Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

“But the ground’s frozen.” Weller was astride a big, very muscular blood bay. “You won’t be able to bury him.”

“Then I’ll burn him. Or I’ll pile rocks. That dog saved my life. He belonged to people I care about, and I am not leaving him here to rot.” Tom gave the last rope a grim tug. Even with the bandage and salve, his hand bawled. Be a while until it healed. “What about the other animals?”

Weller looked impatient. “I told you. I know a farm we can stop at on the way. Three old guys. Brothers. They’ll care for them.”

“You sure they’ll come if there are hunters on the way?”

“As sure as we can be,” Mellie said. “Tom, we can only do our best.”

“But the animals didn’t hurt anyone,” Tom said, stubbornly. “They don’t deserve to die for this.”

“And they won’t,” Weller said. “But we have to leave now. You want to save that girl? You make the bombs and we blow that mine, and then we march in there and you get Alex out of that prison house.”

He looked up at Weller. “It’s never that simple. We have to get in without getting caught. I have to position the explosives just right, and they have to go off in the right order. I’m not even sure it can be done. A building with good concrete support columns would take at least a couple hundred pounds of explosives.”

“Look, we’ve been over this too,” Weller said.

“All we’ve been over is that there’s a mine you want me to help you blow up. What I want to know is why I should. How will blowing a mine full of Chuckies help Alex? How do you even know they’re in the mine to begin with?”

From the way Weller’s whiskered jaw jutted, he could tell the old man was impatient. “Because I’ve seen ’em,” Weller grated, “and we’ve tracked groups. Way before all this happened, kids were always hanging around there. Had their parties, explored the tunnels. It was a meeting place. I know my grandkids, especially Mandy, she . . .” Weller looked away, his mouth working, then hawked and spat. “Anyway, that’s where a lot of Changed—”

“Changed?”

Weller moved one shoulder in a half-shrug. “It’s the name Rule’s given the little bastards. I prefer Chuckies, tell the truth. Changed makes it sound too much like a Hand of God thing.”

“How many are there at any given time? Do they live there?”

Weller’s face folded in a thoughtful frown. “No, it’s like they rotate in and out in these packs and gangs, just like kids in a high school cafeteria. I’d say, maybe, two hundred, two fifty? Sometimes more or less, depending.”

“That’s a lot of kids.” Yet what Weller said echoed what Jed had mentioned on more than one occasion: Chuckies orbited the familiar.What better place to hang than where there’d been great parties and good times? “And they don’t get cold?”

“It’s like I said, Tom. Once you’re deep enough, mines stay pretty warm, and they get hotter the further down you go. Hell, there were days I wasn’t wearing but skivvies, boots, a hard hat, goggles, and gloves. There’s a lot of space to spread out in that mine, too: cut rock rooms for machine shops and storage areas. Places to rest, stretch out a while, even have lunch. There’s this one big stope—”

“Stope?” Anything Tom knew about mines came from movies. “You mean a mine shaft?”

Weller shook his head. “You ever seen one of those ant farms they got in schools? All those hollowed-out chambers? That’s a mine right there, in miniature: nothing more than a big anthill with tunnels that lead to rooms, only the rooms are called stopes and they’re carved out of rock instead of sand. Some are real small, only big enough for a man. Others are huge. In this particular mine, there’s one room about five hundred and fifty feet down that’s nothing more than a big, hollow ball of rotten rock with only these spindly pillar supports holding up the ceiling. There are stress fractures so wide in some of the walls you could drive a truck.”

“Five hundred and fifty feet?” That was just about the height of the Washington Monument. “How deep does this mine go?”

“Just a little over two thousand feet, not that the little bastards can get that far down. Mine’s been flooded below a thousand feet for years. I wouldn’t be surprised if the water’s crept up even higher. In mines as old as this, you can have water on the level above or in the next chamber over and not know it, so long as the rock holds. People who go exploring in abandoned mines around these parts drown all the time.”

“So what, exactly, are you thinking about blowing up? The entrance? That room?”

“Not exactly. We want to take out the room underneath. It’s not as big, but it’s just as unstable. There’s only sixty feet of rock between the two of them.”

Meaning anyone planting bombs would have to drop down even deeper. “Sixty feet’s still a lot of rock,” Tom observed.

Weller snorted. “In a mine like this, sixty feet is nothing, and like I said, the rock is rotten, like bad ice, all cracked and broken-up with stress fractures.” Weller cupped air with his left hand. “So you got this great big room, and sitting right beneath it”—he slotted his right hand beneath the left—“you got this other smaller chamber. Both of them are under a tremendous amount of stress. So you make the bombs, you blow out the pillars in the room beneath this larger room—”

“And you knock out the legs.” He now understood where this was going: blow out the supports and everything would come crashing down.

“Exactly. You do it right,” Weller said, “we bury those sons of bitches.”

“It’s a nice theory,” Tom said, “but there are a lot of variables, and you still need a high explosive, time fuses, igniters, blasting caps—not to mention a way in and out of the mine.”

Mellie stirred. “We’ve got that covered, Tom.”

“Really?” He squinted from her to Weller. “If you guys are so covered, why haven’t you blown the mine already?”

“Don’t think we haven’t considered it.” Leaning forward, Weller straight-armed his saddle’s pommel, the aw-shucks cowpoke coming on strong. “But it’s like this. You can give a little kid a broken-down pistol and bullets. If he’s smart and given enough time, he might eventually put it together so it works. But the chances are also excellent that little tyke’s gonna peek down the barrel and pull the damn trigger just to see what happens. Understand what I’m saying? We got components; we have all the fixings. But none of us is an expert. Takes a long time to learn how to build a bomb without blowing your head off. That’s time we don’t have.”