The underdwelling

“Please,” he kept trying to say as Breed pummeled him. “Please…stop it…stop it…stop it…”

“Okay, I stopped,” Breed said and gave him a shot in the belly that put him back down.

By then Jurgens was on his feet. “Knock it off, Breed! Jesus, you’ll kill him.”

Breed just shook his head and sat back down, staring at Maki. Looking for a reason to really let loose on him. But Maki gave him none. He just squatted there, dazed and punchy, spitting out blood and making a whimpering sound under his breath like a dog that had just been whipped with a newspaper.

“We have to keep our heads here,” McNair finally said. “We can’t let this go on.”

“He’s right,” Jurgens said. “This is a bad spot, but they’re going to get us out. What we need is something constructive to do in the meantime.”

“Well, I’m open to suggestions,” Breed said.

They all were. But what, really, was there to do? What could possibly take their minds off the fix they were in or the possibility of the unpleasant deaths they might soon be facing?

But Jurgens had that covered. “Listen to me,” he said. “All of you. Now I know the drill. I know what’s going on up there right now. They’ve mobilized every possible resource to reach us. And they will, believe me, they will. But maybe we ought to think about helping out. We know the stope leading into this cavern caved-in, but we have no way of knowing the extent of it. There might just be a wall of rocks between us and freedom. I say we form up, go back there and get to work. What do you say?”

Breed stood up. “I’m for it. I can’t stand sitting around like this.”

“Okay, then. Maki? You stay here with Boyd. I’ll go with Dr. McNair and Breed, get them started, then I’ll come back. They’ll dig first for a couple hours, then we’ll take our turns.”

“I guess that leaves me out,” Boyd said.

That got a few weak chuckles, nothing more.

Maki had been sitting silently, nursing his wounds, but now he jumped up and swatted at the air. “Fuck was that?” he cried. “What the fuck was that?”

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Breed said.

McNair and Jurgens just watched him as he spun around in the lantern light, swatting at the air.

Jurgens said, “Calm down, Maki. Jesus, there’s nothing. You’re imagining things.”

Maki was breathing so hard it seemed he might hyperventilate. He kept brushing the back of his neck. “Something touched me.”

Boyd felt a chill go up his spine at that. He’d thought, right before Maki freaked out, that he’d heard a funny scraping on the rocks. But he didn’t dare say so.

Flashlight beams swung around, but there was only the dead trees and the rocks, nothing more.

“There’s nothing, Maki,” Jurgens said.

“There was, there was!” He licked his bloody lips and peered around suspiciously. “Something touched me. I don’t give a fuck whether you believe me or not, but something touched the back of my neck.”

“What?” Breed said.

“I don’t know…it felt…it felt like a stick or something.”

“Ain’t no sticks down here.”

Nobody was sure what to make of it. So nobody tried. They just started talking about digging their way out, leaving Maki to his imagination and Boyd to wondering.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Jurgens said.

Then he, Breed, and McNair walked off, taking one of the lanterns with them. God only knew how long the batteries would last, so for the time being everyone was just using the lights on their helmets. Even those were dimming steadily, casting a surreal, weird glow and making everyone aware of how dark it was down there.

When the footfalls of the digging party vanished away, Boyd said, “Maki? You okay?”

“Sure, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just fine. But I tell you what, Boyd, that fucking Breed is a dead man. He can’t do this and get away with it.”

“Worry about that later, after we get out of here,” Boyd told him.

But Maki just laughed. “Don’t kid yourself, Boyd, ain’t none of us getting out of here alive.”

“Stop it,” Boyd said. “Just stop that shit.”

“It touched me,” Maki said. “Whatever’s down here, Boyd, it touched the back of my neck.”

“Okay.”

“It’s got fingers.”

“Maki-”

“They feel like sticks…like pencils.”

Boyd just waited, saying nothing.

13

While they waited, Boyd was not only thinking about his wife and the kid she was carrying that he might never see, but about Russo. He could see his pig-ugly face in his mind, see the scowl on his mouth, hear those words he’d said when he put him on the graveyard shift: You ain’t gonna get all girly and run off on me when things get tough and dirty below, are you?

And right then, remembering how his old man had died in the Mary B. and how he’d faced that sort of death day after day without so much as a twitch of nerve, he said, “No sir. I’m up to it.”

“What?” Maki said.

“Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t be talking.”

“Yeah…and why’s that?”

Maki looked at him and his eyes were practically luminous in his grimy, bruised face. “Because it uses too much fucking air.”