Read Snitch World for Free Online

remove any material from them—not because anybody cares whether autonomous miners die or not, but because somebody owns every cubic inch of mineral rights for as far as the eye can or cannot see, whether they trouble to exploit these rights or not.
    But that didn’t stop Chang Yin’s father and his father’s best friend, one Steamboat Burton, from the odd underground foray, and, though nobody ever explicitly stated as much, rarely had they not returned with a nugget or two sufficient to ease the family through the next couple of frigid months above ground. This was the knowledge that Chang Yin Sr. had passed on to Chang Yin Jr. Here is the entrance, son. Here is what a nugget looks like in the wild. There’s always one around that other people have missed if you know what to look for. Only Chinese people have the nerve to go into these tunnels, and there’s not so many of us around here anymore. Don’t tell anybody what I’ve told you, and, always remember, respect the earth, wear a helmet, carry extra batteries, don’t go alone, and don’t go too deep.
    Brush and rubble effortlessly cleared, Klinger follows Chang Yin into a tunnel.
    The first thing Klinger notices is the change in weather. Outside, all is windblown snow. Conditions are so lousy there isn’t even any traffic on Highway 24. Before they manage to instantaneously clear the debris, the road is completely drifted over. A complete whiteout.
    A hundred yards inside the gallery, however, there’s a mere draft and it’s dank but, while chilly, it’s not freezing. To their knowledge nobody has been this way in many years but the smell of freshly dug earth permeates the air, rank and foetid and not unlike … rotten carpet …
    Klinger frowns but does not awaken. His eyelids, though twitching, remain closed. The continuum of oneiric greed unreels, uninterrupted.
    The tunnel slopes sharply down. It narrows, too, and they often stop to clear debris sufficient to allow a man to pass. Here and there a rotted timber has splintered, pushed by the insistent geology behind or above it. Only occasionally, and that by aiming his headlamp upward, does Klinger discern a lintel or any kind of overhead shoring timber, and all of these timbers, posts or lintels, appear to be creosoted rail ties, whole or fractioned, and he wonders about the condition of the local railroad.
    The height of a tunnel never exceeds seven feet, more or less the vertical height of a railroad tie with one to two feet of its length buried. Never is a tunnel more than three feet wide. Often these dimensions are much less, and the two men have to crawl on their sides in single file to make progress. Because of these narrow confines, their picks and shovels are short-handled.
    At the first fork in the tunnel, Chang Yin takes a confident left. At the next fork, ten minutes later, he takes another left.
    Klinger tries to remember these turns. He tells himself that, on his the way back, after a cave-in has killed Chang Yin, a left will be a right. And this determination soothes his confidence until, turning to heave a shovelful of gravel, his headlamp reveals, much to his surprise, a tunnel that forks to the right behind him. He’d crouched past this gallery, as they are called, without noticing it. Surely, encountered on the way back, this gallery would count as a right turn, and … And what? Would it eventually join a tunnel that made its way to the surface? Or not?
    “Klinger, mon,” Chang Yin says, behind him now, “watch out for the hole.”
    Klinger turns. Chang Yin is facing him, his headlamp aimed downward and into a hole that disappears into darkness between them.
    Chang Yin shows Klinger a stone and holds a finger to his lips.
    Chang Yin drops the stone into the hole.
    A silence wells between them like a dead spot on an FM dial.
    They never hear from the stone again.
    “Surely,” Klinger says, “the fucker found bottom somewhere?”
    “Hard to say, mon,” Chang Yin says simply. He