Power in the Blood (75 page)

It was not something Slade could accept as being likely or desirable. In his own subversive way, McCaulay was a threat. Slade had not been aware of it until then, and his discovery placed McCaulay in a new light. He would have to be watched carefully, or else he might attempt somehow to remove Slade from existence and take his place without anyone knowing the difference. Now Slade was worried. He could not recall ever having had such thoughts before, so they must be important. He reviewed quickly the points of his revelation, and reached the same conclusion, but this time was more certain he was correct, even if the thing he had realized was terrible to contemplate: McCaulay was planning to
replace
him while they were alone. With Shoupe away, it could be done, and when Shoupe returned he would find just one man there at the rock face, and he would be told that Slade was gone, just plain gone from the mine without explanation, and Shoupe would accept what McCaulay told him, because they were friends.

The full extent of McCaulay’s deviousness was fast becoming apparent. Slade was outraged that someone should even think of doing such a thing, let alone be planning it in detail, as McCaulay clearly was. The man’s back was kept turned to Slade to shield his guilt. McCaulay knew that if he allowed Slade a good long look into his eyes, the plan would fail, so he was pretending to concentrate on his fuses with more than his usual intensity. Shoupe was still gone. Slade could not recall now just how long a time it had been since Shoupe shouldered the steels and walked away into the darkness. Was there some kind of collusion between the two? It was possible. They had talked in low tones while eating their lunches, the words they exchanged garbled by the echo that persisted in so restricted an area as a mine face. Sometimes it was possible to hear things at a distance more clearly than a conversation taking place just around a bend in the tunnel. They had known that, and not objected when Slade went away on his own to eat. He should have sneaked back and listened to them, but he hadn’t known at the time what they were planning for him.

Suddenly he hated them both. He would allow no one to replace him, least of all two fools like Shoupe and McCaulay. They had underestimated Slade if they thought replacing him would be easy. He was ready for them now, and could not be taken by surprise. Slade could not remember how long he had worked alongside the two traitors, but it was long enough for him to feel angry that they had turned against him this way. It was betrayal of the lowest order, and it would not succeed.

A detonation from another mine face distracted him. It was followed quickly by another. The shift was ending, the teams finally done with preparation, lighting their fuses and retiring with the cry “Fire in the hole!” Slade hadn’t heard the familiar warning before either blast. Could that be linked somehow with the plot to replace him? Could all the miners in the Grand Mogul be part of the plan? Another detonation shook the rock wall he leaned against. “Pretty near done,” McCaulay said over his shoulder. Slade didn’t believe him. There was something going on he was not supposed to be aware of, but he was. With sudden insight, he realized he did not know the meaning of the name Grand Mogul. Could it mean some kind of big plan? Had they been preparing it for him even before he came to Glory Hole and began working under the earth? Slade saw no reason to doubt it. They had seen him coming, and made arrangements, and those arrangements were about to be implemented. The explosions in other tunnels were intended to make him believe the usual routine was being followed, but Slade was too smart to be fooled by any of it. He should have known that sooner or later he would be hunted like this. They would not be content to kill him, not someone like himself; they wanted to replace him with McCaulay, so they could all feel comfortable again. They had probably been causing the headaches too, and the moments of forgetfulness … and he saw that even the nice woman who made his sandwiches was part of the plan, because it was she who fed him, and the food had been poisoned with bad things to make him hurt, make him forget, but not strong enough to kill him, so now they were preparing something else, something more powerful to bring about his death … no, something worse than that: they wanted him gone completely, swallowed up into the body of McCaulay like a fly inside a toad. Well, he wouldn’t let it happen. He knew he was able to withstand anything they cared to throw at him, be it poisoned sandwiches or this planned aloneness with McCaulay. He was ready and, in a strange way, glad to have learned of the plan to wipe him from existence. It was exciting to know that he was under siege by inferior men. He would show them, and show them good.

The rock beneath Slade’s shoulder quivered as another blast, in one of the nearer tunnels, sent shock waves through the ground. The miners responsible would be gathered at the cage, readying themselves for the long ride to the upper world, where the sun was gone beyond the western slope of the valley filled by Glory Hole, and the snow continued to fall. They did not want him to see any of that again, but they would fail, because they understood nothing. Now there was more vibration feeding itself into him, not from any dynamite explosion but from the rock itself, and Slade knew the next part of the plan had been made to occur. He did not know what shape it would assume, but he was ready.

