tenpenny nails were being scratched over petrified wood. A flurry of noise that went on for maybe thirty seconds. Then nothing. Nothing at all.
“There’s something up there,” Breed whispered, like he was afraid that whatever it was might hear him.
All lights were up in the petrified treetops now. Most were just posts lacking branches. The lights swept over them and there was absolutely nothing up there. Nothing that the lights could find.
The sounds started again, knocking and scraping, not from one particular tree, but from many as if whatever was up there was leaping from trunk to trunk over their heads. It stopped again and they all stood there, silent and motionless, sensing something but not knowing what it was. Boyd’s flashlight was shaking in his hand, his beam jumping around. He wanted badly to run, to get the hell out of there, before whatever it was showed. Because he had a bad feeling that it was about to. That whatever was up there was about to drop down amongst them in a flurry of scratching limbs.
What they heard next was a clicking.
Click, click, click.
The sound of a deathwatch beetle in the wall of a deserted house or a cicada up in a gum tree. Just that repetitive, chitinous clicking like some insect rubbing its forelegs together or tapping them on its carapace. Whatever it was, it was not a good sound and nobody dared speak. Dared acknowledge what they were hearing.
It’s like Morse Code, Boyd thought. Like something up there is trying to communicate with us.
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” Maki said.
But he didn’t move. What came next stopped him dead.
Stopped them all dead and took away any slim hope they had that what was up there was a bat or something ordinary. It started as a low whistling sound and built to a screeching, strident piping that went right up their spines. It sounded almost frenzied, desperate, the shriek of some mountain cat crying out in agony and despair and maybe even stark melancholy. It rose up to a shrill cacophony and then slowly faded. And by then, they were all scared.
Nothing with a voice like that could be remotely normal or remotely sane.
Boyd just stood there, trying to pull air into his lungs. He could not get past the idea that there was an almost feminine caliber to that cry. Anguished, haunted, and demented, but somehow female. Like some big and hideous insect imitating a human cry. The idea of that made his flesh crawl in waves. It was not a human voice or even a tone a human would be capable of producing, yet it was not strictly bestial and there was no denying a certain sorrow in its pitch.
But it was enough.
It was plenty.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jurgens said and the desperation in his voice was real.
They made it maybe ten feet before things started to happen.
The earth below and above them rumbled like a hungry belly and things began to move and shake and tremble. Rocks and dust fell from overhead. The prehistoric trees began to sway back and forth. Everything was in motion, including the men who tried to stay on their feet. Lights went spinning in all directions as their owners pitched this way and that.
“A cave-in!” Breed called out. “A fucking cave-in!”
Boyd hit the ground, waiting for millions of tons of rock to come down on top of him, for the lot of them to be squashed flat like his old man in the Mary B. mine. He heard that rumbling from the distance and realized that whatever was happening, it was apparently not happening in the cavern. Rocks were falling and dust was kicked up, but the real thunder came from the distance. And then a shock wave rolled at them, throwing everyone to the ground. In the glow of a dropped lantern, he saw one of those giant stone trees sway back and forth and come right down on top of him. He felt the impact as its trunk trapped his leg with a white-hot rush of pain.
And in the back of his head, a voice said, yer probably the only guy ever crushed by a falling tree out of the Permian.
Then there was darkness.
11
Up in Level #8, it was a dog and pony show and Russo, the mine captain, didn’t expect much more. But he was there, hell yes, cracking the whip and kicking ass because time was a factor here. Those men were down there. Trapped. Maybe dead, but maybe alive and this is what he was counting on. It was what everyone was counting on. The brass at Hobart were having kittens over this one and they were crawling up Russo’s ass. They were so far up there he could feel them in the back of his throat.
And what he got, he gave.
Standing there in his rainsuit, boots, and miner’s helmet, he was watching the diggers clearing rubble from the drift. They were going at it hard, but not hard enough for Russo’s liking. “C’mon! C’mon, you fucking pussies! Clean that drift! We got to get it blasted out to get that drilling rig in! Move! Move! Christ, you boys dig like I fuck!”
It was a hive of activity down there with the clearing and the blasting, the rubble being carted away. But the brass were on him and he had never let them down before and he wouldn’t let them down now.
They wanted action.
They wanted results.
There were families out there who wanted to know what the hell was going on and what was being done to free their men. They were riding the Hobart people hard and when they hopped off the saddle, the Safety and Mine people hopped on. And topside, Jesus, the media were already descending and interviewing family members and word had it they’d already dug up a few old hands that were more than happy to spill the beans about the unsafe working conditions at the Hobart. Russo knew who those guys were…people like Lem Rigby and Charlie DeCock. Men he’d fired for being lazy, careless, or downright incompetent. Here was their chance to bask in the sun and point fingers and, goddamn yes, they were sure pointing them.
Revenge, that was it.
Against the Hobart mine. Against Russo himself.
And Russo, like every man who’d worked those drifts and channels, knew that the word of those guys wasn’t worth a sip of piss on a hot day, but the media didn’t know that. The journalists and TV parasites didn’t know the difference between a stope and a gopher hole, just like they didn’t know the difference between a hard-working man and a guy like Lem Rigby who’d shown up drunk and been canned on the spot by Russo.
No, they didn’t know what Rigby’s game was.
They only knew that in him and half-wit Charlie DeCock they had eyewitnesses to the workings of the mine itself that would sweeten the deal and make the Hobart look guilty as hell. And already the brass were smelling those lawsuits and they did not care for the stink.
Russo knew somebody would get dragged over the rocks on this one.
And that somebody would probably be him.
So he shouted. He yelled. He threatened and intimidated and raised three kinds of holy hell.
But what he was thinking about all the while was not his job and not lawsuits and not those candyass reporters topside.
He was thinking about Jurgens and the miners.
Down in the darkness, far below.
Russo had been trapped underground for thirty-six hours once, so he knew. He goddamn well knew what that score was about.
As the air hammers chiseled and the rubble was dragged out, as hydraulic lines vibrated and steam hoses hissed and men scrambled, he said under his breath, “Don’t worry, boys. I’ll get you out. Johnny Russo is on the job and I’ll get your fine white asses out of the pit. See if I don’t. And if you’re nothing but corpses, by God, then I’ll carry you out with my own bare hands.”
