Liard thought it over for another endless five minutes, then got up, and unlocked the cell door.
Yellow lantern light streamed from the kitchen window. Tom ran up the steps and threw the door open.
Virgil sat hunched in an armchair. He had an old afghan wrapped around his shoulders, but he was shivering in spite of it. He stared at Tom, relief spilling across his ravaged features.
“Zelda?” Tom was out of breath. He’d run all the way from the barracks, stumbling often on the dark path, cursing the absence of flashlights. “She’s up on the hill?”
Virgil nodded. “Left long before midnight with the horse and buggy. She was taking Miss Leona with her.” His breath was short, his reedy voice anxious. “She’ll be safe up there, lad, you’re certain of that?”
Tom wasn’t certain of anything, but he nodded anyway. “She’ll be fine, Virgil.” How long would it take him to get there? He looked at the clock on the mantle, and his heart sank.
3:20. No time….
“Where’s Eli?” Virgil looked worn out and cold. He ought to be in bed.
Virgil’s forehead creased in a frown and he shook his head. “Boy should’a been back long ago.” He started to cough, pressing a wrinkled handkerchief to his mouth. Long moments passed before he could continue. “Went to the mine with a map you’d given him,” he managed to gasp. “He wanted the boss on the night shift to have it, so’s he’d know where to dig to get out.” He coughed again, and Tom stared at him, aghast. The coughing went on for what seemed an eternity.
“First,” Virgil wheezed when he could speak, “I said no to Eli, wanted him to stay here by me, safe.” Virgil’s face grew crimson with the effort to suppress another bout of coughing. “But I got thinking how it is underground, lad….” Virgil couldn’t finish. The paroxysm took over and he coughed, bending double with the effort.
Tom didn’t need an explanation. He’d lived through too many bad dreams himself of being buried alive, deep in the bowels of the earth. It was every underground miner’s worst nightmare.
“He must’a gone in with the crew,” Virgil gasped, voicing what Tom had already surmised.
Tom scooped Virgil up and carried him along the passage to his bedroom. He felt as light as a child in Tom’s arms.
Laying the older man gently on the bed, Tom piled up the pillows behind him and drew the quilts around his shoulders.
“You stay here and remember, when the Slide comes down it won’t come anywhere near here. I’ll go see what’s keeping Eli.”
All Virgil could do was nod, but his eyes telegraphed his relief, his gratitude, and his love.
With every hurried step that led him closer to the mine, Tom’s horror grew. If Eli hadn’t come back, there was only one explanation. As Virgil said, the young man had gone into the mine, intent on helping the miners when the Slide came down and trapped them.
Tom knew that twenty miners were on the night shift, and that only seventeen of them survived the slide. Three had perished. Was one of the three Eli? He had no way of knowing, but he had to do whatever he could to prevent it, and that meant going into the mine.
As he raced across the mine bridge that spanned the Crowsnest River, running as fast as he could up the gentle slope to the lampman’s shack. Tom was dimly aware that dogs were howling in the darkness of the valley.
It was ten minutes before four.
Tom knew the lampman, an old miner named Jimmy Grant.
“Eli Ralston,” Tom gasped. “Is he inside?”
Jimmy nodded his kind, wrinkled countenance filled with concern. “Ayup. The lad had a message for one of the night shift. I gave him a lamp.” He knew, of course, of Tom’s association with the Ralstons. “Is poor Virgil took bad?”
Tom nodded. It was no more than the truth. “I have to get to the boy, right away.”
Jimmy handed over a lamp.
“Jimmy,” Tom said urgently. “Get the hell away from here. Tell the men on the mine tipple the mountain’s going to go in just a few minutes. Run, Jimmy. Run for your life, all of you.”
The old miner stared at Tom as if he’d taken leave of his senses.
At a dead run, Tom made for the entrance.
