The procession behind them didn’t leave much room for any talking once they arrived. As people started filing out of their cars, once the doors were all shut, and the feet stilled, a quiet came over the place that was eerie but right. It was right that no one said a thing.
When they started toward the houses, Wayne was the one to warn, “Careful, folks, those boards in there are probably rotted through.”
Not one person paid him any mind as they went to the doorways and started peering inside. Hands were held, tears were shed, but no words were spoken for a long time as everyone looked into the homes of people who’d been made slaves.
Mac searched behind him, waiting for word from Leo or Shan, but nothing came. He took out his phone to call them but saw there was a call from Leo. He walked away from the group as he listened to the voicemail, but the reception was so bad, all he got was baby, houses, cave and help.
He walked farther, his heartbeat pounding in his ears, calling Leo back, then again as he got to the end of the row of slave houses and saw the ATV parked there. “What the Sam Hill?”
Wayne caught up to him. “What’s wrong?”
“Call Shan. See if she found Leo, huh?”
Andrea was waving Mac over and he tried to quell the nagging feeling he got from the strange call, so he could take care of his guests. He went to her and was informed, “They took a vote, Mac. They want to burn them, but not in a bad way. To…to say goodbye. You said you’d thought of that?”
“Yeah, I sure did, that’s what me ‘n Wayne wanted to do a long time ago. It’s more fittin’ you all made the choice, though. I’ll have Wayne go fetch the water truck.”
She nodded to him and said, “Thank you, Mac, for this.”
He didn’t want thanks, and at the moment could only think of one thing, and that was the fact Leo might be in danger.
“Wayne, can you drive back to the ranch, get the water truck ready so these folks can burn the places and git Shan and see if she found Leo?”
“Sure, Mac, but she didn’t. I just spoke to her. She’s gone to every building, and he’s nowhere to be found.”
“Did you see him take a four-wheeler?”
“No,” Wayne said, asking, “Is that who brought that one out here?”
“I don’t know. The guests can use them, if they sign that waiver thing. If they came out to have a look-see, I don’t see anyone around.”
“I’ll head in, help Shan look. Don’t let them get started without the water truck. As dry as it’s been…”
“I hear ya.”
Unfortunately, the moment the taillights of the truck were out of sight, Mac saw one of the men in the group start to pour gasoline over the end shack, drenching the facing wall. One of the women had a lighter she was using to light a rolled piece of paper. Mac ran over to her, pleading, “Not until the water truck gets here, please!”
“Isn’t it coming now?”
The paper had caught fire already and the flames reached her fingers. The overwhelming smell of the gasoline, the fire flying out of her hand, all of it sunk it on him in that instant. He didn’t know where Leo was, the water truck was still twenty minutes away at least, and the fire had started hard and fast. He grabbed the woman and got her away from the flames as they leapt out at the two of them, and the others rushed over to make sure she was okay.
Mac smelled the thick smoke before he turned back to the fire, seeing the flames rising high, the black smoke billowing over the buildings and getting blown in the eastern wind, ready to quickly catch the other structures on fire.
Mac took out his phone, calling Wayne to tell him to hurry, but before he could get a word it, he told Mac, “Leo’s in there! He’s in one of the buildings! Shan just called as I saw the fucking smoke coming up in your direction! There was some note, saying something was there at the houses and Leo had to have gone there!”
Mac’s heart went in his throat and he threw his phone to the ground, heading to the house already on fire. He started screaming for Leo, but he knew it was no use. If he’d been in that shack, it was already too late. The next one was already catching, and he ran inside, only to he pulled back out by the man who’d splashed the gasoline. “Are you crazy?”
“My boyfriend is in one of these buildings! We’ve got to find him!”
The man’s eyes widened a second before he ran back out to the others, screaming at them to spread out and start looking. Mac quickly assessed Leo wasn’t in that one, so he ran to the next and the next, until he noticed the end house, the roof and back wall had caved in, and recently.
