by Ninie Hammon
Soon, the force of the rising flood waters would knock them off their feet, carry them along.
In a dark hole. Washing down a drain pipe. Freezing water all around, getting deeper and deeper.
Could a group of teenage girls survive that?
Could Bailey?
It was a race against time. If they couldn't get out of the front side of the mine before the flood waters filled all the shafts to the roof, they all would drown.
T.J. reached up and flipped on his headlamp and the shadows leapt away from him. He saw the water crashing into the coal pillars, turning in his direction down the shaft. With his headlamp on, he was a sitting duck. If the gunmen were still searching for him and the girls, he had just lit up their target. But he had to chance it, had to give one more effort to finding Bailey and the girls. With him to guide them, they might have a chance.
He slogged his way down the cross shaft and shined his headlamp up and down the shaft at the intersection. Nothing. He slogged to the next cross shaft, turned his head—
Shots rang out. Hunks of coal from the coal pillar beside him sliced into his skin. The light from his helmet as it flew off arched over the ceiling and down the coal pillar to the floor. The light shone out along the floor as it was washed away by the foot-deep water.
Then there was only darkness.
Chapter Fifty
At the sound of the inexplicable rumble, the gunman stopped firing. The line of bullets ripping through the plastic ended only a few feet from where Bailey and the girls lay. Then the gunman was gone.
Accompanying the rumble was a sudden high-pitched screaming, a horrible sound, one voice that echoed and bounced and became two. Three.
Who was screaming and what would make someone scream like that?
T.J.? Dobbs?
No, it wasn't. They were both fine. Fine!
A gunshot. Maybe two or three. Echoes bounced everywhere. The screaming stopped.
But the rumbling sound continued. In fact, it was growing louder. The girls lay where they were, huddled together, afraid to move. The pile of bodies was trembling almost as one. Cold and fear. Bailey was wearing jeans, so she was warmer than—
Suddenly, her pants were wet.
Water? Where had—?
Her heart locked up, stopped beating altogether, then took off in a mad gallop. The rumble was running water.
The girls squeaked in surprise as water flowed under the yellow piece of plastic, water as cold as ice.
There was only one horrifying explanation. The continuous miner T.J. had cranked up had dug into the mine wall. It had hit old works full of water!!
The implications of that hit Bailey like a blow to the belly. They were in a hole under a mountain with a fifty-two-inch ceiling. There couldn't possibly be enough water to flood the whole mine all the way to the top!
But maybe there was.
Mindless panic threatened to take over her legs and propel her in a wild-eyed run away from the incoming water. Already, it was more than an inch deep, and getting deeper. She could hear the rumble continue to change tenor. The water was obviously kicking the hole in the mine wall bigger. More water. Rising faster.
Now there was no strategy to contemplate, nothing to figure out. No game of cat and mouse to play. She couldn't count on finding T.J. or Dobbs. She was on her own. They had to run, now. Out of the mine. They had to run through the darkness to the other end.
If they couldn't get out in time, they would drown.
There was some light where they were now. The bright lights at the face lit up the shafts, stretching out bright fingers into them. An ambient glow carried farther than that and with eyes adjusted to the darkness it was possible to see shapes and images in the gloom. In this faint light, the girls had been able to keep together and stay with Bailey. But where they were going there would be no light at all. She had to keep the girls together and they had to understand what was going on.
"I'm Bailey. Do all of you speak English?"
"Yes," said the red-haired girl. "I'm Lora."
"We do, yes," said the tiny girl with long, black hair. "My name is Sophia."
"Ana, I am Ana, and I speak not so good, but yes," said the black girl. She looked so young and frightened. They all did.
"And you're Jeni," Bailey said to the girl whose hair was the color of Marilyn Monroe's. Whose face she had painted peering out from under the bed. Who had been hosed. And had heard delay.
"You have to listen to me and do exactly what I tell you or you will die here. Do you understand?"
