“Ryan?”
“This’s me.”
“Gordy?”
“What, my good looks don’t glow in the dark?”
“Smells like shit, it’s gotta be Gordy.”
“Sonny?”
“Who the fuck else would it be down here?”
Al, Roop—voices out of the darkness, hands touching hands. So far, thought Hank, so good. Don’t think about what it means.
The men linked hands and felt their way along the wall. Whenever they encountered a box containing another SCSR, they took it, slinging it onto their belts. In addition to the danger from methane, without the fans working, the air would go bad quickly and there was no telling how long they’d have to wait for rescue when they reached the elevators.
If they reached the elevators. Thank God, thought Hank, Applby had gone over to long-wall mining in the new section. He couldn’t imagine trying to grope their way to the downcast if they’d still been doing room and pillar, with the mazes of crosscuts and subsidiary mains. At least there wasn’t anyplace to go but straight back. And another little prayer of thanks that a respirator worked by compressed air and wasn’t susceptible to whatever had knocked out all the batteries. His greatest dread, as he led the way along, was that every second his fingers would encounter an unscheduled wall of loose rock that would tell them they were well and truly screwed.
As they walked, Ryan was still trying to figure out what had happened to the batteries. Others proffered suggestions of who to blame: management fuckup, Arab terrorists, Chinese bombs. Grimes rode the boy unmercifully, jeering at his speculations but offering nothing of his own except obscenities. Hank wanted to punch him but kept silent. Any speech was better than none, against this terrible blind silence and the racing puzzlement that filled his heart.
A faint scuffling of bodies, of voices in the dark ahead. Hank called out, “Yo!” and Andy Hillocher’s voice replied.
“Hank? You guys got a radio?”
“Deader’n a road-kill skunk.”
There was appropriate commentary on both sides.
“Roof’s holding stable, anyway.”
“Well, be sure to write that down for the geology boys,” retorted another sarcastic voice—Dixon’s, Hank guessed from the slight intonation of black speech. “They’ll be glad to hear it.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” snapped Hank. “Who all’s here?”
After an endless crawl through darkness, Hank’s groping hand felt the corner of the wall and, cautiously removing his respirator, he smelled water and wet rock. A little farther on, his hand encountered the edge of the unmoving conveyor belt that led the way toward the downcast. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “Everybody shut up for a second.”
When the voices ceased, the silence flowed back. Terrible silence, horrifying in its completeness, broken only by the slow, infinitesimal drip of water leaking from the pipes and, at long intervals, a far-off tapping and creaking.
“That’s the mine breathin’ in her sleep,” his dad had said. And his grandfather had made spooky eyes at him and whispered, “It’s the tommy-knockers. They digs in the mines, too.”
One of the company boys in engineering had once explained to Hank what those noises really were in terms of ground water and weight distribution over the rock. But when he heard them, he always thought of his granddad, sitting in the warm corner between the big old iron kitchen stove and the cellar door, cradling a shot glass in his hands.
“What you think you’re gonna hear down here, asshole?” demanded Sonny Grimes.
“Maybe Superman and Batman talkin’ about how they’re gonna find us,” retorted Hank. There was something in the air—the coal dust, maybe—that made him itch all over, and his head ached something fierce. He was in no mood for Sonny.
A little farther on they found the tram, dead on its tracks and empty. They encountered the men who’d been in it at the downcast, after Hank laboriously worked the manual openers on the three sets of airflow-control doors that guarded the elevator. “That better be somebody we know,” Gene Llewellyn’s voice called out from behind the third set of doors, and of course Gordy couldn’t resist and let out a horrible growl that fooled nobody.
“Get your hand off my ass, Gordy,” retorted Lou Hanson, and there was general laughter.
“They know we’re down here,” Brackett said comfortingly, as everybody shifted to make room, and they counted off names, made sure it was the whole shift. “Even if the emergency generator up top got knocked out, they’ll have another one in place inside a couple hours. This isn’t like the old days.”
