Wednesday evening saw a veritable deluge from the skies. Kat spent most of the night shivering under a makeshift roof of trash in her alley. Thursday at the mine passed mercifully without incident despite her exhaustion. Kat again pulled double-duty as dryman for both Spur Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine and the intense schedule made the work hours rocket by. Unlike the day before, she was able to sneak away for a five-minute lunch where she wolfed down her food with unrestrained gusto.
The hectic workday also helped Kat ignore the stares from miners on other crews. Between the infamy of her confrontation with Lambert and her heroics with the flatbed, Reece confided to her on the mag-rail ride home Thursday night that a mystique was building around her reputation. Exactly what that reputation was, harlot or hero, Kat was unsure. She was simply grateful the extended duties forced her to focus solely on her job. One thing was clear though. She had certainly made no friends beyond her immediate crew. The other miners avoided her, whether out of deference or disgust.
Even Sadler had disappeared. She had looked for him early in the morning at the courtyard but he had never appeared from the trailers most frequented by the foremen. Thursday had been far too packed to glance coyly for him among the tables and inside the mine. Her entire shift had revolved around the thirty-one sections of conveyor belts that had become her responsibility. The laborers on Spur Twenty-eight’s crew had largely kept their gear in order but Kat was unsure if they were trying to help her or simply didn’t want her around. Of course, Shannon, Deke and Reece helped as much as possible to keep their own spur organized.
By the end of Thursday’s shift, Kat was light-headed from dehydration despite drinking from every water tank she saw. The evening’s ritual head-dunk into her trailer’s washing trough elicited one of the most reinvigorating feelings of her life.
Away from the mines, life in Shantytown had condensed into fast shopping trips for food and the commutes to and from Eastpoint. Worn out each night from the extra duty, Kat had not found time to clear a new sleeping space farther from the alley’s mouth. Yet, even with the specter of danger looming in the main street and despite her unexplainable, unnerving actions in the flatbed earlier in the week, she slept like the dead.
Friday morning, Kat nearly overslept. The week’s physical exertion was making it harder and harder to rouse herself from slumber. Only Rat’s hacking cough kept her from missing the bus at Eastpoint. As she rode the mag-rail to the mountains, she added an alarm clock to her mental shopping list. It would be terribly expensive and a highly coveted item but she could no longer trust herself to wake up early naturally. Since she had first opened her eyes in that unknown alley less than two weeks ago, she had slept mostly in fits and bursts. That was changing. During the last two nights, no thought or noise could have woken her under the blanket of the dark.
Upon reaching the mine, Kat walked with the rest of the day shift to the trailers. Though surrounded by fellow workers, no one spoke to her and she felt strangely alone. She pulled her gear over her regular clothes and exited shortly afterwards to head for her crew’s table. Her thoughts were focused squarely on another hard day’s work when she realized someone was walking beside her.
“Hey,” Sadler said shyly, just centimeters from her. He slipped his hand to her elbow and gently guided her to a stop. A self-effacing expression took hold over him as he tried to keep eye contact. “Still friends?” he asked.
Kat found the awkward peace offering endearing. Thrilled with it and his sudden appearance, she desperately fought the urge to grin. “Of course,” she replied casually. Heat rose to her cheeks and she looked away before admitting, “I, uh, was looking for you yesterday morning. I wanted to say—”
Sadler brought up a hand and addressed her with sincere eyes. “No, you don’t have to say anything, Kat. I want to know all about you but not until you’re ready. Okay? I shouldn’t have pushed it. I’m sorry.”
The heartfelt apology made her want to gush. “I do trust you, Sadler,” she said quickly. “It’s just… scary.” She thought of Doctor Reynolds. Afraid for me. Afraid of me. “My past has pushed someone away before and I’m not sure how much I could explain about it anyway.”
Sadler shook his head. “You don’t owe me any explanation.” A new voice called for him from the courtyard. He looked over Kat’s shoulder and nodded. “I’ve got to go but I wanted to talk to you this morning. I missed you yesterday. Be safe, okay?”
He missed me! Kat nodded with a brilliant smile. “Will do, boss.”
Sadler released his light hold and walked toward the miner waving to him. She rolled her eyes derisively as she replayed her parting words. Will do, boss? Boss? Kat, you might have once been a pilot but you are most certainly still an idiot.
Tick waved from the crew’s table, beckoning Kat forward. She shook herself a final time and moved to start what promised to be another demanding day.
Lambert gave the morning briefing. The production goals had been increased for the week by Phillip Porter himself. The foreman droned on about financial indicators and Porter Mining Enterprises needing an impressive number to help raise its stock.
