Blasphemy wf-2 Read online

  Hazelius joined them. “Dolby won’t come.”

  “We’ve got three problems,” Wardlaw said. “One: Isabella’s going to blow. Two: we’ve got an armed mob out there. And three: we can’t call for help.”

  “What do we do?” Thibodeaux wailed.

  “That steel door in the back leads into the old coal tunnels. We’ve got to get out of here. We need to put a big piece of that mountain between us and Isabella before she blows.”

  “How do we get out of the coal tunnels?” Ford asked.

  “At the far end,” Wardlaw said, “there’s an old vertical shaft that was turned into a gobshaft to pull methane out of the far end of the mine. There’s still an old hoist in there. It’s probably not usable. We’ll have to rig something.”

  “Is that the best we can do?”

  “It’s either that or go out the front door—into that mob.”

  A silence.

  The explosion that shook the computer room knocked Ford and the rest to their knees like they were pebbles in a tin can. The sound reverberated back and forth, the detonation rolling like thunder through the mountain. The lights in the room flickered and electrical arcs seared across the consoles. Ford struggled to his feet and helped Kate up.

  “Was that Isabella?” Hazelius cried.

  “If that was Isabella, we’d be dead,” said Wardlaw. “The mob just blew the titanium door.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Not if they used those military demolition charges.”

  The Bridge door suddenly reverberated with the pummeling of fists. Ford listened. He could see Dolby in the Bridge laboring like a ghost in the smoke, hunched over his workstation.

  “Hazelius!” came a muffled, high-pitched voice through the door. “You hear me, Antichrist? We’re coming to get you!”

  PASTOR RUSSELL EDDY SCREAMED AT THE steel door. “Hazelius, you have blasphemed against God, against His name and them that dwell in heaven!”

  The door was thick steel, and they had no more explosives. Firing into the lock with his revolver in this closed space would be ineffective and even insane.

  The mob surged up against the door, pounding and screaming,

  “Christians!” Eddy’s voice boomed out in the vast, cavernous space. “Listen to me, Christians!” The crowd fell into a restless silence, filled by the infernal wailing of the machine in the tunnel beyond. “Stand back from the door! We need to organize our attack!” He pointed. “On the other side of this cavern, there’s a stack of steel I-beams. I want the strongest men—and men only!—to hoist up one of those beams and batter this door down with it. The rest of you have an equally important task. Divide yourselves into two groups. I want the first group to go into the long circular tunnel, back there.” He pointed to the oval opening, awash in condensation. “Cut and sledgehammer the pipes, cables, and conduits feeding the supercomputer, the Beast!” He held up a piece of paper he had printed off the Internet. “Here’s a map of the Beast.” He pointed to a man who seemed calmer than the rest, who carried his weapon with ease, and who had an air of leadership. “This is yours. You lead them.”

  “Yes, Pastor.”

  “Once we break down this door, I want the second group to follow me into the control room, seize the Antichrist, and destroy the equipment in there!”

  A roar of approval. Already twenty men were manhandling an I-beam off the stack. The crowd parted as they came lumbering back, the I-beam aimed at the door.

  “Go!” cried Eddy, standing aside. “Batter it down!”

  “Batter it! Destroy it!”

  The crowd parted and, at a slow jog, the men closed in on the door. The beam struck it with a massive thud, warping it inward. The beam was thrown back by the impact and the men staggered to hold it up.

  “Again!” Eddy cried.

  70

  A MUFFLED CLANG SHOOK THE ROOM and the metal door reverberated from a massive blow. Ford struggled into the smoke, found Dolby, and grabbed his shoulder. “Ken, please,” he said, “for God’s sake come with us.”

  “No. I’m sorry, Wyman,” Dolby said. “I’m staying here. I can . . . I can save Isabella.”

  Ford could hear the shouts and screams of the mob outside the door. They were ramming it with something heavy. Buckling, it popped one of its hinge pins.

  “You won’t make it. There’s no time.”

  Through the door came the mob’s roar: “Hazeliuuus! Antichriiist!”

  Dolby resumed his frantic work.

  Kate came up behind Ford. “We’ve got to go.”

