Blackdamp
by Aeon Michaels
It's cold.
My right hand is lying in a pool of wet. It's too dark to tell for sure what
it is. I'm praying that it's water, because it's a big pool.
I don't know where my left hand is.
I'm too cold to care, really. There's pain and fear and a billion other
things rolling through me, but most of them are buried beneath the cold.
Buried like I was, when the lights went out and the ceiling came down.
It's quiet.
I can hear myself breathe, I think, so I must be alive, I think. And if I
move my right arm I can hear something wet. But that hurts, so I don't do
that much. Mostly I just lie here and force myself to breathe, face down,
cheek in a puddle, breathing the good air at the bottom of the tunnel like
they taught me.
It hurts to breathe. The dust-choked blackdamp scrapes at my throat and
stings my eyes so that even if there were light I probably couldn't see
through the veil of tears. If I had the energy I'd try to cough, but that
might bring the ceiling down even more, or rip my lungs apart.
It's cold.
The cold starts at your feet, creeps upwards, slowly, too slow to notice,
like a slow massage, then suddenly it's at your knees and half your legs are
just a memory. Already it's halfway up my thighs.
I dimly realize that I'll never walk again.
I consider crying, but then I realize that I'll probably never see the
surface alive again anyway. Tears are pointless. Everything is. Everything
but one thing. One fact.
I'm not hungry.
This seems to be an important fact, hammering home at my temples even
through the haze around my skull. I am not hungry. This means that I haven't
been down here for long, since I hadn't had lunch yet when everything went
to hell. That means they might still find me.
My chances are better than the others, at least. I had just left the lift
when I heard the first crash. I was nearer the surface than most others,
too. If anyone would be found, it would be me. Unless what happened was
worse than I thought. Which was probably the case.
It's cold.
It's getting colder, too. Or is it? Maybe it's just me. The lower half of my
body has vanished, absorbed into the damp blackness around me, and my guts
have turned to ice. I'm not shivering. This, I know, is bad. I think it
means hypothermia or shock. More likely the latter, seeing as this is July,
but still possibly the former, since it's fairly cool below the ground. I'm
a bit embarassed that I don't know for sure.
Strange that one can be embarassed even while dying, alone.
As I wonder, idly, if my face is flushed, I realize that the coldness has
taken my arms from me, and is grasping me around the neck. I gag,
involuntarily, uselessly, and struggle to force air in. I will not die this
way. I will not.
It is then that I hear them.
Strangely, they aren't speaking, but I can tell they are men, because of the
sound, the shuffling of boots upon loose rock, pushing broken beams and
fallen stone aside. I try to cry out, but my voice is gone, throat dry, icy
fingers upon my chin, making my scraggly week-old beard itch.
The footsteps approach, near, and pass me. There are three men. None of them
has seen me.
Panic sets in. Desperation. I shake wildly from side to side, or try to, but
find my body unwilling to move. Only my head is mine. Thrashing wildly,
trying to make a noise, any noise, I manage to thrust my chin out from under
me and to the opposite side. To no avail.
They walk away.
My cheeks grow numb, my mouth drying up, strange icy tendrils snaking their
way up the back of my neck, an aching cold making it hard to think. The ice
takes hold of my eyes, and everything goes even blacker than it was.
And then I see death.
Not Death, but death, the lowercase one. I never believed in Death, and to
be honest I hadn't really ever believed in death, but here it is. The ice
enshrouds my head, my mind, my eyes, and like a pond freezing in winter, a
thin layer of rime grabs the edges of my vision, creeping inwards like a
spiderweb, until the coldness has taken everything from me.
And then it gets weird.
I blink, and the cold darkness falls away from my eyes like scales, like a
chrysalis, and the blackness is gone, all of it, replaced by a merciless
grey light. At first everything is one sheet of grey, but gradually I can
begin to see contours, edges, and then shapes. One dimension splits into
two, then splits again into four.
For a moment, lying there, I can see myself, standing over myself, looking
down at myself, lying there looking up at myself. I can see where I am,
where I was, where I will be, all in perfect greyscale clarity. And then
suddenly I find myself standing, looking down, and there's nothing there but
a puddle of murk.
I don't remember standing, but I don't mind. The fact that I can stand
overjoys me. Legs, arms...all the bits seem to be in working order. All of
them. I gasp as I realize that I might just live through this.
I don't gasp.
I can't breathe.
No.
I don't need to breathe.
I haven't lived through it after all.
Strangely, this does not bother me as much as it should. At the moment, life
itself does not seem to matter. It is enough that I exist.
This thought alone drives me forward, back to the lift, which is strangely
enough right where it was when I left it, an eternity ago. Stepping into the
basket, I pull the handle and let the machinery do its work. Miraculously,
it functions as expected. Then good fortune leaves me.
I emerge into hell.
The buildings around the site have been levelled, cleanly. For a brief
moment I wonder if it was a German bomb, or death ray, or something, but
this fancy quickly evaporates. Why would the Germans blast a small mining
town in Virginia, two months after they surrendered? The Japanese, maybe,
but that, too, seems unlikely. They're all but defeated.
No, whatever this is, it is worse than anything the Axis could come up with.
Much worse.
The sky has gone all reddish-green, flickering betwixt both, refusing to
settle on brown. Cloudless, sunless, lifeless. Behind me, the mountainside
has collapsed in upon itself, a crackling rainbow of greys dancing from the
top of the water tower. No, no longer a water tower. Wooden slats and iron
bands lie in a heap beneath a strange conglomeration of pipes and wires,
snapping, sizzling arcs of electricity playing off of every surface.
Nothing moves. Nothing but the steady dance of electrical current, swaying
tantalizingly from what used to be a mountainside, now just a heap of
shattered rock and blasted trees. It will take some effort to get there.
I have nothing else to do.
