The underdwelling

As the air hammers chiseled and the rubble was dragged out, as hydraulic lines vibrated and steam hoses hissed and men scrambled, he said under his breath, “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll get you out. Johnny Russo is on the job and I’ll get your fine white asses out of the pit. See if I don’t. And if you’re nothing but corpses, by God, then I’ll carry you out with my own bare hands.”

12

Gasping and clawing out, Boyd came awake from a dream where he was crushed beneath a mountain of solid rock.

“Easy now,” a voice said.

Breathing fast, he found that he was laying on his back, his leg from the knee down numb and rubbery feeling. He could see the glow of the lanterns, but they were dimming fast. He blinked his eyes and tried to speak, but all that came out was a groaning sound.

“He’s coming around,” Breed said.

“Take it easy,” Jurgens told him. “One of those goddamn trees caught your leg. We got it off you, but you got a nasty compound fracture, son. Don’t try and move.”

But, of course, Boyd did and right away the pain kicked in. It felt like somebody was driving a spike into his shin. He let out a little muted scream and settled back down again.

“Take it easy now,” Jurgens told him. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll get you out of here.”

Maki let out a high little laugh. “No shit, Jurgens? And how do you plan on doing that? How do you plan on getting us out of this fucking tomb? Huh?” He just shook his head. “Let me be the first to clue you in on something, Boyd. We’re trapped down here. We’re trapped in this fucking cavern-”

“Shut the hell up,” Breed told him.

“-and we can’t get out. We get to sit around and twiddle our fucking thumbs while our lights go out and the air goes bad. How’s that for kicks, Boyd? How’s that for company incentive?”

“Swear to God,” Breed said, “you don’t pipe down, I’ll kick the living shit out of you right now.”

“We’ll be fine,” Jurgens said. “Even now they’ll be digging to get us out.”

They were all sitting around him in a little circle by lantern light and Boyd looked from face to face to face. None of them looked particularly hopeful. Jurgens told him that the cave-in had sealed the stope leading out of the cavern. But that was no real reason for concern, because the cavern was huge and it would no doubt take weeks and weeks to use up all the oxygen in there. And long before that, they’d be dug out. Boyd listened and didn’t honestly believe a word of it. Maybe if it was just the stope that had caved-in and the tunnel leading to it and even the spider hole from the drift above…maybe then, they’d actually get dug out. But what if it was more than that? What if it was Level #8 above? What then? Then getting to the cavern would take months maybe.

The only good thing, he supposed, was that Jurgens had called up to the drift with his walkie-talkie every fifteen minutes. He had told the men above about the stope they found and the cavern it led to. That was something and under the circumstances, it would have to be enough.

After a time, Boyd said, “How about those sounds?”

“We haven’t heard anything else,” McNair said.

Maki laughed again and it was a bad sort of laughter, the sort that echoed from a mind on the verge of a nervous breakdown. No one had ever doubted who the weak link in their chain was. But then again they had not imagined a scenario like this that would put it to the test.

“Nope, not a thing,” Maki said. “But I been feeling things.”

“That’s enough,” Jurgens told him.

But Maki’s days of kissing the guy’s ass were long gone. “Well, who we kidding here, Jurgens? You know there’s something out there same as I do. We all feel it out there, we just can’t see it. But it’s there and you all goddamn well know it. Something’s out there. Something’s watching us. And whatever in the fuck it is, we’re trapped down here with it-”

But that’s as far as he got in his little paranoid monologue because Breed’s fist smashed into his face and dropped him like a dead tree.

Breed was one of the mellowest guys you’d want to meet. Boyd had known him only a matter of hours, but that much was apparent. But all this was too much…even for him. Maki wouldn’t quit running his mouth and this is where it had gotten him.

“You think we need to listen to your shit, Maki?” Breed was saying, on his feet and advancing on the downed man. “You think we need that? You think we ain’t got enough fucking problems right now?”

Maki opened his mouth to say something else and Breed went right at him. No one tried to intervene. Maybe, on some subconscious level, they were glad it was finally happening. Maki tried to rise, his mouth full of blood, and Breed let him. He let him find his feet and then he really gave it to him. A flurry of lefts and rights that knocked his head this way and that. Any one of them would have put him down if it hadn’t been for the blow that followed it, righting him again. Maki’s nose rained blood and his left eye was nearly closed and his lip was split wide open.