The Soldier's Song by Alan Monaghan — Read

He woke with a start, instinctively curling up and huddling on the edge of the bed. He never heard the blast – the dream never got that far. But it was bad enough while it lasted: shapeless things chasing him, cleaving out of the earth to hound him down endless gloomy tunnels. On silent wings they flew, reaching out their blanched white hands to grab him and pull him back into the ground. Sometimes they caught him and he woke suffocating as the earth swallowed him up. Sometimes he escaped to the surface where they could not follow, but they sent their screams instead, unearthly noises that wrapped around him like smoking tendrils, stinking of the shattered ground and pulling him back. Then he would beg Macmillan to fire, for God's sake, to blow the mine, to save him. And Macmillan would smile behind his opaque silver spectacles as he pushed the plunger, and the invisible electricity in the wires would jolt him awake.

He gasped, and instantly the memories of the explosion crowded in on him. The sound of the detonation was deep and muffled, felt as much as heard as the ground bucked beneath his feet. Then came the hot breath of wind on his face as the whole hillside bulged up into the air, slowly, slowly, like a great green balloon, until it finally cracked and burst into a towering cloud of smoke and fire that blotted out the rising sun. It took a moment for the roar of the blast to reach him, but when it came it washed over him like a wave, and brought with it a shower of stones and sods of fractured earth.