Perfect Victim (24 page)

The fireball sucked the remaining oxygen from the bottom shaft in one great paroxysm of searing heat, flinging the killer to the ground with the certainty of a battering ram, reverberating up through two miles of sediment, rocking the surface with a thunderclap heard across six counties, and for one brief horrifying moment filling hell with daylight.

Grove slammed his eyes shut, his wrists still shackled around the topmost edge of the stone, the jet-engine noise rupturing his eardrums. He expected the heat-storm to consume him along with the rest of the labyrinth, hopefully as quickly and as painlessly as possible—

—but instead, the force of the sudden convection current kicked up the edge of the stone slab and flipped it onto its side.

The impact cracked Grove's molars. He couldn't see, he couldn't breathe; he let out a breathless shriek that was lost in the gargantuan surge of fire. The flames, fed by the methane and nitrogen and damp-black gases, pitched the slab sideways—Grove still lashed to it—as though it were a sail tacking on a squall of wind.

The shackle on Grove's left wrist snapped, his body flopping one way, the slab spinning the other. The remaining shackle ripped free at the precise moment the slab smashed into a buttress, shattering the monolith into countless shards of hot smoking stone.

Grove slid, curled into a fetal ball, into an adjacent buttress, the impact sending comets across his vision. Rock particles sleeted down on him, his ears deafened now.

He lost consciousness then.

 

He had fully expected to die in that frenzied instant of blinding heat and pain, as everything was going mercifully black and silent, but that strange feverish sensation, as he would soon learn, had other plans for him, not to mention further pain, because he gasped awake moments later in a cold pocket of muffled noise and light. Lungs heaving, eyelids fluttering open, he realized instantly, with mounting horror, that he was underwater.

With sudden involuntary spasms he coughed and coughed and coughed, expelling water from his lungs, the noise of his gasps a muffled mewling sound in his ears. The fire flickered above him like a lightning storm.

He kicked off his pants and pushed and fought his way out of the broken pieces of shale, his wrists still tangled in their long leather shackles. He wasn't necessarily thinking straight at this point, merely struggling for air, instinctively seeking oxygen.

Clawing in the only direction that made any sense.

Up
.

 

His head burst out of the water only to bang against the low stone ceiling, stars bursting in his field of vision, his face instantly sunburned by the furnace of superheated toxic air. Flames curled along the surface of the water, which was flooding into the mine at the rate of a half a million gallons a minute.

Grove tried to tread water and fill his lungs with the smoldering stew. The water level sloshed and eddied around him, swiftly rising.

Through his blurred vision he madly searched for the only way out:
the back shaft
.

In his peripheral vision he saw a long pale object undulating on the currents about twenty feet away, and he swam toward it, realizing with his last molecule of sanity that the object might be his only chance of survival. The water spumed over his head, making him gag and gasp, but he kept on, completely nude and greasy with tattoo ink, only a few more inches now, reaching out for the thing, clawing at it—

—until he finally got his hand around the collar of the duster.

All at once the water covered him, filling the tunnel, ominously muffling all the noise at the precise moment he got his hand around a thin membrane of plastic stuffed into one of the duster's pockets.

 

Grove knew he had only a matter of seconds—even a healthy person is able to go without oxygen for no more than a minute or two, and Grove was weak and hurting and out of air—so he tore the slender object out of the duster pocket and slammed it over his face. The oxygen mask was designed for first responders and paramedics who get caught in dangerous chemical fires, a small, plastic, cup-shaped mask attached to a half-liter bottle of oxygen, and not recommended for breathing underwater, but now it was Grove's only chance.

His last chance.

He pressed it tightly over his nose and mouth with one hand while he spun the small valve with the other. Darkness was closing in again, the flames boiling and sputtering above him. He breathed in moist, cold, ammonia-smelling air and spun around, madly searching the surface of the water for any sign of the shaft.

Twenty feet away an oval shadow flickered above the ceiling of water.

The shaft! There it was! The phone booth–size enclosure lay beneath it, leaning against the adjacent stone wall, scorched and dented by the maelstrom.

Grove swam toward it through the dense stew, holding the mask in place with one hand, frantically paddling with the other. His raw flesh scraped an outcropping of stone, and he cringed at the seething pain, but he soldiered on. He felt the water around him begin to vibrate.

He reached the bottom of the shaft and got his free hand around the cable. It took every last shred of energy to yank himself up, but somehow he managed it with one hand. The water level had already encroached into the shaft, boiling upward with the intensity of a turbine. As Grove scaled the cable—using the jagged wall of the shaft for footholds—he gazed up.

A curtain of black lay behind the billowing, rising water. How much oxygen did he have? How long would it take to climb over ten thousand feet with only one free hand? His brain struggled with the math like a clockwork jamming. Could he make it?

That strange unnamable warmth rose in him again as he scaled the shaft in slow, painful, lurching gasps. It tingled in his upper vertebrae, crawling hotly across his newly shorn scalp and sparking images across his mind screen—the tiny fingers of an infant curled around his index finger, a spring flower blossoming in the Chalbi Desert. The unexpected surge drove him on so profoundly that he broke through the surface of the water.

Gulping air into his singed lungs, the mask falling from his face, Grove kept climbing, faster and faster, galvanized by the eerie warmth, so galvanized, in fact, that he ignored the violent currents beneath him, coming toward him.

At last he glanced down at the rising, bubbling surface of the water.

A charred hand burst out of the water and grabbed hold of his ankle.

