The Becoming - a novella Read Free

never been a religious man, but
suddenly it seemed critically important he pass along a message to God, just in
case He happened to be listening. Get me out of this, he thought. Please,
get me out of this, and he realized he had nothing else to say. He chuckled
bitterly and pulled on the rusted fixture and once again it didn’t budge. Thanks, he transmitted to God, who was clearly busy with other things, and
tittered.
    The first tendrils
of black smoke began floating down the inside of the tunnel, up near the
ceiling; Karl could see them even in the insufficient lighting provided by the cheap
bastards running the Tonopah Mining Company. He tried to guess how much time he
had left and couldn’t. He opened his right hand as if to slap someone and
reached up and used his arm as a battering ram in a desperate attempt to loosen
the frozen bulkhead door. He smashed his hand into the door and felt his wrist
pop and screamed in fear and frustration and pain.
    And he felt the
door move.
    He steeled himself
against the pain he knew was coming and smacked the door again with his injured
arm, and this time it pulled free of the hook with a squeal of protest. Pain
exploded in his arm, zig-zagging from his wrist all the way to his elbow. Karl
ignored it. He lifted the door free of the hook with his good hand and lowered
it down across the tunnel where it swung snugly into place against its partner.
    Karl latched the
doors together and dropped to one knee to catch his breath. He was shaking from
pain and exertion and, he knew, terror. He closed his eyes and counted to one
hundred and gradually his breathing returned to something approaching normal.
The tunnel had grown noticeably darker with the bulkhead doors blocking the
light from the mine fire, but when he opened his eyes, the first thing Karl
noticed was a sliver of yellow leaking through each side of the shaft around
the outside of the iron frame. Either the frame had bowed inward over the decades
or the walls of the mine shaft had slowly crumbled away.
    Karl didn’t know
which was the case and didn’t care. The fact of the matter was if light could
penetrate the bulkhead, so could poisonous gases. The temperature inside the
tunnel had dropped with the big metal doors closed, but he noticed the chemical
odor had not disappeared. Not entirely. Karl squinted upward and could make out
the shadowy impression of black smoke tendrils still hovering just below the
ceiling like tiny storm clouds.
    He needed to move
deeper into the mine to escape the toxic fumes. The longer the fire burned out
of control—and he had no way of knowing how serious it was and thus how long it
might burn—the more dangerous it would be to stay here at the bulkhead. He
turned and began picking his way back toward his mine car. His plan was to
retrace his steps to the junction of the main tunnel and Alpha Seven, where he
had been standing when the explosion occurred, and then continue past it,
moving deeper into the earth. Eventually he would meet up with other trapped
miners working the two-to-midnight shift. They could gather together and share
warmth and light while awaiting rescue.
    He was surprised
the electric lamps Tonopah Mining had strung along the main tunnel continued to
burn. They flickered constantly and failed on a regular basis, so the fact that
he still had light by which to navigate the tunnels under these conditions was
at least something to be thankful for.
    Karl crunched
slowly along the hard-packed dirt floor of the deserted tunnel. He hadn’t
realized until just now how far he ran right after the explosion. At the time
it had felt like a few seconds, but Karl figured he must have sprinted for at
least a minute before finding and closing the bulkhead doors. He took his time
now, walking slowly, cradling his injured arm. There was no reason to hurry;
rescue certainly wouldn’t come for hours, maybe not for days. The timing all
depended upon how badly the fire was burning and how much