The Mine That Was Just a Reality Show

Ten years into the zombie apocalypse, the eighty-odd residents of our town hid inside an abandoned coal mine. We survived day by day, licking moisture off the cave walls.

In the end, only seven of us were left alive.

After another neighbor mutated and was torn apart, I pressed my hands against the rock face in the deepest part of the mine. My fingers brushed against a piece of hard plastic.

Three words were printed on it. Props Department.

I stared at the plastic tag in my hand, my fingernails digging so hard into my palm they almost drew blood.

On the back of the tag was a pristine barcode sticker. The date of purchase was printed beneath it in crisp, black ink. Purchased October 2032.

But the year the virus broke out, the year the world ended, was 2024.

We had been down here for a decade. Where the hell did a brand new plastic tag come from?

"Mack, come look at this."

I gripped the plastic tag so tightly my knuckles turned white. My voice was a low, breathless whisper, shaking with an emotion I could not quite name.

Mack was my childhood best friend. He had just used his pickaxe to smash a mutated rat scurrying through the tunnels, prepping it for our pathetic dinner. His face was smeared with soot and grime. He dragged his bad leg over to me, a permanent limp from a zombie scratch that never healed right.

He stared at the tag in my hand. For three seconds, he just blinked.

"What the hell is that? Where did you get it?" Mack's voice spiked, sharp and frantic.

"Bottom level, right out of the rock wall in Pit Seven," I said. "It was sealed behind a thick layer of waterproof cement. I dug it out where the water was leaking through."

Mack snatched the tag from my hand, turning it over and over.

When he held it up to the dying yellow light of our emergency lantern and read the 2032 date, his knees gave out.

He collapsed onto the jagged gravel, his eyes bulging wide enough to pop out of his skull.

"Two thousand thirty-two..." he repeated like a broken record, his lips trembling violently. "The outbreak was twenty twenty-four. We have been rotting in this hole for almost ten years."

I stayed silent, holding his panicked gaze.

"So this was made after the world ended?!"

Mack suddenly let out a strangled, broken roar. "People are still making plastic tags out there?! And calling them props?! What the hell is going on?!"

I crouched down and clamped my hand hard over his mouth, snatching the tag back and shoving it deep into my pocket.

"Keep your voice down," I hissed, staring him dead in the eye. "Go get the others. Get Gary, the Mayor, and Martha. Something is wrong."

This abandoned mine used to be the main coal shaft behind our town.

Ten years ago, the zombie horde washed over our homes like a plague of locusts. Limbs were torn apart in the streets. Monsters shrieked in the blood-soaked mud. The Mayor led the surviving eighty people into this mine in a desperate bid for life.

A decade later, those eighty people had been reduced to seven.

Some mutated. Some starved. Some died of fever. The upper tunnels were piled high with their rotting bones.

Just last week, Pete the butcher went out looking for an underground spring and got his throat ripped out by a stray lurker.

Now, the only ones breathing were me, Mack, the Mayor, our old town accountant Gary, a widow named Martha, her eight-year-old deformed son Toby who was born in the dark, and a sickly old man coughing his lungs out in the corner.

By the time Gary and the Mayor limped over, Martha was huddled in the shadows, holding skin-and-bones Toby tight against her chest.

She saw the pale, haunted looks on our faces and squeezed her boy even tighter.

"What happened? Are those things banging on the blast doors again?" Martha asked, her voice cracking with terror.

I did not answer. I just pulled the tag out and handed it to Gary.

Gary was the only guy among us who used to work a desk job. He took the tag, squinting at the front. It did not register.

Then he flipped it over. The barcode. The date.

His entire body went rigid as if he had been struck by lightning.

"Luke, where did you find this?" Gary snapped his head up to look at me, his voice quivering.

"Bottom level. Pit Seven. Behind the concrete wall that leaks."

The moment the words "Pit Seven" left my mouth, Gary and the Mayor turned the color of ash.

I remembered it perfectly.

Pit Seven was completely sealed off eight years ago.

That was the year the horde somehow found our ventilation shafts. Monsters poured into the mid-level sector. We lost a dozen people in one night. We were on the verge of being completely wiped out.

The Mayor made the call.

He took a crew, rigged some old mining explosives, and collapsed the upper tunnels. Then, using tons of rubble and quick-dry cement, they completely sealed off the only deep shaft leading to Pit Seven.

He told us it was the only way to stop the monsters from crawling up through the underground river system.

"Mayor."

Mack pushed himself off the ground. His eyes, sunken deep into his skull from years of oxygen deprivation and starvation, flared with a terrifying, bloodshot rage.

He stalked toward the old man, step by step. "You led the crew to pour that cement eight years ago. Did you hide this tag in there?!"