The water was rising where they sat. It was several inches deep now, moving fast and absolutely frigid. When it got deeper, when they were wading in it, the cold would be numbing. How—?
"The rumble you hear is water. It's flooding the mine and if we don't get out of here fast, we will drown."
A girl with curly, honey-blonde hair squeaked out a cry of fear.
"Hush, Nikolina," Jeni said. "Listen to Bailey."
"This mine has two entrances. We came in the one on this end and there's another one on the other end. But it's a long way from here through the mine. You have to understand — as we go deeper it will get darker and darker …" She paused because the thought literally stole her breath and she couldn't speak. "… until there is no light at all. None!"
Nikolina gasped and whimpered. "I'm afraid of the—"
Bailey blew by her. In truth, Bailey was afraid of the dark, too, but that was irrelevant right now.
"We have to stay together, hold onto each other. Anyone who gets separated from the rest of us is lost."
"We will hold hands," said the girl with short, multi-colored hair. "Hold tight."
"Not good enough …" Bailey didn't know her name. "You are …?"
"Christina."
"Okay, Christina … everybody — when our hands get wet, they'll be slick. We have to have something we can grip."
The girls looked at each other and back at Bailey, shaking their heads.
"Take off your underwear," Bailey told them.
There was the silence that shouted incomprehension.
"Your panties, take them off. Do it now, there's no time!"
The girls wearing skirts lifted them and slipped their underwear down their legs. Bailey and the other three girls wearing pants wiggled to get out of them, wet now and clingy, then hastily put them back on.
As she had guessed, most of the underwear was made of nylon. Nylon was strong. Bailey'd read somewhere that the nylon used for underwear had basically the same molecular structure as Kevlar, the material used for bulletproof vests. But it was the shape of the underwear that mattered. It provided hand holds you could grip.
Bailey reached out and put the fingers of her right hand through one leg hole in Jeni's panties and gripped tight, then held the underwear out for Jeni to wrap her fingers through the other hole.
"Make a chain."
Jeni grabbed her own panties with her right hand, turned and took hold of Lora's panties with the left. All the other girls did the same. When all seven of them were linked together, she told them, "We have to get as far away from the source of that water as we can. We're going all the way across the mine to the far wall. Then we'll feel our way along the wall to the front of the mine."
That idea had struck her in a bolt of insight. She'd been desperate to think of some way not to get lost and disoriented in the darkness, twisting and turning in the maze of shafts and cross shafts. As long as they stuck tight to the wall, they could find their way through the absolute darkness until they could see light from the other side. They had to move fast. When the water got high enough, it would wash them wherever it wanted them to go.
Nikolina had begun the hiccupping cry again, probably unaware she was making the sound, her eyes wide, looking around like a terrified rabbit.
With the roaring rumble of the water now echoing against the walls of the mine, there was no danger one of the gunmen would hear her and find them. Bailey suspected the
gunmen didn't care anymore, anyway, had written them off, gone back to the face and left the girls to drown.
"Remember, you have to hold onto the chain! You can't let go — no matter what."
Nikolina was on the end. Bailey almost moved her up in the line, but didn't. She seemed to be the one most likely to panic and let go, breaking the chain. Bailey didn't want her to carry any other girls away with her if she did.
The water had risen now to about four inches deep, moving so fast it was already slippery.
"Come on now. Everybody … hold on."
Bailey got to her feet and went to the edge of the coal pillar and looked around it. There was no one in that shaft, but the water pouring down it was flowing faster than Bailey'd thought it would. She hurried across the shaft to the next coal pillar, leading the train of girls behind her.
Slipping past the plastic curtain, she went to the edge of the coal pillar, prepared to peer down the next shaft. But a flashlight beam washed across the shaft and she froze.
"Go back," she whispered, and the girls hurried back, retraced their steps to the shaft they had just crossed. Bailey looked up and down it and saw nothing, so she led the girls down it toward the darkness. She couldn't keep going that way for long, had to find the wall before the light failed.
