by Ninie Hammon
Zigzagging. Doubling back. A deadly game of cat and mouse.
Even bent at the waist, their backs scraped painfully across the rough stone ceiling of the fifty-two-inch shafts. They stumbled and fell on the floor littered with sharp chunks of coal that bit into the skin of their knees and palms until they were scratched and bleeding. Three of the girls were dressed in formal evening wear, one of them in a long gown. They'd been in heels and had lost them; now they ran barefoot over the sharp rocks.
When they paused for a few moments, Bailey addressed the girl in the long skirt of blue satin.
"Get rid of that," she said. "Tear it off so you don't trip over it …" She didn't add "like the girl who was shot" but they all got the message. The girls used long, fashionably manicured nails to rip the fabric and tear it away at the waist. Now the girl was wearing only the top part of an evening gown — with long sleeves — and pantyhose.
And it was cold in the mine.
That was one of the few things Bailey had already known about coal mines before she moved to West Virginia. They remained a uniform temperature year round — fifty-seven degrees.
Jeni took off her denim jacket and gave it to the red-haired girl she called Lora.
The girl in the black-sequined dress turned her back to Bailey. "Unzip. Is too shiny." She was right, of course, in the beam of a flashlight, the sequins would twinkle.
When Bailey touched the girl there was … something. Some connection. Not as sharp as a pop of static electricity, but a shock a little like that.
"I'm Christina," the girl said, and Bailey knew she felt it, too.
Bailey helped her out of the dress. Then she turned it wrong side out and put it back on. The black girl, who was the warmest of the lot in a sweatshirt and sweatpants, ripped off strips of fabric from one of the gown skirts and wrapped it around and around Christina and tied it so the unzipped dress wouldn't fall off.
The girl in the torn-away evening gown had started making a whining, mewling sound as the girls ripped the fabric. She was looking around, her eyes open too wide, shaking her head.
"No … I can't … I have to get out." Her breathing was hitching in and out like a child after a crying jag. She squeaked out a little sob and Bailey feared she was about to break, start screaming or—
Jeni slapped her — hard. Then spoke to her in a harsh whisper, a language Bailey couldn't understand. She caught only one word, the girl's name — Nikolina.
Nikolina held her hand to her cheek and stared at Jeni, still looked like she was seconds away from bolting. But they'd all stayed here too long, had to move. Bailey whispered, "This way," and they all took off again, having figured out how to crouch-run beneath the low ceiling. It was like ducking under a kitchen table … and running beneath it for miles.
Though Bailey couldn't have said exactly where she was, she wasn't lost. The light from the face they'd run from was an orienting beacon. She kept track of the numbers spray-painted in white on the cross shafts they ran through. She didn't want to stray too deep, too far away from the face light, or they'd be plunged into utter darkness. But the very nature of running away was inexorably driving them deeper and deeper into the shafts.
They stopped often to listen, to catch their breath, struggling not to cough in the gagging black coal dust that slathered every surface. In one space, they turned from a cross shaft to run down a shaft and the roof above their heads vanished. Roof fall. There was no debris on the floor so it'd been cleaned away, and they were glad to be able to stand upright as they ran. Still, Bailey hurried through that part, back down a cross shaft. Roof fall meant roof fall.
Time came unhooked from the universe and they were captives in a forever-now moment. Had it been an hour since T.J. shot the kidnapper who was going to shoot Dobbs?
Two hours?
Ten minutes?
Forever?
They continued to hear gunfire. Sometimes it sounded so near Bailey was sure the gunmen couldn't be more than one shaft away. Other times it was distant. But the echoing sounds lied and Bailey didn't trust them. During a brief stop hunkered down behind orange plastic sheeting, Bailey glanced up and saw the white, spray-painted number of the cross shaft — #71. The number on the last cross shaft before the face had been #79. They had come a long way into the mine. If the lights at the face hadn't been so bright, they wouldn’t be able to see them. As it was, there was only an orienting glow in the distance.
