Enemies of a Sort Page 6

  *

  Opening his eyes, Flynn pressed his palms to the mine floor beneath him. The ground was solid. That, at least, was a blessing. The air was thick with dust, leaving him in temporary darkness. Flynn felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. He took a quick inventory of his condition. His legs were pinned to the dirt, but as he moved his feet, no pain sliced through his nerves. Thankfully, nothing was broken.

  A coughing sound to his left drew his attention. Light overhead blinded him and he blinked away the phantoms in his eyes.

  “That was no accident,” Chadrick said, coughing heavily beside Flynn as he shook another lantern to life. Standing, he brushed the thick coating of dust from his pants. “Do you think they want us trapped down here?”

  A pile of rocks pinned Flynn’s knees to the dirt, and he shoved them off, letting them clatter to the ground and roll noisily away. “I’m not sure they knew – or cared – we were down here.”

  “Anything I need to look at?” Chad asked, eyes raking over him, questioningly.

  Shaking his head, Flynn rose to his feet and swatted away the cloud of dust that had come from his hair. “Nah, I managed to miss the worst of it.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to think about how I’d get you out of here if I had to try to carry you.”

  “You couldn’t carry me if you wanted to.” Flynn thought back to their school day wrestling matches.

  “Exactly.”

  “Don’t get cheeky, Doc.”

  With a groan, Chadrick looked sideways at him. “I will never forgive my mother for teaching you that word.”

  Flynn inspected the rubble and let out a frustrated sigh, looking behind them. “We’re never going to get out this way. Our best chance is to cut across to another shaft and try a different access. If they blew the main drop we may have to climb out a ventilation duct.”

  Chadrick breathed a heavy sigh and Flynn bit his tongue. Putty would have seen this as an adventure; he would have tried to get Flynn to go up the first ventilation duct they saw. It would have reminded him of the tunnels they built between their forts in the back yard. Chadrick had never been too adventurous. Maybe that was why he’d gotten into an accelerated med-hack program – a safe, quiet, stable job.

  “I know, I know.” Chadrick raised his hands in mock defense. “I’m going to have to climb out of here… just stop looking at me like I’m the last person you would have picked for your farball team.”

  “Oh, no. I’d never pick you last. Jennifer Delictorio was always my last choice.”

  Chadrick stopped, eyes narrowed in curiosity. “I never got that. She could throw better than half the guys.”

  “Yeah, but she always tried to take over the team… and if you tried to stop her, well, she was a biter.” Flynn grimaced at the memory. He’d wound up with a few marks he’d been certain would end up scars. Thankfully they hadn’t.

  “I seem to recall a few guys from school saying something to that effect, but they didn’t seem to mind the biting. Then again, they weren’t playing farball.” Chadrick laughed, kicking a loose stone ahead of them.

  “I’m sure you’ve met more than a few girls at college with the same sort of talents Jennifer had.”

  “Well, sure, especially in the medical sciences buildings. There are plenty of women looking to become doctors’ wives. There are plenty of men looking to be doctor’s husband’s too.”

  “Well, then, there’s hope for you yet.”

  Chadrick rolled his eyes and snorted. “I think I’ll get my relationship advice from someone else, thank you.”

  “Like Putty?” Flynn snorted before he could stop himself. “I haven’t even had a chance to ask him who he’s marrying.” He shook away a strange shiver. “I have a weird feeling about the whole thing, I mean, the guy’s locked up tighter than a steel trap. I think, if I ever found a girl worth marrying, I’d be hard pressed to shut up about her. What do you know about it?”

  “Don’t look at me. I didn’t know he was engaged until just before you walked into the bar. After I left for school, we kind of fell out of touch. He dove into pulling apart and putting things back together, and I had mountains of coursework. You know what they say about long distance relationships.”

  “Tell me about it.” Flynn said under his breath, but a little too loud. “Though my lack of contact was probably worse on him.”

  “I get that.” Chadrick pulled his leg back to kick another rock.

  “I don’t think you do, Chad. It’s not like I didn’t try. I couldn’t call home. Sure, there were probably ways, but where I was, calling home could get your family killed.”

  “That’s the point, Flynn. You had a good reason to stay away. I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “You’re busy, Chad. I’m sure Putty doesn’t hold it against you. I don’t suppose he contacted you either, did he?”

  “No,” Chadrick said, quietly.

  Voices echoing through the tunnels put an abrupt end to the awkward conversation. Flynn flicked off the phosphor flash lamp and pushed Chadrick back against the wall.

