Marc Zicree - Magic Time

He switched over the toggle, and he might as well have flipped a tiddly-wink for all the light it summoned. “Son-of-a-bitch batteries,” said Roop McDonough as Hank shook his own flashlight, took the fresh batteries from his pocket, tried again.

Zip.

Hank felt himself trembling, sweat on his face and bile in his mouth. The smell of coal dust was thick in his nostrils, his lungs. Every man at the face knew that a flame here could be the last light any of them would ever see. Aftershocks, he thought. Wasn’t that what happened in California and Japan? The earth calmed down and then went on shaking, on and off, for days?

Ryan Hanson spoke again. “How come all the helmet lights went out?”

“Everybody okay?” Hank called into the blackness, and Al’s voice and Tim’s echoed in response. Hank hit the toggle on his radio and got nothing-no surprise there. By the stillness of the air he knew the vent fans had quit working, too. “Anybody hurt?”

“Yeah, I slipped in it when I pissed my pants.” Gordy again, and the unwilling laugh it got was like the breaking of an iron band around Hank’s throat.

“What happened to the batteries?” asked Bartolo. His voice was moving. He was feeling his way along the wall, Hank guessed, toward the tunnel that led back to the main.

“Coulda been some kind of electronic pulse,” said Ryan. His voice struggled to retain its calm before his seniors. “Like they say a nuclear attack would cause.”

“Nuclear attack?” Panic edged Roop’s words. “You think. .?”

“Fuck, who’d drop a bomb on West Virginia?” cut in Grimes, exasperation further chipping at the terror, breaking it up like a boulder into manageable chunks.

“Could be something like the same thing, I meant,” Ryan amended hastily. “You know, that would put out electronic equipment.”

“A mile down?”

“A battery and a bulb ain’t exactly what you call ‘electronic equipment,’ butthead.”

“Hey!” Hank pocketed his useless light. “Doesn’t matter what put them out. They’re out. We’ll find out what happened when things get working again. Everybody get to a wall and work your way around to the entrance of the main. Let’s get back to the elevator and maybe find some lights that work.”

Nobody said what everybody was thinking: What if there was a roof fall in the main?

If there was, they’d find out soon enough.

Stumbling and slipping on the rolling masses of shale and coal, Hank worked his way back along the face, the curved gouges in the rock sharp and rough under his fingers. In the darkness the men kept up a banter, cursing or making jokes to cover their fear (“Hey, let’s play Marco Polo!” “Fuck you, Gordy”) and Hank marveled again at their capacity to deal with terror, emergency, God knew what.

We’re not dead. We can deal with the next ten minutes .

“Got here,” called out Tim, presumably from the entrance.

Very suddenly, Hank’s hand encountered damp, slightly greasy cloth and the warmth of a shoulder. “That you, Tim?” He could have hugged the man.

“Ryan?”

“This’s me.”

“Gordy?”

“What, my good looks don’t glow in the dark?”

“Smells like shit, it’s gotta be Gordy.”

“Sonny?”

“Who the fuck else would it be down here?”

Al, Roop-voices out of the darkness, hands touching hands. So far , thought Hank, so good. Don’t think about what it means .

The men linked hands and felt their way along the wall. Whenever they encountered a box containing another SCSR, they took it, slinging it onto their belts. In addition to the danger from methane, without the fans working, the air would go bad quickly and there was no telling how long they’d have to wait for rescue when they reached the elevators.

If they reached the elevators. Thank God, thought Hank, Applby had gone over to long-wall mining in the new section. He couldn’t imagine trying to grope their way to the downcast if they’d still been doing room and pillar, with the mazes of crosscuts and subsidiary mains. At least there wasn’t anyplace to go but straight back. And another little prayer of thanks that a respirator worked by compressed air and wasn’t susceptible to whatever had knocked out all the batteries. His greatest dread, as he led the way along, was that every second his fingers would encounter an unscheduled wall of loose rock that would tell them they were well and truly screwed.

As they walked, Ryan was still trying to figure out what had happened to the batteries. Others proffered suggestions of who to blame: management fuckup, Arab terrorists, Chinese bombs. Grimes rode the boy unmercifully, jeering at his speculations but offering nothing of his own except obscenities. Hank wanted to punch him but kept silent. Any speech was better than none, against this terrible blind silence and the racing puzzlement that filled his heart.

A faint scuffling of bodies, of voices in the dark ahead. Hank called out, “Yo!” and Andy Hillocher’s voice replied.

“Hank? You guys got a radio?”

“Deader’n a road-kill skunk.”

There was appropriate commentary on both sides.

“Roof’s holding stable, anyway.”

“Well, be sure to write that down for the geology boys,” retorted another sarcastic voice-Dixon’s, Hank guessed from the slight intonation of black speech. “They’ll be glad to hear it.”

“ I’m glad to hear it,” snapped Hank. “Who all’s here?”

After an endless crawl through darkness, Hank’s groping hand felt the corner of the wall and, cautiously removing his respirator, he smelled water and wet rock. A little farther on, his hand encountered the edge of the unmoving conveyor belt that led the way toward the downcast. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “Everybody shut up for a second.”

When the voices ceased, the silence flowed back. Terrible silence, horrifying in its completeness, broken only by the slow, infinitesimal drip of water leaking from the pipes and, at long intervals, a far-off tapping and creaking.

“That’s the mine breathin’ in her sleep,” his dad had said. And his grandfather had made spooky eyes at him and whispered, “It’s the tommy-knockers. They digs in the mines, too.”

One of the company boys in engineering had once explained to Hank what those noises really were in terms of ground water and weight distribution over the rock. But when he heard them, he always thought of his granddad, sitting in the warm corner between the big old iron kitchen stove and the cellar door, cradling a shot glass in his hands.

“What you think you’re gonna hear down here, asshole?” demanded Sonny Grimes.

“Maybe Superman and Batman talkin’ about how they’re gonna find us,” retorted Hank. There was something in the air-the coal dust, maybe-that made him itch all over, and his head ached something fierce. He was in no mood for Sonny.

A little farther on they found the tram, dead on its tracks and empty. They encountered the men who’d been in it at the downcast, after Hank laboriously worked the manual openers on the three sets of airflow-control doors that guarded the elevator. “That better be somebody we know,” Gene Llewellyn’s voice called out from behind the third set of doors, and of course Gordy couldn’t resist and let out a horrible growl that fooled nobody.

“Get your hand off my ass, Gordy,” retorted Lou Hanson, and there was general laughter.

“They know we’re down here,” Brackett said comfortingly, as everybody shifted to make room, and they counted off names, made sure it was the whole shift. “Even if the emergency generator up top got knocked out, they’ll have another one in place inside a couple hours. This isn’t like the old days.”