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cursed as loud as he could, and passed out.
         He came to some time later to find himself face down in the dirt pile. His nostrils were full of dirt, and of the dried blood rendered when he fell face first after passing out and broke his nose.
         Now the nerves in his fingers were wide awake and screaming. He knew his fingers were still there, though he dared not touch them to see how much was left. He was in agony, every muscle in his upper body stiff and sore and crying out in pain.
         His nose throbbed, and his head pounded.
         But what he wanted most wasn’t for the pain to go away.
         What he wanted most was a drink of water.
         Now, many hours after the explosions, he no longer felt his comrades bumping against him as they moved about in the tunnel.
         Blind, deaf, and in agony, he just wanted it to be over. His throat was so parched it hurt to swallow. The saliva in his mouth had become thick and sticky.
         He could no longer open his eyes. His eyelids were so dry they just stuck to his eyeballs now. So he just kept them closed. There was nothing to see but blackness anyway.
         He went in and out of consciousness. Each time he awoke he briefly wondered if he was dead yet, then quickly had his answer as the pain struck him anew.
         He just wanted it to end. He knew he was going to hell. He’d raped and robbed and killed. Men like him didn’t get to heaven. Oh, sure, preachers liked to preach forgiveness and second chances. But they just wanted suckers like Alvarez to come to their services. To fill their pews, and their collection plates. To help buy the preacher a new suit. To buy their way into heaven.
         But Alvarez wasn’t having any of that. He’d accepted long ago that he was hell-bound. In fact, he wore it as a badge of honor, telling the others that he feared no one. Not even the devil.
        Now he just wanted it to be over. In his mind, hell couldn’t be worse than what he was going through his last hours on earth.
         A few feet away from him, Rob Linkes was taking a vastly different approach to his impending death.
         He didn’t dig, like Alvarez and Casarez had done. He’d done nothing but lay on the tunnel floor since the first blast.
         The dynamite had obliterated one of the wooden railroad ties that lined both walls of the mine, and held the ceiling braces up. A huge splinter of wood, two inches thick and eight inches long, had pierced Linkes’ abdomen and shredded his stomach and one of his kidneys. He’d gone down immediately and hadn’t moved since.
         He was suffering the same agony as Alvarez, and he too wanted it to be over.
         But Linkes wasn’t a badass by nature. Sure, he’d gotten hooked up with a bad lot, and had been dragged into a killing mission. But he’d gone along partly because he was terrified of Skully and Alvarez, and partly because he was highly susceptible to peer pressure.
         On the outside, he was a mousy accountant. He was in prison for white collar crime- cooking the books of his clients to make a better life for himself.
         When his crimes caught up with him and he went to prison, Linkes was scared to death. For the first few weeks he refused to come out of his cell except for chow. And then he quite literally trembled with fear.
         In time, though, he slowly began to venture out. Prison was a brutal place and he wasn’t well liked among the other inmates. He was forced to do things that no man should ever do. And when he tried to rebel he was beaten into submission.
         Linkes finally decided that the only way to survive his ten year term was to go along with the others. To become one of the gang so he no longer stood out. And it worked to some degree. But it also meant he’d get caught up in their schemes even when he didn’t want to.
         Now, his decision to play ball was going to get him killed.
         But Rob