Authors: Jack Heath
She’d reached the opening to the cavern. Slowly, silently, she peered around the bend.
Giant sodium lamps blazed in every corner, and six gas-analysis vents hummed on the walls – the modern-day equivalent of a caged canary. The miners shuffled around everywhere like ants in
a nest. The woman with the jackhammer was near the centre of the cavern, the enormous machine shuddering in her grip. Ash had expected to see dust and smoke floating around the bit, but no –
it was sinking into the stone as cleanly as a scalpel into butter, leaving holes the size of coins.
A metal walkway, about two metres above the ground, traversed the wall on the right-hand side of the cavern all the way from the tunnel she was in to the other side. There was a flight of stairs
at each end.
It all matched the map, to which Benjamin had added everything the miners had constructed.
“I’ve reached the dig,” she said. “How far away is the box?”
“According to your GPS and Mr. Buckland’s map, it should be thirty-eight metres south-south-west of you, and about six metres down.”
Damn it, she thought. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Tunnel not where it’s supposed to be?”
“Worse,” Ash said. “The miners are digging in almost that exact spot.”
“
What?
”
“Could they know about the box?”
She could picture Benjamin biting his lip. “No,” he said finally. “They’re a legitimate company. And they’ve been drilling here since before the map turned up.
It’s probably just coincidence. But either way, you—”
“Can’t go digging for treasure while they’re in there,” Ash finished. “Right.”
“So. Abort?”
“Hang on,” Ash said. “Just a second.”
She didn’t want to give up, not now. She had assured the curator that she would get his artefact back, and she was so close!
Ash peeked around the corner again.
“There’s another tunnel on the south side of the cavern,” she said. “I think I can get to it. The miners won’t see me if I stay close to the wall.”
“Ash, that tunnel just goes deeper into the mine, all the way to the underground river. It doesn’t curve back around or anything. You won’t be able to come up at the box from
underneath, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It’s not.”
“Then what’s the plan?”
Ash said, “You’ll see.”
She edged around the corner onto the walkway, feeling horribly conspicuous. But no one else was walking around the scaffolding – everyone was on the cave floor. She told herself that
anyone looking up would have the wall-mounted sodium lamps in their eyes. With her camouflage, she would be little more than a shadow on the wall.
Her footsteps were soft on the metal grating – the mining boots looked heavy, but she’d hollowed out the soles and removed the steel caps for ease of movement. Of course, if a mine
cart ran over her foot, she’d be—
“Hey!”
Ash’s heart stopped. Run, or freeze?
She froze.
“Hey!” the miner yelled again. “Jennings!”
The woman with the jackhammer released the trigger. Looked up.
“Foreman wants to see you,” the miner said. His voice echoed around the cavern.
The woman wiped some sweat off her forehead with a yellow glove, balancing the tool on its point with her other hand, and then passed the handle to the miner. He started drilling as she jogged
over to the other side of the cavern.
Ash let the air out of her lungs. False alarm. She kept moving, one careful step at a time.
Two miners were rolling a cart along the tracks to the rocks broken up by the jackhammer, while another drove a Bobcat excavator towards them. The Bobcat’s trowel descended, and the chunks
of stone clattered against one another as they were scooped up. Hydraulics whirred as the Bobcat lifted the load, swung it sideways, and dumped it into the cart. A cloud of dust accompanied the
crash, and the trowel swivelled back for another load.
The scaffolding Ash was on ended at a set of stairs, leading to the second tunnel. She slinked down, shoulder almost touching the wall. For a few frightening seconds, she was on the cavern floor
with the workers – and then she was safe in the darkness of the tunnel.
“I made it,” she whispered.
“To the other tunnel?”
“Yep.” Ash removed her cap and tugged the elastic band off her ponytail with one hand, while removing a cigarette lighter from her overalls with the other.
“Great,” Benjamin said. “And being in there will somehow allow you to sneak past the fifty or sixty miners?”
“Nope,” Ash said. “But now I’ll be out of the way when they leave.”
