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“While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases."
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
-Vincente Blasco Ibáñez, 1916
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Chapter One
The Ascent
Air in the room felt stale to Patrick, recycled even. Dust from the crushed rock around them polluted his sinuses. Chalky particles lingered in the stagnant air, suffocating with a chalk-like taste. At least, the room was cool, being a good distance underground. If they could just get the circulation going, the two month stint in their subterranean abode wouldn’t have been too terrible.
Patrick slept on a matted pile of dirty clothes and trash. Which offered little comfort from the unforgiving rock that lay just beneath it. Comfort? Patrick almost laughed at the thought. This place was a refuge. Their only lifeboat. And it was half-inflated, at best.
Considering his own analogy, he pictured the survivors of the Titanic, scrambling for what few lifeboats there were. Patrick wouldn’t have thought it possible, but even while imagining the people who did make it to life boats, only to float aimlessly in freezing temperatures, he’d prefer those odds. Because the situation he now found himself in, felt more hopeless than being adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.
They, at least, got some fresh air.
Patrick had planned to shave his auburn beard before all this happened – Hell, at least change his shirt that Mark yakked tequila down the back of while Patrick carried the slightly conscious birthday boy from the nearby shantytown, and back to their barracks, just a mile away. However helpful the full beard was during the logging season up in Canada, the same did not apply to working a good mine in Colombia.
An internationally funded, Canadian based corporation, All Source, had mined, cut down, and sucked up, most natural resources around the globe. In light of recent cave-ins at their mining sites, All Source constructed several fortified, ventilated, and stockpiled, safe rooms. Each of which could sustain a fifteen man crew for two weeks – assuming the management found the project to be worth salvaging.
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An open freight elevator shaft jarred awake with a metallic whirring - someone was operating the machine from above.
Thomas Gates and the other two soldiers of fortune went to the surface regularly, trying to time and coordinate their escape plan. Patrick often wondered exactly how it was that Gates was put in command of a highly respected, and often feared, mercenary group. That couldn’t have been an easy position to claim. Regardless, the other two men operated under him without question - prepared to follow their Captain to Hell and back. And in fact, so far, they had.
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“Pat, you think we go today?” asked Mark, the youngest of the survivors. Which was even despite him having just had his birthday two months ago – evidence of the tequila laden celebration had crusted down Patrick’s back.
“Don’t ask me.” Patrick said as he creased a page in the western paperback he had read a dozen times before. Three such times, he read aloud, to his son.
Mark continued to look at Patrick, hoping he’d offer more of an answer. If even just to speculate.
The kid had taken to Patrick like an eager puppy dog to an old one, too tired to get up and find peace and quiet elsewhere. Which was not to say Patrick didn’t want anything to do with him. In fact, quite the opposite.
Mark’s father, Joey, was a mix of crocodile Dundee, Russell Crow, and an “after” picture of what years in jail, and meth for breakfast each morning, would do to someone. Bastard barely acknowledged Mark as his son.
“Ooh-kayy,” Patrick drew out his words, unsure of what Mark expected from him, “Tom said it hasn’t been clear in a while.
“Yea.” Mark said softly, nodding as if to say, oh right-good point.
“But he did say they’re moving in crowds now.” Patrick added. Neither of them paying this remark the attention that it deserved.
“Want some chocolate? Tom said to load up on calories-” Mark started.
“Tom said, pff!” Joey, mocked his son’s words from across the room, his accent was approaching incoherence to those who were unfamiliar to the dialect, “same bloke says lets hide in a hole-”
“Dad!” Mark snapped back at his father, surprising even himself.
Taken aback, by the rare, and unexpected confrontation, Joey was momentarily derailed. The outburst also woke Paul from a labored sleep, but he laid still, as though it hadn’t. If Joey’s short temper flared up, which it did more often than not, Paul wanted no part in it.
Joey scoffed loudly at the comment, but no one paid him the attention he wanted. Save for Patrick’s imperceptible shake of his head, tired of his shit. Maybe snacking on a baseball bat could straighten him out.
“I’m hoping Tom says the coast-is-clear and we finally make for the airstrip.” Paul gave up trying to act asleep. and got to his feet brushing the dirt from his knees.
Since day one at the mining site, Paul’s British accent and its delicate inflections made him seem very out of place. He had the slight presence and the fragility of a Hugh Grant, just not as charmingly befuddled all the time. His wiry frame didn’t help his image either. Nor did the disheveled comb-over, or the shirt that looked like dirty laundry draped over a thin hanger.
Mark stood against a rock wall of the well-lit, cavernous room. His ankles were crossed and he was tossing a water bottle, up and down, flipping it end over end.
“I just hope if we’re going, he gives me the fuckin’ gun he’s been teaching me how to use.” Mark said to no one in particular, eyes on the bottle, holding his eyebrows high on his forehead.
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They all watched the open freight elevator shaft, its anatomy of swaying steel cables and sliding counter-weights, completely exposed.
Patrick’s right hand involuntarily reached to the stubble on his face. His hand pulled rhythmically at his jawline as though trying to gather the hairs at his chin. Were they to actually believe that knowing when they’d make a run for the airstrip, relieve some tension? He had supposed so. But as the elevator banged to a stop, he realized that his naivetè failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. This would, most likely, come back to punch his front teeth in.
The heavy gate door separated along a horizontal line and both halves slid from view.
