White Fire

57

The shots came screaming past her, sparking off the stone floor of the main tunnel ahead, the ricocheting fragments whining away like bees. She ran in terror, leaping the old car rails, expecting any moment to feel a round slam into her back and knock her to the ground. The tunnel ended in another cross tunnel, a wall of rock. Another fusillade of shots came booming down the tunnel, smacking the timbers above her with a burst of splinters and dust, flashing against the rock face before her.

She skidded around the corner and kept running. She desperately tried to remember the layout of tunnels she’d seen on the map, but her mind had shut down in panic. The shots had temporarily stopped after she turned the corner, and now she saw another, much narrower tunnel going off to the right, sloping steeply downward in a series of crude steps like a gigantic stone staircase. She flew down them, two steps at a time, to find herself in a lower tunnel, a trickle of water flowing along its bottom. It was warmer here, maybe even above freezing, and she was sweating in her bulky winter outfit.

“You can’t escape,” came a yell from behind. “It’s all dead ends in here!”

Bullshit, she told herself with a bravado she didn’t feel, I’ve got a map.

Another pair of shots came, but they struck to the rear and she felt the spray of rock pepper her jacket. She looked around. Another tunnel branched off to the left — also headed downward at an even steeper angle, the steps slick with water, with a rotting rope strung along as a kind of banister.

She took it, running at a reckless speed. Partway down she slipped and grasped frantically for the rope, which came apart like dust in her hands. She pitched forward, breaking her fall with her shoulder and rolling hard downhill, finally crashing into the bottom and sprawling on the wet stone. Her bulky winter clothes and woolen hat cushioned the fall — but not by much.

She staggered to her feet, her limbs aching, a burning cut on her forehead. She was in a broad, low seam, barely five feet high, with pillars of rock holding up the ceiling. It extended in two dimensions as far as the beam of her headlamp could penetrate. She ran at a crouch, zigzagging past the pillars, briefly shining the light ahead to see where she was going, and then turning it off again and running onward into the dark. She did this two more times, and then on the third time, while the light was off, she took a sharp right angle, slowing down and moving as silently as she could.

The flashlight beam of her pursuer lanced through the darkness behind her, wobbling as he ran, probing this way and that. She moved behind a pillar and pressed herself against it, waiting. He was now off course and heading past her. In a moment she could see him slow down and look around, a pistol in his right hand. Clearly, he realized he had lost her.

She slipped from behind the pillar and went back the way they had come, then veered off into a new passage, creeping ahead in the dark, not daring to turn on the headlight but rather feeling her way with her hands. She blinked, wiped her eyes — blood was running freely from the cut on her forehead. After a while she saw a flicker of light behind her and realized he, too, had turned around and was coming back. She hurried faster now, pulling the headlamp off her head and holding it down low, just flicking the beam on for a second to see ahead so she could move faster.

Bad move: a pair of shots boomed out and then she heard him running, his light beam flashing around, illuminating her. Another shot. But the idiot was firing while running, which only worked on TV, and she took the opportunity to sprint like mad.

She almost didn’t see it in time — a vertical shaft yawning directly ahead. She stopped so fast that she slid on her side like a base runner. Even so, one leg went over the edge. She scrambled and clawed her way back from the gaping chasm with an involuntary yelp of fear. An iron catwalk crossed the chasm, but it looked rotten as hell. An iron ladder went down into the blackness — also corroded.

It was either one or the other.

She chose the ladder, grasped the rung, and swung around, her foot finding a rung below, then another. The thing groaned and shook under her weight. A stale draft of still-warmer air came up from below. No going back now: she started down as fast as she could, the entire ladder shuddering and swaying. There was a loud snapping sound, then a second, as bolts holding the ladder to the stone broke free, and the ladder jerked violently down. She clung to it, tensing for a horrible, fatal fall — but with a screech of metal it came to an uneasy stop.

A light shone down from above, along with the gleam of a gun. Grabbing the edges of the ladder with her gloves, and taking her feet from the rungs and pressing them against the vertical sides of the ladder, she slid down — faster, faster, the rust coming off in a stream, until she hit the bottom hard, tumbling away, just as the shots came, gouging holes into the stone floor where she had just been.

Damn, she’d done something to her ankle.

Did he have the guts to descend the precarious ladder? Right at its base was a pile of rotting canvas and a stack of old planking. Limping over, she half dragged, half hauled the canvas underneath the ladder. The material was dry as dust and practically falling apart in her hands. The ladder was shaking now, groaning — her pursuer was descending.