  Ford turned and followed Kate into the back computer room. The others were crowding around the emergency exit while Wardlaw struggled to activate the security panel. He typed and retyped the code, his hand on the hand-reader next to the exit. The reader was dead.

  Boom! The door to the Bridge smacked down and tumbled across the floor. The roar of the mob swelled as they poured into the smoky Bridge.

  A fusillade of shots followed, and Dolby screamed as he was cut down at his workstation.

  “Where’s the Antichrist?” a man screamed. Ford rushed to the computer room door, shut it and locked it.

  Wardlaw pulled out a regular key and yanked open a panel next to the door, exposing a second keyboard. He punched in a code. Nothing.

  “They’re in the back room!”

  “Batter down that door!”

  On Wardlaw’s second try, the exit door opened with a smooth click. They piled through it into the damp, moldy darkness of the coal mine. Ford was the last out, pushing Kate ahead of him. A long, broad tunnel stretched out ahead, cribbed with rusting steel beams that held up a sagging, cracked ceiling. It smelled clammy and putrescent, like the petrified swamp it once was. Water dripped from the ceiling.

  Wardlaw slammed the rear door and tried to lock it. But the locks were electronic and, with no power, dead.

  A crashing boom thundered in the computer room, and the noise of the mob mounted. The battering ram had breached the computer door.

  Wardlaw struggled to engage the locks, first using his magnetic card and then stabbing a code into the keypad.

  “Ford, over here!”

  Wardlaw pulled a second sidearm out of his waistband and handed it to Ford. It was a SIG-Sauer P229. “I’m going to try to hold them here. The mines back there are room-and-pillar construction. Everything connects. Keep going and bear to the left, bypassing the dead ends, until you hit the big room where the coal seam played out. It’s about three miles in. The gobshaft is in the far left corner. You can escape through it. Don’t wait for me—just get everyone the hell out. And take this, too.”

  He shoved a Maglite into his hand.

  “You can’t fight them off alone,” said Ford. “It’s suicide.”

  “I can buy you time. It’s our only chance.”

  “Tony—,” began Hazelius.

  “Save yourself!”

  “Kill the Antichrist!” came the muffled wail from behind the door. “ Kill him!”

  “Run!” Wardlaw roared.

  They ran down the dark tunnel, Ford taking up the rear, splashing through puddles of water on the mine floor, the Maglite illuminating the way. He could hear pounding on the door, the screams of the mob, and the word “Antichriiiist” echoing down the tunnels. After a moment, several shots sounded. There were screams and more shots, the sounds of chaos and panic.

  The tunnel was long and straight, with perpendicular tunnels every fifty feet going off to the right, opening into more parallel tunnels. The bituminous seam to the left squeezed down and had been abandoned before being fully mined out, leaving many dead-end tunnels, stopes, and a web of dark seams.

  More gunshots came from behind, the sounds echoing crazily through the confined spaces. The air was dead and heavy, the walls gleaming with moisture, furred with white nitre. The tunnel took a broad turn. Ford caught up to Julie Thibodeaux, who was falling behind, slipped his arm around her, and tried to help her along.

  More distant shots.
Wardlaw was making a last stand, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Ford though sadly, surprised at the man’s courage and dedication.

  The mine opened up into a vast room with a low ceiling, the main seam itself, which was held up by massive pillars of unmined coal left standing to hold up the ceiling. The pillars were twenty feet on a side, black glistening faces of peacock coal shimmering in the light, the mine a mazelike warren of pillars and open areas in no regular arrangement. Ford paused to eject the magazine and saw it was fully loaded with thirteen 9 mm rounds. He shoved it back in.

  “We stay together,” said Hazelius, dropping back. “George and Alan, you two help Julie—she’s having trouble. Wyman, you stay back and cover our rear.”

  Hazelius grasped Kate’s shoulders in both hands and looked into her face. “If something should happen to me, you’re in charge. Got it?”

  Kate nodded.

  THE GROUP OF MEN WITH EDDY were pinned down by gunfire from behind the first pillar of coal.