The tunnel itself began to speak, a throat choked of air, made hoarse by sudden constriction, the words reduced to crackings and splinterings and a rumbling from the heart of the mine that set the hairs on Slade’s head quivering. The tunnel was collapsing, pushing air and sound toward him. He caught the briefest glimpse of light from Shoupe’s returning lamp before the ceiling descended in chunks the size of wagons and crushed it. Shoupe’s scream, lasting only a second, could barely be heard above the groaning of timbers and thudding of displaced rock. A cloud of stinking dust was blasted into Slade’s eyes. He stepped backward to the rock face and stumbled over McCaulay. Both men were on the ground when the final descent of rock from the tunnel ceiling fell just yards away, and the noise began to subside.

Slade couldn’t breathe; the air was filled with dust, McCaulay’s lamp a blur even at arm’s length, and the sounds of coughing that came from beneath it were muffled, as if heard from the far side of a wall. Slade’s own lungs burned with the particles he had inhaled, and his eyelids squeezed shut again. He covered his face with both hands and attempted to breathe slowly through his nose, but could not get enough air into himself; he was obliged to gasp and suck through his opened mouth, which produced a fit of coughing to equal McCaulay’s.

The men huddled where they had fallen, pressed against the rock face Slade had drilled for Shoupe to load with dynamite and McCaulay to prime. There were more distant rumblings, then silence. They continued to cough until the dust began to settle.

“Was that Shoupe I heard?” McCaulay asked.

Slade nodded, tasting the airborne grime that filled his mouth and coated his teeth.

“Jesus God a’mighty, we’re dead men sure.… Oh Jesus God a’mighty we are.…”

Slade found McCaulay’s words insincere. The cave-in was staged in order to confine the two men in a closed-off space, to let McCaulay replace Slade by whatever method had been agreed upon. Slade would have to be on guard for the least indication that violence was about to be used against him. The cave-in had been impressively staged, but he was not fooled.

“Too many fires in the hole …,” sobbed McCaulay. “It shouldn’t all be set off around the same time like they tell us to.… Now we’re in here till they find us.…”

Slade had never heard so many words spill from McCaulay at one time. McCaulay was pretending to be frightened, but again, Slade could see through the ruse. He didn’t believe that Shoupe was dead either; it was another piece of deception. He wondered how long it would be before McCaulay began the process of replacing him. Slade’s one fear was that he would fall asleep and allow it to happen then. He would have to remain awake whenever McCaulay was, and sleep when he slept. There was the danger that McCaulay would waken first, but every sound within the irregular cell they occupied was magnified; McCaulay would have to be silent as a cat to make any move toward a sleeping man without waking him, and Slade had always had the ability to come awake instantly. He would prepare for that possibility by napping with his clasp knife opened and ready, but hidden from sight.

“Too many fellers doin’ it at the same time,” McCaulay repeated. “They should do it different, space ’em out more. By God, think if I hadda lit ours and then we never had time to get out. Shoupe, his missus had a baby.… They won’t ever see him again in this life. You seen him get buried under it all?”

Slade nodded. McCaulay’s make-believe sorrow was interesting to watch. Slade could hardly credit his luck at having realized what was being plotted just minutes before the performance began. Without his foreknowledge of the plan, it might well have succeeded, but it never would now. He despised McCaulay for his part in it, and for the shallow insincerity of his tears. McCaulay’s face was hidden by his hands. Slade wished he hadn’t already eaten his sandwich; he was hungry again. Then he remembered that the woman who made it for him was also trying to replace him with McCaulay. There might even have been something in the roast beef to make him think the cave-in had occurred, when in fact it hadn’t. Slade had heard of drunkards seeing things that weren’t actually there, and for all he knew, it was possible to put the same stuff contained in drink into a sandwich. He leaned over and touched a massive chunk of fallen rock. It felt very real, but there existed the possibility that it was not. Slade would have to act as if he thought it was, just to fool McCaulay.

“They’ll be diggin’, start right to it directly, they will. Shoupe, though, poor feller. There’s likely others. Might not just be ours that fell. Might be tunnels aplenty need diggin’ out, you think?”

Slade shrugged. He was inside only one tunnel, so it would have made no sense for the plotters to cause others to fall. McCaulay was trying to sound like a worried man, that was all, and doing a poor job of it.

“What you got to be smilin’ at, hey?”

Slade frowned. He didn’t like to be spoken to in that tone of voice, even if the rudeness was just a sham. He said nothing, did nothing, waiting to see if McCaulay might apologize, but the man turned away and began extracting his carefully laid fuses from the blasting caps beside them.

