We drove past the Keller Mining Company without stopping. The plant entrance was closed, and there were guards posted behind the sliding chain-link fence gates. They were wearing riot helmets and Kevlar vests, and they weren’t doing anything but standing and staring through the gate. The employee parking lot behind them was a vast, empty concrete field.
Chuck craned his head around and watched the entrance recede into the distance. The guard’s heads did not turn to track us as we passed.
“The actual quarries are on the other side of the cutting houses where the slabs are finished. Most places just cut the stone out of the ground and ship it, but we finish it here at the plant. Countertops, pavers, steps, pretty much anything that can be pre-cut and shipped. We don’t sell the raw stone.”
“We? You work there?”
“Yeah. Pretty much everyone goes right from high school to the plant. Not much else out here, especially not if you want a living wage. I work on the pumps and shit that supply water to the gang saws and the thermalling gear. It’s not too bad. I pay my bills and I still have all my fingers. Can’t ask for more than that.” He stuck his arm between the seats and pointed. “Pull off the road over here. We can hike back behind the plant and get into the quarries that way.”
We swayed in unison as the Rover bounced off the raised asphalt onto the low scrub that dominated the landscape. Scraping and squeaking filled the cabin as I drove over the tough, woody bushes.
Everything was greener than I had expected out here in the dry western flatlands, with ankle-high weeds and low trees with wide, fat canopies. I put the largest tree between the truck and the highway, but it ended up looking more like a picnic scene than camouflage.
We got out of the car and dug through our gear for weapons. Chuck threaded a black nylon hip holster through his belt and dropped in his Taurus. He also stuffed an extra clip into the back pocket of his jeans. Anne unrolled Dominic’s blanket and pulled out the drum-fed shotgun that he had given her.
Chuck whistled appreciatively. “Goddamn, lady. Where the hell did that come from?”
“An admirer. The store was out of flowers.”
“Nice.”
I belted on my.45, freshly supplied with ammo thanks again to Dominic, and then strapped on my steel baton. Of the two weapons, I felt a lot better about the baton.
We crunched across the flat prairie while wind flattened the grass around us in sporadic waves and whipped the tree branches into a frenzy. The ground dipped into a shallow gully that looked like it might have been a creek in years past. On the far side of it stood a long stretch of chain-link fence.
Through the fence we could see the back of a tall, corrugated metal building. Acetylene bottles were racked neatly in ten-foot cradles behind the building, and cigarette butts littered the ground around a metal door with a single dusty pane of glass set at head height. A metal “No Smoking” sign was bolted to the wall directly over the butts. Black ash marks on the face of it showed where blue-collar rebels had crushed out their cigarettes on it.
Chuck gestured. “This is the back of the shop where we work on busted equipment. The quarries are about half a mile that way.”
We kept following the fence. On the other side, the buildings gave way to a vast open area with rutted gravel tracks running between the plant and the quarry area. A few hundred yards later the tracks curved away from us, leaving nothing to see but scrub and the skeletal tops of the block cranes in the distance. We stopped when the first stacks of stone slabs appeared.
Chuck spit and hitched up his pants. “This is Site Two. Number One is further in. I don’t suppose anyone has a pair of bolt cutters hidden in their pockets?” The fence was twelve feet high with a barbed wire cap that angled outward at the top.
“Electrified?”
Chuck shook his head. I touched it briefly with the back of my hand just to make sure, but it was fine. I squatted down and put my fingers through the bottom edge of the fence and bunched the lowest six inches of it up in my fists.
I used to do this kind of thing all the time to impress Maggie, or as she liked to point out, impress myself. I stopped years ago when everything went gray and I let my life seep away, but now I felt the old urge tugging at my cheeks and making me smile. I glanced over at Anne to see if she was watching. She was.
I squeezed hard, twisted, and pulled. The metal strands ground together in my fists and then sheared apart. I kept a straight face as I glanced up, but her wide-eyed look of amazement made me want to laugh out loud.
Chuck stepped back, but he didn’t draw on me this time. “That’s fucked up. I sure hope you really are on our side.”
“Our side?”
“You know, people. Normal people.”
“Chuck, if you think you’re normal, I have some bad news for you.”
To his credit, he grinned. “I guess that’s true.”
I moved up a few inches and repeated the process until there was a ragged tear in the fence about five feet high, and then I stretched the edges apart so that we could slip through without getting snagged on the sharp bits.
Quarry Two was frozen in mid-stride, like any other mining or construction project between shifts. The pit itself was an enormous three-sided box, with the open side a ramp that allowed vehicle access to the back wall where most of the cutting took place.
