Karl didn’t know which was the case and didn’t care. The fact of the matter was if light could penetrate the bulkhead, so could poisonous gases. The temperature inside the tunnel had dropped with the big metal doors closed, but he noticed the chemical odor had not disappeared. Not entirely. Karl squinted upward and could make out the shadowy impression of black smoke tendrils still hovering just below the ceiling like tiny storm clouds.
He needed to move deeper into the mine to escape the toxic fumes. The longer the fire burned out of control—and he had no way of knowing how serious it was and thus how long it might burn—the more dangerous it would be to stay here at the bulkhead. He turned and began picking his way back toward his mine car. His plan was to retrace his steps to the junction of the main tunnel and Alpha Seven, where he had been standing when the explosion occurred, and then continue past it, moving deeper into the earth. Eventually he would meet up with other trapped miners working the two-to-midnight shift. They could gather together and share warmth and light while awaiting rescue.
He was surprised the electric lamps Tonopah Mining had strung along the main tunnel continued to burn. They flickered constantly and failed on a regular basis, so the fact that he still had light by which to navigate the tunnels under these conditions was at least something to be thankful for.
Karl crunched slowly along the hard-packed dirt floor of the deserted tunnel. He hadn’t realized until just now how far he ran right after the explosion. At the time it had felt like a few seconds, but Karl figured he must have sprinted for at least a minute before finding and closing the bulkhead doors. He took his time now, walking slowly, cradling his injured arm. There was no reason to hurry; rescue certainly wouldn’t come for hours, maybe not for days. The timing all depended upon how badly the fire was burning and how much damage had occurred.
It would be nice to have some company to wait with, though. Maybe someone would be able to fashion a crude sling for his arm, which throbbed steadily and had begun to swell, turning an ominous shade of purple. Karl finally reached his empty mining car and walked straight past it. He glanced down into the darkness of Alpha Seven and shuddered, thinking about the bizarre incident with the two rocks just before the explosion. What the hell had that been all about?
He picked up his pace. He wanted some company and he wanted to get past Alpha Seven.
***
Karl leaned against the closed bulkhead door and sighed. He hadn’t had to walk very far beyond his mining cart before encountering the next bulkhead frame. It was a testament to just how frazzled he felt that it hadn’t occurred to him the door would be closed. Undoubtedly the men working beyond this door had heard the explosion just as he did and had rushed to close the bulkhead closest to them, just as he had.
He wondered how many miners were sitting on the other side of the thick door and cursed his luck. What were the odds he would be the only man working in the length of tunnel between two bulkhead frames at the time of the explosion? He began wandering back toward his cart for no particular reason, walking without any real destination in mind. He supposed he would grab his cart and walk it back here, as far from the fire and the potentially deadly fumes as possible.
And that was when the lights went out.
Karl froze in his tracks. Dammit, he thought. Just when you think things can’t get any worse. Losing the lights was normally no big deal; it happened practically every day with the cheap wiring and flimsy incandescent bulbs purchased in bulk by the Tonopah Mining Company. Every worker carried a miner’s light clipped to his belt for exactly this possibility, and Karl unclipped his from his belt. He prepared to light it.
Then he thought about the explosion, and the fire burning somewhere on the other side of the closed bulkhead doors in the main shaft. The miner’s light consisted of a hand-held canister burning an open flame fed by compressed gas.
Gas.
An open flame.
An improperly sealed bulkhead frame with potentially deadly flammable gases seeping through.
Karl gripped his miner’s light tightly, weighing the desire—the need, really—for blessed light against the possibility of blowing himself to kingdom come. He thought about Alpha Seven. About rocks flying out of the darkness. About the potential for injury if he were to be struck in the head by one of them. And, of course, about what he knew was the real question: Where in the hell had the rocks come from? They hadn’t fallen from the ceiling and they certainly hadn’t launched themselves at his head.
The darkness was complete, all-encompassing. Karl realized he was shaking, breathing heavily, sweating like he had just run five miles. He felt the inky blackness closing in around him, a thick blanket suffocating him with its mass. He couldn’t breathe. He needed to see. Now. Risks be damned.
He lit a match with shaking hands, wondering whether he would feel anything when the deadly gases ignited around him, setting his body ablaze and burning him alive. The tip of the match flared and when nothing happened, Karl was so relieved to still be alive he almost forgot to set the tip against his miner’s light.
He turned the thumb screw and heard the barely perceptible hiss of the pressurized gas and relaxed—a bit—as the reassuring yellow glow of the lamp beat back the darkness. Of course, the gas inside the canister would not last forever, and when it was used up, the flame in the lamp would extinguish and Karl would then truly be thrust into darkness, one which would be unrelenting until power was restored to the electric lights inside the tunnels.
It was not a comforting thought. But Karl pushed that uneasy feeling to the back of his mind, at least for now. He could see again and even though he knew he would eventually need to conserve the light, he wasn’t about to turn it off yet.
He looked around, the mine shaft appearing somehow even more alien than usual. The light from his miner’s lamp seemed puny and insubstantial against the encroaching darkness, and the mine shaft—gloomy and dank even under normal circumstances—seemed sinister, filled with evil intent. Shadows loomed, writhing just out of reach of the guttering light. Jesus, get ahold of yourself.
