Story code: ST-001723
Part 2: The Anchor
Lenny ripped at the thick blue tarpaulin, his heavy leather gloves slipping against the wet slime coating the duct tape. He found a seam, dug his thumbs in, and tore backward. The duct tape gave way with a wet, ripping sound. Beneath the plastic wasn’t a valve or a monitoring station. It was a shoulder.
Lenny scrambled backward, his boots sliding in the trench muck, a choked gasp catching in his throat. He aimed the flashlight down. The soft, pliable material he had felt was a thick, black neoprene survival suit, coated in a layer of gray clay. The rhythmic vibration was shivering-violent, uncontrollable tremors racking a human body curled against the steel pipe.
“Hey!” Lenny shouted, his voice cracking. He lunged forward again, frantically wiping the heavy mud away from the top of the bundle.
A face emerged from the sludge. A young man, barely in his twenties, his skin a terrifying shade of translucent white, lips tinted pale blue. His eyes fluttered open, squinting against the harsh glare of Lenny’s flashlight. A heavy-gauge logging chain was wrapped securely around the boy’s torso and woven through a massive steel U-lock secured around the pipe. The rest of the chain disappeared into the bedrock, bolted down tight.
“What are you doing down here?” Lenny demanded, his heart hammering against his ribs. He grabbed the chain, pulling it. It was solid steel, thick enough to tow a semi-truck. “You’re going to get yourself killed! I almost ripped you in half with the bucket!”
The boy coughed, a wet, rattling sound. “That’s… that’s the point,” he stammered, his teeth chattering violently. “You can’t dig here. The pipeline… it crosses the primary aquifer. We have an injunction… just need to hold out until morning.”
“I don’t care about an aquifer,” Lenny said, his voice rising in panic as he checked his watch. 2:14 AM. “I have a job to finish. Where is the key to this lock?”
The kid shook his head slowly, a weak, defiant smile touching his blue lips. “Swallowed it. You’re going to have to call the sheriff. Shut the site down.”
Shut the site down. The words echoed in Lenny’s ears, louder than the idling diesel engine of the Komatsu above them. If he called the sheriff, the site would immediately become a crime scene. The foreman, Miller, would halt all operations. There would be an investigation, statements, delays lasting days, maybe weeks. Lenny wouldn’t get his overtime bonus. He wouldn’t even get his regular pay processed in time. The cashier’s check for seventy-four hundred dollars was due at the hospital admissions office by 3:00 PM tomorrow. No check, no surgery. His little girl’s lungs would continue to fail, suffocating her slowly in her own bed, all because this kid wanted to save some groundwater.
Lenny felt a cold, hard knot form in his stomach. “Listen to me,” he said, leaning in close, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper. “I have a sick kid. I need this money tomorrow. If I don’t finish this trench by dawn, she doesn’t get her surgery. Do you understand? I am not stopping.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy whispered, closing his eyes. “I really am. But I can’t let you destroy this land. My friends… they’re watching from the tree line. If you hurt me, it’s on camera.”
Lenny snapped his head up, shining the flashlight into the dense, black wall of pines bordering the right-of-way. He saw nothing but shadows and rain, but the paranoia spiked instantly. Was he being recorded? Was this a setup?
His radio, clipped to his safety vest, suddenly erupted in static. “Lenny, talk to me,” Miller’s voice barked through the speaker. “Telemetry shows you’ve been idling for ten minutes. You hit a rock or what? You’re eating into the margin, buddy. You don’t hit the marker by five, I’m pulling you off the machine and docking the hours.”
Lenny unclipped the radio with trembling, mud-caked fingers. He stared at the boy, who was watching the radio with wide, terrified eyes. The boy knew exactly what that transmission meant.
“Just a tough root ball, Miller,” Lenny lied, holding the transmit button down. His voice was surprisingly steady. “I’m clearing it now. Give me a few minutes.”
“Get it done. No excuses,” Miller snapped back.
Lenny clipped the radio back to his vest. He looked at the heavy chain, then at the padlock. He reached to his utility belt and pulled out his heavy iron pry bar. He jammed the wedged end under the logging chain, pressing the cold steel against the boy’s ribs.
“Wait, wait, wait!” the boy cried out, struggling against the bindings. “You can’t break that! It’s hardened boron steel. You’ll crush my chest before you snap the links!”
Lenny put his weight into the bar. The chain grew taut, biting deep into the thick neoprene of the survival suit. The boy screamed, a raw, piercing sound that cut right through the hum of the generator. Lenny immediately eased off, his chest heaving. The kid was right. There was no leverage. The chain was wound too tightly. Any mechanical force applied to snap it would inevitably crush the boy’s ribs or puncture a lung. The bitter irony twisted in Lenny’s gut-destroying this stranger’s lungs to save his daughter’s.
He stepped back, wiping the freezing rain from his eyes. He looked up at the massive steel bucket of the excavator, hovering like a mechanical monster over the trench. The hydraulic teeth were easily capable of snapping the bedrock itself. If he angled the bucket just right, he could rip the steel pipe out of the ground. But the chain was wrapped around the pipe, and the boy was secured to the chain. Ripping the anchor point would pull the boy into the grinding teeth of the bucket. He would be maimed, maybe worse.
“Please,” the boy sobbed, his bravado finally breaking under the reality of Lenny’s desperation. “Don’t do this. You’re a good man. You’re just trying to help your daughter.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Lenny growled. He looked back at the tree line. Were they really watching? Did it even matter? If he walked away right now, his daughter’s life was over. The hospital was merciless with its financial policies. The insurance company had already slammed the door in his face. This trench was the last avenue on earth.
Lenny walked over to the side of the trench, grabbed his heavy bolt cutters from the toolkit, and dropped back down into the mud. He grabbed the padlock. The jaws of the cutters barely fit over the thick boron shackle. He squeezed the handles together, the veins in his neck bulging as he put all his upper body strength into it. The cutters groaned. The steel didn’t even scratch.
“I told you,” the boy gasped, shivering harder now. “You can’t. You have to call it in.”
Lenny dropped the useless bolt cutters into the mud. He stared at the kid, then turned and stared up at the glowing cab of the excavator. The engine rumbled, waiting for a command. Time was slipping away. Seventy-four dollars every three cubic yards. He looked back down, calculating the distance to the boy’s leg and tracing the path of the taut chain into the bedrock. If he used the pry bar to shatter the boy’s kneecap, the slack might just be enough to slip the binding over his hips.