“We’re not going to make it back to the shaft before the first charges go,” Luke said. They were in the tracked tunnel with its scatter of discarded machinery and treasure of fool’s gold winking in and out of their lights, Weller at point and Luke sandwiched between then. Ahead, Tom saw the wide mouth of the ore chute opening to the left. The boy’s face flashed a look over his shoulder. “We’ll be trapped.”
“One room shouldn’t do it,” Weller said, but Tom heard the note of uncertainty. “No use worrying about it now. We got to—”
From somewhere above came a series of muffled, throaty booms so close together they nearly sounded like one animal. But Tom knew: the second room had blown. He felt the change almost at once as the explosions raced through the rock to shake the air and shimmy up his feet into his shins. A stream of rotten rock cascaded down the walls with a sound like beans over tin, and in a few seconds, his mouth was filmed with dust and grit. The air was even heavier and harder to breathe. There were new sounds, too: a kind of grinding rumble, like a distant cement mixer, and then another, stranger sloshing, like a gurgle.
“Rock going!” Weller called, but he sounded excited now, almost gleeful. “I think we got ’em, I think we got those sons of bitches, I think—”
To the old man’s left, a jet of water suddenly spumed from the mouth of an ore chute. Not quite like the blast from a fireman’s hose, the pressure was still enough to sweep Weller off his feet, and then the old man was bent over, clawing at the rock wall, unable to stand.
“Holy shit!” Luke shouted. Ducking under the chute, he and Tom fished Weller out of the gush, hauled him to his feet, then battled their way further down the tunnel.
This, Tom thought, was very bad. The water, frothy and gray, kept coming, and they were headed downhill, which meant that the water would chase them the whole way. They were also soaked through to the bone now.
“What’s happening?” Luke shouted over the roar. His hair was matted to his scalp, and water ran down his neck in rivulets. “Where’s all the water coming from? Why is it flooding?”
Tom knew, and he saw that Weller did, too. They were below the water table; the deeper levels of the mine were already underwater, and this gusher was sheeting down from somewhere above. So they might not be buried alive or blown to bits or even keel over from swamp gas.
But they just might drown.
82
Only an idiot runs toward an explosion, but that was the way out and there was no choice.
Peeling out of the drift, she darted right, racing down the tunnel, following the flashlight away from the bodies and the blood and the stink of Daniel, of Daniel, of Daniel.
Why did you? Tears streamed down her face; she could hear the phantom of that shot still rebounding in her brain, an echo that just wouldn’t die. Daniel, maybe it wasn’t too late; maybe you could’ve fought it.
She cut that off. No point. Daniel and his odor had been so close to Leopard’s and Spider’s and Wolf ’s: almost a match as he Changed and kept Changing. She’d known that very first night. Well, it was done now. Over. Too late for Daniel, but not for her, not yet.
Run.
The bats massed in a black scream. They slapped her face, scrabbled through her hair, their nails biting into her scalp, scoring her face. She couldn’t fend them off; she needed to hold the light, and there were too many of them. So she just plowed through, swimming against a panicked tide of screeching bodies. Some shot down the tunnel before her and others just as quickly streamed the other way. She thought there were more than before, and their fear was liquid and just as sour as hers. Bats gushed out of open seams and rocketed up from jagged fissures.
She ran. Her stride was awkward because of the flashlight in her left hand and the Uzi, down low at hip-level, in her right. She didn’t kid herself. Only film gangstas and Arnold Schwarzenegger could do a full mag, an Uzi in each fist, and that was because actors pumped blanks. No kick, no climb. If she had to fire, she’d need both hands, and that meant losing the light.
The Glock was a fist in her back. Its muzzle was still hot and sticky with Daniel’s blood, and Leopard’s. She almost hadn’t taken it, almost let it lie after Daniel’s fingers relaxed—but then she thought of how stupid that would be. Daniel had made his choice, and now she made hers.
The ground twitched and then she heard another, longer rumble that was almost a growl: louder and closer. Another explosion. She thought it must be from ahead and above.
A sudden cloud of bats belched up from an open seam to her right, like the cork blowing out of a champagne bottle under too much pressure. Her nose was full of dead Daniel and dead Leopard, but that burned-match stench was much stronger, and she could feel the air rasp over her throat. Her mouth tasted muddy, and she heard the pop and grind of grit between her teeth.
First a shotgun blast and now two explosions.
An attack? Someone storming the mine? She slowed for just a second.
She could picture it: battling her way to the entrance only to be cut down in a hail of gunfire. She looked every inch the Changed, and she had weapons. To anyone out there, she was the enemy.
No one knows I’m here. She smelled the bats’ desperation, and hers. If I stay and the mine does come down, if that’s the plan . . .
She had to get out. Take her chances. Go up, find that big ramp again, see if maybe she could shoot her way out. No one coming yet either. Sure, of course not. There was a lot going on, and no need to worry about her.
To her right, she caught a glimpse of spray-painted numbers, and thought, Just ahead, there’s a turn, and then I ought to be at the first set of stairs and then—
As she whipped past a chute, her ears snagged on something stranger still. She skidded to a halt. Backed up to the chute. Put her hand to the metal and felt the jump and skip as the metal lurched and the stone shook.
Sound is physical. Vibrations cause sound that the ear’s sensitive machinery translates. Even a deaf person knows sound by feel.
And every kid knew Chutes and Ladders. Ladders you climbed; chutes shot you down. So what she was hearing now—what she felt—was happening somewhere over her head.
What churned from the chute was a roar: thunderous and remorseless and unstoppable. For once, smell was unnecessary. She recognized this.
Water. A lot of it.
The mine wasn’t just collapsing.
It was flooding.
83
The deadfall hurtled down, an engine of death. Chris screamed. Then he bucked, his bent legs pistoning against his mired snowshoes. He catapulted away, but it was as if he were a frog whose back legs had been pinned to a specimen board. He was locked tight.