Inferno Below

The air tasted like static and old pennies. He’d expected the damp, the chill that seeped into bone marrow, but not this. Not the faint, pulsating warmth that pressed against his skin, an impossible heat radiating from the earth’s core. Miles beneath him, a star was being born. Or perhaps, it was an eye opening. He couldn't be sure. All he knew was that the inferno he’d crawled out of, the one that had consumed forty-three of his brothers, was now a subterranean sun, a cosmic hearth that had swallowed their final screams and transmuted them into pure, unadulterated light.

He watched it, mesmerized, from the lip of the access shaft. The rain, a thin, cold curtain, did little to cool the fever that had settled into his blood. It was a fever born of too much fire, too much death, too much *survival*. His own. He’d been the last of forty-four. Forty-four soldiers, forged and honed, reduced to twenty-two pairs of boots, then to a single, ragged breath. They called them the best. They were. And they were broken. Shattered against the unyielding stone, against the fluorescent glare of their own descent, against the gnawing fear that had eaten away at their numbers until only he remained.

He remembered the coin toss. A desperate, drunken ritual in the suffocating dark. Heads for the tags, the letters, the names of the fallen. Tails for the final, blinding detonation. He’d watched the silver arc, a tiny, defiant gleam against the perpetual night, and then the thud as it landed. He didn't know if he'd won. He only knew he was still breathing. Technically.