The Underdwelling (4 page)

“Not as often as your wife does.”

6

On it went.

The work was hard, positively grueling. The charge crew would blast and then the diggers would clean the shaft out, haul out the big rocks and start shoring the tunnel up with braces and timbers so it wouldn’t fall in. Boyd was glad for the work, glad to be doing something other than letting his imagination run wild. Because it was real easy to imagine things in the drift where you couldn’t see five feet in the clouds of dust and drifting sediment, the ceiling pressing down on you and the walls closing in.

He could just about imagine what it would be like to be trapped by a cave-in.

If you weren’t crushed, you’d be sealed in a sarcophagus of rock, slowly going mad as the air ran out and your helmet light dimmed, dimmed, and then went out for good, trapping you in that thick, godawful blackness. It was no wonder his guts were crawling.

But the hard work helped. Busting your ass in there, you didn’t have time to worry about bullshit like that and from where Boyd was sitting, that was a good thing.

The boys kept blasting and the crew kept digging and then on around five AM the shit hit the fan.

The charging team blew their dynamite and Maki and Boyd were the first ones into the drift. The rocks were big, so they went in with jackhammers and chopped them down to a manageable size. Ten minutes into it, Maki stopped.

He pulled off his gas mask and Boyd followed suit.

“What is it?”

Maki just kept shaking his head. “Smells funny, don’t it?”

And he was right: it did. “Yeah,” Boyd said, something in his stomach not just crawling now, but flopping around. “Like age. Like something real old.”

He likened it to the stench you’d smell upon digging your way into a crypt. The odor was weird and dry, a stench of spices and time and stillborn air. Just a hint of it, but enough to make you gag. It was there and then it was gone.

The gas detectors weren’t picking up anything, though.

Somebody down the drift yelled, “Hey, you two wanna quit sucking tongue and get to work?”

Boyd laughed and pulled his mask back on. Maki did the same.

The dust was thick in the air and Boyd couldn’t see much. Just the blazing light of Maki’s helmet, some dirty illumination thrown against the contours of his face. But he was willing to bet that he was scared. He’d heard it in his voice and you can’t disguise something like that. Boyd was feeling it, too, but then he’d been feeling it all night, a strange and inexplicable apprehension like something was circling him in the dark, preparing to slip up behind him and take a meaty bite out of his ass.

Nerves. That’s what.

And what new miner didn’t suffer from that?

They got back at it, using the jackhammers to break up the boulders that were just too big to carry out. It kicked up a lot of dust and debris and little sharp-edged bits of stone that would cut you like razor blades if they had the proper velocity behind them. After a good fifteen or twenty minutes of that, they ditched the jackhammers and the crew formed another daisy chain, passing the rocks out, clearing the drift sufficiently so that it could be properly shored up. It was backbreaking, monotonous work, but they kept at it.

Maki was right in front of Boyd…and then he wasn’t.

Boyd saw him lean over and grab a big rock and then the ground shifted and he simply disappeared. At first Boyd thought maybe a cloud of dust had enveloped him. But then he saw a big black hole leading straight down and Maki clinging to the lip of it with his fingertips.

He stripped his mask off. “Shit! Oh, shit! Hey! Back here! We got trouble!”

What surprised him most was that he did not panic.

Not really.

Something like that should have been second nature. But there was simply no time. He went down on his knees and sidled up by the hole, waving dust away. Poor Maki was hanging on for dear life. His mask had nearly come off, was just hanging by one strap. And his voice, God, it was loud and shrill and cracking:
“Boyd! Boyd, get me the fuck outta here! Don’t let me fall! Oh please Christ in heaven…don’t…let…me…fall…”

Boyd had no intention of that.

The only thing that stopped him as he reached for Maki was that it was not over with.

There was a rumbling sound from below.

Then a hollow, groaning sound came up from the subterranean depths like wind blown through a pipe. There was a moment of suction that accompanied it and Boyd was nearly sucked down like a breeze through a smoke hole. He heard a booming sound from far below and knew it was caused by an instantaneous and abrupt shift in air pressure. Kind of like a sonic boom when air collapses back into the void left by a supersonic aircraft. Something like that. The atmosphere of the mine itself suddenly filling a great, empty vacuum down there.
Boom.

All of that only lasted a second or two and the sucking was replaced by a sudden rushing of black, stagnant air that blew right into his face with gale force like something at the bottom of that stygian hole was exhaling. It hit him, made him teeter uneasily, an awful, dry smell about it. He’d never smelled anything quite like it before: just the raw, hoary breath of incredible antiquity.

“Boyd…”

He reached down and snagged Maki by the collar, pulling hard as he could, but right away, his knees started skidding towards the mouth of the hole from Maki’s combined weight and the fact that he was struggling. Boyd realized with a sudden gush of fear in his belly that he was going over the edge, too. But he refused to let go. Then Breed showed. With the incredible strength and impeccable balance that comes with mining for a living, he took hold of Maki and yanked him up and out. And Boyd with him. Yanked both of them free with those massive hands of his.

Maki fell right on top of Boyd like he wanted to roll him over in the clover, gasping and crying and spitting. Boyd pushed him off, but Maki wouldn’t let go. He grabbed and held on.

“You saved my fucking life, Boyd,” he said, his eyes huge and white in that dirty face of his. “Oh by Jesus, you saved my life.”

“Hell I did. It was Breed. He saved both our asses.”

Breed just chuckled. “Goddamn idiots. I turn my back for one minute and you both fall in a pissing hole.”

By then Jurgens was there with a big flashlight. “What in the hell happened?” he said.

Boyd took in a breath, let it out slow. “Maki picked up a rock and the ground just fell away.”

