Chapter 3 - The Price of a Soul
"You've been accessing restricted telemetry data on the engineering server, Cole," Arthur Sterling said.
His tone was no longer that of a superior addressing an insubordinate employee. It was the flat, menacing cadence of an armed robber who had just realized the cashier recognized his face beneath the mask.
"I don't need a server to tell me when three thousand feet of mountain is groaning, Sterling," I said, leaning over the desk until the brim of my hard hat shadowed his face. "I felt the vibration through the floorboards of the hoist house. The core is fracturing. You have forty minutes before the main roof shears across the entire width of Section Six."
Julian Cross cleared his throat, taking a nervous, agitated step toward the filing cabinets. He was thirty-five, wearing a sleek Patagonia vest over his company polo, his face pale and slick with morning sweat.
"Ethan, let’s be reasonable here," Cross stammered, raising his hands in a placating, diplomatic gesture. "We ran the predictive finite-element models with the seismic team in Morgantown yesterday afternoon. Yes, there are minor micro-fractures in the overlying strata, but the automated support shields on the longwall are rated for eighty thousand pounds per square foot. The safety margin—"
"The safety margin is zero!" I roared, whirling on Cross with such violent speed that the younger man recoiled against the metal filing drawers. "The automated shields are anchored into weathered shale, Cross! You know damn well the company used six-foot roof bolts instead of the twelve-foot epoxy-grouted bolts the federal inspectors mandated back in August!"
Cross’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. His throat bobbed like an apple in a bucket.
In my first life, I hadn't known about the roof bolts until four months after the disaster, when an anonymous whistleblower leaked the internal procurement orders during the state legislative hearings. Sterling had cut three hundred thousand dollars from the support budget to hit his third-quarter operational targets, replacing high-tensile steel anchors with surplus six-foot split-set friction stabilizers that were practically useless against a shifting sandstone cap.
Sterling slowly stood up.
He didn't yell. Men like Arthur Sterling didn't yell when their fortunes were threatened; they turned into ice. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a gold Montblanc pen, and tapped it against the desk with a rhythmic, hypnotic click.
Click. Clack.
"Listen to me, Cole," Sterling whispered, his voice dropping into that dark, subterranean register that had crushed fifty union organizers over twenty years. "You are a shift foreman. You hold a state certification because this company sponsored your training. You live in a house owned by our real estate subsidiary. Your brother Toby is third on the priority list for an apprentice mechanic’s license."
He pointed the gold pen straight at my chest.
"If you walk out of this office and say one single word to the men on that pad—if you cause a wildcat work stoppage that delays the morning extraction—I will have the state troopers remove you from this property in federal handcuffs. I will file an emergency civil injunction for unlawful sabotage, freeze your pension, and blacklist your entire family from every commercial coal field from here to the Ohio River."
He glanced at the digital clock on the wall: 5:56 AM.
Four minutes until the morning cage dropped.
"Now take your hard hat," Sterling purred, his eyes dead as granite stones, "get in that cage, and take your shift down to the face. If the roof settles, our insurance covers the equipment. If you keep your mouth shut, there’s an assistant superintendent's title and a sixty-thousand-dollar bonus waiting for you in Charleston on Monday."
He was buying my soul.
He was offering me sixty pieces of silver to escort my brother and sixty-three innocent men into a slaughterhouse.
I looked down at the gold pen. Then I looked into Arthur Sterling’s cold, arrogant eyes.
I didn't yell. I didn't reach across the desk to wrap my hands around his throat—though every ancestor who had died in these mountains screamed in my blood to tear his head from his shoulders.
Instead, I reached into my canvas coat pocket, pulled out a small, heavy black object, and set it gently in the center of his mahogany blotter.
It was a Motorola commercial radio transmitter, its red operational light glowing solid green.
"What is that?" Sterling hissed, his eyes narrowing.
"That's the secondary auxiliary channel for the entire surface complex, Arthur," I said softly.
I reached out and clicked the toggle switch on the side of the unit.
From the hillside outside, booming through four massive sixty-watt emergency broadcast horns mounted on the high steel girders of the elevator headframe, my voice—and Arthur Sterling’s—erupted across the entire valley in crystal-clear, deafening fidelity:
May you like
"...if you keep your mouth shut, there’s an assistant superintendent's title and a sixty-thousand-dollar bonus waiting for you in Charleston on Monday..."
The mountain air outside suddenly went dead silent.
