shattering pressure that wiped everything blank.
He came to in a howling torrent of darkness. The darkness was incomplete, lacking the utter black of totality. He saw as much as sensed a whirlwind of smoke and dirt streaming over him. That he could distinguish gradations in the murk meant that at least one light was still working.
It wasn’t his. His hard hat lamp had gone dark and the flashlight had fallen from his hand. He was unsure whether he even still wore a hard hat. He felt around the top of his head but numbed fingers and stunned senses were unable to feel the difference between his skull and the protective headgear.
Some of the murk thinned as reality returned with each heartbeat. He was on his hands and knees and a light dangled back and forth, swinging pendulum-like in front of his face. Was it the sun? The moon?
Hands were tugging at him, hooked under his arms and urging him to his feet. The chaos was strangely silent, drowned out by the ringing in his ears. The picture came into tighter focus. The shining globe waving before his eyes resolved itself into the lens of a blazing flashlight. The lens was cracked but the beam still shone.
The flashlight hung from where it was hooked to Anne Armstrong’s belt, hanging down from the side of her hip. She was crouching over him, trying to help him stand up. He knelt on the tunnel’s rocky floor, smoke and dust roiling all around him.
It was hard to breathe in the murk- laden air. Mouth and nostrils seemed filled with dirt. He coughed, choked, spat, managing to clear his throat. It helped him draw a breath, then another.
Armstrong’s face was close to his, weirdly under-lit by the flashlight’s glow, her eyes wide and staring, her features harsh and angular. Her mouth was moving but Jack was unable to hear what she was saying due to the roaring in his ears. More imperative than words was the pull of her hands urging him upward.
He said, “I’m all right!” He mouthed the words but couldn’t hear them. He reached out with his right hand, touching the tunnel wall. He braced himself and rose to his feet, lurching into a half crouch. A wave of dizziness overswept him and he stumbled sideways, bumping his head against the wall. A chinstrap throttled him; that’s how he realized he was still wearing his hard hat.
He got his back against the wall and stood there with legs bent at the knees until the dizziness passed. Armstrong tilted the flashlight at her hip so that it shone at a forty-five-degree angle. It was pointed at something to Jack’s left and behind him. His gaze followed the direction of the beam.
It shone on Bailey, crawling forward head-down on his hands and knees. He was bareheaded, having lost his hard hat in the blast. The view wavered as banks of dust and smoke rolled by. Bailey raised his head, looking up when the light hit him. The whites of his eyes stood out in a dirt-smeared face. Blood trickled from his nose and the corners of his mouth. He lowered his head and continued crawling forward.
Jack staggered to one side of Bailey and Armstrong the other. They each took hold of an arm and tried to lift Bailey to his feet. Jack could barely stay on his own. He tottered, almost falling before managing to right himself. A fall would be disastrous; he was unsure whether he’d be able to get back up. He spread his feet wider for balance; it helped stabilize him.
He and Armstrong somehow managed to get Bailey up and standing. Bailey got his arms across their shoulders as they propped him upright. Arm-strong tilted the baton flashlight level so that it shone forward, pointing the way ahead.
The dust and smoke clouds were drifting away and ahead of them, seeking an exit at the far end of the tunnel, wherever that might be. They must be going in the direction opposite that from which the blast had come. That was the way the trio must go, too.
That was good. Jack’s sense of direction was scrambled and he would have been just as likely to go the wrong way as not. The streaming airborne debris was a signpost showing the way out.
The three agents started forward. Jack and Arm-strong had to half carry, half drag Bailey at the start. Each lurching pace forward was a win. Jack’s thoughts flashed back to Army days, to forced marches with full field battle gear where trainees were pushed to the limits of endurance and beyond, to prepare them for combat conditions that would demand that one must march or die. There had been times later during his term of service when that became literally true and survival depended on the ability to put one foot forward and then the other, slogging along until you were all used up and continuing to keep on going after that.
