An overcast sky held back the light of dawn. Kat woke up three minutes before her watch alarm was set to go off and spent that time thinking about the day ahead of her. Her thoughts had turned to Sadler when the surprisingly loud beep from her wrist shattered the quiet and focused her wandering mind.
She washed her hands and face before running wet fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame her wild locks. Smoothing it back, she fashioned a ponytail and secured it with the band Shannon had gifted her. She grabbed her satchel and threw her newly purchased glass bottle inside. She would fill the bottle with clean water at work at the end of the day and be able to avoid the fire crew entirely. As she walked past a snoring Rat, she smiled at him and whispered a goodbye.
Her morning at the mine was unremarkable if a little disappointing. While she waited in the miner’s courtyard with her crew, Sadler had only stopped by for a few seconds to greet everyone before moving on to other workers. His smile had seemed a little more electric when he informed Kat that she was back to working only Spur Twenty-nine but she may have imagined it.
Once in the spur, Kat stayed focused on her crew and equipment. Cleaning only a single line seemed almost like a vacation after her previous week. The conveyor belt sections in Twenty-nine had never run so smoothly. Every time George stopped the whirling discs of his grinder, Kat quickly stepped to its front and flushed the debris from its exposed mechanism with compressed air. She then thoroughly drenched the critical spots with suppressant while George and Shannon looked over the ailing machine. During her first week, George had needed to wait for her to finish her cleaning job before climbing into the caged cockpit. Today, Kat was back under the conveyor sections before the operator and his assistant finished their inspections. Even Lambert was noticeably quiet. He had taken several minutes to watch Kat perform in the morning and then uncharacteristically left the spur in silence rather than volley insults.
At lunchtime, Sadler spent several minutes at Kat’s table. He had deliberately chosen the sit close to her when large sections of the bench were empty. As he talked with George about the state of the grinder, his leg and then his hand occasionally made contact with Kat’s thigh. Despite the innocent flirtation, each touch sent jolts through her body. In a bold moment, she lowered her hand below the table and squeezed his thigh before quickly folding her hands again on the table’s surface. She grinned at both her assertiveness and the ridiculousness of the situation. I’m a grown woman and here I am acting like a teenager in a school lunchroom. Yet, with every brush of his leg or hand, she couldn’t help but beam.
Her smile twisted wickedly as she quickly devoured the rest of her meal. Once finished, she casually lowered her hands to her lap and then let her right hand creep to his thigh. Sadler shot her a distracted look as he discussed production goals for the week. Rather than remove her hand, Kat gave him a mischievous sideways glance and let her hand slowly ride farther up his leg.
Sadler launched himself off the bench, banging his knees on the edge of the table. He plunged his hands into the pant pockets of his coveralls while hastily explaining to the crew that he had forgotten about an urgent meeting with another operator. He quickly turned his back and retreated deeper into the miner’s courtyard. Kat ran her finger over the rim of her water cup and resisted the urge to laugh. When she had the nerve to look up, she saw Shannon smirking at her shrewdly. The men at the table seemed oblivious to what she had done. The call to work came shortly and Kat returned to the mine with her friends. Shannon walked close to her and whispered, “I’m very happy for you two.”
Ten minutes later, the noise, dust and vibrations in the spur pushed all thoughts of Sadler aside. Kat cleaned her way, section by section, back toward the grinder and her crew. The spur grew longer each shift as the coal wall was demolished by day and night. George had stated that there couldn’t be much length left in the seam and predicted they would reach its end by midweek.
Kat released her trigger to stop the spray of suppressant when a blur in the corner of her eye caught her attention. She stared from under her conveyor at the side wall of the narrow spur. A second rat scurried past her, heading toward the grinder. A third rushed by. Curiosity piqued, Kat slowly twisted her body and carefully crawled from the section as she watched the rats flee into the gloom. Ahead, the spur made a gentle bend to the right, carved that way to avoid a small quartz deposit encountered long before Kat had been hired. The rats turned the bend and disappeared from view. Kat crawled farther out and twisted again to sit. She patted at her pant legs to remove the top layer of dust and pebbles that had clung to her in the tight confines under the conveyor. Experience taught her that the pebbles had a tendency to slip in between her coveralls and kneepads if she didn’t brush them off before standing.
She looked up the spur to the opposite end. The main tunnel was a faint ember of light. Her eyes darted to a jogging miner exiting her spur and turning at the junction. Kat finally stood. Did our crew get called out of the spur? she wondered. The chest-thumping vibrations of the grinder farther down the narrow passage dismissed that notion. She walked toward the main tunnel with an eye on her conveyors. She had just cleaned all of these and had been working her way back toward the grinder. The coal on the belts flew by in a dusty, black blur. Thirty meters from the main junction her eyes caught a red flash on the ground. She stopped and stared in confusion at the dark, bare ground under the conveyor system. A flicker of crimson illuminated the ground again and she bent low and searched for its source. The color seemed too soft to be a spark from a grinding gear or failing bearing.
Kat’s stomach dropped when she saw two tightly wrapped sticks stuck to the frame of the conveyor section. She had seen similar sticks being prepared to drop the ceilings of two expired spurs last week. As a safety precaution, all of the miners had surfaced before the “blast monkeys” had drilled narrow holes into the spur roofs to hold a single stick. Each stick’s detonation had caused tremors all the way to the miner’s courtyard.
Kat gaped at her discovery. A metal prong extended from one of the sticks and ended in a device displaying a countdown. It read “00:32.”
She jumped up, banging her hardhat on the conveyor. Her first step was toward the main tunnel but she quickly spun in place. George’s grinder was still furiously eating away the coal wall at the end of the spur. Kat tucked her head and sprinted toward her crew.
She raced down the narrow path, nearly losing her footing in the loose bits of coal shards. She took the bend at a dangerous pace and bounced her hip off the side of a conveyor frame. The grinder’s terrible cacophony drowned out her shouted warnings as she ran toward her friends.
When she flew past Deke and Reece, both laborers stopped their shoveling to stare. Kat skidded to a stop near George’s cockpit and clawed at the grating around the emergency cut-off switch on the side of the grinder. Once the grate opened, she flipped up the switch’s cover and pounded the control.
Power to the grinder’s discs immediately disconnected. The machine roared as the engine’s RPMs spiked and a cloud of black exhaust vented from its ducts. Shannon was stomping toward Kat even as she could hear the protests from Deke and Reece.
“Get in front of the grinder!” Kat commanded forcefully. She waved urgently as she ran to the front of the machine.
Her crew simply gawked at her, baffled.
“The spur is going to explode! Duck in front of the grinder!” she shouted again. She stood near the grinder’s front corner, its discs spinning to a stop.
Reece broke into a dead run toward her. Deke followed a moment later.
“George,” Shannon shouted frantically, “skip the cut-off sequence! Get down here!” The woman ran to the cockpit and banged on the cab to get the operator’s attention. “George, get down here now!” she screamed while holding a hand up to him.
Reece dashed around Kat and dropped to his knees in front of the machine. Deke stumbled in the loose coal but Kat caught his arm and pulled madly. She took three steps back, still dragging Deke, before the world turned on its side.
Kat’s body viciously slapped the coal wall before she ricocheted back toward the discs of the grinder. She bounced off the 35-ton machine as rocks pelted her and her vision dimmed in a black cloud. She vaguely realized she had let go of Deke’s hand or, perhaps, it had been ripped from her own. While she tumbled to the ground, an ear-piercing explosion thundered down the spur. The tumultuous roar grew louder and louder until a sudden blackness took hold over her senses. Larger and larger rocks dropped onto her body, covering her with a sable death shroud.