Karl leaned against the closed bulkhead door and sighed. He hadn’t had to walk very far beyond his mining cart before encountering the next bulkhead frame. It was a testament to just how frazzled he felt that it hadn’t occurred to him the door would be closed. Undoubtedly the men working beyond this door had heard the explosion just as he did and had rushed to close the bulkhead closest to them, just as he had.
He wondered how many miners were sitting on the other side of the thick door and cursed his luck. What were the odds he would be the only man working in the length of tunnel between two bulkhead frames at the time of the explosion? He began wandering back toward his cart for no particular reason, walking without any real destination in mind. He supposed he would grab his cart and walk it back here, as far from the fire and the potentially deadly fumes as possible.
And that was when the lights went out.
Karl froze in his tracks. Dammit, he thought. Just when you think things can’t get any worse. Losing the lights was normally no big deal; it happened practically every day with the cheap wiring and flimsy incandescent bulbs purchased in bulk by the Tonopah Mining Company. Every worker carried a miner’s light clipped to his belt for exactly this possibility, and Karl unclipped his from his belt. He prepared to light it.
Then he thought about the explosion, and the fire burning somewhere on the other side of the closed bulkhead doors in the main shaft. The miner’s light consisted of a hand-held canister burning an open flame fed by compressed gas.
Gas.
An open flame.
An improperly sealed bulkhead frame with potentially deadly flammable gases seeping through.
Karl gripped his miner’s light tightly, weighing the desire — the need, really — for blessed light against the possibility of blowing himself to kingdom come. He thought about Alpha Seven. About rocks flying out of the darkness. About the potential for injury if he were to be struck in the head by one of them. And, of course, about what he knew was the real question: Where in the hell had the rocks come from? They hadn’t fallen from the ceiling and they certainly hadn’t launched themselves at his head.
The darkness was complete, all-encompassing. Karl realized he was shaking, breathing heavily, sweating like he had just run five miles. He felt the inky blackness closing in around him, a thick blanket suffocating him with its mass. He couldn’t breathe. He needed to see. Now. Risks be damned.
He lit a match with shaking hands, wondering whether he would feel anything when the deadly gases ignited around him, setting his body ablaze and burning him alive. The tip of the match flared and when nothing happened, Karl was so relieved to still be alive he almost forgot to set the tip against his miner’s light.
He turned the thumb screw and heard the barely perceptible hiss of the pressurized gas and relaxed — a bit — as the reassuring yellow glow of the lamp beat back the darkness. Of course, the gas inside the canister would not last forever, and when it was used up, the flame in the lamp would extinguish and Karl would then truly be thrust into darkness, one which would be unrelenting until power was restored to the electric lights inside the tunnels.
It was not a comforting thought. But Karl pushed that uneasy feeling to the back of his mind, at least for now. He could see again and even though he knew he would eventually need to conserve the light, he wasn’t about to turn it off yet.
He looked around, the mine shaft appearing somehow even more alien than usual. The light from his miner’s lamp seemed puny and insubstantial against the encroaching darkness, and the mine shaft — gloomy and dank even under normal circumstances — seemed sinister, filled with evil intent. Shadows loomed, writhing just out of reach of the guttering light. Jesus, get ahold of yourself.
Karl tried to remember what the hell he had been doing when the lights went out. The cart. He had been going to retrieve his mining cart; that was it. Suddenly, it seemed much less important than before. It wasn’t like he had a stash of supplies stored inside the damned thing to help him get through the next few hours or days.
Plus, it was sitting right at the junction of Alpha Seven.
Where the rocks had come from.
Where it was supposedly haunted.
And Karl Meyer didn’t believe in ghosts. No sir, he most certainly did not. But rocks didn’t fly through the air by themselves and they hadn’t been thrown by some idiot miner playing a practical joke. No one would stay hidden in the darkness of Alpha Seven after an explosion inside the mine. No one.
So he made the decision to forget about the stupid cart, at least for now. He would retreat to the bulkhead as far away from the fire — and from Alpha Seven — as possible. There was a problem with his new plan, though, and the way Karl Meyer saw it, it was a major problem, maybe a life-and-death problem. He could smell the metallic chemical odor, the one he had first noticed as he struggled with the rusted bulkhead door, and it was getting noticeably stronger. Clearly more potentially toxic fumes and dangerous chemicals were seeping through the defective bulkhead doors.
Karl began to doubt the wisdom of returning to the bulkhead at the far end of the tunnel. What would be the point? If the gag-inducing poisonous fumes had already traveled this far along the main tunnel, how long would it take them to arrive at the rear bulkhead doors?
The answer, of course, was not long at all; in fact they were probably already gathering back there, invisible and deadly. The obvious solution would be to go pound on the doors until the miners trapped on the other side opened them for just a moment and let him in. But that was impossible. The doors had been designed to remain locked once they had been closed. They could not be opened, no matter how much the men might like to do so, until a management representative arrived with a special key after the fire had been contained.
The air in the shaft felt warmer, fetid, much like it had at the first bulkhead before Karl had managed to close the doors. Breathing was becoming more difficult as the air quality deteriorated. The urge to gag and cough threatened to overwhelm him. He began to feel sick, lightheaded, like he might throw up at any moment.
If he survived this disaster, Karl made a promise to himself he would walk up to mine owner Jedediah Norton and punch the cheap bastard right in the nose as his way of giving notice before quitting outright. Sure, jobs were hard to come by, but risking life and limb for a few measly dollars worth of scrip a day, money that was useless anywhere except company-owned stores where prices were jacked up so the owner could recoup most of the wages he paid out? On a job that was dangerous enough even without taking into consideration Tonopah’s shoddy safety measures? It just wasn’t worth it. Not any more.
Karl began to wheeze. He sounded exactly like his little brother Harold had just before he died from asthma when they were kids. His eyes were watering and he rubbed his sleeve across his face, accomplishing nothing but smearing dirt and coal dust into them. Now they watered and stung.
He wasn’t going to make it. It had been less than an hour since the explosion and the air was already barely breathable. Karl doubted he would be able to survive another couple of hours, never mind days.
But if he wanted to live there was still one possibility. He hacked out a glob of dark black phlegm and began to walk toward the source of the smoke.
Karl paused at his mining cart, still positioned exactly where he had left it just before the explosion. He had fashioned a makeshift mask out of a dirty handkerchief, tying it around the back of his head and breathing through the cloth in an attempt to filter out the worst of the toxic gas. He wondered whether it was actually accomplishing anything of value. He doubted it.