Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  She paused and took a breath. The effort to speak had stilled her shivering, too. The other girls still shook, but not Jeni.

  "Is hard to explain in English, the fear was bigger than being locked up in a metal box on a ship in … some ocean somewhere. On my way to … I not know then where."

  She paused, said something in a language Bailey didn't know. Then started over.

  "If I do not know the day, some part of me is no longer there. When I knew, as long as I knew, I could hold that one thing …"

  "You could control that one thing."

  "Yes! I think to myself, I count the days and think — where could you go in five days? Or nine days? Poli and Rayna, they didn't care where they were. How did they expect to get back home if they couldn't retrace their steps?"

  She stopped then and the sound of the rushing water pounded in the silence. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet.

  "But that was the thing, I knew. They are huddle in a corner of the room. They didn't expect to get back home." She paused. "But I did!"

  They both were silent then. Their breathing was measured, all in the same rhythm. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. In such profound dark there was no passage of time except that measured by their breathing. Like Jeni holding onto what day it was, Bailey was aware of every individual breath. Otherwise, time would have come completely unhooked from the world and she would have lived in the forever now of that one, black empty moment.

  Gradually, and she was probably imagining it, Bailey began to sense a stuffiness in the air. Bailey moved, carefully and painfully, a few feet and slipped her hand down toward the water below her. She grabbed hold of herself in time not to gasp. The water had risen as high as it could, now filled the mine shafts from the floor to the ceiling.

  They were in a bubble now that only had a finite amount of air. How much? She had no idea. Dobbs had told her once about the formula all miners knew — how to figure out if they could survive if they were trapped. All miners knew the simple cave-in principle: one cubic yard of air will last one miner one hour. Even if she could have done that kind of math in her head, she didn't know how tall the hole was above their heads. She should probably stand now, reach up, see if she could touch …

  No. There was no sense in that. She didn't want to know that the roof hung just a few feet above their heads. If they were going to suffocate … well, there were a whole lot worse ways to die. As she understood it, when you suffocated, you just got sleepy from lack of oxygen, closed your eyes, and never woke up.

  She would rather not know that was happening to her. And she definitely didn't want the other girls to figure it out. She crawled carefully back up the rock pile to the others and settled back in beside them. To wait.

  But as she huddled in the darkness, she couldn't deny the reality — the air really was getting stuffy.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  T.J. stood next to Brice, staring at the water gushing out of the mine shafts. Nothing else come out of the mine after they hauled Dobbs away in the ambulance. T.J. shoved his mind away from thinkin' 'bout Dobbs. Wasn't no sense in it. It was what it was. He couldn't imagine a world without Dobbs in it. So he didn't. Dobbs was gonna be fine and T.J.'d b'lieve that until he found out different. End of discussion.

  No more bodies floated out — alive or dead. Not the kidnappers. Not the girls. They were all still in there. In shafts that'd been completely full of water for — he looked at his watch but it had stopped. El Cheapo brand watch, can't get it wet. Whatever happened to Timex watches that took a lickin' and kept on … he realized his mind was ping-ponging off one inane subject after another, an escape mechanism. And wasn't no sense in grabbin' hold of it now, forcin' his mind to face the reality that it was comin' up on an hour and a half since the shafts had flooded all the way to the top.

  There was nothing to say so they said nothing, just stood watching, waiting.

  Then more bodies came — two of them almost at the same time from opposite sides of the mine. One of the bodies was a horror, both legs were only bones. His feet were gone and so was the top of his head where he'd put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  There was no explanation necessary. It was obvious what had happened.

  The other body was a tiny girl, could have passed for ten years old, dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers. She was dead, long dead. Her body was cold.

  Then … nothing.

  T.J. and Brice stood together after the bodies were taken away, just watchin' the water.

  "When I's a little boy and my mama was paintin' them pictures, I was tore up 'bout it all the time, didn't ask nothin' more from life than for my mama not to have to paint them things. Some days, I wanted to run out and warn everybody I seen in one of her pictures and other days I didn't b'lieve it'd do any good if I did. But it never did occur to me back then that interferin' would cause them awful things to happen."

  He turned to face Brice. "I don't know what to think about that. Do you?"

  T.J. had watched the sheriff climb into a shell of professional detachment, saw him close up all the windows to who he really was, slam the door shut, and then lean with his back against it. There was no light in his eyes now, nothing there but pain and longing and T.J. felt those things, too. And guilt. Oh, yes indeedy, guilt.

  "I don't know what I think about the people Bailey tried to save, but I do know if she'd stayed out of it, she wouldn't be in there now." Brice turned to T.J. "And I urged her to do it."

  "I's the one cranked up that continuous miner."

  "I … went to the wrong place." Brice's voice was as emotionless as a recorded announcement at baggage claim in an airport.

  "Maybe Dobbs was right when we was little kids — that you can't change the future. Maybe all you do when you try is make matters worse on everybody, put other folks' lives in danger."

