Hellbender (Murder Ballads and Whiskey Book 2)

by Miller, Jason Jack

  “Who?” I asked. The barking dogs seemed to move back toward us.

  Her breathing quickened. She twisted her mouth, like she was in real pain. I tried to shake her awake. “It’s all right, Alex. I got you.”

  Dogs barked in the thicket no more than a few hundred yards away. I could hear voices muffled by the brake. They shouted to each other. They were lost. And scared. In the distance I heard pickup trucks bouncing over tree roots before drifting to a stop.

  “Wake up.”

  But she wouldn’t. She rocked back and forth. A scream formed on her lips. I tried to muffle it with my hand. She bit me with enough force to draw blood.

  “Alex!” I said in a muted shout.

  She screamed through my fingers and the barks came closer, more freely, like the hounds had been let off their leashes. They called to the other dogs, formed a pack, rushed this way. Men cried out as they tried to keep up. From behind us I heard Charlie. “Get ‘em boys! That’s it.”

  “Shit,” I said. They’d surrounded us. Cornered us. The road, and the mill, had to be close. “Get up!”

  She screamed again.

  Charlie said, “I hear you now. And when I catch you, you little bitch, I’m fixing to run a spit through you and feed you to every last one of those cocksucking Collins. We was being courteous last time, trying to play fair.”

  He was less than thirty yards away. Had to be.

  “Odelia’s got big plans for you, girl. You don’t go against family. You have to know that.” He fired a few shots into the laurel.

  “Darren!” He fired a few more times into the thicket. “Over here.”

  I squeezed Alex’s hand and gave her a few light slaps on the cheek. “Please.” “They are here,” she said again.

  “I know. Right here, now get up.”

  “They burned up in the fire.” Alex was frantic.

  “Who did?”

  Her eyes snapped open. She gasped for breath. Her arms paddled through the air, like she was drowning.

  “Alex!” I pulled her into a sitting position.

  She looked at me, tears dripped from her eyes. Blond hair fell across her face. Strands darkened by her tears clung to her lips and cheeks. She sang, tiny words punctuated by sniffles and gasps for breath. Another spell. “Bluebird says she can’t flap her wings no more.”

  She gulped for air. “She could leave the mountains, but what for?”

  She grabbed at the moss while she sang, ripping it from the ground. An odor like wet, rotting fruit came out.

  “Stop it, Alex. The dogs will find us.” I was on my feet pulling at her.

  But she persisted until the smell coming from beneath the moss made me sick. The fetid, mold-filled air darkened our sanctuary. I pulled my shirt over my mouth to keep from inhaling it. She sang, “Bluebird still sings like she’s going home, in the morning I see here, tell her she’s not alone.”

  She gasped again, and tore right down to the bare bones of the earth, the jumbled rocks that supported this forest. I saw something nesting between the rocks. Metal and glass.

  “Jars,” I said, but she persisted. “Leave them.”

  “Bluebird loves me and knows my song, when I get down he tells me to just hang on.”

  First there were ten, then fifteen, then twenty killing jars beneath the blanket of moss she stripped from the jumbled sandstone. Barks came and went from all directions, but they somehow never found their way to us. They howled, like when one of them gets a raccoon up a tree. I pulled Alex with my good arm while I watched through the trees. “Stop it. Please.”

  One of the dogs burst into our clearing and I froze. I scanned the ground, looking for a stick or a rock. The young brown hound sniffed us, then sniffed the air. He circled. His back was wet. It was the milk from the laurel. He tried to lick it off, then ran out into the brake, barking and howling.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  Alex worked to the edges of the small clearing, green chlorophyll covered her arms like sleeves. All around the barks of confused hounds mingled with the voices of their handlers.

  I said, “You did that?”

  Alex mumbled as she dug. Or chanted, I couldn’t tell.

  Lewis yelled, “Where are you going?” and banged his truck’s cab with the butt of his rifle. His men didn’t hear him. Frustration filled his rant. He leaned on his truck’s horn. An unmistakable command. “She’s over this way!”