Which meant he wouldn’t be able to fire his weapon.

She shoved the heap of canvas against the base of the ladder and piled on the planks, pulled out her lighter, and lit the makeshift pyre. It was so desiccated, it went up like a bomb.

“Burn in hell!” she screamed as she dragged herself down the tunnel, trying to ignore the pain in her ankle. God, it felt like it was broken. Limping, the pain excruciating, she continued along another tunnel and then another, taking turns at random, now completely lost. Clearly, though, she was well out of the Christmas Mine and deep into the labyrinths of the Sally Goodin or one of the other, lower mines that honeycombed the mountain. She could hear sounds from behind, which seemed to indicate her pursuer had somehow gotten past the fire, or perhaps he’d just waited until it burned out.

Ahead, her headlight disclosed a cave-in, a bunch of jagged boulders strewn about on the floor of the tunnel, with some crossed beams lying atop. A narrow path, however, could be seen twisting through the rubble. Cold air streamed down from above. She climbed painfully over the piles of rock and broken timbers, then looked up. A crack disclosed a piece of dark, gray sky — but that was all. There was no way out, no way to reach it.

She continued picking her way through the rubble and came at last to a flat area on the far side. Suddenly, she heard a buzzing noise. She stopped, shone her light ahead, then gave a little cry and shrank back. Nestled among the fallen boulders, blocking the way, was a huge, ropy mass of hibernating rattlesnakes. They were half asleep in the cold air, but the twisted clump still moved in a kind of horrible slow motion, pulsing, rotating, almost like a single entity. Some were awake enough to be rattling in warning.

She shone the light around and saw that other rattlers were coiled up into the various small spaces between the rocks. They were everywhere — seemingly hundreds of them. Even — she realized with a sickening sensation — behind her.

Suddenly the boom of the gun sounded, and she felt one hand jerk in response to an impact. Instinctively, she leapt over the mass of snakes, scrambling among the boulders, the pain in her ankle even more excruciating. Another shot followed, then another, and she took refuge behind a large boulder — right next to a fat, sleeping rattler. There were some stones nearby — this was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. She picked up a heavy stone in her right hand — something was wrong with her left hand but she’d worry about that later — and jumped onto the large boulder, letting the rock fly with great violence at the main mass of snakes.

The rock smacked into the bolus of reptiles, and the reaction was immediate and terrifying — an eruption of buzzing that filled the tunnel with a sound like a thousand bees, accompanied by an explosive writhing of movement. The lazy mass of snakes suddenly turned into a whirlwind, coiling, striking, sliding off in all directions — several coming straight at her.

She scrambled backward. Another shot struck the rocks around her, ricocheting about, and she fell in between two boulders. The buzzing filled the cave like a vast humming dynamo. She got up and ran, dragging her injured ankle. Half a dozen snakes struck at her and she jumped away. Two got hung up by their fangs on the thick fabric of her snow pants. With a scream she whacked them off, fairly dancing among the striking snakes, as another pair of shots whined among the rocks. A few moments later she was beyond the furious mass, limping away, until she could stand it no longer and finally collapsed in pain. She lay there, gasping, the tears running down her face. Her ankle was certainly broken. And then there was her hand: even in the dark she could see that her glove was soaked with warm liquid. She removed it gingerly, held her hand up to the light, and was amazed by what she saw: her pinkie finger was dangling by a mere thread of skin, blood welling out.

“Fuck!”

She shook off the useless finger, almost passing out from a combination of dizziness and disgust. Unwrapping her scarf, she cut a strip of it off with a knife and wrapped it around her hand and the stump of the finger, tightening it to stem the flow of blood.

My finger. Jesus. In a dream, almost in shock from disbelief, she pulled the glove back over the wadded scarf as best she could to hold it in place. As she did so, she heard a shout from behind, then a scream, and the wild firing of the gun. But this time the shots were not directed at her. A rattling noise filled the tunnel with an unholy sound of reptilian fury. More shots and yells.

She had to keep going — eventually he would get through the snakes, unless by great good luck he was bitten. She hauled herself to her feet, fighting the dizziness and, now, a growing nausea. Christ, she needed a crutch, but there was nothing at hand. Limping badly, she continued along the tunnel, which descended steadily for some distance, passing several crosscuts. In time she came to a small side alcove, blocked up with rocks that formed a makeshift wall, now half collapsed. A place to hide? She dragged herself to it, pulled out some more stones, and looked in.