Grove let out a strangled, involuntary cry, and the hand tightened with the pressure of a boa constrictor. The monster connected to the hand, his face bursting out of the muck, was a charred husk of a human being that used to look just like Grove but now resembled a blackened leech, so ravaged by fire the tissue was peeling away from his face in gelatinous wet flakes. Glistening, bloody eyes locked onto Grove with primordial hate.

In that one frozen tableau the two souls again regarded each other. A wave of pure denatured hate crashed up against a tide of sorrow—sorrow for an endless cycle of grief that would never—
ever
—come to an end.

Something shifted inside Grove then—invisible and inchoate—way down in the depths of his being, that eerie warmth erupting in him like a fragment bomb, cauterizing every molecule, every atom, and all that he knew, all that he was, all that he loved and cherished, the entirety of his soul, his very
goodness
, all of it suddenly sparked around him like an armature singing with electricity, forming an envelope of neon-blue voltage—

—until a single notion filled his brain, distilled down to a single phrase, spoken in all languages, past and present, all at once:
I will never stop.

The monster froze.

The balance of power changed.

 

It occurred over the space of a single moment, the water level pitching and sluicing and rising. The killer convulsed in the heat of Grove's implacable gaze and the darkness seemed to turn inside out.

It was as though the earth itself had suddenly rejected this cancerous parasite known as John Q Public in a peristalsis of ectoplasm coming off the stone walls, ghostly synapses of pale antimatter the color of festering wounds, sparks the color of sickness, penetrating the killer, piercing him, instantly metastasizing in him, eating away at what remained of his life force.

The killer's mouth gaped, helpless with ghastly agony, hinging open so wide it threatened to dislocate the jaw of his scorched cranium.

Grove let out a wail of primal rage, the sound of it blending with the roar of floodwaters.

Then he slammed his bare heel down on the killer's face. The killer's neck whiplashed, his grip slipping. Grove slammed his heel down again and again, and at last the killer lost his hold and plunged back into the rising waters.

Something ruptured then in the deepest core of the labyrinth.

 

Veteran miners have a word for what happened next. They call it a “bump”—a laughably insufficient word for a catastrophic mine collapse when ceiling and floor crash together in a chain reaction not unlike a tremendous earthquake. Grove saw this occur directly beneath him in that frozen moment after the monster plunged back into the black mire.

The very walls of the shaft trembled. The water surged explosively upward, and the bottom of the shaft contracted upward toward the ceiling.

Grove gawked down at the horrible spectacle, momentarily rapt, the spectacular noise like an airliner crashing inside the mine. The bottom of the shaft imploded, slamming together, crushing the burned, mangled remains of the killer.

Grove turned away when he saw the man's skull crack underwater, extruding a cloud of pink bubbling brain matter like the meat of a smashed gourd.

It was a sight that would stay with you the rest of your life. Unfortunately he had no time to even register the horror of it now. The greasy waters were boiling upward, fissures forming in the shaft walls.

The bump had set off an earthquake.

What happened next—transpiring over the course of roughly twenty-three minutes—would for years to come be partially shrouded in mystery for all those involved in the Wormwood event. Especially for Grove. He would remember tremendous cracking noises down there like a glacier shifting all around him, the fissures opening in the shaft, the cracks traveling up the walls of the well on either side of him. He would remember shimmying frantically up that elevator cable for several frenzied minutes as the mine disintegrated beneath him and the earthquake rent the ground. All the while Grove was clawing and scraping his way up through the smoke and steam as swiftly as his ruined arms would carry him. He also would remember not being fast enough, because the water finally caught up with him, shooting him up the shaft with the force of a cannonball.

At that point, his memory started getting sketchy because he became a virtual projectile, naked and flailing in the rising piston of water. He probably lost consciousness more than once, intermittently coming back to awareness only to upchuck a lungful of water, gasp for air, and then resume his frantic shimmy up that pulley-line before the furious currents could swallow him.

One of the things that saved him was that ancient cable, which somehow managed to stay intact during the event and keep Grove oriented in the right direction:
upward toward the surface
.

He had no idea how long he flailed and slashed his way upward, upward, upward through the black chaos, the very structure of the earth giving way around him, but at one point he felt the strangest sensation engulfing his greasy nude body in the darkness. It felt like a cushion of air rising beneath him, levitating him, pushing him upward toward the surface. In Grove's scattered brain he saw it as an impassive act of God, a juggernaut of magic, propelling him upward into another earthly purgatory—wifeless, childless, friendless, loveless—into another hell from which he would never escape.

But as it turned out, the source of that force was far more prosaic.

 

Geologists studying the aftermath of the event weeks later would discover that the little-known fault line that lay beneath the Wormwood mine, awakened by the firestorm, had caused the century-old excavation to undergo what is known as an “inversion quake.” Rather than shifting the earth sideways, as do standard earthquakes, the inversion quake buckles underground strata deep below the earth's crust, setting off a chain reaction that causes landmasses to crack open like giant eggshells. Biblical historians believe that this rare phenomenon occurred in the first, second, and fifth centuries—signaling epochal changes, even informing the creation of
The Revelations to St. John
—which might explain the phenomenon's legendary status. Plagues of locusts and rivers of blood were nothing compared to this “Rending of Paradise,” as the phenomenon had come to be known in occult circles.

For Grove, the effects of that inversion quake would ultimately take on mystical proportions in his memory and imagination. Since Wormwood had been sunk so deep into the driftless shale, the result of the event was a sort of evacuation of the mine's contents, a shitting out of its foreign bodies. Grove was pushed out of that main shaft like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

Which is the point at which Grove completely lost consciousness.