Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

the ground reached out to snatch at Boon’s foot. She jerked it away but looked down at the dying man.

“You know this ain’t no way to die,” he said. “You got to take care of this.”

“You mean kill you quick.”

“Do it.”

Boon grinned.

“No.”

We went into the mine. The night had seemed warm to me, probably due to the fire and the action, but only a few feet into the mouth of the mine it got cold. The timbers bracing the opening and the walls and ceiling, lit dimly by campfire and moonlight, looked like they were so much a part of the rock that they’d grown there like that a hundred thousand years ago. Iron and steel tracks started up a little further in, and I realized they probably kept going a ways out, only time and disuse had blown them over with dust and scrub. There was no telling how much ore they’d cut out of this hole, but it sure hadn’t done anything for making a man like Arthur Stanley worth half a damn. I had no illusions about either Boon or me being particularly good. Stanley, though, was pure damned evil through and through. Slaver, flesh peddler, killer. Worst of everything, how he’d done his own flesh and blood, not to mention Boonsri’s mama. Was she truly dead and gone? Boon seemed convinced of it, though I still couldn’t see why. Mayhap blood just knew.

My mind was wandering. We hadn’t gone very far, but without light we’d never get any farther. I started to say something about it when Boon struck a lucifer, the sulphur stinging my nostrils, and touched the flame to a lamp wick.

“How’d you find that?” I said.

“Lower your God damned voice,” she whispered, “and I see better than you in the dark, which you know perfectly damn well.”

She did, that was true. Truth was my eyes were starting to go. I’d wear spectacles like some back-east dude the same day it rained rye whiskey and the trees grew cash money instead of leaves. Didn’t matter. I had Boon.

“Come on,” she said, and we continued into the tunnel.

The campfire and all of the outside world gradually shrank to a pinprick behind us until the track dipped down and we were fully swallowed up into the dead mine’s throat. While I’d given heaps of thought to how it would feel hauling wealth out of a place like that, I had never much considered the finer mechanics of the thing. As such, I had no sense of how far or how deep it would go, or of anything in front of us. The walls seeped and sweated and there was a constant, arrhythmic drip, drip, dripping all around. Step by step the air grew colder, though oppressively dank and humid. Hard to breathe.

It was an awful place to be, sinking ever deeper into the tight darkness, and every second of it the panic was rising in me that the lowdown son of a bitch might already have done something terrible to poor little Meihui.

She was, I figured, a lot like Boon in a lot of ways. The biggest of those ways was that she was one who never caught a break, never got a bit of luck or the decency of love that a lot of folks presumed human beings deserved from the start. She was a sufferer like Boon, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that meant she would become a killer like Boon, too. If she survived.

If any of us did.

“Here,” Boon said, snapping me back from my thoughts. “It splits off.”

She raised the lamp and the flickering flame illuminated the tunnel, still descending slightly into the rock, but to the left, a new drift was cut with creaking lengths of wood forming an entrance into a new unknown. We stood still and silent for a moment, just listening. Nothing. Then she moved toward the branch tunnel, peering into the shadows.

“Let’s go,” she said.

I had no idea why she chose to explore the drift. I didn’t ask. We just went, same as the miners went some twenty-odd years earlier when a new vein was detected in the quartz. They’d have pounded out the quartz, blasting deeper and deeper into the rock, to truck it out to where the camp we’d infiltrated now stood, then crushed it all to powder with an arrastra or maybe that big old stamp mill to get at the color until they bled the vein dry.

Our task wasn’t altogether that different, really. Me and Boon, we’d been bleeding veins dry for years to get to that place under the world. Mayhap if we kept on long enough, far enough, Boon would end up back where she started in Siam, town of Korat, almost like none of this had ever happened at all. We could start us a farm together, people farmed everywhere you went, with livestock and rows and rows of whatever crops grew best there. Rice, maybe. Chinese seemed crazy about rice, so maybe the Siamese did, too. Suited me fine. So long as she and I were together, I’d break my back to do it.

Only there wasn’t any farm at the end of the drift. No Siam or town of Korat. Just a bedraggled old Englishman, his face dark with dirt and golden teeth shimmering in the lamplight. He looked every bit the wraith or goblin, some terrible dweller of the darkness, even without the cocked pistol he pressed against the young girl’s side.

Meihui’s eyes bulged, wet and pleading. None of us said one word for several long, dragging seconds. When that silence was finally broken, it was Stanley, of course.

“You really are something,” he said. “Maybe you’ve got a little bit of me in you, after all. The tenacity. I don’t think your mother had that. She was a follower. Meek. Weak, really. But you’re not weak, are you, Boonsri?”

She said, “I reckon not.”

“How many of my men have you killed? Just this night alone?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Really