An Ambush
Halloween: 3:01 p.m.
Nate Hanassey waited for whoever was behind him in a stope that was about as large as a large barn. The carved-out cavern resembled half a ball that sat at a slant in the earth. The tunnel path here was like a ledge on the edge of a steep slope to Nate's left as he faced the tunnel the voices were coming from.
Ever since he’d heard the voices behind him, he’d known he’d have to deal with whoever was following first. The kid and the girl were not expecting him. Whoever was following was.
He had an advantage in that whoever was coming after him had to round the corner he was watching to follow the tunnel into the stope. It was a blind corner where gobbing was held up by one thick log post and an old wooden wall.
He’d had a long wait. He’d had to use the parabolic microphone to assure himself that someone was still coming. At first, he thought there were at least two people coming. But now all he heard was one. Whoever was coming was coming very slowly and very cautiously.
Finally, he could tell that the person was very close. He put the parabolic microphone down and readied his sawed-off shotgun. When a flashlight showed around the corner, he’d let go with both barrels.
Buried
Halloween 3:02 p.m.
With the loud blast that rang out my flashlight was torn from my hand. Pain shot up my forearm. I caught a glimpse of flame in the distance as the beam of the flashlight winked and died. A loud wrenching sound filled the air, a tearing of wood, and I realized too late that the log timber holding back the wall of waste rock had taken most of what I guessed was Nate’s shotgun’s blast and was now collapsing.
With both legs, I kicked backward as hard as I could as rock began to push against me on my right side. Dust filled the air, and I began to choke as I fell. I landed hard on my right side, and heavy blows began to pound my legs.
When the movement of rocks subsided I lay a moment in the darkness and discovered I could move both my arms as I grabbed my bleeding left forearm with my right hand. I assumed I'd been hit by at least one double-ought buck shot round. My legs would not move. Using my hands, I found that my legs were partly buried in stones that had tumbled into the tunnel as the barrier the log supported collapsed.
One rock was digging into the top of my thigh. I grabbed it and lifted it off and bent forward to remove the next when a light appeared behind me down the tunnel. Not long after, Denny appeared. He bandaged my arm then and began helping lift the rocks off me.
Six minutes later I was able to stand on aching legs and view the damage the collapse had caused. One .33 caliber buckshot ball had grazed the fleshy part of my forearm. Now, bandaged, it hurt like nothing I’d felt since I’d had a kidney stone years before. I was very lucky I had jumped backward when I did. Where the corner had been was now a pile of stones head high. The passage was completely blocked. Had I remained a few feet further in, I would have been buried alive, and it was doubtful Denny could have dug me out in time.
“What now? Swim?” Denny asked as he handed me a new looking headlight.
“Where did you get this?” I asked as I put the headlight on.
“Gnat’s truck,” he said.
The water seemed the only way to go, but when we got back to the winze through which I suspected Billy and/or Cassie had fallen, water no longer rushed by forty feet below. Instead, the water now filled the lower portion of the shaft, and the drop was only thirty feet to a pool of water that seemed to be rising.
“Must have caused a cave-in below in the lower tunnel,” Denny said.
“We have to get to those kids before Nate does,” I said.
"I have an idea," Denny said. He led me back to the alcove with the makeshift table.
Denny examined the pieces of dynamite on the old bench very carefully. “Old dynamite sweats nitro. It can go off if you even bump it,” he said.
He had found an old empty cardboard box beneath the table and now lifted an intact looking stick of dynamite into it. Next to the one he lifted sat another stick, partly corroded, which had a few yellow beads of liquid on the outer skin.
Denny pointed at the corroded dynamite stick I had been looking at and said, “Got to avoid ones like that.”
My heart was in my throat as he chose three more sticks and carefully placed them in the box. When he was done, I took a deep breath. Then he gently picked up the box and held it out to me.
He must have registered the surprise on my face. “Just walk slowly and don’t jostle the box. The caps are the dangerous part.”
Instead of going I watched him turn away and bend down. He’d found an old Prince Albert tobacco tin, which he now stepped on and flattened. Next, still bent over, he carefully pushed two of the rifle-cartridge-like, cylindrical blasting caps onto the flattened can.
He turned and looked at me, perhaps surprised I had not gone ahead as told. “You go ahead of me. You don’t want to be anywhere close to these.”
At the cave-in, Denny placed the four sticks of dynamite in a crevice between stones at about waist height. With his pocket knife, he cut the sides of the cardboard box I'd carried the dynamite in away from the bottom, cut the rectangular section into one long strip by cutting it at a corner, and stuck an edge under the four dynamite sticks. He then very carefully placed the two blasting caps on top of this long paper fuse.
He pulled out his lighter and handed it to me. "Wait until I've gotten quite a ways down the tunnel. Then light the fuse and run!"
When Denny's headlight was just a small spot down the tunnel, I lit the base of the cardboard fuse.
I thought with my height and longer legs I could run pretty fast. Yet, I seemed to be moving down the tunnel in slow motion.