The beam of light fell upon a horde of rats, which erupted in excitement and went scurrying every which way with a chorus of squeals — exposing the remains of several bodies.

She stared with something like stupefaction. There were four in all, laid out in a row of skeletons — or rather, partial mummies, as they still had dried flesh on their bones, rotten clothes, old boots, and hair. Their dried-up heads were tilted back, their jaws wide open as if screaming, exposing mummified mouths full of black, rotten teeth.

As she crawled in to look more closely, she could see all the signs. They had been shot — she could see numerous holes in their skulls, many other bones broken by what looked like bullet impacts. A firing-squad attack far in excess of what would have been necessary to kill them — a display of violent, homicidal fury.

The four mercury-crazed miners. They’d been killed somewhere in this tunnel system, probably the Christmas Mine, and their bodies dragged down here and hidden.

Near the corpses lay a long, heavy stick — a cudgel, really, perhaps carried by one of the killers. It would do for an improvised crutch.

As quickly as she could without compromising the integrity of the evidence, Corrie took off her knapsack, removed the specimen bags, and laid them out. Removing the glove from her good hand and dropping to her knees, she crawled from body to body, taking from each a sample of hair, a fragment of papery dried flesh, and a small bone. She sealed them in the bags and put them back in her backpack. She photographed the bodies with her cell phone, then put the pack back on.

With a gasp of pain, she managed to get to her feet, leaning on the cudgel. Now she had to figure out where she was and find her way out — without getting shot in the process.

As if on cue, she could hear, way back near the cave-in, additional firing. She almost imagined she could hear the buzzing of the rattlers, a soft hiss in the distance: pleasant, like the ocean.

She made her way farther down the tunnel, gasping with pain, trying to find some distinctive landmark that she could in turn locate on the map, and thus orient herself toward an exit. And to her great relief, ten minutes of slow wandering brought her to a junction of tunnels — three horizontal ones and a vertical shaft coming together. She collapsed, took out the map, and scrutinized it.

And there it was.

Thank God. A break, at last. According to the map, she was now in the Sally Goodin Mine, not far from a lower exit. A dewatering tunnel, containing a large pipe, lay a few hundred yards from where she was, and it led directly to the Ireland Pump Engine, in the cirque below the Christmas Mine. Folding up the map, she tucked it away and took the indicated tunnel.

Sure enough: after a few more minutes of excruciating travel she finally came to a low stream of water that covered the rock floor, and then to the opening of an ancient pipe, nearly three feet in diameter, that ran along one side of the tunnel. She stooped and crawled into its mouth, grateful to be off her feet, and began making her way down its length.

It was dark and close, and her bulky suit kept catching and tearing on rusted areas of the pipe. But the going was relatively clear, with no cave-ins or narrowings. Within ten minutes she could feel the flow of air growing colder and fresher, and she fancied she could smell snow. In another few minutes she made out the dimmest of lights ahead, and soon she emerged, first through a shunt, and then a partially open wooden door, into a dark, dingy space, thick with rusted pipes and giant valves. It was now very cold, and a dim gray light filtered in through gaps and cracks in the wooden ceiling. She figured she must be somewhere in the depths of the old Ireland Pump building.

Giving a sob of relief, she looked around and saw an old staircase leading upward. As she limped toward it, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a dark, moving shape. A human shape — coming at her fast.

He’s gotten through the snakes. Somehow he’s gotten through the snakes and flanked me…

One arm wrapped around her waist; another around her neck, covering her mouth, stifling her scream and pulling her head back. Then a face appeared, in the dimness — a face that was just recognizable.

…Ted.

“You!” Ted cried, suddenly loosening his grip and uncovering her mouth. “It’s you! What on earth are you doing here—?”

“Oh, my God,” she gasped, “Ted! There’s a man. Back there…he tried to kill me…” She gasped, unable to continue, as he held her.

“You’re bleeding!” he exclaimed.

She started to sob. “Thank God, Ted, thank God you’re here. He’s got a gun…”

Ted’s grip tightened again as he held her up. “He’s fucked if he comes here,” he said quietly, in a dark voice.

She sobbed, gasped. “I’m so glad to see you…My finger’s been shot off…I need to get to a hospital…”

He continued to hold her. “I’m going to take care of you.”