Dead Simple

by Jon Land

  He had just aimed his light into the darkness before him, wondering how large this particular mine might be, when something grabbed hold of his ankle. McCracken swung his light and gun together, the beam catching a half-mad face stretched into a grin.

  “’Bout time you showed up,” said Buck Torrey.

  FORTY-ONE

  “No!” Tyrell yelled when Earl Yost started to rush from the ridge into the cavern after their adversaries.

  “They’re getting away, goddamn it!” Weeb yelled from his brother’s side, the sling Othell had fashioned for his wounded arm dangling empty beneath his jacket.

  Tyrell glanced at Lem Trumble, the biggest, toughest man he’d ever known, grimacing as he tightened a tourniquet around his leg wound. First time he’d ever seen anyone so much as give Tremble a scratch.

  “Race after them into the darkness?” he challenged the Yosts. “Not a good plan, boys.”

  “You got a better one?”

  Tyrell’s gaze moved to the tanker. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “I suckered them real good,” Buck Torrey proclaimed proudly, grimacing.

  Supported by Liz, he continued with his story as Johnny Wareagle redressed his wounds with the first-aid kit Buck had pried from the tanker’s cab the night before.

  “I made ‘em think one of the dead soldiers from that truck was me; in the darkness, movement’s movement, right, son? Their bullets got a gasoline fire going, and I figured I’d trap as many of ’em as I could in the flames. Trouble is the damn truck’s extinguishers put them out too soon.”

  “Indian?” Blaine asked when Wareagle finished rebandaging Buck’s midsection.

  “His ankle’s shattered. Bullet passed through his side.” Johnny looked up. “He’s lost a lot of blood, Blainey.”

  “Hell, I could’ve told you that much,” Buck said, using Liz to prop himself up straighter as he sat on the mine floor. “Something else you need to hear instead: this place is a death trap. There’s enough carbon monoxide floating around to choke a city. We’re safe now, but if it rains and the lower chambers of the cavern get flooded, the carbon monoxide gets forced up to the higher ground here.”

  Blaine looked back at Johnny. “Explains why Hank never heard from the tanker’s crew again after they pulled in here to get out of the storm.”

  Buck interrupted. “Will somebody explain how in the hell you found me?”

  “We were searching for treasure,” Liz said. “Just like you.”

  Blaine looked back toward the tanker’s location. “Now let’s make sure our friends down there don’t leave with it.”

  Othell Vance didn’t like Tyrell’s idea at all. “You don’t just open a valve on a rig like this. It’s not an oil truck, and that’s not goddamn diesel inside.”

  “What we got is fifty thousand gallons of liquid death sitting here for us to use.” Jack’s eyes glistened. “Wouldn’t mind seeing it in action myself.”

  “I wouldn’t know how much to siphon off!”

  “Take a guess, Othell, and try not to blow us up too.”

  The sleek rig poked its dust-coated nose out of the cavern first, then rose gracefully to the ridge as the winch hoisted it upward. Its tail end was just vanishing from sight when Blaine and Johnny rounded a corner, having returned to the opening that led down into the mine, M-16s in hand.

  Blaine steadied his M-16 on one side of the mine, Johnny covered the other, holding their fire in hopes of seeing a guard or guards venture up the steep grade into the light to provide a clear target. Blaine was sighting down the M-16’s barrel when he spotted one of the white-faced twins, favoring one arm, backpedaling up the incline. The albino was gazing into the darkness with his pink eyes as he followed the progress of the tanker back to the surface. Blaine took a deep breath and clacked off a quick burst.

  It looked as though the albino’s legs had been yanked right out from under him; that’s how fast he went down, the familiar spray of blood left coating the air. His twin dashed desperately up the steep grade, grabbing hold of the dead man just as Johnny added his fire to Blaine’s.

  “Leave him!” Tyrell ordered Earl.

  “The fuck you say!” Earl shouted back, opening up wildly with his sub-machine gun as bullets coughed dirt and rocks all around him.

