by Anthology
Monday morning we ran the idea by Snodgrass. I did most of the talking, selling Snodgrass on the strike of the seam and fossil unconformities while Zan backed me up on the finer points of geology. I finished off our argument with the "gut feeling" approach. Snodgrass, eyes narrowed, looked at the two of us without speaking. I liked to think he saw a streak of the old wildcatter he used to see in himself. It was the kind of thinking that drove his generation to make dynamite out of fertilizer and blast away at hills while hiding under pickup trucks.
"We'll see," was all he said, but while Zan and I worked nearby, he and Johnny did a test bore to the depth Zan had suggested. Thirty feet was an understatement.
It was deep, it was thick, and it was perfect. We had to go and rent a longer bore bit to find out how thick it really was. The coal was high sulphur, as was all west Kentucky coal, but also high BTU. In fact, this coal was so high in heat output that the Paradise power plant bought every ton we could produce on spec. We got new equipment. Me and Zan got bonuses. We thought things could only get better. That's rapid change for you.
By the end of March the Lindsey mine looked like a crater on the moon, as we bore into the giant orb of coal that hid at the bottom. Long, hastily constructed, earthen ramps spider-webbed the grey shale walls where endless streams of dump trucks carried overburden to the rim that now made up the horizon line in all directions. On the lip of the pit a whole army of yellow earth moving equipment waited, looking like dinosaurs posed into a strange tableau. Snodgrass had not revealed the true dimensions of the seam to anyone, and asked us to keep quiet as he signed over our bonuses. "I don't want to get a bunch of Frankfort busybodies down here. Regulators ran me out the first time around. Longer we can pull this out of the ground without anybody getting too interested the better."
Nobody came to see it. Nobody came to study it, and we just kept on digging.
The spring thaw held off until April, then came a kind of half-assed spring that doesn't clean the winter out of your pipes and leaves you feeling stung until August. It was the first chill week of April that we found the bones. I was on the loader trying to dump a shovel load into the dump truck. I knew Zan had kicked the dozer engine off because the endless, bone jarring vibration that surrounded me shifted pitch, causing a tickling in my inner ear and nostrils. I dumped the load and locked the break, turning to see what had happened. I thought it would be a split hydraulic hose, maybe empty of diesel. Instead I saw Zan crouched down in front of the dozer pouring out his soft drink and wiping the liquid around with a blue grease rag. I radioed the driver of the dump truck to hold on, and climbed down from the end-loader to go and see what was going on. As I got close I saw what had stopped him.
In a long arc, running at a shallow radius across the entire layer of coal we had just exposed were hundreds of fossils. Not ferns, nor small lung fish that miners saw with regularity, but giant four-legged monstrosities, eight- and ten-feet long. Their legs were short, a foot long or so. The rear legs had elongated toes and on many of the skeletons I could discern the faint trace of webbing between them. The front legs had shorter, more rotund feet that were tipped in tiny sharp nails. The tail was also short with large protrusions on the individual vertebrae. The heads were shark-like, torpedo shaped with rows of jagged, needle-like teeth turned back at an angle.
"What the hell are these?" I asked Zan.
"I have no clue. I have never seen anything like this. Not in here, not in the upper carboniferous."
"Are fossils usually laid out in circles?" I asked.
"No." He looked at the arc of bones that disappeared into the cut and his eyes continued to move around the crater of the mine. "This circle goes around the entire seam. I bet there are more of them further in too."
"We should stop and call up to Western. I bet they'll send a scientist down. You'll be famous."
He turned to me. His face serious and pale. "No I won't. When some guy uncovers a bone in his backyard the history books don't give him credit. They give credit to the scientist who first identified the bone. They say 'so and so' discovered 'such and such' after some bumpkin found it. I'll be known as 'the coal miner,' that's all." He crouched back over the skeletons. "No, I'm going to do this. There ain't no reason to call Western. We'll work the higher seam for awhile then after work I'll come back here and dig some of these out. Promise you won't tell nobody."
