Nanowrimo Day 2
The trouble with nanowrimo is I don't really have it all in linear form. I have scattered notes and a list of names. I'm basically just stream of consciousness typing it out. When I hit a block I hop to another part.
The coal mine was the only source of industry for miles. When it started to shut down, the bosses left and expected the town to die without them. They were glad to leave the failing mine behind and the lawsuits from all the disappearances and the stares from the workers.
The people there didn’t leave though. They knew very well where the disappeared workers were. The bosses hadn’t been interested in what had happened, just cleaning it up. They had hired outsiders to retrieve and dispose of the bodies of the first crew. They had been paid very well to keep quiet, but Junie Shaw( Isiah’s wife) had an aunt who worked at the Three Room Inn where they were staying.
She had listened at the doors and at the vents and heard the strangers trying to make sense of what they found. The first team hadn’t been dead. They had been crouched like animals at the end of the shaft, digging furiously with their hands. They had uncovered a link of what looked like a huge chain. They had ignored the second team, even when poked with a shovel. They hadn’t even looked up when the machine had been fired up again.
The leader of the second team had done recovery work for tunnels that had collapsed, flooded, burned, or been filled with poisonous fumes, but he had never seen anything like that. Junie’s aunt said that they were all shaken and wanted out of this deal, but the leader said their reputation was on the line.
They went back in the next day with ropes and sacks and guns. They had the machine out, now they had to figure out what to do about the people still inside. No one was allowed to see what was inside the sacks when they came out, and the tunnel had been collapsed behind them.
The story was that poison air had been what had driven Kahl’s team to go crazy and flee. It had gotten worse by the time the recovery team had gone down and sent them off their heads and trying to tunnel their way out in the wrong direction. It was their insane digging that had collapsed the shaft on them. No one believed it.
It seemed much more likely that the second team had killed the first and hauled their bodies out in bags and collapsed the shaft to hide the mess. Or they could’ve just saved time and blown out the supports and buried the first team alive. What was in the sacks then? Could be anything, really.
The bosses had planned to dig in other directions and avoid that area completely, but none of it worked out well. The miners were difficult and found problems everywhere rather than just dig. Machines failed so often that sabotage was suspected.
And then one night, a member of the missing team showed up, so filthy that no one recognized him. He was emaciated and silent, fingers worked to the literal bone. He looked more ghoul than human, but he stood still and let his former neighbors pour buckets of water over him until they could see the man he had been.
He hadn’t died from poison air. And if he been in a cave-in he had dug his way with his bare hands over the long days since. Someone went to get Benjamin Kahl and all seven of the blackbirds came to see. Kahl took the man’s arm to see his tattered hand and the gaunt survivor tugged him to follow.
The blackbirds all went together and a few of the town’s people came along as well. The man led the way into the woods and up the side of the mountain to a sinkhole. Another of the crew sat there, as starved and filthy as the first. When they looked down into the sinkhole, they could see empty eyes looking back. The whole team was there.
That could’ve been us, Kahl thought. If we had stayed any longer. If we had helped them dig out the chain.
“They’re starving,” he said aloud. “We need some food and water up here.” Several of the people agreed and headed back the way they had come, glad for the excuse to go.
“Think they’re ready to come out?” Meyer asked. “They could get out of that if they wanted to.”
“Let’s get some lean-tos set up,” Kahl said. “So they can come out and eat if they aren’t ready to come back to town.”
Glad of a plan, the people around him jumped into action. The blackbirds begin setting up a camp, making the lean-tos and clearing a place for everyone. Others went back to town for blankets and boards to make a better shack. By sunset, there was a very rough three sided shelter put together and a campfire.
People had come back with sandwiches and boiled eggs and thermoses of black coffee. Maggie and Junie came with bacon to cook on the fire and a raisin pie. The first team emerged from the sinkhole like the dead rising from the grave and gathered close to the fire to eat. They didn’t talk and their hands were in a horrible state. They ate exactly like people who had been days underground with no food.
Maggie swore under her breath and began ripping up one of the sheets for bandages. She was allowed to wrap the torn hands as long as she didn’t block them from eating.
“It won’t do any good,” she said, as much to herself as anyone. “They’re so dirty, it’ll only fester.”
“Better than nothing,” Kahl said.
“Is that what would’ve happened to us?” Rabbit asked.
“I think so,” Kahl said. That got a murmur from the other people who hadn’t been there. That was horrible.
“We have to take care of them,” Rabbit said. The murmur sounded more like agreement. He still looked around for approval. “It could’ve been any of us. We can’t just leave them like this.”
“It’s driving them,” Isiah said. “It’s making them do this. It won’t let them go until they’ve done what it wants. Maybe not even then.”