  He kept spraying the tunnel with fire the whole time he dragged his brother’s body up from the chasm.

  “What do you want me to do with this?” Othell Vance stammered nervously, liquid death sloshing around inside a pair of canteens he had filled as soon as the tanker was safely on the ridge.

  “Dump it down there!” Tyrell ordered.

  “Just dump it?”

  “Now!”

  Othell did as he was told, flinching. He spilled the Devil’s Brew down into the cavern as though he were emptying stale water. It splashed lightly, and then he heard something that sounded like a hiss.

  “How we gonna set it off?” Tyrell asked, as a wailing Earl Yost emptied yet another clip into the cavern’s darkness to hold their advancing enemies at bay, still standing protectively over his brother’s corpse.

  “I don’t know! Fire, I guess. We should be able to ignite it with something that’s flaming.”

  Tyrell grabbed him by the shirt. “So what are you waiting for?”

  “Can you walk?” Liz asked her father, supporting much of his weight. With her help, he had managed to heave himself to his feet.

  “Gonna have to, I guess,” he said, grimacing from the pain. He forced a smile. “Gave you quite a scare, didn’t I?”

  “I ought to shoot you myself for running off like that. Not telling anyone what you were up to.”

  “Better wait till I can afford to lose the blood.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Not that I’d end up in a shooting war—I’ll tell you that much. Just how did you find me?”

  “We followed the trail.”

  “Mine?”

  “Colonel William Henry Stratton’s,” she said.

  The remaining twin’s submachine fire was enough to keep Johnny and Blaine from advancing further toward the mouth of the mine. They waited until it stopped before they proceeded opposite each other in time-practiced hunkers.

  Suddenly the ground immediately below the opening seemed to pulsate. The effect quickly turned to a rippling that spread forward, the earth turning itself over right before their eyes, creating the illusion that it was chasing them down in a foot-high wave of dirt and rock.

  Devil’s Brew, Blaine realized.

  Johnny Wareagle had already swung back around before Blaine could warn him. They rushed away from the opening as fast as they could, neither seeing the fiery ball of paper that floated down toward the cavern’s floor.

  “Come on!” McCracken yelled, when he reached Buck and Liz. Barely slowing, he scooped up Buck’s body and threw it over what had been his bad shoulder, just before the blast sounded, not so much an explosion as an expulsion of air from the bowels of the earth.

  Liz looked back only long enough to glimpse a vast cloud of steamy darkness coming toward them. She realized in the next instant that the mine was collapsing, closing up behind them as they ran. The sound was deafening, causing a searing pain in the center of her skull. It felt like the end of the world was chasing them, about to catch up, and then the ground was pulled away and they plunged toward oblivion.

  FORTY-TWO

  Blaine was sprawled on a hard surface, enveloped in a cushion of earth under a soft blanket of darkness. A gagging sound snapped him alert and sent him flailing through the powdery dirt in search of Buck Torrey.

  His hands closed on Buck’s shape, and McCracken pushed and clawed the rubble aside until it was all behind him. He and Buck sucked in lung-fuls of cold, dank air.

  “I think you dropped something,” Buck said. His laugh turned into a choking retch, and he coughed up a stream of dirt as he handed over Blaine’s pocket flashlight.

  Blaine shone the beam about, but the darkn
ess gave back nothing.

  “Johnny,” he said. “Johnny!” Louder.

  Wareagle appeared by his side, breathing heavily. “Here, Blainey.”

  “Liz,” Blaine muttered, then repeated her name out loud. When there was no response, he and Johnny began to dig frantically through the piles of dirt and rubble about them.

  Johnny found a leg and plunged both his hands through a wall of dirt to yank Liz’s body out. He laid her across the floor of the pit, reaching down to check her vitals as she twitched and began coughing.

  She opened her eyes, to find the beams of both small flashlights shining down upon her. “My father …” She sat up.

  “Over here,” Buck called weakly.

