Douglas Preston - White Fire

Damn, she’d done something to her ankle.

Did he have the guts to descend the precarious ladder? Right at its base was a pile of rotting canvas and a stack of old planking. Limping over, she half dragged, half hauled the canvas underneath the ladder. The material was dry as dust and practically falling apart in her hands. The ladder was shaking now, groaning — her pursuer was descending.

Which meant he wouldn’t be able to fire his weapon.

She shoved the heap of canvas against the base of the ladder and piled on the planks, pulled out her lighter, and lit the makeshift pyre. It was so desiccated, it went up like a bomb.

“Burn in hell!” she screamed as she dragged herself down the tunnel, trying to ignore the pain in her ankle. God, it felt like it was broken. Limping, the pain excruciating, she continued along another tunnel and then another, taking turns at random, now completely lost. Clearly, though, she was well out of the Christmas Mine and deep into the labyrinths of the Sally Goodin or one of the other, lower mines that honeycombed the mountain. She could hear sounds from behind, which seemed to indicate her pursuer had somehow gotten past the fire, or perhaps he’d just waited until it burned out.

Ahead, her headlight disclosed a cave-in, a bunch of jagged boulders strewn about on the floor of the tunnel, with some crossed beams lying atop. A narrow path, however, could be seen twisting through the rubble. Cold air streamed down from above. She climbed painfully over the piles of rock and broken timbers, then looked up. A crack disclosed a piece of dark, gray sky — but that was all. There was no way out, no way to reach it.

She continued picking her way through the rubble and came at last to a flat area on the far side. Suddenly, she heard a buzzing noise. She stopped, shone her light ahead, then gave a little cry and shrank back. Nestled among the fallen boulders, blocking the way, was a huge, ropy mass of hibernating rattlesnakes. They were half asleep in the cold air, but the twisted clump still moved in a kind of horrible slow motion, pulsing, rotating, almost like a single entity. Some were awake enough to be rattling in warning.

She shone the light around and saw that other rattlers were coiled up into the various small spaces between the rocks. They were everywhere — seemingly hundreds of them. Even — she realized with a sickening sensation — behind her.

Suddenly the boom of the gun sounded, and she felt one hand jerk in response to an impact. Instinctively, she leapt over the mass of snakes, scrambling among the boulders, the pain in her ankle even more excruciating. Another shot followed, then another, and she took refuge behind a large boulder — right next to a fat, sleeping rattler. There were some stones nearby — this was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. She picked up a heavy stone in her right hand — something was wrong with her left hand but she’d worry about that later — and jumped onto the large boulder, letting the rock fly with great violence at the main mass of snakes.

The rock smacked into the bolus of reptiles, and the reaction was immediate and terrifying — an eruption of buzzing that filled the tunnel with a sound like a thousand bees, accompanied by an explosive writhing of movement. The lazy mass of snakes suddenly turned into a whirlwind, coiling, striking, sliding off in all directions — several coming straight at her.

She scrambled backward. Another shot struck the rocks around her, ricocheting about, and she fell in between two boulders. The buzzing filled the cave like a vast humming dynamo. She got up and ran, dragging her injured ankle. Half a dozen snakes struck at her and she jumped away. Two got hung up by their fangs on the thick fabric of her snow pants. With a scream she whacked them off, fairly dancing among the striking snakes, as another pair of shots whined among the rocks. A few moments later she was beyond the furious mass, limping away, until she could stand it no longer and finally collapsed in pain. She lay there, gasping, the tears running down her face. Her ankle was certainly broken. And then there was her hand: even in the dark she could see that her glove was soaked with warm liquid. She removed it gingerly, held her hand up to the light, and was amazed by what she saw: her pinkie finger was dangling by a mere thread of skin, blood welling out.

“Fuck!”

She shook off the useless finger, almost passing out from a combination of dizziness and disgust. Unwrapping her scarf, she cut a strip of it off with a knife and wrapped it around her hand and the stump of the finger, tightening it to stem the flow of blood.

My finger. Jesus . In a dream, almost in shock from disbelief, she pulled the glove back over the wadded scarf as best she could to hold it in place. As she did so, she heard a shout from behind, then a scream, and the wild firing of the gun. But this time the shots were not directed at her. A rattling noise filled the tunnel with an unholy sound of reptilian fury. More shots and yells.

She had to keep going — eventually he would get through the snakes, unless by great good luck he was bitten. She hauled herself to her feet, fighting the dizziness and, now, a growing nausea. Christ, she needed a crutch, but there was nothing at hand. Limping badly, she continued along the tunnel, which descended steadily for some distance, passing several crosscuts. In time she came to a small side alcove, blocked up with rocks that formed a makeshift wall, now half collapsed. A place to hide? She dragged herself to it, pulled out some more stones, and looked in.

The beam of light fell upon a horde of rats, which erupted in excitement and went scurrying every which way with a chorus of squeals — exposing the remains of several bodies.

She stared with something like stupefaction. There were four in all, laid out in a row of skeletons — or rather, partial mummies, as they still had dried flesh on their bones, rotten clothes, old boots, and hair. Their dried-up heads were tilted back, their jaws wide open as if screaming, exposing mummified mouths full of black, rotten teeth.

As she crawled in to look more closely, she could see all the signs. They had been shot — she could see numerous holes in their skulls, many other bones broken by what looked like bullet impacts. A firing-squad attack far in excess of what would have been necessary to kill them — a display of violent, homicidal fury.

The four mercury-crazed miners. They’d been killed somewhere in this tunnel system, probably the Christmas Mine, and their bodies dragged down here and hidden.

Near the corpses lay a long, heavy stick — a cudgel, really, perhaps carried by one of the killers. It would do for an improvised crutch.

As quickly as she could without compromising the integrity of the evidence, Corrie took off her knapsack, removed the specimen bags, and laid them out. Removing the glove from her good hand and dropping to her knees, she crawled from body to body, taking from each a sample of hair, a fragment of papery dried flesh, and a small bone. She sealed them in the bags and put them back in her backpack. She photographed the bodies with her cell phone, then put the pack back on.

With a gasp of pain, she managed to get to her feet, leaning on the cudgel. Now she had to figure out where she was and find her way out — without getting shot in the process.

As if on cue, she could hear, way back near the cave-in, additional firing. She almost imagined she could hear the buzzing of the rattlers, a soft hiss in the distance: pleasant, like the ocean.

She made her way farther down the tunnel, gasping with pain, trying to find some distinctive landmark that she could in turn locate on the map, and thus orient herself toward an exit. And to her great relief, ten minutes of slow wandering brought her to a junction of tunnels — three horizontal ones and a vertical shaft coming together. She collapsed, took out the map, and scrutinized it.