A Hole in the Sky

by William C. Dietz

  Capelli’s first shot was hurried. It nicked the man’s shoulder, and produced a puff of aerosolized blood, but failed to bring him down. Capelli was worried lest the man shoot Rowdy, but he forced himself to concentrate, and fired again. The second projectile was dead-on. The would-be thief staggered, appeared to lose his balance, and collapsed.

  It had been a brief but bloody battle, and as Capelli stood there in what should have been a peaceful wheat field, the scene had a surreal quality. “Damn,” Locke said, as he arrived. “You’re good.”

  That’s true, the voice said mockingly. You are good. At killing people.

  Capelli felt the usual post-combat tremors, as a surfeit of adrenaline coursed through his circulatory system, and he sought to hide them. “We need to check each body, strip it of anything that has value, and get the hell out of here.”

  It was clear that Locke didn’t want to deal with the bodies, but he understood the need to do so, and followed along behind as Capelli went from corpse to corpse. And it turned out that the third one, the thief he’d shot immediately after emerging from under the bridge, was a woman. That didn’t surprise Capelli, but his client was shocked. “That’s her!”

  “That’s who?”

  “The woman I gave the coin to. The one with the sick baby.”

  Capelli nodded expressionlessly. “That comes under rule six.”

  “Which is?”

  “Mind your own business. Search her pockets! See if you can find the coin.”

  Locke knelt, and it took him less than a minute to find what he was looking for. He shook his head as he slipped the gold piece into a pocket and stood. “This world sucks.”

  “Tell me about it,” Capelli said, and that was when Rowdy began to bark. Capelli turned towards the highway, raised the Marksman, and looked through the telescopic sight. “Shit.”

  Locke squinted into the afternoon sun but couldn’t see anything. “What is it?”

  “Stinks, at least a dozen of them, all coming on strong.”

  “After us?”

  “No, not originally. I think they were following the people who were planning to rob us,” Capelli said as he eyed the oncoming mass. There were Hybrids, a couple of Steelheads, and an eleven-foot-tall Ravager. “But now they’re after us,” he added. “Or will be in a couple of minutes.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Locke inquired nervously.

  Capelli lowered the rifle and turned back towards the bridge. “We’re going to grab our gear and run like hell.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  GOOD AS GOLD

  Saturday, September 26, 1953

  The Lucky Buckle Mine near Idaho Springs, Colorado

  Colorado State female inmate 26301 was in a lateral, working to shore up a section of Tunnel Five, when the rock under her boots trembled. Bits of rock rattled as they rained down on her helmet, a column of particulate matter shot up out of a ventilation shaft located ten feet behind her, and dust swirled through the beam projected from her headlamp.

  The inmate’s name was Susan Farley. Her heart skipped a beat as she waited for the next tremor and the sudden blackness, as tons of granite crushed the life out of her. Then the moment was past. The people around her began to cough and Mary Howe said what everyone else was thinking. “That felt like it was directly below us. It’s my guess that Tunnel Four collapsed.”

  That was Susan’s theory as well, and if it was true, then the inmates working immediately below were in big trouble. She turned to look at Red Cooper. The middle-aged guard was of medium height, with carrot-colored hair and a face like an Idaho spud. His double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun was aimed upwards as if the weapon could defend him from the possibility of a rockfall. “How ’bout it, Boss Cooper?” Susan inquired. “Should we check on the people in T-4?”

  Cooper glanced at her. His face looked pale in the glare from her light. Tiny dots of perspiration populated his forehead. It was easy to see that the guard was frightened and trying to hide it. “Yeah, sure,” he said hoarsely. “Take Howe and go down for a look-see. The rest of you can get back to work. This ain’t no tea party.”

  As the guard who was closest to the cave-in, it was Cooper’s responsibility to go down and check on the crew himself. But it was relatively safe where he was and it looked like Cooper had plans to stay.