  They said nothing more then, just stood together watching the water gunshot out of the mine shafts. The water pressure was as intense as it had been when that continuous miner poked a hole in the mine wall. It'd never occurred to T.J. that the thing would hit a wall, dig a hole in it, hit … He was just trying to create noise, distraction, put the thing in gear so the noise'd move and they'd think somebody was operatin' it, maybe get lucky and one of the kidnappers'd walk into the blades.

  But old works?

  T.J. glanced at the big watch on the sheriff's arm. Yeah, it'd been an hour and a half now, just like he'd guessed. He felt despair well up in his chest and it took all his strength to beat it back down. No, he wouldn't go there.

  Bailey had intended to stay upright so the cold rocks wouldn't suck away their body heat. Though they were still huddled together as close as possible for warmth, they were stretched out on the rocks now, and she didn't know how they'd gotten there.

  Ana and Bailey were on one side of the heap, Jeni and Christina on the other, with a semi-conscious Lora between/beneath them. They were a pile of clinging arms and legs and shivering bodies. Still desperately cold, their combined body heat had made it possible to stave off hypothermia, at least for a while.

  It didn't matter. They wouldn't live long enough to die from it.

  Their breathing was becoming more and more raspy. Bailey didn't want to gasp, but when she drew in a normal breath, it didn't seem like there was enough air in the air. She couldn't help sucking in another one, seeking the air she hadn't found in the one before.

  The absolute darkness had been so terrifying when she first encountered it that she could only barely hold onto her panic. That initial fear had passed. She couldn't see, but it felt more like being blind than like the darkness itself was some malevolent force, some monster with an open maw waiting to devour her. And in the last — what? Half an hour? Five hours? Three days? — she had begun to regard the darkness as … well, not her friend, but not her enemy either. It felt almost inviting now, the empty blackness, and when she died, when she breathed her last, it would be easier to pass from this life into the next if this
life were dark. She believed, she knew there would be a next life and that it would be brilliant, full of sparkling light. Here, like this, it would be possible to watch the glory of it happen, watch the passage from absolute darkness into absolute light.

  That would be a sight to see!

  Maybe it was a result of the fuzziness of her brain, but she couldn't seem to hold onto her anguish anymore, her pain over losing Bethany. All she could feel now was gratitude for the time she'd had with the precious child and with Aaron. They'd been happy, and though that happiness had been ruthlessly snatched away from her, she could feel the golden warmth of where it had been in her soul, like crawling into bed between warm sheets.

  She knew that the monsters who had taken her husband and daughter from her would never awaken in light. They were doomed to remain in some form of darkness forever — and for them, it would not become a friend.

  "You were … in my head." Jeni's breathless voice. "When he beat me with the hose, you … how you did that?"

  "I painted your picture, your face." She didn't have the air or the will to explain what that meant, so she just left it there, hanging in the darkness between them. "I lived the beating with you." She paused for more air. "You were very brave."

  "Who are … what are you?" Jeni sounded so achingly young it broke Bailey's heart.

  She couldn't have answered that even if she weren't suffering from hypothermia and oxygen deprivation.

  "The air is to be gone soon. I … I thank you for trying."

  The darkness began to pulse with her heartbeats. If felt like every breath drew darkness into her lungs now instead of air. And soon her lungs would be full. She would be full.

  She squeezed Jeni's hand. But Jeni didn't squeeze back. Maybe, she had already left.

  "I'm sorry," Bailey whispered. Or thought she did. But even if she hadn't spoken, if Jeni was still here, she had heard.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  When the water level in the mine began to drop, it dropped quickly and dramatically. Brice and T.J. instantly saw it when a small space appeared between the rushing water and the roof of the mine shafts. Then the velocity of the water diminished, only a little at first, then quickly. It went from a raging torrent to water flowing fast, to water merely flowing. The water level dropped and dropped again. Whatever the source of the water that had gone tearing through the mine, it was finally emptying.

  Brice wanted to go in as soon as there was even a foot of clearance between the water and the mine roof. But that was too dangerous. He couldn't lead a rescue team into the mine at the risk of their own lives. The Scotia coal mine explosion in 1976 had been a devastating but effective object lesson in mine safety. Caused by a spark igniting methane and coal dust, an explosion rocked the mine one spring morning and killed fifteen miners. Tragically, another eleven rescue miners died in a second explosion because they'd gone dashing madly into the mine before it was safe.

  It was probably dawn out there on the flatlands, but the sun would not crest the mountain to the east until midmorning. Still, West Virginians knew the look of the sky when it began to turn, could read the subtle changes as it transformed from black velvet to dark blue, could see above the mountains the blue become pale blue, then watched pink and gold capture the sky.

  Brice had organized the rescue squad members, firefighters and deputies into teams, three each. They would move in tandem, one in each of the shafts. Besides headlamps, each team carried a high-powered light — flashlight or LED lantern — and they'd be connected to each other with walkie talkies. They'd cross the first cross shaft — the one with "#1" in white spray-paint on all the coal pillars — then the second, and all the rest at the same time, searching behind the curtains as they came to them. Brice didn't even bother to try to convince T.J. to stay behind, though he had finally managed to talk him into allowing an EMT to treat his wounds. The lead paramedic spoke to Brice, said T.J.'s bullet wound wasn't life threatening, but it was serious enough to need stitching and he'd lost a lot of blood. He belonged in a hospital.

