The yellow canvas flag, torn from its staff by the gale, billowed out across the front of the dropping extraction rig like a sail before a squall.
The white chevron—stitched from coarse flour ticking—flashed against the pitch-black dark rock walls of the chimney pipe, a stark, exact angle of clean white linen framed by sulfur-yellow cloth. In the split second before the crash, that chevron was the only thing visible in the dark: a signpost of human labor dropping through a heavy-duty slaughterhouse to snatch a courier from an office machine.
Len felt the leading edge of the canvas cradle strike his body.
It wasn’t a gentle impact. Even with the curve of the swinging weight sweep, twenty-five miles an hour of heavy flax canvas struck him across the thighs, hips, and lower back with the bone-shaking force of a runaway horse.
The breath was driven from his lungs in an explosive, wet grunt that sprayed crimson foam across the yellow cloth. But the cradle didn’t bounce off him. It was a heavy-duty scoop designed to catch falling miners. Its four-foot flax basket opened like a jaws of heavy cloth to envelope his torso.
The canvas caught him beneath the armpits and across the buttocks, scooping his eighty pounds of mortal flesh out of the empty air of the drop.
