Run (39 page)

***

John climbed, leading Fran up the small ladder that extended up a long shaft.  He had never taken this ladder before, but knew it was one of the ways into and out of the mine, though it was long-abandoned in favor of other, easier methods of egress like the lift.  They had been crawling for hours, it seemed, and his arms were tired.  He knew that Fran’s arms must be on fire, feeling like her shoulders were pulling out of their sockets, but she made no sound, whispered no complaints.

The ladder had no such toughness and felt no similar need to keep from grumbling.  It crackled and splintered during their entire ascent, noises that disquieted John.  He tried to remember how long ago the ladder had been built.  It had been decades at least, he knew.  That was part of why the lift was put in: the ladder was not only inefficient, it was dangerous.  Several times during the climb he stopped and signaled Fran to do the same, worried that their combined weight in a trouble spot would pull the ladder away from the wall or just splinter it under their hands, casting them back into the depths of the earth.  He would navigate the dangerous area himself, carefully testing each rung for strength, before allowing Fran to follow behind him.

In spite of his misgivings, however, the ladder held, and when John looked up for what felt like the millionth time, he saw a glorious sight: the top of the slim shaft.  He couldn’t remember for sure, but it seemed to him that the top was within feet of the tunnel entrance.  He redoubled his efforts, climbing faster.

"Why the rush?" panted Fran from below him.

"We’re almost out," he said.

He heard her move faster behind him as well, gaining strength with the news of their impending exit from the depths of the mountain.  Splinters from the old wooden ladder bit into his hands, but he didn’t care.  He wanted to leave.

He pulled himself up over the lip of the shaft, then reached down to help Fran up the last few feet.

She reached out a hand.

And the ladder, old and weary from years of neglect, at last did exactly what John had most feared.  It fell away.  It crackled and snapped like a log in the fire, then shattered into several large pieces.  Short segments of the ladder remained anchored to the wall of the shaft, tethered by tenacious bolts that had rusted solid and so dirty they were nearly invisible against the wall of the slim shaft.  The rest of the ladder plummeted into the darkness, its skeletal outlines disappearing into the black below long before sounds of the splintering and cracking that marked its final dissolution had ceased.

Fran screamed, and John heard an echoing noise escape his own lips as Fran desperately lurched upward, catching onto his hand.  The ladder section she had been resting on fell from beneath her, leaving her suspended over a dark and bottomless well.

"Oh, God, John, help me!" she cried.

"I’ve got you, Fran!"

"Help me, John!"

"I’ve got you!  I won’t let go!"

He felt himself slipping toward the rim, her body weight pulling against him and the bad angle of his body on the tunnel floor giving him no leverage.  He reached out his free hand, trying to gain purchase on something.  He found only loose sand and dirt, and tried to stop himself by jabbing his palm hard onto the dirt floor, as though he could pummel the mountain into submission and force it to provide him with a handhold.

It didn’t work.  He was still slipping, scrabbling desperately for a grip on the hardpack dirt floor of the mine.  Pebbles and gravel came away in silty handfuls, and he knew he was going to lose Fran.

"Help!" he cried out, though no one was there to save them.  Only Malachi and his goons might be around, and they had hardly shown themselves to be the saving type.

Fran was going to fall, he realized.  He also knew that he wouldn’t let go of her, so her fall would be quickly proceeded by his own.

Then something stopped him.  Pain lanced through his hand and his forward movement stopped.  He looked over and saw a cleated bootsole, grinding onto the back of his hand, trapping it against the floor of the tunnel. 

"Jenna," said the woman who wore the boot, one of the women who with Malachi had been trying to kill him and Fran.  Her mouth was caked with blood from where he had hit her while they struggled at Gabe’s house twelve hours and a lifetime before.  He could make out the damp shards of broken teeth jutting out through her mangled lips.  "My name is Jenna," she hissed.  Blood drooled from her mouth in ropey strands, but she smiled like a little girl who she had just been given a pony for her birthday.