The group of descendants headed there with him, but he barely noticed them until he started trying to pull long beams from the rubble that was just behind the doorway. Someone grabbed him, someone else pulling him away, though he fought.
He was thrown to the ground and as he got to his feet, ready to fight them all to find Leo, Linnie Monroe was walking toward him, helped by Andrea and one of the men. “Wait, Mac!”
“I’ve got to get him out of there before the fire gets here!”
One of the men who’d pulled him away yelled, “That’ll come down on his head, if he’s down there in the basement! You can’t just start pulling stuff!”
“The fire!”
Linnie told the men, “Get over there and start he’pin’.” To Mac, she ordered, “Take the he’p, Mac! They know what they’re doin’!”
He didn’t know how, but he looked into those blind eyes, eyes that still held life though they couldn’t see, and felt Leo, felt him telling Mac to trust them. “Yes, ma’am, but we gotta hurry.”
The fire was igniting the third shack, and Mac couldn’t think, his instincts to react. The man with Linnie urged, “I know it’s dire, but we can’t act like madmen. One wrong move…it’s like that game, Jenga. It can come tumbling down, and if he is under there, and right under, he’ll be crushed.”
Mac doubled over like he’d been struck in the gut, Leo’s face swimming into his mind, taking up everything, blocking every other thought.
That was until Linnie grabbed his arm with a crushing grip, surprising him with her strength as he stood up straight to see the determination in her set jaw. “Get to work! There’s no time to feel sorry for yourse’f.”
She was right. Of course, she was, so he went with the others, carefully taking pieces from the top, working together with the other men and women as quickly, but carefully, as they could.
A couple of the others followed him to look around while Mac went back to helping take the debris from the collapse, but was soon stopped as someone started screaming, “The fire’s coming!”
It was a house away from them. The dry wood and light wind made the flames find the next source of fuel all the easier. It would engulf the house in minutes once the flames found it and getting Leo from the basement would be impossible.
They pulled enough away that one of the men shouted, “I can see through!”
All of them ran around, careful not to fall in themselves, and looked down, but they couldn’t see anything but a deeper hole than they’d thought.
“This isn’t a fucking basement,” one man yelled, pulling one more board from over the hole.
Mac looked and saw that the hole went far deeper than a normal basement, and then saw the fire coming on them fast. “Where is he?”
A woman next to him pointed down and to the right, “There are more boards there, a pile of ‘em. That’s gotta be twenty feet or more! What the hell is this?”
The answer would have to wait. As the fire started on the outer wall of the house, someone shouted that the firetruck was coming.
Mac ran around the house and down the road, jumping on the step on the side of the truck, Shan and Wayne there, Shan with a paper in her hand. “Mac, it’s a mine! There’s a mine there!”
That didn’t make sense, but then, it did. “Is that why it’s so damn deep?”
Shan was nodded frantically, and she thrust the paper at him as they got close enough
to the fire. Mac jumped off as Wayne turned to start backing up the truck and he read the words that still made little sense to him.
“A goddamned gold mine?”
There was no time to feel the fury that he wanted to unleash, not with Leo trapped in a mine. He dropped the paper and ran, helping Wayne and the others get the hose unrolled, the water going to get the fire controlled.
One of the men was yelling for them to keep the water from being pointed over the hole, but that was inevitable with one of the two remaining standing outer walls catch. Mac worked with the men to keep moving as many boards as possible and he’d sent two men back for ladders and rope that were kept in the stables.
Everything was going too slowly. It could be time ticking down for Leo and every second seemed like it stretched an eternity. They weren’t working fast enough, Leo was in danger and nothing was happening fast enough.
The smoke was choking people, so they couldn’t work fast enough, and the fire was getting out of control. He worked furiously, and it wasn’t helping, nothing was helping. He screamed Leo’s name over and over, his voice going hoarse from it, but he didn’t stop. He just screamed louder.
