Free The Journey Prize Stories 28 by Kate Cayley Page A

something sharp and hard
thunks
her steel-toe.
    The cage doors open suddenly, almost unexpectedly; light floods the cage. It’s always a nice feeling, Roxane thinks, when the cage hits the collar and you see sun through the windows. But today she worked the nightshift and the sun won’t be up before she finishes her drive home.
    The men pile out quicker than usual, leaving just Gloria and Roxane standing there, blinking. The floor is littered with wrenches and ratchet heads and a portable safety line—there’s even a roll of toilet paper, a muddy boot tread mashing up the tissue.
    â€œWhat the hell…?” Roxane mutters.
    Gloria’s laughing so hard he can barely say “There was no check! The stupid asses!”

    Roxane hates driving the loci alone on 4000 level because it’s where the fire started. It had been more than twenty years, but there were miners still working who remembered the two dead men’s faces, what they were like at The Miner’s Inn on Friday nights. There’s a plaque on the drift with the names and the date of the fire. The plaque always glints in Roxane’s headlamp when she drives the loci past, winking at her in the dark. Gloria told her a fire’s the worst thing that can happen in a mine. The smoke has nowhere to go when the power’s out and the fans aren’t working. This whole place breathes through a tiny little hole in the surface, he said, just like how you breathe out of tiny holes in your face. If the hole gets clogged, the whole body dies. There was nothing left of those two boys but their shadows on the rock.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” she had asked.
    â€œBranded into the rock,” he’d said again, “like at Hiroshima.”
    She still didn’t understand, but didn’t want to ask him again because he might have thought she didn’t believe him—or worse, that she was afraid.
    When she drives the loci by an intersection at a subdrift, the loci’s headlight shines down and carves the tunnel as deep as the light goes, but no farther. The darkness collapses behind her. Usually there’s always buzzing in the mine, the hissing of pneumatics and the hard tinny vibration of dieselengines rebounding off the walls, filling up the dark with sound. But the loci’s battery-powered and quiet except for the sound of the gliding wheels on the rails.
    Roxane sees a light up ahead, down the drift. It’s faint but too big to be a headlamp. She blows the horn. The light doesn’t move. She tries the horn again. She can’t stand the way the sound expands and fleshes out the drift, turning it into the ribbed gut of a bloated worm.
    Before she can break, the loci starts slowing on its own. Something underneath her feet feels different, the pull of the wheels gone slack. Then the loci’s headlights go out. The loci glides to a complete stop and Roxane’s left staring down the drift at the light in the distance—she’s sure they’re headlights now, a Kubota, probably.
    Son of a bitch
. Roxane switches on her headlamp and turns off the loci’s motor in case the battery kicks in again while she’s out looking for the Femco phone so she can call a mechanic. It’s the third time this month that the battery’s died on her. The last time she had to spend five hours waiting in the dark. When it happened to the other guys they just stretched back in the driver’s seat and slept like the dead, but Roxane had never been able to sleep underground.
    She jumps down onto the track, water spattering from her boots, and starts toward the light in the distance. The Kubota is empty but still running. Farther down the drift she sees the steel rails of a grizzly sitting overtop a dark patch on the ground that her headlamp won’t light up—it’s the chute where trainloads of ore are dumped. The grizzly stops all the really big muck from going down the hole and plugging the