened wide.
Wide, however, is not one of the goals of political identity reconstruction. The tapered end of the instrument slid between his lips well enough, but as it widened, his jaw snapped and popped like bubble wrap. Not that he could completely blame the surgery—he wasn’t sure any mouth was meant to open that wide. Thankfully, he’d set his selfie drone to Private at Harv’s behest, so his constituents weren’t privy to the livestreaming of him gagging on the world’s cruelest dildo or the suddenly real possibility that years of plastic surgery were about to crumble off his face like the last of the icebergs collapsing into the ocean.
“That’s a sight I never wanted to see,” Harv said as the machine withdrew from Adam’s throat.
Wiping his lips, Adam felt more fractures, but so far his façade was holding up heroically. Again, he tried to occupy his mind by checking on his credits, but not even the sight of his ever-expanding lead brought him comfort. He said hoarsely, “I’m not sure what this is doing for me.”
“It’s winning you the election!”
“No, I mean this…” He waved his hand from the contraption to the mountains of paperwork stacked on the counter. Like most men with a divine calling, he was feeling wishy-washy. He was only on the Second Miracle, after all. “We’ve battled security guards, waited for hours, received countless voting credits—to be seen by a machine. I’ve spent more time filling out paperwork than I have reforming anything.”
“That’s quality!” Harv boasted, returning to his seat next to the door. “Paperwork is what keeps us safe.”
“Is reform even possible? Oblamo’s term was in a different time. People still expected the government to do things then. Now they want the opposite—the last time there was bipartisan agreement on anything we abolished reform and forbid using hashtags related to it.” The chair tilted back as if about to climb an incline, and once again he felt like Sisyphus, only doomed to eternity at an amusement park—the same ride, the same queasiness, over and over and over again. The next instant, purgatory was forgotten at the point of an instrument invading his naval. “How can there be any time for reform when it takes an entire day just to be stuck in every end?”
“Abso-fuckin-tutely there can, champ.” Harv stood up on his chair, his body tensed like he was about to impart some great wisdom or pop the pec of another stadium guard. “There’s nothing magical about reform. It’s a matter of acknowledging problems and sticking them in every hole! Look at history. The problem with liberals was they could only be right if everyone agreed with them. The problem with conservatives was that they were dicks, so no one wanted to agree with them. That’s why conservatives rebranded as the Heel Party. Liberals as Babyfaces. Reform at its finest!”
“I don’t know if that’s reform.”
Chelsea sat up, the joints in her front legs crackling, and stuffed her greying snout between Harv’s legs. “Shoo!” he cursed, clapping at her. “This mare’s nose needs reformed, I’ll tell ya that much.”
Adam regarded Chelsea, trying to find strength in her blazing golden aura but seeing only her unwanted advances. “It’s just—” he stammered—“I’m just…”
“What are you, an independent? Spit it out!”
“I’m afraid, Harv,” he sighed. “I never thought I had any chance to be guber. I mean, how could the city want me when my mother didn’t? I was conceived while she was filming a movie. All I know about her is that being pregnant boosted her career, but she left me at an orphanage once I was born. And now I’m in the lead thanks to you and Chelsea, but I’m still that abandoned kid no one wanted.”
“Wait,” said Harv, “you were conceived while your mom filmed a movie?”
“Yup. Right on camera.”
“So when The Hawk says you’re a bastard, orphan, son of a whore…?”
“He’s spot-on.” The chair rotated, the stirrups widening until Adam was spread-eagle and looking at Harv’s face directly between his legs. “And sometimes he makes a joke about something called a ‘Hamilton.’ I think it’s when one guy has his girlfriend doggy-style and the next guy comes up from behind...”
Harv spat a gob of chewin’ tar on the linoleum floor, then wiped his nose with his forearm. “Champ, I’m not going to lie to you—yer starting to piss me off.”
Adam flinched. “What?”
“You’re supposed to be a leader!” He pounded his chest with his fist, and Chelsea scooted away, dragging her butt across the floor. “Leaders don’t talk about fear or even acknowledge it exists. When my platoon faced down a canine brigade during the War of Northern Aggression, I took a whizz as those tall bastards closed in with their fangs bared. And I see a similar small bladder in you.”
