Walk With Me In Hell

Chapter Twelve

Burt loaded his last five bullets into the cylinder and then closed it with a sense of finality. “Well, that’s all for me.”

Helen sighed and held her rifle in her hands. “I have eight rounds left. Teshenah’s gun is empty.”

“So that’s it?”

Burt took the other stick of dynamite out of his back pocket and held it up. “And this. Do you want to handle this one, Teshenah?”

Teshenah was on his feet and leaning on Louisa for support. As far as Helen was concerned, it was a miracle that he was standing at all. They had bandaged him up as best they could, and tightly buttoned up his blue jacket to try and keep the bandages in place, but he desperately needed a physician to clean the wounds and stitch him up properly.

“No,” he said in a tired voice. “No, I could not throw it.”

“You better give me those matches, then.”

Louisa took them from Teshenah’s jacket pocket and gave them to Burt. She carried the lantern with her injured arm and still wielded her machete. Teshenah had his tomahawk, but Helen doubted he would be much use with it. And she and Burt had a combined thirteen shots between the two of them.

“All right, then,” Helen said. “Are we ready?”

She and Burt went first down the next winding tunnel. Again, she marveled at how deep this mine went. Although technically, they were no longer in the mine, they were now in a subterranean cavern. But how deep did the cavern go? For all they knew, they were miles beneath the surface. They might be directly under Haventown by now.

After awhile, they reached the end of the cave tunnel. The lantern illuminated a massive chamber with a high ceiling lined with stalactites, that extended out before them and then curved to the left. The rock walls were a sickly gray-green color and the cave smelled of mold and decay. The amorphous rock formations cast multiple shadows, seemingly in directions were the light wasn’t even shining. Helen thought she detected some kind of faintly-noticeable vibration in the rock floor, but she didn’t want to check to make sure. Cautiously they all moved through the cave and followed it around the curve, tensely waiting for some new horror to show up and block their path.

“Look,” Burt said pointing with his gun.

From around the side of some huge rocks, Helen saw bodies sprawled all over the floor. Ten or fifteen of them, as if they had been dumped there intentionally, their limbs all twisted and tangled. Again, the stink of death reached Helen’s nostrils, but she was so accustomed to it by now that she barely noticed. She kept her rifle pressed against her shoulder and crept forward with the others right behind her. At any moment, she expected these corpses to get up like the other ones, but the closer she got, she could tell that these bodies were truly dead.

“How can there be so many?” she asked out loud. They had already encountered more than a dozen dead miners in the other chamber, and there were more than that number here. Could this mine possibly have more than thirty dead miners and townsfolk? How could so many people have gone missing without the news spreading all over the country? There should have been a crowd of people in Haventown demanding to know the truth. And this was just one single mine. Helen now believed that this same thing must be happening all over. How many people had lost their lives in these terrible mines? Hundreds or even thousands?

Behind her, Burt reached down and picked something off the ground. It was a small sliver of purple crystal about the size of his thumb.

“So this is what all the fuss is about,” he muttered. “All these poor folks died for this.”

He made a sour face and tossed the bit of dark stone away.

Helen stepped carefully among the twisted corpses. It was clear that not all of these people had died at the same time. Some of their bodies were far more decayed than others. One or two looked like they had only been killed in the last few days. Like before, there were men and women, a few of them elderly, but thankfully no children. Helen didn’t think they were all miners, either. Some of them looked like regular people from town.

She paused when she crossed over one of the bodies. A young man, badly decomposed, one arm missing at the elbow and his lower body buried under two other corpses. Something seemed familiar to Helen. The color of his hair or the shape of his jaw. She slowly knelt down and touched the collar of the man’s filthy gray shirt. Pulling it aside, she saw a thin metal chain embedded in the decayed flesh around his neck.

A shining pendant hung from the chain, with an engraved letter M, exactly the same as the one that Helen wore.

She looked at it for a long time. Burt, Louisa, and Teshenah stood silently behind her, giving her space. Tears dripped down her cheeks, but she didn’t cry out loud, she was far too numb and exhausted for that. From the moment that she had entered the mine, she had always known that Henry was almost certainly dead, but she could not return to her family without knowing for sure. In a way, she had already mourned him.

She closed her eyes and shut away the vision of his decomposed body. Instead, she remembered him as he was: young, energetic, and playful. Her little baby brother, gone from this world too soon.

And underneath all that, she hated the world that had conspired against him and led him to this ignominious death. She hated the mining companies, the ruthless businessmen who profited from the misery and torment of others, and she hated the damned dark stone that had filled the minds of so many people with greed, including her brother. He had been ambitious and foolish, and maybe a little greedy himself, and now he was gone and all Helen had left were her memories.

She wrapped the chain tightly around her hand. She wanted to avenge herself on the people that had allowed this to happen, but she knew that such vengeance would be denied her. The wealthy companies would never face punishment for any of this. They would shuffle around their managers and their executives, and the blame would disappear into a fog of corporate red tape, and no one would face any real consequences for any of these pointless, tragic deaths.

But she could get her vengeance another way. Helen might not be able to punish the politicians and businessmen responsible for the death of her brother and so many others, but she could certainly take out her anger on the monsters that had killed him.

<--Previous Chapter|Next Chapter-->