“I put it to you, my dear esteemed colleagues,” Doc said in summation, “that here, at last, we come face to face with the hard and bitter fruit of our civilization’s ignorance and arrogance.”
No one could argue that.
No one tried.
When the downhill trek resumed, as they approached ground zero, the focal point of the nuke’s blast, they were confronted with even wilder and more fanciful hellscapes. They circled immense frozen whirlpools of dirty glass. They looked down into the seemingly bottomless pits of crevasses, voids the nukes had drilled thousands of feet deep into the bedrock, which were then glazed over or backfilled with cascades of molten thermoglass.
As Ryan walked he tried to keep his mind focused and alert by paying attention to these bizarre details. It was difficult because he was light headed, having sweated out a lot more water than he’d taken in. Then he heard moaning sounds, more distinct and directional than before.
“There,” Jak said, raising his pale arm to point ahead on the right, just off the road.
Ryan was treated to a strange sight. Five stickies lay marooned on a flat-topped spire of glass. Even from a distance, they didn’t look human—a combination of their hairless skulls, their flat, black doll’s eyes, their tiny nostrils centered in moist flab and their rows of yellow nail-point teeth. Ryan assumed the killer muties had panicked and tried to run, probably because the earthquake had frightened them. The attempt had cost them their sucker hands and feet. Then the plain of glass around them had collapsed, again probably due to the earthquake, leaving them stranded on the raised hourglass of a pinnacle. Because they had no hands or feet, they couldn’t stand, let alone jump the required forty feet to safety. Forty feet over a deep chasm lined with huge chunks of broken glass.
Ryan had never heard stickies make noises like that. So desperate. So fearful. They certainly weren’t the familiar, soft kissing sounds of a chiller pack on the hunt. While the slaves silently marched past them, the stickies moaned and waved their handless arms for help.
“As if we would, if we could,” J.B. said.
The matter was settled by the rambling gait of the ore wags. The vibration caused the pillar to crack at its narrowest point, tipping the screaming stickies off into space. When they hit the razor-sharp edges of the blocks below and began to slide, they were sliced and diced, backs, fronts, thighs, faces, cut through the bone. Their screams suddenly stilled, they tumbled to the bottom of the chasm, leaving long, bloody smears on the glass.
Without shedding a single tear, the file of humanity struggled on.
After another quarter mile of descent, the lowest point in the crater came into view. Their final destination. Ground Zero. It was a pancake-flat depression, roughly circular, five hundred feet across and stippled with shallow dimples like the rind of a moldy orange.
In the light of the late afternoon sun, the glass looked more gray than green. To illuminate the area at night, it was ringed by a battery of klieg lights on tripods. In the center of the ring were three great holes in the glass; the holes swarmed with laborers going in and out. Parked beside the mine entrances were ore wags. They were being loaded by hand from crude carts on skids. From the edge of the ring of lights, battlesuited troopers stood guard with laser rifles. There was a large holding tank, presumably for water, which had its own guard. There were no sleeping or cooking facilities, but there were long, open-flame heaters to keep the workers from freezing to death after the sun went down. In some of the shallow depressions, bodies were curled up—whether sleeping or dead, it was impossible to tell.
The group of fresh slaves was met at the end of the road by troopers who forced them into a long single file. As they passed a checkpoint, under the muzzles of triblasters, they were given another cup of water to drink and a large plastic badge was pinned to their chests.
After the last badge was handed out, one of the troopers addressed the crowd in an over amplified voice. “When the badge glows green, you are in an area of glass worth mining, and the glow will be bright enough to work by. If you bring out ore that doesn’t register bright enough green, you will get no water. If you don’t fill your sledge to the top with ore, no water. If there are problems with quality or quantity, everyone assigned to that sledge pays the same price. No water.”