“The only thing anyone sees in me is Dr. Gnat Stevenson’s handiwork.”
“The best image refreshment debt can buy!”
Chelsea flopped down on the floor next to Harv, her head limp and tongue hanging out of her mouth like a soldier on leave.
Harv gave her a wary glance, then looked at Adam with an expression so hard it could have been the definition of certainty. “If yer going to be the reformist candidate, yer going to have to reform yourself, kid.”
Reform himself?—the words struck Adam harder than a paddle-shot upside the head. Maybe he hadn’t experienced any miracles. Maybe the auras weren’t a sign. Maybe Mother and Father were as distant and imaginary as his biological parents. Nonetheless, he was in the lead. Because of Harv. And if he was going to reform himself, he would have to start with his true self, the self below the molding. And Harv deserved—no, had to know—the truth. Adam said, “There’s something you should know.”
“No no there isn’t,” Harv said briskly. “The best men are the ones who don’t know anything they should know.”
“Harv—I appreciate that you see a leader in me.” The machine panted a steamy breath, then shifted so that it was aimed like a torpedo about to be loaded below his deck. “But all you see is a mask.”
“Don’t say that, champ. You’ll wind up pissing me off again.”
“Harv…” His voice broke, and the fissures in his political plaster radiated as if rivers of acid. He imagined saying the words as slabs of sculpting flaked off and fell to the floor with each syllable. The full breadth of the machine pressed up his hospital gown, and he had to spread his legs wider to allow it passage to the final orifice it needed to probe. It was now or never. He took a deep breath and tried to unclench his cheeks. “Harv,” he said, trembling, cheeks decidedly still clenched—“I had more than a refresh before I met you. I had a complete identity reconstruction. And, and… Harv—I’m black.”
Before he could see the look on Harv’s face, the machine plunged full bore into his rectum. He closed his eyes, praying that to Harv it didn’t matter if he was black or white, and squealed—
“hee hee!”
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Sneak peek at next week’s installment
Chapter 13: Mama’s Got Dandruff in Her Hair
Farmhouse of Terrors
Kohl awoke to the sound of flowing water. Thirsty, so thirsty—he lapped at the sound before he had fully regained consciousness. In fact, it was the lack of his thirst being quenched that roused him. Tortured dreams warped into tortured coughing, and he hacked up knots of what he first thought was mucous but quickly recognized as sharkitten fat. Shivering like a tick on a hound dog’s backside, he cranked his eyelids open, dull pain radiating from the center of his face. Through the throbbing haze, he could see Keet’s angelic form angling away from him with a rainbow arching from his center and splashing against the wall.
“I’d appreciate it if you pulled up your pants,” he croaked, suffocating beneath the words. Tugging an arm out of the blanket he was swaddled in like a newborn, he prodded the area formerly known as his nose. Now there was just a goey crater, crusty on the outskirts of his lips and eyes with dried blood. Before he could examine his injuries any further, Keet leaped atop him and hugged so tight he could barely breathe. “I say again, I’d appreciate it if you pulled up your pants.”
Trembling, Keet pulled away, his glowing face smeared black with tears. Loosing a quiet alarm call, he pointed the ketchup bottle at Kohl’s face and squeezed—it was empty.
“Forget about my nose,” said Kohl, using a pinkie to carve two small orifices into the sharkitten fat Keet had apparently used to plug his nasal cavity. Taking a melodramatic breath, he flipped open his hands. “See, good as new. Besides, ain’t nothing no mud can’t fix.”
“Boorkoo,” Keet trilled like a homing pigeon, finally pulling his overalls up. “Gruu gruu, Boorkoo Boorkoo.”
Kohl pushed out of the blanket and propped himself up on an elbow. “We can’t go home yet. We already found the still. The treasure is here. I can feel it in my blood. Ain’t no shapeshifter alive or dead gonna stop me. Is gonna stop us.”