He wasn’t the only one. Shan was on her hands and knees by the hole, the smoke billowing in her face as she screamed, coughed and screamed more. The fire was starting to recede, the sound of it like thunder all around them, dulling to a far-off roar.
His arm was gripped, and he swung around, ready to scream at whoever was stopping him, then he saw it was his brother. “What?”
“The fire’s going out, but we’re no closer to getting this dug out, not by hand. The dirt walls are caving in from the water, and since we don’t know where he is down there, we don’t want to keep going.”
Mac demanded, “Who is we?”
Wayne waved a man over, one of the descendants, and Mac recognized him as the one who’d helped him start to pull out the boards the right way after Linnie stopped him. “I’m Marcus. I used to live in West Virginia. I saw a cave in or two, and I know we can’t just dive in. Not like this, with water loosening the sides and all.”
Stopping the urge to scream at Marcus and Wayne, instead, he started begging, “What can we do? How do we do this?”
“One person heads down there to check. Real easy, we lower someone in.”
“We’ve got ladders coming.”
“That ground down there is soft, I’m bettin’.”
Mac didn’t know and didn’t care. “I’m goin’ then. It’s gonna be me.”
Wayne didn’t like the idea, but he knew better than to argue. “There’s some rope behind the seat in the truck. I’ll get it.”
They tied the rope around Mac’s chest and he got as close as he could to the hole, scooting along carefully so he wouldn’t knock more debris in. He lowered his legs over the side, some of the others pointing beams of lights from their phones or actual flashlights, but he saw nothing. Wayne handed him a flashlight and made sure he had his phone.
“Be careful down there. This is all really unstable still.”
Mac didn’t care. “I gotta find ‘im, Wayne. I…I can’t lose him.”
Wayne nodded once and told the others, “Lower him down!”
Another thing that took too long, inch by inch, them being careful with him while anything could be happening with Leo. He wanted to take out his pocketknife and cut the rope, get there all at once, but if he broke his legs, he’d be no help to Leo.
The farther he got in, the darker it became. Light, even from above, didn’t get far in the cave. He took the flashlight, getting it on and right away, he saw the gold. The gold his father had kept from him. His father and all those before him that had kept the land that was supposed to go to the men and women who’d lived on it, all for the gold. It was so clear to him. It may have been racism, but it was more about greed.
Never had he seen them as more like devils, the evilness sucking his soul.
He wanted to spin, to look in every corner, but he was told to be as still as he could. The rope tight around his chest was painful, and he knew it would be worse, but his pain was nothing.
When his feet finally touched the ground, he shoved the flashlight in his mouth, got the rope off him as fast as his hands would work and he took the flashlight from his teeth, spinning around and around again, looking for any sign of Leo.
“Leo! Leo are ya down here?”
He listened, but he didn’t hear a thing except the creaking of more beams ready to crack. The light landed on freshly broken beams on the ground that had likely been on the ceiling of the mine earlier. He went to the pile of dirt and wood, worried that Leo might be under it.
They were calling down to him and all he could call back up was that he hadn’t found him.
The words, his words, saying that, drove it home for him. He used the flashlight as he made his way around the pile, squeezing between the dirt wall and three jutting railroad ties that had to be a hundred years old. The long, jagged splinters from the breaks tore his shirt, scratching his stomach deeply.
When he could go no farther, he held the flashlight up as high as his arm could reach and peered over the pile. All he saw was more wood and dirt.
“Leo! Leo, baby! Call out to me if yer here!”
That’s when he heard it, a low groan, but no words. He didn’t need them, he knew the voice like he knew his own. That voice that had spoken words into his ear as they made love, he knew it was Leo and he screamed, “I hear ya! I hear ya, and I got he’p ta git ya outta there!”
His first impulse was to pull boards away, dig with his hands in the dirt, but he feared it would be like up above, like the Jenga game, where one wrong move could bring more down on Leo and finish the job of killing him.
