“Get a move on, James” Dan nudged my shoulder with excessive force.
I stirred from my rough night’s slumber, rubbing the grogginess from my eyes. “How’d you get in here?” I pressed, sifting over my bedside table until I found my glasses. I raised them to my face, relieved to see Dan had not kicked the door in.
“Front desk gave me a key… after some convincing,” Dan mumbled that last part. Another motel we wouldn’t be welcome back in. Great.
Unwilling to uncover what exactly Dan had done to earn the key, I pushed him off the foot of my bed and sat up. “What time is it anyways?”
“Ey c’mon Jamie boy, that was uncalled for!” Dan protested from the ground. “Three in the a-m, fresh n’ early,” Dan’s energetic facade wavered slightly as he groaned. “Let’s just get a move on, the sooner we scope out the mine, the sooner we get our money and head home.
“We can’t just come up with something and head home right now?” I whined, already knowing that wasn’t possible. Payton would not allow us to bail on the assignment.
Dan got up, muttering something fierce as he left my room, leaving me to clean myself up for the last time in what could be a day, a week, or longer. I checked my pack, tested my batteries, then finally hazarded a glance at the clock. 3:23 AM. I hate this job.
I made my way to the front desk, apologizing profusely to the acne riddled teen with bags deeper than any cave I’d traveled, under their eyes. Kid must hate this job too. I mused over what life could have been, as I joined the others outside.
The nine of us wordlessly tossed our packs into the bed of two of our rental trucks, then broke off into two pairs between the trucks, the other five sat in the rental van. I was seated with Dana in one of the trucks, set in the middle of our caravan.
We stopped to get coffee, but ultimately arrived at the empty field. Local reports had notified our parent company of a potential ‘gold’ mine, which meant a rich coal mine, to clear up any confusion. We were dispatched to take samples of the area, and make any unusual observations to warn our parent company of what to bring, if the samples were promising.
After two hours of scouring and taking samples, Tony shouted to catch everyone’s attention.
“Oi, I found sum’in!” Tony called through his thick southern accent. The eight of us made our way over to where Tony was crouching. I made it there third, joining the others as they inspected the ground.
A metallic surface gleamed in the early day’s sun, growing in clarity as we worked to uncover it. Eventually, we managed to clear away a good portion of the dirt and grass that had hid the massive manhole cover.
“Well shit, whaddya reckon we have ere, partners?” Dan snickered, only for Payton to slap the back of Dan’s head, just beneath the helmet. That did not deter his chuckles.
“Probably a doomsday prepper or something, pull the trucks over and we’ll use the winches,” Payton ordered. Sam and I walked back to the trucks, drove them over, and hooked up the winches. We were given a countdown before we tapped the gas pedals, slowly dragging the metal plate from where it sat. A few feet later, we were signaled to stop.
Sam and I returned to the huddle, peering into the cave we had unsealed.
“Nothing seems to be lunging out at us, so let’s go,” Jackson sighed, sticking his head into the hole. “There’s a ladder, though I wouldn’t trust it. Someone tie me off to the trucks.”
Dan tied a few knots to the trucks, then laced Jackson’s carabiners to a rock climber’s standards. Dan had always been into climbing, he insisted he’d climb Everest one of these days. We trusted his skills with rope, boy scouts had nothing on him. As a former boy scout, I can attest to that.
Jackson lowered himself into the hole, scanning around with a flashlight. After a few seconds of descent, Jackson called up, “we got a mineshaft down here!”
“Shaa!” Payton whisper yelled down the hole, tying their carabiner off to another rope and dropping into the hole. “We don’t want a cave-huh?” Payton fell silent with a grunt.
The seven of us above ground crowded around the opening, frantically searching for what happened. There they were. Jackson and Payton had sunk into unusual terrain. The mound the two seemed to have landed in was yellow, almost alien in nature.
“Feathers?!” Payton whined, quite loudly for someone who just scolded Jackson over volume.
“Canaries?” I called down, confused. That’s a lot of feathers.
“Seems like it, but there are a lot of ‘em down here. Er, there were, anyways” Jackson confirmed.
“Definitely a coal mine, at least,” I drooped my head, realizing this complicated the assignment. Part of our assignment meant we had to follow the mineshaft to the end and test for carbon levels in the air. I just prayed it was a small shaft.
“Man, you have your meds?” Dan asked, pulling me back from the ledge, softly.
