James Axler – Cold Asylum

J.B. WOULD NEVER HAVE admitted to anyone, not even Ryan or Mildred, that he suffered from claustrophobia, but the truth was that he found any confined spaces extremely difficult to handle.

It dated back many years, before he met the Trader and Ryan Cawdor.

He’d been born in Cripple Creek in Colorado, a beautiful town that had boomed during the nineties with the legalization of gambling in the old mining township. A boom that was predictably followed by bust, not long before skydark, when that same legislation was repealed.

The hills around the township were littered with hundreds of old mine shafts. Since the long winters, many had been used by the ragtag collection of rad-sick survivors, countless numbers of them dying in those cold, barren caverns.

The young John Dix had been a great explorer, preferring his own company to that of the teenaged gangs around Cripple Creek. He knew that some of the mummified corpses in the tunnels had died with blasters in their possession. Even at the age of ten, J.B. had been fascinated by weaponry.

He’d taken to roaming for days on end, living off the land, exploring the more isolated diggings.

It had been called the Lucky Chance Mine. Boards across its entrance had been pulled down for burning, and the entire site had almost vanished under a rock slide. But there was a gap just big enough for a skinny little boy to wriggle through, his pocket oil lamp primed and ready.

At first it had looked like it was a deuce on the line. No signs of human habitation. J.B. had persevered and gone deeper into the winding passage.

At first he thought he was imagining it, holding the light higher, so that its flickering golden glow reached into the deeper shadows.

A cabin was built within the mine. Using the old props and timbers, the rickety roof actually held up the roof of the mine. As the boy had walked closer, the echo of his feet brought down a fine dust from the curved ceiling, a sure sign of serious danger of collapse.

There was a glider on the porch, its swing long rusted through. A dried corpse lay among the tattered rags of a blanket. J.B. had looked at it from a few yards off, seeing to his disappointment that there was no blaster around.

Moving as if he were treading on eggshells, he’d picked his way past the body, the lantern ahead of him, into the ramshackle hut, aware that even his light weight was making beams shift a little, creaking in protest, like a sleeper being pulled back to the light of morning.

There was a table with a couple of plates on it, both covered in a sheen of gray dust; a collapsed armchair and a fireplace, soot-blackened and empty; half a dozen empty bottles and a few cans, still silver-bright in the dry atmosphere.

And a double bunk bed in the far corner.

As the lad had stepped across toward it, he’d felt the floorboards shift, and somewhere there was a brittle, snapping sound.

But he’d seen the gun, glittering like a jewel in a pirate’s den. He’d recognized it immediately as a chromed Colt Cobra 1973, a 6-round double-action revolver that fired a solid .38 round. It had a snub-nose two-inch barrel, and J.B. reckoned he could get a handful of jack for it at the general trading store.

There was a bundle shape on the top bunk that he figured might well be the partner of the corpse out on the porch. Likely they’d both starved to death or succumbed to the long-term effects of rad sickness. He’d seen enough of that himself in the previous few years, hair loss and bleeding gums, and sores that spread to cover most of a person’s emaciated body.

He had moved like a frail ghost, setting one foot slowly down in front of the other, trying to ignore the ominous sounds of straining timbers and the fine dust that floated around the sheltered flame of the oil lamp.

As the boy knelt to pick up the gun, his hand brushing the checkered grips, the cabin collapsed. The ceiling gave way, bringing down part of the roof of the old mine shaft. The bunk bed folded over on top of J.B., knocking him to the floor, trapping him faceup, boulders and splintered wood confining him in a tiny cave.