Karl tried to remember what the hell he had been doing when the lights went out. The cart. He had been going to retrieve his mining cart; that was it. Suddenly, it seemed much less important than before. It wasn’t like he had a stash of supplies stored inside the damned thing to help him get through the next few hours or days.
Plus, it was sitting right at the junction of Alpha Seven.
Where the rocks had come from.
Where it was supposedly haunted.
And Karl Meyer didn’t believe in ghosts. No sir, he most certainly did not. But rocks didn’t fly through the air by themselves and they hadn’t been thrown by some idiot miner playing a practical joke. No one would stay hidden in the darkness of Alpha Seven after an explosion inside the mine. No one.
So he made the decision to forget about the stupid cart, at least for now. He would retreat to the bulkhead as far away from the fire—and from Alpha Seven—as possible. There was a problem with his new plan, though, and the way Karl Meyer saw it, it was a major problem, maybe a life-and-death problem. He could smell the metallic chemical odor, the one he had first noticed as he struggled with the rusted bulkhead door, and it was getting noticeably stronger. Clearly more potentially toxic fumes and dangerous chemicals were seeping through the defective bulkhead doors.
Karl began to doubt the wisdom of returning to the bulkhead at the far end of the tunnel. What would be the point? If the gag-inducing poisonous fumes had already traveled this far along the main tunnel, how long would it take them to arrive at the rear bulkhead doors?
The answer, of course, was not long at all; in fact they were probably already gathering back there, invisible and deadly. The obvious solution would be to go pound on the doors until the miners trapped on the other side opened them for just a moment and let him in. But that was impossible. The doors had been designed to remain locked once they had been closed. They could not be opened, no ma
tter how much the men might like to do so, until a management representative arrived with a special key after the fire had been contained.
The air in the shaft felt warmer, fetid, much like it had at the first bulkhead before Karl had managed to close the doors. Breathing was becoming more difficult as the air quality deteriorated. The urge to gag and cough threatened to overwhelm him. He began to feel sick, lightheaded, like he might throw up at any moment.
If he survived this disaster, Karl made a promise to himself he would walk up to mine owner Jedediah Norton and punch the cheap bastard right in the nose as his way of giving notice before quitting outright. Sure, jobs were hard to come by, but risking life and limb for a few measly dollars worth of scrip a day, money that was useless anywhere except company-owned stores where prices were jacked up so the owner could recoup most of the wages he paid out? On a job that was dangerous enough even without taking into consideration Tonopah’s shoddy safety measures? It just wasn’t worth it. Not any more.
Karl began to wheeze. He sounded exactly like his little brother Harold had just before he died from asthma when they were kids. His eyes were watering and he rubbed his sleeve across his face, accomplishing nothing but smearing dirt and coal dust into them. Now they watered and stung.
He wasn’t going to make it. It had been less than an hour since the explosion and the air was already barely breathable. Karl doubted he would be able to survive another couple of hours, never mind days.
But if he wanted to live there was still one possibility. He hacked out a glob of dark black phlegm and began to walk toward the source of the smoke.
***
Karl paused at his mining cart, still positioned exactly where he had left it just before the explosion. He had fashioned a makeshift mask out of a dirty handkerchief, tying it around the back of his head and breathing through the cloth in an attempt to filter out the worst of the toxic gas. He wondered whether it was actually accomplishing anything of value. He doubted it.
He dropped to his knees and took a few deep breaths. The air quality seemed marginally better here, close to the ground, than it had up near the ceiling. He thought about all the whispered rumors he had heard regarding Alpha Seven. That shaft was ancient, one of the mine’s original tunnels, dug into the earth more than seventy years ago and abandoned well over sixty years ago. It was long; nobody still alive knew exactly how long, because nobody still alive had ever been all the way to the end of it.
In fact, Karl couldn’t think of anyone who had ever traveled any significant distance into Alpha Seven. Everybody laughed about the legend of Alpha Seven being haunted—by the ghosts of long-dead miners, or worse, by something inhuman and bloodthirsty—but everybody stayed out of the damned thing, too.
But if the shaft really was as long as the old-timers claimed, if it went as deep into the earth as rumored, then it stood to reason that at some point along the length of Alpha Seven the air would clear, at least enough to remain breathable. It’s not like he really had a choice, anyway. The oxygen in this section of the main tunnel was corrupted; that much was obvious. Staying here was not an option, and neither was returning to the far end of the main shaft.
Karl rose unsteadily, arm throbbing, and approached the entrance to Alpha Seven. He glanced back at the rock which had nearly hit him an hour or so ago. It was nestled harmlessly in the dirt where it had fallen after clanging off his cart. He knew the second rock would still be sitting at the base of the tunnel wall, too, if he decided to look for it.
He didn’t. He took a deep breath, coughing and hacking, and squeezed between the ancient rotting two-by-fours nailed in an X pattern across the entrance and into the darkness. His miner’s lamp seemed to be dimming, the light changing from bright yellow to dirty brown, and Karl knew it was only a matter of time before the damned thing burned out, leaving him trapped in the inky blackness of a haunted—rumored to be haunted, he reminded himself; it was only a rumor—mining shaft with . . . what, exactly?