Her gun pressed against John’s cheek.  He didn’t move as she looked over the edge of the shaft, looking at Fran who still hung helplessly from John’s rapidly tiring grip.  Jenna’s macabre grin grew even wider, the gnarled remnants of her teeth seeming to swell and twist in among themselves in the dim light of the mine entrance.

"I just wanted you to know who sent you to hell," she rasped, and John saw her finger tighten on the trigger.

DOM#67A

LOSTON, COLORADO

AD 1999

1:15 PM TUESDAY

***ALERT MODE***

The shot rang out, and John felt his fingers slip away, heard Fran shriek once and then go silent, and waited for the end.  He expected a sudden burst of pain, a white light, and then the deep black of oblivion, a darkness so pervasive and all-encompassing that the deepest tunnels of Resurrection would seem light by comparison.

But none of that came.

Instead, he felt the boot come off his hand, granting him sudden relief from the pressure and accompanied by an equally sudden jab of pain as the nerve endings in the abraded skin were exposed to the damp air of the cave.

He looked at Jenna, still not sure what had just happened.  Blood poured from her mouth, but this time it was more than the blood leaking from the wounds John had inflicted upon her.  She was hemorrhaging, and dark arterial blood welled over her lips and fell in a stream onto her chest.  Jenna stumbled once, looking surprised at the blossoming stain on her bosom where blood flowed thick and fast.  Then she fell past him, tripping into the open shaft and disappearing without a sound.

A man stood behind her, lowering his gun.  It was a strange gun, but clearly a gun nonetheless.  He was an older man, his hair white and his face deeply creased with age and worry.  Even in the dim light, John could see that his eyes were the most startlingly blue he had ever seen. 

Several others stood behind the man, all dressed in strange clothing and body armor, all holding the same strange weaponry as the man who had shot Jenna.

He saw all of them watching him, but he didn’t care to know who they were, or how they came to be here, or why they had saved him.  He turned to look back down the shaft.  Fran was gone, he knew, and his vision swam as tears blurred his sight.  But still he had to look.

He swept his head back and forth, looking down in spite of the impossibility of finding her alive.  All that mattered was Fran.

Please, God, he prayed.  Please let her be there.

The thought that he had not prayed since Annie’s death came to him, and he wondered if God would even listen to him at all, much less answer such a prayer.  When we turn our backs on Him, thought John, does He turn His back on us as well?

A moment later he had his answer.  Or at least, he had as close to an answer as he was ever likely to get: Apparently He doesn’t. 

John sobbed as he saw Fran, upside down and unconscious, her legs tangled in one of the sections of ladder that remained bolted to the wall.  She was far out of reach, he knew, but he tried to lower himself farther anyway, unwilling to give her up.

The piece of a ladder that she hung from started to creak, beginning to give.

"No!" shouted John, and redoubled his efforts, straining as though by mere thought or physical effort he might be able to add another inch to his reach.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back from the edge.  It was the man who had saved him.  The blue-eyed old man.

John fought against him.  "I can’t let her die!" he said, almost in tears.

The man shook him.  "You won’t.  But you’re exhausted and you’re likely to miscalculate.  Let one of my people take care of her."

John struggled a moment longer, before the man’s words penetrated his pain-fogged and fatigued brain.  He nodded.  Immediately the man nodded to one of his crew, a thick, burly man who stepped forward instantly.  His clothing, mostly some kind of body armor that John was unfamiliar with, almost glistened in the darkness of the shaft.  It wasn’t any material John had ever seen.  But it
was
similar to the fabric worn by the man who killed John’s father. 

Answers might be within his reach, he realized.  He might at last know who had killed his father, and how his father had risen from the dead to save him.  Perhaps he would even learn what had happened to transform the town and the people he knew and loved into undying killers.  But not now.  Now, Fran needed to be saved, and if that didn’t happen, the rest could fall into the shaft and be lost with her for all he cared.

