The Sundering
Weird West Fiction from The Sundered World
Clem Wilkins shook the ringing from his ears and grappled against the hard, dusty floor of the mine. His eyes stung, flashing with sparks despite the pitch darkness. Rising onto his strong but shaky legs, he gulped air, then instantly doubled over in wracking coughs.
He reached blindly for the shaft wall and missed, tumbling down as phlegm, blood, and silver dust raked up his throat. His head swam and the wheezing nearly made him black out.
The fit passed. A dry moan creaked past his cracked lips.
Miners called it “rocks in the box.” The doctor who diagnosed him called it “silicosis.” No matter the name, it came from breathing silver dust and it had no cure. Barely twenty years old, Clem’s damaged lungs had him on borrowed time.
Now, that borrowed time grew even shorter.
Another faint, echoing roar rattled the walls, sounding like a beast emerging from hell.
“It’s gotta be a cave-in,” Clem muttered. What else caused the sudden gust of pressure that snuffed the lanterns and sent him sprawling?
He searched his pocket for the matchbook kept for times like these. The little flame hissed to life, warring against the smothering dust. Clem spotted a fallen but intact lantern and hustled toward it. The match burned down to his fingers before he reached it, and he dropped it with a curse. Darkness returned with the smell of spent phosphorous, filling him cold fear. He grit his teeth and buried it.
Just like the cave-in that buried the others…
He checked the matchbox. Two left.
Family filled his racing mind: Joe, bayoneted at First Manassas by some Mick fresh off a New York City dock; Pa, his limp from Gettysburg leaving him near-useless for work; Ma, all grief and stubborn hope, still tending husband and surviving son, their devastated Shenandoah farm abandoned as Clem led them West to chase silver.
Clem struck the match against the wall. It flared and dimmed. Clem shielded it, his hand burning and shaking as he touched the flame to the lantern’s worn-out wick.
Nothing happened. The match slowly burnt down, flame falling like Clem’s heart into his sickened gut.
Then it caught, glowing to hopeful golden light. Clem exhaled sharply in relief and pocketed the matchbox. Turning up the lantern’s brightness, the big Virginian peered further down the shaft.
“Anyone alive down here?” he called, stepping cautiously.
Timbers above and to the sides remained mostly in place, though some chunks of rock had broken free. Wherever that cave-in fell, it wasn’t close.
“Anyone?” he cried again, voice cracking. He groaned in frustration and let the coughs come.
A voice answered, faint but clear.
“Wilkins? That you?”
Heart pounding, Clem made his way to the voice. He stopped when it spoke again, broken apart by pained grunts.
“Saint Barbara, holy shield of the deep, pray for me now…”
An angry pulse burned through Clem’s chest. That accent, that Papist babbling.
Clem knew it well.
The lantern’s glow revealed a wiry dark-haired man trapped under broken timbers, freckled face smeared in gray dust, wide brown eyes pleading.
Sean Mallory.
Time and again, that too-lucky-by-half card sharp had cleaned Clem out at the saloon. A filthy cheater and thief, just like all Micks were. No better than the ones who killed his brother.
Clem hesitated, skin crawling. He looked over the wreckage pinning Sean, then spotted a mattock just an arm’s length away. Clem squinted down the shaft and listened. Nobody else. Just sounds of settling dust and stone.
His hand drifted towards the mattock. Suddenly, his chest seized, pain flaring like a hot spike as another cough tore through him.
Clem spat blood over his shoulder and stared down at his trapped rival.
“Hold on,” Clem sighed, barely believing his own words. “I’ll get you out.”
Dropping to his knees, Clem set the lantern down and pulled at the fallen rubble. A rock removed here, a broken timber lifted there, and Sean wriggled free like a rat from a trap. Panting, the Irishman rubbed at his legs.
“Thanks, Wilkins,” he said, brows lifted nervously.
“Don’t mention it,” Clem grumbled, turning away. He picked up the mattock—long handled and heavy like a woodsman’s axe—and found another similar but smaller tool nearby.
Sean shambled to his feet, eyes nervously shifting.
“Say, Wilkins,” he ventured, “about them two bucks I won offa ya last week...”
“Don’t mention that neither,” Clem spat, shoving the hatchet-sized mattock into Sean’s hands. Where Clem’s was made for swinging, Sean’s looked more fit for close work.
“Let’s move. We gotta hurry and save whoever we can down there.”
Clem grabbed the lantern and started forward, Sean at his heels. His shoulders itched with the Mick behind him, a potentially deadly tool in hand.
“Once we’re topside, I’ll give it back to ya,” the Irishman vowed.
Clem growled and spun on him.
“How about I give you the light,” he demanded, thrusting out the lantern. “I need both hands on this.”
He brandished the mattock and set his jaw.
The Irishman took the light with a gulp and didn’t protest, holding his peace as they marched on.
“Don’t worry about the money, worry about this cave-in,” Clem muttered.
For a long minute, only their footsteps and panting echoed through the shaft.
“It isn’t a cave-in,” Sean said with a shaky whisper.
Clem scowled and slowly turned. In the amber lantern light, Sean’s eyes bulged like a cornered animal.
“Then what is it?” Clem asked.
“I don’t know how, but...oh, saints preserve us…” Sean twisted his mattock in white-knuckled fingers.
“Out with it, Mick!” Clem barked.
Sean stiffened and flinched.
“It’s something...from below,” he said.
Clem scoffed and turned back down the shaft.
“Then they better look out below, ’cause I’m findin’ out what happened. And helpin’ whoever else is trapped.”
Clem was still speaking as growls rumbled from the shadows. Low, devilish and all too close.
Two pairs of eyes burned red in the dark, then lunged into the light. Eyes of tall, scaly things on two legs like a man, but with alligator heads and teeth to match.
They charged like rabid wolves.
TO BE CONTINUED…