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uckled; he could hardly take a step like some newborn pony on spindly legs. “Hold on to me; I’ve gotcha, Tim,
me boy.”
“Feels like I picked up something, Francis. Got no time for this. No time for sickness.”
“You’re nose is bleedin’, Tim—gushin’ it is.”
“Get me to the surface, now!”
McAffey’s ears began to bleed now, but in the darkness, O’Toole didn’t notice. “Never been sick a day in
your life, Tim, so what’s this?” he asked, but McAffey could not form words. Blood strangled any attempt to
speak or to breathe. Halfway up the lit elevator shaft, Superintendent McAffey died in O’Toole’s arms, his eyes
first imploring as if to ask why and then going absolutely blank. As if a shadow was crossing over his brow and
eyes—a gray-greeness turning to sienna. Yes, in the eyes. Francis, distracted, paid little heed to this. He was too
busy trying to forgive himself for his first thought—I’m sure to be promoted to McAffey’s job…make more
money.
The lift platform creaked and bumped its way toward the surface.
By this time, under the elevator light, O’Toole watched McAffey’s body turn into a stiff, brown-skinned
mummy. Francis knew that Tim had died a terrible death. A death which left his body looking like a brittle
ancient unwrapped mummy, yet despite the bizarre desert-like dry condition of the body, a strange odor emanated
from every orifice, an odor Francis could not place at first until he thought of Hades as it must surely be the odor
of fire and brimstone and sulfur.
Francis knew also that he was himself feeling ill and far from normal.
And this terrified him.
He feared whatever had destroyed Tim McAffey before his eyes; feared it was no doubt now inside him,
infecting him. He hadn’t time to feel guilty over his earlier thought of taking charge—finally—as mine
superintendent. His hand went for his pocket, and he grasped the saber-tooth cradled there and cursed it. He
knew, like McAffey, that he was on his own way to a horrible death, and it had to do with handling that beast he’d
left below in the mine, all save the damnable fang.
He recalled having first tapped the damned thing with his pipe; recalled how they both had dug it from the
wall, how they’d both tugged at it with their gloved hands, exerting themselves, breathing heavily as they worked.
He thought of Tim’s fateful decision to remove it rather than call in the experts from a local university to give it a
name—whatever the hell it might be.
Francis felt a stirring in his body like a foreign emotion. He tightened his fingers around the overlarge tooth
resting in his palm now and squeezed until the tooth bit into his flesh. He did so just to feel something other than
the numbing fear overtaking him. Something suggested that while he had no future, that he would live longer than
McAffey had; that whatever this was, it had fed on Tim like a starved dog over a piece of meat, but that it would
take its time with Francis O’Toole who had made the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Mistake was goin’ back into the mine the second time…being human—of caring, of doing me best to help Tim
to the surface air he craved in his last moments.”
Whatever had killed Tim, he feared now may well have spread to his body, but what in God’s name had killed
Tim? It’d all happened so fast. One moment good old Tim’s feeling nauseous and begging for air—to get to the
surface—and the next moment, he’s gone! Just like that!
But Tim McAffey calling for the surface and the air like he did, pleading like a frightened child—that was so
unlike Tim; didn’t seem like Tim at all. Tim’s appearance, so changed, his skin resembling beef jerky, leather to the
touch, like some ancient Egyptian. What did it all mean? What did it herald? Something Old Testament? A plague?
Could there be any disease that could kill a man so fast and so surely as this? If so, O’Toole had never seen it nor
heard of it. Not even the dreaded smallpox could take a man so fast and do such hideous things to the body.
It’d been a swift end for Tim.
“If I’ve picked it up, I should be dead as well,” he ciphered aloud, “or shortly now sure. Yet I’ve me legs—a
bit stiff, to be sure, but I-I feel fine,” he tried reassuring himself.
However, deep within, he felt an overwhelming fear that this disease, whatever it was—some new strain of
malaria, smallpox, the bubonic plague, whatever—it was beginning to sap his strength and resolve. Still, Francis
fought it, suddenly as anxious for topside air as Tim had begged for—that and the company of men.
Air I m-must find…find air, said his mind. Survive I must, came a second voice in his head, yet so real.