“We can help them with that too, then,” Rabbit said. “Make it so it doesn’t work them to death or kill them.”
“Won’t that make you just like them after all?” Junie asked. “Just with the sense to know it?”
“I don’t know,” Rabbit said, his big, wet eyes as wild and lost as ever. “But if it was me, I’d want somebody to help.”
“It let them come and come get us,” Kahl said. “So maybe they aren’t all gone. Maybe we can get them back. If we’re careful.”
“The bosses still don’t know what it is,” he added. “Or if they do, they haven’t told anyone. They won’t take kindly to this.”
“So we don’t tell them,” one of the locals said. There was more agreement to that. “If they ask, we say that we came up here because somebody’s cow fell in the sinkhole. We have to fill it back in until it can get out. That takes time so we gotta feed it until then. It’s hard work filling a sinkhole and it’s not like they can tell us what to do when we’re off shift anyway.”
“Better if they don’t ask,” Isiah said.
“If that is Tom Whitaker over there, one of us needs to tell his wife,” another said. “She’s got them kids and they’ve been trying to figure out what to do.”
“I’ll tell her,” Maggie said, wiping her dirty hands on her dress. “Do you think he’ll know them?”
All eyes turned to the huddled group eating their way through the pie as ferociously as they had dug into the wall. It was hard to tell one from another. The number of people was right, but under the blood and grime, no one could tell who was who. It made Kahl wonder for a moment how hideous it would be to clean them all off and find out that they weren’t the lost men after all, but some wasted demons crawled up from below.
“Maybe not at first,” was what he said. “Give them some hope.”
Maggie nodded. She stood to go and Junie stood with her. Junie and Isiah touched hands tenderly in farewell and the two women started back down the mountainside. The sun was down now, but they aimed toward the lights from town and feared nothing.
“We’re lucky men,” Kahl said to Isiah, who beamed proudly.
“Luckier than them,” Grady said, nodding to the recovery team. “What are we going to do about them, Kahl?”
“Just watch them for now,” Kahl said. “They may come out of it and be able to tell us something. They may go right back down and start digging again. We won’t know until it happens.”
“What do you think the bosses will do if they do find out?” one of the locals asked. Kahl didn’t know him well. He was on a completely different shift, but it was a small town.
“If they know what the chain is,” Kahl said. “And they are still willing to send us underground with it? Then something very evil is going on. It may be they have their heads so far up their asses, they don’t know or care. My money is on that one. If they find out these men are alive, the first thing they are going to do is cut off any money to their families.”
“Bastards,” somebody grumbled.
“And they’ll be sending us back to work without any more thought to it being dangerous,” someone else said.
“After they chew us all out for causing a delay.”
“And dock our pay for hours lost.”
“Bastards!”
That was when the recovery team stood up to a man and began to head back to the sinkhole. The other miners fell silent as they went by. It was eerie to see them troop by in the firelight with no shine in their eyes. Like ghosts, as if a coal town wasn’t brimming with ghost stories of dead miners and lost souls anyway.They slid down into the sinkhole one after the other until it was just the other men standing there. They stood just as silently there in the dark woods, until someone cleared their throat.
“I’m not on the clock until noon tomorrow,” the miner said. “I can stay up here and keep the fire going if someone will stay with me.” There wasn’t any shame in the last part and no one would’ve blamed the young man if there had been.
“I’ll stay,” another said after a minute. “But I want to go get my gun first.”
“Get mine too,” another said. “And I’ll stay until you get back.”
“I can come up in the morning,” another offered. “Bring some coffee. Biscuits.”
“Sounds good,” Kahl said. “I’ll be back up tomorrow too. We’ll figure this out. Put it right somehow.”
Everyone else agreed and what choice did they have really? The man going to get the guns started down the hill and the rest began to head that way as well. The two men who were staying settled down in the shelter with the blankets. Kahl decided he would sent up some whiskey with the guns. Not enough to get three men drunk enough to be stupid, but enough to keep them warm and brave until the sun came up.
He wasn’t curious enough to want to go down that sinkhole to find out what was going on for himself. He wondered how Mrs. Whitaker was taking the news. If she wanted the money from the company, she would keep quiet until the check was in her hand. He didn’t know her well enough to be able to say what she might do.
Maggie would handle it. He had every confidence. She didn’t talk about going north to the train yards anymore. She knew as well as he did that whatever had happened to them had changed everything and going north wouldn’t save them from it. The thought of leaving the blackbirds behind made him a little queasy.
He wondered if soldiers felt like this when they went home from war, if the joy of being back kept them from aching over their lost brothers like a severed limb. Everyone said his father had never been the same after he came back. Maybe that was why. The old man had never talk about anyone he had left. Those he had come back to never seemed like quite enough to make him happy.