After a moment of silence, I nodded once, then tied myself off, and took the plunge. I… I am a claustrophobic cave explorer. Much to my doctor’s dismay, I continue to expose myself to tight spaces. As such, I was prescribed a series of antidepressants, and a few antipsychotics in case I… well… let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Down we went, into the natural freezer below the surface. The cave was cold, though not moist enough to be dank. A sickly sweet smell wafted faintly up from the abandoned mine we had congregated in.
We knew that scent well. As certified cavers, we know the telltale signs of death and decay. Though these mounds of feathers could not have caused such a thick, pungent odor.
We assumed a single file line, noting the occasional canary skeleton that lined the all-in-all well built shaft. The crossbeams were sturdy enough, the walls weren’t too sharp or rigid. It looked relatively standard, if not old. The gas lamp we encountered was not too reassuring. A lit flame with risk of coal gas, not smart.
“Why so many canaries?” Jess asked, nudging another skeleton with her steel-toed boot.
“Can’t say, this is absurd,” Jackson muttered, absentmindedly. “I’ve never seen anything like this, maybe a caged canary or two, but this… this is a mass grave… it’s disgusting,” Jackson audibly shuddered.
“Let’s just keep moving. I don’t like this place,” Dan pleaded, hastening his pace.
We kept a quick pace, taking readings, once deeming levels safe, and overcoming the ever growing, gag inducing scent of decomposition, we carried on.
At some point, the walls began closing in. I reached an arm out to a phantom wall, stumbling as my hand never met a physical boundary. I caught myself, though our swift pace resulted in Sam running directly into my backside, sending us both to the ground. Our forced game of twister was made all the more challenging with our packs, so we allowed the others to pull us off of one another, and back to our feet.
“Man, ya good?” Dan voiced what everyone, including myself, was thinking.
“I’ll be fine. Just gimme a sec,” I reassured, fumbling for the pocket on my pack with my meds. Dan did not idly stand by, pushing my hand down and sifting through my pack for the meds I desperately needed, in order to continue.
We took a break, I took my benzodiazepines, and we all took a cocktail of advil for the headache from the nearly palpable odor wafting from deeper in the mine. We passed around some drinks, both professional and less than professional, much to Payton’s dismay.
The walls slowly returned to normal as my meds did their part. I signaled to the group that I was ready to continue. Apprehensive, we pushed deeper.
Beep! Beep! Our monitors all chirped in unison. We’ve got raising levels of carbon in the air.
No one felt the need to say it out loud, we all knew what that alarm meant. We were on a timeline, soon we’d have to depart. We pressed ahead at an even swifter pace.
It was at that moment that a gut wrenching crack came from Jackson, followed shortly after by retching.
“What?!” we all cried out in concern.
Jackson said nothing, collapsing and dry heaving. Dan stepped beside Jackson, producing another crack, this time echoing up the shaft.
“Cha-ugh” Dan began, only to begin gagging and heaving as well.
“Chil…dren” Jackson forced between sharp inhales. “Bones… they’re everywhere!” he cried out. Though he wasn’t facing us, we knew the tears streaming down his face. We knew those tears all too well. Those involuntary tears were streaming down each of our faces.
You always hear the saying ‘like a canary in a coal mine’ but the world has a much darker reality. Kids were sent to mines, frail, innocent children.
“Coal didn’t kill ‘em,” Dan wheezed, vomiting. “Something tore ‘em apart.”
We pushed past the two ill men to take our own glances at the corpses, and well, it was horrible.
There were at least five of them, far too decomposed to identify gender, but not too decayed to make out the clear incision in the center of their lower torsos.
“Only animal to do this is a human,” I quietly stated, not in control of my mouth, nor registering my own words.
“Why?” Payton asked to no one in particular. A shiver shot up my back as a gust of icy wind blew up from the depths.
Beep beep beep! Our alarms all ticked, warning us of the growing air contaminants. We didn’t have time to process, we had to get out.
Dan reached down and began attempting to collect a corpse in his arms. The body could not hold up, I’ll spare you the details. Sam managed to recover a few of the deceased children’s possessions, though we didn’t pay him much mind, as the alarms grew more and more erratic. We ran for the exit, leaving the corpses behind.
We later sorted through the items Sam had taken from the bodies, discovering these children to have been orphans. They were coal miners, sent to make a living in the early 1840s. These outcasts lived quietly and died quietly. Though something still bothers me. What killed them?
Though the corpses were ultimately removed and inspected, the nine of us never heard another word about them. Nor did we get an answer on the absurd number of canaries. We were sent our separate ways, scouting various sites with new stipulations. We were never to investigate anything below the surface, we were told to never read between the lines.
But one question still haunts me to this day, something I’ll likely take to the grave. Just what happened in those coyote creek coal mines?