The girls and Bailey had said almost nothing to each other, though the girls had whispered back and forth in a language Bailey didn't understand. But she held fast to Jeni, and Jeni held fast to her. And there was some kind of bond there she couldn't have explained, but it was real and true and she experienced it, knew Jeni did, too.
Bailey hurried to the orange piece of plastic across a cross shaft, moved it aside for the girls to pass through, replaced it where it'd been and hurried to the edge of the coal pillar — and only escaped detection by seconds. A light saber of flashlight beam flashed in the dirt of the shaft she'd been about to lean into.
She froze. Backing away, she ran back to the orange plastic and darted back to the other side of it, and ran to the edge of that pillar. When she peeked down the shaft she and the girls had just run down she saw light there, too.
One of the gunmen was crouched at the intersection of the next shaft and this cross shaft, deciding which way to go. If he picked this way, she and the girls would be trapped. With a gunman coming down the shafts on either side of them. She waited, held her breath. There was a sudden rattle of gunfire. The gunman with the flashlight coming down the shaft behind them was spraying the shafts in every direction.
"You can't get away," he yelled. "I'll find you and I'll strangle the life out of you."
"Fiara," Lora whispered. The Beast.
Any second, bullets would rip into the plastic sheeting that lay between them and the gunman. Bailey shoved the girls down onto the floor, hunkered down as low as she could. Bullets stitched the plastic on the far side, ripping it apart, the line of bullet holes coming right at them.
Then there was a rumbling sound and the ground beneath them shook like an earthquake. Black coal dust filled the air and small pieces of coal fell down from the roof into their hair.
Someone began to scream back up toward the face of the mine and the rumble grew louder. What on earth …?
Chapter Forty-Nine
Dobbs raced down the Broadway shaft, his back and shoulders scraping painfully across the roof, unconsciously falling back into the coal miner's duckwalk he'd used when he worked in the mines. But that had been fifty years and maybe a hundred pounds ago. And even then, he always left the mines with painful cramps in his legs and his back so sore he couldn't stand up straight even when there was room above him to do it.
He'd never played football — had been big enough but his mother would never have considered such a thing! But the boys who did play said the coaches made them perform an exercise in practice called a "bear crawl" that was exactly how you had to move beneath a low coal mine ceiling.
When a roof bolt tore into his shoulder, he felt it, knew what it was and that it ought to hurt. But he was pumped so full of adrenaline from being milliseconds away from death, that he didn't feel a thing. He couldn't run fast enough to get to the first cross shaft and behind the coal pillar unless he stood up as straight as possible. So he dragged a bloody snail trail along the roof, heard his gasping breaths, cringed away from a bullet he knew any second would rip into his back, strained every muscle, and let out some kind of wimpy whine when he got to the cross shaft and dived into the space behind it. Seconds later, a hail of bullets ate up the coal beside where he'd been standing.
Scrambling as fast as he could, he crossed the distance to the yellow plastic curtain — he'd used a chunk of dressing-slathered lettuce leaf as a curtain on his coal mine model at Bailey's birthday party … a lifetime ago.
He ducked behind the curtain and crossed to the other edge of the coal pillar
. Seeing no flashlight beam, he stepped out into the shaft and ran down it instead of continuing along the cross shaft, duck-walk-bear-crawl staggering as fast as it was humanly possible for him to move.
He made it to the next cross shaft, crossed it immediately to the plastic, slipped behind it and scrambled to the edge of that pillar.
Then he doubled back toward the face, down the Boardwalk shaft, hurrying from one cross shaft to the next, hiding behind the plastic, knowing he had to keep moving.
Sweat poured down his flushed face. His breathing was so loud and labored he couldn't imagine it wouldn't give his position away. With his protruding belly, he flat out couldn't keep leaning over and lumbering along. The back of his head, his shoulders and back were soon gouged raw. Blood flowing down his forehead mingled with the sweat to sting his eyes so all he could do was squint.
