“Exactly. And we were stupid. So we’re even better prepared this time. Let’s go.”
They marched in, flashlights beaming the ground, spying wires along the walls and rails on the floor and Tim’s hindquarters as he scouted ahead.
A full minute inside the tunnel, Kerri glanced behind at the surface world. She saw nothing but a tiny square of distant, howling light.
—
The electric lamps on the left wall magically blinked on a space break later, marking Al’s victory over the generator and pulling out of the canary a single chirp of ephemeral joy, between seeing the darkness repelled and assessing how little its situation had improved. The line of lights ended ahead, where the tunnel opened into a wider, brighter cavern.
The radio cracked, cuing Al to speak. “You’re welcome, over.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Andy smiled. “We’re below Sentinel Hill already. We’ll be at the drift in no time. Over and out.”
The party marched forward, out of the adit and into the shaft station. Their claustrophobia yielded a little at the wide, level room directly beneath the mine’s shafthead frame, and Andy even reexperienced some of the fascination of their first visit. Ancient yellow lighting painted the stopes, loading docks, catwalks, crates, and mine carts.
“We are definitely riding a mine cart this time around,” she said.
“I think I’ve got my quota of video game clichés fulfilled,” Nate commented, examining the rusted wheels on one of the wagons, seemingly as inclined to move as the mountain itself. It had been forty years since those carts had last carried the materials that were still lying around: rocks, tools, hydraulic machinery, gas tanks.
He lingered by that last item: gas tanks.
“Oxygen?” he said, kneeling to read the stenciled letters on the side of one of the industrial-sized bottles. “Should this really be here?”
The rest of the team approached as Tim came by to sniff the objects and formulate his expert opinion.
“Maybe it’s not that strange,” Andy offered. “We’re carrying oxygen.”
“Portable bottles. These could feed a space shuttle.”
“Maybe they were used to refill the smaller ones.”
“It’s funny,” Kerri commented darkly. “I’m not sure miners used oxygen forty years ago. In fact, I’m not sure they use it now.”
Tim puffed at the tank, completing his evaluation—Yup, it’s a big metal thing—while Andy and Nate waited for Kerri to come to a conclusion. Instead, she just shrugged.
“I guess I’ll have to hit the library.”
Andy checked the different galleries opening at the other end.
“That’s our door. One-point-six miles to the Allen shaft. About twenty minutes.”
—
Those twenty minutes turned out to be some of the longest twenty minutes in the history of minutes. The drift was wired and lit enough to store away the flashlights, but there was very little sighting to do. The novelty of bare rock walls instead of concrete had become old at the speed of SNL material. Rails were laid on the floor as well; Kerri tripped twice on them, mind numbed by the dull, everlasting stonescape.
“Why did they even dig this?” Nate heard himself ask out of boredom. “I mean, do they just start mining in a random direction and hope to strike gold?”
“They follow a quartz reef,” Kerri explained. “This quartz reef.” She fingertapped a dark red vein on the wall across the lights.
“This is quartz? In a gold mine?”
“Yeah. In the nineteenth century, gold was either found along water streams or inside quartz veins. The latter discovery was one of the triggers of the Gold Rush.”
“So you think there is gold down here.”
“Well, I’m not sure Debo?n could keep a company running for a hundred years by planting the gold himself. Plus, quartz reefs happen when the rock cracks and the gap is filled up by crystal growth.” She paused, if only to appreciate the fact that she was lecturing again. She went on anyway, because it felt good. “High volcanic activity means tremors; tremors mean cracks. So these hills are not a bad place to prospect.”
“If we find gold, Kerri, first thing I’m buying you are some proper hiking boots,” Andy joked, glancing at Kerri’s suede boots dragging on the dusty ground.
The idea merrily walked along with them for a few seconds, before the rancid air and ichorous lights weighed it down and dissolved it.
One-point-six miles, twenty minutes, 880 lamps, and 1,763 rails later, Kerri thought they were stopping at a random milestone of tedium until she noticed the iron grille under her feet, the steel beams, the handrail before her. They had reached another smaller station.
She leaned over the handrail. Hopeless, brainless pitch-black shadow coagulated below.
“Cap?” Andy radioed. A burst of static responded. “Cap, do you copy, over?” With her free hand, she pulled Kerri away from the chasm. “Captain, we can’t hear you. We’re at the Allen shaft. Got a little problem. Over.”
“What’s the problem?” Kerri whispered.
Nate punched two big fat buttons on a yellow control panel: “We were hoping to find an elevator here.”
“Al? I’m not copying; we’re going downstairs anyway. We stick to the plan. Repeat, we stick to the plan.”
“What stairs?” Kerri asked.
Nate directed his light to the opposite wall of the shaft. A flimsy iron catwalk led to a set of metal rungs jutting out of the rock, torn spiderwebs flapping off them.
“How far down?”
“Five hundred feet.”
“Jesus Ichabod Christ,” Kerri muttered, smoothing her hair down. “How’s Tim going to climb down those?”
“He can’t,” Nate said. “He’ll have to stay behind.”
“No,” Andy objected. “We don’t split up. I will carry him.”
“You will?”
“Yeah.” She paused to reckon the Weimaraner’s size. “It’s okay; he’s what? Forty-five pounds? I’ve carried that weight in air force training.”
“More like sixty-two,” Kerri winced to say.
“Right,” Andy acknowledged. “Fine. That’s what males used to carry.” She smirked, irony-punched. “I can do anything boys can do, right?”
—