Shadows (38 page)

The first room was smaller than he thought it would be, and the pillars weren’t exactly uniform either, but mushroom-shaped, dropping from the ceiling in a taper before spreading out in a wide, rocky footprint. The layout reminded Tom a little of a very large, very low-ceilinged basement held up with two-by-fours and jackstraws. “This is it?”

“No. Worst stope’s further west and not exactly on the same level. We just got to find it,” Weller said.

“I thought you knew where it was,” Tom said.

“It’s been a while.”

“You keep saying that.”

“We’ll
find
it.”

“Well, let’s do
something.
” Luke was unhooking his pack. “Where do we start?”

Tom pointed. “Two charges right there next to that big pillar just off center. Put ’em behind the main entrance here, out of sight. That way, if anyone does smell something or come by—”

“They won’t see.” Luke nodded and moved off. “I’m on it.”

“I’m going to scout ahead,” Weller said.

“You should wait.” Tom had dropped to a knee and opened his bag, but now he stopped and looked up. “One of us should be with you.”

Weller shook his head, then glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “This is taking too long. You see that kid’s eyes? How they’re getting a little red? I think that’s the gas.
You’re
starting to look like you need to sleep off a bender.”

“What?” Only when Weller mentioned it did Tom feel the slight burn and tingle. “The smell isn’t worse.”

“It may not have to be, or maybe it kills your sense of smell after a while,” Weller muttered. “How’s your breathing?”

“Fine, until you mentioned it.”

“Yeah, I’m getting tight, too.” Weller flicked a look at his watch. “How much time you need?”

“No more than five minutes.”

“See you soon,” Weller said.

He’d already prepared the blasting caps, carefully crimping each shell onto time fuses with SOG needle-nose pliers and then using the C4 punch to core a hole for the detonators. He’d timed the burn rate—forty-five seconds a foot—and under more normal circumstances, this wasn’t necessarily a problem: just pull the igniter and run like hell. But they didn’t exactly have a lot of open space in a mine. For more elaborate preps, there was remote detonation. But Tom’s only option had been to rig a time device.

“Done.” Luke dropped beside him.

“Okay, give me another couple seconds here.” He glanced at his watch. Almost five minutes gone. “Here, hold this one straight out. The rock’s pretty uneven.” He waited until Luke got his hand around the charge, then unspooled a few lengths of duct tape around the legs, securing them to the stone. Uncoiling the time fuse, he used tiny strips of duct tape to keep the waterproof cord from curling on itself. “Let’s go.”

“Where’s Weller?” Luke asked at the entrance. He squatted and scratched two large Xs in white chalk.

“Scouting ahead for that room he’s hot to blow.” Tom glanced at his watch again. Seven minutes gone. “How many charges you got left?”

“Eight.”

He had eleven, plus two blocks of C4 and time fuses, because you just never knew. “Come on. If he’s marking the way, we can catch up. Better than just waiting here.”

“Okay,” Luke said, then coughed. His nose was red as Rudolph’s, and he looked as if he’d just staggered back from a serious barcrawl. “Chest feels funny.”

“You’re doing great. We’ll be done soon.” Tom trotted down the tunnel with Luke on his heels. His lungs burned with the effort, and he coughed, and thought,
Maybe ten, fifteen more minutes; then we got to get out no matter what.
To his right, he spotted stairs, an X chalked low on the wall, and a down arrow. The stairs sounded too loud, their footfalls ringing and echoing against the rock. At the bottom, Weller had chalked a small, left-facing arrow.
We’re moving either west or south.
Tom pictured the terrain overhead. This would put them closer to the decline ramp and further from the first set of charges. They would have ten minutes max before the first charges went off. By then, they had to be well on their way toward the shaft.
Just hope we have ti—

“Whoa, whoa,” Luke hissed, and then slowed down. “You hear that?”

Tom had been so focused he hadn’t noticed, but now he did hear: a grunt and then a harsh gasp, the scrabble of feet over rock.

Weller.

He darted down the hall, running on the balls of his feet, then grabbed Luke before the boy could spurt ahead. Together, they flattened against a rock wall just left of another X—

In time to hear Weller groan.

Flicking the Uzi’s selector, Tom pivoted, weapon at waist level, each hand on a grip. He felt Luke move to flank him.

