“Drag on that soot mixer, Virgil Roberts!” came the shout from up front of the Burrower. “You feel it, you Mary-Anne? We’ve gone and hit wet sand.”
Scooping his fingers around a small leather loop that hung alongside the larger one linked to the air duct, Virgil hauled down on it. As he did so, he tucked his head into his right shoulder and tried to peer past Jos’s front seat. The view was limited, but he got an idea that the soot mix was piping through the gills either side of the main hub thanks to the black spray coating the viewing pane.
“Lights... Hit the lights! Christ, man, if you ain’t gonna cease daydreaming over Carrie-Anne, I’m gonna pack her off to Michigan. She’s got a bitch of an Aunt Rita out there. Nibbling little ferret who’d have Carrie-Anne married off to some rich bilious bastard quick smart, I can tell ya.”
Virgil paid Jos no mind. He felt to the left of his chair for a triangular brass panel containing one squat flip-switch. It was an awkward location for a seemingly essential mechanism, except, as Jos has instilled in him a thousand times over when he had first started working for her, what real need was there for light when the bore that went before them was as blind as a mole. Best to feel their way through the earth’s materials, acclimatise themselves to the rat-tat-tat of sand, the plug and crack of rock, the lumber through shale-sounding gravel. But, on occasion, even Jos’s curiosity could not be contained, and that’s when she called for him to fumble for the switch and flood their murky world with light.
A blaze of illumination accompanied his tug on the switch. Virgil blinked wildly against its burn.
Jos, on the other hand, seemed insusceptible to alterations in light and dark. Yet clearly she benefitted from the refreshed view.
“There. Sand, And wet sand too. How’s the tunnel bearing up?”
Virgil revolved a polished wooden handle to crank the drive shaft that ran up the back of Jos’s seat. The whir of clockwork was just audible over the grind and sluice of the Burrower in motion. Lanterns affixed to the roof of the cabin as well as a number of spots integrated into the corrugated iron floor flickered then strengthened. Virgil stared at a rack of dials above his head. Indigo and ruby glass shields protected fine spindles which twitched or held firm.
“Whiskers say we’re okay for now,” he stated in the loud clear voice Jos had beaten out of him. “A little fallout to the right of that rock gorge few moments back.”
“Then we’re gonna haul anchor and get ourselves a sample of that pretty wet stuff, my boy.” Jos half-leant back, her vinegar features squeezed up in an attempt to express happiness.
It was Jos’s job to steer the Burrower, as it was to dig the twin steel sleds at the undercarriage into whatever matter lay beneath in an effort to slow then cease their motion. Virgil watched her leathered hands punch, skip and tug their way around switches, wheels, plungers, knobs, gears and levers, and the rest of the coke-dusted motorisation bank.
“Keep an eye on those whiskers.”
Jos eased off on the steam release and drew the Burrower to a juddering halt.
The engine wheezed noisily then idled. A faint sensation of crushing in threatened to overwhelm Virgil. He pushed that to the back of his mind. It was just his imagination... or an innate knowledge of how preternatural the circumstances were that had brought him below ground. Somehow it was more eerie to be at a standstill in that freshly-cut tunnel, the illumination from the floodlights spilling either side of the colossal bore. All that lay ahead and behind was tight-aired darkness, hence the detection of any faults in the tunnel walls being left to a backend full of softly sprung copper spines, or ‘whiskers’ as Jos was prone to call them. If matter sifted down too heavily, the weight of it would trigger a kick-back action in the spine, and, with it, a clockwise shift of the farthermost dial in the rack above his head.
All was still for now.
“Dig your little horn into the belly of this beast, Jos,” he said softly, doing a mental check of the fill level of the coke channel to his right.
Jos worked a small fly wheel in the ceiling 45 degrees right. There was the slightest rocking motion as the sample needle took its two foot worth of rock sample then withdrew. Jos rewound the lever in the opposite direction.
“Wet sand... No time to shake hands on it now, Virgil Roberts,” she tossed over a shoulder, and in a tone which implied he had attempted to. “We’re only a couple of lengths below the surface. Best get you back to that strawberry of a niece of mine. You sure do seem to like the taste of her.” The old gal snorted, like a smaller version of her vast grunting machines. “Lets shake free of this sand and haul on up.”
It was difficult not to wipe his glad, tired eyes, not to pat the whorled dragon on her shoulder and say, ‘Well done, Jos. Well done you wise old dear’, not to dream of ice chips pressed to Carrie-Anne’s lips, her jugular, her glistening sternum, not to just sit and sigh and sleep.
Instead, Virgil dove the scoop hard through the coke, ripped open the iron flap in the wall and shook off the fuel, feeling his skin flush and hurt with the heat. The engine bubbled under, then roared in its gullet as Jos manoeuvred the twin steel tracks free of their footings and the tremendous hammer of a machine thrust forward and up.
“Tell you one thing, Virgil. That water gotta come from someplace. Don’t know if you been over the way of the old Indian Academy recently?” Jos made a sound like spit had caught up in her throat and spun there. “Now there’s some suffering. I’ve been hiking up there with a backseat of beet and sweet potato and the rest whenever I get a minute. ‘Cept what do you do? Help the few or try to fix the root problem? That’s what we’re aiming at, ain’t we, Virgil, boy? Let’s hope we gotta a break through, hey?”
Jos Splitz. A devil of a woman on her dried up exterior. A polished silver heart on the inside. Virgil broke out a smile.
It was such a small, simple instance of happiness – snatched away the very next second. A noise, like the scream of a great wind buffeting a hide of metal scales. The Burrower shuddered and the whole cabin seemed to tear forwards an inch then sling back several feet. Virgil heard the wind cut from Jos’s throat; the old gal caught it badly, sucking and choking to guzzle down air.
“You alright, Jos. You alright, girl?”
What the hell had they hit? A sheet of bedrock? Wasn’t possible at that angle. He’d surveyed that stretch of land like a mother knowing every inch of her baby’s skin. Wouldn’t do to risk that nosecone on a more difficult stretch. Something was hard up against them though.
“Jos? You gonna answer me there?”
Unclipping his harness, Virgil manhandled himself up to lean a short way over the front seat. Jos’s head lolled towards him as he dug a hand into the metal boning of her chair, eyes closed so that she looked like a husk of a woman whose clockwork had just run out.
No chance to move her. Never was. The notion of a stalemate underground was something they’d both signed up to. He had no choice then but to attempt to work the motorisation bank by stretching his limbs at grotesque angles. The pain cut at his mind like a lash, but he succeeded in engaging the gears and driving the Burrower hard forward. At impact, his ribs jolted against the driveshaft that fed the lights, plunging the cabin into darkness.
Virgil gulped down the baking air and tried to calm himself. He’d promised Carrie-Anne they’d surface by midday, that she would have her afternoon of shared breath underneath a ripe gold sun. If Jos would just wake up. If the Burrower could just work its way home.