Blood, Bones and Bullets

by Tim Curran

  “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.”

  “I guess that leaves me out,” Boyd said.

  That got a few weak chuckles, nothing more.

  Maki had been sitting silently, nursing his wounds, but now he jumped up and swatted at the air. “Fuck was that?” he cried. “What the fuck was that?”

  “What the hell’s he talking about?” Breed said.

  McNair and Jurgens just watched him as he spun around in the lantern light, swatting at the air.

  Jurgens said, “Calm down, Maki. Jesus, there’s nothing. You’re imagining things.”

  Maki was breathing so hard it seemed he might hyperventilate. He kept brushing the back of his neck. “Something touched me.”

  Boyd felt a chill go up his spine at that. He’d thought, right before Maki freaked out, that he’d heard a funny scraping on the rocks. But he didn’t dare say so.

  Flashlight beams swung around, but there was only the dead trees and the rocks, nothing more.

  “There’s nothing, Maki,” Jurgens said.

  “There was, there was!” He licked his bloody lips and peered around suspiciously. “Something touched me. I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, but something touched the back of my neck.”

  “What?” Breed said.

  “I don’t know…it felt…it felt like a stick or something.”

  “Ain’t no sticks down here.”

  Nobody was sure what to make of it. So nobody tried. They just started talking about digging their way out, leaving Maki to his imagination and Boyd to wondering.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Jurgens said.

  Then he, Breed, and McNair walked off, taking one of the lanterns with them. God only knew how long the batteries would last, so for the time being everyone was just using the lights on their helmets. Even those were dimming steadily, casting a surreal, weird glow and making everyone aware of how dark it was down there.

  When the footfalls of the digging party vanished away, Boyd said, “Maki? You okay?”

  “Sure, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just fine. But I tell you what, Boyd, that fucking Breed is a dead man. He can’t do this and get away with it.”

  “Worry about that later, after we get out of here,” Boyd told him.

  But Maki just laughed. “Don’t kid yourself, Boyd, ain’t none of us getting out of here alive.”

  “Stop it,” Boyd said. “Just stop that shit.”

  “It touched me,” Maki said. “Whatever’s down here, Boyd, it touched the back of my neck.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s got fingers.”

  “Maki—”

  “They feel like sticks…like pencils.”

  Boyd just waited, saying nothing.

  13

  While they waited, Boyd was not only thinking about his wife and the kid she was carrying that he might never see, but about Russo. He could see his pig-ugly face in his mind, see the scowl on his mouth, hear those words he’d said when he put him on the graveyard shift: You ain’t gonna get all girly and run off on me when things get tough and dirty below, are you?

  And right then, remembering how his old man had died in the Mary B. and how he’d faced that sort of death day after day without so much as a twitch of nerve, he said, “No sir. I’m up to it.”

  “What?” Maki said.

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

  “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be talking.”

  “Yeah…and why’s that?”

  Maki looked at him and his eyes were practically luminous in his grimy, bruised face. “Because it uses too much fucking air.”

  “It would take a hundred men a month to use up the air in this cavern, Maki. And you know it.” And to prove that, he pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “You got nothing to worry about.”

  Maki shifted a bit. “Well, then maybe there’s other reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  Maki licked his lips. “Because we ain’t alone down here, you dumb shit. And the more we talk, the more what’s out there will know where we are.”

  “Quit it. You sound like a kid scared of the fucking dark.”

  Maki moved, grabbing his arm. “I am scared, cookie. I’m real scared and you should be, too.”

  Of course, Boyd was scared. Scared like he’d never been before in his life. Even more scared than he’d been when news had reached him about his old man dying down in the Mary B. That had been a fear of the future and a fear of going through life without his old man’s smiling face, his salty wit, his unflappable demeanor which could weather any storm as long as they were together, as l
ong as he had his family. That had been a fear of closure and a fear of what it would do to his sisters and particularly his mother. But even as bad as that fear had been as he laid in his bed the night of the funeral, the wind making the roof creak, he knew that it was done with. Over. That he could cry his eyes out every night and withdraw from life and make this hard on his mom…but it was over.