  “Cover!” Eddy screamed, aiming his Blackhawk at where he had seen the last flash of light and squeezing off a round to suppress the incoming fire. More shots rang out from behind as others poured in, concentrating their fire at where the gunflashes had come from. Beams from a dozen flashlights flickered down the tunnel.

  “He’s behind that wall of coal!” Eddy cried. “Cover me!”

  Scattered gunfire struck the wall, spraying chips of coal.

  “Hold fire!”

  Eddy rose and ran to the broad pillar, which extended for at least twenty feet before turning. Flattening himself against the far side, he indicated with a hand signal for several other fighters to go around the other side. He crept along the ragged face of coal, weapon at the ready.

  The shooter anticipated their move and bolted for the next pillar.

  Eddy raised his gun, fired, missed. Another shot rang out just before the man reached cover. He fell and began crawling. Frost came around from behind the other side of the pillar, handgun in both hands, and fired a second and third shot into the crawling man, who hunched up. He walked over and put a final bullet in his head at point blank range.

  “All clear,” he said, sweeping the tunnels with his flashlight. “Just one. The rest fled.”

  Russell Eddy lowered his gun and walked to the center of the tunnel. People were crowding in through the open door and filling up the space, their voices loud in the confined quarters. He held up his hands. Silence fell.

  “The great day of his wrath has come!” Eddy cried.

  He could feel the surge of the crowd behind him, he could feel their energy, like a dynamo powering his resolve. But there were too many. He needed to go in with a smaller, more mobile group. He turned and shouted over the grinding hum of the machinery: “I can only take a small group into the tunnels—and only men with guns. No women, no children. All men with firearms and experience, step forward! The rest fall back!”

  About thirty men shouldered their way forward.

  “Line up and show me your weapons! Hold them up!”

  With a cheer, the men held up their weapons—rifles and handguns. Eddy walked down the line, looking at each man in turn. He eliminated a few with muzzle-loading antique replicas, a couple of teenagers with single-shot .22 rifles, two who looked demented. Two dozen were left.

  “You men, you come with me to hunt down the Antichrist and his disciples. Stand over there.” He turned to the rest. “The rest of you: your work is back there, in those rooms we just came through. God wants you to destroy Isabella! Destroy the Beast of the Bottomless Pit, whose name is Abaddon! Go, Soldiers of Faith!”

  With a roar, the crowd broke, hungry for action, and poured back through the open door, swinging sledgehammers, axes, baseball bats. The sounds of bashing came from the room beyond.

  The machine seemed to scream in agony.

  Eddy grabbed Frost. “You, Mike, stay at my side. I need your experience.”

  “Yes, Pastor.”

  “All right, men—let’s go!”

  71

  HAZELIUS LED THE GROUP THROUGH THE broad tunnels cut through the massive seam of coal. Ford covered their rear. Falling back, he peered into the darkness and listened. The shooting between Wardlaw and the mob had ended, but Ford could still hear the mob’s shouts as they pursued them through the tunnels

  They stayed to the left, as Wardlaw had advised, sometimes getting hung up in dead-ends and blind leads, which forced them to backtrack. The mine was vast, the great bituminous seam going on forever in three directions. A maze of curving, crisscrossing tunnels had been cut in the seam, leaving square blocks of coal in a room-and-pillar arrangement, creating a labyrinthine sequence of spaces that connected with each other in unpredictable ways. The mine floor was crisscrossed with railcar tracks from 1950s mining operations. Rusting metal carts, rotting rope, broken engines, and heaps of discarded coal lay about. They had to wade through pools of slimy water in the low spots.

  The deep-throated scream of Isabella followed them as they ran through the tunnels, like the agonizing bellows of a mortally wounded beast. Whenever he stopped to listen, Ford could also hear the clamoring pursuit of the mob.

  After running for over a quarter hour, Hazelius called for a short rest. They collapsed on the damp ground, heedless of the black coal muck. Kate hunkered down next to Ford, and he put his arm around her.

  “Isabella’s going to blow at any moment,” Hazelius said. “It could be anywhere from a large conventional bomb to a small nuke.”

  “Jesus,” said Innes.