I promised. Now that I think back on it, that is when my life really ended.
We worked the higher seams during the day. The ultra rich coal coming out by the hundred-ton load to go to the Paradise furnace. In the evening, after everyone knocked off, Zan would go to the lower seam and excavate bones.
"It's a perfect circle of remains," he told me one evening while having a beer on my porch, "Every skeleton is facing the same direction too. They are all pointing to the middle of the coal deposit. It's like nothing anybody's ever seen. It's like thousands of animals came to this one place and died, one on top of the other. I don't know what kind of animals they were. I can't find any examples of anything like them online."
As the days wore on, Zan began to look worse and worse. I noticed that the lower excavation was also growing. One night I swung down by the mine and saw the lights of Zan's dozer in the pit as he cut further into the seam. It was one in the morning.
"You're going to get your ass fired." I said the next day.
"No way." he replied, "I discovered the damn seam. Snodgrass wouldn't do shit to me. Ten minutes stripping pays for the diesel I use. Anyway, I've discovered something you should see."
After work I went with him to the excavation site and what I beheld took my breath away. Zan had indeed gone further in toward the middle of the crater. The track he had cut was now only about one-hundred feet from the center. The bones were there too. It was apparent that they were arranged, not in a circle around the crater, but in a disk, a complete disk of fossils that covered the entire seam at that level. They did not seem to occur beneath that disk nor above it, and every single skeleton was oriented toward the center. The only change in the bones was the bones themselves. The skeletons closest to the middle looked nothing like the ones that had been uncovered at the perimeter.
"Look at the head!" Zan exclaimed, as he dusted off a particularly large specimen nearly twelve feet long. This head wasn't a torpedo, but was anvil shaped. Its jaws extended two feet to each side and were filled with regular, three-inch-long teeth. "And look at the feet," he said, pointing to the back feet. The webs were gone. The toes on the rear appendages now had three joints and looked nimble and dangerous, tipped with wicked claws. "If I walk back to the edge of the fossil bed I can see the feet change. Thirty feet back the last of the webbing disappears. The jaws start extending to the anvil shape you see here at about fifty feet back. These are the same animals we found at the edge. It's like they are evolving right in front of our eyes!" He seemed manic, jittery. If I hadn't known better I would have thought he had taken up a meth habit.
"Listen, Zan, I'm worried about you," I said, crouching down beside him. "You're doing all right. Maybe you should take a few days off. Say you got the flu or something. I can keep this safe."
He turned toward me, his face frantic and contorted with fear. "No! No, no, no! I am getting close to something here. Something big. It's in the middle. Something is in the middle. Something big. I'm going to find it. I'm going to get out of this shit-hole once and for all! So either help me or leave me alone!"
What was I supposed to do? I helped him. That night I came back to the mine and found him on the dozer, gingerly pealing away at the fossil shelf, working toward the center. When I got out of the truck and went to fire up the loader, he waved to me, nothing more. As the night wore on we worked the layer of overburden, pulling out the priceless tons of coal and pushing them aside as if they were so much shale. About four hours into the dig Zan climbed down from the dozer and began to dig with a shovel, uncovering the fossils that lay not forty feet from the middle of the pit. H
e waved to me and I came down, leaving the loader running.
"Look at this." He called out over the competing roar of the diesel engines, his breath coming out in great, ghostly torrents of steam in the chill air. He pushed aside the black, crumbling coal with a booted food to reveal the latest skull.
I have to confess that at first I didn't recognize what it was I was looking at. I didn't see a skull, or even a thing produced by a natural process. There was too much order to it to be a thing of random creation, but there was nothing in the form that suggested a linear or sensible derivation from understandable life. I can say, however, that the first thing I recognized, were teeth. Hundreds of them, of all sizes, jutting out at obscene angles from what must once have been four distinct shelves of a mouth. They interlocked and ground into one another in a manner that must have insured a life of constant gnashing and pain. The only consistency in the mass was that every tooth was uniformly sharp and terrible. It would seem the evil god that had spawned this abomination could not find a design more awful than the predator's tooth, and so made it more dreadful by forcing it to hurt the predator as much as the prey.