Three full figures of black tactical gear stepped out from the elevator. Each carried an M4 assault rifle, pistols bobbed on their hips as they walked. Two of them broke off in different directions. The third, approached the group of survivors. All of whom, except Joey, collected around the man.
Patrick had never seen a person so military-bred and symmetrical as the mercenary commando. He wasn’t too large of a man, and he didn’t have bulging biceps, but it was somehow apparent that he was a very capable man. Thomas Gates had a presence, even while at ease, that was both precisely measured and intimidating - he was authority.
“We’re going, aren’t we?” Paul blurted out almost immediately. His shoulders were squared to Gates, but his eyes tracked the other two soldiers. Neither of them had relieved themselves of their rifles, and they were both already doing their methodical equipment checks.
Gates nodded slowly as he gave the survivors the answer they’d hoped for. He curled his lips inward and grabbed at each of his shoulder straps with his thumbs. He let his elbows drape over the rifle pressed to his chest. Gates rotated just his upper-torso, turning to check on his men. Satisfied they were gearing up, he came back around and righted himself to face the survivors.
Everyone had been waiting for weeks to finally hear that the soldiers were confident enough to head for the airstrip, and it was a relief when the anticipation had finally lifted. However, the relief quickly dissolved into a myriad of feelings much darker and tortuous than anticipation.
“We don’t know what kind of a time frame we are working with, so,” the emphasis Gates put into the So, drew everyone’s attention. It said, this is what the plan will be. “Sheldon and Lanier are going topside first. We wait for a sit rep from them, if it’s clear, we all head up, and then we move. And we move fast.”
Gates raised his right arm straight out in front of him. Then, bending at the elbow, he made three more chopping motions in different directions to demonstrate a compass rose relative to the world above, “North. East. South. West.”. It was the best he could do to orient the group. He made a fifth chop with an open, vertical palm, “we move East, Southeast for the tree line.”
When Gates had finished the rest of his brief, the group went into a questioning frenzy. The room could’ve passed for a press conference at the White House. It was just as frantic and almost as unproductive. Patrick had no time for the Q and A. He knew where the airstrip was, and he knew how to move with military units.
Patrick had spent a few years as a battlefield correspondent in the SpecialActivitiesDivision of The Defense Intelligence Agency. At least, that was his official cover story when he was stationed in Yemen, and South Sudan, during the early two thousands. He was, instead, an operator within the infamous, JSOC, rightly known as, The Ninja’s.
Patrick went straight for his backpack. He grabbed a strap and hoisted it up onto a pallet of water bottles. Patrick took the Colt 1911 out from one pocket of his bag, and his last fully loaded magazine from another. The spare he had only held four more rounds. He slid the fully-loaded magazine into the pistol grip with a metallic grind until it clicked in place.
When everyone was aboard the elevator, Gates flipped a lever that was comically similar to the one which Dr. Frankenstein used to create his monster. Gears whirled, steel cables pulled taught, and the metal cage lurched upward.
This was it.
They’d been so impatient to leave the mine. But now, that they were thinking about the horrors awaiting them on the surface, each of them wanted to liquefy and seep back down through the earth. They wanted to burrow themselves into the sanctuary they had just left behind.
Only the soldiers had ridden the elevator since they all used it to escape weeks earlier. But, Patrick could still see the grated-metal door teeming with clawing, misshapen hands. Bloody, splintered fingernails had bits of flesh stuck under them - whether they were a result of defensive wounds, or from the evisceration of victims, Patrick couldn’t be sure. Either way, their elongated, bone thin, and talon-like fingers sought purchase deep within soft flesh.
There had also been the smell, like defecation and rot. In a way, the clouds of cordite from the gun fire acted the same as lighting a match in the bathroom after Taco Tuesday. At the spark, a chemical reaction would occur that would sting the nostrils and mask the stench.
Just before reaching the surface, Patrick searched for Mark in the crowded elevator. The kid was probably scared shitless. But when he saw Mark, and they made eye contact, Patrick saw something other than fear on the kids face. Well, there was fear, just not as much as Patrick assumed there would be. Instead, Mark held a pistol vertically, pulled the slide back and held it. The maniacal look he gave was almost a, how fucking badass is this!? Mark released the slide, readying the weapon Gates had apparently decided to give him.
Between the top of the elevator and the edge of the first floor, slivers of sunlight breached the grated elevator doors. It washed over the survivors like a warm shower on a winter’s morning. This created a fleeting illusion of everything being bright and alright – that was, until the world began to reveal itself as though it were a large picture frame being lowered in front of them. They were back inside the mining facility – back inside the recurring nightmares each of them had suffered through for weeks – back inside the hollow metal room and the decomposing carnage that it housed.
Chains clamored along a track as the gate opened like a mouth of heavy metal. It had presented the survivors to a new, and harshly unwelcoming reality.
Thomas Gates moved swiftly from the elevator and with purpose, heading for his men at the exit. Patrick watched the man as he chose each step carefully, though indifferent to the morbid obstacles. The floor was littered with bodies and twisted limbs, many of which were not attached to one another. Any space to step between the bodies was blood-stained and sprinkled with brass shell casings.
A sharp whistle from across the room snapped the survivors from their bewildered trance. Gates made quick hand gestures to signal them over. He was only a few dozen yards away, but the expanse of gore and mutilation that lay between them, seemed to stretch on for the horizon.
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