***
For a long time, Karl walked in what felt like basically a straight line, although he could feel the shaft floor sloping steadily downward. He scanned left and right as he moved, the weakening beam of light moving back and forth, back and forth. There was no indication anyone (anything) had been here recently; no clue to indicate where the flying rocks may have come from.
But Karl felt uneasy, like he was being watched. That was absurd, of course; the ancient mine shaft was only four to six feet wide, a rounded, hollowed-out tube burrowed into the ground. There was no place for anyone to hide and no reason for them to do so.
Nevertheless, the farther he walked, the more apprehensive Karl Meyer became. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, as did the hair on his arms. Although the air quality seemed to be improving, somehow the density of the air seemed to be thickening. It was as if some invisible entity was massing in front of him, trying to force him to turn back.
I wish I could, Karl thought.
At last the shaft turned, banking gradually to the right. Why the miners seven decades ago had elected to turn here rather than continuing to dig straight ahead was a mystery, but Karl had no alternative than to turn as well. He had now been walking for at least thirty minutes and began debating whether he had gone far enough. He removed his makeshift mask and breathed deeply. The air wasn’t exactly sweet and fresh, but that metallic-chemical odor he had been so concerned about had disappeared.
Karl turned around, peering back the way he had come. The little miner’s lamp proved ineffectual at piercing the darkness, which had seemed to grow much thicker and fuller the farther Karl walked. The beam of light simply disappeared, swallowed up by the encroaching darkness.
Then the lamp failed.
The hiss of gas sputtered and recovered, sputtered again and then stopped entirely, and Karl was plunged into darkness, only now realizing how much he had come to depend on the weak yellow glow. He turned, panicked, making a full three hundred sixty degree revolution as his heart rate skyrocketed.
He felt his way to the side wall and eased into a sitting position, trying to slow his breathing and force his racing pulse to ease before his heart simply exploded in his chest. There’s nothing here in the dark that isn’t here in the light. There’s nothing here in the dark that isn’t here in the light. Besides, he reasoned, the damned miner’s lamp had barely shone ten feet in front of him, anyway. When he really thought about it, Karl decided the lamp didn’t make a damn bit of difference. He would be fine.
Problem was, knowing he would be fine and convincing his body to accept that hypothesis were two entirely separate issues. He was shaking like he had just contracted yellow fever and staring into the darkness so hard he thought his eyeballs might just pop out of his head and roll away in the dark.
He leaned against the dirt wall, feeling the earth’s damp chill leach through his overalls and into his body. He wondered how long it would be before the rescuers came, and how he would even know when they did. He guessed he had traveled close to a mile into the old mine shaft, probably the deepest penetration any human being had made into Alpha Seven in nearly a lifetime. Hell, the shaft hadn’t been active in at least sixty years, so when you took the life expectancy of the average coal miner into consideration, it probably had been more than a lifetime since anyone had trod this dirt floor.
Karl thought about Susan, and about the children. The prospect of his wife trying to raise their family as a widow filled Karl with sadness, and he vowed to do whatever necessary to survive this ordeal, if only to make it home to his wife, because—
—a stealthy slithering noise from somewhere off to the right made Karl’s breath catch in his throat. He strained to identify the noise and it stopped.
He listened hard. Nothing.
He realized he was holding his breath and tried to chuckle but could not; his throat was dry and scratchy and he became acutely aware of his lack of food, water or survival supplies. If the rescue took more than a day, maybe two, Karl kn
ew he was going to be in big trouble. Food, he could do without for a while, but water—
—there it was again. The sound was softer this time, somehow even stealthier, as if whatever was making it knew Karl could hear and was trying to mask its advance.
Could it be rats?
He knew the filthy, disease-carrying rodents lived in the mines, but had never seen any this far underground and doubted that was what was making the noise. Rats tended to scurry, and this slithering, sliding sound struck Karl as the sort of noise a snake might make. But if it was a snake, it would have to be an unimaginably large one. The noise, although stealthy, implied a heft to whatever was making it that most snakes didn’t have, at least no snakes living in North America that Karl was aware of.
He concentrated hard and the sound stopped again and his blood chilled when he realized he was being stalked. By what, and for what purpose, he didn’t know, but there was no doubt in his mind that something was out there in the dark, watching. And waiting.
He reviewed his options. It didn’t take long, because he didn’t have any. He knew the main mining tunnel was far off his left, but the thought of returning all the way down Alpha Seven in the dark, exposing his back to whatever was lurking in the darkness, filled Karl with dread. It was completely illogical, he was already at the mercy of whatever was out there, but he simply could not bring himself to contemplate turning his back on the potential danger.
Plus, the situation back inside the main tunnel undoubtedly had not changed. Even if he were successful at finding his way out of Alpha Seven with no light and some strange creature stalking him, his reward would be a painful and probably protracted death. The air was certainly even more poisoned now than it had been when he made the decision to walk away.
The Becoming - a novella Page 2