Love
and Other
Metals
K. P. Redmond
Copyright © K. P. Redmond 2016
The right of K. P. Redmond to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher. No responsibility for loss occasioned to any person or corporate body acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material in this book can be accepted by the Publisher, by the Author, or by the employer( s) of the Author. Certain images copyright.
Redmond, K. P. Love and Other Metals
Contents
PART I: THE VOYAGE
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
PART II: HROTHGAR
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART III: BACK TO SHACKTOWN
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
ABOUT LOVE AND OTHER METALS
PART I: THE VOYAGE
“Something was dead in each of us, and what was dead was Hope.”—Oscar Wilde
“Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone”—Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The roof is surely gonna fall. I cringe at the thought of saying anything—I already know what the reaction’s gonna be. But the rock here is soft. I can feel the weakness through my gloves as my machine drills the roof. It’s going through like a hot knife goes through soft cheese. That’s why their mining machine is working so good today, why the rock is grinding out fast, and ain’t one of them clever enough to ask himself how come we’re moving so fast today?
I watch them out the corner of my eye: they’re grinding, manhandling the conveyor belt, trenching the floor to guide the trickle of water to the collection point. But too fast!
I know a lot of the guys on the crew from high school—I especially remember a couple that ganged up and punched me out a few months back. Why not, everybody else did. But no one ever apologized and I reckon no one ever will. That ain’t the way it goes here. I don’t hang with them, don’t eat with them, and they don’t talk to me neither—unless it’s about work. I steer clear when I can; it’s healthier that way.
I figure I gotta speak up. But I cringe at the thought.
“Excuse me, Mr. Ickes,” I say, punching transmit on my wristy as I walk up to face him. “I’m sorry—I’m doing my level best but I can’t keep up.”
The foreman stops yammering at his boys and faces me. His visor is foggy with his own breath. I can see his pale, wrinkled face and yellowed eyes from behind the transparency, see him struggling to catch his breath, hear his constant phlegmy cough. Decades of dust exposure, a sad souvenir of the early days when the decontamination rules were all loosy-goosy. Big chunks of his lungs are most likely rotted away. And he’s also got that chip on his shoulder—that seething, crotchety anger smoldering just below the surface, so common among the old-timers here. Especially towards me. Ain’t I the lucky one.
“You’re just gonna have to pick it up, Yuuta boy,” he barks. “We ain’t gonna slack off for some Yuuta so he can stand around pickin’ his ass.”
“But my machine won’t go no faster,” I say. “Without the bolts, the roof could collapse.”
“Ah, buncha dust puke crap,” he says. “Roof ain’t gonna fall. Besides, we only got a few more hours before we gotta stop. We meet quota or we all get docked. Even you, rich boy.”
Rich boy. There it is again. Everybody in Shacktown thinks I got a secret fortune stashed away. But Pops didn’t never share squat with me. Wherever he’s gone with the money, it’s just as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else. I’d like to kill him just like they would. More so I reckon. And I will someday if I get the chance, the black-hearted sumbitch. But nobody believes that.
“Look,” I say, “the roof bolter won’t go no faster than I been pushing it. If you ain’t gonna slow down, I’m gonna go back and get some jacks to fill in behind until you stop.”
“Suit yourself boy, but we keep moving,” he says, and spins his arm around to signal his crew to get back at it.
I hoof it over to the tram. I’ll go back to the staging area, load up the bed with roof jacks, and be back within a few minutes. I check my wristy—that son of a billy goat Ickes is right about the time. We’re only allowed to dig during certain hours on account of the ground vibrations blur the images from the Big Scope. It’s agreed that they get certain hours of eyeballing and we get the other hours to dig. The big digging machine that Foreman Ickes and his boys are driving makes a lot of vibration. My roof bolter, not so much. I can follow up later with bolts and take down the jacks after the diggers are done. Of course, that makes my shift longer, but it’s better than a cave-in. I hope Ickes don’t start making a habit of this.
I push the tram’s motor to its max. The long, flat cart lurches forward. It’s pretty bumpy but I gotta go fast just the same. The sooner I get back, the better. I careen through the rocky tunnel, glove gripping the tiller, careful to avoid the sharp-edged walls and the conveyor belt topped with its endless, moving stream of rocks. The shadows on the walls and floor ahead skitter away from the tram’s lights like shy, black ghosts. And everything is veiled behind the always-present dust, which makes the tunnel even spookier. But I’m used to that by now.
The roof above me is peppered with the bolts and plates that my machine and I have screwed in—hundreds of them. And Ickes says I’m lazy. Off to the side of the tunnel is the trench with a precious trickle of water rushing down the incline. That’s what this whole exercise is about: the water.
Malapert has a much better system—they find pockets of water before they dig. They drill directly to underground pockets of the stuff, but we in Shacktown have to guess where the water is and mine for it. Malapert has a gadget that we don’t have, and we can’t get, because they won’t license the tech to us. And they won’t sell us their water. For us, it’s dig or die.