"What the hell is that thing?" I was shaking as I spoke and it was not from the cold.
"Those are holes for the eyes." He sounded like a child discovering the mechanics of some simple device for the first time: this is how a bicycle works; this is how a skateboard rolls; this is how an animal fits fifteen eyeballs into its head.
He jumped up from the wretched thing and climbed back onto the dozer, roaring up the engine. I was glued to my spot, beholding the bones in the dead lights of the dozer's halogens. Zan called down to me, "Come on, we're going to see what these things were looking at. He plowed the dozer toward the center of the crater, unconcerned for the fossil bed he had gone to such great lengths to protect until then. The tracks of the giant Cat twisted and shattered the skeletons as Zan charged hard into the remaining overburden. I stumbled over to the loader, dreading the act with every halting step. I know I could not have stopped him even if I'd wanted to.
Zan charged into the remaining feet of cover. Black dust boils rose in the lights, and cracks rang out as the coal seam splintered in the petroleum-powered onslaught. Then I heard the ear shattering ping of steel breaking. The dozer's engine went dead and I watched Zan leap from the cab and run around the front of the machine. I killed the loader and climbed down, not sure if I wanted to know what had happened. As I came around the dozer I found Zan looking down at the base of the dozer's blade. Two of the inch-thick steel teeth that lined the bottom of the blade were cleanly broken off, rent back under the blade by the terrible pressure of the Cat's unrelenting drive.
"What the hell did that?" I asked. We might be able to hide the fact that we're using up fuel, but two teeth busted on a new dozer was going to be trouble. "Shit. We're going to have to weld those on before Monday or it's going to be our ass. What did you hit?"
Zan dusted off the black ground the teeth had apparently struck. He spat and, using his shirt sleeve, rubbed the spit on the patch of ground. It quickly took on a reflective, even luminous quality like black glass.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It looks like obsidian, but that would never have broken steel teeth." He dusted around the broken steel and withdrew a six-inch-long shard of the glassy material, sharp and dagger-like. "I'm going to see what I can figure out about this stuff."
We decided to knock off. It was four in the morning and even though we weren't working on Sundays anymore, I knew my wife would skin me for staying out so late. It was freezing outside and Zan was on his motorcycle so I offered him a ride. We loaded the bike into the back of the truck and set off down the road.
We pulled out of the mine's gravel access road and out onto the deserted Highway 70. "What do you think all that shit is?" I asked, trying to keep fear out of my voice as best I could.
Zan's voice was calm, reserved in a way it had not been for days. "Do you know much about the Pennsylvanian age?"
"It's full of coal. I know that. Bowling Green is Mississippian, at Hadley Hill you climb up into Pennsylvanian."
"Yeah, well back during the Pennsylvanian age all this was a great big swamp. I mean really big. The Appalachians were bigger than the Himalayas, and all the moisture got trapped on this side making one giant swamp at the edge of a hot shallow sea. All that shit died and sank and became coal, all the trees and ferns and fishes. But something happened then. Nobody knows why, but everything died. Every fish and fern and tree. All of it. Scientist think it was a meteor."
"Oh, yeah. Off the coast of Mexico. Killed all the dinosaurs. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. That show about the T. rex."
"No. That was millions of years later. That was a meteor, and it killed like, sixty percent of the world's species. The extinction that I'm talking about was bigger, and they're not certain that it was a meteor at all. There is no evidence it was, and this extinction took out over ninety percent of the species. The dinosaurs first appeared a few million years later. Plants started bearing seeds, shit started running on two legs. Everything that survived the extinction got a lot meaner and they got meaner really fast. It was like all of a sudden a whole bunch of pressure was put on every living thing. The ones that survived did so because they could run, or hide, or have lots of babies."
