Prologue

Macon was supposed to be the Atlanta of central Georgia. Everything was lined up for it to turn out that way, but it just...never happened. Some said it was too deep south to ever be a great city like Atlanta. The old guard racism and antebellum thinking would never give way to a metropolitan city. But still—time marched on, and Macon’s residents saw the wheels of progress begin to turn, little by little. In ‘76 the first big corporation had tried to come in and have a go of it. As far as good breaks go, for a city, having a corporate headquarters is as good as it gets. Bering Lumber was a big corporation, and they did a lot of logging in Georgia anyway, so a central Georgia hub seemed like a good idea. The land was cheap and the surrounding areas like Milledgeville and Sparta were poor as dirt, just begging for a few low-paying corporate jobs as janitors and technicians. And Bering would provide. Big companies in small towns become the font of all blessings and the name Bering would be synonymous with pride and paychecks. But it never quite happened that way. A funny thing happened on the way to the bank for Bering. A series of horrific accidents plagued the company’s headquarters. Most of the accidents weren’t even related to manufacturing or logging in any way, with the notable exception of the seven loggers who were cleanly decapitated by a wayward saw blade that spun through their necks and spinal cords every bit “as cleanly as a steak knife through butter” as the advertiser for the blades had put it for Bering’s executives in an unfortunately accurate sales pitch years before. Most of the accidents were work-related but did not result from high danger situations. There was Brent Minor, the janitor at Building B. (Finance Dept. and Advertising) who got a little too stoned on the job and fell asleep. His ammonia bottle (fell) from his cart and evidently soaked him to the point of death by exposure. He was found lying peacefully in the hallway the next morning by Marty the constantly smiling CFO, they always are smiling, those rich bastards. Oddly enough, Marty’s secretary was the next to go. She was sitting at her desk, writing notes for a presentation Marty had to give the next day and wham a baseball came straight through her office window and clocked her in the head. She was dead on the spot. Police tried to find some evidence of what happened, but they came to the conclusion that some kids had been playing baseball and got scared when they broke a window. They probably ran away before they had any idea someone had been hurt. Next was George Herman, the technician. He worked all day on parts for logging truck machinery, difficult stuff. But when he tried to put in some extra hours at the office to fix his TV from home (he didn’t have the necessary equipment at home) he electrocuted himself. His coworkers found him with drool on his chin and the smell of burnt hair still lingering. These all occurred within two weeks of each other, and the public meltdown was complete. Bering relocated the next year and never came back. They stuck to the Midwest. A few other companies gave it a go, but none of them could make it stick. Macon remained a town that should have been. It had everything that an up-and-coming town was supposed to have, but it remained in a constant embryonic state, never truly born. The population grew, but the amenities didn’t. It was still considered a big city by folks from Sparta, Milledgeville, Greensboro, and the like—they went for the movie theater that had six whole screens, which meant big city luxury to them. But in the eyes of the world, Macon was a Civil War relic, nothing more than in between Savannah and Georgia, and maybe not even worth stopping off on the way. Soon enough, stopping off wouldn’t even be an option. And there were those who were very happy with that. Very happy indeed.

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