Blasphemy (43 page)

More distant shots. Wardlaw was making a last stand, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Ford though sadly, surprised at the man’s courage and dedication.

The mine opened up into a vast room with a low ceiling, the main seam itself, which was held up by massive pillars of unmined coal left standing to hold up the ceiling. The pillars were twenty feet on a side, black glistening faces of peacock coal shimmering in the light, the mine a mazelike warren of pillars and open areas in no regular arrangement. Ford paused to eject the magazine and saw it was fully loaded with thirteen 9 mm rounds. He shoved it back in.

“We stay together,” said Hazelius, dropping back. “George and Alan, you two help Julie—she’s having trouble. Wyman, you stay back and cover our rear.”

Hazelius grasped Kate’s shoulders in both hands and looked into her face. “If something should happen to me, you’re in charge. Got it?”

Kate nodded.

THE GROUP OF MEN WITH EDDY were pinned down by gunfire from behind the first pillar of coal.

“Cover!” Eddy screamed, aiming his Blackhawk at where he had seen the last flash of light and squeezing off a round to suppress the incoming fire. More shots rang out from behind as others poured in, concentrating their fire at where the gunflashes had come from. Beams from a dozen flashlights flickered down the tunnel.

“He’s behind that wall of coal!” Eddy cried. “Cover me!”

Scattered gunfire struck the wall, spraying chips of coal.

“Hold fire!”

Eddy rose and ran to the broad pillar, which extended for at least twenty feet before turning. Flattening himself against the far side, he indicated with a hand signal for several other fighters to go around the other side. He crept along the ragged face of coal, weapon at the ready.

The shooter anticipated their move and bolted for the next pillar.

Eddy raised his gun, fired, missed. Another shot rang out just before the man reached cover. He fell and began crawling. Frost came around from behind the other side of the pillar, handgun in both hands, and fired a second and third shot into the crawling man, who hunched up. He walked over and put a final bullet in his head at point blank range.

“All clear,” he said, sweeping the tunnels with his flashlight. “Just one. The rest fled.”

Russell Eddy lowered his gun and walked to the center of the tunnel. People were crowding in through the open door and filling up the space, their voices loud in the confined quarters. He held up his hands. Silence fell.

“
The great day of his wrath has come
!” Eddy cried.

He could feel the surge of the crowd behind him, he could feel their energy, like a dynamo powering his resolve. But there were too many. He needed to go in with a smaller, more mobile group. He turned and shouted over the grinding hum of the machinery: “I can only take a small group into the tunnels—and only men with guns. No women, no children. All men with firearms and experience, step forward! The rest fall back!”

About thirty men shouldered their way forward.

“Line up and show me your weapons! Hold them up!”

With a cheer, the men held up their weapons—rifles and handguns. Eddy walked down the line, looking at each man in turn. He eliminated a few with muzzle-loading antique replicas, a couple of teenagers with single-shot .22 rifles, two who looked demented. Two dozen were left.

“You men, you come with me to hunt down the Antichrist and his disciples. Stand over there.” He turned to the rest. “The rest of you: your work is back there, in those rooms we just came through. God wants you to
destroy Isabella
! Destroy the Beast of the Bottomless Pit, whose name is Abaddon! Go, Soldiers of Faith!”

With a roar, the crowd broke, hungry for action, and poured back through the open door, swinging sledgehammers, axes, baseball bats. The sounds of bashing came from the room beyond.

The machine seemed to scream in agony.

Eddy grabbed Frost. “You, Mike, stay at my side. I need your experience.”

“Yes, Pastor.”

“All right, men—let’s go!”

HAZELIUS LED THE GROUP THROUGH THE broad tunnels cut through the massive seam of coal. Ford covered their rear. Falling back, he peered into the darkness and listened. The shooting between Wardlaw and the mob had ended, but Ford could still hear the mob’s shouts as they pursued them through the tunnels

They stayed to the left, as Wardlaw had advised, sometimes getting hung up in dead-ends and blind leads, which forced them to backtrack. The mine was vast, the great bituminous seam going on forever in three directions. A maze of curving, crisscrossing tunnels had been cut in the seam, leaving square blocks of coal in a room-and-pillar arrangement, creating a labyrinthine sequence of spaces that connected with each other in unpredictable ways. The mine floor was crisscrossed with railcar tracks from 1950s mining operations. Rusting metal carts, rotting rope, broken engines, and heaps of discarded coal lay about. They had to wade through pools of slimy water in the low spots.

