His legs had gone numb. Knowing the lack of feeling meant nothing good, he nonetheless enjoyed his respite from pain. His head, though, was another matter entirely. He could feel every millimeter of the gash on his scalp, like some Cherokee warrior had done a half-assed job collecting his trophy. To distract himself, Cyrus fidgeted with the Zippo, turning it over and over in his palm like some addict’s version of a rosary.
The silence of his tomb, a blessing at first, had grown more maddening than mollifying. Absent the thunder of the continuous miner and the rattle of conveyors straining to carry that cursed rock to the surface, Cyrus’s mind was too at liberty to reflect. The past, crisp as freshly ironed linens and pungent as death, scratched and clawed its way to the forefront of his mind. Voices long dead seemed to seep from the rock to settle in his ears.