"What are you saying?" I asked.
"What if it wasn't a meteor, or volcanoes changing the climate that made everything die? What if it was some new species, or old species that changed real fast and had the edge all of the sudden? Not in a million years where everything could get used to it, but in just a few thousand years, or even a few hundred. What if something was changing the animals that came near it, like a virus, or some sort of mutation? What if all those bones were the generations of some new super-predator that got, I don't know, changed, and then started killing off all the other species that were just too weak to compete?"
I didn't have an answer. I dropped Zan off at his house, then drove home, an uncomfortable pit of anxiety in my gut.
That night I dreamt of swamps, great reeking swamps floating on miles of hot, rotting filth. I dreamt that deep, deep down the rottenness beat like a heart, slowly rising up until it bubbled onto the surface, a vast black pool of vile contamination. I heard the screams of the tiny, unfortunate amphibians as the black pool engulfed them. And I heard them change. I heard it. It was the sound of bones breaking, of skin splitting. It was the noise of an incomprehensible power, ancient even in infancy, a remnant sound from the bridging of the gulf between a dead universe and bloody, fecund life.
I was roused from sleep by the gasp of my wife. I didn't need to open my eyes to know something was very wrong. In fact, I couldn't open my eyes. Pain came on quickly and did not stop.
"What the hell is wrong with me?" I cried.
"Your face is...is...it's cooked!"
I knew what she meant. It was the pain of twelve hours in the sun, of scalding water poured on the arm. From my neck to my forehead the skin was tight and throbbing. Every time I tried to speak I felt it crack, sending jolts of misery into the core of my brain.
The ER doctor questioned me for an hour. He all but accused me of botching a batch of meth. When I continued to deny any drug activity he threw up his hands. "Well, have you been exposed to any radioactive material?" No, no of course not.
I had to have my wife dial the phone and hold it to my ear. My hands were wrapped in gauze. My face was covered in a mask of thick, white cream. I could smell the blisters festering on my skin. The phone rang until the answering machine picked up. "This is Zan, leave a message or don't."
"Hang it up." I told her. She was convinced I was cooking meth with Zan, and no amount of pleading would convince her to give me a ride to his house. With no other option left, I called the sheriff's office. Two hours later a white police car pulled up into my drive.
"We didn't find Zan. Something got his dog though. Poor thing got tore to pieces. His house was trashed, but
it didn't seem like anything was missing. Just a bunch of food everywhere and the tub was full of black water." Even through my half closed eyes I could see that the deputy was suspicious. I looked every bit like a victim of mishandled anhydrous ammonia, and it must have seemed like I was trying to use the police in some sort of backfired drug burn. "You mind if I have a look around?"
"Go ahead," I muttered through split lips, hearing the skin around my mouth crackle with the words. He poked around the yard and shed for several minutes then returned.
"Well, if he ain't turned up by this time tomorrow his family can file a report." He was halfway out the door when he stopped and turned back to me, "You sure you and him ain't been into nothing?"
I didn't bother replying.
It rained hard that night and into the next day, and the day after that. Snodgrass called to see how I was and to tell me that the walls of the coal pit had collapsed in the rain and work would be halted in the bottom seams until they could get the water and mud out. Zan's father filed a report. Zan stayed missing.
By the end of the week the bandages were removed and my face no longer caused people to look away. Now they only winced. I got the call at around noon.
Mr. Snodgrass sounded tired, shaky as he said hello. "How you doin' boy?"
"Fine, Mr. Snodgrass. I'm a whole lot better."
"Good, that's real good. I got some bad news for you. Seems Owen and B.J. had an accident. Well, they um, they're dead. Ain't no mincing words here. I ain't got any operators worth a damn and Monday we are going to be hitting the seam hard. I know Zan was your friend, but the kid's gone AWOL and I need all the help I can get. What are the odds of getting you onsite Monday morning? You ain't got to operate, just keep an eye on the new ones, make sure they ain't screwing around."