He had heard T.J. start the continuous miner, could tell by the sound of it that T.J. had put it into gear. It was in the next cross shaft up, rumbling along behind the coal pillars and out into the shaft. He followed the sound, one cross shaft away, sometimes two, as the machine lumbered across the mine toward the wall. Its roar used to intimidate him, but now the familiarity of it was comforting somehow in a way he wasn't in any position to pick at. All his mind could process was that he couldn't keep running, would drop dead if he did, and other than behind the miner, there was nowhere else in a mine for a man his size to hide.
Eventually, the machine crossed the whole width of the mine. The boom on the continuous miner finally ran into the mine wall and the whirling blades began to cut into it, as easily as a drill into the side of a chocolate cake. In seconds, there was a hole and the blades kept digging. An operator using the continuous miner would have moved the boom arm up and down and side to side, across the face of the mine, digging shallowly, uniformly cutting away the face as the scoop operator came up on the side and men shoveled the coal into the scoop. Without an operator, the boom arm would simply dig a single hole deeper and deeper into the coal the whole length of the cutting arm until the miner itself ran into the wall. Dobbs stopped and listened, feeling in his teeth the rumble of the miner's engine and the cry of the coal as the rotary blades dug deeper and deeper. He had in mind to hunker down on the front side of the miner beside the boom, when he stepped out into the shaft.
Standing beside the miner was one of the gunmen, who must have crossed in front of the miner before it hit the wall. He didn't see Dobbs at first, shining his flashlight longways down the tunnel past the miner. He must have thought someone was operating the machine and had come to kill him. Dobbs tried to turn and hurry back into the cross shaft but he was exhausted and stumbled over his own feet.
"Stop right there, fatboy."
Dobbs stopped. It was the big blond kidnapper. He was taller that Dobbs and he had trouble bending over and leveling the gun at the same time.
"You're coming with me — out of this hole — and we'll see if your friend wants to save your butt again bad enough to show himself."
Dobbs got up on his hands and knees facing the man, who focused his flashlight into his eyes, blinding him.
Before Dobbs could make a move toward the man the world exploded around him.
The force of the water that suddenly spewed out the hole the miner had dug in the wall was so fierce it knocked the miner back down the shaft like a kid's toy, throwing chunks of rock as big as refrigerators along with it. Dobbs dived back into the cross shaft as boulders flew past him in the shaft.
The roar of the water was deafening, but not so loud that it drowned out the screams of the man who had moments before been holding a gun on Dobbs. The flashlight had been knocked out of his hands and it had rolled into the shaft toward the cross shaft where Dobbs crouched. He crawled out, picked it up and directed it into the shaft where roaring water was shooting out a hole in the wall with such force it was splashing off the side of the coal pillar fifty feet away. The flow of water down the shaft was so swift even behind the coal pillar it would have knocked Dobbs off his feet if he'd been standing, was a foot deep and rising in seconds.
The water pressure was ripping the hole in the wall bigger and bigger and Dobbs thought of the movie Titanic, the scene where the edge of the iceberg collides into the hull of the ship, slicing it open. The water behind the wall was doing the same thing, creating an ever-widening gash in the coal.
Dobbs turned the flashlight beam on the screaming man.
The man had been knocked into the miner, which was now lying on its side, the boom arm whirring in the empty shaft. A boulder the size of a washing machine rested on top of him, like a beach ball in his lap, and the force of the water against the boulder held him fast. He was screaming so loud his voice could be heard above the sound of the rushing water.
Dobbs directed the flashlight beam downward to the man's legs, sticking out beneath the rock. The force of the water had torn the flesh off both of them — skin, fat, muscle, everything. From his mid-thighs down was bare bone — knees and shins. His left leg ended in a jagged bone where his foot had been torn off. The bone of his right leg ended at the top of his running shoe, which tore away as Dobbs gaped in horror.