There were four. A boy at each arm, and another draped over Weller’s waist. The girl straddled Weller’s chest, and Tom and Luke had arrived in time to see her rip a chunk of Weller’s shoulder with her teeth. There was a harsh tearing sound, and the old man bucked, trapping an abortive scream behind his teeth. In the bad light, Weller’s blood was oil, and his skin would’ve looked at home on a shark.

The girl heard them, the scuff of boots against rock, and she twisted, a stupefied expression spreading over her face. A ragged flap of Weller’s skin hung from her mouth, and she was still chewing it back like a kid with a too-large bite of spaghetti. Gore painted the girl’s mouth and face in a clown’s scream. Her eyes widened, and then her snack fell with a moist plop to the rock as her jaw went slack.

“Oh
fuck
,” Luke said, and then he and Tom were squeezing off quick, silenced shots:
pfft pfft pfft pfft!
Tom heard the
tick-tick-tick
of brass against rock; saw the sudden blooms on the girl’s chest. She fell back without a sound. The boys were halfway up when Luke and Tom fired again. The boys jerked, then drooped in limp tangles.

“Weller!” Tom knelt by the old man. The girl had gnawed off enough meat to reveal the dull glimmer of bone.

“F-found it.” Weller was shaking. His face gleamed with sweat and blood. He had a hand clamped to his shoulder, but Tom heard the
drip-drip-drip
. “Down the tunnel. I was c-coming back when these little f-fucks jumped me. N-never saw th-them.”

“Why didn’t you call for help?” Luke asked.

Tom knew why; read it in the tears streaking the old man’s face. Weller hadn’t wanted to give them away.
Not just an old hard-ass; the guy’s willing to go down to make sure we do this.
Dragging out the thermal top he’d taken from the dead boy, he used his knife and ripped it into strips. “This is going to hurt,” he said.

“Just d-do it,” Weller said. He let out a gargling, barely audible scream as Tom crammed silk into his wound. Weller panted as Tom knotted more strips of silk into a crude bandage. “L-lucky if I don’t get r-rabies.”.

“What do we do?” Luke said.

“You finish.” Weller’s skin was ash and his swollen eyes were pink, but his voice was a knife. “I marked the rooms. The good one’s a little further on and down one more flight of stairs. But you got to hurry.”

Tom knew he was right. There were more kids where these had come from. After he and Luke dragged the bodies to a corner, he helped Weller to a spot along the far wall, then laid an Uzi across the old man’s lap. “Don’t use your light. You hear something and we don’t say your name, you stay quiet.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Weller said.

“Ten minutes,” Tom said, and then he and Luke hustled.

The first stope was even better than the one they’d already rigged. The cored rock room was larger, the pillar supports under much more stress. Rubble and drifts of scree were scattered along the floor. The pockmarked pillars looked moth-eaten.

“Jeez,” Luke muttered. “Looks like all it’d take is a good push.” “You do this room. Use every fuse. Concentrate on the pillars in the middle. Then you wait right here. Don’t move until I come back.” At the entrance, he turned back. “If I don’t say your name, you light up whoever comes in here and blow their heads off.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Luke said. “Good luck.”

Wish people would stop saying that.
He took the tunnel at a run, spotted another X and a down arrow. After clattering down the stairs, he doglegged left, trotted another length of corridor—and then saw the room yawning to his right.

This chamber was very different: not only a forest of spindly stone pillars but a huge ball, rotten from the inside with stress fractures radiating out in a sphere. The walls were a warren of fissures and nearly horizontal seams in gray rock. He studied the seams, saw how the cracks tracked and split the rock. This was like the rotting timber of a neglected basement beneath a house of solid stone. Take out the timber, core out the walls, and the room above—hell, the whole house—would fall.

He got busy, first fitting two charges, one to each of two pillars. Then he climbed along the walls, digging his boots into the crevices and crannies and using his fingertips to hoist himself into hollowed-out seams where miners had scraped rock with chisel and hammers. He set charges as far back as he could maneuver, using the points of his toes to push himself into the seams. Jagged stone grabbed and scoured his back and stomach, bit into his legs. He worked feverishly: squirming into a seam, backing out, flipping onto his back at another, and fixing a charge to rock that was just inches from his nose.

He was on his sixth seam when a new idea occurred to him. Setting off the delay devices to each and every charge would take too long.

