There was silence. They knew he was right. But they all had the miner’s inborn horror of fire below the ground.
“After you close that third door behind you,” Gene said at last, “you count to three hundred before you light that match. There shouldn’t be dust this close to the downcast, and if there’s gas, you’re not going to make it that long and nobody has anything to worry about. Anybody in here got a problem with that?”
“I got a problem,” groused Sonny. “Why the hell don’t we just wait till the company gets its butt in gear and comes down after us?”
“Because they might not, asshole,” Hillocher retorted. “And if the ceiling’s getting ready to cave in or there’s water pouring down the walls or something, I’d kind of like to know about it while there’s still time to shift our sorry asses someplace else, okay?”
There was a little more argument, but at length Hillocher handed his lighter and a twist of paper-it felt like a page from a magazine-to Hank. Hank cranked open the doors, cranked them shut and cranked open the next pair, and the next.
“Fuckin’ asshole’s gonna blow us all up,” Grimes muttered.
“So sue him.”
The doors shut off their voices.
Beyond the third set there was the dim smell of coal and rock dust, of wet rock and oil from trams and machines.
And silence.
Hank listened again to that silence and let it fill him.
On the other side of the downcast, he knew, would be the mains leading into the older sections of the mine, the worked-out room-and-pillar areas where black crosscuts intersected the rubble of roof falls and controlled collapses that had occurred as the men had retreated after taking every fragment of the supporting coal. But no sound, save for the drip of water, the creak of the tommy-knockers.
Behind him, muffled by three sets of doors, he heard Brackett ask, “Some other kind of gas, maybe? Does anybody smell anything?”
“You mean other than the shit in Hanson’s pants?”
“Oh, fuck off, why don’t you, Sonny?”
“Does anybody else have a headache?”
“I’m gettin’ a headache listening to Hanson’s crap about Arab fuckin’ terrorists and nuclear warfare.”
Hank had a headache. Not the same as he’d had from his brushes with firedamp in the mines, but a strange sense of tightening, a weird ache in his neck and back and in some deep center of his brain. Looking back toward the doors- toward his friends-he felt a curious unwillingness to return to them, a sense that he’d be more comfortable here in the dark, with the tommy-knockers. Hank lit the spill of paper, but he had to force himself to do it. The light showed him the tunnels, the silent machinery, the pipes slowly dripping water. Everything as normal.
Quickly he blew out the flame. The light of it, he found, hurt his eyes. He wondered if that meant anything.
Shaking his head a little, he made himself go back.
Chapter Eight
WEST VIRGINIA
“Arleta? Are you there?” Wilma sprang up the front steps of the big white house, tried the knob with fingers barked and bloody from having been thrown off her feet by the earthquake. Behind her, old Mr. Swann from the trailer court and young Shannon Grant-to whom she’d been talking when the quake hit-waited anxiously, ready to give whatever help might be needed. Only a few years ago Shannon had been one of Wilma’s students, and Wilma fully expected to one day see Shannon’s daughter Tessa, currently two years old and perched on her mother’s hip, in her classes as well.
The knob wouldn’t turn. Oddly, it didn’t rattle, as it would have if the door were locked. It felt frozen, jammed hard. Wilma pushed inward. Nothing. “Arleta?”
“We’re all right here, Wilma.” Arleta’s voice, behind the shut door.
Wilma tried to look through the window, but the curtain was drawn. “Arleta?”
“We’re all fine.”
She must be terrified, thought Wilma. Like the cats, skittering spookily around the shadows, fearful of everything, and why not? The house wasn’t supposed to move. “Can you open the door? Are you hurt? Is Bob okay?” There were, of course, backup batteries on Bob’s machines, but every battery in Wilma’s house seemed to have been affected, and in Shannon’s, too.
“We’re all fine, really.” If it hadn’t been for the unmistakably human timber of the voice Wilma would have sworn it was a recording. Poor Arleta!
“What about Bob’s machines?” she persisted. “How long do the backup batteries keep running? Do we need to get an emergency team here or something?”
Still that stilted, wooden tone, still that sense of… what? Something odd, Wilma didn’t know quite what. As if it wasn’t really Arleta. “Bob’s machines will run for forty-eight hours without any problems. Don’t worry. We’re fine.”
As Ryan would say, thought Wilma, my ass.
“I have to go now. Bob’s calling for me.”
“What? Arleta?” Wilma gripped the doorknob again, shook it. Bob? Bob’s in a coma. “Arleta, let me just. .”
Behind her, Mr. Swann gasped, put a hand to his chest and leaned suddenly against the railing. Shannon caught his elbow as he staggered. “It’s nothing, I just felt sorta bad.” The neighbors were all coming out into the street now, the Stickneys and June Culver and old Mrs. Weise. She saw Jim Stickney walk over and get into his Jeep Wrangler, then get out again a few moments later.
Shock because of the quake, thought Wilma. Californians got used to them, she’d heard-didn’t even bother to get out of bed, most of them. But the Appalachians weren’t supposed to shake.
She got Mr. Swann into her living room and sat him down on the couch. Shannon and Rae Ann Stickney and Gerda Weise followed them through the door uninvited, making soft-voiced inquiries: Was everything all right and did much get broken and were the batteries out in your radio too? Their faces showed something Wilma hadn’t seen there a few moments ago: bafflement. The expressions of people faced with something they’ve never encountered, something far wider than an earthquake.
“It’s not just batteries.” Shannon was still holding Tessa’s hand. “That old hand-crank generator of Jim’s won’t go, either. We were going to drive over to the pithead and see if everything’s all right there, and. . ”
Wilma realized how deep the silence was. The refrigerator was still. The battery-operated clock wasn’t ticking. Nor were there the sounds she had been half-listening for in the distance, the wail of emergency sirens.
Nothing. Stillness.
She began to understand that what had happened was very different from what she had thought.
NEW YORK
The sky was clear now, save for a few twisting vapor trails, already dissipating, melting into the clouds.
Cal had not seen any of the planes hit ground; the buildings had blocked his view. But they had crashed; how could they not have? Most on the periphery of the city, away from its heart, so perhaps. . He caught himself trying to force the disaster into the smallest possible proportions.
As for the buildings, none had collapsed as far as Cal could see, though many were fractured and a few tilted at treacherous angles.
It’s omens, Cal, Goldie had said. Something’s coming.
Cal shuddered, and the desperate urgency to be on the move, to reach his sister, drowned all else.
The legal staff, drawn together in the dim light of the common room, had learned soon enough that, of all their technological marvels, only lighters still worked. Most of them had children, parents, spouses and others of variable significance. Despite their misgivings at leaving the relative safety of the building (now that it had stopped shaking), they, like Cal, were eager to brave the stairwells and be gone.