Prologue
SUMMER 1939
The village of Heritage had been nestled on the southern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains ever since settlers first made their homes across North Carolina. Looking to live in the solitude and peace of the Appalachians, they were uncaring about the indigenous land they stole, and despite battles, Heritage remained. With a population of fewer than a hundred souls, its community lived off the grid. Its fields yielded an abundance of crops: apples, peaches, and a variety of berries, all of which thrived in rich soil. Every season was marked by the rhythm of planting, growing, and harvesting. The village drew its water from clear springs, as the people passed their skills of hunting, fishing, and foraging down through the generations, ensuring no one went hungry. It was a place of the old ways, respecting the mountain they lived on. The high rocks sheltered the village from the world beyond.
“Freakin’ yokels,” Henry Sawyer grumbled as he got into his rusted pickup, slamming the door behind him.
Having had no choice but to stop in this small village to ask for directions, he had been met with only vacant, unhelpful stares.
“They say where it is, boss?” a young voice from the driver’s seat asked.
Sawyer turned to Ed Oswald, the newest mining crew member, who sat fresh-faced and smiling behind the steering wheel. Sawyer hated that he had to travel with this kid and resented his perpetual joy—a trait he wished he could punch right out of him.
“Kid,” Sawyer said, “does my face look like I got the news I wanted? Am I smilin’? Do I look happy to you?”
Ed, barely nineteen, shrugged. “You look like you normally do, boss.” He gulped. “I… I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile, if I’m speakin’ plainly.”
Unable to contain a sudden grin, Sawyer’s rough beard parted, revealing a set of browning teeth behind cracked lips. “Well, you got me there. Let’s just continue up the track a way. Gotta be along here somewhere.”
“They didn’t help us to the caves at all?”
“Nope.” Sawyer shook his head. “And I told you already, stop callin’ ’em caves. They’re pits. Miners call ’em pits.”
“Sorry, boss, I forgot.”
The ride up the rocky track was precarious and slow going. Tools in the flatbed rattled loudly. Pickaxes, shovels, pans, hand-crank drills, sledgehammers, oil lamps, and a box of dynamite clanked and banged against the suspension of the old pickup.
As he drove, Ed didn’t say a word and just stared ahead with immense concentration etched on his face. Not only desperate to get them there in one piece—if they could ever find it—he also wanted to impress Sawyer. He needed to keep this job.
Ed’s uncle—one of the crew they were on their way to find—had vouched for his nephew to the company as a great driver and a hard worker. Something Ed knew was a big chance for him to be given. His uncle’s reputation was in Ed’s hands, and how he did was up to Sawyer.
Money was tight for Ed, of course. His family needed it. Since his father passed, Ed had been the sole breadwinner
for his sisters and mother. He had to step up, and this job promised more income than he could have got lugging coal or rolling paper at the mill. No, this was a chance he wouldn’t give up, nor one he would fail at. Too much was riding on it.
Sawyer, on the other hand, had no one to support, no family except the men on his crew, the men he knew and trusted. But he resented being stuck as the mentor to anyone this young. Not because he was a mean person, but because he had seen how new workers could end up. No matter how you teach someone to tie the rope or hold the pick, all new crew members were accident magnets.
Before Ed, in the last year alone, three new crewmen had been hired. Three young, happy, eager annoyances that all ended up the same: injured and having to quit. Mining wasn’t a safe job, especially when mining old, uncharted underground systems. But no matter what, each new job started with a new man waiting to be mentored, and it was Sawyer’s turn to teach him what to do so he didn’t get killed.
After an hour of slow driving, as the winding dirt track snaked up even higher, they reached a plateau as the track veered left into a large swathe of woodland.
“We’ll go as far as we can here or just make camp and walk it,” Sawyer said. He glanced at the sun that had begun its descent towards the horizon. “Won’t make it back down in the dark.”
“Hey, look!” Ed pointed ahead of them.
Up ahead, the tree line parted, and a makeshift campsite emerged from between the trees. Three other rusted pickups had been parked on one side.
“Well, halle-fuckin’-lujah,” Sawyer said.
The pickup rolled to a stop beside a small cluster of two-man tents sitting around a used firepit.
As Sawyer got out of the truck, he surveyed the site with a sense of unease. “Check those tents. I’ll start unloadin’.”
After closing the driver’s door quietly, Ed obediently walked over to the tents. At each one, he unbuttoned the flaps and peered
inside, expecting to find the crew asleep. But he found only empty cots.
As Sawyer carried a crate of pans from his pickup to where other tools had been left, he noticed the burnt-out fire in the centre of the camp. He moved over to it, crouched, then held his hand over the blackened wood. His weathered face creased with concern; the fire had been out for some time.
“This ain’t right,” he muttered, scanning the area.
“Nothin’ in the tents over here,” Ed said, walking to Sawyer. “Ya think they gotta be off down the pit?”
“Not now, no.” Sawyer scrunched his brows. “We all start early and always end early. Always. No exceptions.”
“How come?” Ed asked. “Not like you can see the daylight down there.”
“’Cos pits change at night,” Sawyer explained matter-of-factly. “Dunno how, but they always do. Like the dark outside brings new dangers down there. No digger stays past sundown. It’s unspoken but always followed.”
