DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
10:48 AM TUESDAY
***ALERT MODE***
John slammed into Deirdre, feeling her in the complete blackness of the room. The move caught her by surprise, and him too: he had expected to be gunned down in the darkness. He knocked into the barrel of her weapon, and grappled for it, gasping as the gun barrel - hot from the Uzi’s high bullet expenditure - burnt his hand. The woman tightened her hold almost immediately, no doubt aware as John was that letting go would be tantamount to signing her own death sentence.
The struggle was a silent one as John and the woman slammed against the cave wall, each trying to gain the upper hand in the complete darkness. He felt a breath of cool air whisk by him in the darkness, and knew it was Fran, once again following his directives perfectly. He managed a grim smile even in the thick of the struggle.
He saw a light flick on down the tunnel and again knew it must be Fran, clicking on her headlamp. At the same moment, he felt his enemy’s body tense. The woman redoubled her efforts, trying now not so much to win as to get away.
To follow Fran, John thought. They wanted Fran much more than they wanted him, he realized, and again wondered why.
The thought distracted him enough that the woman was able to get a hit in. She loosened her grip on the gun and slammed her palm into John’s cheek. It wasn’t a hard blow - her leverage was bad - but the contact dazed him, and she was able to push him away. He heard her running and made out her dim outline, sprinting toward the light that marked Fran’s location.
He knew he’d never catch up in time, and his reaction was more instinct than thought.
In one swift move, he pulled the coil of rope off his shoulder. It was thick gauge, meant for hauling miners up and down new shafts, for lashing temporary support braces and other strength work. So it was heavy, almost a cable, with a good heft to it.
John threw the rope, dimly saw it fly through the air in tight curls like an air born tarantula. It hit the woman’s legs, tangling them, and she tripped. Her arms reached out to break her fall, and in the time she was going down, John leapt to his feet and ran toward her. She careened into a wall brace, then fell to her knees in the dusky gloom of the tunnel.
If he could get to her before she stood, he felt sure he could kill her. But he was still twenty feet away when she jumped up, gun aimed at him. Point blank, and no way to miss.
***
Deirdre’s knee hurt where she had hit the ground. Her knuckles were skinned from the impact with the wall, and her whole body was bruised from the short but intense fight in the dark. She knew her mission was to get the girl, but now she had the chance to make sure John didn’t get in their way anymore. He was in her sights, hard to see in the dim light, but still impossible to miss at this close range. She could see that his hands were raised in a ridiculous stance of defeat, as though he thought she would let him go.
"Die," she snarled. He leaped to the side, but she didn’t pull the trigger. She didn’t want to waste any ammo, so she would wait a fraction of a second longer, then kill him when he stopped his sideways move.
In the fraction of a second she waited, a thin trickle of dirt fell on her head.
Then, with a deep rumble, a hundred tons of rock rolled out of the wall, slamming into her with a life-ending torrent that masked any slight noise she might have made in the millisecond between realizing what was happening and becoming a permanent fixture of the mountain’s structure.
***
Fran heard the collapse behind her and launched herself forward, shielding her head with her arms and landing in a fetal position on the ground. She felt a cloud of dust roil over her like an angry and biting wind, and then there was only stillness, a silence that was as deep and profound as the darkness she had experienced in this place beneath the world. Silent and dark, quiet and deep. The mountain seemed to her as though it was holding its breath, deciding whether to let loose another torrent of rock and dirt. There was another deep rumble, and then silence again.
She looked behind her. A solid wall of rock and rubble greeted her.
"John!" she screamed.
No answer.
She looked the other way down the hall. There was nothing, just twenty feet of straight shaft, then an intersection. John had told her to wait at the intersection. No matter what.
So she stood and walked to it, knowing she would wait there as if he were alive, because her heart would not allow her to believe he was dead. Besides, she knew that she would never be able to find her way out of this place on her own. If John didn’t appear to help her, she could wander this subterranean labyrinth for a year without ever coming close to finding the way back to the surface.
She waited, gripped by a loneliness she had never felt before, one that few people had experienced, but which one of the miners could have told her went with being in the ground. It was the peculiar sensation that all above is gone, a dream, and only she and the earth still existed. But the existence was dark and solitary, with rock columns for companions, and the ever-present ink that painted everything the same bleak shade of black hovering beyond the reach of her small headlamp. Loneliness was the way of the earth, and now for all Fran knew she would die in this profound solitude.
Still, she clung to the thought of John. She prayed he was alive.
***
Adam stood before the shaft. The elevator was gone. So was Del, one more Controller gone from the ever-dwindling population of would-be saviors of humanity. He didn’t know how to get down without the elevator, so all he could do was guard the entrance and hope against hope that John - and more importantly, Fran - surfaced.
The remaining Controllers knew the same thing. They shuffled nervously as they waited for Adam to move. None of them was really sure how to get back to the entrance. For all the technological advances they may have enjoyed in their own place and time, here under the mountain they found themselves bereft of advantage. The ground had stolen their skill, and left them alone to fend for themselves with only base primal instinct as their guides. And instinct was found wanting in people who had not had to use such a thing in millennia.
A distant rumble sounded, and all of them stiffened. They didn’t know what the sound meant, but it sounded ominous.
"Subterranean slide," whispered one of the Controllers. Adam didn’t know what the noise was. It certainly could have been a subterranean slide.
Then again, it could have been a giant kangaroo hopping on the mountaintop in steel-toed ballet shoes for all Adam knew. He was no expert in geology, and knew his spelunking experience was even more limited than his knowledge of the different rock strata in which he now found himself encased.
A moment later, he started walking. They were at the elevator, he reasoned, so the tunnel opening couldn’t be far.
At least, he hoped not.
***
Fran struggled against tears in the darkness. The light from her headlamp was on, but it only illuminated a dim cone in the thick dust that still hadn’t settled completely after the cave in.
Alone.
Never had that word ushered such dread into her heart as it did now. Even in the dark days and months directly after Nathan had died, her sense of loneliness had been tempered by the outpouring of love and sympathy she received as a daily allowance from friends and relatives. She had never truly felt alone in the way she did now. This was how the dead must feel, she thought, locked in a silent tomb with nothing but the earth and their own steady decay for company.
She sniffled, then coughed as the dust entered her nostrils and lungs. It was thick and sharper than any dust she was used to, composed as it was of tiny slivers of silicon and volcanic rock that could cause what the miners called black lung or the bleeding. She didn’t worry particularly about contracting silicosis, not in the short time that she had been here, but the air irritated her mucus membranes, making her nose run and her eyes water.
She covered her mouth and coughed, and then heard something coming down one of the side corridors. She swung her light around to see what it was, worried that new horrors awaited her, demons that had lingered until now, until she was completely alone, before coming with their obsidian eyes and razor claws to claim her life.
A dark shape hurtled out of the darkness, and Fran screamed.
"Fran, it’s me!" shouted John, and her scream instantly dissolved into a whimper as she clung to him. She was trying to be brave, but everything she had been through in the past twenty-four hours had drained her.
"I’m so tired," she said.
John nodded. "Me, too," he said. "Come on, let’s get out of this hole."