The Becoming - a novella

by Leverone, Allan

  THE BECOMING

  BY

  ALLAN LEVERONE

  Kindle Edition Copyright ©2012 by Allan Leverone

  All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  First eBook edition: 2012

  For my wife, Sue: The patience you exhibit while I indulge my obsession for making stuff up and writing it down is awe-inspiring. As always, thanks for your unflagging support.

  Special thanks to Neil Jackson for the breathtaking cover art…

  Praise for Allan Leverone

  “Suspenseful and well-written, The Lonely Mile shows how far a father will go to save his child.”

  —Debbi Mack, New York Times bestselling author of Identity Crisis and Least Wanted

  “Written with edge-of-your-seat suspense and precise detail…The successor to Michael Crichton has landed. And his name is Allan Leverone.”

  —Vincent Zandri, Amazon bestselling author of The Innocent and The Remains

  “Allan Leverone delivers a taut crime drama full of twists and conspiracy. A serial killer thriller with a heart.”

  —Scott Nicholson, Amazon bestselling author of Liquid Fear

  “Allan Leverone raises the stakes with every turn of the page…”

  —Sophie Littlefield, Anthony Award-winning author of A Bad Day for Sorry

  “Thriller fans will enjoy Allan Leverone’s new book, The Lonely Mile, which will carry readers along as a daughter is stolen by a vengeful serial killer.”

  —Dave Zeltserman, author of Pariah and Monster

  “A dark and creepy chiller!”

  —Ron Malfi, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Floating Staircase

  “Fast-paced and eerily seductive, Darkness Falls is a well-told and atmospheric tale of loss and obsession, of madness and revenge. Allan Leverone is a terrific writer with a bright future…”

  —Mark Edward Hall, author of Apocalypse Island and The Lost Village

  “I was floored by the great writing…this book is a steal for anyone that is a fan of a good crime thriller.”

  —Book Sake

  “…a chillingly realistic suspense thriller that will have you holding on for the ride of your life.”

  —Life in Review

  “…this story drew me in, grabbed my attention and would let go until the very surprising and climactic ending…one hell of a roller coaster ride…”

  —Café of Dreams Book Reviews

  “…the suspense never stops…an intense thriller…”

  —Martha’s Bookshelf

  “From page one to the end you will be breathless with suspense…simply an entertaining and enjoyable and intense story…This is one of the things that I love about book blogging—finding new authors from smaller presses that are true gems.”

  —My Reading Room

  “…a must have for anyone looking for a great page turner with mystery and mayhem”

  —Community Bookstop

  “If you enjoy thrillers…this is a great option. It’s a fast-moving storyline…and you’ll find you care about the main characters…”

  —My Book Retreat

  “…feels like I’m watching an episode of 24. There is not a dull moment, and absolutely no lag time…The characters are well developed, and I find the plot easily believable and very easy to get absorbed in.”

  —Southern Fiber Reads

  “…a high suspense thrill ride…”

  —Derry (NH) News

  “…keeps you on the edge of your seat, reading pages as fast as you can…I highly recommend that you read this book…you will not be disappointed.”

  —Two Ends of the Pen

  “…absolutely fantastic…The story moves along at a good pace, dripping with atmosphere…The frights come at you hard and fast…A great story, believable characters, tension, atmosphere, frights galore, blood, and a nice twist at the end…”

  —Literary Mayhem

  “…the storyline was haunting and creepy…I would recommend Darkness Falls to anyone who enjoys a really nightmarish tale.”

  —Horrornews.net Book Reviews

  Books by Allan Leverone

  Final Vector

  The Lonely Mile

  Paskagankee

  Other Novellas by Allan Leverone

  Darkness Falls

  Heartless

  The Becoming

  Short Story Collections

  Postcards from the Apocalypse

  Uncle Brick and the Four Novelettes

  1

  July 12, 1925

  Tonopah Coal Mine

  Tonopah, Pennsylvania

  The handcar’s rusty iron wheels squealed out a song of complaint as the big box wound its way deep into the earth. Karl Meyer shuffled along behind it, weary after a long day, counting the minutes to the end of his ten hour shift. Seventy-five to go. Glittering black coal dust caked his boots, his jumpsuit, his helmet and every inch of exposed skin.

  Karl guided the car—empty now, but soon to be filled almost to overflowing with black Pennsylvania gold—around corners, along straightaways and through switchbacks, moving ever farther from small entryway back at the surface. The Tonopah Mine had been in continuous operation since the mid 1850’s, and over the ensuing seventy years a complex network of underground tunnels had been engineered.

  Many of these tunnels had been sealed off, mined until the coal was played out and then abandoned. Rusting signs nailed to rotting two-by-fours placed in gigantic X’s across mine shaft entrances warned miners DANGER—TUNNEL CLOSED! Some of the signs had been in place so long they were virtually unreadable. Karl passed them all without a thought and kept going.