“Yeah, I picked up a rock and the ground fell away,” Maki reiterated for clarity. “That’s what happened. If Boyd hadn’t grabbed me…”

Jurgens was near the edge with his flashlight, shining it around down there. The dust was so thick in the beam it looked like smoke from a bonfire, clotted with specks of swirling dust and debris.

“That’s a funny looking hole,” Breed said.

And it was. As Jurgens played the light around, they all could see what Boyd already had: that it was nearly circular, smooth and glossy like it had been burned through the rock and not dug with tools. It almost looked like the inside of a foundry smokestack.

“Looks artificial,” Maki said.

Boyd looked at him. “Way down here?”

“It’s not artificial,” Jurgens explained. “Glacial meltwater tunneled it out thousands of years ago. The water constantly funneling through it smoothed it out.”

Lots of miners had crowded into the drift and were muttering about the hole. All work had ceased back in the stope. The generators and compressors were still running, but that was about it.

“Let’s find out how deep it is,” Jurgens said.

Since there was no high tech echo-sounding equipment handy, he called out for 500 hundred feet of rope. When it got there five minutes later, Jurgens got out his tape measure and marked off the rope every ten feet with a black magic marker. Then he began to lower it down there with a stone tied to the end for weight. Nobody said a word as he did so. 420 feet of rope went down before it hit bottom.

“Pretty damn deep,” Breed said. “You’d have been nothing but one ugly shitsplat at the bottom, Maki.”

“All right,” Jurgens said. “Clear this drift, you men. I want it cleaned out and shored up. And call up to Russo. I want a winch and a basket down here.”

“What for?” Maki said.

“Because somebody’s going down there.”

7

Right away, Maki jumped on that one, rode it for all it was worth. “Well, it ain’t gonna be me,” he said as they cleared out the drift. “It ain’t gonna fucking be me. Every time some shit job shows up, goddamn Jurgens calls for me. Like I got the biggest shovel and I don’t mind the smell. Well, believe you me, Boyd, I ain’t going down there. No way in hell am I going down there.”

“So don’t,” Boyd told him. “He can’t make you.”

“Damn straight he can’t. I’d like to see him try. I’d be all over him. He doesn’t want to get me going, no sir. I’d jump his shit and stomp it flat. It would take three cops to get me off him. You can take that to the bank. Hell, yes.”

“Take it easy,” Boyd said.

“I ain’t taking it easy. I know how that guy works. He’s always had it in for me. But not this time, not this time. He tries and I’ll call the Union. I’ll shove a dozen grievances right up his ass sideways, that’s what.”

Jurgens came walking up. “C’mon, boys, we got work to do here. Let’s go.”

And Maki, true to form, almost knocked Boyd down getting to it. “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Jurgens.”

Boyd just shook his head.

They hit it pretty hard. In about two hours they had the drift widened to accommodate a portable winch that was pushed in there on lengths of track. Once the ceiling was braced up, there was nothing to do but wait and see what Jurgens decided next.

Jurgens was gone for about twenty minutes, but when he returned he had McNair, the paleobiologist, with him. McNair was a short, round little guy with a shaggy gray beard. He looked more like a prospector than a scientist, but he would do in a pinch.

“Okay,” Jurgens said. “Dr. McNair and I are going down. I’d like a couple volunteers to go with us.”

Not a man moved. Maybe they didn’t like that aged odor whispering up from the shaft and maybe it was something else, the idea that whatever was down there had not been disturbed in a very long time. Like the depths of an Egyptian tomb with a curse on it.

“I’ll go,” Boyd said.

“Me, too,” Breed chimed in.

“Good, good,” Jurgens said. “Probably nothing down there, but we need to have a look. We got caves or subsidence, we might have to cancel this drift altogether.”

Maki looked from Boyd to Breed again and again. Then over at Jurgens. There was something brewing in him. He was ancy and wide-eyed. “I’m going, too,” he said.

“I don’t need you,” Jurgens told him flat out.

“I got seniority over Breed and Boyd,” Maki said. “If anybody goes down, it should be me. I’m the most experienced.”

One of the miners giggled at that.

“I am. I been here longer than most. I got the seniority.”

Jurgens said, “This isn’t a matter of seniority, Maki.”

“I’m going. I’m the one that should go.”

Boyd laughed. “An hour ago you were bitching that you didn’t want to go.”

“I never said any such thing.”

Jurgens sighed. “All right, Maki. You can go.” He just caved-in, knowing that if he didn’t allow it Maki would whine and stomp his feet and make a general nuisance of himself like a spoiled brat until he got his way. And that would burn precious time.

Once the basket was hooked up to the winch, Jurgens and McNair went down. They took a walkie-talkie with them and called up that it was okay for the others to descend.

“You sure you want this?” Boyd said to Maki.

“Yeah, they’ll need me.”

Which was silly. Did anybody really need Maki? The only reason he was going was because he was still playing the big balls game, trying to show Boyd what a tough customer he was. It was silly. Absolutely silly.

They all wore rubber boots, helmets, and raingear. They took flashlights and gas masks. McNair and Jurgens had taken cameras, gas detectors, and Coleman battery lanterns down with them. It was a long ride down through that cloying darkness, the basket bumping around in the narrow shaft.

About half way down, Breed said, “Hey, Maki? Your mother have any kids that lived?”

And down they went into the underworld.

8

When they touched bottom, Boyd was glad to see the lights from the lanterns. They lit up the gloom enough so that he could see right away that this was going to be no quick excursion. For there was a tunnel down there leading off into the earth.

“Limestone cave,” Jurgens said. “Just like I thought.”

That meant trouble for future mining operations and he didn’t like it. McNair, on the other hand, was clearly excited.