The pressure to work harder was tangible. During the first half of the shift, Kat noticed a marked increase in the rounds Lambert and his assistants made and the intense scrutiny of their visits. Twice, Kat caught Lambert inspecting her work as she raced to keep the conveyor systems of both spurs running.
She did the best she could. The grinder operators in Spurs Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine couldn’t coordinate their needs and Kat had to inspect the conveyor sections nearest each machine dozens of times each hour. To her horror, Lambert reprimanded her after inspecting a section in Spur Twenty-eight that she had been unable to clean immediately following a grinding pass. The scolding stung not only because of Lambert’s crude, callous demeanor but also because he had been right to point out her deficiency. Kat asked when Twenty-eight’s dryman position would be filled and the foreman suggested it could be as early as Monday. The news buoyed her spirits. She only had to get through the afternoon and she would be back to only working Spur Twenty-nine.
Kat skipped lunch to clean the long-neglected sections of each conveyor near the main tunnel. The equipment farther away from the grinding machines naturally accumulated coal dust at a much slower rate. She had ignored the last four sections in each spur during the final hour of the morning in an attempt to keep the deeper, dirtier sections operational.
From underneath Conveyor 5-A in Spur Twenty-nine, Kat positioned her nozzle behind a series of gears and shot bursts of compressed air with surgical precision. The black film over the metal blew away and she followed with a judicious spray of suppressant. She could tell by how little the nozzle head bucked that she was running low of the fluid. Both George and Twenty-eight’s operator had pushed their grinders hard during the morning, attempting to meet the new production quota.
Kat crawled down 5-A’s length to the opposite end and used her remaining suppressant to finish the section. Damn, she cursed to herself as she stood in the narrow spur. I’m going to have to run up to the surface and refill. More time wasted. She trotted toward the main tunnel, nearly tripping over a rat that scurried from underneath the last conveyor in the spur.
As she began to turn the corner at the main tunnel, her eyes caught a man kneeling halfway under a conveyor section in Spur Twenty-eight. She tried to identify him but failed. After the first hour’s work each day in the mine, everyone looked the same. The man pushed himself from under the section, revealing reflective strips on his coveralls that she had only seen on one person. The strips were enough for Kat. It’s Lambert. She pushed herself into a jog toward the elevator car at the end of the tunnel. I don’t need to have another five minutes wasted while he chews my ass for whatever he’s found, she thought irritably.
It took ten minutes for the maintenance worker at the equipment trailer to refill her dryman’s pack. By the time she was returning to the mine’s entrance, the other miners were finishing lunch. She rode down in silence with a group of five miners she didn’t recognize. Their chatter as they approached the elevator suggested they knew each other well but the banter had stopped when they entered the car and spied Kat’s black-smudged face under her raised miner’s mask. When the safety cage opened at the bottom of the mine, Kat wordlessly left the group behind at a jog, anxious to finish cleaning her spurs before the grinders started back up.
She finished Spur Twenty-nine before the familiar rumbles and vibrations of working grinders filled the mine. Knowing the conveyor sections closest to the grinders were clean, she walked the short distance to the end section in Spur Twenty-eight to crawl under the rattling, clamoring machinery. I can clean one, maybe two sections here before rushing forward to work near the grinders, she told herself.
The intensity of the tremors in the spur increased as large, metallic teeth chewed the front coal wall farther down the tunnel. The bouncing conveyor stirred the coal riding on top, creating a constant cloud of black tendrils that drifted down from the belt like a mournful mist.
Kat contorted her body to reach behind a return idler when the loud whining of the conveyor system escalated into a piercing screech. She looked up at the belt zooming only centimeters overhead in near panic as the screeching transformed into a harrowing wail. Kat kicked her legs out to push her body from under the section. The entire frame shuddered violently and the master plane of the section became skewed.
Kat continued to slide backwards on her bottom, digging her boots into the mine floor. She looked to her left, deeper into the spur. The next conveyor section was spewing a thick, white cloud of smoke. Sparks flew from under the belting and the section’s transition idler glowed an alarming red.
In between heartbeats, the section’s frame torqued thirty degrees and crumpled. The belt fractured and shot toward Kat as coal was thrown down the length of the spur. Kat felt several impacts on her body from large chunks of coal and an uncountable number of stings from smaller pieces. In the chaos, she saw the torn frame flip nearly on its end and slash the roof of the spur. It gouged deep grooves as it twitched in death throes.
The sparks died with the machinery but a never-ending line of coal spat from the last working conveyor section to build a growing pile on the spur’s floor. Through her cracked visor, Kat could see a pall of white smoke roiling on the ceiling. It stank of burnt rubber and scorched metal. Her hand reached for the emergency whistle attached to her overalls. She brought the orange plastic to her lips and emptied her lungs.