  Karl Meyer was a trammer, a mine worker whose job it was to run the empty container along the tracks to an active mine shaft, fill it with coal, then muscle the now-heavy iron box back to the surface, where it would be unloaded and he would begin the process again.

  It was now 10:45 p.m., and this would be Karl’s final run of the night. By the time he made his way to the shaft in use—Charlie Five was the shaft’s rather unromantic name—loaded his car with coal, and worked his way back to the surface, his two to midnight shift would be just about over. He would have enough time to clean up in the crowded shack employed as a base building by the Tonopah Mining Company before clocking out and trudging down the street to The Lucky Shamrock Bar—Tonopah Mining owned and operated, of course—to exchange some company scrip for a few beers.

  Karl moved slowly along the main shaft. For an operation as busy as Tonopah Mining, he was continually amazed at how deep into the earth he could travel without setting eyes on another human being. He could hear workers every now and then; sound played tricks on the senses down here, so far beneath the earth’s surface. Long-abandoned mine shafts and tunnels to nowhere and unreliable ventilation all combined to result in strange, eerie sound patterns.

  Snippets of overheard conversation might float through the air as if miners were near, but the shaft would be empty. Weird, toneless noises, ululations like the cries of a loon on a lonely lake, would begin without warning and end just as suddenly. Pockets of dead air would float throu
gh tunnels for no apparent reason, warm and thick and stifling as opposed to the cool dampness typical of a tunnel hacked into the earth hundreds of feet below its surface.

  Men had died down here, dozens that Karl knew of over the seven-plus decades the mine had been in operation. Coal mining was a difficult, dangerous job and the risk of violent death was a constant companion to miners, but that was especially true in the Tonopah Mine. Here safety standards were generally lax, the miners viewed by management as interchangeable parts; replaceable cogs in the operation.

  The old timers told stories of shadowy creatures living in the far reaches of the deepest closed-off mine shafts, of hideously deformed monsters skulking through the darkness, stalking miners and wreaking havoc on them. There were stories of good men who had walked into the mine and simply disappeared, vanishing into thin air, their bodies, clothing and tools never recovered.

  Karl had heard all the stories, plenty of times. He tried to ignore them. Working ten hour shifts six days a week, three-quarters of a mile under the earth’s surface was hard enough to handle without adding superstitious nonsense to the mix. He was an uneducated immigrant with a wife and three hungry children to support, and Karl knew he was lucky to have a job at all. So he wasn’t about to complain, about the difficulties of the job or about the stupid stories told by a bunch of old men with coal dust lining their lungs and overactive imaginations or—

  —Bang!

  Something smashed into Karl’s empty coal cart and bounced off, sending a loud gong reverberating through the mine shaft. He ducked reflexively and jumped back, then gazed into the murky semi-darkness at the edge of the six-foot-wide shaft. A jagged rock, roughly the size of a baseball, settled into the dust of the ancient shaft floor, spinning a couple of times and then falling still.

  What the hell?

  Karl had been pushing his cart, lost in thought, rolling it past the entrance to one of the oldest and deepest closed-off shafts in the entire mine. Alpha Seven it was called, and it had been abandoned for as long as Karl could remember. Hell, even old Sandy Schaefer, at sixty the oldest and longest-tenured Tonopah Mining employee, had never stepped foot into Alpha Seven and couldn’t remember a time when the shaft had been active.

  It was also one of the shafts rumored to be haunted.

  But of course that was ridiculous. Karl stood at the corner of the long-abandoned Alpha Seven and peered as far into the tunnel as he could, which wasn’t far at all. The light provided by incandescent bulbs strung too far apart on frayed wiring was weak and insufficient even in the active portions of the mine; the abandoned shafts were as dark as a hooker’s heart, as Karl’s father would have said.

  “Hello?” Karl attempted, cupping his hands and directing his voice down the inky blackness of the long-dead shaft. “Who’s there?” The sound fought its way into the tunnel and then seemed to give up. There was no echo, no indication anyone could hear him.

  There was also no reason to believe anyone would. Who the hell would be hanging around in the unrelenting darkness of Alpha Seven? And for what purpose? No one would have known Karl—or anyone else—would be passing by at this exact moment, so even in the unlikely event someone wanted to pull a prank, that person would have had no way of determining when a potential target might appear.

  Karl took a step into Alpha Seven, then two. “I said who’s there?” he repeated, more forcefully this time.

  Silence.

  He turned back toward his mining car, shaking his head, and the moment he did, another rock whizzed past, this one so close to his helmet the displaced air tickled his ear. It passed directly over his cart and smashed into the tunnel wall on the other side.

  “Goddammit!” he shouted, and that was when the explosion occurred.

  ***

  A muffled roar marked the blast, and then a wall of compressed air rolled through the tunnel, invisible but unstoppable. It knocked Karl to the ground seconds after the ragged boom echoed down the chambers. He covered his head with his arms as he fell and rolled over once, striking Alpha Seven’s side wall, instantly forgetting about nearly being beaned with a rock.