The water was six inches deep now, flowing so fast it was hard for the girls not to lose their footing. Finally, the absolute darkness ahead stopped Bailey. She turned around and could barely see the glimmer of light from the face shining down this shaft. She had to cross the mine here, not go deeper into it. She had to find the mine wall and follow it out.
Bailey'd had time to consider that whoever'd been carrying that flashlight might come up with the same escape plan, might be heading for the mine wall as they were. But she had no choice but to continue. They crossed another shaft, behind the pillar, then another shaft, and another. After two more shafts, the cross shaft they were traveling down came to a dead end. The mine wall!
Bailey peered back toward the face, saw nothing except the faintest glow of the lights there, and nothing in the other direction but absolute black.
She put her left hand on the wall, held onto the link to Jeni with her right, and headed out into oblivion, the light behind them diminishing with every step.
Chapter Fifty-One
It grew darker and darker. There was no ambient light at all anymore, only inky blackness ahead of them, and now, when they looked back, not even a pinprick of light from the open area at the face of the mine.
Feeling their way along in the darkness. One step. Another and another.
For a while, they outdistanced the water. It was flowing out a hole in the eastern wall near the face of the mine. They were running away from it toward the front of the mine along the western wall. But it caught up with them eventually and kept rising.
Bent over, Bailey trailed her left hand along the wall and with her right clutched tightly to the nylon daisy chain. Soon, water rose over her feet.
With the roar of the water diminished, Bailey could hear Nikolina now, sobbing, making squeaking sounds, almost screams. The other girls were silent as the water rose over their ankles.
Up their calves.
Toward their knees.
It was so cold! And the current was strong.
After a while, Nikolina stopped crying.
Suddenly, Ana, who was next to last in line, lost her footing and fell, dragging Christina and Nikolina down with her. The three of them washed forward with the water and bowled Lora, Sophia, Jeni and Bailey off their feet. The water was almost to Bailey's knees by then and the current was too swift for them to get their balance and stand back up.
In the total, absolute blackness, which way was up?
All the girls screamed, cried out when they tumbled down into the frigid water. Then they were washed down the shaft in a tangle, going under, coming back up, sputtering and choking. Fighting the water. Disoriented. Sobbing.
Drowning.
It's all Bailey can do to keep her head above water and hold onto the piece of nylon. Jeni is still holding onto it. Bailey can feel her.
Black and cold. Everywhere is water, moving water. She is carried along, trying to keep her hand out trailing along the wall to her left. It's all that orients her. But now she needs the hand to keep herself upright in the flooding water, too.
It feels like shooting the rapids in a mighty river. Except the river is in a drain pipe and there's no light.
If the water rises higher, Bailey knows she will die, in the dark, drown here.
She has drowned before, with Macy Cosgrove in the black water of a flood. She remembers how it felt — the agony of holding her breath, her lungs desperate to let the air out, knowing there's no air to breathe back in.
No, please, not that!
She bangs her head on the roof of the tunnel again and again as she's washed forward. Suddenly, there's no tension on the piece of nylon in her right hand, the one she's grasping with all her strength. Jeni has let go. Bailey can hear her behind, though, thrashing in the darkness. Coughing as she, too, begins to strangle on the water. Bailey is on her back, washing feet-first down the tunnel, using both hands now, her left on the wall of the shaft, her right feeling along the roof, which now seems to be right in her face.
Jeni's behind her, alive. She feels her bare feet kicking her in the back of the head as she, too, washes along. But the other girls …? The shaft is fifty feet wide. If they strayed away from the wall, were washed out into the center of the shaft, they could pass right by Bailey and she would never know.
Oh, please no! No, no, no! Not like this, drowning in the dark. No light, no air.
Where's Jeni?
She cries out in her head in anguish, Jeni! Jennnni!
