I can hardly deduce how much time I had left, frankly, how much time we all had left.
Mere minutes had passed since the instantaneous collapse, engulfing in a junk pile of hard, gray rocky rubble, as if we were in the eye of a storm.
My only light source was a tiny oval bulb, intermittently flickering, offering a chance to get a slight grasp of my surroundings, absorbing in whatever visual information I could receive. We had the ability for very little mobility, as our flimsy, energy-deprived limbs were largely trapped under rubble or broken machinery, so color-deprived it looked like a scene from a greyscale movie.
I was given a slight view of the excavator amidst the collapsing tunnel, as it had thick and thin grooves lined parallel, till it reached the tip of the machine, with a somewhat lustrous glow coming from the scuffed silver saws.
I got a glimpse of my group and they didn't look or sound much better than me. Charlie, a girl who started working in the mines only a couple of weeks ago looked rightfully frightened. She used to have long, silky blond hair, sky blue eyes and a carefree smile, but post-collapse, her hair started resembling the coal we were mining, the vibrancy of the eyes began diluting and her smile turned to horror. Even her striped yellow-orange helmet had a crack running through it, like the gap between tectonic plates.
Just adjacent to her ugly Tom. I was getting teary-eyed reminiscing about the countless nights we stayed up eating a slice of pizza, just chatting about life. He looked rightfully as awful as me and Charlie. His curly black hair was all ruffled and tears were streaming out of his eyes, being the only liquidity on his now dry, brown, blood-clotted skin.
The uneven flickering of the bulb also gave me a sight of the dust and smoke, making us prisoners of their realm of death and suffering, giving the illusion we were stranded in the depths of hell.
The collapse had subsequently caused a shockwave through my helmet, inciting a migraine-inducing ringing in my ears, which still wasn't the worst of my pains. I could slowly feel the lack of oxygen in my surroundings making my head dizzy, slowly but surely extracting my consciousness out of my body, like a dementor -But I couldn't die, my whole 34 years of life, working tirelessly night and day to provide for my wife and children, to extinguish the spark like this? It couldn't be. But what could I do? How could I even call for help?
Almost as if a bolt of lightning struck my head, I remembered in safety training, my instructor kept nagging me about the emergency-only cell phone in the inside pocket of our neon vests. With my last push of hope, I used my one dislocated free hand to continually pull out the cell phone and flip open the cover, only for my heart to skip a beat. There was no signal at all. As all hope, courage and motivation left my body, I gently rested my eyelids and laid back, reliving all my happiest moments, hoping my family would do well without me.