  Of all the potential dangers posed by earning a paycheck under the earth’s surface, fire was the worst. It was worse than a cave-in by far, because after a cave-in, unless a miner was unfortunate enough to be standing in the exact spot of the tunnel’s collapse, the possibility of rescue was high. He simply stayed where he was and waited. Collapsed tunnels could be re-dug and reinforced.

  But fire was different. In addition to the obvious danger of being blown to bits or burned alive, fire meant smoke and smoke meant toxic fumes which had nowhere to disperse other than through the tunnels.

  And fire lived on oxygen. A raging inferno could suck all of the available air right out of a shaft in minutes, leaving trapped miners gasping for breath like fish out of water, suffocating them, condemning otherwise perfectly healthy men to a horrific death, writhing in the dirt, clutching at their throats as their lungs burned not from fire but from lack of air.

  Karl crawled out of Alpha Seven and back to his cart. He wondered how powerful the blast of compressed air would have been had he not been standing a few feet inside a ninety degree offshoot of the major mining artery. He grasped the side of the heavy iron cart and pulled himself to his feet, peering in the direction of the explosion.

  A flickering yellow glow in the distance seemed to indicate the explosion had occurred not far from where Karl was standing, and that was bad. Smoke and gases would soon be billowing through the tunnel, threatening his life.

  Metal bulkheads had been constructed at irregular intervals throughout every shaft, with the intention of giving miners a shot at surviving the exact scenario now playing out. Every man working the mines had been taught the same thing in the event of an underground fire—make your way to a bulkhead between you and the fire as soon as possible and secure it.

  The theory was that with miners on either side of the blaze closing their bulkheads, the spread of the fire would be limited, accomplishing two things: a chance at survival for as many workers as possible, and the limitation of the blaze to one stretch of tunnel, making it easier to extinguish.

  That was the theory. Karl had never had occasion to test it, because he had never been caught in a mine fire before. But he had no earthly idea what else to do, so he fell back on his training. He sprinted toward the source of the explosion, trying to recall how far away the nearest bulkhead might be and wondering whether he had any chance of reaching it before the noxious smoke and gases made their way through the tunnel and killed him.

  He panted through his open mouth as he ran. Was it his imagination or was it getting harder to breathe? He wasn’t sure. He kept going. He rounded a gentle bend in the mine shaft and on the other side the air felt hotter, stifling even. The hint of yellow he had seen far off down the tunnel immediately following the explosion became much brighter and more pronounced and he knew he was running out of time. He was sweating profusely; the air was stagnant and smelled vaguely of chemicals.

  And then he saw it. The rusted iron frame of a bulkhead. His savior.

  He ran to the frame on the right side of the tunnel and reached up almost to the ceiling, where a large hook had been threaded through a hole in the metal bulkhead. Karl anchored the bulkhead door with his left hand while yanking on the hook with his right. Nothing happened. The pieces appeared to have rusted together.

  Karl wondered how long it had been since anyone had tested the damned bulkhead doors and cursed between panting breaths. He pulled again, and again nothing happened. He hurried to the opposite side of the tunnel and tried that door. It lifted free of the hook easily and swung down into the shaft, filling the left side of the tunnel and accomplishing absolutely nothing unless Karl could lower the other door, blocking the entire shaft.

  He returned to the right side of the tunnel. Karl Meyer had never been a religious man, but suddenly it seemed critically important he pass along a message to God, just i
n case He happened to be listening. Get me out of this, he thought. Please, get me out of this, and he realized he had nothing else to say. He chuckled bitterly and pulled on the rusted fixture and once again it didn’t budge. Thanks, he transmitted to God, who was clearly busy with other things, and tittered.

  The first tendrils of black smoke began floating down the inside of the tunnel, up near the ceiling; Karl could see them even in the insufficient lighting provided by the cheap bastards running the Tonopah Mining Company. He tried to guess how much time he had left and couldn’t. He opened his right hand as if to slap someone and reached up and used his arm as a battering ram in a desperate attempt to loosen the frozen bulkhead door. He smashed his hand into the door and felt his wrist pop and screamed in fear and frustration and pain.

  And he felt the door move.

  He steeled himself against the pain he knew was coming and smacked the door again with his injured arm, and this time it pulled free of the hook with a squeal of protest. Pain exploded in his arm, zig-zagging from his wrist all the way to his elbow. Karl ignored it. He lifted the door free of the hook with his good hand and lowered it down across the tunnel where it swung snugly into place against its partner.

  Karl latched the doors together and dropped to one knee to catch his breath. He was shaking from pain and exertion and, he knew, terror. He closed his eyes and counted to one hundred and gradually his breathing returned to something approaching normal. The tunnel had grown noticeably darker with the bulkhead doors blocking the light from the mine fire, but when he opened his eyes, the first thing Karl noticed was a sliver of yellow leaking through each side of the shaft around the outside of the iron frame. Either the frame had bowed inward over the decades or the walls of the mine shaft had slowly crumbled away.