  Wareagle then walked off to explore the section of mine into which they had plunged, his flashlight stopping on a dark wooden chest seconds later.

  “I’ll be damned,” Buck said, when he recognized what Johnny’s beam of light had revealed.

  “One of the chests Colonel William Henry Stratton signed for,” McCracken realized, moving over next to Johnny and adding his beam in a sweep about their new confines.

  The other chests and strongboxes, minus the keg chest that must have been damaged when Stratton’s regiment sought refuge from the blizzard, were all here as well, strewn amidst decayed and rotting wood that had been part of the wagons hauling the load. Blaine imagined the convoy taking shelter in here from a storm, just as the tanker’s crew had. Sitting down to wait things out, only to be overcome by carbon monoxide fumes and never seen again—until now. Their skeletal remains were scattered about, along with the bones of the oxen that had been hitched to Culbertson’s wagons. Frayed and tattered Union uniforms still clung to a number of the skeletons, coated with so much dirt and debris that they looked like extensions of the floor.

  And that wasn’t all. A gleaming brass radiator drew Blaine’s attention to a Model T Ford, complete with a skeleton in the driver’s seat, evidence of another party who had ventured into the mine, never to leave it.

  Blaine’s best guess was that this chamber ran partially under the one where the tanker had ended up. Its roof was thirty feet over their heads, compared to half that height in the tunnel they had fled, and that meant an even higher content of carbon monoxide was swirling through the air. And since the opening both Stratton’s regiment and the tanker must have used to gain entry to the mine had been blasted closed by the Devil’s Brew, they would have to find another route leading back to the surface, or face the same fate.

  He moved about the cavern, cataloguing what was available for them to use in aiding their escape. Suddenly he came upon a uniform with colonel’s bars pinned to the shoulders, and he crouched down. He had heard so much about William Henry Stratton lately that he felt awed to be kneeling over what must have been his corpse. Almost reverently, he dipped a hand inside the remnants of the coat and found a letter-size leather pouch sewn into the lining. Recalling his own assertions about the documents Stratton must have been carrying, he tore the pouch free and wedged it inside his own pocket.

  “Blaine!” Liz called, and Blaine rushed back to her, to find Buck passed out. His breathing sounded irregular. “There isn’t much time,” she continued. “We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  “We’ve got to get ourselves out of here,” Blaine said, looking around.

  Across the cavern, Johnny Wareagle was examining the walls, finding them too unstable to climb or mount. And even if they managed that task, they would still face the challenge of digging an escape route through the roof of the mine to the surface without any tools whatsoever.

  What they needed first and foremost, Blaine thought as he checked on Buck, was a stairway upward, to at least give themselves a fighting chance.

  A stairway …

  He pulled his pistol from his belt, aimed it at the latch of the nearest large strongbox, and shot off the lock. The strongbox rocked a little, then settled. Blaine lifted up the top and shone his light inside.

  The neatly stacked gold bars glistened, holding their magic after one hundred thirty-five years underground. He calculated the number of strongboxes, number of bars, and then ran his eyes up the face of the wall.

  “We’ve got work to do,” he said to Johnny.

  Their first task was to empty all the large strongboxes of their contents. Then they used the three keg chests that held the mysterious coins, along with the strongboxes still in decent enough condition, to form a base for the staircase Blaine intended to build. From there they worked with desperate resolve, racing the inevitable effects of the thickening carbon monoxide to erect a stairway of gold bars in the form of a half pyramid that rose toward the roof of the mine.

  While Blaine and Johnny worked feverishly building the staircase, Liz toiled equally hard, emptying gunpowder from unused M-16 shells into an empty clip in the dim light from one of the tiny flashlights. Her father’s breathing, meanwhile, seemed to be stable. But his features were growing increasingly pale, evidence of internal bleeding only a hospital could stanch.