She wrapped the elastic band around the lighter, tying down the button so a steady stream of butane flowed from the nozzle. Not enough to risk an explosion, not even enough to be detectable to
the human nose – but just the same, enough to create a panic down here. She pitched the lighter back up onto the walkway.
A perfect throw – the lighter bounced twice on the grille before clattering to a stop right under one of the gas-analysis vents.
“Leave?” Benjamin was saying. “We can’t wait for them to—”
An alarm shrieked, so loud that Ash had to press her palms against her ears. All work on the cave floor stopped instantly, and there was a moment of absolute stillness before someone yelled,
“Gas! Evacuate!
Evacuate!
”
Tools thudded to the ground as the miners fled back towards the tunnel Ash had come in through. Their boots left dusty craters in the dirt. Someone hit a switch on the generator on their way
out, and Ash watched it shudder to a stop.
She should have expected that. The miners wouldn’t want to risk a short circuit while the generator was unsupervised – it was possible, though unlikely, for a spark to set the fuel
tank alight.
The lights flickered and started to fade. Darkness grew from the corners of the cavern like squid ink.
In a matter of seconds, the dig site was deserted. The miners were well trained – at the first sign of toxic or explosive gas, stop what you’re doing and get out.
Ash could hear Benjamin saying something, but she couldn’t tell what. The alarm was deafening, and she had a growing suspicion that it couldn’t be shut off.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” she said, “but I’m okay. The alarm wasn’t me. Well, it
was
me, but it’s not
about
me. Don’t freak
out.”
She raced up the stairs onto the walkway in the fading light, and snatched up the cigarette lighter. No sense leaving unnecessary traces. She pulled her hair back through the elastic loop and
dropped the lighter into her pocket, then ran back down to the cavern floor.
The last of the lights had gone out now – Ash couldn’t see a thing. Living in the city, Ash thought of darkness as her bedroom with the curtains closed, or a movie theatre between
when the house lights go down and when the trailers start. But this was completely different. The blackness was so pure, so perfect, that when she waved a hand in front of her face, she felt the
breeze on her cheek, but otherwise had no way of telling that she’d moved. In fact, for a surreal moment, Ash wondered if she’d simply
thought
about moving her hand, but
hadn’t actually done it, and the breeze had been something else.
The alarm was still blaring. They must be wired to an external power source. Anyone or anything could be in here and she wouldn’t be able to see it or hear it—
Get a grip, Ash, she told herself. She fumbled for her phone, and snapped it open.
The glow of the screen was useless against the black ground – she had to crouch to see it, and even then it only illuminated the small circle in which she stood.
She selected
camera mode
, and pushed the button.
The flash lit up the cavern for a fragment of a second, like a mountainscape in a lightning storm. Ash regained her bearings – the jackhammer lay on its side at her two o’clock, the
pile of spare hard hats and headlamps were at her eleven thirty. She jogged through the darkness towards them. When she guessed she was about three metres away, she took another picture.
The flash told her she’d underestimated; the pile of equipment was almost five metres away. She walked over and sorted through them until she found something that felt like a headlamp.
She clicked the switch. The bulb worked. She tightened the straps around her head, tilted the lamp so the light fell upon the ground roughly five metres in front of her, and ran back towards the
jackhammer.
She had a collapsible trowel in her pocket, but now that she’d seen the kind of equipment the miners were using, she thought she could do better. She didn’t know how to use the
jackhammer, but there was a pile of shovels, mattocks and other digging tools nearby. Ash selected a pickaxe, swivelled it in her hands, and then swung it into the ground between her feet.
The rock crumbled easily – it was clearly a different substance from the stone the miners had been drilling through a few metres to Ash’s right. Which made sense, she realized, since
the box had only been buried here a couple hof years. Not enough time for the mud to solidify into tough stone.
She swung again. The light jittered on the floor. She couldn’t hear the rocks shattering over the screaming of the alarm, but she could feel the impact through the padded grip of the
pickaxe.
