Were- Read online

  “That’s suicide,” one of the moles said. “You’ve got a blast, no way to know what supports are still good, no way to know what else is going off? Just like the last time and the time before that?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, lowering his head and glaring at the mole under knitted brows. “And if it’s you next time? I’ll do it.”

  “Damn badgers,” someone muttered. “More teeth than brains.”

  Tom smiled, showing teeth. The crowd jostled back a half step, starting with the moles. “I’m going for it. Who’s with me?”

  “I’ll go,” Smitty said.

  “And I.” “I’m with you.” “I’ll go.”

  MacDougal nodded, clear relief washing the worry from his expression for at least a few seconds. “That’s good. Good. Look, boys, sign up before you go change, so Mr. Gillings here will have a record—“

  “Because he has to have a record of every breath we take, in case we inhale some silver in his mine,” someone shouted from the back. Gillings’ head jerked up, and he stared at the crowd of diggers, looking for the speaker. The crowd stared back at him, sullen.

  “What are the chances there’s anybody alive in there, really?” Mitchell asked. He had jumped up on the rock beside MacDougall and Gillings, brushing his hands together as if to get the dust off, and lowered his voice. “Why do you think they’re alive?”

  “I heard them,” said another man at the foot of the rock, craning his neck to look up at them. His face and one leg were soaked in blood. “The roof came down right in front of us, but we could hear screaming. We were down the main shaft, past the store rooms, right where it branches. There’s a good vein there.”

  “So what happened?”

  The man shrugged and winced, putting one hand against the platform rock as he staggered. “We were setting charges. Mikey, he said he thought they were greasy, but—”

  “It couldn’t be,” Gillings said. “I knew we were opening up a new shaft. New equipment, new everything. Somebody made a mistake. Somebody lit a short fuse.”

  MacDougal shook his head. “Look, boys, there are six men still in there. The reason why doesn’t matter. Can we go get them? Now?”

  Tom Mitchell looked at him consideringly. “It matters if it means there’s going to be another explosion that will take the rest of us out, yeah.” The Flickers behind him nodded, and a few yells of agreement echoed. “But you’re right. If someone’s still alive down there, we’re going to try to get them out.” He jumped down from the rock and started up the slope to the hole in the side of the hill. The other diggers looked at each other, shrugged, and followed. Behind them, MacDougal waved papers. They ignored him.

  The first few yards past the timbers were illuminated by the sunlight through the opening, and their shadows stretched before them. When the shadows disappeared, they turned as a group into a small room carved into the guts of the hillside. There was barely light at all, as if light was only a memory from the outside.

  They stripped, bundled their clothing in careful piles against the wall, and Flicked. In one instant they were men, scruffy, muscular, poor. In the time it took to look away and back again—in the Flick of an eye—they were not men any more. Not, at least, in shape.

  The mine Flickers shook themselves and looked around the darkness, and a chorus of snorts and sniffs filled the space around them as they oriented themselves by smell. Tom Mitchell growled low as someone brushed by him—Smitty, by the feel of the scales that covered his body. The scent only confirmed it.

  He could smell the moles, clustered together in a corner as far from him as he could get, and the human still within him grinned without humor. Badgers ate moles. Flickers didn’t eat each other—generally speaking—but the animals remembered. Tom wasn’t planning on eating anyone today, but the moles’ caution still amused him. The same magic that gave him, as a man, the proportionate strength of a badger—as well as the short temper, aggression, and weak eyesight—gave him a man’s ability to think, to reason, in his animal form. He was never one or the other, but always both.

  Whelford was the macaque. Almost useless, really, in mines, but he did have one gross advantage over the rest of them: he still had hands. He also had a monkey sense of humor, and Tom found himself being used as a springboard as Whelford leaped from the floor, to Tom’s back, to a shelf above their heads. For a blind leap, it wasn’t that much of a risk; he’d done it before, knew what was stored there, and like the rest of them had been there before with a lamp.