"Did you know something back then?! Did you seal out the zombies, or did you seal our only way out?!"

Faced with Mack's desperate, suffocating interrogation, the Mayor's wrinkled face twitched violently.

He backed up against the freezing rock wall. He stayed silent for a full minute before burying his face in his filthy hands.

"I did not know. I swear I did not know what was out there."

The Mayor's voice broke into a hoarse, jagged sob. "Eight years ago, when I was pouring that concrete. I felt something in the rock fissures. I felt thick, heavy cables."

"They were not the kind of cables you find in an old coal mine. They were brand new. Like fiber optic lines from the big cities."

"I wanted to dig following those lines. But the monsters were already clawing at the barricades! Pete's wife got half her face bitten off right in front of my eyes!"

"What else could I do?! I had to pour the cement. I had to seal the wall!"

The Mayor dropped to his knees, tears cutting clean tracks through the soot on his cheeks. "I never told a soul. For ten years, I kept my mouth shut. I convinced myself I was hallucinating. I told myself everyone out there was dead, and those were just leftover mining wires."

"You convinced yourself?!"

I let out a cold, venomous laugh, cutting his confession short.

"You convinced yourself, and you let eighty people live like rats in a sewer for a decade!"

I looked at Toby, huddled in the corner, gnawing on his own dirty fingers just to dull the hunger pains. I looked at the hollow, dead emptiness in Martha's eyes.

A violent, apocalyptic rage ignited in my chest, burning through my veins like wildfire.

"Get the picks."

I turned to Mack, my eyes locked in a dead, absolute resolve. "Get the iron picks, the steel bars, every single thing we can use to smash stone."

"I do not care if there are zombies behind that wall. I do not care if it is fiber optic cables, or God himself."

"Even if it costs me my life, I am tearing that wall down today!"

Breaking through that concrete was a brutal, soul-crushing ordeal.

Eight years ago, fueled by the terror of being eaten alive, the Mayor's crew had poured three thick layers of quick-dry cement, packing it with solid granite boulders.

All we had were a few rusted pickaxes and crowbars.

But driven by sheer, rabid desperation and an absolute hunger for the truth, nobody felt the fatigue.

Mack and I took turns swinging the heavy pickaxe. Every strike against the rock sent shockwaves up our arms, splitting the skin between our thumbs and index fingers until blood coated the wooden handles. Gary and the Mayor hauled the broken chunks of rock away. Even Martha strapped Toby to her back and smashed at the cement with a heavy stone.

Hour one. We broke through the first layer of cement.

Hour two. The pickaxe blades curled and dulled. We resorted to using steel bars as chisels.

Hour three.

Mack raised the pickaxe high above his head, ready to strike, but froze mid-swing.

"Luke. Listen." Mack's voice was sandpaper dry. He stared unblinking at a crack in the wall.

Every single one of us stopped moving. We held our breath.

The enclosed cavern was dead silent, save for the ragged, wheezing sound of our own lungs.

Then we heard it.

Leaking through the two-inch crack we had just hammered open, a faint noise drifted into the dark. It definitely did not belong in an abandoned coal mine.

It was a sharp burst of radio static.

It sounded exactly like a security guard adjusting the frequency on a walkie-talkie.

But that was not all.

A draft of air pushed through the crack.

It did not smell like rotting corpses, or damp moss, or human waste.

It was a rich, warm, intoxicating aroma.

I inhaled sharply, my pupils contracting into pinpricks.

It was the smell of freshly brewed espresso.

And underneath it, the rich, savory scent of roasted meat and hot takeout food.

"That is not the smell of the dead." Martha's tears broke like a dam. She clamped both hands over her mouth, biting her palms to keep from sobbing out loud.

Mack's hands began to shake violently. The heavy iron pickaxe clattered to the rocky floor.

"There are people out there. They are drinking coffee."

If there were walkie-talkies out there. If there were people sipping espresso and eating hot meals.

Then what the hell were we doing for the last ten years?

What about the neighbors who strangled each other over a single sip of dirty water?

What about the family members torn to shreds by those monsters in the dark?

What was it all for?!

"Smash it!"

My eyes went completely red. I snatched the pickaxe off the ground and swung it at the crack like a deranged madman.

"Tear this entire damn wall down!!"

Mack and the Mayor snapped out of their trance. They let out guttural, animalistic roars, grabbing whatever tools were left and hurling themselves at the barricade.

Rocks splintered. Concrete dust and droplets of our own blood flew through the air.

The hole grew larger. The light bleeding through became painfully bright.

It was the harsh, artificial glare of fluorescent studio lights.

"Let me look."

Mack pushed me aside. He pressed his pale, sun-starved face directly against the jagged opening.

He peered through.

Just one look.

Mack's body went completely rigid.