Scorched

by Britt Ringel

  Rat lurched upright with the cane’s support. Grubby fingers swept irritably under his eyes. “I’m not gonna get up one of these days.” He hacked loudly into his hand and then wiped the bloody phlegm on his tattered shirt. “No one will even notice either. Just the rats.”

  “I’ll notice,” Kat promised gently.

  “You’re a good girl, Kitten.” Rat’s voice softened. “Closest thing I had to a daughter.” He stumbled to his nest and eased himself down with a groan. “When I don’t wake up one morning, I want you to have my alley.”

  “I ain’t living next to that bitch for the rest of my life!” Starlet screamed from across the trash wall.

  “I can take care of that right now, you old hag!” Rat bellowed back.

  Chapter 24

  An overcast sky held back the light of dawn. Kat woke up three minutes before her watch alarm was set to go off and spent that time thinking about the day ahead of her. Her thoughts had turned to Sadler when the surprisingly loud beep from her wrist shattered the quiet and focused her wandering mind.

  She washed her hands and face before running wet fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame her wild locks. Smoothing it back, she fashioned a ponytail and secured it with the band Shannon had gifted her. She grabbed her satchel and threw her newly purchased glass bottle inside. She would fill the bottle with clean water at work at the end of the day and be able to avoid the fire crew entirely. As she walked past a snoring Rat, she smiled at him and whispered a goodbye.

  Her morning at the mine was unremarkable if a little disappointing. While she waited in the miner’s courtyard with her crew, Sadler had only stopped by for a few seconds to greet everyone before moving on to other workers. His smile had seemed a little more electric when he informed Kat that she was back to working only Spur Twenty-nine but she may have imagined it.

  Once in the spur, Kat stayed focused on her crew and equipment. Cleaning only a single line seemed almost like a vacation after her previous week. The conveyor belt sections in Twenty-nine had never run so smoothly. Every time George stopped the whirling discs of his grinder, Kat quickly stepped to its front and flushed the debris from its exposed mechanism with compressed air. She then thoroughly drenched the critical spots with suppressant while George and Shannon looked over the ailing machine. During her first week, George had needed to wait for her to finish her cleaning job before climbing into the caged cockpit. Today, Kat was back under the conveyor sections before the operator and his assistant finished their inspections. Even Lambert was noticeably quiet. He had taken several minutes to watch Kat perform in the morning and then uncharacteristically left the spur in silence rather than volley insults.

  At lunchtime, Sadler spent several minutes at Kat’s table. He had deliberately chosen the sit close to her when large sections of the bench were empty. As he talked with George about the state of the grinder, his leg and then his hand occasionally made contact with Kat’s thigh. Despite the innocent flirtation, each touch sent jolts through her body. In a bold moment, she lowered her hand below the table and squeezed his thigh before quickly folding her hands again on the table’s surface. She grinned at both her assertiveness and the ridiculousness of the situation. I’m a grown woman and here I am acting like a teenager in a school lunchroom. Yet, with every brush of his leg or hand, she couldn’t help but beam.

  Her smile twisted wickedly as she quickly devoured the rest of her meal. Once finished, she casually lowered her hands to her lap and then let her right hand creep to his thigh. Sadler shot her a distracted look as he discussed production goals for the week. Rather than remove her hand, Kat gave him a mischievous sideways glance and let her hand slowly ride farther up his leg.

  Sadler launched himself off the bench, banging his knees on the edge of the table. He plunged his hands into the pant pockets of his coveralls while hastily explaining to the crew that he had forgotten about an urgent meeting with another operator. He quickly turned his back and retreated deeper into the miner’s courtyard. Kat ran her finger over the rim of her water cup and resisted the urge to laugh. When she had the nerve to look up, she saw Shannon smirking at her shrewdly. The men at the table seemed oblivious to what she had done. The call to work came shortly and Kat returned to the mine with her friends. Shannon walked close to her and whispered, “I’m very happy for you two.”