  And there was a lamp on the shelf. Whelford brought it to the floor, fumbled with a match, and lit it. His job was to carry it down the shaft, hang it on a hook, and then leave. The single flame would provide enough light for the moles, who were nearly blind anyway, and the badgers, and the rest of the diggers to see where they were going, and more importantly, the way back out.

  Tom let Whelford scamper well ahead before padding out of the change room, Smitty at his side. He couldn’t smell gas, and the flame should be safe enough, but he didn’t like fire, and he liked it less in fur form. They passed several more rooms, used to store carts, tools for the Stills—the ones who couldn’t change—and crates of explosives. Tom paused to look inside, sniffing deeply of the scent of dirt, explosive, wood, primer cord, the scent of the men who had carried the boxes here.

  Smitty snorted and shouldered past, his long tongue touching here and there across the crates. Whelford, insatiably curious, came back to see what they were looking at, but there was nothing, nothing but the skittering of long gray insects across the crates. Smitty caught up a half dozen on a long, flexible tongue. The labels, with their large red warning text, were relatively bright against the wood, even in the impossibly dim light from the lantern. Tom snarled, and Whelford scampered away. Reluctantly, Smitty turned back to go with him down the shaft, wobbling a bit as he went. Pangolins walked on their foreclaws, huge and curved and impossibly sharp. Tom’s claws, by comparison, merely scarred the dirt and rock floor, a mixture of earth, rock, and guano under their paws. All the bats had fled when the collapse had started. The path sloped gently, and then not so gently, downward into the earth.

  With a happy chirp, Whelford hung the lamp from a hook and took down another waiting in a niche beside it and continued leading them downward into the dark. They followed the railroad tracks laid down for ore carts until they veered away down the tunnel and a new hole appeared. This one was round, rough, without the relatively smooth finished sides of the mine shaft; rock outcrops jutted up from the ground and hung down from the ceiling. The scent trail said that miners had gone this way.

  New lamp niches appeared every twenty feet, leaving tiny flames to provide more hope than illumination, marking support beams that grew shorter and shorter as the tunnel narrowed. The Tolliver mine contained mainly silver, with some gold, zinc, lead, and even an occasional turquoise outcrop. The group of Flickers straggled into single file, ducking under outcrops that hung down from the ceiling, scrambling over knots of rock that had been too hard and too unproductive to bother removing from the floor. Three niches down, the macaque stopped and chittered. The shaft before them was completely blocked, with support beams sagging and splintered across boulders bigger than any one of them, and a fan of dirt poured out at their feet. As they surveyed the damage, the pile shuddered. More rocks fell, and more earth whispered down the sides of the tunnel. Whelford squeaked again, set down his lamp, and scampered back up the tunnel. The opening before the rock fall was too low for a human form to stand comfortably, even one as short as most of them were.

  The moles moved up, with nearly supersonic squeaks, and Mitchell snarled. One turned blindly toward him, still squeaking, and he reached out with a casual paw and batted it against the far wall of the tunnel. Every Flicker froze in place.

  Mitchell listened.

  A badger can hear the sound of an earthworm moving, smell the memory of a prairie dog’s passing. A Flicker could do that, and more. He could hear the air moving in and out of
the lungs of the Flickers around him, the tiny, uncontrolled moan of the mole whose leg had been broken by his blow, and taste their fear in the air. He could hear the shifting of the earth above him, before him. He could smell, through layers of rock and dirt, blood and death and the stink of explosives. Stretching up on four short legs, he raised his head and focused on the rock fall before him. Next to him, Jerry’s long, wide ears swiveled forward to scoop sound out of the air.

  When he had heard enough, he Flicked back into human form, coughed once to clear dust from his lungs. “I hear them,” he said. “Moles, take your friend back up and have him looked at. Next time,” he snarled at the protesting moles, “shut the hell up when you’re told to. Now move. Jerry and I will start here. Send us some Stills to move earth.”

  One of the moles Flicked, hunched over in his human form, and spat on the ground between them. “We can help,” he said. “They’re our people, too. Even if they are Stills, they’re miners.”