And there's an answer, soft but clear. Here, I'm here.
Bailey's right hand on the mine roof above her head was suddenly no longer touching stone. The roof was gone and she reached up into nothingness. A few seconds later, her feet hit something. Her left hand that'd been touching the wall clawed at empty air. What did she hit?
Then the rest of her was washed along with her feet into … rocks. A pile of rocks. She smashed into the rocks, rough edges, but not sharp. What …? There was no roof above.
Lora crashed into her, pinning her body against the rocks. Bailey wiggled out of the tangle of arms and legs and scrambled — up? Yes, she was moving out of the water, crawling, squirming, dragging her body up onto rocks, a pile of rocks.
Rock pile. Roof fall!
She reached up and could feel no roof above.
The other girls crashed into her and Lora and the rocks. Someone — Sophia or Ana — cried out in pain. Christina was choking and gagging, half-drowned. Jeni landed next and the world became all wet arms and legs, crying, coughing, gagging, scrambling to find up.
Up was out of the water. Up!
"Climb!" Bailey coughed out the word, sputtering as she scrambled to pull herself up, her body tangled with the others. She was out of the water from the waist up, then she dragged her legs out, too, collapsed on top of dry rocks and lay coughing, gasping for air.
"Up here." Her words were ragged and hoarse, as if she'd been cheering too loud at a ball game.
Coughing, gagging, crying, the girls felt their way up onto the island in the absolute blackness.
"Lora!" Bailey cried. "Lora, are you—?"
"Here." Lora coughed, then sounded like she was vomiting up water.
"Sophia!"
"Sophia, where are you?" The voice was Jeni's.
There was no answer.
"Nickolina!" Bailey called, dread in her throat.
"Ana?" Lora's voice then.
"Where's Sophia?" Ana asked.
"Sophia!" several voices cried out.
There was no answer. Bailey couldn't countenance that the tiny, black-haired Sophia had washed past her in the dark.
"Nickolina!" Jeni cried. Bailey called her name, too, but the only answer was th
e rush of water past the rockfall.
Then Lora said, "Here. I think this is … Sophia's here in the water, but she's not moving."
"Get her up here out of the water," Bailey said.
The girls were tangled in a pile, trying to find Sophia's arms or legs or something to pull her out of the water. Something hard smacked Bailey in the cheek, an elbow maybe, and she cried out. The girls were feeling around for each other in the dark, trying to get their own bodies upright, out of the water, and then help the others do the same.
"Drag her up," Bailey said, and felt the others pushing and shoving an unmoving body, arms, legs and torso up and over themselves to the top of the pile where Bailey was. Bailey felt the girl's leg, her body, found her shoulder, her neck, put her hands on the girl's face
"Sophia!"
Nothing.
Bailey slapped Sophia's cheek.
"Sophia, answer me!"
She hit her again and the limp form moved and groaned, and Bailey could tell she was breathing. They were all here, then, all alive.
Except Nickolina.
Nikolina had been on the end. Had been so terrified. Had she panicked and lost her reason, unable to control her desperate need to get out of there, the enclosure and the flood. Had blind terror driven her …? Or had she just lost her grip? Clearly, for some reason, she had let go of the daisy chain and the current carried her … where?
"Nikolina!" Bailey cried. The others called her name, too. Over and over again.
There was no answer.
"Everybody, stop wiggling for a minute. Let me feel around up here, see how high, how far I can get out of the water."
Feeling her away along in the dark, Bailey moved to the left, her hand out, searching for the side of the shaft, the wall of the mine, but there was nothing but air, so the rock fall had taken out a piece of the wall with it, wasn't right next to it. But it could have been only a few feet away, just out of her reach. There was no way to know. She climbed up, scrabbled, slipped. The rocks weren't sharp. Broken coal created sharp edges so these rocks had fallen down into the shaft from above the coal seam … the rocks no coal company would remove just so a miner could stand upright when he worked.
