“He’s got you there,” J.B. said.
Mildred hated losing an argument with the old man, and rarely ever conceded defeat, but from her expression she knew he was right this time. Bracelets or not, the slave catchers needed chilling.
The companions watched the bus driver use a hand-powered pump to refill his fuel tanks from the tier of steel drums marked Baron Jolt. Once this was done, the big man climbed back in the wag, and he and his sluts drove back the way they’d come, disappearing in a spiral of dust.
“Off to collect another busload of fools,” Krysty stated.
“Before they do,” Doc said, “may God strike them dead. Or better still, afford me the opportunity.”
A loud rumbling noise made them all look toward the massif. A pair of ore trucks appeared over the rise, rolled down the road and pulled off onto the plain near the domes. The companions watched the wags dump their cargos into the semitrailer’s hopper. They had a much closer view of the operation this time and could see that the loads consisted of chunks of nukeglass and various other, seemingly unsorted debris. When both wags had been emptied, the troopers ordered the whole group of slaves to their feet.
“Walk ahead of the tracks,” one of the troopers told them. “The road is clearly marked. If you step off the road, you will lose your hands and feet. If you fall behind, the trucks will crash you. It’s eight miles to where you’re going.”
It was a stock speech, delivered without inflection. It could even have been a recording.
In response to the slowly advancing ore wags, the assembled slaves, companions included, began to move forward, and as they did so, they were funneled onto the road by bracketing phalanxes of troopers.
“Stay together,” Ryan warned the others.
The mob that surrounded the companions was mostly made up of men, aged from their late teens to early sixties. There were a few women, too, and some of them carried small children. They all walked with stooped shoulders and lowered heads. Some cried brokenly into their hands; others stared blankly at their feet. Clearly, they knew enough about Slake City’s singular, unnatural wonder to realize they were on a one-way trip.
“What’s it like where they’re taking us?” Dean asked his father.
“Don’t know, son,” Ryan said. “Never heard of anybody going out that far on the nukeglass and returning to tell about it.”
“We’re coming back.”
“That’s right. We’re coming back. Keep that thought front and center in your head.”
After the first gradual rise, the road began a slow descent as it wound towards the sunken epicenter of the twenty-mile-wide blast crater. The trailing ore trucks kept the slaves moving at a steady, five-mile-an-hour pace.
Even this late in the day, the heat and glare off the glass was tremendous. The landscape before them was completely devoid of life. There was no soil for plants to grow in. No standing water. There were no birds flying overhead. There was just glass.
Glass, glass and more glass.
The roadbed underfoot was a uniformly light shade of gray green because it had been etched for better traction. On either side of the roadway, the glass’s coloration was irregular, and in some places it edged almost to black. In those spots, large shadowy objects lay entombed many feet down. Buried things, in some cases huge things, caused erratic humps and dips to appear in the surface. There were also great, yawning holes filled with fractured, room-sized sheets of glass. The road had to be diverted around these massive cave-ins. There were truly mad shapes on the surface, too, like breaking waves frozen in time, like floes of dirty icebergs, separated by banks of ground glass, blown by the wind into glittering heaps.
“We’d better cover our noses and mouths,” Mildred said as she knotted a bandanna around her head. “We don’t want to inhale or swallow any of that glass dust. Try to keep it out of your eyes.”
The companions did as she suggested.
When the slaves moving alongside them saw what they were doing, they followed suit, tearing off strips of their clothing to protect themselves.