The Becoming - a novella Read Free Page A

damage had occurred.
    It would be nice
to have some company to wait with, though. Maybe someone would be able to
fashion a crude sling for his arm, which throbbed steadily and had begun to
swell, turning an ominous shade of purple. Karl finally reached his empty
mining car and walked straight past it. He glanced down into the darkness of Alpha
Seven and shuddered, thinking about the bizarre incident with the two rocks
just before the explosion. What the hell had that been all about?
    He picked up his
pace. He wanted some company and he wanted to get past Alpha Seven.
    ***
    Karl leaned
against the closed bulkhead door and sighed. He hadn’t had to walk very far
beyond his mining cart before encountering the next bulkhead frame. It was a
testament to just how frazzled he felt that it hadn’t occurred to him the door
would be closed. Undoubtedly the men working beyond this door had heard the
explosion just as he did and had rushed to close the bulkhead closest to them,
just as he had.
    He wondered how
many miners were sitting on the other side of the thick door and cursed his
luck. What were the odds he would be the only man working in the length
of tunnel between two bulkhead frames at the time of the explosion? He began
wandering back toward his cart for no particular reason, walking without any
real destination in mind. He supposed he would grab his cart and walk it back
here, as far from the fire and the potentially deadly fumes as possible.
    And that was when
the lights went out.
    Karl froze in his
tracks. Dammit, he thought. Just when you think things can’t get any
worse. Losing the lights was normally no big deal; it happened practically
every day with the cheap wiring and flimsy incandescent bulbs purchased in bulk
by the Tonopah Mining Company. Every worker carried a miner’s light clipped to
his belt for exactly this possibility, and Karl unclipped his from his belt. He
prepared to light it.
    Then he thought
about the explosion, and the fire burning somewhere on the other side of the
closed bulkhead doors in the main shaft. The miner’s light consisted of a
hand-held canister burning an open flame fed by compressed gas.
    Gas.
    An open flame.
    An improperly
sealed bulkhead frame with potentially deadly flammable gases seeping through.
    Karl gripped his
miner’s light tightly, weighing the desire—the need, really—for blessed
light against the possibility of blowing himself to kingdom come. He thought
about Alpha Seven. About rocks flying out of the darkness. About the potential
for injury if he were to be struck in the head by one of them. And, of course,
about what he knew was the real question: Where in the hell had the rocks come
from? They hadn’t fallen from the ceiling and they certainly hadn’t launched themselves at his head.
    The darkness was
complete, all-encompassing. Karl realized he was shaking, breathing heavily,
sweating like he had just run five miles. He felt the inky blackness closing in
around him, a thick blanket suffocating him with its mass. He couldn’t breathe.
He needed to see. Now. Risks be damned.
    He lit a match
with shaking hands, wondering whether he would feel anything when the deadly
gases ignited around him, setting his body ablaze and burning him alive. The tip
of the match flared and when nothing happened, Karl was so relieved to still be
alive he almost forgot to set the tip against his miner’s light.
    He turned the
thumb screw and heard the barely perceptible hiss of the pressurized gas and
relaxed—a bit—as the reassuring yellow glow of the lamp beat back the darkness.
Of course, the gas inside the canister would not last forever, and when it was
used up, the flame in the lamp would extinguish and Karl would then truly be
thrust into darkness, one which would be unrelenting until power was restored
to the electric lights inside the tunnels.
    It was not a
comforting thought. But Karl pushed that uneasy feeling to the back of his
mind, at least for now. He could see