He scooted back out from the pile and the wall, heading for the rope to tug on it, scream up to the other that he’d found him, but the rope was gone. He stood under the hole and saw feet. Someone was coming to help.
As soon as Marcus was halfway down, he yelled to Mac, “As soon as I’m down, they’re throwing down shovels and tools. Your brother went to fetch them. We got the sheriffs coming and rescuers, but we are starting now!”
Marcus got to the bottom and Mac helped him untie the rope. “I can’t thank ya enough.”
“Don’t thank me ‘til he’s out of there.”
They worked as a team, grabbing up the tools to start digging as they were thrown down. More descended into the mine, five at a time, to start. The sirens could be heard an hour in, but Mac didn’t stop, and neither did the others, all of them carefully pulling the broken wood and rock away, using the shovels to gently dig around the next few, then pulling those.
Wayne came down, but was sent back up to coordinate the rescue on the ground, and as soon as the deputies came into the mine, they heard Leo calling out, and Mac was relieved to hear it was much stronger, louder.
Mac screamed for him, “We’re coming! Don’t move, Leo!”
The sheriff was on the deputy’s phone, and Mac barely heard with the bad reception, “You all keep taking it slow. We’re getting you some help.”
Mac didn’t want to take the time to talk to him, so he said a quick, “Thanks,” then went back to work.
The deputy rattled off as he tried to help, “The medical team is on the way, and they’re trying to find specialists that handle cave-ins. The sheriff wanted you all outta here, but he said not to push too hard as long and someone had some idea of what they was doin’. There ain’t a lot of mining experts ‘round these parts.”
“We got it. Marcus, here, he knows what he’s talkin’ ‘bout.”
His heart was in his throat as the pile shifted, another beam falling from the ceiling and nearly hitting Mac, Marcus and another two men. “Leo! Leo, you okay?”
“Didn’t hit me,” he heard, still too far away. The farther they got the pile knocked down, they saw that Leo had to be in what Marcus call an adit. It was likely the entrance to the mine before it was either covered over
or caved in, and Mac knew which it had been.
The place was unstable, Marcus said, and they had to get Leo out of there soon. The sounds of popping and creaking were terrible precursors for what was going to come, and they didn’t have much time left. Digging couldn’t be done fast, though, as each shovelful was endangering the stability of the mine itself.
Every step they took down in the cave brought them danger, and worse to Leo, who was already buried within the adit.
Marcus stopped them after a heavy creak sent chills up their spines. “We may have to stop down here. Take it from the covered entrance to this place. We don’t know where the hell that is, though.”
“We’re so close,” Mac yelled. “He couldn’t be more than ten feet!”
“Then we need to shore this up. If we have this fall in on us, they’ll be digging all of us out, and that won’t do him any good.”
Frustration got the better of him, and he turned to the dirt wall, seeing the gold and cussed his entire family. “Greedy mother fuckers! Why? Why’d ya do this? Fuck you, Daddy! Fuck you and fuck this gold!”
The deputy and Marcus started plans for doing both, digging from the other side, and keeping the digging going in the shaft they were in. The deputy called up for beams to be brought in, and Mac closed his eyes, praying hard that they got to Leo before it was too late.
His voice didn’t sound like the confident man he was. Leo sounded scared and his voice strained. He was in pain, he was afraid for his life. He knew like they all did that it was a slim chance to get him out of there before more happened in the mine that was dug by men who knew only ranching.
Marcus had cussed a hundred times how the mine had been dug, how it had been shored, but that was to his advantage, he finally said. They could do it right. “We’ll get this done as fast as we can while being safe, Blaylock.”
“Thank you. I know I’m pushin’, but that’s the man I love in there.”
“I keep thinking that if it was my wife, I’d be as scared as you.”
While they waited, Mac went as far as he could to be nearer to the sound of Leo’s voice. “We’re working on getting you out of there! I swear, I won’t stop ‘til we do!”
Remember the Alamo (Legacy Book 1) Page 18