  Ten minutes later, the noise, dust and vibrations in the spur pushed all thoughts of Sadler aside. Kat cleaned her way, section by section, back toward the grinder and her crew. The spur grew longer each shift as the coal wall was demolished by day and night. George had stated that there couldn’t be much length left in the seam and predicted they would reach its end by midweek.

  Kat released her trigger to stop the spray of suppressant when a blur in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She stared from under her conveyor at the side wall of the narrow spur. A second rat scurried past her, heading toward the grinder. A third rushed by. Curiosity piqued, Kat slowly twisted her body and carefully crawled from the section as she watched the rats flee into the gloom. Ahead, the spur made a gentle bend to the right, carved that way to avoid a small quartz deposit encountered long before Kat had been hired. The rats turned the bend and disappeared from view. Kat crawled farther out and twisted again to sit. She patted at her pant legs to remove the top layer of dust and pebbles that had clung to her in the tight confines under the conveyor. Experience taught her that the pebbles had a tendency to slip in between her coveralls and kneepads if she didn’t brush them off before standing.

  She looked up the spur to the opposite end. The main tunnel was a faint ember of light. Her eyes darted to a jogging miner exiting her spur and turning at the junction. Kat finally stood. Did our crew get called out of the spur? she wondered. The chest-thumping vibrations of the grinder farther down the narrow passage dismissed that notion. She walked toward the main tunnel with an eye on her conveyors. She had just cleaned all of these and had been working her way back toward the grinder. The coal on the belts flew by in a dusty, black blur. Thirty meters from the main junction her eyes caught a red flash on the ground. She stopped and stared in confusion at the dark, bare ground under the conveyor system. A flicker of crimson illuminated the ground again and she bent low and searched for its source. The color seemed too soft to be a spark from a grinding gear or failing bearing.

  Kat’s stomach dropped when she saw two tightly wrapped sticks stuck to the frame of the conveyor section. She had seen similar sticks being prepared to drop the ceilings of two expired spurs last week. As a safety precaution, all of the miners had surfaced before the “blast monkeys” had drilled narrow holes into the spur roofs to hold a single stick. Each stick’s detonation had caused tremors all the way to the miner’s courtyard.

  Kat gaped at her discovery. A metal prong extended from one of the sticks and ended in a device displaying a countdown. It read “00:32.”

  She jumped up, banging her hardhat on the conveyor. Her first step was toward the main tunnel but she quickly spun in place. George’s grinder was still furiously eating away the coal wall at the end of the spur. Kat tucked her head and sprinted toward her crew.

  She raced down the narrow path, nearly losing her footing in the loose bits of coal shards. She took the bend at a dangerous pace and bounced her hip off the side of a conveyor frame. The grinder’s terrible cacophony drowned out her shouted warnings as she ran toward her friends.

  When she flew past Deke and Reece, both laborers stopped their shoveling to stare. Kat skidded to a stop near George’s cockpit and clawed at the grating around the emergency cut-off switch on the side of the grinder. Once the grate opened, she flipped up the switch’s cover and pounded the control.

  Power to the grinder’s discs immediately disconnected. The machine roared as the engine’s RPMs spiked and a cloud of black exhaust vented from its ducts. Shannon was stomping toward Kat even as she could hear the protests from Deke and Reece.

  “Get in front of the grinder!” Kat
commanded forcefully. She waved urgently as she ran to the front of the machine.

  Her crew simply gawked at her, baffled.

  “The spur is going to explode! Duck in front of the grinder!” she shouted again. She stood near the grinder’s front corner, its discs spinning to a stop.

  Reece broke into a dead run toward her. Deke followed a moment later.

  “George,” Shannon shouted frantically, “skip the cut-off sequence! Get down here!” The woman ran to the cockpit and banged on the cab to get the operator’s attention. “George, get down here now!” she screamed while holding a hand up to him.

  Reece dashed around Kat and dropped to his knees in front of the machine. Deke stumbled in the loose coal but Kat caught his arm and pulled madly. She took three steps back, still dragging Deke, before the world turned on its side.