The coal mine was the only source of industry for miles. When it started to shut down, the bosses left and expected the town to die without them. They were glad to leave the failing mine behind and the lawsuits from all the disappearances and the stares from the workers.
The people there didn’t leave though. They knew very well where the disappeared workers were. The bosses hadn’t been interested in what had happened, just cleaning it up. They had hired outsiders to retrieve and dispose of the bodies of the first crew. They had been paid very well to keep quiet, but Junie Shaw( Isiah’s wife) had an aunt who worked at the Three Room Inn where they were staying.
She had listened at the doors and at the vents and heard the strangers trying to make sense of what they found. The first team hadn’t been dead. They had been crouched like animals at the end of the shaft, digging furiously with their hands. They had uncovered a link of what looked like a huge chain. They had ignored the second team, even when poked with a shovel. They hadn’t even looked up when the machine had been fired up again.
The leader of the second team had done recovery work for tunnels that had collapsed, flooded, burned, or been filled with poisonous fumes, but he had never seen anything like that. Junie’s aunt said that they were all shaken and wanted out of this deal, but the leader said their reputation was on the line.
They went back in the next day with ropes and sacks and guns. They had the machine out, now they had to figure out what to do about the people still inside. No one was allowed to see what was inside the sacks when they came out, and the tunnel had been collapsed behind them.
The story was that poison air had been what had driven Kahl’s team to go crazy and flee. It had gotten worse by the time the recovery team had gone down and sent them off their heads and trying to tunnel their way out in the wrong direction. It was their insane digging that had collapsed the shaft on them. No one believed it.
It seemed much more likely that the second team had killed the first and hauled their bodies out in bags and collapsed the shaft to hide the mess. Or they could’ve just saved time and blown out the supports and buried the first team alive. What was in the sacks then? Could be anything, really.
The bosses had planned to dig in other directions and avoid that area completely, but none of it worked out well. The miners were difficult and found problems everywhere rather than just dig. Machines failed so often that sabotage was suspected.
And then one night, a member of the missing team showed up, so filthy that no one recognized him. He was emaciated and silent, fingers worked to the literal bone. He looked more ghoul than human, but he stood still and let his former neighbors pour buckets of water over him until they could see the man he had been.
He hadn’t died from poison air. And if he been in a cave-in he had dug his way with his bare hands over the long days since. Someone went to get Benjamin Kahl and all seven of the blackbirds came to see. Kahl took the man’s arm to see his tattered hand and the gaunt survivor tugged him to follow.
The blackbirds all went together and a few of the town’s people came along as well. The man led the way into the woods and up the side of the mountain to a sinkhole. Another of the crew sat there, as starved and filthy as the first. When they looked down into the sinkhole, they could see empty eyes looking back. The whole team was there.
That could’ve been us, Kahl thought. If we had stayed any longer. If we had helped them dig out the chain.
“They’re starving,” he said aloud. “We need some food and water up here.” Several of the people agreed and headed back the way they had come, glad for the excuse to go.
“Think they’re ready to come out?” Meyer asked. “They could get out of that if they wanted to.”
“Let’s get some lean-tos set up,” Kahl said. “So they can come out and eat if they aren’t ready to come back to town.”
Glad of a plan, the people around him jumped into action. The blackbirds begin setting up a camp, making the lean-tos and clearing a place for everyone. Others went back to town for blankets and boards to make a better shack. By sunset, there was a very rough three sided shelter put together and a campfire.
People had come back with sandwiches and boiled eggs and thermoses of black coffee. Maggie and Junie came with bacon to cook on the fire and a raisin pie. The first team emerged from the sinkhole like the dead rising from the grave and gathered close to the fire to eat. They didn’t talk and their hands were in a horrible state. They ate exactly like people who had been days underground with no food.
Maggie swore under her breath and began ripping up one of the sheets for bandages. She was allowed to wrap the torn hands as long as she didn’t block them from eating.
“It won’t do any good,” she said, as much to herself as anyone. “They’re so dirty, it’ll only fester.”
“Better than nothing,” Kahl said.
“Is that what would’ve happened to us?” Rabbit asked.
“I think so,” Kahl said. That got a murmur from the other people who hadn’t been there. That was horrible.
“We have to take care of them,” Rabbit said. The murmur sounded more like agreement. He still looked around for approval. “It could’ve been any of us. We can’t just leave them like this.”
“It’s driving them,” Isiah said. “It’s making them do this. It won’t let them go until they’ve done what it wants. Maybe not even then.”
“We can help them with that too, then,” Rabbit said. “Make it so it doesn’t work them to death or kill them.”