He was already racing down the manway, heading deep into the bowels of the mine when, in the mist-shrouded darkness outside, high above the town, a single boulder broke free and tumbled down the face of Turtle Mountain.
Across the valley, on the hill above the town, Zelda squinted in the moonlight, trying and failing to make out the individual shapes of the three figures standing in the clearing, their arms wrapped tightly around one another.
Her heart hammered like a wild thing in her chest, and the silence was thick and heavy.
The earth might have stopped on its axis. Even the dogs were no longer barking. It was difficult to breathe.
The moment stretched on and on, and for an instant, she was certain it was all a dream.
Nothing at all was going to happen. It was a huge joke on all of them. She opened her mouth to call to Leona, but before a sound could escape her lips, a solid icy wall of air struck her and she was thrown violently to the earth.
A horrendous sound, like a gigantic clap of thunder, reverberated through the valley. The horses neighed in terror, rearing and pawing the air with their hooves.
Zelda’s scream was drowned in the cacophony of monstrous noise as ninety million tons of rock broke away from the face of Turtle Mountain. They careened down and down, into the valley and halfway up the side of the hill where she cowered, her face and body pressed into the earth.
It seemed to last an eternity, but it was only a short hundred seconds before echoing silence and a gray mass of dust hung like a shroud over the valley.
Trembling, coughing, barely able to breathe, Zelda struggled to her feet.
Below her, where the town of Frank had slumbered only moments before, there was now a sea of jagged rock.
She cried out and whirled around, searching for her friends, needing the reassurance that others besides herself were alive in this holocaust. She felt the hairs at her nape stand on end.
A building shimmered in the dust-filled air, a strange, cantilevered construction surrounded by concrete walkways, with glass walls that seemed to glow in the light of some invisible sun. The glass reflected a peaceful vista, a valley covered in tumbled gray stones, and high above, the scarred and ancient face of Turtle Mountain, placid and worn.
A sign hung on chains from a board, blowing gently in a slight breeze. “Frank Slide Interpretive Center,” Zelda read. “Built 1986.”
Three figures made their way slowly up the walk, toward a doorway, two men and one very pregnant woman.
“Leona.” Zelda’s scream rang out in the silence. “Jackson, wait....”
They paused and turned. Zelda began to run toward them, but she tripped on a root and fell flat, her breath whooshing from her body. For a moment, she lay sobbing, struggling to breathe. When at last she clambered to her knees, she watched in disbelief as the building, solid, real, began to shimmer in the eerie light. Before she could get to her feet, it disappeared like smoke.
There was only the dark, dusty clearing.
Except for Zelda, and the horses, it was empty.
Tom raced down the mine tunnel, stumbling and half falling, his lamp bobbing, shooting rays of dim light at crazy angles into the blackness. He’d been running for some time before he saw the dim glow of another lamp as a miner came toward him down the track, leading a pit pony hauling cars of coal.
“Have you seen--- ” Before Tom could finish the sentence, the earth shuddered around them. The other man cried out in alarm, and the tunnel heaved and twisted.
Tom grabbed a beam and put his hands over his head as a shower of rock and coal tumbled down.
“Explosion!” the other man screamed. “Run for the entry!” His foot caught in the tracks, throwing him violently to the ground.
Then, like the breath of a demon from hell, a blast of hot, pu
trid air came blowing down the narrow passageway, flinging Tom against the side of the mine shaft.
Other panicked voices sounded now as men came running from the depths of the mine, racing for the mine entrance, fearful of the dreaded afterdamp, the deadly gaseous mixture resulting from an explosion. They stumbled and many fell headlong as the tracks heaved and twisted and buckled beneath their feet.
“Eli!” Tom’s shout echoed eerily through the dust-filled tunnels. “Eli!” he roared again.
A tall, lean man with glasses stopped long enough to say, “I saw the lad near the cabin not ten minutes ago. Be careful, the water’s rising back there.”