  The hounds departed down Alex’s trail and loped back toward the heart of the brake. I listened as voices trailed off, completely unaware of how lost they were. Charlie fired his rifle.

  “They’re leaving,” I whispered. “It worked.”

  When I turned, Alex knelt, surrounded by all of the Mason jars she’d discovered mixed in with the cobbles of sandstone. The lids were rusty, but the glass was clear.

  She held a jar at the end of each outstretched arm.

  “Alex!” I rushed over as her eyes rolled back in her head. She quivered, trembled, then seized.

  I gently lowered her to the ground and tried to pry one of the jars from her grip. She wouldn’t release, her hand was white from squeezing so hard.

  “Alex, please.”

  I twisted one of the jars out of her hand. In the clear liquid floated a kitten. Its eyes were closed like little half-moons. Its mouth was a quiet little curve. The tip of a tiny pink tongue lapped from beneath an incisor.

  Its gray fur wavered with my movements. I was about to set the jar back down when the kitten moved.

  I held it up to my face. The kitten’s eyes fluttered.

  Horrified, I dropped the jar. When it hit the ground and shattered Alex gasped. Her breathing slowed momentarily, and I relaxed a little. “You’re good, okay?”

  Her green eyes found me, then without warning, she seized again.

  I picked up a rock and smashed another jar. And then another. With each, she gained a little more consciousness, a little more breath.

  Alex watched me work, realized what was happening, then picked up a baseball- sized cobble. She helped me smash them. The curled kittens just lay there, as fresh as the day they were placed in the killing jars.

  Alex’s voice was the last bit of her to return. She coughed. Water trickled from her mouth. I put her head on my shoulder and she cried. “Odelia Lewis did this. She’s fixing to kill me. Like she killed Jane.” She wiped her mouth.

  And I held her, despite my pain and the blood, as all around us kittens shook water from their fur and gathered around Alex’s ankles. They mewed for milk.

  “Are you okay to go?”

  “I think.” It sounded like breathing still wasn’t coming easy for her. “It felt like a spell.”

  I didn’t say anything. “Odelia is here, you know.” “I figured as much.”

  “We can’t take them, can we?” she asked.

  “Alex….” I pulled her out of the clearing. “We have to move.”

  We snuck to the edge of the brake, away from the dogs. Charlie’s men fired shots into the air. Some shouted for help. But the maze that Alex created had too many twists and double-backs, too many dead ends. Far to our left Charlie and some of his boys honked the horns of their trucks, but the noise barely penetrated the green tangle.

  We crept along a series of cliffs that overlooked the river, always trying to remain in cover behind stray rhododendrons or greenbrier thickets. The raised path we followed was no doubt the remains of an old rail line that brought timber from the hills to the mill to be cut. The tiny cobbles, even after a hundred years, hadn’t settled completely even though the rails had been sold for scrap and the ties rotted a long time ago. The cobbles spun and twisted with our steps. But the old rail bed kept us out of the laurel.

  Over on the far side of the canyon, the golden orb of a setting sun was the only relief from the darkness of our situation. Canyon winds buffeted our push to the mill, but they were warm. They brought a squeak of hope. At this point anything that wasn’t trying to kill us seemed like a reason to
keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  “There it is,” Alex said.

  “That’s no moon, it’s a space station.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not a mill.” I squinted through the trees to see it and shook my head. “It’s a machine house for an old coal mine.”

  The timeworn building sat in the lap of a steep hillside, just above a cliff that dropped down to the river. The hopper had fallen from its perch long ago. It rusted on the old rail bed. Greenbrier poked through the rusted out holes. The remains of an old brick pump house sat between us and the mine. The old machine house looked rough, but it still had four walls and most of its roof. Red dog and ash from old coke ovens paved the yard all around it.

  On the far side rested a stream that ran orange with acid mine discharge. Bracken ferns and white pine popped up alongside the poisoned water.