  Mitchell’s face twisted, as if to issue a snarl more suited to his other form, and then took a deep breath and let it go instead. “All right,” he said. “But take care of him first.” He looked the injured Flicker in the face. “I’m sorry.”

  The tiny, blind eyes blinked, as if in surprise. His human-form kin picked him up, carefully, and started back up the tunnel, bent double with the mole tucked against his chest. The rest of the moles gathered, shoulder to shoulder, and settled in, oozing stubbornness.

  “I’m going up to the top of the slide,” Mitchell said. “I’ll let you know if—when—I need you.” There was general grumbling, but they kept it quiet, and Mitchell Flicked into his badger form. His real form, the form where he could breathe and move and dig.

  He sniffed at the pile of dirt and rocks, then swarmed up the slope, ignoring the way the rock fall slid and shifted under his paws. In this form, he weighed only about thirty pounds, and it wasn’t enough to move the bigger boulders.

  The ground wouldn’t stay still, though. He had to scramble to stay in place, get to a rock that would hold long enough for him to sniff deep at the place where the ceiling had given way. The Flickers below and behind him were silent. Silent as the tomb, he thought, and his lip curled, showing fangs. Some jokes weren’t so funny. Tombs were only supposed to be six feet deep.

  Poised at the top of the collapse, he reached out one paw to test the consistency of the dirt, and snarled to himself. There wasn’t room for him to Flick back, not up here, and he’d wind up sliding all the way to the bottom and bringing more of the ceiling with him if he tried. He couldn’t talk in this form, and he really wanted Jerry’s claws right now to rip into the dirt and rock.

  But he’d Flicked, he’d climbed, and now—he stretched out his front paws, armed with five long flat claws each, four of which were two inches long, and he took hold of the earth, and he began to dig.

  His front feet scooped out the dirt, while his back feet shoved it clear behind him. In the right dirt, a badger could dig faster than a man with a shovel, and no man with a shovel could get in the places he could go. He could hear the Flickers below him chittering and talking—some of them must have Flicked back—but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the movement, the resistance of the earth, the eagerness with which he sank into it, swimming through it, snarling as he hit rock, shaking dirt from his nose, digging deeper and deeper toward the voices and the howls and cries he could hear on the other side of the earth.

  He could feel the earth pressing down against his back as he clawed at it. To either side he could feel the heat of other bodies that had followed him up the slope of the rock fall and were digging as well.

  The ground shifted under his paws, and he stopped and growled a warning. Around him, the others stopped too, waiting for Earth to decide whether it would bury them today.

  As they waited, Earth shuddered, and they could hear the frightened cries from the other side of the rock fall clearly now. They were close, close enough that the smell of blood and terror of the trapped Stills—all of the living ones Stills, according to his nose—filled his nostrils, and Mitchell reached farther, harder, to pull away the rock and grit separating them from him.

  Off to one side a Flicked fox yelped as rock tumbled and slid. Mitchell forced himself to slow down. They didn’t have to remove the entire fall, only enough to allow the trapped men to get through. Behind him he could hear voices of Flickers in human form, talking about stretchers. He felt a shiver in the fur of his left foreleg, reached over, and snapped. A spasmodic quiver of life and blood between his teeth told him it was a mouse, and he swallowed without pausing in the steady reach, claw, swing back, shove rhythm of his excavation. His paws were bleeding now. Even badgers rarely tried to tackle rock.

  Bugs, he thought, in some distant corner of his mind. He needed to talk to Smitty about the bugs.

  His claws reached and pulled, narrowly avoiding the other Flicks around him.

  A mole was the first to punch through, announcing its achievement with a startled squeak as it fell into the chamber on the other side. For an instant there was silence, and then they could hear voices, moans, cries from the miners on the other side. A single lamp’s-worth of light glowed feebly from the blocked chamber.

  There was still no room to change to communicate. Mitchell growled and redoubled his efforts, nearly following the mole into the next room when he emerged at the top of a mass of rock that dropped off abruptly on the other side. Earth rumbled.