No, thought Hank, scratching absent-mindedly at his shoulder. It isn’t like the old days. In the old days there’s no way we’d have been trapped a mile under the ground. The Green Mountain mine was a slope, not a shaft, and you could walk out, provided you weren’t cut off or buried yourself.
In the old days, too, there were things that worked without batteries.
“What about it, Gene?” asked Andy Hillocher. By the sound of it he’d removed his respirator, to save on air, something he was pretty safe doing here by the shaft. Hank had already taken his off, because the straps itched like fury. “You’re the company egghead. How come all the headlamps went out?”
“Beats the crap out of me.” Llewellyn tried to sound jaunty but didn’t quite succeed.
“There any record of gas in this part of the mine?” asked Hank.
Llewellyn’s voice replied from the darkness. “If there’s been a floor heave, there could be gas anywhere; you know that.”
“Okay,” said Hank. “But even with a couple of respirators apiece, things are gonna get pretty stuffy pretty quick. I think somebody needs to take a look around outside. I mean a look.”
There was silence. They knew he was right. But they all had the miner’s inborn horror of fire below the ground.
“After you close that third door behind you,” Gene said at last, “you count to three hundred before you light that match. There shouldn’t be dust this close to the downcast, and if there’s gas, you’re not going to make it that long and nobody has anything to worry about. Anybody in here got a problem with that?”
“I got a problem,” groused Sonny. “Why the hell don’t we just wait till the company gets its butt in gear and comes down after us?”
“Because they might not, asshole,” Hillocher retorted. “And if the ceiling’s getting ready to cave in or there’s water pouring down the walls or something, I’d kind of like to know about it while there’s still time to shift our sorry asses someplace else, okay?”
There was a little more argument, but at length Hillocher handed his lighter and a twist of paper—it felt like a page from a magazine—to Hank. Hank cranked open the doors, cranked them shut and cranked open the next pair, and the next.
“Fuckin’ asshole’s gonna blow us all up,” Grimes muttered.
“So sue him.”
The doors shut off their voices.
Beyond the third set there was the dim smell of coal and rock dust, of wet rock and oil from trams and machines.
And silence.
Hank listened again to that silence and let it fill him.
On the other side of the downcast, he knew, would be the mains leading into the older sections of the mine, the worked-out room-and-pillar areas where black crosscuts intersected the rubble of roof falls and controlled collapses that had occurred as the men had retreated after taking every fragment of the supporting coal. But no sound, save for the drip of water, the creak of the tommy-knockers.
Behind him, muffled by three sets of doors, he heard Brackett ask, “Some other kind of gas, maybe? Does anybody smell anything?”
“You mean other than the shit in Hanson’s pants?”
“Oh, fuck off, why don’t you, Sonny?”
“Does anybody else have a headache?”
“I’m gettin’ a headache listening to Hanson’s crap about Arab fuckin’ terrorists and nuclear warfare.”
&nb
sp; Hank had a headache. Not the same as he’d had from his brushes with firedamp in the mines, but a strange sense of tightening, a weird ache in his neck and back and in some deep center of his brain. Looking back toward the doors— toward his friends—he felt a curious unwillingness to return to them, a sense that he’d be more comfortable here in the dark, with the tommy-knockers. Hank lit the spill of paper, but he had to force himself to do it. The light showed him the tunnels, the silent machinery, the pipes slowly dripping water. Everything as normal.
Quickly he blew out the flame. The light of it, he found, hurt his eyes. He wondered if that meant anything.
Shaking his head a little, he made himself go back.
Chapter Eight
WEST VIRGINIA
“Arleta? Are you there?” Wilma sprang up the front steps of the big white house, tried the knob with fingers barked and bloody from having been thrown off her feet by the earthquake. Behind her, old Mr. Swann from the trailer court and young Shannon Grant—to whom she’d been talking when the quake hit—waited anxiously, ready to give whatever help might be needed. Only a few years ago Shannon had been one of Wilma’s students, and Wilma fully expected to one day see Shannon’s daughter Tessa, currently two years old and perched on her mother’s hip, in her classes as well.
