The Underdwelling (7 page)

What they heard next was a clicking.

Click, click, click.

The sound of a deathwatch beetle in the wall of a deserted house or a cicada up in a gum tree. Just that repetitive, chitinous clicking like some insect rubbing its forelegs together or tapping them on its carapace. Whatever it was, it was not a good sound and nobody dared speak. Dared acknowledge what they were hearing.

It’s like Morse Code,
Boyd thought.
Like something up there is trying to communicate with us.

“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Maki said.

But he didn’t move. What came next stopped him dead.

Stopped them all dead and took away any slim hope they had that what was up there was a bat or something ordinary. It started as a low whistling sound and built to a screeching, strident piping that went right up their spines. It sounded almost frenzied, desperate, the shriek of some mountain cat crying out in agony and despair and maybe even stark melancholy. It rose up to a shrill cacophony and then slowly faded. And by then, they were all scared.

Nothing with a voice like that could be remotely normal or remotely sane.

Boyd just stood there, trying to pull air into his lungs. He could not get past the idea that there was an almost
feminine
caliber to that cry. Anguished, haunted, and demented, but somehow female. Like some big and hideous insect imitating a human cry. The idea of that made his flesh crawl in waves. It was not a human voice or even a tone a human would be capable of producing, yet it was not strictly bestial and there was no denying a certain sorrow in its pitch.

But it was enough.

It was plenty.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jurgens said and the desperation in his voice was real.

They made it maybe ten feet before things started to happen.

The earth below and above them rumbled like a hungry belly and things began to move and shake and tremble. Rocks and dust fell from overhead. The prehistoric trees began to sway back and forth. Everything was in motion, including the men who tried to stay on their feet. Lights went spinning in all directions as their owners pitched this way and that.

“A cave-in!” Breed called out.
“A fucking cave-in!”

Boyd hit the ground, waiting for millions of tons of rock to come down on top of him, for the lot of them to be squashed flat like his old man in the Mary B. mine. He heard that rumbling from the distance and realized that whatever was happening, it was apparently not happening in the cavern. Rocks were falling and dust was kicked up, but the real thunder came from the distance. And then a shock wave rolled at them, throwing everyone to the ground. In the glow of a dropped lantern, he saw one of those giant stone trees sway back and forth and come right down on top of him. He felt the impact as its trunk trapped his leg with a white-hot rush of pain.

And in the back of his head, a voice said,
yer probably the only guy ever crushed by a falling tree out of the Permian.

Then there was darkness.

11

Up in Level #8, it was a dog and pony show and Russo, the mine captain, didn’t expect much more. But he was there, hell yes, cracking the whip and kicking ass because time was a factor here. Those men were down there. Trapped. Maybe dead, but maybe alive and this is what he was counting on. It was what everyone was counting on. The brass at Hobart were having kittens over this one and they were crawling up Russo’s ass. They were so far up there he could feel them in the back of his throat.

And what he got, he gave.

Standing there in his rainsuit, boots, and miner’s helmet, he was watching the diggers clearing rubble from the drift. They were going at it hard, but not hard enough for Russo’s liking. “C’mon! C’mon, you fucking pussies! Clean that drift! We got to get it blasted out to get that drilling rig in! Move! Move! Christ, you boys dig like I fuck!”

It was a hive of activity down there with the clearing and the blasting, the rubble being carted away. But the brass were on him and he had never let them down before and he wouldn’t let them down now.

They wanted action.

They wanted results.

There were families out there who wanted to know what the hell was going on and what was being done to free their men. They were riding the Hobart people hard and when they hopped off the saddle, the Safety and Mine people hopped on. And topside, Jesus, the media were already descending and interviewing family members and word had it they’d already dug up a few old hands that were more than happy to spill the beans about the unsafe working conditions at the Hobart. Russo knew who those guys were…people like Lem Rigby and Charlie DeCock. Men he’d fired for being lazy, careless, or downright incompetent. Here was their chance to bask in the sun and point fingers and, goddamn yes, they were sure pointing them.

Revenge, that was it.

Against the Hobart mine. Against Russo himself.

And Russo, like every man who’d worked those drifts and channels, knew that the word of those guys wasn’t worth a sip of piss on a hot day, but the media didn’t know that. The journalists and TV parasites didn’t know the difference between a stope and a gopher hole, just like they didn’t know the difference between a hard-working man and a guy like Lem Rigby who’d shown up drunk and been canned on the spot by Russo.

No, they didn’t know what Rigby’s game was.

They only knew that in him and half-wit Charlie DeCock they had eyewitnesses to the workings of the mine itself that would sweeten the deal and make the Hobart look guilty as hell. And already the brass were smelling those lawsuits and they did not care for the stink.

Russo knew somebody would get dragged over the rocks on this one.

And that somebody would probably be him.

So he shouted. He yelled. He threatened and intimidated and raised three kinds of holy hell.

But what he was thinking about all the while was not his job and not lawsuits and not those candyass reporters topside.

He was thinking about Jurgens and the miners.

Down in the darkness, far below.

Russo had been trapped underground for thirty-six hours once, so he knew. He goddamn well knew what that score was about.

As the air hammers chiseled and the rubble was dragged out, as hydraulic lines vibrated and steam hoses hissed and men scrambled, he said under his breath, “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll get you out. Johnny Russo is on the job and I’ll get your fine white asses out of the pit. See if I don’t. And if you’re nothing but corpses, by God, then I’ll carry you out with my own bare hands.”

