The Bullet, A Tale of a Piece Of Lead

The Bullet

            CHAPTER 1: The mining of the lead

Frank was working in the mine like he was every other day. He was mining rocks strewn with lead, when he looked up and saw a drop of water squeeze its' way through  a tiny crack in the ceiling. He stopped and stared.  Slowly more cracks started appearing and a small trickle of water streamed from the ceiling, the wooden supports holding the ceiling splintered and split sending fragments of wood in every direction. Frank took one last look when the ceiling exploded into fragments of stone.  The water gushed right behind it. He was swept down the mineshaft and never came up again. Frank woke up sweating, he was shivering and saw that he had kicked his blanket off during sleep. He got up and heated some water on his tiny wood stove and made coffee. He walked over towards the window that looked onward to the firewood stack, the rusting old Ford tractor, and the brown rotten old tool shed. He saw that it was about 5 in the morning. He lived in Alabama, in a little bungalow next to the Tombigbee river, the nearest town Alpine, a couple miles away. Well, old Frank finished his coffee and went to fetch a egg and sausage out of the ice box for breakfast. He made some jambalaya and had a hearty breakfast. He fed the chickens and started his way down the dirt road to Alpine. 

He walked a couple miles and approached the mine entrance. "Morning Joe" Frank said. "You got level 4 today with team 6" said Joe.

Now the lead mine was a privately owned mine; owned by Roanoke a matter fact; it was a pillar style mine, small, didn't produce much, it wasn't a very big deal to the Roanoke corporation, they had bigger problems. Well, frank got his gear and met with his team and the manager told him, "we have found led on level 4 row 3 To the right" Frank and his coworkers walked down the shaft until he reached level 4. He found the area that the manager talked about and began to cut into rock and tossed the ore ridden rock into the sleds waiting. Franks hands started to bleed after a while He took no heed of them and continued mining. He was covered in a mixture of sweat, blood, and grime when he yelled, "come on boys" 5 fourteen year old boys who were currently carrying slag came over and dragged the sleds up the mineshaft into the light. Thomas had been working all day. First the right wing of level 4 caved in so he helped clean up the mess, then while he had done that sleds began to fill up with stone and he spent the last 3 hours hauling slays of rock with the other boys. He  hauled the slays up to the smelters where they were smelted and the lead separated from the rock. It was 12:00 and they  gave him a break and let him cary the cooled off lead onto the truck, "big metal slabs, great, some break" Thomas thought to himself.  he carried huge 50 pound slabs of metal about 100 feet onto the back of a truck he filled it up and said, "alright Paul, send her away" then he waited until the truck came back and he did it again and again. 

CHAPTER 2: The delivery of the lead

Paul had been driving all day. He practically memorized every sign, every bend in the road, every house he did the same thing day after day, year after year, for two miserable decades of crappy food and minimum wage. He started up his truck and started on his way. He drove until his tank was near empty, then he stopped at a dinosaur gas station. He told the service man, "fill me up" He did so. All of the suddenly three criminals drove in on a beat up truck dressed in black and one with a shotgun. He shot the serviceman and nearly missed Paul when Paul stepped on the gas. He didn't stop until he hit the shipping station. Where Paul got out of his truck and went to see the manager where the manager sent some boys to unload the lead from Paul's truck. Paul saw how about ten boys got up and went to unload the lead from his truck and carry it across the train yard. The manager asked, "This all?"  Paul said yup and he drove back to do it again. The manager Bob always oversaw the boys loading lead onto a train. Always, it was a noble job, fairly important, bob saw that the lead have all been loaded and stacked in great big blue train carts. Then he got back on the train and sat with the engineer as it went by to north Carolina. He saw the trees go by lightning fast, the houses, and towns. he arrived no time at all. He got out and talked to the compact manager and found a company manager. He got out, shook his hand, and received a small fee for shipping the materials. The company manager had a team of boys who put the lead in a warehouse. There they sat until the familiar words came on the radio:

It was a speach by Adolf Hitler.  

1940 rolled around (on tracks) and Germany went to war with the united states. Some men went and unloaded the lead and onto a truck where it went to a factory where it was unloaded and carried inside it was then melted. It did so for some time, then it was poured into bullet molds and left to cool for some time. Then when it had been cooled they were popped out of the molds and stacked in boxes where they were carried inside. Then the lead bullets were put together by some women. They were loaded onto trucks, then planes. They were flown over to Europe where they landed in Greg's rifle. Greg landed on the beech in Normandy there he fought well. He came face to face with a officer. There he shot at him. But missed and went into the tree. With a look of fear in his eyes the captain shot Greg.