For one second she looked as though she might cry.
Then she looked past the guard.
Past the engineer.
Toward the rig.
Something was wrong.
She stopped.
The engineer turned away.
The girl shouted:
“Wait.”
No one listened.
Her eyes moved toward a shallow puddle fifteen feet from the rig.
The surface was trembling.
Not from rain.
There was no rain.
Concentric ripples spread outward.
She stared.
Then at one of the orange survey stakes beside it.
The stake leaned.
Slowly.
Barely perceptible.
Two degrees.
Three.
The girl pointed.
“Then why is your drill pad moving?”
The senior engineer turned.
“What?”
A sound came from underground.
Low.
Deep.
Not an explosion.
Not machinery.
A crack.
Everyone heard it.
The senior engineer looked toward the rig.
The operator inside the cab looked down.
Another crack.
Louder.
One worker shouted, “Shut it down!”
The rig engine began winding down.
Too late.
Mud beneath the left crawler track dropped perhaps two inches.
Then another six.
The operator yelled something through the radio.
Workers nearby scattered.
The senior engineer froze.
The girl screamed, “BACK UP!”
The security guard grabbed her.
This time the contact saved her.
He pulled her backward as a dark seam opened through the mud where she had been standing seconds earlier.
The earth moved.
Not downward all at once.
First it sagged.
A broad circular section perhaps thirty feet across sank like wet bread beneath a heavy hand.
Water rushed inward.
Then the center disappeared.
The rig tilted.
Steel screamed.
The operator opened the cab door.
Someone shouted for him to jump.
He did.
He hit mud hard, rolled, and scrambled.
The right crawler track lifted.
The mast leaned.
Forty tons of steel drill pipe twisted in the hole.
Workers ran.
The senior engineer finally moved.
“EVERYBODY BACK!”
The entire pad collapsed.
The sound was enormous.
Earth.
Rock.
Steel.
Water.
A twenty-million-dollar drilling rig descended into the ground with terrifying slowness for the first second and impossible speed after that.
The cab vanished.
Then the tracks.
Then half the upper machinery.
The mast tilted nearly horizontal before buckling against the cavity edge.
Mud erupted upward.
A crane operator reversed desperately.
A dump truck spun its wheels in wet soil.
People screamed.
Then suddenly everything stopped.
The largest drilling rig on the site was gone.
Only the upper third of its mast remained visible at an angle inside a newly opened sinkhole.
Silence followed.
Absolute.
Impossible silence.
The girl stood behind the security guard.
Nobody laughed.
The senior engineer stared at the hole.
Then at the muddy notebook lying open near his boots.
One page had unfolded when it fell.