All three sides were solid stone with flat faces with sunken geometrical sections missing out of them. Slabs were cut from the top down, leaving a weird saw-toothed shelf marking the current level of progress.
Two cranes stood silently dangling chains high over the pit, while arcane heavy equipment slept haphazardly around them. It was strange to me, like being backstage at an industrial magic show.
Chuck led us around the excavation area. “This is the active site. Quarry One is a little farther that way, it was shut down about ten years ago.”
“Why do they abandon them?” asked Anne while we crunched along on the gravel road.
“Impurities, mostly. We have feldspar out here, which is good as long as it’s fairly regular in the granite, but big veins of it don’t work for us, so they’ll dig a new pit to get back to saleable stone. Doesn’t happen very often, though. You can run a quarry for twenty or thirty years. Quarry One started in the late seventies and ran through about ninety-six or so. That was all before my time.”
We hiked about half a mile before spotting more crane masts, this time brown and scabby with rust. A low hill squatted between us and the bottoms of the cranes.
“Shh.” I stopped and listened. I could hear an engine in the distance, and the faint roar of tires running through low grass and gravel. “Sounds like there’s a security patrol driving around back here, so let’s see if we can get out of the open.”
We ran to the hill, which was dotted with large shrubs and small trees, as well as several large irregular chunks of stone.
The growling of the tires grew louder, then stopped. A few seconds later, the engine died and car doors slammed. I jumped a little. The sound was shockingly close.
Weeds scraped at my neck and chin as I belly crawled up the face of the steep hill, the motion as easy and familiar to me as it had been nearly seventy years ago in the field in Europe. I peered down over the top, hidden by grass and head-sized rocks.
Close to the base of the hill was a large police van with the back doors gaping open. Six uniformed figures stood perfectly still next to it. They were stout, with big guts and big chests blending into one massive barrel with tree-stump legs and gorilla arms. Black armored vests made them look even larger. They all wore riot helmets with tinted face shields pulled down.
I frowned and looked harder at the cops. I figured that Piotr would have been running an all-bag crew, but never in my life had I seen bags standing perfectly still like that. Scratch that, the one in the diner had been eerily still, too. And the guards out in front of the plant. Were these something different? Or did they just act differently? This was a really shitty time to find out that I didn’t know as much about the other side as I thought I did.
The van was parked at the edge of the old quarry, a huge square stone pool half the size of a football field. The granite had been mined from the face of a tall hill, easily a hundred feet higher than the surrounding terrain, and a good fifty feet below it.
A rectangle of stone and earth was missing from the ground, cutting the hill in half and leaving a deep green lake in front of the sheared-off vertical face, like a giant’s swimming pool with a granite cliff on one side and a downward sloping ramp on the other side leading into the water.
The left and right sides of the pool were flush with the ground, with the water lapping a little less than two feet below the edge.
The top of the hill had been leveled, and two massive metal crane arms sprouted out of the flat stone top. They appeared to have been bolted directly into the granite. One of them was still tall and comparatively slender, though dark brown and pitted with rust, while the other was broken about halfway up with the top half pointing down towards the water, looking for all the world like a broken fishing pole.
A long metal shack stood behind the two cranes. Occasional gusts of wind rippled the glassy surface of the opaque water. Even in the wan, cloud filtered sunlight the emerald water and cut stone had a stark and elemental beauty.
The unmistakable roar of a diesel bus drew my attention to the gravel road leading up to the pit. Air brakes hissed as the long steel carapace of a prison bus pulled up next to the lake. There was movement behind the barred windows.
The front doors jerked open and another armored guard emerged, followed by a stream of handcuffed men, one after another, until maybe twenty of them stood in frightened knot. A second guard exited the bus, and between the two of them, they began herding the prisoners towards the quarry. They didn’t speak. Instead, they simply pointed and the men started stumbling forward.
Anne and Chuck had eased up on either side of me to watch. Anne’s breath tickled my ear as she leaned close and whispered, “You think this is the first busload?”
“Probably. I think those giant bags just got here.”
“If this is where the Mother is, I’m guessing that those men are about to become a fresh batch of bags.”
“Not if we can help it.”
The police van by the edge of the quarry swayed a little, and someone emerged from the back. The top of his white cowboy hat obscured his face as he stepped down. As he straightened up, the wind snatched the hat off his head and ruffled his wispy white hair. He smiled with good humor as his hat tumbled and skidded away from him.
It was Piotr.