The deep-throated scream of Isabella followed them as they ran through the tunnels, like the agonizing bellows of a mortally wounded beast. Whenever he stopped to listen, Ford could also hear the clamoring pursuit of the mob.

After running for over a quarter hour, Hazelius called for a short rest. They collapsed on the damp ground, heedless of the black coal muck. Kate hunkered down next to Ford, and he put his arm around her.

“Isabella’s going to blow at any moment,” Hazelius said. “It could be anywhere from a large conventional bomb to a small nuke.”

“Jesus,” said Innes.

“A bigger problem,” said Hazelius, “is that some of the detectors are filled with explosive liquid hydrogen. One neutrino detector has fifty thousand gallons of perchloroethylene and the other a hundred thousand gallons of alkanes—both flammable. And look around—there’s a hell of a lot of burnable coal left in these seams. Once Isabella blows, it won’t be long before the whole mountain goes up in flames. There’ll be no stopping it.”

Silence.

“The explosion could trigger cave-ins, too.”

The cacophony of the pursuing horde echoed down the tunnels, punctuated by the occasional gunshot, rising over the wobbling, grinding, vibrating hum of Isabella.

The mob, Ford realized, was gradually catching up. “I’m going to drop back a little and fire a few rounds in their direction,” he said, “To slow them down.”

“Excellent idea,” said Hazelius, “But no killing.”

They moved on. Ford hung back in a side tunnel, where he switched off his light and listened intently. The sounds of the pursuing mob rolled through the caverns, faint and distorted.

Ford moved down the tunnel by feel, his hand on the wall, memorizing his path. Gradually the sounds became louder, and then he could see, at the edge of sight, the faint bobbing glow of half a dozen flashlights. He removed the pistol, and crouching behind a pillar of coal, pointed it obliquely at the ceiling.

The pursuers closed in. Ford squeezed off three 9 mm Parabellum rounds in rapid succession, and they thundered through the confined space. Eddy’s mob fell back, firing wildly into the dark.

Ducking into a dark passageway, Ford laid a hand on the far wall and, using it as a guide, moved quickly past two more tunnel openings. A second group of searchers was coming up—they seemed to have broken up into smaller teams—but this group was now moving cautiously because of the gunshots. He fired five more times, to slow them down.

Retreating—still with one guiding hand against the wall—he counted off three more pillars before he felt safe enough to switch back on his light. He kept low, jogging, hoping to catch up with the group. But as he ran, he heard from behind a strange coughing sound. He paused. Isabella’s growl suddenly changed pitch; rising precipitously, higher and higher, it became an earshattering scream, a monstrous roar, growing louder, louder, a crescendo that shook the mountain. Ford, sensing what was coming, threw himself to the ground.

The roar turned into an earthquake, the ground convulsing. A massive
boom
followed, a wave of overpressure ripping through the mine, picking him up like a leaf and hurtling him into a coal pillar. As the great thunderclap rolled off into the caverns, a sucking wind swept back through the tunnels, screaming like a banshee. Ford huddled in the lee of the coal pillar, head down, as coal and rocks blew past.

Ford rolled, looked up. The tunnel ceiling was cracking, splitting, raining bits of coal and matrix. He leapt to his feet and tried to outrun the collapsing tunnel as it roared up at him from behind.

EDDY WAS THROWN TO THE GROUND by the force of the explosions. He lay facedown in a muddy pool, pebbles and grit raining down around him, the tunnels echoing and booming with thunderous crashes, near and far. Dust filled the air and he could hardly breathe. Everything seemed to collapse around him.

Minutes passed, and the thunderous cave-ins slowed to the occasional rumble. As the sounds died away, an uneasy silence ensued, the voice of Isabella no more. The machine was dead.

They had killed it.

Eddy sat up, coughed. A moment of fumbling around in the choking clouds of dust, and he found his flashlight, still shining in the murk. Others were rising, their lights like disembodied glowworms in the fog. The tunnel had caved in not twenty yards behind them, but they had survived.