  But this fear…it was now.

  It was happening.

  Nothing was over, it was still rolling along. There was something out there and he knew it and that knowledge was not only terrible, but crushing. Just them. And something in the cavern. Something unnatural.

  In the distance he could hear Breed and the others clearing rubble. Hear their voices echoing off into the darkness. He had never felt so small or so helpless in his life.

  And then—

  Click, click, click.

  Christ, not again.

  Boyd felt his entire body go tight as a wire. He felt like crying out or maybe getting up and running off even though there was nowhere to run to. And maybe he would have done both those things if it hadn’t been for his bum leg and the fact that whatever was out there might hear him, might decide to come after him.

  “You hear that?” Maki said, scared but also exhilarated.

  “Sshhh!”

  Maki didn’t say a thing after that. He just pulled in a little closer to Boyd and did it most stealthily like a soldier in the jungle doing everything he could not to draw the attention of the enemy or a sniper’s bullet. As he moved, something fell from his pocket and clattered to the ground.

  It seemed very loud in the silence.

  Boyd saw what it was…Maki’s lock-blade knife. Maki picked it up again and then, offering him the most unpleasant of grins, tapped it against a stone near his knee. Tap, tap, tap.

  The result was immediate.

  Out in that cloying darkness: click, click, click.

  God, that sound. Like a claw tapped against the trunk of one of those petrified trees. At that particular moment, Boyd could not imagine a worse sound to be hearing.

  Maki raised the knife again.

  “Don’t,” Boyd told him.

  Maki tapped it against the stone…but changed the rhythm. This time it was tap, tap, tap-tap-tap. Boyd tensed at the sound of it, at Maki attempting to communicate with whatever in the hell was out there, hiding in the trees. For several seconds there was nothing, nothing at all. Boyd made to open his mouth to tell Maki he was an idiot, then:

  Click, click, click-click-click.

  Boyd felt his heart plummet as fear left a hollow inside him. He was so scared at that moment that it felt like a balloon was slowly expanding in his chest. Where the hell were Jurgens and the others? Why weren’t they here to stop this madness before it went too far if it hadn’t already?

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap, tap, went the knife.

  And somewhere in that night world, the clicking sound repeated it exactly. Again and again, almost excitedly. It echoed through the cavern like fingernails tapping on the inside of a coffin lid. Boyd felt himself trembling. A trickle of cool sweat ran down his temple, cutting a clean path in his dirty face. The walkie-talkie was sitting but inches away and he desperately wanted to pick it up and call for help, get the others over here. Because he was trapped with a madman and with something far worse. Any moment now, he expected that horror to come whispering out of the foul blackness on a thousand legs.

  But five minutes later, it still had not shown itself.

  Boyd knew it wasn’t over, though. He could feel it in his guts that now that they had communicated with it, it would never leave them alone. It would get more daring. It was curious now. Again, he was about to jump Maki for what he had done, but then he heard it out there, moving around. It was skittering. That was the only word to describe that ticking sound he heard, a skittering of many legs. It was running up one tree and down another, leaping from trunk to trunk. And that skittering noise…like dozens of scratching nails…seemed to be far distant, then very close. Off to the left, then the right. Moving away and then ominously coming right at them.

  Maki and he were pressed up against one another like lovers now, needing each other’s touch.

  They looked around, their helmet spots darting around in the darkness but never finding anything but the spokes of those prehistoric trees.

  “Fucking place is haunted,” Maki said with absolute conviction.

  Boyd did not argue with him: it was surely haunted, just not by ghosts as such. But at the same time, he could feel the atmosphere around him and it was charged with some ethereal energy, an oscillating discharge almost like static electricity.

  The thing out there clicked again. Twice.

  Maki did not dare answer it.

  After a few seconds, it clicked again: click, click, click-click-click.

  Maki made a low moaning sound in his throat.

  The thing clicked and clicked, repeating the previous exchange perfectly. It wanted to communicate again, but the men were silent and as its repeated attempts went unanswered, it began to click feverishly out of what seemed anger or frustration, not just clicking now but knocking loudly against a petrified bole.