Thankfully, we were both far down the tunnel, when, with a sound like being inside a thunderclap, the dynamite blew. I turned back to see a red ball of fire like a dragon’s breath rushing toward us. It closed half the distance to us, and then the flame died, but its heat washed over us like a pounding, scalding wave.
Where the flames had been now hung clouds of dust. Through the dust, it was hard to see if the blast had cleared the passageway. Then, sudden and unexpected, like an aftershock to an earthquake, with a deafening roar the stone around us seemed to rumble as if the entire mine were caving in.
All Hallows Eve
Morning
When Cassie, lying on her back, opened her eyes a vast expanse of roof stretched high above her in flickering light. The cavern they were now in was so vast all she could see was darkness at the far end. The sound of rushing water filled her ears. She turned on her side. Billy was feeding sticks from a small pile spread out across a stone floor into a very small fire.
She turned toward the water and saw it came from a tunnel from which she assumed they had come. The stream spread widely out and ran across the floor just a few feet below her. It seemed to vanish into a rock wall too far away to see clearly in the fire's light.
“You saved me?” she said.
Billy looked at her and gave a bright smile. “Good morning, at least I think it's morning.” He paused a second and then added, “My watch seems to have stopped. And, it appears we are now 'even' in the saving department.”
She looked at him for a long time. “All I did for you was show up with a light. You had to jump down a deep hole and swim after me.”
“You said you don’t swim well.”
Cassie just shook her head. She didn’t know what to say. Billy looked into her eyes. She'd never had any boy look at her that way.
“How old are you?” Billy asked a moment later.
“ Why?” Cassie asked.
“I'm guessing you're fifteen or sixteen,” Billy said. He seemed almost sad when he said it.
"Almost sixteen. Why do you ask?” she asked.
“People frown on someone my age dating a fifteen-year-old.”
At his words, Cassie felt something she had never felt before. But whatever it was felt very, very good.
&nbs
p; “How old are you?” she asked back.
“I'm figuring today is Halloween. I'll be twenty-two tomorrow.”
“I’m old for my age,” Cassie said.
“Not old enough,” he said, reaching out and touching her cheek gently with his fingertip. She wanted him to keep touching her, but he took his hand away.
“You could wait for me,” Cassie said, hopefully.
“We have to get out of here first,” Billy said. “Did you see the size of this place?” He’d had the headlight off, but now he turned it on and moved it about the chamber they were in. It appeared to be a gigantic ballroom-sized cavern. Old wooden scaffolds climbed the far walls. Small tunnels seemed to go off in every direction.
"I guess I lost my boots," she said, lifting her feet and wiggling her toes.
"I have one left," he said lifting the still soggy piece of sleeping bag with his hand. "Do you want it?"
Cassie shook her head.
"Then neither do I," he said and tossed the wet 'boot' into the stream. "Maybe we should start looking around for a way out.”
Cassie nodded. She got up and followed him toward an opening to the side of the spot where the water ran.
“So today is Halloween?” Cassie said after a bit. “If it weren’t for the accident I’d be trick or treating with my little brother sometime today.”
A Hunter and His Prey
Halloween 3:02 p.m.
The double shotgun blast rang out in the cavern. As expected the flashlight vanished in the darkness, but he did not expect the whole wall on the far side of the stope to give way. Rock crashed down, and then one giant slab fell from the ceiling, flew down the side of the stope, and punched a hole in the floor below. When the crashing was done, he saw water welling up out of that hole.
He quickly reloaded the sawed-off. With his shotgun ready he went as close as he dared to the now caved-in opening. A quick glance told him no one would be coming that way.
He went back and picked up his parabolic microphone and pointed it toward the open tunnel at the other end of the stope. Before long he heard faint voices. He was headed in the right direction.
A Sound in the Dark
Halloween 3:02 p.m.
Cassie and Billy both looked back in the direction of the tunnel on the far side of the cavern they were making their way across. A muffled explosion followed by the sounds of a cave-in came from that direction. They had assumed that tunnel, as it was in the direction from which the water was flowing, was the same one they had been following before they entered the water.
They were not far from the right-hand wall of the cavern. They had followed the water to see how it might exit on the far side. The water vanished into a tunnel so low they couldn't have entered it if they wanted to. So they had followed the wall, hoping the tunnel they had been walking through earlier continued on up ahead. The sounds of the explosion and cave-in sent both their hearts racing.
“Do you think someone’s coming?” Cassie asked.
“Nobody knows we're here but the person or persons who put us here,” Billy said. They had been moving slowly as the floor of the cavern they were in was uneven and littered with boulders of varying size.
“So we need to find a place to hide or a way out,” Cassie said.
“I think, if we don’t find a way out with the very next tunnel we check, we should find a place to hide and turn off this headlight. That didn’t sound that far away.”
Cassie looked across the floor of the cavern to the glowing coals of their little fire, now, quite some distance away. “Do you think we should go back and put that out?”
“I think they’ll smell the smoke even if we do,” Billy said.
Suddenly, sounding far away, a voice came echoing out of the tunnel. “Billy! Cassie! Where are you?"
“Maybe it's help,” Cassie said, her rising hope obvious in her voice.