12

Gasping and clawing out, Boyd came awake from a dream where he was crushed beneath a mountain of solid rock.

“Easy now,” a voice said.

Breathing fast, he found that he was laying on his back, his leg from the knee down numb and rubbery feeling. He could see the glow of the lanterns, but they were dimming fast. He blinked his eyes and tried to speak, but all that came out was a groaning sound.

“He’s coming around,” Breed said.

“Take it easy,” Jurgens told him. “One of those goddamn trees caught your leg. We got it off you, but you got a nasty compound fracture, son. Don’t try and move.”

But, of course, Boyd did and right away the pain kicked in. It felt like somebody was driving a spike into his shin. He let out a little muted scream and settled back down again.

“Take it easy now,” Jurgens told him. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll get you out of here.”

Maki let out a high little laugh. “No shit, Jurgens? And how do you plan on doing that? How do you plan on getting us out of this fucking tomb? Huh?” He just shook his head. “Let me be the first to clue you in on something, Boyd. We’re trapped down here. We’re trapped in this fucking cavern—”

“Shut the hell up,” Breed told him.

“—and we can’t get out. We get to sit around and twiddle our fucking thumbs while our lights go out and the air goes bad. How’s that for kicks, Boyd? How’s that for company incentive?”

“Swear to God,” Breed said, “you don’t pipe down, I’ll kick the living shit out of you right now.”

“We’ll be fine,” Jurgens said. “Even now they’ll be digging to get us out.”

They were all sitting around him in a little circle by lantern light and Boyd looked from face to face to face. None of them looked particularly hopeful. Jurgens told him that the cave-in had sealed the stope leading out of the cavern. But that was no real reason for concern, because the cavern was huge and it would no doubt take weeks and weeks to use up all the oxygen in there. And long before that, they’d be dug out. Boyd listened and didn’t honestly believe a word of it. Maybe if it was just the stope that had caved-in and the tunnel leading to it and even the spider hole from the drift above…maybe then, they’d actually get dug out. But what if it was more than that? What if it was Level #8 above? What then? Then getting to the cavern would take months maybe.

The only good thing, he supposed, was that Jurgens had called up to the drift with his walkie-talkie every fifteen minutes. He had told the men above about the stope they found and the cavern it led to. That was something and under the circumstances, it would have to be enough.

After a time, Boyd said, “How about those sounds?”

“We haven’t heard anything else,” McNair said.

Maki laughed again and it was a bad sort of laughter, the sort that echoed from a mind on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No one had ever doubted who the weak link in their chain was. But then again they had not imagined a scenario like this that would put it to the test.

“Nope, not a thing,” Maki said. “But I been feeling things.”

“That’s enough,” Jurgens told him.

But Maki’s days of kissing the guy’s ass were long gone. “Well, who we kidding here, Jurgens? You know there’s something out there same as I do. We all
feel
it out there, we just can’t see it. But it’s there and you all goddamn well know it. Something’s out there. Something’s watching us. And whatever in the fuck it is, we’re trapped down here with it—”

But that’s as far as he got in his little paranoid monologue because Breed’s fist smashed into his face and dropped him like a dead tree.

Breed was one of the mellowest guys you’d want to meet. Boyd had known him only a matter of hours, but that much was apparent. But all this was too much…even for him. Maki wouldn’t quit running his mouth and this is where it had gotten him.

“You think we need to listen to your shit, Maki?” Breed was saying, on his feet and advancing on the downed man. “You think we need that? You think we ain’t got enough fucking problems right now?”

Maki opened his mouth to say something else and Breed went right at him. No one tried to intervene. Maybe, on some subconscious level, they were glad it was finally happening. Maki tried to rise, his mouth full of blood, and Breed let him. He let him find his feet and then he really gave it to him. A flurry of lefts and rights that knocked his head this way and that. Any one of them would have put him down if it hadn’t been for the blow that followed it, righting him again. Maki’s nose rained blood and his left eye was nearly closed and his lip was split wide open.

“Please,” he kept trying to say as Breed pummeled him. “Please…stop it…stop it…stop it…”

“Okay, I stopped,” Breed said and gave him a shot in the belly that put him back down.

By then Jurgens was on his feet. “Knock it off, Breed! Jesus, you’ll kill him.”

Breed just shook his head and sat back down, staring at Maki. Looking for a reason to
really
let loose on him. But Maki gave him none. He just squatted there, dazed and punchy, spitting out blood and making a whimpering sound under his breath like a dog that had just been whipped with a newspaper.

“We have to keep our heads here,” McNair finally said. “We can’t let this go on.”

“He’s right,” Jurgens said. “This is a bad spot, but they’re going to get us out. What we need is something constructive to do in the meantime.”

“Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Breed said.

They all were. But what, really, was there to do? What could possibly take their minds off the fix they were in or the possibility of the unpleasant deaths they might soon be facing?

But Jurgens had that covered. “Listen to me,” he said. “All of you. Now I know the drill. I know what’s going on up there right now. They’ve mobilized every possible resource to reach us. And they will, believe me, they will. But maybe we ought to think about helping out. We know the stope leading into this cavern caved-in, but we have no way of knowing the extent of it. There might just be a wall of rocks between us and freedom. I say we form up, go back there and get to work. What do you say?”

Breed stood up. “I’m for it. I can’t stand sitting around like this.”

“Okay, then. Maki? You stay here with Boyd. I’ll go with Dr. McNair and Breed, get them started, then I’ll come back. They’ll dig first for a couple hours, then we’ll take our turns.”