“Easy,” Ryan said, raising his own ax as he stepped between Krysty and the guy. “We don’t want your ore.”
The slave scuttled past them with his bag, his back to the wall, feinting with short swings of his weapon. His arms and hands were a mass of barely healed cuts. There were deeper gashes across his forehead and cheeks. His trousers and shirt were slashed from glass edges; his spindly thighs were visible between the long tatters.
Ryan knew the looks of wild animals caught in traps or mortally wounded, awaiting death. He knew the looks of human beings as they faced that same terrible unknown. But what was in the slave’s eyes was something even more desperate, even more despairing. The man’s expression said that he knew his life wasn’t worth living, but he couldn’t let go of it yet.
As Ryan and Krysty moved deeper, the available light became nil, but their badges grew brighter, casting forty instead of twenty feet ahead of them.
“Wait,” Ryan said, stopping.
“I thought I heard something, too.”
It wasn’t the intermittent crying of the glass, which was something they had gotten used to, like the sound of the wind. This was the moan of a human being. And it was punctuated by the whack of an ax. Over and over again. Then came a crash of falling glass.
“Let’s take it slow,” Ryan said,
As they advanced, at the edge of their green circles of light, they could see a single dim figure. Moving forward, they caught the frantic rise and fall of the ax it was wielded two-handed. A slave was hacking away at the face of the right-hand wall. Puffs of glass dust exploded at every impact. Chunks of glass lay at his feet.
The slave turned to blink at their badge lights. His nose and mouth were uncovered, and snot swayed in long strands from his chin. His pupils were mere pinpoints. “You’ve got to help me get her out!” the man cried. “We’ve got to save her!”
With that, he returned to the wall, slamming his ax into it.
“Save who?” Ryan said as he and Krysty came closer.
“Hold on, honey,” the man cried as he reared back for another blow. “Hold on!” He was bleeding from deep cuts on his forearms and hands.
“Who is it?” Krysty asked him. “What is it?”
“My baby, she’s caught in there,” the man said. “Can’t you hear her calling me? Can’t you see her? Are you deaf? Are you blind?”
When the man lowered his ax, Ryan looked into the crude crater he had fashioned. Much deeper in the matrix was a dark, elongated shape. Something was entombed.
“That’s definitely not a baby, mister,” Ryan said. “It looks more like a big rock.”
Not understanding, perhaps not even hearing, the man rambled on, “Her name is Charla. She’s only four…she calls me Poppy Deary.”
Ryan shook his head.
“Idiots!” the man cried, and resumed smashing the wall with his ax. Foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth, and as he swung his tool, it flew in sticky streamers along his neck.
A big hunk of glass tumbled to the floor. From deep in the wall came a crying sound, shrill, quavery. It grew louder and louder.
Rearing back for another blow, the man said, “I’m coming, honey. I’ll save you!”
“Out of here!” Ryan told Krysty. “Now!” They turned to run back the way they had come. They got no more than a few strides before the ceiling and walls crashed down behind them. There was a rush of wind, and Ryan took the stinging blast of glass fragments on his back, protecting Krysty with his body.
When the dust cleared, they found the man partially buried in jumbled pieces of glass. His head was connected to his body by the slimmest of threads, a single strip of muscle and skin. His still jetting blood glistened black on the edges of the glass.
The cave-in had exposed the entombed object that had cost him his life.
It wasn’t a rock after all, but a dirty void, a nothingness. A gap left by a section of predark wooden log or telephone pole that the nukeheat had charred to ash.