The knob wouldn’t turn. Oddly, it didn’t rattle, as it would have if the door were locked. It felt frozen, jammed hard. Wilma pushed inward. Nothing. “Arleta?”
“We’re all right here, Wilma.” Arleta’s voice, behind the shut door.
Wilma tried to look through the window, but the curtain was drawn. “Arleta?”
“We’re all fine.”
She must be terrified, thought Wilma. Like the cats, skittering spookily around the shadows, fearful of everything, and why not? The house wasn’t supposed to move. “Can you open the door? Are you hurt? Is Bob okay?” There were, of course, backup batteries on Bob’s machines, but every battery in Wilma’s house seemed to have been affected, and in Shannon’s, too.
“We’re all fine, really.” If it hadn’t been for the unmistakably human timber of the voice Wilma would have sworn it was a recording. Poor Arleta!
“What about Bob’s machines?” she persisted. “How long do the backup batteries keep running? Do we need to get an emergency team here or something?”
Still that stilted, wooden tone, still that sense of... what? Something odd, Wilma didn’t know quite what. As if it wasn’t really Arleta. “Bob’s machines will run for forty-eight hours without any problems. Don’t worry. We’re fine.”
As Ryan would say, thought Wilma, my ass.
“I have to go now. Bob’s calling for me.”
“What? Arleta?” Wilma gripped the doorknob again, shook it. Bob? Bob’s in a coma. “Arleta, let me just . . .”
Behind her, Mr. Swann gasped, put a hand to his chest and leaned suddenly against the railing. Shannon caught his elbow as he staggered. “It’s nothing, I just felt sorta bad.” The neighbors were all coming out into the street now, the Stickneys and June Culver and old Mrs. Weise. She saw Jim Stickney walk over and get into his Jeep Wrangler, then get out again a few moments later.
Shock because of the quake, thought Wilma. Californians got used to them, she’d heard—didn’t even bother to get out of bed, most of them. But the Appalachians weren’t supposed to shake.
She got Mr. Swann into her living room and sat him down on the couch. Shannon and Rae Ann Stickney and Gerda Weise followed them through the door uninvited, making soft-voiced inquiries: Was everything all right and did much get broken and were the batteries out in your radio too? Their faces showed something Wilma hadn’t seen there a few moments ago: bafflement. The expressions of people faced with something they’ve never encountered, something far wider than an earthquake.
“It’s not just batteries.” Shannon was still holding Tessa’s hand. “That old hand-crank generator of Jim’s won’t go, either. We were going to drive over to the pithead and see if everything’s all right there, and. . . .”
Wilma realized how deep the silence was. The refrigerator was still. The battery-operated clock wasn’t ticking. Nor were there the sounds she had been half-listening for in the distance, the wail of emergency sirens.
Nothing. Stillness.
She began to understand that what had happened was very different from what she had thought.
NEW YORK
The sky was clear now, save for a few twisting vapor trails, already dissipating, melting into the clouds.
Cal had not seen any of the planes hit ground; the buildings had blocked his view. But they had crashed; how could they not have? Most on the periphery of the city, away from its heart, so perhaps . . . He caught himself trying to force the disaster into the smallest possible proportions.
As for the buildings, none had collapsed as far as Cal could see, though many were fractured and a few tilted at treacherous angles.
It’s omens, Cal, Goldie had said. Something’s coming.
Cal shuddered, and the desperate urgency to be on the move, to reach his sister, drowned all else.
The legal staff, drawn together in the dim light of the common room, had learned soon enough that, of all their technological marvels, only lighters still worked. Most of them had children, parents, spouses and others of variable significance. Despite their misgivings at leaving the relative safety of the building (now that it had stopped shaking), they, like Cal, were eager to brave the stairwells and be gone.
Only one question delayed them.
“What about Mr. Stern?”
He remained secluded in the conference room. Since Cal’s exchange with him, none had ventured to disturb him. Yet to leave without informing him, gaining his sovereign consent...