But if I only have to set off one . . .

He wriggled out and squatted on the rock; pulled out four, five, and then six lengths of time fuse. Thought about it. Then he went to work with his knife and the duct tape, knitting the lengths together until they radiated in a huge spiderweb. Thirty feet, fortyfive seconds a foot: almost twenty-five minutes. No need for a time delay. With all this extra fuse, this room might actually go last of all, but the explosion would be the most powerful and concentrated. If Weller was right, all that separated this room from the Chuckies were sixty feet of lousy rock. The floor would simply give way.

Might even punch through to the flooded levels, and if there
are
pockets of hydrogen sulfide, they’ll explode.
He ripped off another strip of duct tape with his teeth, then scooped up the rock he’d used to keep the fuse from curling back.
If they ignite, then—
He heard a sudden loud scrape of rock against rock as someone kicked aside stone. At the noise, Tom turned, a little annoyed. Hadn’t he just told Luke not to
move
? To stay
put
? God, if
he’d
been just a little bit jumpier, he might’ve shot the kid.

But that was when Tom registered two things at once.

For one thing, he couldn’t have shot Luke, because
he’d
been stupid enough to leave his Uzi propped next to his pack.

And for another, he had visitors.

The girl had probably been in a lot of trouble before she turned. Maybe she’d been into drugs or a gang. Or maybe it was abuse. The scar slashing across her face could have been from a knife.

The jittery boy’s outfit reminded him of a ninja’s. A bandolier of M430 grenades sagged around the kid’s scrawny shoulders. Without a launcher, the grenades wouldn’t arm and weren’t a problem.

Scarface’s shotgun, though . . .

Alex had only gotten good and hammered once, and all alone: the very first time she’d ventured with her friends, Glock and Jack, into her aunt’s basement. There was nothing fun about her being drunk—no sense of relaxation or euphoria or even the giggles— just a sickening swoosh in her head: not spinning so much as falling backward, in place, and being sucked into very deep water. Closing her eyes only made things five thousand times worse, the blackness behind her lids going round and round and round. She didn’t get sick or weepy, but the next time she got cozy with the Glock, she took it easy with that bottle of Jack.

That
feeling—of tumbling into a black whirlpool—was
this
.
God, no, why now?
She gritted her teeth, fighting against the vertiginous swirl. Of course, she knew why. He was thinking about
her
, planning what he would
do
. Worse, the movie in his mind was already running, the images flickering in a blistering, bright montage: Alex, flailing, as Leopard pinned her to the rocks, clamped a hand around her throat to keep her from screaming while the other hand ripped and tore away her—

Stop.
She slapped her right cheek, a stinging blow that jerked out a breath and cut tears. For an instant, the images broke apart the way a pond’s perfect reflection of sky and trees fractures the instant you shatter the surface with a rock.
Come on, come on, stay with it . . .
She slapped herself a second and then a third time, much, much harder, enough that the sharp
crack
echoed. Something seemed to snap in her head; a jagged flash of white sliced through that deadening swirl, and that awful feeling of falling evaporated as her mind cleared.

She was panting. Leopard’s aroma was hot and heavy and cloying, like boiled honey laced with sewage, and he must have just eaten because his breath was foul, thick with the greasy stink of fat and wet copper. The yellow spray of his light was a dusty glow growing firmer and more coherent by the second. She scrambled back like a crab, stumbling over Daniel in her rush. She heard Daniel’s breathing change, and she had a split second when she thought maybe now
would
be a good time to scream, while she still had the chance. Stupid. No one would hear or help, and she was too deep anyway. The only person who gave a damn about Leopard was Spider, who must be busy somewhere. Maybe filleting steaks for the chow line.

The spear of light swept into the drift like a searchlight and tacked her into place. Squinting against the sudden brilliance, she put up a hand to shield her eyes but couldn’t see anything. The light left her for an instant and found Daniel, who barely reacted. His eyelids twitched and his head rolled; he swallowed. But that was all. No help there. No help anywhere. The light slid back and held on to her for a good five seconds. Now that she knew what to expect, she braced herself against another mental slip, but the monster was either playing possum or she really might be able to control this after all. Anyway, nothing happened. If she lived through the next ten minutes, she might even figure out why it had happened at all.