Too late, Dobbs realized that the man who'd dropped his flashlight had managed to hold onto his gun. In what felt like slow motion, Dobbs watched the man lift the gun, point it at him and pull the trigger, spraying bullets indiscriminately as Dobbs dived back behind the coal pillar. He felt a fire brand of pain on his upper arm, his thigh and calf, but he didn't know if he had been wounded by the gunfire, or by pieces of coal shrapnel that sprayed where the bullets tore into it. But he had been hit with something, more than once, and the pain seemed so all inclusive he wasn't sure exactly where or how many times.
The gunfire continued, bullets and coal shrapnel flying around as thick as moths around a backyard light. Off balance, Dobbs floundered in the water, couldn't duck down far because the water was already up to his elbows and rising rapidly. But the force of it shoved him away from the gunfire, and he didn't try to get control of his retreat, just floated along with the water, trying to keep his head above it. The gunfire stopped, though the screaming continued. Then there was a final burst of gunfire and the screaming stopped abruptly.
Now, Dobbs tried to regain his footing, but the force of the water kept him off balance and he was pushed farther and farther away from the face. He finally managed to get his feet under him, stagger and dive into a cross shaft that was rapidly filling with water, too, but the force of it was not so strong. Dobbs staggered down the cross shaft, leaning for support against the coal pillar. The water rose up his legs. The water was frigid, as cold as if it'd melted off a glacier. How much water was there in the old works the miner had cut into? Was it enough to flood this whole mine? Yeah, it probably was.
Staggering along the cross shaft, Dobbs crossed one shaft after another, the force of the water diminishing the farther he got from the gushing geyser of it on the far wall. But the water level continued to rise. Dobbs felt weak, dizzy. He knew if he ever went down, was swept off his feet again, he might not be able to get back up.
He shook his head, trying to orient himself. A wave of vertigo overtook him and he went down, face-planted into the water, the cold of it a slap that revived him as he washed out of the cross shaft into the next shaft — where his legs connected painfully with something — the belt line! He grabbed it and held on with all his strength, the river of water parting around him. If he could manage to keep a grip on the belt line, he could follow it out.
He wasn't the only person who'd figured that out, though. Between him and the face he could see the form of a man, also clinging to the conveyor belt. He hadn't yet seen Dobbs, but if he lost his grip on the piece of machinery, he'd wash right into him.
The man was not armed, had obviously lost his weapon in the water. Any second now he would notice Dobbs and … yeah, and what? He'd try to kill Dobbs, of course. With his bare hands. Dobbs wasn't armed, either. Well, except for
the flathead screwdriver he'd stuck down in his belt.
T.J. heard the rumble from the mine wall and horror stole his breath. He knew instantly what had happened. The continuous miner had dug into old works full of water and now it was pouring into the mine. He heard the screaming then. It was a horrifying sound, unnerving in its intensity. But it was a man's voice, not Bailey or one of the girls. So unless it was Dobbs … No, it wasn't Dobbs. T.J. decided that and wouldn't let his mind countenance another interpretation.
Then the gunshot silenced the screams. That meant there were only two gunmen still pursuing them and once they were left with only handguns, T.J. could quickly dispatch them to the hell they deserved. But there was no time for that now. The men with guns hunting them was no longer the most life-threatening danger in the mine. The girls couldn't play a cat-and-mouse game, hiding in the labyrinth of tunnels until T.J. was able to pick off the remaining gunmen. Those tunnels were filling up with water. The mice were about to drown.
The only safe place in the mine right now was the open area at the face, with its ten-foot ceiling and elevator leading up to LHOM #1. The flood waters would only rise up fifty-two inches, the height of the mine shafts. The gunmen were the closest to the face of the mine. If they had the sense to retreat to it, they could escape. But the girls couldn't go back to the face. They could only run from the rising water deeper into the mine, into the disorienting darkness. On the other side of the blackness, the lights at the front would guide them out.
Could they make it through the darkness?
Would they panic and freeze, unable to move forward, so disoriented they were unable to determine which direction "forward" was?
Actually, even that was no longer an option. They couldn't hunker down somewhere, unmoving, paralyzed.