  Two men walked along the perpendicular shaft. The blue light of their lanterns created a pair of ironic, swinging halos at their feet.

  Whistling a jaunty tune, they came closer. One held a bag over his shoulder, a length of det-cord snaked out of it, dangling at his hip. The ugly mirth in the other one’s smile told Flynn there was no chance these two were innocent in the cave in.

  “I don’t like it,” the bag man said, shifting his rucksack and letting his lantern swing in a wider arc. “Blowing holes in the place just means we’ll have to dig them right back out again when we kick the fuckers out.”

  “Boss man says he wants a cave in, we provide him with a cave in. He tells me to shoot you, I don’t blink.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re a bastard like that.” The bagman shoved his partner sideways.

  “You wouldn’t either.”

  “Not even a flutter of the eyelids. Let’s set these damn charges and get the hell back off this dustbowl.”

  “If the plan works, this’ll probably be our new home, you know.”

  “If the plan doesn’t work, we’ll both be six feet under.”

  The two men moved past the connecting tunnel where Flynn and Chadrick hid, and Flynn turned back to the doctor-in-training. “You any good at hand to hand combat? Or are you still a ninny when it comes to that sort of thing?”

  “I’ve never had a problem with the sight of blood,” he said, looking at Flynn, “but I’m still not very good at producing it. I took a jujitsu class last term… but I only passed because it was graded on attendance and I showed up every day.”

  That was unfortunate. Flynn had only one gun and he preferred to hang on to it. But dire conditions called for dire solutions. “You still know how to shoot a bottle off a fence post?”

  “I’d put down money that I’ve still got the steadiest hands of the three of us.” Chadrick held his hand out flat, not a shiver.

  “Great. Of course Putty bashes his with wrenches, and I bloodied mine on a battlefield, while you went off to to learn how to stitch people up.”

  Chad shrugged. “Yeah, well I figured for as often as you two need patched up, one of us ought to get some training.”

  A slow rumble brought their banter to silence as another rockslide pulled their attention to their left.

  “We need to hurry. We’ll want to catch up to them before they have a chance to seal us in.” Flynn whispered. He clicked off the gun’s safety and reluctantly handed it over. Chadrick had been a decent shot when they were kids, but that had been target practice. A man on the other end of the barrel changes things—especially if you’ve spent the last couple of years in medical school. His speech to Seamus was not for show.

  “Ready whenever you are.” Chadrick’s face wasn’t corroborating his mouth’s story.

  Flynn didn’t have time to worry about it. He swung around the corner in a run, his best chance was to
get them from behind before they knew what was coming.

  He hit the bag man hard, his shoulder connecting with rib cage, the crunch and crumple of bones breaking was audible as the man fell to the ground in abject agony.

  His partner wasn’t so easily dealt with.

  A fist in Flynn’s ribs sent his hips in the opposite direction of his head, but the man was clearly expecting to fight a miner – not a soldier. Correcting his posture, Flynn flung himself at the man and landed a jab straight to the man’s nose. A bloody river flowed .

  Fingernails tore at the sensitive scar tissue at Flynn’s neck, and he lashed out with an elbow, cracking it sharply against the guy’s hard skull. The second thug slumped to the ground, glassy eyes rolling to the back of his head before they shuttered closed.

  Behind him, Chadrick stood silently, unused gun in his hand hanging limp at his side.

  “I’m sorry, Flynn. I just couldn’t.” Chadrick stared down at the crumpled bodies, gun shaking in his grip; barrel cold.

  Flynn took it from him and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Listen to me. No one on this world, or any other, can tell you what’s right by you. If you can’t shoot someone, you shouldn’t be troubled by it.”

  Chadrick’s jaw twitched, clenching and unclenching and Flynn clamped a hand down on his shoulder.

  He looked the doctor straight in the eye. “The difficulty in shooting a gun has nothing to do with pulling the trigger.”

  Flynn tied up the unconscious men and dropped them unceremoniously into a nearby ore cart.

  “Have you ever froze?” Chadrick stared at him over the edge of the cart.

  “Yeah.” He swallowed hard, trying not to remember the failing. “You going to help me push, or are you just here to look pretty?”

  The cart tracks sloped upward and soon Flynn was sucking in breaths of fresh air. Chadrick provided about as much help pushing the cart as he’d provided in helping to fight the jerks in the cart.

  The thugs, ironically, led them most of the way to the secondary shaft.

  Squinting at the hint of sunlight in the distance, Chadrick said, “This is probably how they got in here in the first place.”

  “Hopefully there’s no one waiting for them up top.” Flynn checked his gun, just in case, and resumed pushing.