  Susan followed shiny narrow-gauge railroad tracks back to Shaft Three. The wooden platform was where the crew had left it an hour earlier. The elevator was large enough to handle a single ore car and powered by the generator on the first level. Immediately after the levers were pulled, the cage dropped three inches before coming to a momentary halt. That was followed by a loud clanking noise and the squeal of an unoiled pulley as the elevator began to descend. If the cable broke, or something went wrong with the machinery that controlled the lift, both women would plunge to their deaths. It wasn’t where either one of them was supposed to be.

  The inmates had been housed in a standard prison facility near Canon City before the Chimera swept into Colorado, the state government collapsed, and everything went to hell in a handcart. That was when Susan and her fellow inmates had been transferred to the Lucky Buckle Mine, where the sentence “twenty-five years at hard labor” took on new meaning. Because the existence that Susan and the other prisoners had been subjected to was more like slavery than a prison sentence. Especially since it was pretty clear that whatever gold the mine produced was going to Warden Brewster and his guards rather than the citizens of Colorado.

  Susan saw a white line flash through the blob of light projected from her headlamp and pulled on the cable brake. It took a considerable amount of muscle to stop the elevator, but Susan was a lot stronger than she had been months earlier, and brought the box to a stop.

  Howe was a short, stocky woman of thirty-three. She’d been sent to prison for beating her husband senseless with his own whiskey bottle. Nobody messed with her. She slid the safety gate out of the way, entered Tunnel Four, and sent the light from her headlamp skipping ahead. Susan came up to join her, and the two women followed the shiny tracks back into the darkness. They hadn’t traveled more than a hundred feet when they found the cave-in.

  As Susan’s light played across the jumble of granite, she could see the glitter of quartz crystals and the lengths of shattered timber that stuck out of the pile like the ends of broken bones. She knew some of them dated back to the early 1930s, when the upper laterals had been driven deep into the mountainside. So was that it? Were some half-rotted supports responsible for the rockfall? Yes, that was the way it appeared, although there was no way to be sure.

  The rubble was head-high, but Susan could see what looked like a gap at the top, so she crawled over chunks of rock in order to get closer. “This is Susan Farley,” she announced. “Can anyone hear me?”

  “Farley?” a distant voice answered. “This is Mundy. Boss Atkins is dead. Johnson has a broken leg, and Liddy is unconscious. Her pulse is weak—and I’m worried about her. Can you dig us out?”

  “I don’t know,” Susan replied uncertainly. “We’re about a hundred feet in. How far back are you?”

  Susan heard the characteristic clatter of loose rock, and suddenly the other woman’s grimy face was there, peering through a small hole. “Another fifteen feet or so.”

  “That’s a lot of rock to clear,” Susan observed doubtfully. “And we’ll have to put up new support beams as we go. That’ll take two or three days at least.”

  “I don’t think Liddy will survive that long.”

  “Okay, hang tough. There might be a faster way to get the crew out of there, but I’ll have to get an okay from Boss Cooper. And you know that chickenshit bastard. He’ll want to check with the warden. You’ve got air. What else do you need?”

  “A first-aid kit and more water.”

  “Howe can work on that while I go up and talk to Cooper.”

  “Thanks, Farley, we won’t forget.”

  Susan’s mind raced as she returned to the elev
ator, stepped aboard, and closed the gate behind her. There was a sudden jerk, followed by the usual clanking sounds, as the pawls were engaged and the cage rose.

  Her idea was to drop a rope down through the ventilation shaft that connected Tunnel Five with Tunnel Four. The vertical passageway was narrow. Very narrow. But most, if not all, of the women were smaller than the average man. So the logic was there. But would that be enough? It was difficult to predict how Warden Brewster would react, because his decisions were almost always based on what was good for him, and Tunnel Four hadn’t been all that productive of late. So if forced to choose between spending hundreds of woman hours clearing a played-out lateral and removing gold-bearing rock from Tunnel Five, the heartless sonofabitch might go with the second option. Leaving the crew in Tunnel Four to die.

  It wouldn’t be the first time. Four months earlier, after the bottom of the shaft that served Tunnel Three caved in, Brewster had left the crew in the lateral above to starve rather than invest the time and energy necessary to repair the elevator. All of which was on Susan’s mind as she left the lift and went looking for Boss Cooper.

