Which means this has to be done right. They’re going to be using dynamite to thread a needle. Davey can no longer be good. He has to be great.

Has to get this right or they’re all, as he is wont to say, “fuckered”.

And it doesn’t help that they work down here. On the edge of oblivion. With any number of horrible things coming up out of the dark, smelling the sweat, hankering for blood. They’re the union-within-a-union. The 147½. The last line between the light and the dark. Only makes the job, oh, a thousand times harder.

Someone taps him on his helmet. It’s Boise – young kid from Jersey who when he was first asked where he was from said Boise instead of Joisey because he’s a nervous kid who stammers when he talks, but he’s also a hard worker and that’s all that matters to Davey. Boise says, “I hear a pig comin’ down the tunnel, Davey.”

Davey tilts his head. Gets away from the boys chipping and hauling blown rock.

Sure enough, he hears it–

The chug chug chug of a powered mine cart.

Now who the hell would that be? All his boys are here.

Some fucko from the EPA? Or Home-Sec? Bah.

He gives the tunnel a good look. Feels the Blue crackling at the edges of his vision – he’s looking for anything that belongs to this place, that shines of the Great Below. At least half his crew are Blazing at any given time. They take shifts. Half on, half off to cool down, ease off the powder. Some of them end up addicts. When they go that way, Davey puts them through his own personal treatment program. Which isn’t a fun program to go through, but he can’t have shaky hands playing with dynamite.

He doesn’t see squat down the tunnel.

Davey turns back to the crew. Whoops and twirls his hand like he’s got a fake lasso to get their attention. Men in hardhats with grime-streaked cheeks and goggles stand against the backdrop of a forbidding stone wall that will need to be blasted – others off to the side pouring concrete that will eventually get made into the walls of the tunnel proper.

Davey yells to them in his muddy one-generation-removed Irish accent:

“Any of you boys know who might be comin’ down the tunnel? Dutch–” He points to an old stoop-backed Hog with a scar across the bridge of his bent nose. Dutch is the radio-man. “Any news from above?”

Dutch starts to shake his head, but then his eyes go wide.

The other men start to yell and point–

One reaches alongside a mine cart and Davey sees a shotgun coming up–

Another grabs for a pick-ax.

Davey turns. Almost falls.

Sees something he’s never seen before and it’s coming at him fast–

It appears out of nothing – like a car riding through a heat haze on a long desert highway that seems to drive out of the vapor. All black. A shifting shape – like a kite, a bird, a flying puddle of dark oil. Big, too, big as a tarp.