The big train rolled out shortly before midnight under the light of floodlamps and the orange glow from a sky of flame dancing among black clouds. Beyond, the diffuse incandescence from Athena showed, moving around to Earth’s night side. Above the growl of the diesels and the rumbling of the wheels, distant thunder boomed continually. In the wilderness to the north and the south, patches of orange and red flickering through veils of unseen smoke glowed where the mountains and the desert were on fire.
45
The eleven shared space in one of the coaches with guards who were off duty or resting. It had open seats that could be folded down to make beds, rather than being divided into compartments, and a galley and dining space at one end next to the bathrooms. Several layers of corrugated sheeting alternating with sandbags overlaid the roof, and the windows were covered outside by steel mesh. Most of the soldiers were making the best of the chance to rest, and the lighting was kept dim.
Keene and several of the others remained awake, but there was little talk among them. They sat staring out through the windows at the Dantean sky and the intermittent glows shimmering through the dust and smoke-laden air—perhaps, like Keene, able for the first time since the nightmare began to reflect on the meaning of what they were seeing. The world they had known was being destroyed, never to be rebuilt in any of their lifetimes. Having risen to the highest peak in its history of comprehending and harnessing the physical universe, the human race had become distracted from its quest for truth and worthwhile knowledge, and been mesmerized instead by the pursuit of false values based on vanity and petty ambitions. The remnant that was holding together did so on time bought with the salvaged residues of a civilization that had already died. When the machines became still and the bulbs flickered out, the last ruins were ransacked for a surviving stash of cans, ammunition for a useless gun, a cake of soap, a knife, then those left would be reduced to the condition of the tribes that had wandered amidst the devastation in the years following the Exodus. The only hope for recovering in a period that would not extend over millennia now lay with the Kronians—assuming that Kronia itself was able to survive. The biblical accounts had been pretty close to the truth when they said that God periodically destroyed the world and its life, and replaced it with a new world. Now, it seemed, He was displeased with the latest life that had set up its own golden calves. Keene wondered if the next form to arise would meet with better approval as a more faithful rendering of what life and its expression were supposed to be. Did the Kronian model hint at a possible way? A light flaring suddenly, close enough to be visible through the murk, then followed several seconds later by a whoosh ending in a sharp report like a thunderclap, reminded them that the bombardment had just eased for a while, not ceased.
About three hours out from El Paso, the train halted. The lights were turned up, and the NCO in charge ordered the guards down with their weapons to stand to outside. A few minutes later, an officer from the staff coach in front came through to say that they had picked up a detail left by the scout train ahead to warn them to slow down over a risky stretch of patched track. Searchlights played over the area revealed just broken cliffs, rocky slopes, and clumps of scrub. The guard contingents manning the flatcars were changed, and the train got under way again. Everyone began settling down except Mitch and Legermount, who sat around the dining counter at the end with the troops who had just been relieved, talking, drinking coffee, and eating. Cynthia, who had been tending Charlie’s bruises and lacerations, was now huddled up with him. Tiredness overcame Keene too, finally. He stretched out, using his folded parka as a pillow, pulled his blanket close around him, and slept.
* * *
It was a little after eight the next morning when they caught up with the scout train in the rugged country between the Davis Mountains and the Tierra Vieja Mountains. They were roughly a hundred fifty miles from El Paso, having left the Rio Grande valley to cut across the large southward bend in the river, which they would rejoin two hundred miles farther on at Langtry. The scout train had halted on the approach into a shattered township, where the engineering crew were still fixing torn track and improvising repairs to an embankment. The activity had drawn out the survivors, now clustered along both sides of the tracks with the same shock-widened eyes staring from dazed, blackened faces, holding up unfed babies and injured children in the desperate appeals for help that Keene had seen a hundred times already and was sickened by because he knew there was no help, would never be help for them. But there was a lot of anger out there too. An officer came back to tell everyone other than the guards deployed outside to remain on the train.