The cabin was the small room inside the mine set aside for officials, several hundred feet down a side tunnel. Tom, running in the opposite direction to the others, dodged frantic bodies as he hurried down the manway and turned into the downsloping tunnel where the cabin was. The ever-present trickle of water underfoot became deeper, and Tom was soon slogging through an ever-increasing murky stream.
He almost tripped over Eli’s limp form. The boy lay half-submerged in water in a crumpled heap just outside the cabin, and at first Tom thought he was dead. His entire face and his shoulders as well were covered with blood, and awful fear overcame Tom as he threw himself down beside him. Icy water splashed over them both, and Tom reached an arm under Eli, raising him out of the wet, trying to ascertain where he was injured.
After a frantic moment, he realized that the blood all came from one deep gash on the back of Eli’s skull. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the wound, and Eli flinched and groaned. His eyes fluttered open, blank and confused. After a second, recognition dawned and he struggled to sit up, but the exertion made him retch. He vomited on them both and slumped back, his eye’s rolling.
“It’s okay, kid. I’m gonna lift you up over my shoulder, and we’ll head back to where the other men are.”
They’d have to make it quick. Tom remembered that the Slide had altered the course of the river that ran through the valley, and that parts of the mine, the areas where the men might have otherwise escaped, had become rapidly flooded with water.
Drowning in here didn’t appeal to him any more than being buried alive. The earth shuddered once again beneath him, and Tom gritted his teeth.
“The Slide...” Eli’s voice was weak and panicked.
“It’s over. The worst is over. All we need to do now is get out of here.” Tom got to his feet, grunting as he lifted the boy over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. They were both soaked, and the water was icy and rising fast.
Tom shivered and started rapidly back up the incline toward the entry. He panted and staggered under Eli’s weight, aware of the sound of water rushing along the tunnel behind him.
It was already up to his thighs. Eli seemed to grow heavier with every step.
“I can walk now, Tom, put me down.”
Tom did, keeping a tight grip on the boy’s arm. Together, they stumbled and threshed their way to the main tunnel. There, the mine was deathly quiet. The floor had ceased its shuddering, but Tom was horrifyingly aware of being trapped in the belly of the mountain beneath tons of rock.
The other miners’ had rushed to the main exit, which Tom knew was blocked. As he and Eli joined them, the breathless men were trying to ascertain whether they could dig their way out. One of them, a burly man with an English accent, had worked the mine since its opening day and knew every inch of the timbering and tracks.
“We’re a good three hundred feet from the outside, laddies. We’ll run out of air before we ever dig through that lot,” he pronounced, and a murmur of consternation rippled through the men.
They already knew that the lower level was rapidly filling with water, making escape from the exits there impossible.
Several had climbed three hundred feet up ladders to the old workings of the mine, searching for an alternative way out. They returned now with the awful news that gas was collecting rapidly up there, and that the air shafts had been completely sealed off.
Some men were already working at the entrance, making little progress against the snarled mass of timber and rocks. Every man was aware that if the air shafts had been damaged, their supply of fresh air would rapidly disappear.
Panic began to spread.
“There’s a way out of here, up through an outcropping of coal some distance back along the tunnel.” Tom’s voice was quietly assured.
The men nearest him repeated what he’d said to others, and after a moment the entire group of miners were silent, listening, as he repeated what he knew to be true, detailing exactly where the outcropping was. “It’ll take us a while, for we have to dig up through the seam to the surface. We’ll take it in shifts. It’s a small seam and cramped quarters.”
“How’d’ya know you’re right, man?” The voice in the darkness was accusatory. “How’d’ya know it’s not just a wild-goose chase you’re suggestin’?”
“I know, believe me,” Tom replied. “Who’s with me?”
A chorus of voices answered. They made their way along the tortuous tunnels to the area Tom indicated and men had begun doggedly hacking away at the narrow seam of coal.