  Once a rail line was completed no natural resource was safe. Coal could be removed from beneath the ground while the trees were taken from above. In this way, business wiped out a region twice as fast. And money could escape just as easy on those shiny straight rails.

  “Think I can steal a truck?” I said. “Or distract them while you take a truck?” “There are too many men. And they’re going to be mad after what I did back at their camp.”

  They fired their guns more willingly now. They shouted with blood in their throats.

  “There’s Darren and Billy,” I said. “And Eddie Tasso. Leave it to Charlie to bring an army just to light a fire. What’s plan B?” I lowered my head to catch my breath. Just like after running laps at baseball practice.

  “You did a hell of a lot better than I did while I was in charge.”

  Alex stood next to me, hand extended. Always aware of the pain I was in. Together we crept toward the mine.

  Then inspiration struck. “Any way we could trap them in there and burn it?” I said, surprised by my own suggestion. I looked over my shoulder, but Charlie seemed fixated on the laurel hell. Eddie honked his horn, trying his best to draw his guys toward him.

  “Seems really complicated. Isn’t it better just to get away.”

  “And just run forever?” That idea felt like it was just one step above doing nothing at all. I said, “So stealing the truck’s really all we got?”

  “We’ll have to wait until it gets darker.” She ran the last few yards.

  The old mine building rose from the ferns like a mountain amongst hills. Tall, weatherworn timbers rested on a foundation of local stone. Nothing really grew where years of lead and mercury leaching from coke tainted the ground. Add in forest fires, trucks and heavy machinery spilling all sorts of fluids and it was really easy to see why plant life had stayed away.

  “This is a good place for snakes, though,” I whispered, completing my thought out loud.

  We squeezed through a small opening between the foundation and wall like a rat into a corncrib. Dusty golden light filled the space, square shafts fell at shallow angles with respect to the rest of the room. Long conveyer beds that once guided coal to and through the old tipple and rotten belts lurked in the shadows. Coke ash hid the rotting floorboards. Beyond, a hole in the floor opened to the tracks and river beyond.

  “Watch the ground there. Doesn’t look too safe over these floorboards. But it might make a good escape route.” The room smelled like sulfur and old grease. The dusty air tried to force a cough from me. I grabbed my side and continued to look for a magic bullet.

  As we moved across the room I caught a cool draft. I dropped onto my knee and felt for a breeze, then inhaled the musty breath of bedrock geology itself. Ancient rock layers just a little closer to the soul of the earth than we were.

  “The mine shaft. Feel that? See if you can pull up that board right there.” I tapped a particularly weak section of floor with my toe. “It’s like the building is built over an old vent or something.”

  The dry-rotted wood came up easily in her hands. Within seconds she’d opened at least three or four square feet of floor.

  “Somewhere beneath the floor is the opening. They probably built the shop when they opened up newer shafts down the mountain after the coal played out here. So continuous mining machines could fit down there. Machines work a hell of a lot faster than people do. My dad said they always had to watch for patches of dead air. Might mean there’s methane in here, too.” I waved my finger in a circle around my head.

  Alex held her hand over the draft. “This air is coming out of the mine?” “Maybe. But these old places are notorious for holding trapped gases. Firedamp, they called it. Could be a lot or just a little bit. Could be nothing. Look at the coal dust.” A river of grime rose through the remaining light. I held out my hand to show Alex.

  I kicked at a rotten floorboard, exposing a little more of the fissure that the air came from. “Back there.”

  Alex shivered and pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her shoulders. “What if it explodes?”

  “Air can explode even if it’s only ten or fifteen percent methane. It’s unpredictable. There’s a lot of coal dust floating around in here, so…” Grit landed on my tongue when I talked. I could feel it on my skin. “Coal dust is combustible, too.”

  “I appreciate your optimism. Makes me wish we were still back in the woods.”

