Reamde

“Why?”

“They used to booby-trap it.”

“Who did!?”

“Back in the day,” Chet said, “the business got a little competitive. A little nasty. Crazy people got into it. People who’d kill you. That’s when Dodge and I decided to go straight.”

Zula painted the light beam up and down the length of the door crack, and noticed, way up at the top, a steely glint. Piano wire. It had been made fast around the vertical bar that served as the edge of the door, and routed horizontally across the gap between door and frame, across the grid and all the way to the tunnel wall. There it disappeared into a mound of trash that had been piled up in the corner formed by the wall and the steel grid.

By the time she finished piecing this all together, Chet had caught up with her and was following the wire with his own eyes as he leaned against the gridiron, breathing raggedly and gurgling as he did so. “Holy crap,” he said, “I didn’t actually expect to see it.”

“You think there’s something hidden in that trash pile?”

“Must be.”

In a pocket of his leathers, Chet was carrying a Leatherman that included pliers and a wire cutter. After insisting that Zula go back outside and stand with her back to the mountain, he reached up, snipped the wire, and pushed the gate open—she could hear the massive hinges groaning. “All clear,” he announced, after counting to ten. “But before we go through, I’m going to take a little rest here while you go back to my bike and get something.”

The something turned out to be a massive cable lock. Zula fetched it back into the tunnel and helped Chet thread it through the bars of the gridiron and the gate, locking it securely behind them.

After that, they proceeded with extreme caution, which was not that difficult anyway since Chet couldn’t move very fast. Once they got past the drifts of party trash that cluttered the floor near the grid, there weren’t that many places to hide booby traps. And if the first one was anything to go by, Jones would have marked them all with spray-painted warnings so that the follow-up group—presumably Ershut, Jahandar, and anyone else deemed worthy to follow—wouldn’t run afoul of them. So her nose became extremely sensitive to the sharp perfume of spray paint, and her eyes keen for the fluorescent green color that Jones had been using.

After a few minutes, they came to a place where the tunnel terminated in a rock wall pierced by a mouse hole just big enough for Chet to walk upright. “See, this thing was an adit,” Chet was explaining, “which is what the miners call a tunnel that runs horizontal, flat enough that you can run rail cars on it. Straight into the ore body in the heart of the mountain. Only this first part of it, here, got expanded for the railway. But now we’re going into the adit proper.” There was another pileup of trash and another steel door, barring the entrance to the adit, that had been jimmied open and left hanging askew. It would have been a natural place to put another booby trap. But Zula did not see or smell spray paint, and Chet’s minute inspection of the trash and the door revealed nothing suspicious. They stepped into the much more confined space of the adit and discovered that, as always, revelers and graffitists had been there first.

“Third one on the right,” Chet intoned, then coughed and hacked up something dark which he spat against the wall. The physical effort of the coughing left him woozy, and he leaned against the stone for a few moments, then stumbled forward, insisting on leading the way.

Zula wanted to ask Third what on the right? but reckoned she would see soon enough and didn’t want to put Chet to the trouble of talking. She got a clue when they passed a hole in the wall, and she shone her light into it to see another adit leading away into what she gathered was the ore body. They had clearly entered into a sort of rock that was different from what they’d seen at the surface: darker but laced through with veins of color and a-sparkle with crystalline growths, especially in those places where water seeped out of cracks and trickled along the gutter carved into the adit’s floor. Only a few moments later they went by another, similar landmark, and perhaps twenty meters farther along, after passing momentarily through rock of a different sort, they reentered the ore body and came to adit number three. Which Zula could have guessed just by nosing it out, since the odor of spray paint had become strong again. This time several lines of script had been scrawled across the wall next to the side passage.

They stopped here so that Chet could gather his strength. He had been consuming water at an alarming rate and still complained of thirst. “You go down this adit for, I don’t know, a hundred feet, and you’ll come to a shaft in the floor of a chamber. Should be a steel ladder. Used to be a hoist, but it’s busted now. Down the ladder all the way to the bottom. About fifty rungs. That gets you into an adit that takes you out to another intersection like this one.”

“Does this mean you’re not coming with me?”

“Just a figure of speech,” he said, after a pause to consider it. “Just gathering my energy for that damned ladder.”

It was more or less as Chet had predicted. The chamber at the end of this adit contained a surprisingly large machine that must have been brought down in pieces and assembled here. Its most prominent feature was a giant, rusty wheel with cables running over grooves in its rim and descending into the hole below. Obviously the thing hadn’t moved in eons and so Zula, had she been a recreational spelunker, would have given up and turned around at this point. But Chet insisted, and more Day-Glo-green graffiti affirmed, that there was a way down. She followed him around to the back side of the machine. She began to collect that the shaft below them was circular in cross section, but that the circle had been parceled out into a bundle of separate squarish or rectangular passageways. The largest of these was in the middle and was serviced by the giant wheel, but smaller ones seemed to be reserved for other purposes such as cabling, ventilation, dumbwaiter-like rigs for carrying ore, and the ladder that could be used when nothing else was functioning. Chet gave the top of this a good careful look, inspecting for booby traps. Then he undid his belt, threaded it through the wrist loop on his flashlight, and rebuckled it so that the light would dangle in front of his crotch and the beam would shine downward. He began to descend the ladder with such speed that Zula feared he was falling, rather than climbing. She got the sense that he just wanted to get this over with. Perhaps he was expecting to find a booby trap at the bottom and wanted to set it off long before she got there. This didn’t give her a lot of incentive to move quickly. Gripping her flashlight in one fist so that it shone downward, she began to descend the ladder, and quickly found herself in an environment that would have been violently claustrophobic had she been disposed to such feelings. Space in the shaft was apparently precious and the engineers didn’t want to sacrifice any more than was absolutely necessary to this purpose. Her pack kept getting wedged against the wall behind her, or hung up on brackets, forcing her to push back a little wave of panic each time.

“I think there’s another booby trap,” she said, passing by a fresh annotation in green spray paint.

“I saw it too,” he announced. “Hold on for a second.”

She stopped and forced herself to look down. Chet was hanging from a rung near the bottom, unfolding his Leatherman. She heard a crisp snip as it severed a piano wire, and then several seconds of absolute silence as they both waited for a detonation.

“I think we’re good,” he announced.

They had made no effort to hide this one: it was a curved rectangular slab, simply lying on the floor at the base of the ladder, lashed into place with zip ties. “Claymore,” Chet announced. “Aimed straight up. Would have taken out anyone on the ladder.”

“How are you doing?” Zula asked him, since there didn’t seem to be much more to say on that topic.

“Not bad!” Chet said, sounding a bit surprised. “Going to sit down and take a little rest. I’ll meet you at the drift intersection up thataway.” He waved his flashlight beam down one of three adits that radiated away from the base of the shaft. “Go about a hundred feet, we’ll be taking the second adit on the left.”

Zula had been noticing that Chet’s condition improved markedly when something happened to trigger an adrenaline surge and declined during uneventful parts of the journey. At the moment he seemed quite energetic, so she was surprised that he was now requesting a break; but perhaps this was just his polite way of saying that he wanted her to leave him alone so that he could take a leak. Certainly he had been drinking enough water. So she walked up the adit to the second hole on the left and smelled and saw more graffiti. But she smelled something else as well: a current of fresh air coming down from that direction.

She tried shutting off her flashlight and letting her eyes adjust, and she convinced herself that she could see faint gleams of daylight ricocheting from the tunnel’s moisture-slickened walls.