The Boy says nothing.
“The fuel we pumped from beneath the runway is making the engine of the tank too warm. I don’t remember much about engines but I do remember that if they are too hot for too long they might melt.”
No one said anything.
“Tomorrow we will reach the valley floor. It will be even hotter down there.”
After a moment his granddaughter asked, “So what do we do, Poppa?”
“I don’t know,” confessed the Old Man.
It seemed like the admission of ignorance, the surrender to helplessness. His statement lured him into a brief moment where he may have been asleep or falling toward it.
“Then we must go now,” said the Boy quietly.
The Old Man sat up.
Natalie said the road we must take to the bottom is gone now. Off-road, in the darkness, feeling our way down the side of a cliff, that would be madness.
“It’s a good moon to see by tonight,” said the Boy as if reading the Old Man’s thoughts. “Good for traveling. In an hour or so it will be very cold. The desert is like that.”
Chapter 21
The tank is running.
The night is colder, and ever so slightly, the needle is a little lower than it was in the heat of the day.
The Old Man circles the running tank, then climbs onto the turret and into the hatch.
Inside, his granddaughter is buckled into the gunner’s seat.
He shows the Boy how to use the seat belt in the loader’s station.
“I can drive, Poppa, or at least be in the driver’s seat up front.”
The Old Man, sweating slightly and feeling weak, as if nauseated, climbs up into the hatch.
“I think it’s better if we’re all strapped in here, together. It might get pretty rough.”
The Old Man takes hold of the control sticks Sergeant Major Preston had built to maneuver the tank from the commander’s seat.
The Old Man looks down inside the tank and sees the Boy bathed in red light.
He is looking forward at nothing.
Nothing that exists anymore.
How do you know, my friend?
I just do.
The Old Man puts his hand on the switch that will activate the tank’s high-beam light.
A moment later, everything in front of the tank is bathed in a wide arc of white light, throwing long shadows of deep darkness away from the blistered pavement and scattered rock.
For a few hundred yards they are able to follow the winding road, but almost immediately the road lies buried beneath a collapsed wall of red volcanic rock. The Old Man taps the throttle and listens to the two wide treads grind and crunch the porous rock as the tank climbs up onto the pile. On the other side, the final descent begins as the road rounds a curve, falling away out of sight.
So far, so good.
The Old Man smiles and adjusts his grip on the twin sticks, which are already slick with sweat.
On the other side of the curve, a fallen bridge sends only a strip of a railing across the gap.
The Old Man nudges the tank forward and looks into the empty space.
It’s not deep, but it’s steep. If we go down in there, we might get stuck.
To the right is a small plateau of crumbling rock that is little more than a wide ledge and a drop that disappears off into the night. To the left, a rock wall.
The Old Man maneuvers the tank out onto the wide ledge.
There is more than enough room.
Once the tank is back on the narrow two-lane road, the descent steepens and then halts.
The rock wall has shifted over the road. There is no ledge to turn onto and bypass the wall.
The Old Man waits, straining to see something in the arc of light that he has not yet seen.
He checks the temperature gauge.
Warmer.
But not as warm.
If we sit, if we wait, it will get warmer.
But I need time to think.
Right now you must be very rich to afford such a luxury, my friend.
The Old Man pulls back on both sticks and the tank shifts gears and begins to back up the road. When it’s wide enough, which is just barely, he pivots the tank, mashing one stick forward and pulling back on the other, then he races back up to the ledge.
He climbs up out of the hatch and runs forward through the night across the warm rock.
Don’t trip and break anything. A hand or a wrist, or even a leg.
Yes, that would be bad.
Below, the ledge falls steeply down a small hill onto a ridge that seems to cut back toward the road.
We could make it back to the road that way.
You might also get stuck.
Time.
Back in the tank, the Old Man starts the machine toward the ledge.
“Hang on,” he mumbles over the intercom.
The near horizon is gray rock and long shadows in the brightness of the tank’s lamp. The darkness of the night seems to devour the ground just beyond the light as the earth falls away and disappears.
Like the surface of an asteroid tumbling through the dark.
There is a moment when the tank is pointing straight toward the horizon, and a moment later it feels as though the gun barrel is aimed down into a black pit that lies just beyond the shattered rocks that dot the arc of light. All of them feel as if they are falling out of their seat belts and harnesses.
The tank picks up speed and the Old Man is leaning hard into the brakes as the tank slides forward into what must be an abyss.
The tank hovers halfway down the cliff and the Old Man can hear himself muttering.
“Poppa?” asks his granddaughter, breaking the dull hum of the intercom net.
The Old Man can see that the ridge ends abruptly and well before connecting with the broken road that winds off toward the unreachable north.
If I back up, the temperature will rise. It’ll put too much strain on the engine.
The Old Man gives slightly on the brakes and the tank begins to ease forward, the gun barrel pointing even lower.
A hundred yards later, the tank is sliding down through rocks and dust, and the Old Man can only give and release on the brakes as the massive war machine slides faster and faster toward the unknown, unseen bottom.
Ahead, a large rock juts out of the dust that seems to chase and overtake the tank every time the Old Man jams his feet onto the brakes.
The Old Man engages the right tread and steers wide of the rock, clipping it at one edge and sending a spray of gravel off into the night.
“Wheeeeeee!” squeals his granddaughter over the intercom.
It feels like we are being bounced to death.
Like a roller coaster.
She has never known roller coasters. So this is her first roller coaster.
And though the Old Man is frightened, afraid he has chosen badly from the start and will soon be