The passage was narrow, and only two or three men could work at a time. At first, the others kept their spirits up by singing, and the strains of “Clementine” and “Oh Susannah” rang through the inky darkness. They pooled their lunches, and when the men digging were forced by exhaustion to relinquish their places to a new shift, their reward was a tiny bite of sandwich and a single sip of cold tea.
Hours passed and it began to be apparent to everyone that the supply of oxygen was diminishing. The laboring men grew weary after only a short time, and the ones who took their places were morose and silent.
Tom had settled Eli nearby, making him as comfortable as he possibly could, and after each of his own stints in the claustrophobic passageway, he returned to Eli’s side. The boy slipped in and out of consciousness. Once he whispered, “Are you sure we got it right, Tom?”
“I’m sure.” Tom’s voice rang with certainty, and Eli relaxed and slept again. But cold sweat trickled down Tom’s forehead and off his nose, and the terrible dread that had been building in him during the past futile hours threatened to overwhelm him now.
The truth was, he wasn’t sure at all. The memory of a diagram in a book he hadn’t laid eyes on in a year we all he’d had to go on. The corridors and tunnels underground were convoluted, and any sense of direction became easily distorted.
What if historical facts could be altered after all, and he and Eli and all these brave men were fated to die in the belly of this cursed mountain?
The latest trio came scrambling wearily back into the main tunnel, and Tom got to his feet. “I’ll take this shift,” he said, aware that no one argued for a turn now the way they had a short time before. It was three in the afternoon. They’d been digging since six that morning.
Two hours later, only Tom and two other men still persevered.
The others, oxygen-starved and losing all hope of escape, slumped dejectedly against the mine wall, their heads bent and resting on their knees. Some prayed audibly while others sat silent.
Tom’s head swam with dizziness. Every muscle hurt, and he could barely lift the pick to swing it. His partners, a man named McKenzie and another called Farrell, were also struggling. Tom was aware of their labored breathing.
Then, with no warning, McKenzie’s pick broke through a layer of hardpan, and like a benediction, a stream of brilliant sunlight blinded the three men crushed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow shaft.
Fresh air streamed in, and they could see blue sky high above.
“We’ve made it!” McKenzie hollered. “We’re out!”
They’d tunneled through thirty-six feet of coal and clay, and they were free. Tom closed his eyes and said a fervent prayer of thanksgiving.
Elation turned to horrified disbelief when the exhausted miners looked down at the
valley and saw the devastation and destruction the Slide had wrought. Far below, tiny figures clambered over rocks, frantically searching for survivors.
Nothing was left of the rows of cottages where some of the men had left wives and children only the night before.
Fifty yards below, in an effort to free their fellow workers, frantic miners dug ceaselessly where the mine entrance had been. There was nothing now to mark it except a sea of stone.
McKenzie called down to them, and a glad shout went up. The men digging sent their caps flying into the air and began scrambling up the rocky slope, elated that in the midst of tragedy, there had been a miracle. Their fellow miners were safe.
Tom, with Eli beside him, looked down at the stricken valley, emotions too powerful for words coursing through him.
The vista was both horrendous and familiar. It looked, now, the way it had when he’d first seen it, one year ago and decades from now. His gaze went to the hillside across the valley, and for a second his mind played tricks on him.
He thought he saw the Interpretive Center there, white-roofed and shining in the sunlight, but, of course, it was a mirage.
Where were Jackson and Leona right now? Were they somewhere below, in the ruins of the town, or had the pathway been there for them, when the Slide came down?
And most important of all, where was Zelda?
Apprehension roiled in his gut. With an arm around Eli’s waist, supporting the groggy youngster every step of the way, Tom began to climb down the treacherous slope.
A Distant Echo: Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was long past dawn by the time Zelda arrived home.
The events of the night had left her dazed and shocked, and all she could think of was making certain the ones she loved were safe. Surely Tom would be free by now, waiting for her return.
Now and Forever: Time Travel Romance Superbundle Page 95
