Chapter 13: The Slide

He got two steps and stopped.

Our safeties were off. That comes first, because everything else came out of it. When the thing rose up out of the ash, rifles came up with it and safeties came off, and when Dodd gave his order nobody put one back on. I know I did not put mine back on.

For two seconds after he stopped, nothing happened. He was out in the middle of the draw with his back to us and his hands out at his sides, and it hung in front of him where it had been hanging for the past minute, the same blue, the same size.

Then it came apart.

It did not scatter and it did not fly up. It came apart into three of itself, and each of the three was the same size as the one it had come out of, which is not a thing fire does.

One of them went into Dodd. He was close to it, so it did not have far to go, and he went over backward with his shirt already burning. The other two came across the ground faster than a man can move his head and got Doc and got Keene, and then there were three men on fire in the wet grass in front of the rest of us.

Voss went down on her face in the grass and did not get up.

All three of them were screaming at once. Dodd rolled into the water and came up burning. Doc rolled. Keene got up and ran.

Men went at them anyway, with jackets and with a poncho and with their boots, and it did not put out one inch of what was on them, and it did not so much as take the grass. That lesson had already cost us the lieutenant that morning.

Keene had the radio and Keene was eighteen. He ran down the draw with the set burning on his back and his rifle in both hands, and the rifle was going off.

The first rounds went into the mud in front of his own boots and threw mud up over his knees. Then his muzzle climbed and walked across the draw and the next burst went through the party.

There had been two road engineers in that party that morning. One of them was under canvas in the green strip behind us. The other one was standing ten yards off my left, and he went down on his face in the water and did not move again. The rest of it cracked off the rock behind us and went off up the draw.

Everybody got flat. Chee was shouting at all of us to be quiet. He kept saying it, the same thing over and over, and it was a long way past the point where that was going to help anything.

I had my rifle up by then. I shot the three of them, one burst each, and after that the only noise left in that draw was the noise coming back off the walls.

The draw was narrow at the bottom and both walls of it were wet rock, and they answered. The sound came back off one wall and then off the other and then off the first one again, so that after the shooting stopped there was still shooting in that valley.

We had been told what noise would do in there. A shout might bring the hill down. A rifle shot would do it every time, and nobody had been exaggerating about that, and now the shots were in the draw with nowhere to go.

Then something came up off the bodies.

One out of each of the three, slow, blue, the size of a basketball. The fire on the men kept going. Inside each one was a bug, the same red shell Tank had turned out of the dirt on the end of his shovel, with something moving around inside it the way light moves on water.

Chee was the best shot in that party and it was not close. He had his rifle up before I did and he did not use the sights. He fired three times, one at each of them, and every round went through the middle of the blue and took the bug with it, and the blue went out where it hung. The fire on the men did not go out.

Then something cold touched me on the forehead.

I put a hand up and my fingers came back wet and gritty, and I looked at them, and then I looked up the draw, and the slope over us was moving. A quarter mile of hillside was coming down into the draw. Not a rock off the face of it — the whole wet face of it, coming down at once, like something being poured.

Chee said something. Tank said something. I did not hear either of them and I did not say anything at all.

Tank got Voss up off the ground and put her over his shoulder. He told me and Chee to get Delgado between us. Then he said, “Go,” and we went, because the bottom of that draw was the one place there was nowhere to go from.

We dropped everything. Packs, the survey gear, the cases, all of it went off our backs into the mud behind us. Nobody dropped a rifle.

Delgado had one arm over my shoulder and one over Chee’s and his boots were not doing much of the work. He did not say a word.

Halfway to the far wall, the wall opened. The shaking had done it, or the weight of the hill behind it. A seam in the rock, black, running down at an angle into the ground, wide enough for one man and not for two, with water going down into it. Chee went in first because he was on that side, I went in second with Delgado, Tank came last with Voss on his shoulder, and the slide came in behind us.

Two steps in, the floor went out from under us. It was a great deal steeper inside than it had looked from the outside, and it kept going down, and the five of us went down it in a heap, off one rock and off another one, and the last drop was longer than the others.

Above the mouth of it, something the size of a house came down and shut it. It threw grit in on us, and all five of us went into a coughing fit that went on until our eyes ran. Above us the noise went on for a long time, and then the noise stopped.

Nobody said anything for a long time after that. It was black in there. Not the black of a night — the black of a room with the door shut, and it had a ceiling to it, and water going somewhere below us, and I could hear Tank breathing.

Then Tank’s voice, from close by, flat.

“Hollis.”

I got enough wind back to make a sound at him, and that was all he needed.

“Chee.”

“Here,” Chee said.

“Delgado.”

Nothing came back. He asked again and got nothing back the second time either.

“Voss.”

Nothing. Then a click, and Chee’s light came on and went around the place we were in.

We were at the bottom of a hole in the rock with the ceiling a long way up and nothing that looked like a way out of it. Voss was sitting against the wall with her eyes open and her hands in her lap and nothing on her face at all. Delgado was on his side three feet from her with his eyes closed, and the shinbone of his left leg was out through the skin above the boot, white, with the muscle drawn back off it.