“Wouldn’t do to have these here go up in our faces now, would it, with the fellers diggin’ for us. Don’t want ’em to find us all of a mess now, do we, hey? Hey?”

Slade shook his head. The last of the caps was defused, then McCaulay began the task of easing each cap from the dynamite sticks, in case it should detonate through an accidental bump or further shifting of the rock. When all had been disarmed, he lay back and took several deep breaths, the skin of his face running with sweat.

“Best be turnin’ off our lights, I’m thinkin’, save ’em for later. No tellin’ how long a job it’ll be, the diggin’.”

Both carbide lamps were turned off, and the darkness became absolute. Slade felt that without light, the thing called darkness extended beyond the confines of the tunnel’s end; it reached as far as Slade cared to extend it, further even than the natural darkness of night that must by now have fallen far above them in the world. The darkness that had swept across his eyeballs when the lamps were shut down was of a velvety richness, a darkness without depth. It seemed to Slade’s suddenly blinded eyes like water into which ink had been poured, or air so choked with chimney soot it became something else, some other, impenetrable substance that probably could be found nowhere but down where he saw it, an underground dark of blackness beyond all known shades.

“Be able to hear ’em comin’, most likely. Hear ’em diggin’ even when they’re far off still. Then we’ll know. Could be a day or two, even so. Too bad for us we et our lunch already. Be starvin’ hungry by the time they fetches us out, the both of us. Got anythin’ left in your water flask? Near empty, mine. Can hear drippin’, though. Always some water in a mine. Hear it, just a little ways off? That’ll see us through all right. Ought to put our flasks under it to catch what’s there. Waste not, see? I’ll do that now, I will.”

The shocking brilliance when McCaulay turned on his lamp again caused Slade to turn his head away. When the light passing through his eyelids had lessened, he opened them, and saw McCaulay scrambling over the nearest chunks in search of the dripping he had heard. Slade made no move to assist him; if McCaulay wanted to play at acting concerned, Slade would let him. With McCaulay out of sight, Slade drank the last from his metal water flask and restoppered it. He would have drunk what was left in McCaulay’s but he had taken it with him. It would have been interesting to see the look on McCaulay’s face when he came back to find his flask empty. The thought of that made Slade smile. It would irritate McCaulay if a lot of pranks like that were played on him. Instead of Slade becoming more and more fearful of the danger they were in, which would make him easier to replace when the time came, he would do just the opposite, and cause McCaulay every kind of upset he could think of. It would pass the time, and keep him alive.

“Found it! Just a trickle, but it’ll do for us. Pass your flask over.”

Slade moved cautiously toward the light of McCaulay’s lamp, suspecting a trick, but McCaulay lay on his back beneath an overhang of rock created by the cave-in, completely vulnerable to attack. His arms were stretched into darkness, despite his lamp. “It’s back here, hell of a squeeze.… Flask’s under the drip now. We’ll fill yours when this’n gets full.”

Slade handed his flask over, then resumed his position by the rock wall. McCaulay followed, and both turned off their lamps. “Take a couple hours maybe, to fill all the way up. We can wait, I reckon.” McCaulay laughed briefly.

Soon McCaulay slept. Slade waited for the sound of his slowed breathing before allowing himself to relax. The air was hot enough to permit his removing his shirt to make a cushion. Slade folded this and tucked it beneath himself, then placed both forearms across his knees and bowed his forehead to rest on them. He was calm, although he had been unable to figure out how the replacement of himself by McCaulay was supposed to occur. It could not be anything too difficult, because McCaulay was not a smart man. Maybe it was Shoupe who had been elected as replacement, but the tunnel had collapsed a minute too soon. No, it was McCaulay, because it had been while he watched the man working with his fuses that Slade first became aware of the plan to replace him. It was the actual business of replacement he could not understand, in fact he had already forgotten how it was that he realized in the first place that replacement, not simple murder, was the object. He had been positive about it at the time, though, so he would not change his mind now on account of a little haziness. Replacement, that was their game. What had they planned to do with his body? Was it to be swallowed somehow by the mine? There were plenty of played-out tunnels and corridors where no one went except to shit. They might place him far along one of those, then seal it up. No one would notice the stink of a rotting man along with all the other bad stenches down there. He would make McCaulay tell him all the details before he died. McCaulay would have to die so Slade could survive. There was no doubt in his mind about that. Slade considered doing it while McCaulay slept. It would have been easy, even in total darkness, thanks to McCaulay’s plugged sinuses; the man gave himself away with every whistling intake of breath.