Even over the engine and wheel noise of the ore wags, Ryan could hear the crybaby sounds of splitting glass. Beneath his boots, the road surface was crazed with an interlacing of fine cracks caused by earth tremors and the weight of passing loaded trucks.
They trudged around a series of spires, maybe fifty feet tall, set along the perimeter of a wide rectangle. As the sun angle changed, Ryan could see dull orange monoliths inside the spires—encased by nukeglass were the rusting steel girders of a ruined skyscraper. Farther on, they came across a field of smaller spikes, perhaps one-tenth as high, created by the crystalline growth of some melted components. The elevated areas were few in comparison to the low spots, which ranged from small, star-shattered cave-ins a few feet wide to great sprawling bowls of glass blocks hundreds of yards across.
Evidence of recent human activity, the narrow holes hacked into the thermoglass by Slake City’s scroungers, disappeared after they had walked less than a mile. The farther they went, the hotter it got. The crater’s concavity seemed to focus and intensify the sun’s rays. As they walked, the horizon line on all sides shrank away. Snowcapped mountain peaks were gradually blocked from view by the rim of the crater, until there was only sky and glass.
Three miles in by Ryan’s reckoning, the first of the slaves collapsed. A man in his fifties with big overhang of pot belly and a wild shock of white hair suddenly clutched at his chest and dropped onto the roadway. He fell into a fit, his body twitching, his eyes rolled up in his head.
Everyone but Mildred stepped over or around him and kept on moving. She knelt and started to try to help the man, but J.B. grabbed her shoulder and pulled her away.
“There’s nothing you can do for that one,” he said. “We can’t carry him. You can see he’s not going to make it. We’ve got to keep going.” He forcibly dragged the woman along with him.
They had only gone a dozen yards, when from behind, they heard the wheels of the first wag crunch over the body.
“Fuckers,” Mildred said. “Dirty fuckers.”
She didn’t look back.
Inside of another mile, two more people fell beneath the huge wheels. After the third fatality, the trucks stopped and the slaves were allowed to rest and were given a cup of warm water each. There was pushing and shoving in the water line. The companions stayed together and made sure they all got their rations.
“What’s that?” Dean said, pointing at another entombed object on the side of the road. “Looks like gold.”
The afternoon sun flashed off something buried under humped-up layers of glass. It was, in fact, gold. It was the gilded head and shoulders of an enormous statue with arms extended, its hairline melted down into its chin.
“That is all that is left of the Angel Moroni,” Doc said, removing his neckerchief to mop his brow. “A great statue that used to adorn the east tower of the Mormon Tabernacle. The place of worship was completed in 1893, three years before I was time-trawled by whitecoats, before the life I should have lived, the death I should have died were stolen from me. I remember showing newspaper pictures of it to my beloved wife and my cherished children…” He suddenly choked and his voice trailed off.
With tears in his eyes and the sweat peeling down the sides of his face, he swept his arm wide, making the kerchief flutter as it took in the bleak panorama. “What consummate wickedness conceived this nightmare? What spavined pelvis birthed this abomination of God’s beauty?” As Doc spoke, his voice changed. It grew deeper and more resonant, as if he were projecting his words to some larger audience only he could see.
Ryan looked from face to face. Doc wasn’t the only one showing the effects of the forced march under skyrocketing temperatures. All of them were breathing hard under their bandannas, their foreheads flushed and slick. But there was something else, too. It was there, in their eyes, like a passing shadow. Not just simple exhaustion, but a growing sense of doom.