Six metres down, Benjamin had said. But that was when she was up in the entrance tunnel, which was at least four metres above the cave floor. She should only need to dig down two metres. But the
hole had to be fairly wide, or else there was a risk that she would completely miss the—
Clack
. Ash paused. That last strike had felt different. Either she’d hit a tougher kind of rock, or she’d found what she was looking for.
She swept the broken stones aside with the blade of the pickaxe, and shone the headlamp into the hole she’d made.
Wood. She’d struck something made of hard wood.
She reached down and grabbed the box. It was scarcely bigger than an engagement-ring box, with dirty brass hinges and a scalloped handle. There was a scar on the top where the pickaxe had
scraped it.
Reverently, she placed the box beside the hole. Lifted the lid.
Urgh, she thought. Success. She could have taken the object out so she could rebury the box, but she didn’t want to touch it with her bare hands.
Shuddering, she closed the box again. “I have the prize,” she told Benjamin. She tried to keep her voice from shaking. “Time to go.”
Benjamin was talking, but Ash couldn’t make out what he was saying. Probably asking her out, yet again, knowing she’d refuse. That was his usual way of congratulating her.
Ash started jogging back up towards the north tunnel. Now came the tough part: sneaking back out. The miners had all evacuated, so they would be watching from a distance as
she emerged from the tunnel. Even if she put her overalls back on and wiped the grime off her face, they’d be curious, wondering why she’d taken so much longer than they had.
She’d have to find a way to get past them without being spotted.
Or a place to hide, she thought, while I wait for them to come back in and resume work. But who knows how long that’ll take? I have to be home by the time school finishes, or Dad will
freak.
She kept moving. She couldn’t strategize without seeing how far back the miners had evacuated. Maybe they’d be so far away that she could just walk out the mouth of the tunnel and
head straight to the rendezvous.
A vague glow stained the tunnel wall up ahead – she was getting closer to daylight. She reached up and switched the headlamp off. There was no way of telling how long it would be before a
hazard team got suited up and came down to search for the gas leak. If they rounded the corner further up the tunnel, Ash didn’t want them glimpsing her torch.
She didn’t think it was likely to happen soon, though. It seemed quiet and still up ahead.
Now that she was further away from the cavern, the alarm was growing fainter. “Benjamin,” she said. “I’m coming out with the box.”
There was no response.
“Benjamin?”
Nothing – except rustling of static.
Ash’s heart kicked against her ribs. Had something happened to Benjamin? Had the local cops found him? If that had happened, she told herself, then there’d be no static, just
silence. Right? It must be an equipment malfunction. Nothing to worry about.
The light was brighter now. She was almost at the guard station. Hopefully the guard would have evacuated too. He was suspicious of her before, he’d be even more suspicious now...
Ash rounded the last bend, and saw that the guard hadn’t evacuated. He was slumped halfway through the window of his booth, broken glass stuck into his belly, a chunk of his throat torn
out. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind him.
Ash’s eyes widened. What the hell?
Then she looked down. And stumbled backwards, stifling a scream.
The miners were strewn all over the floor of the tunnel. Most had exit wounds in their backs. The rest had imploded heads. Ash could smell the blood, rank and coppery.
Someone had opened fire from outside the mouth of the tunnel. At first Ash imagined a psychopath with a machine gun, sweeping it from side to side with his finger on the trigger – and then
she realized that the shooter’s accuracy was too good for that. Almost every shot seemed to have hit someone in the head or the heart.
A sniper? No, too slow – a sniper wouldn’t have been able to hit them all before they realized they were under attack and started running.
Then what the hell had happened here?
“Psst!”
Ash jumped. Jennings, the woman who’d been drilling, was crouched against the wall in the darkness. Her hand was covering a thigh wound – blood bubbled up between her fingers. Her
face was white.
“Run!” she hissed at Ash.
And then her head snapped sideways, a half-second before the sound of the gunshot reached Ash’s ears.
She clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream. Her mind was whirling. A sniper couldn’t do this, she realized. But a dozen snipers could.
And even as Ash had this thought, she heard them. Boots thumping, ammo belts jingling. Sprinting towards the tunnel from outside.