Panic climbed inside me, and I shouted “No, for God's sake!” and started to run.
Thud!
Thud!
The cry of my voice was lost in the reverberations, in the gathering rumble of loosened rock and earth and wooden supports. Dust obliterated the opening now, spiraled back toward me in smoke-like billows that cut my visibility with the flashlight to less than fifteen feet. I could not see clearly where I was running, and my foot stubbed against one of the rails, sent me lurching into a wall, off it and hard against a loose timber; the timber gave and I went down, jarring on knees and forearms, pain slicing up into my left armpit and the flash spinning free and winking out and rocks like sharp-edged hailstones buffeting my back and buttocks and legs. The tunnel was filled with a rage of sound now, with upheaval and suffocating grayness.
I tried to get up, gagging, choking, but I could not pull my legs under me. I crawled instead and kept on crawling until I came up against a miniature avalanche of earth and limestone, until something that felt like a collapsed support struck a glancing blow across the backs of my legs. Then I flung my hands over my head in blind sick terror And the entire front of the shaft seemed to cave in around me.
Seventeen
It might have lasted seconds or minutes; I was suspended in time, lost inside myself. Falling things pummeled my body, made me jerk and squirm in agony, and I kept waiting with a kind of wild fatalism for a heavy chunk of rock or wood to shatter my spine, my neck, the back of my skull. A slide of pebbly earth threatened to bury my head; I twisted fetally so I could keep my nose and mouth free, but they were already clogged with hot dust, the taste of it like cinders and mold. My lungs felt as though they had been set aflame.
The echoing, banging roar reached a crescendo, and then ebbed so rapidly into a vacuumlike stillness that I believed at first I had gone deaf. There was pressing weight the length of my body-but I could no longer feel the bite of assaulting objects. A thought took shape in my mind: It's over. Is it over?
All around me, the upheaval seemed to have ended; I could sense a restless settling. I moved my arms away and raised my head a little and opened my eyes. Gray-black, faintly mobile; a rivulet of earth that I could not see sifted down inches from my right cheek. I wanted to raise up, get up off my belly, but the feeling of fatalism was still with me; if I moved, it would start all over again, maybe it hadn't really stopped, there was still a rock or a timber ready to come crashing down on me A wash of pain in my chest cut through that. Then my ears popped and the false deafness vanished, and I could hear myself gasping; I realized like someone coming out of heavy sedation that there was no air where I was lying, there was only a stagnant graininess all but void of oxygen. Breathing was impossible-like trying to draw solid matter into my lungs.
Panic clawed at me again, forced me to struggle under the weight along my back and hips and legs, push up and turn into a sitting position with earth and rocks sliding off me- man rising up out of his own grave. My shoulder brushed against the splintered edge of a timber, and I jerked it away reflexively, hunching, and twisted over and around until I was on hands and knees. Blood hammered in my ears, there were flashes and shimmers of yellow-white behind my eyes and a sudden slow, spinning dizziness. I was close to blacking out; if I didn't get air I would suffocate. But the entrance was blocked, I knew it was blocked. Back into the shaft then. If I could gut to where Bascomb's body was, if that part of the tunnel had not caved in too, there would not be so much dust and the air would still have oxygen.
I started to crawl, but immediately a part of my mind said: No, get on your feet, get your head close to the ceiling; air's clearer, you might even be able to breathe a little up there. Half coughing, half retching, I pulled one foot under me and then shoved up, staggered forward a step and caught myself without touching anything around me. I stood swaying, and it was not quite so bad nearer the ceiling, all right. I forced my mouth open wide, craning my head back; my lungs heaved, dragged in a series of shallow breaths. The coughing slacked off and the giddiness eased-not much, just enough so that I could make my body work with some control.
The tunnel floor was strewn with debris, but it didn't seem as bad going backward as it must have been the other way. I located one of the cart rails with my foot, because I had to keep myself at the center of the shaft; I did not dare touch either of the walls. Then I moved forward a step at a time along the rail, stop and go, hands probing in front of me in the clotted dark. My legs had a liquidy weakness at the knees, there was a thin pain in the left one every time I put weight on it. Five steps, ten-and my forehead banged into a hanging ceiling support that I had missed with my hands. I stumbled, toppled to one knee and then broke the fall skiddingly with both palms. Above me the timber made a groaning noise that built into a low rumbling. Earth fluttered down, then a piece of rock that narrowly missed my head as I scuttled forward and kept on scuttling until I butted up against a mound of rubble.