The Day Before Midnight

second, then yield to the impact of his boot.

He was in something.

He shook his boot off, staggered forward. Everywhere the maggoty, glistening bodies Jay, beyond color, beyond everything except their own disintegration. He stumbled ahead, finding himself in a larger chamber, then saw the drama of it. His beam flicked backward in confirmation, and there revealed the fallen tunnel, a hopeless no-exit of collapsed coal. These men, what? fifty or so? had been trapped back here in the coffin. They’d known they hadn’t the strength or the time to tunnel back out through the fallen chamber, and had thought therefore to dig laterally, from their tunnel — Cathy, wasn’t it? something beginning with a C — into his tunnel, Elizabeth. But Elizabeth, that bitch, that white bitch, had betrayed them as she had betrayed him. She had been just inches away before exhaustion and airlessness had overcome the last of them, and they’d died in a frenzy of effort.

Walls wept for their effort and guts. White boys in a tunnel, digging for their lives. Tunnel men, like he was. Hey, man, dyin’ underground no way to die, Walls knew, having seen enough of it himself in his time.

But why are they rotting now?

Walls worked his mind against it and then he had it. Of course. They’d been sealed off in airless, germless protection down here for their long half-century, and without air, there is no rot. They had quietly mummified, turning to leather and sinew, perhaps even refrigerated by the coolness. But then — he struggled to remember the details as they had been explained to him — the hole had been left open for years and years and finally, last summer, when they excavated for the missile shaft, it had rained even more, and the rain had poured into the open mountain and eaten its way down through the coal, and eventually reached and punctured this coffin. And when it violated the grave, it admitted grave robbers, the millions of germy little creatures that turned flesh to horror.

Git your ass going, boy!

Walls had entered the main tunnel now, where the rest of the miners were. His light flashed upon them. The ceiling was low. Walls tried not to imagine it but he could not avoid it: thinking of them trapped down here in the dank dark, feeling the air ebb in slow degrees, waiting for a rescue that wouldn’t — couldn’t — come.

He walked forward, bumped his head, crouched, walked forward some more. He felt the cool pressure of air, and had a bad moment as he imagined his lungs filling with microscopic maggoty things, with the wormy crawlers and creepers that scuttled through the flesh. He felt very close to panic, even he, Walls, the hardest, meanest, baddest tunnel dick of all time, and not a slouch of a street player either, thank you, ma’am. Maybe this was the worst moment for him: standing among the corpses, no place to go, it seemed, but to join them. He saw an image of himself, a ragged, mealy hunk of rot spangling a few old African bones. Years later white people would come and hold up a Walls drumstick and with great distaste say, “Good Lord, Ralph, this fellow’s limbs are so darned much thicker than the others; why, he must have been a colored man!” But then Walls got hold of himself, yessir, saying it over and over, black and proud! black and proud! and the panic flapped out of his chest and found some other chest to fill somewhere in the world: old Walls was back.

No stiffs going to get the best of this nigger, no, sir!

This boy goin’ live. Jack, don’t you know?

Walls crawled forward, feeling. He didn’t need his lamp now, he didn’t need nothing. He flicked it off. He loved the darkness. He was the man of darkness. He was home in the darkness; it was his natural element. He had this tunnel beat. This motherfucker was his, its ass belong to him.

In the dark his fingers reached out. He was alone with the dead but no longer afraid.

Then he saw the light. Milky, luminous, faraway, but light nonetheless.

Okay, motherfucker, he thought.

The breeze continued to blow, and he was surprised at how strong and sweet it smelled. He crawled over bodies, feeling them crumble beneath him. They couldn’t harm him, they were only the dead.

He came to it at last. Air poured down from the hole in the roof. He looked up. There was the light, far away, a long life’s upward chimney crawl or squirm. But light. The light at the end of the — whatever.

Okay, Jack, he thought. Here comes Walls.

He wrapped his friend and companion Mr. Twelve tightly to him, and began his journey toward the light.

It was a chasm by now, a tunnel into the heart of the metal.

“Mr. Hummel?”

“Yes, sir?”

“How much farther?”

“Last time I measured, I’d gone one hundred twenty-five centimeters. That puts us maybe ten or fifteen away.”

“Time, please.”

“Oh, say three, four hours. Midnight. We get there at midnight.”

“Excellent. And then we can all go home.”

He’d been cutting for hours now, and the ache in his arms from the awkwardness of holding the torch deep in the guts of the titanium block was terrific. Yet he was proud, in a terrible way. Lots of guys couldn’t have done what he’d done. He’d done a beautiful job, clean and elegant and precise. He’d just quit bitching and gotten it done. But he was still scared.

“The Army. It’s up top, trying to break in, isn’t it?”

“It is, Mr. Hummel.”

“What happens to me when those guys kick the doors down and start shooting?”

“They can’t get down here.”

“They’ll figure out a way. They’re smart guys.”

“Nobody is that smart.”

“Who are you guys? Tell me, at least.”

“Patriots.”

“I know enough to know all soldiers think they’re patriots.”

“No, most soldiers are cynics. We are the true thing.”

“But if you shoot this thing off, everybody will die. Because the Russians will shoot off theirs, they’ll shoot off everything they’ve got, and everybody dies!”

It scared him to defy the man. But it just blubbered out.

The general smiled with kind radiance.

“Mr. Hummel, I could never permit a full-scale nuclear exchange. You’re right, that would be the end of the planet. Do you think I could convince all these men to come with me on this desperate mission only to end the world?”

Jack just looked at him and had no answer.

“You see, Mr. Hummel, war doesn’t make sense if everybody loses, does it? But if we can win? What then? Then, isn’t it the moral responsibility of a professional soldier to take advantage of the situation? Isn’t that where the higher duty lies? Doesn’t that save the world rather than doom it? Millions die; better that, over the long run, than billions! Better a dead country than a dead world? Especially if the millions are in the enemy’s country, eh?”

The man’s eyes, beaming belief and conviction, radiated passion and craziness. It frightened Jack. He swallowed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I assure you, Mr. Hummel, I do. Now, please, the flame.”

Jack put the flame in the hole. He had a feeling of terrible guilt.

“We’re done,” announced the engineer sergeant.

“At last,” shouted Alex. “God, you men have worked so hard. Get the tarpaulin pulled back.”

With grunting and heaving the men of the Red Platoon pulled back and discarded the heavy sheets of canvas that had obscured their work.

In the darkness Alex couldn’t see much, but he knew what was there.

“They’ll never get through that,” he said. “We should know, eh? We learned the hard way?”

“Yes, sir,” said the engineer sergeant.

The air was crisp and cold and above them the stars towered, spinning firewheels, clouds of distant cosmic