A cold gust fingered into the crowd. The solemn people huddled closer together. Their scratchy wool coats were touching each other. Another person shuffled into the forty person elevator. He stepped in firmly. Cautious to the touch, the front line shuffled a few inches back. The second line shuffled a couple inches back. The ripple effect made everyone shuffle a little bit.
The guard with the trim uniform, leather band diagonally across his chest, and round hat whistled. He pushed the mesh fence door closed and swung the big lever across to lock the door. His eyes looked steely cold at the control room window. He had a thick mustache, which was his pride of individual expression in this glum world. He whistled again.
A safety horn tooted. The big wheel above the elevator jumped an inch, when the brake was released. The eerie sound of the two inch thick steel cable singing under the pressure began. Lithia always felt a chill in her bones listening to that sound. It felt ghostly. It felt like the cable was strained with otherworldly pain. The slowness of it made her fear that the strings bundled into the cable may individually get overstretched and break. The sound would mute itself once they got deeper into the ground.
"Lithia," Morticia tucked on Lithia's coat and whispered, "Remember to steal coal again tonight."
The men and women in the mine elevator were dressed in gray wool pants and coats. They had cotton masks over their faces, so that only their eyes peeked out impersonally. The formerly white cotton masks were dark gray. Over their heart, they displayed the red and yellow logo of the mining company: Three lions caught in mid-jump. There was a general silence. They watched the exposed rock walls rise as they went deeper. The platform would hit a bump every once in a while and jerk. They caught the jerk with a swift bent in the knee and stoic faces like cattle that didn't participate in their own lives' anymore.
"Talon was ordered to mine under the East shaft in Falcon Mountain again. He lied for us. He said that there was no coal. It's full of coal. I know. We have to save enough money for a pick and a shovel. And we'll start our own mining company. We are the ones that will get out of here," Morticia carefully whispered into Lithia's ear so that none of the body-to-body-close bystanders could hear her.
An uproar of angry male screams erupted on the other side of the elevator. The crowd pushed with panic. Lithia and Morticia were pressed hard against the bodies lining the wall. It was hard to fill the lungs, because even pushing back those one or two inches against the big male bodies was hard. Lithia's face was pushed into a scruffy, dirty wool coat. The wool scratched her cheeks. Her face was quickly dashed with wool soot. Only her blond hair in a ponytail was still vaguely clean.
A single male found himself in a circle of avoidance. A big splotch of wet was on the ground in front of him. His arms were waving around helplessly. There was no place to go for him. He had spontaneously ejaculated. The other men were terrified to get infected with Muttonia. Muttonia was a disease very much like a cold that easily passed from person to person by the dispersal of the virus in bodily fluids. It also affected the diseased for about a week or two only. However, the spread was rapid in the crowded places. And rather than affecting the sufferer with sneezes and snot, it caused spontaneous ejaculations, which were of course rather inconvenient in the crowded mining spaces. Women could not contract the disease.
In tense silence, the elevator passed the one hundred yard marker, that plaque of metal with the white numbers. The chill was gone from the air. One could feel the warmth of the deep earth seeping through the raft of wood planks on the ground. Slow whispers began among the people as the guard and oversight faded in the distance above ground. Another ejaculation happened. Another herd stampede that pushed everyone the other direction. The men were in panic and grumbled angrily about the packed working conditions. The women were pressed by the big male bodies. A young lad wiped his pants in panic. He had been hit by stray ejaculate.
The two hundred yard plaque passed. "Do you remember being kids riding the swing under the apple tree? And the sun shone on our faces. It felt so good," dreamed Morticia.
"I forget. It's like a memory that is drifting away. When I go to sleep, I don't remember how the mine shafts are. In the morning, when I come back down here, all the memories of the heat, sweat, and coal dust come back. When I look in your face, I can see in the glow that you are back in the garden. I can't go there anymore. I remember the day like a faded fact. I can't feel it anymore," said Lithia.
Five hundred and fifty yards under the ground, the elevator raft hit the ground. It was so deep that one could feel the breathing of the earth as if she were alive. The surface was a distant place, unreachable. A tension tightened around the solar plexus, like a band, of being trapped down here. A mental voice silently whispered to each one: "Don't panic. Panic doesn't get you out of here. Only calm, patience for the escape vehicle gets you out of this trap."
The boots knocked over the elevator planks. Sweat drops here or there formed on foreheads. The sweat pearls were black from the coal dust that had already settled on their faces. The hot earthen air was standing. They shuffled past the lockers filled with shovels and picks. They grabbed one each.
The guards never came down here into the danger and dirt. Every miner knew their assignments. The main tunnel branched out into spurs. Miner pairs disappeared into them. The slow shuffling crowd stretched out into fast legged ones and bumbling fat ones in the back. Lithia's eyes followed the wagon tracks. There was something calming and predictable about anticipating the next plank under the iron track or the next gap in between two iron beams. It provided a sense of moving forward.
They turned left. It was Lithia's and Morticia's spur: Gazelle canyon. They were by themselves. Only the electric hand light was flickering in the rough mining shaft. To save money, there were no wood beams for support. The claw marks of the pick were evident in the walls.
"It wasn't always like this. Everyone was so happy about the Confederate Party rising to power fifteen years ago. They promised to lower taxes. They promised to keep foreign workers out. And now, we are here in the mining camp imprisoned. 90% of the population got enslaved to do menial and hard labor, because we blocked foreign workers and imports. My mom wanted me to become a ballerina. Every day, I practiced for hours. And now all the graze and flexibility is gone by shuffling coal for years for 14 hours a day," complained Morticia.
"I wanted to be a computer scientist. I loved reading books and thinking. Now, the mining company has banned books for miners. It would distract us too much, make us unsatisfied. I always used to be so clumsy that I'd bruise myself down here. They didn't care. They kept stuffing me down here every day. Now, I'm an expert in reading coal markings to estimate the shift and approach angle. Ha! I never cared about knowing those things," Lithia said joining the complaining.