Billy’s stomach clenched. He felt sick. He recognized the voice. It was Nate Hanassey’s voice.
“That sounds like the guy I met carrying the water—the guy who has to be the one who put me in here. I think we really need to find a place to hide,” Billy said in a whisper. He took Cassie’s hand, and they both began running toward a dark hole that opened in the wall just fifteen feet ahead of them. As soon as they entered they saw that it was just a tiny L-shaped alcove that went nowhere. They both crowded into the L, and Billy turned off the headlight.
A Final Stalk
Halloween: 3:21 p.m.
Nate Hanassey proceeded very cautiously down the tunnel he was following. He’d learned in the prison yard that you should never underestimate an opponent. The one time he’d not followed that rule he’d taken a pencil to the groin before he split the man’s skull.
He hadn't walked for long before he saw in the distance ahead that the tunnel opened into a much vaster darkness. When he was near the opening into this new cavern, he aimed the parabolic microphone into the black void, and then called out to Billy and Cassie. He did not expect a reply. He heard what he expected: a whispered voice very clearly saying they should hide. It would not be long before he had them.
Moments later, standing in the gigantic open area, a light, off to his right, caught his eye. He turned his headlight off and looked toward the light. It looked like the dying coals of a fire.
“Billy! Cassie! Where are you?" He called out, trying to make his voice sound concerned.
He kept his eyes focused in the direction of the dying fire. There was no reply. He now doubted they were by it, but he would have to check it out. It might take a while to find their hiding place, but he would find it.
He scanned the area he could see with his headlight very carefully. He could see no immediate danger to himself. He had a ploy that just might work.
“Billy!” he called loudly. “Billy Wesley! The cops are on our tail. They shot your brother. Bobby’s dead. We have to get rid of the girl and get out of here. Do you hear me?”
His voice echoed through the cavern. For a few moments, all he heard was the sound of water.
"Bobby?" He heard Billy whisper on the parabolic microphone. Nate could tell he'd gotten to him.
A moment later he heard the girl say, "Look at me." Nate could tell she was losing it. "Did you have anything to do with this?"
"There was an accident. Your Dad died. They would have killed you." Billy whispered.
Nate grinned sensing Billy’s desperation.
The girl began screaming, “Let go of me.” And Nate didn't even need the parabolic microphone to hear her. The sound was coming off to his right from a point in the darkness. He had just taken a step in that direction when the whole mine seemed to heave. A hot wind blew out of the tunnel behind him, and he heard the ear-wrenching sound of cracking stone.
Point of View of The Prey
Halloween 3:44 p.m.
When Nate had called to him that Bobby was dead, Billy lost it. “Bobby?” he said out loud in shock. Cassie had been pressed against him in the darkness. When he said “Bobby?” she stiffened. He could feel her body pulling away from his. She turned and looked right at him.
“Look at me. Did you have anything to do with this?"
Billy could tell she was about to lose it. He realized he had wanted to tell her the truth as soon as he had gotten to know her.
"There was an accident. Your Dad died. They would have killed you," he whispered.
He sensed she was about to run off blindly into the dark. He somehow managed to grab her coat. He had to explain.
“Let go of me,” she’d cried sounding so terrified he couldn’t believe it. He tried to hold onto her coat sleeve, to talk to her, to calm her. But instead with a burst of energy that amazed him, she shook him off.
He took another step after her but stumbled and fell.
Lying on the floor of the cavern he reached up and touched the headlight. If he turned it on, Nate would see her. He’d see both of them. He’d have a gun. They might both be dead in seconds. He started to sta
nd.
Then the floor of the mine heaved as if from an earthquake, and he fell back to the floor with a thunderous crashing about him.
Confluence
Halloween 3:48 p.m.
“What the hell?” I cried when the mine stopped moving around us.
“Let’s hope we didn’t kill them all,” Denny said.
We both rushed to the corner where we’d set the explosives. There was a hole through the stones about four feet around. I dove through, and Denny followed.
I saw as I emerged on the far side of the hole where a huge slab had slid downhill and punched through the floor. With a glance, I saw that water was pooling around the hole.
We hurried ahead while being careful at every corner, at every step across the tunnel floor least the explosion had weakened the floor over another tunnel or Nate Hanassey was lying in wait for us. Finally, we rounded a curve and were greeted by bright light ahead. This was light that could only be sunlight.
“This’s the big stope,” Denny said. “It came very close to the surface. The explosion must have caved it in.”
Fearful that Cassie might have been under the ceiling of the stope when it caved, I rushed ahead. Denny followed.
Large slabs of stone littered the path through the center of the stope and blocked our view of the slope up to the opening. So it wasn’t until I came almost to the center of the now roofless cavern that I saw Nate Hanassey directly ahead of me. Nate stood above me on a rising slope that seemed to lead right out of the mine. His thick arm was wrapped around Cassie Carew’s neck, and he had a sawed-off shotgun pointed at her temple. He was looking off to my right.
“Let her go, Nate,” a desperate unseen voice cried out from behind some rocks.
Winslow- The Lost Hunters Page 23