“Unless they found something good, I guess?” Ed added, hopeful.
Sawyer sighed. “Sure, I guess,” he said, though he didn’t believe a word.
In all his years as a digger for the Eastern Mining Corporation, he had never seen a big find on any of their scouting trips. Their job was to go around the country, finding cave systems that may still have some remnants of gold in them. And if they had them, they would call it in for a proper digging excavation.
The only issue was that most underground systems had been stripped bare decades before.
Finding a brand-new cave was rare. Finding one with an abundance of riches inside was even rarer. The most they could hope to find were small nuggets of gold they could excavate and bring in themselves. But these caves, though unofficially charted, must have been dug out.
As a crew, they had been scout-mining over the Appalachians for nearly a year. Each cave they were sent to was allegedly untapped.
But every time, it had been stripped clean long ago. And this was the last section of caves they’d been hired to check out. For the whole year, the sum of their efforts was collapsed tunnels and broken bones. There was no gold. Just weakened caves that required extra care to traverse.
“What do we do now?” Ed asked.
“We wait.”
* * *
The night brought with it a cold that made sleep difficult for Ed. With Sawyer in his tent, snoring loudly, Ed woke up after hours of frozen restlessness and decided to sit by the campfire.
None of their crew had returned in the hours since they made camp, and despite Sawyer’s gruff insistence that all would be fine, Ed was still very worried. Intuition scraped his mind that something had gone wrong.
In the tent, still dressed in his dirty overalls, Sawyer was dreaming of what he always dreamt of: mining. It’s all he knew and all he ever did. That, and drinking. He had no time for love, or travel, or family. He was content to dig until the day he keeled over dead. But tonight, his dreams were ripped away as a shattering cry ricocheted from outside.
“Help!” Ed screamed from the far side of the camp.
Sawyer lurched upward, violently awoken. Scrambling out of the tent, he struggled to focus in the darkness. As he tried to discern where the scream had come from, Ed appeared by the tree line holding a lit lantern.
“I need help!”
Rushing over, Sawyer saw what had caused Ed to yell out. A man was slumped against a tree, broken, coughing up blood as he
tried to breathe.
This man, dressed in torn overalls, was caked in blood, mud, and filth. His skin was stained by a murky redness. Ragged wounds marred his body—and deep gashes that oozed almost-black in a slow, pulsing rhythm. His breathing was shallow and hitched. His wide eyes were pale, terrified, catatonic, staring ahead at nothing, glazed over with shock.
Despite the state of this man, Sawyer recognised him easily. Chuck Barnecki. The crew’s pit leader.
“Chuck, what happened?” Sawyer said, and his voice shook as he crouched beside the man. “Where’s everyone?”
Ed couldn’t contain his panicked tears. He had never seen injuries like this.
“Chuck!” Sawyer screamed louder.
But still no reply.
He noticed the gouge across the man’s stomach, a wound so large and deep he could see his glistening intestines poking out.
Before anyone could retch at the grotesque sight, before anyone could run to find some help in the small village down the mountain, before Sawyer could reassure Ed that everything would be okay, Chuck spoke his final words.
“I left ’em down there,” he spluttered as his face contorted in torment. “God forgive me. I left ’em. They screamed. They screamed so loud.”
The light in Chuck’s eyes flickered as he took his last ragged breath.
Sawyer stared down at his lifeless body.
“No, no, no,” Ed wailed. “This can’t be happening.”
Sawyer couldn’t allow Ed to be consumed by his fear. He had to find his crew, and he needed Ed’s help to do it.
* * *
proved easy. A hundred yards from the campsite, a large hole opened wide at the base of a high rock face, giving way to a dark cave system below.
A series of ropes crawled out from the darkness and led to a set of iron pitons that had been hammered into the dirt. Each rope that trailed downward had been knotted around its own piton.
Ed stood behind Sawyer, barely able to talk. Images of Chuck spun in his head like a nightmarish carousel.
Sawyer stared down at the ropes with grim resolve. Carrying his hard hat in one hand, a pickaxe in the other, and a lit oil lamp hanging from his belt, he spoke without turning to Ed. “You wanna help your uncle, right? No time to cry or be scared. You got me? Especially down there. That asshole, Chuck, must’ve left them trapped.” He gritted his teeth. “We never leave anyone. Ever.”
“But what did that to him?” Ed bawled, unable to control his emotions. “His belly… It was—”
“I told you pits ain’t good after sundown.”
He stepped forward, the cave’s entrance opening in front of him. He knew full well that night was still very much upon them, and that any danger he spoke of was still very much present.
“If ya finished your tears, grab any rope ya want,” Sawyer said, motioning to the ones fixed to the pitons. “You know what to do… you’ve done it before. And don’t think of Chuck. Just think of your uncle waitin’ for us down there. How happy he’ll be that we came after him.”
* * *
It was the smell that hit them first: a mix of decay, damp earth, and something more pungent. Something that clawed at their instincts, telling them to turn and run. But Sawyer, wearing his miner’s helmet—complete with his name painted in large black letters on the front—ignored the smell, ...
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