“Won’t that make you just like them after all?” Junie asked. “Just with the sense to know it?”
“I don’t know,” Rabbit said, his big, wet eyes as wild and lost as ever. “But if it was me, I’d want somebody to help.”
“It let them come and come get us,” Kahl said. “So maybe they aren’t all gone. Maybe we can get them back. If we’re careful.”
“The bosses still don’t know what it is,” he added. “Or if they do, they haven’t told anyone. They won’t take kindly to this.”
“So we don’t tell them,” one of the locals said. There was more agreement to that. “If they ask, we say that we came up here because somebody’s cow fell in the sinkhole. We have to fill it back in until it can get out. That takes time so we gotta feed it until then. It’s hard work filling a sinkhole and it’s not like they can tell us what to do when we’re off shift anyway.”
“Better if they don’t ask,” Isiah said.
“If that is Tom Whitaker over there, one of us needs to tell his wife,” another said. “She’s got them kids and they’ve been trying to figure out what to do.”
“I’ll tell her,” Maggie said, wiping her dirty hands on her dress. “Do you think he’ll know them?”
All eyes turned to the huddled group eating their way through the pie as ferociously as they had dug into the wall. It was hard to tell one from another. The number of people was right, but under the blood and grime, no one could tell who was who. It made Kahl wonder for a moment how hideous it would be to clean them all off and find out that they weren’t the lost men after all, but some wasted demons crawled up from below.
“Maybe not at first,” was what he said. “Give them some hope.”
Maggie nodded. She stood to go and Junie stood with her. Junie and Isiah touched hands tenderly in farewell and the two women started back down the mountainside. The sun was down now, but they aimed toward the lights from town and feared nothing.
“We’re lucky men,” Kahl said to Isiah, who beamed proudly.
“Luckier than them,” Grady said, nodding to the recovery team. “What are we going to do about them, Kahl?”
“Just watch them for now,” Kahl said. “They may come out of it and be able to tell us something. They may go right back down and start digging again. We won’t know until it happens.”
“What do you think the bosses will do if they do find out?” one of the locals asked. Kahl didn’t know him well. He was on a completely different shift, but it was a small town.
“If they know what the chain is,” Kahl said. “And they are still willing to send us underground with it? Then something very evil is going on. It may be they have their heads so far up their asses, they don’t know or care. My money is on that one. If they find out these men are alive, the first thing they are going to do is cut off any money to their families.”
“Bastards,” somebody grumbled.
“And they’ll be sending us back to work without any more thought to it being dangerous,” someone else said.
“After they chew us all out for causing a delay.”
“And dock our pay for hours lost.”
“Bastards!”
That was when the recovery team stood up to a man and began to head back to the sinkhole. The other miners fell silent as they went by. It was eerie to see them troop by in the firelight with no shine in their eyes. Like ghosts, as if a coal town wasn’t brimming with ghost stories of dead miners and lost souls anyway.They slid down into the sinkhole one after the other until it was just the other men standing there. They stood just as silently there in the dark woods, until someone cleared their throat.
“I’m not on the clock until noon tomorrow,” the miner said. “I can stay up here and keep the fire going if someone will stay with me.” There wasn’t any shame in the last part and no one would’ve blamed the young man if there had been.
“I’ll stay,” another said after a minute. “But I want to go get my gun first.”
“Get mine too,” another said. “And I’ll stay until you get back.”
“I can come up in the morning,” another offered. “Bring some coffee. Biscuits.”
“Sounds good,” Kahl said. “I’ll be back up tomorrow too. We’ll figure this out. Put it right somehow.”
Everyone else agreed and what choice did they have really? The man going to get the guns started down the hill and the rest began to head that way as well. The two men who were staying settled down in the shelter with the blankets. Kahl decided he would sent up some whiskey with the guns. Not enough to get three men drunk enough to be stupid, but enough to keep them warm and brave until the sun came up.
He wasn’t curious enough to want to go down that sinkhole to find out what was going on for himself. He wondered how Mrs. Whitaker was taking the news. If she wanted the money from the company, she would keep quiet until the check was in her hand. He didn’t know her well enough to be able to say what she might do.
Maggie would handle it. He had every confidence. She didn’t talk about going north to the train yards anymore. She knew as well as he did that whatever had happened to them had changed everything and going north wouldn’t save them from it. The thought of leaving the blackbirds behind made him a little queasy.
He wondered if soldiers felt like this when they went home from war, if the joy of being back kept them from aching over their lost brothers like a severed limb. Everyone said his father had never been the same after he came back. Maybe that was why. The old man had never talk about anyone he had left. Those he had come back to never seemed like quite enough to make him happy.