  The trapped miners screamed as fresh air came in the opening and began clawing frantically toward it, and Mitchell, and the mole. Mitchell moved to one side as one by one they scrambled through.

  All but one man, not much older than Mitchell, but with softer hands, and a left leg that clearly could not bear his weight. Mitchell growled down at him as the man tried again and again, with human hands and human feet, to climb up, but his injury was against him.

  A rumble shivered through the air, and a fine patter of dirt and rock fell across them.

  “Help me!” the Still screamed up at him. “Help me!”

  This man didn’t belong here, down in the mines; he was too soft, his clothes too good, and Mitchell could smell the incipient panic in him from the closeness and darkness pressing in on them. But here he was. And here Mitchell was. The mole beside him squeaked a shrill warning as the ground shifted again, and fled.

  “Hel—”

  The man didn’t have the chance to finish the plea before Mitchell slid down the pile of rocks and Flicked. “Lie down on the slope, face up, and shut up,” he said. And then he Flicked again, and badger jaws clamped down on the rough collar of the Still’s shirt, and he began backing upward.

  A fine patter of dirt rained down from the roof of the chamber. The Flicks at the top of the rock fall screamed, and Mitchell set his jaws hard and yanked, pulling nine times his own weight uphill, backwards, with only the man’s good leg pushing to help as he pulled, and now rocks were falling on them both. One chunk of ore, almost as heavy as he was, smashed down next to the man’s shoulder, and he arched up in panic, carrying the badger with him. Mitchell snarled again through the mouthful of cloth and slapped the man’s arm, and he settled into pushing as Mitchell pulled. They were nearly at the top when the roof caved in.

  * * *

  A week later, Tom Mitchell was summoned to the offices of the Tolliver Mining Company. MacDougal had sent a runner, a child of seven or eight years, down to Silverfield to find him as he prepared to join his shift for the first time since the rescue.

  “What does he want?” Mitchell asked.

  The child shrugged. “Don’t know. Just says, they want to see you in the big boss’s office.” He gave the man a sideways glance. “Trouble, maybe?”

  Mitchell’s lip curled. “Maybe.” For whom, though?

  Once again he trudged the familiar path up the hill to the square, the warehouse, the mine shaft. This time there were no crowds milling around, just the miners gathering, waiting to be che
cked into the mine for their shift in the bowels of the earth. He raised a hand to them, but instead of joining them, climbed the wooden steps to the door of the office building.

  MacDougal, smiling, met him in the foyer and led him down the hall to the office in the back. “It’s a great thing today,” he said, “a great thing.” Mitchell lifted an eyebrow and did not bother to respond.

  Six men were waiting in Gillings’ office, including Gillings, four well-dressed strangers he thought were members of the Board of Directors—their portraits lined the hallway—and another, younger man he could not place. By their scents, they were all Stills; they stank of cigars and wool and sweat. They were all seated in comfortable leather chairs, with Gillings behind a broad desk and the rest in a semicircle to the right and left, with a gap in the middle so the visitor would be properly awed. Gillings and the Board members glanced at each other as Mitchell came in and stopped in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, waiting. He was wearing his work clothes and boots, and a rough bandage was still visible under the collar of his flannel shirt. There was not, he noted, an extra chair available for him, or for MacDougal either.

  “Mr. Mitchell!” Gillings said, rising from behind his desk and coming around it, a broad smile fixed on his face. “Thank you so much for joining us. This is a very special day. These gentlemen here are from the Board of Directors for Tolliver Mines, and they’ve all come together today just to meet you.”

  The younger man cleared his throat. A shadow of annoyance flashed across Gillings’ face. “And of course this is Mr. Norris, from the Bureau of Mines.”

  The last time Tom Mitchell had seen “Mr. Norris” was when he had dragged him by main force through a hole in the ground, just as the roof collapsed in the chamber where the miners had been trapped. Now Norris was cleaned up, smiling, levering himself out of his chair with a crutch, limping forward with hand outstretched. “Mr. Mitchell. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again.”