  Liz finished her job well before the staircase was complete and then busied herself with using the most intact boards she could find to fashion a makeshift stretcher for her father. She found rope to fasten the wood together, but most of it fell apart when she tried to knot it, and the stretcher wobbled as a result. Still, she and Johnny eased Buck onto it and tied him down with what was left of the old rope.

  Starting to feel light-headed now from the effects of the carbon monoxide, Blaine climbed back up the golden stairs and wedged the magazine packed with Liz’s makeshift explosive into the mine ceiling. He used a shoelace for fusing, wet down with saliva and then coated evenly in gunpowder so it would burn.

  “Here goes,” he said, flicking out the flame from his lighter.

  He touched the flame to the shoelace, which ignited with a poof! in a sizzling flash. In the next instant he turned toward the wall and covered his head with both arms.

  The blast shook the staircase but didn’t topple it. A cascade of rubble showered over Blaine and fell to the floor of the mine. He could feel streams of light and air flooding into the cavern before he turned and looked up through the jagged hole just above him.

  Blaine had to dig a little to open the hole enough to climb out. Once on the surface, he took a fast look around, sucking fresh air into his lungs. He had emerged on a plateau several hundred yards beyond the ridge where he, Johnny, and Liz had entered the cavern originally. That ridge was deserted now, no sign of the gunmen or the tanker filled with Devil’s Brew.

  Beneath him Blaine heard Liz and Johnny coughing as they mounted the stairway, Buck Torrey’s makeshift stretcher supported between them. When Wareagle neared the surface, Blaine reached down and helped raise the stretcher to the surface. Liz and Johnny had just joined him over Buck when a helicopter swooped overhead, its rotor kicking dust into their faces.

  Blaine moved instinctively to shield Buck when a dozen men in the black uniforms of SWAT commandos descended on the area from the hills above.

  “Hands in the air!”

  “Don’t move!”

  They froze while the commandos charged forward and cut their legs out with sharp rifle slashes behind their knees.

  “Who’s in charge?” Blaine asked from the ground.

  A foot pressed into his neck. “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Listen to me!” Blaine said through a mouth forced tight against the dirt. “The people you want are getting away!”

  The foot pressed harder. “Where are the troopers?”

  “Another part of the mine. The people who are getting away killed them.”

  “You son of a—”

  “I’ll take things from here, Captain,” said a new voice.

  The foot let up enough for Blaine to turn his head in the direction of a man in his fifties with a face at least twenty years older. The deepest of his wrinkles carved his face into segments of pale, liver-spotted skin. His eyes looked tired, their whites yellowed
.

  “I said I’d take things from here,” repeated Will Thatch.

  Will was at highway patrol headquarters in Johnstown when word of the missing troopers came down. A SWAT team was hastily assembled, and Will talked his way into accompanying them.

  He had been waiting for hours, feeling in his gut something would happen, and knowing it had happened as soon as contact was lost with the trio of cars that had gone out after a trooper who’d been in an accident. Will had warned them about the kind of man they might be going up against, the captain’s response indicating he had listened.

  “I let you ride along out of courtesy, Mr. Thatch,” the captain said.

  “And I’d like to repay the favor, save you some time and trouble.” Thatch took a long look at the man still pinned beneath the captain’s foot. “These aren’t the people we want.”

  “So you say.”

  “This man’s right: the ones we want must be getting away.”

  “Ones you want, maybe. I’m satisfied with these folks until I’ve got something better. It’s my men who are missing.”

  “Killed by the same people who shot my father,” Liz said, sitting up and moving over to Buck in spite of the rifles steadying down on her. “And if we don’t get him to a hospital soon, he’ll die too. Difference is,” she accused the captain, “it’ll be your fault.”

  “Your choice,” Will Thatch told the trooper as staunchly as he could manage. “Either I take responsibility or I assume jurisdiction.”

  “You better hope to God you know what you’re doing,” the captain sighed, and he signaled his men to lower their guns.

  FORTY-THREE

  “You’re here because of the Monument,” Blaine said to Will

  Thatch in the highway patrol’s Johnstown barracks interrogation room.