They milled uncertainly in the gloom, Janice Fishman and Paul Cajero and Tom Sammon and the others. The lowly ones who made the office go, the exalted few who jockeyed for position and coveted partnerships. Darkness veiled their expressions, but Cal could read their fear.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
As he cracked open the conference room doors, Cal could see in the weak light from the outer office that Stern had not moved. He sat slumped against the wall, eyes half-closed, a black stillness.
Cal entered, hunkered down. “Mr. Stern?”
Not looking at him, Stern said, “Hm?”
“How are you doing?”
“Got a bitch of a sinus headache. Tell Naomi to get me some Sudafed.” He scratched one arm languorously but relentlessly through the black fabric of his coat sleeve. Somehow, more than the planes careening out of the sky, the buildings drunkenly askew, this strange diffidence spoke most powerfully to Cal of calamity. Earlier, he had thought himself a rock perilously seamed and cracked, but it was Stern, not he, who had shattered.
“Looks like power’s out all over the city,” said Cal. No need to elaborate on the cars and planes, keep it simple. “Everyone wants to head out, find out what’s happened.”
“Not five yet,” Stern mumbled absently, still not looking at him.
No, it’s not five yet.
Cal visualized the vaulting, unreinforced brick walls of St. Augustine, tried not to picture his sister crushed beneath them. . . .
I’m not Mother Teresa. This is not Woodstock. But it was sure a hell of a lot like Mount St. Helens and Hurricane Andrew and Armageddon all rolled into one, so why aren’t you getting it?
Cal forced down his anger. Stern was clearly, however elusively, injured. The crackling blue lightning Cal had glimpsed about Stern as he himself had dived beneath the table could readily have been some electrical discharge spat from the wall sockets as the juice cut out.
“Come on now,” Cal said firmly, grasping Stern’s arm, hauling him up.
With a mad shout, Stern tore his arm free, so violently that Cal staggered, was nearly flung off his feet. Stern plopped down sullenly, staring at nothing.
“Your skin itch?” he asked idly.
Cal backed slowly to th
e doors. “No,” he said quietly. “Does yours?”
Still looking away, Stern muttered, “No.”
Cal’s back brushed the doors, and he stopped. He might get Paul Cajero and Ed Ledding and Chris Black in here to help deal with Stern, try to wrestle him down the stairs. But Stern would fight them every step of the way, he felt certain of it, and precious time would be lost.
“Look,” Cal sighed. “I’ll get someone to send back help for you, okay? I’ve got to go now.”
Stern didn’t turn, but something at last seemed to register. “Leave, and you’re terminated.”
Cal gave a mirthless laugh—the dreaded words at last.
The coffin-lid doors murmured softly against the carpet as they closed behind him.
Stern was glad Griffin was gone. His chatter had been irritating, almost as maddening as that damn itching. But it felt muted now, hushed in the darkness and the quiet. Calm descended over him as he floated on a gentle sea, its waters embracing him. All he wanted was to remain awhile, to let the feeling wash over him.
But then a dim memory came to him. The Bernero-Vivante deposition was later today. What time was it getting to be? Dreamily, he lifted the Piaget on his wrist to eye level, glanced at its face. In the gloom, he caught a reflection of his eyes in the glass.
I should be frightened by this, he thought. But he wasn’t, merely intrigued, and far removed. He continued to stare at his own eyes looking back at him, their irises no longer the familiar black. Vaguely, it occurred to him that his choice of clothing no longer matched the color of his eyes.
For that, he would need yellow.
“Easy there. Nobody’s got to hurry now.” Cal’s voice betrayed none of the sick urgency he felt. Cautiously, they descended the stairwell, Anita La Bonte and Barbara Claman and about ten of the others holding their lighters aloft, offering a timorous, close illumination. The fire doors at each floor blocked any light; other than the scant blue flames all was blackness. It lent their party a hushed intimacy. As they had ventured down, their group of thirty-odd had been joined by others with the same imperative, had swelled to more than seventy. On floors above and below them, they could hear similar parties, moving with the same blind tentativeness. Their feet shuffled on the steps, a dull thudding like an army of golems on the march. When they spoke, even in whispers, their voices echoed back, a loud, jarring assault. So they were quiet, by and large, their reeling thoughts held checked within.
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