The burly man withdrew a tiny device from an inner pocket.  He pressed a small button on its face, then dropped it to the ground near the rim of the shaft, where it affixed itself with a solid thunk.  Then the man slid out over the lip himself, easing himself downward farther and farther and then finally letting go.  John saw him float downward toward Fran, and wondered if, on top of all that had happened in the last few days, he was now about to find out that people could fly, too.  In a moment, however, he realized that the man wasn’t actually floating, but was hanging from some kind of micro-fiber.  The filament was affixed to the man’s belt, and a continuous feed of the thread came forth from the device the man had affixed to the shaft rim above him.  He descended like a spider, suspended from a single silken line that was clearly too thin and weak to hold him. 

Yet hold him it did.  John watched as the man drifted down to Fran, then carefully unhooked her legs and pulled her into his arms.  John heard the men and women who stood nearby him sigh, and realized that they had been just as afraid as he.  Fran’s safety meant something to them, he could see.  The thought comforted him as nothing else in this long nightmare had been able to do.  Perhaps he was safe.  Perhaps he and Fran would no longer have to run.

John heard the white-haired man speak to another one of the men and women who stood nearby: "Call the jet."

The man holding Fran started up again, the machine attached to the shaft’s edge reeling in the slim fiber that held them aloft against gravity’s insistent tug.  Soon they were both at the level of the tunnel floor, and John pulled Fran over to him.  A wound on her scalp bled profusely, but John could see instantly that it wasn’t deep.  Head wounds bled copiously, but were often of superficial importance.  More frightening was the possibility of internal injuries.  He began inspecting her expertly, checking her for obvious signs of trauma, then probing gently to see if he could find any edema or other signs of internal damage. 

"Please," said the man who had helped them, the white haired man with the sorrowful eyes, "why don’t we do that after we arrive?"

"Arrive?" said John, continuing his examination.  He was beyond fear or any other strong sensations, the night having burned out his capacity for normal feeling, cauterizing the ragged edges of his emotion and leaving only unfeeling scar tissue behind.  All he felt now was concern for Fran, and he wasn’t going to stop trying to help her to make small talk with this man, whoever or whatever he was.  "Arrive where?  Who the hell are you, Mister, and why is everyone I know so intent on killing me?"

"All will be explained."

"Explain it now.  Who are you?"

"
Deus ex machina
," answered the man, speaking with the tone of one who was making a private joke, though his eyes did not glint with any kind of merriment.  Rather, they seemed to look even more sorrowful, if such were possible. 

If the response
was
a joke, John didn’t get it.  Fear and amazement fraying his patience to mere threads, he repeated his question more emphatically, making it clear that he wasn’t going to tolerate any more nonsense. 

"Answer me, dammit."

The other man’s eyes grew cold and flinty, and now John discovered that they were capable of filling with more than just sadness and wisdom.  They contained strength beyond anything John had ever before seen.  Clearly this was a man who was accustomed to being obeyed.  But John also sensed something more than the existence of a man of power.  This man was not one of those pale dictators and petty tyrants whom John had dedicated much of his life to putting down.  Instead, the man before him seemed to wear the mantle and bearing of a true king, evoking a sense that he must be obeyed not merely because he was the monarch, but because he was
right
.

"Really, John," said the man.  "We’ve devoted quite a large of amount of effort to you.  The least you can do is come with us."

The men and women standing near the man leveled their weapons at John.  It wasn’t a request.

"Who are you?" asked John again, his tone pleading this time.  It was a defeatist gesture, he knew, begging at least a morsel of information in return for his acquiescence to their wishes.

The man nodded and looked as though he felt pity for John, his face clearly conveying a sense that he hated all this, but that for some reason it was necessary.  "My name is Adam," he said, and nodded at his crew.  Two of them holstered their weapons and moved as though to pick up Fran.  John gathered her into his arms and stood before they could do so, standing before Adam, daring the man to try and take her from him.

Adam nodded, conceding John’s right to hold the unconscious woman, and gestured for him to move.

John looked down the tunnel the way the man had pointed "We going back into the mine?" he asked.

"What?  No, we’re leaving," said Adam. 

"Then we go this way," said John, walking in the direction opposite to the way Adam had indicated.  He walked a few feet, turned the corner, and headed to the entrance, feeling a bit better knowing that, for all their mystery and apparent technology, these newcomers couldn’t get out of a hole in the ground without his help.