He dug himself out of the blanket and wrenched onto his hands and knees, the cave swaying like a rocking chair in a thunderstorm. He waited for the swaying to still, then rose to one knee, and with a heave onto his feet, his muscles so lame and his balance so uncertain he could rely only on sheer determination to maintain his footing.
“Boorkoo,” Keet trilled insistently. “Boooorkoooo.”
Kohl wobbled, spat sharkitten gunk onto the wall. “This is dreamland. And I aim to do the maiming now.”
Trilling, Keet sat and crossed his arms and legs. Moths swarmed over him, so thick they created a shimmering shroud over his neck and the right side of his head. Plucking a moth from behind his ear, he popped it into his mouth, then he snatched another from his crotch and held it out to Kohl.
“I reckon I could eat,” he said, taking the moth. As he chewed the brittle, dust-flavored critter, it melted into the sharkitten fat lining the inside of his mouth and tongue, an ever-present reminder of his missed supper with Daisy. What he wouldn’t do for some cooked sharkitten right about now. “Listen, bird. You’re the smartest, most resourceful son of a gun I’ve ever met. Why, if you spoke people-language, I reckon you’d change the world. Maybe even be one of them fancy influencers. Ain’t nothing special about me other than maybe a couple stories. I know that. Ain’t no shame in that. But I’m determined, and I have dreams. And I speak people-language.”
Keet grinned, his face glowing like a clown in black light.
“What do ya say? Dreamland or… Boor-koo?”
With a furious shake of his head, arms, and shoulders, Keet rose to his feet in a hurricane of moths, the patterns on their diaphanous wings as vivid as radioactive snowflakes. The nocturnal butterflies lingered only a moment before drifting down a corridor and igniting like a constellation, almost as if they’d entered a room lined with reflective surfaces.
The moths were leading them to the treasure!
Come back next week for the full chapter!
Chapter Notes
BEWARE: potential spoilers ahead…
Voting credits, or “voting cred” as it came to be called, are awarded based on a complex accounting of social media activity relative to a candidate. For instance, each verified friend or follower is worth five voting credits; a Like is worth one credit; shares and reposts, three; social credits, which themselves are determined by an algorithm as unpredictable[Ma1] as Mother’s mood, can add or subtract credits in a “Father works in mysterious ways” way. Influencers with rabid followings are deemed “superdelegates,” and voting credits associated with their activity are multiplied by the number of followers. Trending hashtags and Snapchat Streaks also factor into the equation, which can be leveled up based on achievements in Candy Crush, making voters who have attained “double wrapped candy” highly sought after.
[Ma1]Thought about “impenetrable” but went with unpredictable as it was funnier with Mother’s mood, which leads to Father, the combination of them with political machinations, and then the Poopé.
There are provisions, of course, totaling 9,625 City Register[Ma2] pages long. Voting credits can be deducted for a multitude of reasons—YinzTube videos with a thumbs down, posts caught in the “fake news” filter, starting a TikTok challenge for charity—all result in various reductions. Each vote associated with a Reddit thread counts for only three-fifths of a credit. And candidates with a Myspace account are subject to random drug testing. In fact, Myspace users were deemed so deplorable that credits are deducted for every new friend; while the loss of a friend—requiring a herculean effort to traverse thirteen screens, ten popup advertisements, and an epic scroll of banner ads—counts for a whopping two hundred voting credits, which can multiply exponentially based on the notoriety of the de-friender. This dichotomy makes Myspace the battleground app most closely watched during election season.
[Ma2]Was originally Federal Register, and this was how long the so-called “Obama Care” bill was. Changed to City Register for obvi reasons, left the number of pages the same.
The exam chair dipped right, then left, then jerked forward as if he were about to plunge down Condemned[Ma3] Splash Mountain. His stomach swam—he’d always hated rollercoasters. When the chair finally stopped after gyrating like it was chugging along invisible tracks, he was face-to-tip with the machine. The tip opened, and a long pink instrument resembling an unnecessarily large meat thermometer thrust out. Adam gulped, then opened wide.
[Ma3]This is a ride at Castle Condemned-Vania, which appears later
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