  After listening to her plan, he frowned. “I don’t know,” the guard said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “Your idea might work—but we’d better check with the warden.”

  “Yes, sir,” Susan said evenly. Well, you’re predictable if nothing else, she thought to herself.

  It took nearly twenty minutes of precious time to reach the lowest level, or “main” as the prisoners referred to the large tunnel, and follow the tracks back to Shaft One. Most of the mine had a fairly reliable source of electricity thanks to the Cummins V12 diesel generator positioned near the main entrance. A long string of lights dispelled the gloom as they made their way down the corridor to Shaft One.

  Then they had to summon the cage again and ride it up a level to the played-out lateral, where a pair of armed guards were waiting to receive them. Their job was to protect Brewster from the inmates, his own correctional officers should they decide to turn on him, and any Chimera who might find their way into the mine.

  Cooper had to surrender his shotgun, and consent to a cursory pat-down, but that was nothing compared to what Susan was forced to endure. She was ordered to lock her hands behind her neck and spread her feet, so the guards could search for weapons. Not that squeezing her breasts and rubbing her crotch had anything to do with keeping Brewster safe.

  Like the rest of the women in the Lucky Buckle Mine, Susan had been forced to endure the humiliating process many times before, and it never got easier. She kept her eyes forward, gritted her teeth, and tried to ignore Pete Pardo’s rank body odor as he pawed her body and nuzzled a cheek. “Uh-oh,” Pardo said, “this one is carrying concealed weapons. Two of ’em!”

  It was an old joke, but Tom Olson never got tired of it, and laughed appreciatively. “You’d better let me check ’em out, Pete. Who knows? Maybe you’re wrong.”

  And so it went until both men had groped Susan more than once and Cooper chose to intervene. “Save some for later, fellas. We’ve got a collapse in Tunnel Four—and Atkins is dead.”

  He didn’t mention the women, injured or otherwise, but Susan didn’t expect him to. “Dead?” Pardo demanded incredulously. “He owed me half a box of .22s. The bastard.”

  “You’d better get going,” Olson put in. Now that the guard knew about the cave-in, he was worried about how Brewster would react if the twosome were delayed.

  Susan was ordered to enter the tunnel and Pardo gave her a pat on the fanny as she walked past. A line of dangling lightbulbs led her back to the natural cave where Brewster’s quarters were located. Susan felt the usual sense of fear as she brushed between a pair of makeshift curtains and entered what she thought of as “the lair.” A fitting analogy: Brewster was a beast, and he lived in a cave.

  The relatively narrow entrance opened up into an irregularly shaped chamber that was about thirty feet long and twenty wide. The rocky floor was covered with overlapping mismatched rugs. The main furnishings consisted of a black potbellied stove, an imposing desk, and an enormous bed.

  At the moment, a prisoner named Corly Posner was sitting on it with her back resting against the mahogany headboard. She was painting her toenails red, and when she looked up, the puffy black eye was plain to see. Though servicing Brewster had its privileges, not the least of which was escaping the sort of fate that had befallen the women in Tunnel Four, it had its risks as well. The warden’s temper being one of them.

  Susan’s thoughts were interrupted as a Hudson’s Bay blanket was thrown aside and Brewster entered the cavern. He was wearing a waist-length leather jacket, khaki pants, and a pair of hiking boots. After placing his Fareye rifle in a rack alongside some other weapons, Brewster removed his jacket and turned to face his visitors. He had dark eyes, a formidable nose, and had chosen to shave his head rather than wear a halo of hair. “Aren’t you supposed to be up in Tunnel Five?” Brewster demanded, as he eyed Cooper.

  Cooper’s feet shifted nervously. “Tunnel Four collapsed, sir. Atkins was killed—and what’s left of the crew is trapped.”

  Brewster circled the desk and sat in a thronelike chair. “Okay,” he said calmly. “That explains your presence. Why bring her along?”

  Cooper’s eyes flicked towards Susan and back again. “Inmate Farley believes there’s a way to rescue the crew in Tunnel Four in a matter of hours rather than days.”

