by Ninie Hammon
* * *
Warren was surprised at how glad he was to feel empty air with his feet as he crawled backward out of the pipe. This job had been more difficult and—go on, admit it, scarier—than he’d anticipated, and he wanted nothing in the world so much as to light the end of the fuse in his hand and get out of there!
He eased down out of the pipe into the sunshine and took great, heaving gulps of good air as he opened the now-empty sack and dropped his helmet down into it. Then he dug into his pocket for a lighter, an old-fashioned flint lighter, gold-plated, with his initials on it. He’d used it to light his cigars back when he actually smoked them. He flipped open the cap, thumbed the little wheel and a flame instantly appeared. He hesitated for a moment, then touched the flame to the end of the fuse. Sparks flew. Then the sparking light began to rush down the fuse into the black hole of the pipe.
He didn’t remember that fuses burned so fast! In seconds, it was just a flickering light in the darkness. Warren turned quickly to climb up to the top of the dam and then run like his life depended on it to the spot he’d determined was high enough up the hillside to be safe. That’s when he saw people below, standing above Impoundment Dam No. 1! If they looked up, they’d see him. He had to get out of sight—all the way over the hill and down the other side. Then he did run like his life depended on it.
*
Carter, Maggie and Grayson edged carefully down the steep incline, watching where they placed each step, digging their feet sideways into the loose dirt so they wouldn’t slip and slide the rest of the way down. Once they got to the bottom, they carefully picked their way across the tumble of giant rocks and mining debris piled on the lakeshore. Water that looked like viscous tar or used motor oil rose to within about fifteen feet of the top of the dam on their left. The three climbed out across the tumble of rocks until they were standing on a large boulder at the water’s edge, looking down at the lake six or seven feet below.
Since they now stood in the bottom of a shallow, three-sided bowl formed by the ridges and the dam, there was no breeze, and the stagnant stink off the oily, black liquid was almost overpowering—dead water, a chemical odor like sulfur and something else, something unnamable.
“Is this it?” Grayson asked gently. “Is this the monster in your dream?”
Maggie’s face was pale.
When she spoke, her voice was quiet, filled with fear and awe.
“Uh-huh. But it’s not awake. Not yet.”
* * *
Warren reached the end of the dam, sprinted across the flat area beside the lake and began to claw his way up the hillside. He was panting and wheezing, a stitch in his side jabbed a dagger under his ribcage, but he didn’t slow down. Unless he made it all the way over the hill, when the charge blew, the people below would look up and see him. They couldn’t identify him from that distance, of course…could they? His hair! They might very well be able to see Warren’s white hair! And they’d at least be able to tell he was a tall, skinny man, and Addington said the Campbell guy who’d attacked him at the hospital was short. He struggled to climb faster.
And now that he’d actually done it, now that he’d lit the fuse, he was frightened, too. Like a little kid running away from a cherry bomb in a Coke bottle, he wanted to get far away from the blast that would erupt in that pipe any second. He was no longer concerned that he hadn’t made the charge big enough, that it wouldn’t do enough damage, that it’d make a little hole in the top of the dam a work crew could fill in with a backhoe.
When he finally staggered the final few feet to the top of the hillside, he stumbled blindly across it and dived off the back. Gravel and small rocks imbedded in his palms painfully as he slid. He skinned both knees and tore his right pant leg before he finally came to a stop.
He lay there for a few moments trying to get his breath back, gasping from the strain—and from relief! He rolled over, looked up at the bright blue sky and sighed out, “I made it!”
They were the last words Nelson Warren ever spoke.
A great, grumbling roar split open the morning silence with such force the whole mountain trembled, shook like it was having a seizure. Then the center of the massive mound of coal slag that was Impoundment Dam No. 2 heaved upward and erupted like a black volcano.
Warren had woefully underestimated the explosive power of the dynamite charge he had shoved four hundred feet into the guts of the dam. The instant the sparking fuse ignited the sticks of dynamite, thousands of tons of coal slag, rocks and mining debris spewed skyward in an ugly black column a hundred and fifty feet tall. When the velocity of the force propelling it upward had expended itself, the column collapsed and the rocks rained back down to the earth like meteors, sprayed out in every direction. They splashed down into the lake, hammered in the top, trunk and hood of Warren’s new Pontiac and buried the man himself under four feet of rubble. No one found his body until it started to stink.
* * *
At the first cracking sound of the explosion, Grayson instinctively dropped into a crouch and covered his head protectively with his arms. Maggie staggered backward a step, then stared up the valley, her eyes the size of dinner plates. Carter gasped, then couldn’t draw in another breath, could only gawk in stunned disbelief. Something had exploded—it looked like inside the dam. A geyser of coal debris shot into the sky, then plummeted back to the earth, leaving a cloud of black dust suspended in the air that obscured the explosion site.
With their attention riveted on the erupting dam above them in the hollow, nobody noticed a small girl with honey-blonde hair running toward the lake as fast as her little legs would carry her.
