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A shout and a shot pursued me. I sped up, dropping the shovel in my haste.
Like a Father Christmas wearing a coat of blood and brains, I bounded down the hill by threes, with the weapons collected in the tarp bouncing on my shoulder.
A shot passed close enough for me to feel the air pressure change as it passed through my fur. It is a unique experience, the brief touch of a bullet’s path. I wrapped my legs around my burden and started to roll down the hill.
I fetched up against the mine office. The troopers were popping up and down like a line of prairie dogs, getting off shots. I retrieved one of the carbines from the roll, checked to see that it was loaded, adjusted the sights, and returned fire. Ineffectually, I might add, but I was shooting uphill with a rifle I’d never used before.
Had the troopers been a little more aggressive, they might have taken the office by a quick assault, if they’d been able to get by me. But things were still at a standoff and no one was eager to overstep their orders.
They were still plinking away, and I hugged the hill so they could no longer see me from their position. I picked up the machine gun—it had a convenient handle on the barrel and a pistol grip—and rose up to give them a real taste of fire, but they’d either gone to ground or backed off. Perhaps the bodies of their fellow troopers had given them something to think about. Were they up there, wondering what would have happened had their lieutenant selected them to man the gun?
Time and Chance happeneth to them all.
• • •
The mine buildings now had a “grazing line” of dirt and debris showing where the machine guns of the firemen could cover. We scuttled from room to room like crabs, keeping heads below the bullet holes. Where there were no buildings or parked heavy equipment, we’d dug trenches so we could crawl from point to point in safety.
It seemed as though there were fewer vehicles surrounding Number Four after that first week. Rumors flew, that other mines had joined in our “strike” (if all-out battle could still be called a strike) or that the regime was trying to hide the fact that fighting was even going on by only keeping small contingents around to starve us into surrender.
I suspect it was just the Kurian Order being economical. They knew we would wear down eventually (they didn’t know the callused toughness of miners) and surrender.
They tried dropping mortar shells on us, but it was too easy to escape back underground.
Unbelievably, we were smuggled fresh food, firearms, ammunition (but not enough). The runs were carried out by boys who snuck up the mountainside. They usually came at dawn or twilight, wiggling through the underbrush.
Explosives—those we had plenty of. We rigged bombs and flung them into the parked armored cars and fire trucks of the firemen and troopers through a simple counterweighted arm that turned a collection of hammered-together bracing wood and plastic conduit into a trebuchet fired up and out of a ventilator that had the fans removed. Once we fired it a few times, we were amazingly accurate with it.
Rage, dirty fighter that he was, had the idea of rigging one of the bombs to look like the detonator had fallen off. A pair of firemen went to retrieve it, perhaps to launch it back at us. The real detonator was activated by radio signal. It turned one of the firemen into scraps of dog meat and struck the other hard enough that he had to be taken away in an ambulance.
We started off with about seventy men and women. By the first week we were cut in half. Some of those were casualties; these weren’t trained soldiers and we lost many to surprisingly accurate sniper fire. There must have been at least one among the troopers or firemen who was an expert shot. The rest simply slipped away from their posts and either surrendered or tried to get away into the wilderness.
We were all on edge. At least we could sleep by going deep into the mine where the lights and noise couldn’t penetrate, though there were persistent threats from the Conglomerate that they’d helicopter in something called a fuel-air bomb powerful enough to blow the mine up entirely.
BLEECHER’S TRY AT A RESOLUTION
We ended up with two prisoners. A trooper patrol on the slope west of the mine stumbled across a fireman machine gun position, which panicked and opened fire on their allies. The two trooper survivors ran blindly right into a couple of our miners who were creeping forward to throw explosives at the machine gun and were taken underground.
Rage suggested using them as decoys against snipers during relief of the men guarding the motor pool and ruins of the mine office.
Bleecher saw it as an opportunity to try to negotiate a settlement.
“I hope that means you’re volunteering to sit down at a table across from a damn Hood,” Pelloponensis said.
“Just because I was foreman doesn’t mean I don’t side just as strong as you about the demands,” Bleecher said.
After a little more bickering at an informal council of war (I missed the bickering because I was at the mine entrance with the machine gun), Bleecher walked out, waving a white flag and escorting the prisoners.
“A cease-fire is in effect,” a loudspeaker atop one of the fire trucks boomed. “A cease-fire is in effect.”
We watched Bleecher stand with a couple of firemen, tiredly talking and pointing. He turned over the prisoners and the discussion continued. Bleecher seemed to be begging at one point. Finally, two firemen grabbed him and a third emptied a ten-gallon jerry can of what was obviously gasoline on him.
Then the group of firemen released him and began poking at him with those little butane torches used for lighting fires in kindling and fireplaces and so on, the ones that produce a flame at the end of a six-inch tube. Bleecher frantically backpedaled toward the mine entrance until one of them tired of the game and set him alight at the waist. To our horror, he was soon engulfed in flame.
“A cease-fire is in effect,” the fire truck boomed.
I fired a burst with my machine gun into the man who’d set Bleecher alight. The others raced for their trenches.
Bleecher staggered toward us, a living pillar of fire. I fired a second burst into the kindly supervisor who’d bought me countless root beers at the end of an overtime shift, and he fell. So much for all his attention to duty as foreman.