  "You want to tell him that," was all Brice said.

  He didn't.

  Brice forced himself to wait until the water was only a foot deep and the level still falling before he'd lead the teams into the dark world of Last Hope Ollie #2. It was particularly hard for Brice and a couple of the other men. The female EMTs and rescue squad members and his three women deputies were all considerably smaller and had an easier time beneath the low roof. Brice had to perform a modified duckwalk/bear crawl. He had only been in a coal mine a half dozen or so times in his life, had always admired the miners willing to go miles underground in a hole and work bent-over all day, knew he could never have survived that kind of life. But right now, he would have crawled down into a two-foot pipe filled with three feet of water if it meant rescuing the girls who'd been locked up inside a water-filled, airless mine for hours.

  He wouldn't admit it was hopeless, though. Still, he was steeling himself for the emotional hammer blow of discovering the lifeless body of the woman he loved …

  The woman he loved.

  When had he decided that? He didn't know, did know he'd never hung words on it until now. It was more an acknowledgement of a long-held reality than a discovery of some strange new thing. Yeah, he loved Bailey. What did that mean to a man who could not become involved with a woman, could not have a relationship, could not … he didn't know. All he knew was he had to find her. And when he did, he was certain that whatever he found would change forever the course of the rest of his life.

  Brice took the west wall, with Fletch a step behind him. T.J. took the east wall — the one that had filled first with water gushing out of the hole ripped in that wall of the mine on the other side of the mountain near the face.

  The water level and the force of water pressure they were striding against as they entered the mine diminished almost with every step. By the time they had reached the dark interior of the mine, the space beyond the reach of the lights from the open area at the face and in the front of the mine, the water had fallen to about six inches deep, flowing fast against their progress, but not gushing, not threatening to sweep them away.

  At cross shaft #35, the team two shafts over called a halt.

  "We've got a body," said the voice from the walkie talkie on Brice's shoulder.

  He kept himself from shouting, "Who?" Just waited.

  "It's a man, must be one of the kidnappers," he said. "Looks like a gunshot wound in the front of his neck."

  They'd mark the location, but continue. This was a rescue mission. It would switch to a body retrieval mission only if they could find no live survivors.

  Another team found another one of the kidnappers, his body floating in the shaft between the wall and cross shaft #41, where it had obviously been held against the coal pillar by the force of the water until the water level dropped. The leader reported that the man was black, with red hair, and he could see no apparent cause of death. The man could have drowned, of course, but Brice suspected his neck had been broken. That left one more kidnapper — the Beast.

  Brice was in front, his headlamp scanning the dark corridor in front of him, formed by the mine wall on the right and the coal pillars and shafts on the left. At each intersection, he shined the light down toward the team members who were in the same cross shafts all the way across the mine, could see the glow of their headlamps through the ones with plastic curtains.

  Then Brice began to notice that he could not see the sheen off the top of the water in the shaft ahead of him. The shaft appeared to be blocked. He was still thirty feet away before he realized the shaft had been blocked with rockfall, which was now an island with the water flowing around it down the tunnel.

  He edged out from under the low roof and stood upright in the shaft around the pile of rocks, the cramping in his back and legs easing instantly.

  The first thing he saw as he approached the rockfall was the body of a man. He was lying on his back, head dangling down
, no longer in the water, but it would have been underwater until the level receded. The front of his head was a train wreck. It looked like he had fallen off a three-story building and landed on his face. It was beyond unrecognizable. His forehead was crushed inward — nose, mouth, eyes — gone. His whole head was nothing but wounds and protruding bones and … gray matter.

  He had died a grizzly death.

  Brice leaned over and picked up the dead man's right arm and shined his headlamp on it. When he turned the arm over, he saw the skull tattoo on the wrist. The stone on the small pinky ring sparkled in the light.

  The Beast.

  Dropping the arm, Brice straightened and began shining his headlamp in a sweeping motion over the rockfall. Fletch and the state trooper with him had crawled out from under the low roof of the shaft and stood beside him, shining their—

  A tangle of wet bodies.

  Even from where he stood, Brice could tell they were female.

  He pulled in a gasp of air that'd suddenly gone thick as pudding. There were two — three, no four, maybe five — bodies lying together on top of the rocks. But they weren't in a tangle, as if they had been washed there by the current. They were lying longways beside each other, their arms—

  He dropped to his knees on the rocks, reached out and took the arm of the nearest girl. She fell over toward him when he pulled on it. Her face was a mess, wet and dirty, her lip split, cuts and … it wasn't Bailey.

  It was Jeni, the girl he'd spoken to in the ladies’ room of the casino. These girls had been huddled here together on the rockfall. They'd been alive, had climbed up here.

  He felt Jeni's neck. Nothing. The girl's skin was cold. No, wait. Weak. A heartbeat!

  "She's alive!" he roared, the first words he had spoken since he entered the mine. He had been unable to produce a sound when he first saw the mound of bodies, unable to form the horrible words.