The crashing, rumbling roar of the explosion had catapulted Sadie from sleep. She sat up in the truck cab, alone and so terrified she couldn’t even cry. Her eyes wide, she looked out the driver’s side window and could see Unka Cardur, Mabie and Daddy in the distance. She turned toward the door beside her. It was locked, but Sabie knew how to unlock it. Mabie had shown her. She pulled upward with all her strength on the button, used both hands, grunted from the effort. When it slid up with a click, she pushed down the door handle and the door swung open. Quick as a baby rabbit, Sadie climbed down to the ground and took out at a dead run toward the lake, her long blonde curls flying out behind her in the breeze.
Nobody saw her reach the dirt incline, where her feet slipped out from under her, and she slid on her backside all the way to the bottom. She got up and began to climb onto the boulders, now too out of breath to call out. She crawled up on the lowest one, then the next and next until she reached the top of the pile, then she started across the jumble toward the lake.
That’s when Edna spotted her and started to holler. She ran as fast as an old lady with arthritis could run across the ridge toward the incline, yelling at the three figures on the lake shore still staring in shock up the valley.
Maggie and Carter turned at her cry, but the explosion had joined all the other explosions to form a jackhammer hum in Grayson’s ears that all but blotted out sound altogether. He didn’t hear Edna. But he heard Maggie.
“Saaaadie!” Maggie cried.
The word bounced around inside Grayson’s skull like a pinball, setting off lights and whistles. He turned slowly toward her, his eyes wide, then saw the look of horror on her face and followed her gaze to the tiny child clambering across the rock pile toward them.
And then Sadie vanished.
* * *
Piper heard a rumble like nearby thunder, but recognized the sound for what it was—an explosion. Blasts set off at the strip mine far up the valley reverberated down to Sadler Hollow almost every day, making Piper grateful she hadn’t lived here when Northfield Coal was ripping off the top of Chicken Gizzard Mountain. Marian said that two or three times a week, the cabinet doors flew open, and plates, saucers or glasses leaped to the floor and shattered.
But today was Sunday. The mine didn’t operate on Sundays. And this blast didn’t sound like the others she’d been hearing for m
onths. It was louder, like it was much bigger or much closer. It couldn’t have been closer, of course, because there was nothing to blast on this end of Chicken Gizzard Mountain anymore.
“What was that sound?” Marian asked. Her breathing was labored again. It seemed to take so much effort for her to draw in a breath that Piper tensed every time she exhaled, waiting/hoping/praying that she’d have the strength to breathe back in. “Was it trumpets? Could it be…?”
Her eyes grew bright. She looked up toward the ceiling and seemed to see something there Piper couldn’t see.
The sound most certainly had not been trumpets. Something had blown up in the valley above the house. Something on the ridge behind the dam.
* * *
Grayson had no memory of crossing the rocks from where he stood beside the lake to where his daughter had disappeared. He was just instantly there, down on his knees, staring into the crack between the boulders that Sadie had fallen into.
Carter was less than a second behind, calling, “Sunshine!”
A little voice Grayson could barely hear in his rumbling ears replied clearly. “Unka Cardur. Sabie fall down!” And then she started to cry.
Grayson sucked in a great, heaving gasp of relief. She was unhurt! He could see her standing about eleven or twelve feet below, looking up at them. The gap she’d fallen through between two giant hunks of rock couldn’t have been more than seven or eight inches wide. She must have scooted down the slanted side of the smaller rock like a slide into a space shaped more or less like a long-necked wine bottle—narrow at the top, wide at the bottom.
He began to look around for an opening where he could climb down to get her. As he looked, his gut began to synch into a knot. The boulders were jammed tight together. He couldn’t see a space between any of them that was big enough for him to fit.
There was a rumble.
Carter said something Grayson’s damaged hearing didn’t quite catch, but the horror in his tone needed no translation.
Grayson turned to look up the valley toward the dam. What he saw clamped his heart in a steel vise. The dust had cleared, revealing a gash in the dam at the site of the explosion. The rip extended from the top of the structure halfway to the bottom, a forty-foot slash where black water had begun to flow out in a deep-throated rumble. As they watched, spellbound, a hunk of the top of the dam beside the rip washed away, almost in slow motion. A waterfall of black water cascaded out behind it, down the back of the dam, and began to flow down the valley toward them.
Even though Carter’s voice was hushed, this time Grayson heard him clearly.
“That dam, it can’t—it’s not going to hold.”
No, it wasn’t.
The implications of that froze both men in place for maybe five full seconds. A flood was about to surge down this valley, water from a lake five times the size of the one below them. The smaller dam couldn’t possibly hold the water back, and the flood would gush down the mountainside into Sadler Hollow, which was swathed in an impenetrable veil of gauzy white fog.
They’d never see it coming! No one would have any warning at all.
There was another rumble as another hunk of the dam washed away. Now the water gushed out the crack where a twenty-foot section of the dam was gone.
The sight planted sudden terror in Grayson’s gut to gnaw away at his insides like a lazy rat. What if…if that dam completely let go all at once, just collapsed? The whole lake behind it would roar down the valley, a wall of water thirty, forty feet tall! They had to get to safety on top of the ridge quick, go…up. Exactly where Maggie had kidnapped Sadie to take her.
