A Hole in the Sky (6 page)

The highway seemed to leap forward as Capelli found the strip of blacktop and followed it back to the five-person column. They looked bigger than they had before, the heat rising off the blacktop causing them to shimmer slightly, and the left-to-right breeze would be a factor as well. Not to mention the fact that the bastards were still running.

Still, Capelli was confident of his ability to make the shot as he led the first figure slightly and wondered which one of the would-be thieves was the group’s leader. The one in front was a good bet. Unless the number-two man had enough power to force someone else into the point position. Capelli was running through the possibilities when he saw the lead figure wave the others forward.

Confident that he knew which person to shoot first, Capelli glanced over his left shoulder, and saw that a thin column of smoke was rising up into the sky. Locke was doing his part and the thieves were taking the bait.

Capelli turned back, nuzzled the rifle with his cheek, and felt a sudden emptiness at the pit of his stomach. Suddenly the column was close, a
lot
closer, which left very little margin for error. Capelli made a slight adjustment for windage, squeezed the trigger, and felt it break. The butt kicked his shoulder, and the report was nearly lost in the vast grasslands, as the group’s leader appeared to stumble and fall.

It was tempting to stay on him, and make sure he didn’t get up, but that would be dangerous. The column was breaking up, so he had to send a second projectile after the first, and do so quickly. The trigger gave, and another man threw up his arms in a gesture of final surrender, as the rest of the thieves sought cover in the wheat field beyond.

That was good, but not good enough, as the wheat rippled and the surviving thieves made a beeline for Locke. Capelli swore. He’d hoped that after two pursuers went down the rest would pause, giving him an opportunity to thin the group even more.

But these people were not only tough, they were determined, and that made them that much more dangerous. And as the road rose to meet the bridge deck, it was going to provide the thieves with more cover if he remained where he was.

So Capelli was forced to pull back, slide down the slope, and splash south. As he passed under the bridge and emerged on the other side, he noticed that Rowdy was nowhere to be seen. And, having heard the gunshots, Locke had gone to ground.

Capelli didn’t have time to look for his client as he climbed up out of the streambed and looked towards the west. He could see them now, plowing their way through waist-high wheat, weapons at the ready. And they could see
him
. The man on the right fired a Bullseye tag, which missed by a foot. Then, as the thief triggered half a dozen poorly aimed projectiles, Capelli shot him in the chest. He appeared to throw the Chimeran weapon away as he fell over backwards.

The others were firing by then, so Capelli had no choice but to throw himself facedown, and roll sideways. The man on the far left fired a carbine, and geysers of dry dirt shot up all around the ex-Sentinel as he came to a stop. He was pinned at that point, or would have been except for Locke and his Winchester. The rifle made a
crack, crack, crack
sound as the businessman triggered three rounds. That was followed by a familiar growl and a cry of pain as Rowdy attacked one of the men from behind.

Capelli popped up at that point, and saw that another thief was down as the last one whirled, trying to bring his shotgun to bear on Rowdy. However, the dog’s teeth were locked onto his butt. So as he turned, Rowdy spun with him.

Capelli’s first shot was hurried. It nicked the man’s shoulder, and produced a puff of aerosolized blood, but failed to bring him down. Capelli was worried lest the man shoot Rowdy, but he forced himself to concentrate, and fired again. The second projectile was dead-on. The would-be thief staggered, appeared to lose his balance, and collapsed.

It had been a brief but bloody battle, and as Capelli stood there in what should have been a peaceful wheat field, the scene had a surreal quality. “Damn,” Locke said, as he arrived. “You’re good.”

That’s true
, the voice said mockingly.
You are good. At killing people
.

Capelli felt the usual post-combat tremors, as a surfeit of adrenaline coursed through his circulatory system, and he sought to hide them. “We need to check each body, strip it of anything that has value, and get the hell out of here.”

It was clear that Locke didn’t want to deal with the bodies, but he understood the need to do so, and followed along behind as Capelli went from corpse to corpse. And it turned out that the third one, the thief he’d shot immediately after emerging from under the bridge, was a woman. That didn’t surprise Capelli, but his client was shocked. “That’s her!”

