'Where are we going?' a man asked.
'No comment,' Shoat answered for Ike.
'Have you been in our particular territory yourself?'
'Never,' Ike said. 'I used to hear rumors, of course. But I never believed they could be true.'
'Rumors of what?'
Shoat was checking his watch.
The train gave a soft lurch. They braked to a slow halt. People went to look through the small windows and Ike was forgotten, momentarily. Shoat stood on a chair. 'Grab your bags and personal effects, folks. We're changing trains.'
Ali shared an open flatcar with three men and freight, mostly heavy equipment parts. She sat against a John Deere crate labeled PLANETARIES, DIFFERENTIALS . One of the men had bad gas and kept grimacing in apology.
The ride was smooth. The artery was man-made, bored to a uniform twenty-foot diameter. The trackbed was crushed gravel sprayed with black oil. Overhead, bare bulbs bled down rusty light. Ali kept thinking of a Siberian gulag. Wires and pipes and cables veined the walls.
Cavities opened to the sides. They didn't see any people, just crawlers and loaders and excavators and pipe layers, piled rubber tires, and cement ties. The track made a slithery sound under their wheels, seamless. Ali missed the click-clack of rail joints. She remembered a train journey with her parents, falling asleep to the rhythm while the world passed by.
Ali gave one of her fresh apples to the man who was still awake. They'd been grown in the hydroponic gardens at Nazca City. He said, 'My daughter loves apples,' and showed her a picture.
'What a beautiful girl,' Ali said.
'Kids?' he asked.
Ali pulled a jacket over her knees. 'Oh, I don't think I could bear to leave a child,' she answered too quickly. The man winced. Ali said, 'I didn't mean it that way.'
The train was relentlessly gentle. It never slowed, never stopped. Ali and her neighbors improvised a latrine with privacy by pushing some of the crates together. They had a communal supper, each contributing some food.
At midnight the walls brightened from cinnamon to tan. Her companions were all sleeping when the train entered a band of marine fossils. Here exoskeletons, there ancient seaweeds, there a spray of tiny brachiopods. The bore-cutter had sheared the rich find with impunity.
'Did you see that, Mapes!' a voice yelled from a car ahead. 'Arthropoda!'
'Trilobitomorpha!' Mapes shrieked in ecstatic response from behind.
'Check those dorsal grooves! Pinch me!'
'Look at this one coming up, Mapes! Early Ordovician!'
'Ordovician, hell!' Mapes bellowed. 'Cambrian, man. Early. Very early. Look at that rock. Shit, maybe even late Precam!'
The fossils jumped and writhed and wove like a miles-long tapestry. Then the walls went blank again.
At three in the morning, they came upon the remains of their first ambush. At first it seemed like nothing more than a car accident.
The clues began with a long scrape mark on the left wall where a vehicle of some sort had struck the stone. Abruptly the mark leaped to the right wall, where it became a gouge, then ricocheted to the opposite side and back again. Someone had lost control.
The evidence became more violent, more puzzling. Broken fragments of stone mixed with headlight glass, then a torn section of heavy steel mesh.
The gashes and scrapes went on and on, left, then right.
Miles farther, the crazy bounce ended. All that remained of the reckless ride was a tangle of metal. The destroyed backhoe had been torn open.
They drifted past. The stone was scorched, but furrowed, too. Ali had seen war zones in Africa, and recognized the starred splatter print of an explosion.
Around the bend, they came on two white crosses planted Latino-style in a grotto
carved into the wall. Tufts of hair, rags, and animal bones had been nailed to the stone. The rags, she comprehended, were leather hides. Skins. Flayed skin. This was a memorial.
After that, miles passed in silence. Here it was at last – all their childhood legends of desperate fights waged against biblical mutants – before their eyes, unintended, where fate had given it. This was not a TV report that could be turned off. This was not a poet's inferno in a book that could be put back on the shelf. Here was the world they lived in now.
At around three, Ali fell asleep. When she woke, the stone was still in motion. The tunnel's smooth walls became less regular. Fractures appeared. Pressure cracks filigreed the ceiling. Crevices lurked like darkened closets. Ali saw a cardboard sign in the distance. WATTS GOLD, LTD. it announced. An arrow pointed at a secondary path branching off into the gloom. A few miles farther on, the wall breached upon another ragged hole. Ali looked inside, and lights sparkled far away in the darkness. B LOCKWICK CLAIM , a sign said. BEWARE OF DOG.
From there on, side roads and crude tunnels fed off every mile or so, sometimes identified as a camp or mining claim, anonymous and unwelcoming. A few were lit at their deepest points with tiny fires. Others were as dark as wells, forlorn. What kind of people gave themselves to such remoteness? H. G. Wells had gotten it right in his Time Machine. The underworld was peopled not with demons, but with proles.
Ali smelled the settlement long before they reached it. The smog was part petroleum, part unrefined sewage, part cordite and dust. Her eyes began watering. The air got thicker, then putrid. It was five o'clock in the morning.
The tunnel walls widened, then flew open upon a cavernous shaft steeping in pollution and overhung by bright turquoise cliffs lit, in a civic fashion, with several spotlights. Otherwise, Point Z-3, locally known as Esperanza, was dimly illuminated. The burden of darkness was evidently too much to overcome with their thin ration of electricity from Nazca City. Despite the cheerful Matisse-like cliffs, it did not look like a friendly home for the next year.
'Helios built a science institute here?' asked one of Ali's companions. 'Why bother?'
'I was expecting something a little more modern,' agreed another. 'This place doesn't look like it's heard of the flush toilet.'
The train coasted through an opening in a glittering briar patch of razor wire. It was like a city made of knife-sharp Slinkys. Concertina piled atop glittering concertina. The coils lay twenty feet high in places. The razor wire got more space than the settlement itself, which was simply a mob of tents on small platforms whittled into the descending hillside.
The train slowed upon a ridge that fell on the far side into a chasm.
Farther along the barrier, they saw a desiccated body suspended high on the outside section of an accordion snarl of wire. The creature's grimace was almost joyful. 'Hadal,' said a scientist. 'Must have been attacking the settlement.' They all craned to see. But the rags hanging from the body were American military. The soldier had been trying to climb his way in over the concertina. Something had been chasing him.
The railway ended in a bunker complex bristling with electric cannons. There was no question about its function. If the settlement came under attack, people were meant to come here. This train would be their last hope of exit.
A squalid settler in canvas pants made notes on a piece of paper as they rolled past. Except for the steel teeth, he might have been an extra in a hillbilly movie.
'How you doing?' one of Ali's companions called down. The settler spat.
The train slid inside the bunker and stopped. Immediately it was set upon by gangs of men with huge hands and bare feet. The workers were degraded, some scarcely recognizable as anatomically modern humans. It wasn't just the Hulk muscles and Abe