  Kat’s body viciously slapped the coal wall before she ricocheted back toward the discs of the grinder. She bounced off the 35-ton machine as rocks pelted her and her vision dimmed in a black cloud. She vaguely realized she had let go of Deke’s hand or, perhaps, it had been ripped from her own. While she tumbled to the ground, an ear-piercing explosion thundered down the spur. The tumultuous roar grew louder and louder until a sudden blackness took hold over her senses. Larger and larger rocks dropped onto her body, covering her with a sable death shroud.

  Chapter 25

  Brown eyes opened before instantly closing against the sting of coal dust. Kat tried to move a hand to her face but found it trapped by something heavy. She thought she was on her stomach but was not entirely sure. Her hardhat was still on her head, askew, but her miner’s mask was missing.

  The bomb! she remembered with a gasp. She struggled futilely to push herself off the ground to run. Icy fingers of anxiety closed around her heart as the terror of impending death tried to wrest control of her thoughts. Wait, Kat! The bomb’s already gone off. You’re still alive.

  The aches and pains erupting through her body were testament to life. She again pulled at her hand and this time it moved. She wriggled it from under the avalanche atop her and gradually worked it free. Her fingers reached her eyes to rub the stinging away. Her face was damp. Blood? she wondered. She forced open her eyes and inspected her fingertips in the barest light coming from an unknown source. No, just tears.

  She heard the crunch of gravel and a boot appeared near her face. It kicked up more dust, forcing her to cough. Gloved hands began to pull the weight of larger rocks off her. “Kat? Say something!”

  The voice sounded faint, as if very far away. She was suddenly aware that her ears rang fiercely. “Here,” she said feebly while raising her free hand up.

  A second pair of blackened gloves worked to free her. “I can’t believe you’re alive!” The voice sounded like Deke’s. “You saved my life, Kat!”

  When enough rubble had been moved, two pairs of hands gently turned her over. Reece and Deke were coated in black. Only the whites of their eyes and a crimson line running from Deke’s nose betrayed any hint of humanity as both men knelt beside her. The tunnel was pitch black but for the twin beams of light from their headlamps.

  “George… Shannon?” Kat croaked.

  Reece shook his head sadly. “They didn’t get to the front of the grinder in time. That’s the only thing that saved us.” His rail-thin body rose from Kat and walked over the rock-strewn floor. The light from his headlamp cut a streak of white through the dust-choked air beyond the large machine. “I came to first,” he recounted. “Actually, I don’t think I ever lost consciousness. I huddled right behind the discs and was pretty well-shielded from the blast.” He turned to face Kat, his light blinding her. “Kat, I thought for sure you were dead. It slammed you so hard against the wall I thought it broke every bone in your body. You flopped only a meter from me before the ceiling started coming down.”

  Kat sat up from the ground and assessed her condition. Her body throbbed in a hundred places and her eyes still stung. When she inhaled, she felt pain along the left side of her ribcage. Shallower breathing seemed to help. She probed her ribs through her coveralls. They were very tender but she didn’t feel the stabbing pain of a fracture. “I, I think I’m okay.” Her voice was regaining its strength. She reached up to Reece, who helped her from the ground. To her surprise, she could stand and bear her own weight. She removed her hardhat to inspect it and black hair flowed around her face distractingly. She had lost Shannon’s hair tie.

  “I got knocked out,” Deke said, still kneeling. “One second, you were pulling me behind the grinder and the next, Reece was pulling rocks off me.” He looked up appreciatively. “You saved my life, Kat. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Her hardhat was fractured. A crack started on the left side and ran halfway up the dome. The mask had been ripped clean from the front, leaving only a twisted hinge near the brim. The lamp was unlit and she dropped the hardhat to the ground.

  “How did you know there was going to be a dust explosion, Kat?” Reece asked. He was looking up the spur again.

  Kat recalled the terrifying moments of discovery. “It wasn’t from the dust. I saw a bomb underneath a conveyor section near the junction.”

  “What?” both men exclaimed.

  “Someone planted a bomb in our spur,” Kat repeated.

  The laborers exchanged looks between them. “Are you sure?” Reece asked dubiously.