But Sadie wasn’t going anywhere. She was stuck down there between the rocks.
Chapter 31
Piper got up from Marian’s bedside and went to the window that looked out at the mountainside behind the house. Or would have if the puffy white fog hadn’t obscured the view. For a brief, passing moment, she yearned to go racing out the back door and climb up above the fog. What a sight it must be to look back over the hollow at it, lying on the floor of the valley like cotton candy. A lake of white enclosed by the mountains. That sight would make a Kodak moment, she thought, if she’d had a camera, and the heart to care about beauty or art or anything except the family that life had chewed up and spit out bloody on the ground.
“Can you see it?” Marian’s voice was soft, wistful.
“No, there’s nothing to see,” Piper said without turning. “The fog’s still got everything socked in.”
“It’s so lovely it takes my breath right out of my chest.”
Piper turned around and saw that the old woman was staring raptly out the window, but she knew the rheumy eyes weren’t looking at what she could see there. There was an expression of such joy on Marian face, Piper knew. It was time.
* * *
Understanding passed between Grayson and Carter without the necessity of words.
“Maggie, get up to the top of the ridge!” Carter said. When she hesitated, he barked, “Now! Go!” and she turned and headed back across the rocks toward the dirt incline.
Grayson and Carter began frantically looking for some way to reach Sadie, who stood with her thumb corked in her mouth in a small open space between boulders, far out of arm’s reach.
“Maybe there’s some way we could roll…move the smaller…” Grayson didn’t bother to finish because it was a ridiculous suggestion. The “smaller” rock was roughly the size of a Volkswagen, jammed up against a larger one that was bigger than a Sherman tank. Even if the rocks had been lying out in the open, the two men couldn’t have budged either one.
Grayson scrambled over the tops of the rocks, looking for anywhere he might squeeze through, somewhere he could move some other rocks, maybe, to enlarge a space—anything!
His glance passed over Carter, then yanked back to him like a fully extended rubber band. Carter’s face had gone so white that blue veins showed at his temples. Grayson followed his gaze. The stream of water that had gushed out the hole in Dam No. 1 had reached the smaller lake, and the water level in it was beginning to rise, like water in a bathtub with the spigot turned full blast.
The hammer blow of realization hit Grayson so hard it knocked his knees out from under him, and he dropped to the rock. The space where Sadie was trapped was only a foot or two above the lake. It would fill with water as the lake spread out of its banks and up the sides of the ridge. At the rate the water was rising, in three, maybe four minutes…
In a panic, he threw himself at the opening Sadie’d slipped through, jammed his arm down into it and tried to wedge his shoulder in, reach down to her. But Sadie would have to jump up more than twice her own height to grasp it.
His leg then, it would reach farther. He turned to shove his leg into the…it wouldn’t reach far enough.
If she could swim, maybe she could just rise up with the water.
Sadie couldn’t swim. In fact, he doubted she’d ever been in water deeper than a bathtub. When it began to swirl up around her, got into her face, she’d panic and…
Carter suddenly reached down, grabbed the front of Grayson’s fatigue shirt and yanked it open, sending buttons pinging away like BBs. Grayson immediately understood what his brother meant to do.
“Hey, Sunshine,” Carter called down to her as Grayson ripped open the buttoned cuffs and yanked his arms out of the long sleeves. “I need you to grab hold of your daddy’s shirtsleeve and hold on tight, and we’ll get you out of there. Okay?”
The child stopped crying.
“Sabie want up wif you and Daddy.”
Grayson turned to lower the shirt through the space between the rocks.
Carter dropped to his knees beside him. “My arms are longer!”
Grayson moved instantly aside and handed him the shirt. Holding the end of one sleeve, Carter fed the shirt down into the hole. When he lay on his belly and stretched his arm out into the hole, the other sleeve dangled six or eight inches above Sadie’s head.
Grayson saw something dark edging across the dirt toward Sadie. Black water. He nudged Carter and nodded toward it, rasping, “Hurry!”
“Okay, Sunshine, we’re going to play a game,” Carter said, his voice shaking with tension. “Get up on your tippy toes and grab Daddy’s shirt. Then hold on tight, tight as you can. And don’t let go! Can you do that?”
He jammed his shoulder into the crack between the rocks to lower the shirt another couple of inches. Sadie nodded, reached up and took hold of the sleeve. With one hand. The other held her thumb securely in her mouth.
“Both hands, honey. Use both hands.”
Sadie shook her head and kept her thumb where it was.
“You can’t hold on tight enough with only one hand. You have to use both.”
Again she shook her head.
“Sadie,” Grayson said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “Remember when I pushed you in the swing?”
She nodded.
“You had to hold on tight with both hands so you wouldn’t fall out, remember? You have to do that now. Please, sweetheart, do that now.”
Reluctantly, the little girl pulled her thumb out of her mouth, stretched up and grabbed the sleeve of Grayson’s shirt with both hands.
“Hold tight,” Carter said. “Tight as you can.”
Then he began to pull slowly, steadily upward. The little girl began to rise.
Grayson flattened out on his belly and jammed his arm down into the crack. If Carter could just get her high enough so he could grab…