  The sounds were very loud, echoing and echoing.

  After maybe five minutes in which Boyd and Maki were nearly holding each other out of terror, the sounds ceased. The silence that followed was somehow worse, just pregnant with nameless possibility. And then another sound rose up, like air blown over the mouth of a pop bottle. A steadily rising mournful wailing that was high-pitched and almost hysterical in tone. It got louder and louder like the night-call of some huge insect, then died away.

  The very timbre of it made the fine hairs at the back of Boyd’s neck stand up, made the flesh at his groin shrivel. Because although that shrilling was not remotely human, there was something almost despondent and melancholy about it.

  “Hell is that?” Maki said.

  “I don’t know what she is.”

  “She?” Maki whispered. “She?”

  It had been a slip of the tongue, but Boyd did not retract it. For the very sound of that crying voice had been very feminine somehow and that was sheer lunacy, yet the certainty of it remained. That thing out there…dear God…it was female.

  They sat there quietly for some time and the only sounds now were the distant dripping of water and the noise of Jurgens, Breed, and McNair clearing more rubble from the stope mouth. And Maki breathing with a hoarse, frantic sound.

  “What’re we gonna do, Boyd? Fuck are we gonna do?”

  “We’re gonna wait for them above to get us out,” he said. “Listen, Maki, I don’t know what’s down here with us, but just leave it be. Don’t fool with it. Don’t try and make sounds for it. Maybe it’ll…I don’t know, maybe it’ll just go away.”

  But he didn’t believe that, not for a moment.

  Because it was still out there and, God help him, but he could feel its eyes on them.

  14

  They’d been at it a good six hours that was closer to seven and Russo was feeling the heat. It was coming from every direction—the media, the families, the mine execs. Felt like every damn last one of them was standing on his back. He rubbed his aching neck and swallowed a couple Tylenol. He watched the men widening the drift, the constant sound of jack hammers and rock drills, the hiss of steam and thudding of limestone chunks being shoveled into metal cars. It was all making his head pound.

  He rubbed his eyes, then his temples.

  Everything down here echoed. Banging and booming, clanging and ringing out. Russo lit a cigarette and motioned Corey, the shift boss, over.

  “Well?” he said.

  “We’re making progress, but I’m guessing it’ll take us most of the day to widen that drift so we can get the raise borer in here,” Corey told him. “If that shaft is just filled up with loose limestone, we can drill through it like cheese, but…”

  Russo glared at him. “But?”

  Corey shook
his head. “You know same as me. If it’s just loose rubble, we can drill it in three, four hours with a reamer bit. Even cutting four-hundred feet we’ll have her in eight hours…but we don’t know what happened down there. Whole goddamn earth might have moved. Limestone is unstable. If we have to cut through solid rock it’s gonna take days.”

  “And more likely weeks,” Russo said, spitting.

  Weeks. Weeks down there for chrissake. Russo pulled off his cigarette and watched Corey making his way up to the drift, hollering orders and telling the diggers to keep at it. He stood there, wondering what it was like for them down there. He remembered the time he’d been trapped below. Even now, it made his flesh crawl.

  15

  Boyd was waiting.

  He didn’t know for what or maybe he did and just didn’t want to admit it to himself. He lay there next to the tree that had broken his leg. Maki hadn’t spoken in some time and he figured that was a good thing. The silence was killing him, the desolation and the claustrophobia that clawed at his throat, but he did not want to know what was going on in Maki’s head because he figured it was plenty bad.

  Much like what was in his own head.

  A sound.

  Shit.

  “What’s that?” Maki said.

  Then a light splashed through the spiderwebbing of trees and they saw Jurgens coming in their direction, moving over mounds of rock and down into little hollows, splashing through puddles. He leapfrogged a cluster of roots and stood before them, panting.

  “We’re making some progress, I think,” he told them. “Lot of rock fall over there, but Breed and McNair are doing a good job of it. When they come back, Maki, we’ll take our turn.”

  “Maybe she don’t want us getting out,” Maki said.

  Jurgens just looked at him, smiling as if he expected a good joke, but seeing that none was coming, he frowned. “What are you talking about?”