“That’s who?”

“The woman I gave the coin to. The one with the sick baby.”

Capelli nodded expressionlessly. “That comes under rule six.”

“Which is?”

“Mind your own business. Search her pockets! See if you can find the coin.”

Locke knelt, and it took him less than a minute to find what he was looking for. He shook his head as he slipped the gold piece into a pocket and stood. “This world sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” Capelli said, and that was when Rowdy began to bark. Capelli turned towards the highway, raised the Marksman, and looked through the telescopic sight. “Shit.”

Locke squinted into the afternoon sun but couldn’t see anything. “What is it?”

“Stinks, at least a dozen of them, all coming on strong.”

“After us?”

“No, not originally. I think they were following the people who were planning to rob us,” Capelli said as he eyed the oncoming mass. There were Hybrids, a couple of Steelheads, and an eleven-foot-tall Ravager. “But now they’re after us,” he added. “Or will be in a couple of minutes.”

“So what are we going to do?” Locke inquired nervously.

Capelli lowered the rifle and turned back towards the bridge. “We’re going to grab our gear and run like hell.”

Colorado State female inmate 26301 was in a lateral, working to shore up a section of Tunnel Five, when the rock under her boots trembled. Bits of rock rattled as they rained down on her helmet, a column of particulate matter shot up out of a ventilation shaft located ten feet behind her, and dust swirled through the beam projected from her headlamp.

The inmate’s name was Susan Farley. Her heart skipped a beat as she waited for the next tremor and the sudden blackness, as tons of granite crushed the life out of her. Then the moment was past. The people around her began to cough and Mary Howe said what everyone else was thinking. “That felt like it was directly below us. It’s my guess that Tunnel Four collapsed.”

That was Susan’s theory as well, and if it was true, then the inmates working immediately below were in big trouble. She turned to look at Red Cooper. The middle-aged guard was of medium height, with carrot-colored hair and a face like an Idaho spud. His double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun was aimed upwards as if the weapon could defend him from the possibility of a rockfall. “How ’bout it, Boss Cooper?” Susan inquired. “Should we check on the people in T-4?”

Cooper glanced at her. His face looked pale in the
glare from her light. Tiny dots of perspiration populated his forehead. It was easy to see that the guard was frightened and trying to hide it. “Yeah, sure,” he said hoarsely. “Take Howe and go down for a look-see. The rest of you can get back to work. This ain’t no tea party.”

As the guard who was closest to the cave-in, it was Cooper’s responsibility to go down and check on the crew himself. But it was relatively safe where he was and it looked like Cooper had plans to stay.

Susan followed shiny narrow-gauge railroad tracks back to Shaft Three. The wooden platform was where the crew had left it an hour earlier. The elevator was large enough to handle a single ore car and powered by the generator on the first level. Immediately after the levers were pulled, the cage dropped three inches before coming to a momentary halt. That was followed by a loud clanking noise and the squeal of an unoiled pulley as the elevator began to descend. If the cable broke, or something went wrong with the machinery that controlled the lift, both women would plunge to their deaths. It wasn’t where either one of them was supposed to be.

The inmates had been housed in a standard prison facility near Canon City before the Chimera swept into Colorado, the state government collapsed, and everything went to hell in a handcart. That was when Susan and her fellow inmates had been transferred to the Lucky Buckle Mine, where the sentence “twenty-five years at hard labor” took on new meaning. Because the existence that Susan and the other prisoners had been subjected to was more like slavery than a prison sentence. Especially since it was pretty clear that whatever gold the mine produced was going to Warden Brewster and his guards rather than the citizens of Colorado.

Susan saw a white line flash through the blob of light projected from her headlamp and pulled on the cable brake. It took a considerable amount of muscle to stop
the elevator, but Susan was a lot stronger than she had been months earlier, and brought the box to a stop.

