Red Sky: Year 2 - Chapter 19

The cave-in happened fast. Faster than I could have anticipated. I can still hear the cries of the inmates. I can still feel the crush of dirt on my body. There are moments in life when you have an instant to react. You may not know why you do what you do, it’s a momentary decision not even a conscious one, but once that action is taken our future changes.  

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Suffocation infiltrates the subconscious of every miner. This usually happens at night when one is asleep. The dark thoughts we are able to put out of our heads during the day can no longer be blocked. They inform the most benign dreams and even happy memories. I would find myself waking up in the middle of the night trying to catch my breath, not even remembering what dream I had just experienced but knowing why I was in such a panic. It’s impossible to stop the reoccurring nightmares of being smothered below mountains of earth. I would find myself at a loss for breath in the most random of moments, sitting at a table eating dinner or having a conversation with an old friend when suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I would grasp at my throat trying to open an airway, digging through the skin of my neck with whatever sharp instrument was close by. Sometimes this was a knife from the kitchen, sometimes it was a scissors, sometimes it was my own fingernail.

When I woke from these dreams I would be relieved to be breathing again. To be breathing the stale air of my tiny cell. Then the reality of my situation would sink in and the momentary relief would be replaced by a suffocation of a different kind. I would have those inevitable thoughts of a cave-in swallowing me up. The sights and sounds would penetrate my mind as I sat safely in my cell. I would start listening like I was on tunneling duty. Listening for the fall of the dirt, for the break of one of the rods, for the screams of my fellow inmates, which would mean being trapped forever.

This is all to say that when the cave-in happened I wasn't listening, I wasn't alert to my surroundings like in those moments when I woke up from a suffocating dream. I was working on tunneling duty, no different than a typical boring day in the mine. Max and I were the lead riggers behind the gophers and the subgopher’s. We secured the first level and we're moving on to the second, placing the fiber alloy rods into the walls of the tunnel. The inmates behind us began to move the rig forward. “Watch out!” The tall one said as the rig started plowing through the dirt. Max wiped his mouth and turned to me, “this goddamn dirt tastes like rotten…” That’s when we heard the crunch of the rods collapsing. Then the rumble of falling dirt like being trapped inside a thundercloud. All of this happened in fractions of a second. That was the first crush. 

There are two kinds of cave-ins on the red moon; ones that happen all at once, there’s not anything anyone can do about those, and then there are the others, which happen suddenly then completely. The gap in time from first rumble to complete collapse is never the same, but the end result is, the entire tunnel will vanish. The last few rods will give way under the additional weight of the dirt. That’s the second crush. The time in between the two allows the rest of the workers to retreat. Those caught behind the wall of dirt from the first crush are always lost.

The first crush must have been lighter this time because I could hear voices in front of me. There was a crevice, too. I could see a slight crack in the wall and before I knew what my body was doing I whirled and took the axe off of Max’s belt and cut the cord that tied the two of us together.

“Get out of here!” I yelled.

Using a chisel I staked the cut end of the cord to the ground and jumped into the crevice knowing there was little chance that such a small stake and thin cord would save me when the entire tunnel caved in. I had seconds, maybe minutes to save those lives.

I crawled one elbow ahead of the next, plowing through thicker and thicker dirt. It was like crawling through water. The red moon pushed against me. My vision blocked by a thick film of soil, my eyes mutating as I tried to keep them open, black spots filling up large areas of my sight. I tried blinking the obstructions away. That only brought more soil down into my eyes. My eyelids literally grew heavy as the dirt built up on my face. By squinting with my left eye I could make out a faint source of light in the distance. It had the blue tint of a freeze light and through my blinkered eyes I could make out a five-fingered outline. That hand was my homing beacon. My right eye was now closed because of the dirt. I was operating with one squinting eye. I needed to reach that hand. If there was still an air pocket where that hand was I had a chance to retrieve those four men and get us out of there. If there was no pocket it would be over for all of us. We would suffocate in the belly of the mine.

None of this went through my mind at the time. I was too busy using all of my force to push through the dirt. I’m not the strongest man, but every synapse of my brain, every tissue of my body focused on that one task, slowly moving forward one centimeter at a time. As long as I was moving forward I would stay alive and the others had a chance to stay alive as well. Hesitation is death, movement is life.

I was also counting. In the back of my head a fast-running stopwatch was counting down. One hundred seconds. I have one hundred seconds to save them. One hundred seconds before the second collapse envelopes us completely. I based this estimate on past experience, but it really was a guess. A hope. A prayer. I knew it was possible the second cave-in wouldn’t complete for another minute and a half, I also knew there was no way the rods would hold out for another two minutes. One hundred seconds was my best chance. As long as I was counting the second cave-in would hold off. I willed myself to believe that. If I could get us out of there before I counted to one hundred seconds the dirt of the red moon would obey my commands.

The first couple of meters were the easiest, the next five were much harder. Max was right, the dirt tasted rotten. Like rotten eggs, rotten fruit, rotten anything. There were times at dinner when I thought the dirt of the mine would taste better than the paste. I would never think that again after crawling through that crevice. I tried spitting the dirt out of my mouth, but there was nowhere to spit to. The crevice closed in and now formed itself around my body. I had to make it to that pocket.

Sixty seconds left, still four meters to go.  My body slithered while the force of the dirt increased the pressure on my muscles. My shoulders started to break down. I needed those shoulders like a swimmer needs their shoulders when they swim against the current. I started to kick my legs to help me move forward. I was doing the breaststroke through a pile of dirt. I kept listening as I did this, waiting for the next round of thunder that would mean certain death. You always hear the shifting of the dirt milliseconds before you see it.

Forty seconds, I punched my hand forward and was greeted by a hand on the other side of the wall of dirt. Two men grabbed me and dragged me the last meter into the pocket that saved them. I had made it. And now I was trapped behind meters of dirt just like them.

I fell hard onto the compacted rock. The floor was as solid as brick and soon my little escape tunnel would be as well. I could hear cries of pain and suffering. Cries for help. I looked up at my two companions in the air pocket. They weren’t making any noise. The cries were coming from further on down the mine, from the gophers who were trapped beyond our sight. I wiped away the dirt from my right eye. I studied the inmate closest to me trying to make out where his dirt-soaked hair stopped and his dirt-soaked face began. I caught a flash of the brilliant white of his eyes peering out from underneath his dark mask. He looked like a shadow with eyes. Behind the whites of those eyes I could make out an outline of a head that slowly shook in sadness as the cries from beyond continued. There was no hope for the gophers. They were still breathing but they were already dead.

Back on Earth, there are stories from long ago about miners surviving for days, even weeks, in pockets in a mine. There are no such stories on the red moon. There would be no rescue missions, food would not be dropped to us no matter how long we survived on the other side of a collapsed wall. There is no hope of being rescued from a cave-in when you’re an inmate. The only question is how you die, either suffocated in an avalanche of dirt or starved to death while sitting in an air pocket. As I contemplated those two options and our dwindling odds of survival, I realized I had lost track of the count in my head. Was it thirty seconds or twenty or ten?

It didn’t matter. The three of us heard the second rumble of shifting dirt, suddenly no better off than the gophers I counted as lost. The second inmate in the air pocket, the one with the only working freeze light, a newt, looked at me with fear in his eyes.

“What do we do now?”

“Save our breath,” I said. I started counting again. I decided there were still twenty-five seconds left in our miserable lives.

Next Chapter: Chapter 19 - Part 2
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