Now as then he concentrated all his thoughts and energies on forward motion. The passage became a torturous nightmare, a seeming treadmill to oblivion. But he kept on going, reaching down deep somewhere to find something to pick up those feet and put them down.
Bailey began carrying more of his own weight. That helped. Jack was in top condition, and his tremendous endurance began to reassert itself. That helped more.
Armstrong kept the flashlight hooked to her belt. That was smart, keeping it safely tethered so as to avoid having it slip free from a betraying hand to fall and shatter, blacking out their sole source of light. Jack had his pocket flash but he didn’t know if it still worked. It took all the energy he had to continue moving ahead and propping up Bailey; there was none for checking on the pocket flash, not when Armstrong’s light served their purposes. She needed to be able to use her right hand to tilt the light to point the way, so Jack did what he could to shoulder more of Bailey’s weight to enable her to do just that.
They came to a junction point. That was tricky because the murky clouds streamed into all three tunnel mouths in search of an exit. It would be easy to take the wrong branch. Jack steered Bailey to a tunnel wall and put both their backs against it and held him up in place, freeing Armstrong to search for the green arrow marking the correct tunnel.
She found it and returned, got Bailey’s other arm across her shoulder, and the trio continued their onward march. It was like one of those textbook-case nightmares where life depends on fleeing deadly danger but the sleeper is slowed to a maddening tortoise pace, creeping along while swift-winged Death swoops in for the kill. But this was no dream, it was real, appallingly real. How many junction points had they passed on their way in toward the shaft, two or three? Jack couldn’t remember. No matter. All that counted was picking up one foot and putting it down, one after the other. Don’t bother counting them; waste of time. Just keep going. His ears popped and the constant roaring in his ears was replaced by intermittent bursts of sound. Rasping breath that was his own sounded like wood being sawed. The shuffling tread of his footfalls, more felt than heard, as each successive step sent tremors from his feet through bones all the way to the top of his head. Groans and inarticulate mumblings from Bailey. Maybe they were articulate but Jack couldn’t make them out.
Armstrong’s panting gasps were sometimes interrupted by shouted remarks that reached Jack in bits and pieces like garbled transmissions.
He thought of that hoary comedy cliche, the one where a couple of drunks hold each other up as they stagger and reel from lamppost to lamppost. That’s what he, Armstrong, and Bailey would have looked like to a stranger’s eyes. Not so funny when you were living it.
Another junction point. Armstrong seemed to take forever to find the green arrow marker while Jack kept Bailey on his feet. Jack told himself that that was okay, better she should take her time and get it right rather than make a mistake that would send them up a blind alley. The trouble was that Bailey’s legs kept folding at the knees and he’d start sliding down the wall, forcing Jack to expend more effort to keep him upright.
It was a relief when Armstrong took her place beside Bailey, lessening some of the weight on Jack. They lurched forward, resuming their stumbling, swaying stagger along the tunnel.
Jack’s hearing was returning, the roaring muting down to a continuous low murmur like surf breaking on an unseen shore. It counterpointed the sounds of their passage, the heavy breathing, gasps, and groans, the foot- dragging shuffle of their forward march.
An eternity of slogging and heaving brought them to a third junction. Jack shook his head, stifling a groan. It wasn’t fair to have come so far only to have to continue the ordeal. What of it? Fairness was irrelevant, only facts mattered. The fact was that they must go on.
Wasn’t there some character in Greek myth whose punishment for offending the gods was something like this? Only he was condemned to roll a rock up and down hills for all time. Jack had it better than him, he told himself. At least he didn’t have to climb any hills.
Pick them up and put them down. Jack couldn’t help resenting Frith and Sanchez. They must know what had happened. Where were they? Why hadn’t they come to help?
Never mind about that. Just keep moving.
The airborne murk was starting to thin out as it streamed ahead. It was like a river made up of many currents of different hues, some light, some dark, all of them intertwining and writhing, coming together and