  Kat nodded. “I know what I saw. Two sticks of that explosive they use to close the played out spurs. It had a timer attached to it. The count was thirty-two seconds. There was a small light that flashed red periodically. That’s what caught my attention.”

  “You’ve just described a timed detonator,” Deke told her. He was pinching his nose, trying to stem the blood flow. “We use them on spurs that are too far in to reliably string a cord to.”

  “That’s crazy,” Reece commented. “Who would want to try and kill us?”

  “Try hell,” Deke responded with disgust. “They’ve probably succeeded. The blast might not have gotten us but we’re going to run out of oxygen long before anyone can reach us.” He gingerly sat back on his bottom and leaned against the grinder. After a deep sigh, he rested his head in his hands. “My leg is killing me.”

  “I haven’t had time to check the tunnel,” Reece stated. “Why don’t you both stay here and I’ll see how far I can get?”

  Kat recovered her hardhat and thumped the lamp. Remarkably, it came to life. “I’ll go with you,” she said while placing it on her head. It fit loosely because of the crack but stayed mostly in place.

  The pair made careful progress up Spur Twenty-nine. The height of the tunnel had been cut in half by the flood of debris on the ground. Many of the conveyor sections were now twisted pieces of art. The rest had been crushed flat. When Kat rounded the slight bend, climbing over the rubble on her hands and knees, she could see the tunnel draw tighter and tighter to the ceiling. Reece and Kat approached the spur’s new end on their stomachs, crawling over and through the rubble for the last twenty meters. She pressed her hand to the collapsed scree blocking their way.

  She looked back to Reece. “How close to the main tunnel do you think we are?” Kat asked. Sweat dripped off her face.

  Reece blew out loudly before answering. “Maybe another twenty, thirty meters.”

  Kat flinched as she inhaled deeply and called out, “Hello? Help!” She felt Reece’s hand shaking her boot.

  “Save your breath, Kat. They know where we were when the ceiling dropped. Once they give the All Clear to reenter the mine, they won’t rest until they’ve broken through,” he stated.

  “How long until they can come back down into the mine?”

  Reece rubbed a thin hand over his pointed, blackened chin. “Depends on the safety guys but they won’t signal All Clear until they’re absolutely sure. At least a few hours, probably longer. They’re doing roll call right now, trying to figure out who’s missing and what happened.” He returned his hand to Kat’s boot and promised, “They wo
n’t give up on digging us out though.”

  “Even if they think we’re dead?”

  “Even if they think we’re dead,” he confirmed. “Which we probably will be.”

  Kat pushed at the boulders in front of her. She stopped and began to pick at them, placing the smaller rocks behind her. “Can we dig ourselves out?”

  “I’m sorry, Kat,” Reece answered sadly. “Not by hand. You can get the small ones but there’ll be rocks that weigh hundreds, maybe thousands of kilos blocking our way.”

  She cocked her head at an awkward angle to shine her beam of light at a narrow gap through the collapsed tunnel. “But it looks like there’s another opening just ahead,” she protested.

  “There probably is but I can promise you that one will be blocked too. And so will the one after that and so on.”

  Kat stubbornly pulled more stones from the wall as dust from the ceiling settled down over her. “But I can almost squeeze to the next cavity.”

  Reece sighed and looked at her with hollow eyes. “If it makes you feel better, you can try. Just don’t bring more of the ceiling down on yourself.” He stared uncertainly at the roof before pushing himself backwards. “I’m gonna go back and check on Deke.”

  Kat spent the next ten minutes clearing enough room around a large boulder in front of her to force her body past the impasse. The ceiling tore at her coveralls and she felt the bite of sharp fragments lash against the fabric to her skin but she urged herself forward. When she broke free, her body slid down the rubble to the larger space beyond the bottleneck. The new opening gave her more room as the gap between the tunnel floor and ceiling expanded to over a meter and a half. She painfully crawled her way forward and toward the left corner of the tunnel. There, a large boulder had come to rest, acting as a support that she could pull herself around.