But Tess was righting herself, pulling the parchment into the pocket of her apron. “Patty will do whatever’s necessary,” she said. “But if your father lives, Donny, I doubt we’ll see him anytime soon.” He heard her turn on her heel, heading for the kitchen. “He’ll know better than to show his sorry face round these parts, unless he wants me breakin’ it.”
CHAPTER THIRTYNINA
My elbow wedged into my own sternum, the bones there grinding against one another. Dirt seeped inward, clung to the inside of my nose and stifled the air.
Earth had a tendency to behave like water belowground. It threaded into every space, found impossible pathways, drowned its venturers.
I coughed, tried to find a remaining bit of power to push the dirt back, push it out of my lungs.
Bodies on every side of me, angular and unnatural. The blade of an arm, or a shin, or a foot at my back and sides. They were just more things pushing the oxygen from me, making it impossible to snatch it back in. In the back of my mind, a thought rose, that if this is what it was to be buried alive, then it was too slow.
But there was grunting, too. Grunting and breathing and shifting. A weight lifted from beneath me and on top of me. I inhaled like my head had breached water.
“Fuck!” came a voice. John Colson’s.
Then another, Patrick’s. “The pulley,” he said. “Someone find it.”
Slowly, I became aware that the angular bones at my back were rungs. Someone shifted and grunted in exertion. The sound of screeching metal accompanied it, followed by collision.
A lighter flickered—Patrick’s, illuminating his own face, then the rest of us.
We were encased in a shaft lift, its metal cage closed, barring out clods of dirt and rock. Patrick bore down on me, held the light so close to my face I could feel its feeble warmth. “You’re all right,” he said, putting his hand against my sternum, reassuring me, or himself, perhaps, that my heart still beat. We were alive.
“Fuckin’ damn it,” John expelled, maneuvering himself hurriedly, his hands searching the walls. “Didn’t I say it, Pat? The struts were too far apart.Fuck.”
Polly was gasping noisily for air. Theo was struck, it seemed, by the same thing I had been just moments ago, the sensation that we weren’t dying by degrees, but somehow, miraculously, still alive.
Patrick stood upright. “Just breathe slow as you can,” he said. “Try not to talk. We only got so much oxygen.”
Immediately, Polly stopped breathing altogether.
The light petered out, and a moment later, I heard the slap of metal against metal, the chink of chains, the expelled exertion of John and Patrick as they heaved at something. They worked mechanically, as though operating on some sort of default, lifting us upward.Any moment, I thought.Any moment, the chains will break. They’ll lose their grip.
But we jolted upward in increments, the smell of sweat permeating the air. In the dark, I felt we could have been moving sideways, or farther down, delivering ourselves to the heart of the earth.
They worked, alternating. Pull, pull, pull, for an impossible amount of time, until long after I measured a human capable. The air grew thin. I couldn’t seem to fish enough oxygen out of it.
An almighty heave, a final shout of exertion from Patrick, from some supernatural reservoir of strength, and the lift collided—or bottomed out, it was difficult to distinguish. I felt, with a narrowing awareness, that I was only halfway there.
“All o’ you,” John panted. “Get up,” he said. “All hands.”
There were the sounds of our scrambling, the feel of a hand around my wrist, pulling it toward something, flattening my fingers against a cool metalridge. “Dig your fingers in,” Patrick said. “Pull it apart.” And even his voice had begun to err toward a void, reduced to gasps.
“Give it all you got,” said John.
Shoulders clashed against mine, all five of us jammed together, and we worked to pry apart the doors. A memory surfaced: Patrick and I in a collapsing mine.The gate jams in a collapse, he’d said.
We’re stuck, I thought.We’ll all die here in a shared tomb.
I felt rendered useless, my body no match for the weight of the door.
But then, a whisper of something on my throat. Air, trickles of it. Then light.
Another jolt, another growl of exertion, and the doors shuddered back an inch. My hands fed all the way through and gripped the sides.
We were washed in oxygen and light, made delirious by it. I threw every ounce of weight against the door and heard the others do the same.
Like the jaws of a beast relinquishing, the doors shuddered apart, and one at a time we spilled out onto our fronts, breaths rattling, wailing through our chests.
