Chapter 5 - The Mountain Clears Its Throat
6:09 AM.
The valley had transformed into an organized, furious beehive of survival.
Because the men had heard the betrayal with their own ears, there was no bureaucratic hesitation. There were no committee meetings, no union votes, no calls to corporate headquarters in Wilmington.
Under Toby’s roaring direction, thirty men were moving down the rail spur with four heavy diesel switch-engines, coupling every piece of rolling stock, every supply car, and every personnel mantrip they could hook, hauling them across the narrow timber bridge that crossed Black Ridge Creek toward the western ridge.
Old Hank Miller was in the hoist house with a four-foot cold chisel, having personally driven the steel through the primary brass planetary gears of the main drum motor, welding the six-foot cable wheel into a permanent, immovable dead-stop.
Nobody was going down that shaft today. Nobody was going down that shaft ever again.
Up on the administrative porch, Arthur Sterling and Julian Cross were sitting zip-tied to the heavy cedar posts of the railing, guarded by two massive timber-men holding six-foot peaveys.
Sterling’s face was the color of curdled milk. He sat shivering in the freezing Appalachian mist, his tailored clothes ruined, his eyes darting between the towering headframe and the dense woods, listening to the forest.
The birds had stopped singing ten minutes ago.
The crows, which usually nested by the hundreds in the dead chestnuts along the upper ridge, had lifted into the gray sky in a massive, swirling black cloud, fleeing westward toward the Tug River without making a sound.
"Cole," Toby jogged up the gravel steps of the porch, panting heavily, wiping black grease from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "The last mantrip is across the trestle. The surface crews have cleared the bathhouse. Every man on the payroll is accounted for on the high ridge."
"What about the livestock?" I asked, scanning the staging yard below. "The pit ponies in the upper stable?"
"Caleb Vance cut their halters five minutes ago," Toby replied. "They're running up the timber trail toward the gap."
I checked my watch.
6:13 AM.
One minute left.
The world suddenly lost all color.
The gray dawn seemed to darken, the air turning thick and heavy as warm oil. Beneath our work boots, through eight inches of reinforced concrete and twelve feet of mountain gravel, the earth didn't shake.
It sighed.
It was a sound like a vast, subterranean lung collapsing under the weight of an ocean—a deep, rhythmic THUMP-HUUUUM that vibrated through our kneecaps, rattled our teeth in our gums, and sent concentric ripples across the puddles in the driveway.
On the porch, Arthur Sterling let out a high, dog-like whimper, his knees pulling up against his chest as he pulled against the plastic zip-ties.
"Here it comes," I whispered.
A quarter-mile away, at the mouth of the main haulage drift, the concrete portals began to dust.
It started with a puff of fine, talcum-like white shale powder blowing out of the darkness like flour from a baker's sack.
Then came the sound.
It was not an explosion. It was the sound of the planet tearing its own bones apart.
A deafening, concussive shriek of shearing crystalline granite tore through the valley, so loud it instantly blew out the eardrums of every man within a hundred yards. The mountain ridge—the ancient, three-thousand-foot spine of Black Ridge—dropped four feet in a single, vertical lurch.
BOOOOOOM!
The displacement wave from Section Six hit the surface.
A wall of compressed, supersonic air, carrying three hundred tons of pulverized slate, twisted steel rail ties, and shattered timbers, erupted from the mouth of the drift like an artillery shell fired from a siege mortar.
The two-story brick bathhouse situated sixty feet from the portal was pulverized in a microsecond, its walls exploding outward in a cloud of red dust and flying mortar. The steel headframe—four hundred tons of structural iron—buckled in the middle, its massive lattice legs twisting like wet licorice before collapsing into the crater of the shaft with a catastrophic, ground-shaking crash that sent a plume of black coal dust five hundred feet into the morning sky.
The shockwave hit the administrative trailer.
The windows blew inward in a blizzard of diamond shards. The porch roof groaned, three cedar posts snapping with the force of gunshot cracks, throwing Toby, Hank, and me onto the shaking floorboards.
I rolled over on my belly, coughing on the sudden, blinding wall of black soot that engulfed the porch, wrapping my arms over my head as chunks of shale and splintered oak rained down on the tin roof like shrapnel.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the roaring ceased.
The rain began to fall again—heavy, cold, black drops of water mixed with atmospheric coal dust, washing clean streaks through the darkness.
I slowly pushed myself up onto my elbows, wiping the soot from my eyes, and looked down into the valley.
Where the staging pad, the hoist house, and the portal of Black Ridge Number Four had stood two minutes ago...
There was nothing.
Only a massive, smoking, four-hundred-foot-wide crater of jagged black rock, tangled cables, and shattered iron girders, completely sealed under three million tons of collapsed mountain.
Not a single entry remained. Not a single air shaft survived.
If sixty-four men had stepped into that cage at 6:00 AM... they would have been pulverized before their screams could reach their lips.
Behind me on the porch, Arthur Sterling sat covered in black soot, staring down at the smoking grave of his mine with wide, unblinking eyes, his mouth hanging open in pure, unadulterated horror.
Beside him, Toby slowly stood up, holding his bruised shoulder, looking down into the pit where his body was supposed to rot.
My brother turned his head. His eyes found mine through the falling black rain.
May you like
Toby didn't speak. He couldn't speak.
He simply dropped to his knees in the mud of the porch, reached out his calloused, grease-stained hands, and pulled me into an embrace so tight that neither of us could draw a breath.
