Twenty-Seven Bones

8

Digging continued through the night. There had been no mudslides. Apparently Apgard’s grenade (they knew it was a grenade-they’d found the pin in the first hour of digging, and continued to find fragments of shrapnel) had already brought the more unstable sections of the hillside down to their angle of repose.

By dawn the rain had turned to a steady drizzle. The tunnel, shored by timbers supporting a platform of interlocking iron pipes, was deep enough by then for four volunteers to lie head to foot on their backs, passing buckets of newly excavated earth over their heads to the bucket brigade waiting outside the mouth of the tunnel. Every fifteen minutes, the personnel changed and more shoring was added. It was a slow process but a steady one.

At the other end of the blocked tunnel, Pender had cleared a few feet with his bare hands, dredging at least his own weight in dirt and rocks and piling them in a cairn at the bottom of the tunnel.

But the farther up the tunnel he went, the worse the air quality. His breathing grew deep and labored, the pressure in his head seemed to be building, there was a ringing in his ears, an acid taste in his mouth, and a burning in his nostrils.

Pender, who knew far too much about far too many ways to die (an occupational hazard), recognized these as symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning. Still he refused to give up. Instead, every time he dragged a pile of debris back down to the cave, he’d fill his lungs, crawl back into the tunnel, and continue digging for as long as he could hold his breath, then crawl back out with the debris for another gulp of good old Oh-Two.

The time came, however, when he just couldn’t make that uphill crawl one more time. Back to Plan A: conserve oxygen. Pender dragged his makeshift pallet to the bottom of the tunnel, where the air quality seemed to be a little better, aimed his flashlight up the tunnel, lay on his back with his head pillowed on the Epp manuscript, closed his eyes, and waited for rescue or death.

He was hoping for the former of course-mostly so he could catch those other sons of bitches-but he wasn’t afraid of the latter. Some two years earlier, Pender had had a near-death experience on the floor of a holding cell in the old Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California. Not only had he seen the glowing light at the end of the tunnel, but his father, former Marine Sergeant Robert Lee Pender, had made an appearance in his dress blues, and ever since that moment, Edgar Lee Pender had known with a certainty that amounted to spiritual conviction that there was nothing to fear there.

Still, he fought against sleep as long as he could. Eventually, though, he succumbed, and when he opened his eyes again and saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he couldn’t be sure which light it was, or which tunnel, the one made of dirt or the one made of the glory.

Doesn’t matter, he told himself, closing his eyes again-you’ll find out soon enough.