  “My dad doesn’t just drink because my mom left. He lost an entire shift in an explosion down by Rowlesburg.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m very sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. How could you know? Hard times are nothing new for the Collins. Makes you wonder why the fuck they kept having kids?” Moving on, I said, “Here’s what we do. Let’s cover the openings. Block every way in except for the hole in the floor. As they bang their way in we move out along the ground toward the cliff and go for a truck.”

  Alex rested her hand on my shoulder. “Can you make it through with your ribs?” I wanted to pull away, but didn’t. “I’ll do what I have to.”

  Together we dragged a small conveyer on squeaky casters to the big main door, then used chains to secure it to the building’s wooden frame. Behind it we piled leftover framing timber and machine parts, covering gaps and holes and perforations and punctures until we ran out of material. By now the sky was dark.

  Through gaps in the planking I could see the headlights from the trucks. They had bright handheld spotlights, the kind used for poaching deer, shining in all directions. I went over to the hole where we entered the building and pushed the big conveyor away.

  “When I come back in be ready to push this across the hole.” I gave the conveyor a half-turn left and right just to make sure she wouldn’t have any problems. “Use the chains.”

  “You are not going out there.” Alex stepped in front of the hole.

  I put my hand on her arm. “Don’t think I’m going to let you run out there. They can’t wait to get their hands on you.”

  “Do you really think you can hobble fast enough? Or have you somehow managed to heal yourself ? Can you walk on water now, too? Because the last time I checked you were in serious pain.” Alex tore a few more strips off her little dress. “Time to man up and let me do this.”

  She handed me her jacket, kissed me on the cheek then was gone.

  She flitted from shadow to shadow, moving like a firefly. Erratically. Steadily. Her white dress hid her in the glow of the brightly illuminated forest.

  One by one she tied the little strips to the laurels, creating a trail that led back to the mill. An invigorated howl came from the darkest part of the laurel brake. Voices called for the hounds to return. Guns were fired and Charlie Lewis waved a light, but the men’s frantic screams paid him no mind. They called for the hounds, over and over again.

  “Buckshot!”

  “Polecat!”

  “Chief !”

  “Bramble!”

  “Remington!”

  “Jethro!” But the dogs gathered and bolted toward the mill.

  The men shouted for help and fired
their rifles. Charlie turned his light on the dogs, abandoning the men in the brake.

  Alex raced back to the mine, but the braying hounds moved a little faster. Buckshot, Polecat, Chief, Bramble, Remington, and Jethro inherited Charlie as their new owner. He’d reward them for obeying the instinct and training that his men in the thicket lacked.

  Alex came into the spotlight, arm raised to shield her eyes. The dogs entered the light just a few seconds behind her. “Go!” I yelled, unable to do much else.

  She hit the hole stumbling, scraping her shoulder on the old wood. Blood filled the abrasion.

  The first muzzle appeared in the hole. I gave it a good, sharp kick with my heel. The hound reared and I rolled the conveyor across the opening.

  “You okay?” I gave her jacket back to her.

  “Yeah, let’s get ready.”

  The sound of truck ignitions firing turned our attention to the gang. The first part of our plan had worked. The easy part. We jammed boards and timbers against the door. I bounced on each a few times to make sure they’d hold.

  Spotlights and headlights flooded the building. Slivers of white light landed on the rusty equipment. Men rushed down the slope, their shadows passing back and forth made it seem like all this was taking place in a film. The flickering white light. The actors. The giant set. But it was real. I had to keep reminding myself of that.

  From back in the laurel hell the lost men shouted more frantically. With the lights gone they realized Charlie didn’t need them anymore. Their contracts with him had expired.

  “Into the floor.” I grabbed Alex’s hand to help her down.

  We scurried through the floorboards and began to crawl toward the river. At the end I could see the far wall of the canyon, the horizon of mountains beyond, and a sunset somewhere past that. A few bright stars hung in the sky. I ignored my screaming ribs to get there. Like I thought crawling to the Milky Way would be easy.

  In the shop above, the sound of men banging on the big door rattled my concentration. I froze.