Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 42549 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 213(@200wpm)___ 170(@250wpm)___ 142(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 42549 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 213(@200wpm)___ 170(@250wpm)___ 142(@300wpm)
“Stop,” Boonie said.
I shook my head.
“Your hair is full of pine needles,” he added quietly. “Let me fix it. Otherwise you’ll catch shit.”
Crap. He caught my shoulders and turned me around, fingers combing through my hair. The touch sent shivers running down my spine. I wanted to lean back into him, to feel him wrap his arms around me.
Instead I waited for him to finish then started down the hill.
“Erin, I’m headed down,’’ I called, glancing back at him. “Wait for me and I’ll be right there.”
Boonie watched as I left, making no move to follow. That was different, too. We’d fought with each other as much as we’d played through the years, but more often than not it’d been us against the world—I was used to having him at my back. That boy was gone now. He’d turned into someone else. Someone hard and fierce and maybe even a little scary.
I wanted him to kiss me again. Desperately.
Erin started babbling about the eighth-grade graduation dance when I reached her, oblivious to the world-shaking events that’d taken place farther up the slope. I followed her down the hill to the road and we started walking along the gravel toward the trailer park.
“Everyone else already went home,” she declared. “It took me forever to find you. What were you doing?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t have five bucks. I couldn’t let Boonie find me.”
“Whatever,” she replied, and I wondered if she’d even been listening. Probably not. She never did. That usually pissed me off but today it was exactly what I needed.
It was just after five when we slid through the ancient wooden fence surrounding Six Mile Gulch trailer park, which was missing at least half its boards. My dad would be zoned out in front of the TV with his beer and Mom was working swing shift at the grocery store. That gave me plenty of time to get dinner started on a normal night.
But as soon as we reached the central dirt driveway I realized this wasn’t a normal night.
My steps faltered as I took in the clumps of anxious, upset adults. Some of them were crying. Children sat on steps, watching with wide eyes. Over at the Blackthorne place, Granny Aurora stood on the porch looking lost. I’d never seen her like that—usually she was the rock holding all of us together, always ready with a hot cookie and a cold glass of milk. My stomach sank. This was bad. Really bad. Fear and something worse hung in the air.
“What’s going on?” Erin asked, her voice wavering. Shanda ran over to us, her face smeared with streaks of black mascara.
“Have you seen Boonie?” she asked breathlessly.
“He’s probably right behind us,” I told her, ignoring Erin’s sharp look. “What happened?”
“There’s a fire at the silver mine—it’s bad. Real bad.”
“That’s impossible,’’ I said, confused. “It’s solid rock down there. What could be burning?”
“Nobody knows, but it’s definitely on fire. Boonie’s stepdad was underground today. So were Jim Heller, Pete Glisson, and Buck Blackthorne. We need to find Boonie and get him up there because his mom’s lost her shit. Nobody knows if they got out or not.”
Oh crap. Boonie’s mom had gone downhill over the years. Not that his stepdad was that hot, but Candy Gilpin was a basket case on a good day. In a genuine crisis she’d be uncontrollable. Like, shooting at people uncontrollable.
“Fuck,” I whispered, running across the dusty ground to my place. Tossing my backpack on the porch, I grabbed my bike and pedaled down the driveway and out onto the road. Boonie couldn’t be that far behind, could he?
Two minutes later I saw him, looking more like a man than a boy as he walked toward me. My bike skidded to a stop so hard I nearly crashed.
“What the fuck?”
“The mine,” I gasped. “There’s a fire at the Laughing Tess. Your stepdad’s underground and your mom needs you.”
Boonie’s face paled and I started to climb off my bike, planning to give it to him. He was already off and running. That’s when I happened to glance up at the sky and I saw it.
A pillar of thick, black, oily-looking smoke was rising slowly, over the ridge.
Holy shit. What the hell had happened down there, half a mile underground in the darkness?
________
Funny how we turn disasters into dry, sterile numbers.
Three. That’s how many days it took for the fire to burn out. Sixty-six. That’s how many self-rescuing breathing devices failed because they hadn’t been repaired or replaced on schedule. Eighty-nine men died, most within the first hour. Some were found sitting in front of open lunch boxes—that’s how fast the smoke took them out.
And then there was the worst number of all. Two hundred fourteen. Two hundred and fourteen children lost their fathers that day. One of them wasn’t born until months after the last funeral.