  “So rather than steal the idea, and claim credit for it, you brought her along to take the blame if I think it’s stupid.”

  Cooper seemed to wilt under Brewster’s unblinking stare. “I thought she should have an opportunity to speak for herself,” he said lamely.

  The warden laughed contemptuously as his eyes shifted to Susan. She felt as if his gaze were stripping her clothes off. “So, Inmate Farley, let’s hear this idea of yours.”

  Susan swallowed the lump in the back of her throat and tried to muster more saliva. Then, careful to keep her sentences short, she told Brewster how the ventilation shaft could be used in a rescue effort. He toyed with an ivory letter opener while she spoke—and nodded when she was through.

  “Short and to the point. I like that,” Brewster said, as he studied her. “Some women don’t know when to keep their mouths closed.”

  Susan saw Corly flinch out of the corner of her eye. “It’s hard to know for sure,” Brewster continued conversationally, “but I have a suspicion that you might look pretty good without those overalls. Or anything at all, for that matter.

  “So here’s what I want you to do. Accompany Boss Cooper back to Tunnel Five, pull the crew out of Tunnel Four, and report to me. Oh, and one other thing.”

  By that time Susan was scared, and sorry she had put her idea forward. What had begun as an attempt to help some fellow inmates had turned into a nightmare. “Sir?”

  Brewster jerked his head in Corly’s direction. “Take that piece of shit with you.”

  More than two hours had elapsed since the cave-in by the time a tripod was set up over the ventilation shaft and Susan was lowered down through the narrow chimney that connected Tunnel Five with Tunnel Four. She used a claw hammer to bang away at the worst obstructions as the beam produced by her headlamp played across the glittering surface in front of her.

  Then she arrived in a circle of light, where three anxious women were waiting to receive her. Mundy’s face was smeared with dirt. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Farley. We owe you.”

  “You’d do the same,” Susan replied, and wondered if it was true. “How’s Liddy?”

  The other woman shook her head. “She stopped breathing. We couldn’t bring her back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said soberly.

  “Yeah, we all are,” Mundy replied. “We’ve got a splint on Johnson’s leg. We’ll send her up first.”

  They spent the next hour piling rocks over and around Liddy’s body while a succession of women were winched through the shaft to the lateral above. Finall
y it was Susan’s turn. Her body twirled gently as the rope pulled her upwards. Eager hands were waiting to pluck her out of the hole and unbuckle the harness. A boss named Riley had arrived to take charge. Cooper couldn’t meet her eyes. “Let’s go, Farley! It’s time to get cleaned up. The warden is waiting for you.”

  “Yeah,” Riley put in, as he grinned lasciviously. “Brewster wants to thank you in a very special way!”

  Cooper didn’t laugh, but a couple of the women did, which showed how hard some of them had become. Susan was following Cooper towards the elevator when a hand touched her arm. As Susan turned, her light came around to illuminate Corly’s battered face. She blinked.

  “Farley?”

  Susan paused. “Yes?”

  “Be careful. He’s mean.”

  “Why did he hit you?”

  Corly looked away. Tears cut tracks through the dirt on her face. “I told him that I’m pregnant.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said softly. “But I have some good news for you.”

  Corly wiped her nose with the back of a wrist. “Really? What’s that?”

  “Brewster is going to die.”

  Corly might have spoken, might have asked how, but Susan was gone by then.

  It took Susan about an hour to finish a lukewarm shower, fix her hair as best she could, and apply some color to her cheeks and lips with a borrowed lipstick. Then, certain in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be back, she made her way through the sparsely furnished dormitory. The workday was over, so the other inmates were present, and all of them knew where she was going. Most of the women pitied her. A few no doubt thought she was a slut. Some even envied her, absurd though that clearly was.

  But Susan’s thoughts were elsewhere. She wasn’t sure exactly when the decision to kill Brewster had been made. The last time she was groped? When she saw Corly’s black eye? It hardly mattered. What did matter was to do the job quickly. Always take your first opportunity. Odds are there won’t be a second one.