Howe was a short, stocky woman of thirty-three. She’d been sent to prison for beating her husband senseless with his own whiskey bottle. Nobody messed with her. She slid the safety gate out of the way, entered Tunnel Four, and sent the light from her headlamp skipping ahead. Susan came up to join her, and the two women followed the shiny tracks back into the darkness. They hadn’t traveled more than a hundred feet when they found the cave-in.

As Susan’s light played across the jumble of granite, she could see the glitter of quartz crystals and the lengths of shattered timber that stuck out of the pile like the ends of broken bones. She knew some of them dated back to the early 1930s, when the upper laterals had been driven deep into the mountainside. So was that it? Were some half-rotted supports responsible for the rockfall? Yes, that was the way it appeared, although there was no way to be sure.

The rubble was head-high, but Susan could see what looked like a gap at the top, so she crawled over chunks of rock in order to get closer. “This is Susan Farley,” she announced. “Can anyone hear me?”

“Farley?” a distant voice answered. “This is Mundy. Boss Atkins is dead. Johnson has a broken leg, and Liddy is unconscious. Her pulse is weak—and I’m worried about her. Can you dig us out?”

“I don’t know,” Susan replied uncertainly. “We’re about a hundred feet in. How far back are you?”

Susan heard the characteristic clatter of loose rock, and suddenly the other woman’s grimy face was there, peering through a small hole. “Another fifteen feet or so.”

“That’s a lot of rock to clear,” Susan observed doubtfully. “And we’ll have to put up new support beams as we go. That’ll take two or three days at least.”

“I don’t think Liddy will survive that long.”

“Okay, hang tough. There might be a faster way to get the crew out of there, but I’ll have to get an okay from Boss Cooper. And you know that chickenshit bastard. He’ll want to check with the warden. You’ve got air. What else do you need?”

“A first-aid kit and more water.”

“Howe can work on that while I go up and talk to Cooper.”

“Thanks, Farley, we won’t forget.”

Susan’s mind raced as she returned to the elevator, stepped aboard, and closed the gate behind her. There was a sudden jerk, followed by the usual clanking sounds, as the pawls were engaged and the cage rose.

Her idea was to drop a rope down through the ventilation shaft that connected Tunnel Five with Tunnel Four. The vertical passageway was narrow. Very narrow. But most, if not all, of the women were smaller than the average man. So the logic was there. But would that be enough? It was difficult to predict how Warden Brewster would react, because his decisions were almost always based on what was good for
him
, and Tunnel Four hadn’t been all that productive of late. So if forced to choose between spending hundreds of woman hours clearing a played-out lateral and removing gold-bearing rock from Tunnel Five, the heartless sonofabitch might go with the second option. Leaving the crew in Tunnel Four to die.

It wouldn’t be the first time. Four months earlier, after the bottom of the shaft that served Tunnel Three caved in, Brewster had left the crew in the lateral above to starve rather than invest the time and energy necessary to repair the elevator. All of which was on Susan’s mind as she left the lift and went looking for Boss Cooper.

After listening to her plan, he frowned. “I don’t know,” the guard said, rubbing the stubble on his chin.
“Your idea
might
work—but we’d better check with the warden.”

“Yes, sir,” Susan said evenly.
Well, you’re predictable if nothing else
, she thought to herself.

It took nearly twenty minutes of precious time to reach the lowest level, or “main” as the prisoners referred to the large tunnel, and follow the tracks back to Shaft One. Most of the mine had a fairly reliable source of electricity thanks to the Cummins V12 diesel generator positioned near the main entrance. A long string of lights dispelled the gloom as they made their way down the corridor to Shaft One.

Then they had to summon the cage again and ride it up a level to the played-out lateral, where a pair of armed guards were waiting to receive them. Their job was to protect Brewster from the inmates, his own correctional officers should they decide to turn on him,
and
any Chimera who might find their way into the mine.

Cooper had to surrender his shotgun, and consent to a cursory pat-down, but that was nothing compared to what Susan was forced to endure. She was ordered to lock her hands behind her neck and spread her feet, so the guards could search for weapons. Not that squeezing her breasts and rubbing her crotch had anything to do with keeping Brewster safe.