“Praise the Lord!” said Eddy, coughing again.

“
Praise the Lord
!” a follower echoed.

Eddy took stock. Some of his soldiers had been injured by falling rocks. Blood streamed down their foreheads, their shoulders gashed. Others seemed unhurt. No one had been killed.

Eddy steadied himself against the rock wall, trying to breathe. He managed to straighten himself up and speak. “
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and earth were passed away
.” He lifted both his hands, gun in one, flashlight in the other. “Warriors of God! The Beast is dead. But let us not forget the even more important task at hand.” He pointed into the drifting murk. “Out there, lurking in the dark, is the Antichrist. And his disciples. We have a battle to finish.” He looked around. “Rise up! The Beast is dead! Praise the Lord!”

His words gradually drove life into the shell-shocked group.

“Recover your weapons and flashlights. Stand with me.”

Those of the group who had dropped their weapons searched around, and in a few minutes all were standing, armed, and ready to continue. It was a miracle: the tunnel had caved in behind them where they had been only moments before. But the Lord had spared them.

He felt invincible. With the Lord at his side, who could strike him down? “They were ahead,” he said, “down that tunnel. It’s only partially collapsed. We can climb over that rubble. Let’s go.”

“In the name of Jesus Christ, let’s go!”

“Praise Jesus!”

Eddy led them forward, feeling his strength and confidence return. The ringing in his ears began to subside. They picked their way over a heap of broken rock that had fallen from the ceiling. Smaller rocks were still rattling out of the hole in the sagging, shattered roof, but it held. Visibility gradually improved as the murk settled.

They came to an open cavern, created by the cave-in of one side of the mine ceiling. A stream of fresh, clean air flowed down from the opening, clearing out the dust. A large tunnel yawned at the far end.

Eddy paused, wondering which way the Antichrist had gone. He signaled for the group to be quiet and turn off their lights. In the silence and the dark, he heard and saw nothing. He bowed his head. “Lord, show us the way.” He flicked on his light, at random, and saw which tunnel it was pointing down.

“We go this way,” he said. The group followed, their flashlights bobbing like glowing eyes in the murky dark.

BEGAY LAY IN THE TALL ALFALFA, stunned by the blast, as secondary waves of overpressure ripped across the valley and over the bluffs. Flattening the sage, the shockwaves uprooted piñon trees, flinging sand and gravel before them like multiple blasts of buckshot, the ground shuddering and concussing beneath him. He covered his face until the first waves had passed and then sat up. A huge fireball floated above the cliff top, a blazing sphere trailing a stem of smoke, dust, and debris. He averted his face from the searing heat.

He heard Willy Becenti’s muffled curses coming from the alfafa and then his head appeared, hair askew. “God
damn
!”

Across the field, other people slowly stood. The horses, which they had been rounding up to saddle, had panicked, rearing and kicking at their hobbles, bellowing with terror. Some had broken free and were tearing away across the alfalfa field.

Begay stood. The tipi had been blown down and the poles lay broken on the ground, the canvas shredded like confetti. The blast had knocked the old Nakai Rock Trading Post off its foundation. He squinted into the darkness and wondered where his horse, Winter, had run off to.

“What the hell was that?” Becenti asked, staring upward.

The giant ball of fire appeared to float high above the trees, looming above them, drifting and rolling as it collapsed into a deep reddish brown color.

On the mesa top above Isabella, Begay had seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people gathered. What had the blast done to them? He shuddered at the thought. A rumble came from belowground, and Begay could hear the distant rattle of gunfire.

Glancing around the field, Begay did a quick head count. Everyone was accounted for. “We got to get people the hell out of here,” he called to Maria Atcitty. “I don’t care if we’re short of horses. Double everyone up and head for the Midnight Trail.”

Somewhere just south of them, the earth growled and convulsed. At the far end of the valley, the alfalfa field buckled and sagged, a web of cracks appearing in the earth. Dust detonated into the air as a gaping sinkhole opened, the size of a football field, its edges collapsing into a cavernous darkness.

“The old mines are caving in,” said Becenti.