I’m grateful for the work though, because without it I don’t know how I would eat. Things ain’t easy in Shacktown. I cannot wait to leave. I’ll leave Ickes and water mining and the dirty squalor of Shacktown in my past. I been training for the Corps for a whole year; nights and days off, even reviewing material during slack time at work when Ickes and the super weren’t around. And I graduated a few months ago, yay. All I need now is a ship and a berth and I will kiss this piss-pot town goodbye. That’s my plan, anyways. Gotta have something to look forward to or I would go crazy down here.
I come to the pile of jacks I’ve left up near the plug. The plug is a movable rig that seals against the walls and contains three rooms: the dressing room, the airlock, and the decontamination unit. If you enter from the civilized world, you go through the dressing room, where you put on an environment suit, go through the airlock, then go through the decontamination unit. The decon unit spr
ays your suit with a coat of special oil. When you leave the mine, you get the oil dissolved off you in a shower of solvent. Then you go back through the airlock, doff your suit in the dressing room and leave it on a hook to dry until the next day of work. Just watch out when you take the suit off because the solvent stinks. I mean, really bad; it stings your nose and makes your eyes water. So it takes a while to get in and out of the mine but you get used to the routine. At least you’re on the clock.
I jump off the tram and gather jacks fast as I can. They’re big and long but not too heavy. Bulky, mostly. I pile up a couple dozen on the flat bed of the tram, careful not to tear my suit. I take the tiller on the other side. I twist the speed control and off we go, rolling and bumping through the gloom back down to the mine face.
Within a minute I feel a jolt. My seat bumps and I and see a thick, angry cloud of dust rolling in on me from the tunnel ahead. Oh no. My suit radio erupts.
“I’m stuck! Somebody help!” That sounds like Kirk, the leader of the gang that walloped me back in school.
“What the hell!” That one is Ickes because I can hear his gurgle and wheeze between the corners of his words.
I hear more panic, cursing, cries of pain. I’ve already got the tram going as fast as it will go but I twist the handle a little harder anyway. I hit a rushing wall of white pea-soup anthracite dust that I can’t see through. It collects on my visor and the tram’s lights won’t penetrate it. I am blind. I jam on the brakes. For a second I’m not sure what to do. The cries for help keep coming.
A responding call from Emergency Services comes over the radio: they’re on their way. But they won’t get here for at least 20 minutes—they have to get suited up and go through the plug just like everybody else. I jump off the cart, grab a heavy crowbar from the toolbox in back of the seat, and shuffle my feet down through the dust, feeling my way along the rough wall to my left side, wiping my visor to make a clean steak so I can see at least a little.
My helmet lights ain’t doing too good neither, it just makes the opaque cloud glare into my eyes, so I turn it off and continue down the tunnel in near darkness. The only light is a weak yellow flicker coming from a wall lamp about 5 meters back of me. I’m stumbling on loose rocks that I cannot see. I feel my way around them as frenzied pleadings for help squawk from my headset speakers, one after another.
I transmit. “This is Yuuta. I’m coming to you quick as I can. You probably heard that Emergency Services is coming too. Hang on.”
Just then my boot hits another rock. I lose my balance and stumble into the wall. I flail around for something to grab but there ain’t nothing so I fall down onto another big rock. Its sharp edges jam into my ribcage, hard. I gasp from the pain. The wind is knocked out of me. For a few seconds I can’t breathe, and I just have to let the pain wash over me. Eventually I can breathe but every time I do it hurts.
I push myself back to a kneeling position. I check for tears; the suit is OK. Then I stand, wobbly at first, and continue on, holding my aching, bruised ribcage, feeling my way.
My boot hits another rock but this time I don’t fall. I swing the crowbar in front of me. The metal hits something solid. I feel with my gloves to get an idea what’s in front of me. It takes me a few seconds to figure out that the pile of rubble reaches from one side of the tunnel to the other. Ain’t no passage through.
I’ll have to make my own. I switch my headlight back on and start on the right side of the tunnel, pulling rocks from the pile, one by one, and toss them to my left. Some boulders are half as big as I am. Their size makes them hard to manage, but I slowly make a dent in the wall. The crowbar helps with rocks that are hard-jammed in. Sweat streaks down my face inside the helmet, stinging my eyes.
There’s a tap on my shoulder. “You must be Yuuta,” says the voice in my headset.
I sweep my glove over my visor to make a clean path and look at the cluster of suited figures behind me. Emergency responders. “Yup, that’s affirm, I’m Yuuta. They’re on the other side of this pile,” I say.
“OK,” he says, “You’ve done what you can do. We need you to clear out now. In these conditions you’ll only be in the way. We’ve got equipment that will open this up.”
“Roger that, I’m out of here. Good luck,” I say.
I hoof it all the way back, finding the tram where I parked it, but leaving it there; the visibility this far back is still too bad to drive. I feel along the wall and walk until I’m back at the plug. I go through the solvent shower and stand in the airlock, dripping, until the chamber is pressurized. I open the hatch to the dressing room.
