Zero Game - Brad Meltzer [86]
“How we doing on air?” I ask as she looks down at her oxygen detector.
“Twenty-one percent is normal—we’re at 20.4,” she says, flipping to the instructions on the back. Her voice wobbles, but she’s doing her best to mask her fear. I check to see if her hands are shaking. She turns slightly so I can’t see them. “Says here you need sixteen percent to breathe normally . . . nine percent before you go unconscious . . . and at six percent, you wave bye-bye.”
“But we’re at 20.4?” I say, trying to reassure her.
“We were 20.9 up top,” she shoots back.
The cage bucks to a final halt. “Stop cage?” the woman asks through the intercom.
“Stop cage,” I say, pressing the red button and wiping the slime against my tool belt.
As I take my first peek through the metal safety gate, I look up at the ceiling, and my mine light bounces off a bright orange stenciled sign dangling from two wires: 4850 Level.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Viv mumbles. “We’re only halfway there?”
I press the intercom button and lean toward the speaker. “Hello . . . ?”
“What’s wrong?” the hoist operator barks back.
“We wanted to go to the eight thousa—”
“Cross the drift and you’ll see the Number Six Winze. The cage is waiting for you there.”
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“It’s fine if you wanna stop at 4850, but if you plan on going deeper, you gotta take the other.”
“I don’t remember this last time,” I say, bluffing to see if it’s changed.
“Son, unless you were here in the 1900s, there ain’t nothin’ that’s different. They got cables now that’ll hold a cage at ten thousand feet, but back then, the furthest they could go was five thousand at a time. Now, step outside, cross the drift, and tell me when you’re in.”
I tug on the safety gate, and it rolls up and out of the way. A downpour of water from the shaft forms a wet wall that partially blocks us from seeing out. Darting straight through the waterfall and feeling the freezing water pummel my back, I dash out into the mine, where the floor, walls, and ceiling are all made of tightly packed brown dirt. No different from a cave, I tell myself, stepping ankle-deep in a puddle of mud. On both sides of the tunnel as it stretches out in front of us are another twenty feet of side-by-side benches. They’re no different from the ones up top, except for the elongated American flag that someone’s spray-painted along the entire backrest. It’s the only patch of color in this otherwise muddy-brown underworld, and as we walk past the long stretches of bench, if I close my eyes, I swear I can see the ghostly afterimages of hundreds of miners—heads hung low, elbows resting on their knees—as they wait in the dark, beaten from another day spent huddled underground.
It’s the same look my dad had on the fifteenth of every month—when he’d count up how many haircuts he’d need to make the mortgage. Mom used to scold him for refusing tips, but back then, he thought it was bad taste in a small town. When I was twelve, he gave up the shop and moved the business into the basement of our house. But he still had that look. I used to think it was regret for spending his whole day down there. It wasn’t. It was dread—the pain you feel from the thought that you have to do it again tomorrow. Entire lives spent underground. To cover it up, Dad put up posters of Ralph Kiner, Roberto Clemente, and the emerald green outfield at Forbes Field; down here, they use the red, white, and blue of the flag—and the bright yellow door of the cage that sits fifty feet dead ahead.
Crossing the drift, we plow through the mud, heading straight for the door marked Winze No. 6.
As I enter the new cage and pull the safety gate down, Viv scans the even tinier metal shoebox. The lower ceiling makes the coffin feel even smaller. As Viv cranes her neck downward, I can practically smell