A soft bump as it hit uneven rock.
Then, deeper, a shout. The first human sound he'd heard.
Joe raised the rifle and fired two quick shots into the darkness around the corner, not aiming for a kill, aiming for a reflex. Men ducked when bullets snapped past. Men froze when sound turned into threat.
The shouting sharpened. Movement surged.
Too late.
The dolly kept rolling, the slope doing the work for him.
Joe stepped back, pressed flat against the rock, and counted in his head.
The blast hit as a hard, concussive punch that shoved air out of the tunnel in a violent exhalation.
The sound was not a boom so much as a vicious cracking, stone and timber and metal all arguing at once. The tunnelexhaled debris and darkness, a rolling cloud that turned the LED work lights into dim smears.
Joe ducked and covered his head as grit rained down, sharp as sand, and something heavy struck the ground nearby with a wet thud that might have been rock or might have been something else.
The mine groaned.
Timbers snapped with sounds like rifle shots.
Rock shifted and settled in a long, grinding sigh that seemed to come from deep below, from places where the earth had been holding its shape for a million years and had just been given permission to let go.
When the dust began to thin, Joe lifted his head.
The tunnel ahead was partly choked now. Not sealed. Not a tomb. A partial collapse. Broken beams angled like ribs. Jagged rock piled in the center, some pieces the size of cars, others no bigger than fists. The tunnel beyond was darker, tighter, and angry.
He coughed once, spat grit, and got to his feet.
Joe switched his light to a narrower beam and stepped forward, into the wreckage.
35
The mine had gone quiet in the way only damaged places did.
Not silence. Settling. A low, internal creak, like something large thinking about whether it still wanted to stand.
Joe stepped through the blown section carefully, boots crunching over broken rock and splintered timber, his light cutting through dust that still hung in the air like fog.
The smell was sharp now, reeking of burnt propellant, scorched metal, pulverized stone, and underneath it all, the copper-iron stink of blood and torn flesh.
The tunnel had been transformed into a house of horrors.
What had been men were now pieces. A torso lay face-down in the rubble, the arms and head simply gone, the ragged edges of the neck and shoulders showing white bone and dark tissue.
A leg, still wearing a boot, jutted from beneath a collapsed beam at an angle that made no anatomical sense. Further on, a hand lay palm-up in a pool of blood.
The blast had done what explosives did in confined spaces. It had turned pressure into a weapon, slamming bodies against stone, tearing them apart with overpressure, shredding tissue and snapping bone. The walls were painted with it. Dark streaks and splatter patterns that told the story of men who'd beenstanding in the wrong place when physics stopped caring about their structural integrity.
Joe moved past it all without slowing.
A helmet lay upside down near his feet, the chinstrap still buckled. He didn't look inside it.
The tunnel narrowed where the collapse had been worst, forcing him to climb over a pile of broken rock and twisted rebar. His light caught something pale in the debris. It was a section of ribcage, the bones snapped and splayed like fingers.
A few feet beyond that, a face stared up at him from the rubble, eyes wide and surprised, the rest of the body buried somewhere beneath tons of stone.