  “A bigger problem,” said Hazelius, “is that some of the detectors are filled with explosive liquid hydrogen. One neutrino detector has fifty thousand gallons of perchloroethylene and the other a hundred thousand gallons of alkanes—both flammable. And look around—there’s a hell of a lot of burnable coal left in these seams. Once Isabella blows, it won’t be long before the whole mountain goes up in flames. There’ll be no stopping it.”

  Silence.

  “The explosion could trigger cave-ins, too.”

  The cacophony of the pursuing horde echoed down the tunnels, punctuated by the occasional gunshot, rising over the wobbling, grinding, vibrating hum of Isabella.

  The mob, Ford realized, was gradually catching up. “I’m going to drop back a little and fire a few rounds in their direction,” he said, “To slow them down.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Hazelius, “But no killing.”

  They moved on. Ford hung back in a side tunnel, where he switched off his light and listened intently. The sounds of the pursuing mob rolled through the caverns, faint and distorted.

  Ford moved down the tunnel by feel, his hand on the wall, memorizing his path. Gradually the sounds became louder, and then he could see, at the edge of sight, the faint bobbing glow of half a dozen flashlights. He removed the pistol, and crouching behind a pillar of coal, pointed it obliquely at the ceiling.

  The pursuers closed in. Ford squeezed off three 9 mm Parabellum rounds in rapid succession, and they thundered through the confined space. Eddy’s mob fell back, firing wildly into the dark.

  Ducking into a dark passageway, Ford laid a hand on the far wall and, using it as a guide, moved quickly past two more tunnel openings. A second group of searchers was coming up—they seemed to have broken up into smaller teams—but this group was now moving cautiously because of the gunshots. He fired five more times, to slow them down.

  Retreating—still with one guiding hand against the wall—he counted off three more pillars before he felt safe enough to switch back on his light. He kept low, jogging, hoping to catch up with the group. But as he ran, he heard from behind a strange coughing sound. He paused. Isabella’s growl suddenly changed pitch; rising precipitously, higher and higher, it became an earshattering scream, a monstrous roar, growing louder, louder, a crescendo that shook the mountain. Ford, sensing what was coming, threw himself to the ground.

  The roar turned into an earthquake, the ground convulsing. A massive boom f
ollowed, a wave of overpressure ripping through the mine, picking him up like a leaf and hurtling him into a coal pillar. As the great thunderclap rolled off into the caverns, a sucking wind swept back through the tunnels, screaming like a banshee. Ford huddled in the lee of the coal pillar, head down, as coal and rocks blew past.

  Ford rolled, looked up. The tunnel ceiling was cracking, splitting, raining bits of coal and matrix. He leapt to his feet and tried to outrun the collapsing tunnel as it roared up at him from behind.

  EDDY WAS THROWN TO THE GROUND by the force of the explosions. He lay facedown in a muddy pool, pebbles and grit raining down around him, the tunnels echoing and booming with thunderous crashes, near and far. Dust filled the air and he could hardly breathe. Everything seemed to collapse around him.

  Minutes passed, and the thunderous cave-ins slowed to the occasional rumble. As the sounds died away, an uneasy silence ensued, the voice of Isabella no more. The machine was dead.

  They had killed it.

  Eddy sat up, coughed. A moment of fumbling around in the choking clouds of dust, and he found his flashlight, still shining in the murk. Others were rising, their lights like disembodied glowworms in the fog. The tunnel had caved in not twenty yards behind them, but they had survived.

  “Praise the Lord!” said Eddy, coughing again.

  “Praise the Lord!” a follower echoed.

  Eddy took stock. Some of his soldiers had been injured by falling rocks. Blood streamed down their foreheads, their shoulders gashed. Others seemed unhurt. No one had been killed.

  Eddy steadied himself against the rock wall, trying to breathe. He managed to straighten himself up and speak. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and earth were passed away.” He lifted both his hands, gun in one, flashlight in the other. “Warriors of God! The Beast is dead. But let us not forget the even more important task at hand.” He pointed into the drifting murk. “Out there, lurking in the dark, is the Antichrist. And his disciples. We have a battle to finish.” He looked around. “Rise up! The Beast is dead! Praise the Lord!”