The superintendent is in the room, putting on his suit as I start pulling mine off. He’s a tall, red-faced man with bushy eyebrows and a tendency towards drama. He pauses, helmet under his arm. “What happened, Straker?” he asks.
I pull off my helmet and sip from a paper cup full of water before speaking. The vapor from the solvent always dries out my throat. “There’s been a cave-in,” I say between gulps. “It’s pretty bad. I think some of the crew are hurt. The guys from Emergency Services are working their way through the rubble now.”
“How did that happen, Straker?” he asks, his eyebrows low over his narrowed eyes.
“Roof fell, I think,” I say. “I was working as fast as I could. Ickes and his men were digging faster than I could bolt.”
“Why weren’t you with them then?”
“I…wait a minute, this was not my fault! I told Ickes to slow down but he wouldn’t. I came back to get some jacks to shore up behind him. The roof caved in when I was on my way back to the face.”
“So you left them there? You left your machine, with the roof unbolted behind the crew?”
“Well, yea, but it was the best I could do! I can put up temporary jacks faster than I can bolt. I was gonna finish up the bolting after he stopped.”
The super shakes his head and frowns. “Yuuta, you’re fired. You can’t just leave the machine while a crew is digging. That was completely irresponsible. Get your stuff and get out.”
“What? You’ve gotta be hosing me!”
“You think I’m gonna take your word for it?” he says, one hand on his hip, the other shaking a finger in my face. “Last time I trusted someone named Yuuta I was out ten thousand coin. Now get out. Out!”
With a final red-eyed glare, he pushes on his helmet, climbs into the airlock and slams the hatch shut behind him. I sit there, on a bench in the dressing room, my head in my hands, surrounded by empty staring helmets and flaccid suits and stinking air, feeling the rage build inside me.
I can’t believe this. I know life is unfair; I’ve known that for a long, long time. But my gut wants something more. My gut wants an even break. Is that asking too much? Really, is that asking too much?
I pull off my suit and put on my regular clothes. I leave my enviro suit laying on the floor—let somebody else pick it up. I look around at all the other suits hanging from the wall, each with the name of a crewperson bonded to the chest, the wrists and ankles tied off to keep the stinkroaches out. The empty helmets gawk at me in judging disapproval.
I yank them down, every helmet and every last suit; I yank them all down to a pile on the floor and then kick the nasty contents of the trashcan onto the pile for good measure. A half-dozen greasy stinkroaches scurry for cover. Somebody else can pick that up too.
I leave the room, slamming the door behind me. I tramp up the rocky slope, passing the security doors and entering the wide main tunnel. The thrumming of heavy machinery recedes behind me as I trudge forward through a main, wide tunnel. The sign on the wall says ‘Corridor C’. Emergency personnel are still running in from the other end of Corr C but I don’t turn my head as they pass.
I only think about my own anger, walking hard and fast to bleed it away. I catch the moving sidewalk in stride and continue walking. I make my way through the meandering tunnel with its ventilation ducts, pipes, and electrical conduit bolted to the rock. It’s colder here—I fasten
the top snap of my coveralls when I start seeing my breath. There are the kiosks selling everything from pastries to homemade tools, with grim-faced people walking in the both directions, wordlessly shoving past one another unless they’re arguing about something. A scrawny rooster cautiously picks his path through the crowd, hoping for a snack.
The only relief from the dismal scenery are the colorful murals on the walls; something I’ve grown accustomed to and usually fail to appreciate. School children over the years have painted them to add color and life to their otherwise bleak world. Much of it is just graffiti, but some of the murals are halfway decent, depicting families walking outside, breathing free air, surrounded by trees and birds and animals; sometimes with forest animals but often featuring cats and dogs.
We see none of those things here. The murals are all imaginings from videos and pictures the children have seen. I pass the Cesar Chavez entrance to the farm tunnels, where people queue up to get a glimpse of the goats and sheep. They don’t let folks see the rabbits no more—too dangerous. Further on I pass the environmental plant, where water is purified and made into air, then come to the recreation areas where kids play tunnel soccer and roller skate.
Markets for clothing, food, tools, computer equipment, specialty water. An old woman squatting on a blanket, onto which she has spread a few dozen pair of shoes and trinkets and worn-out wristies, hoping something will sell. A couple of boys arguing about something.
I wonder if there’s going to be a fight, consider sticking around to watch, but keep walking. I get off on the stop near the Blisters & Blood saloon. It’s where I usually snag my meals instead of a cafeteria. Their menu ain’t much and the water is cloudy, but it’s a good place to be alone.
I push past the double swinging doors and past the little stage where the local bands play. But not now, it’s much too early and the place is nearly empty, just a couple of guys and a woman sitting at tables, wolfing down chow before their shifts. I take a seat at the bar. The lights are low. The place stinks of whisky and frying oil.
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