On the other side he slammed on the brakes and the tank skidded across marble, careening into a lone desk that must have once greeted arriving guests. The Old Man swiveled the turret and found a wide entrance leading back out onto the street. He pivoted the tank and throttled the engine to full as it tore through the last remnants of broken glass and bent steel, surging out onto the wide steps and a driveway that led off toward the main road. The tank bumped its way down the steps, crushed an ancient taxi, and charged up the driveway and out onto casino row.
All around him, radiation-rotted towers and palaces rose up in only the color of burnt ash. Dry white grass and burnt earth lay beneath a constant snowfall of settling radioactive debris. In the middle of the street lay an airliner in two distinct parts, its center section long gone, the tail rising up at an odd angle in the background, the cockpit smiling sickly at some bad joke played forty years ago. Its sweptback wings akimbo, as though in some confession of final helplessness.
The dust storm had stopped.
The moon was out.
Fading flakes of ash drifted like snow on a winter’s night.
Everything that was not burnt black or tired gray remained bone white.
The Old Man checked the “outside” dosimeter. It was pegged to the red line. The “inside” counter was high, but still within the green.
It works.
Our little blanket works.
The Old Man maneuvered the tank onto the main road.
A path of frozen destruction lay carved from when the airliner had come down onto the street moments after takeoff and left a clear path through the forty years since. The Old Man settled the tank into the ditch of scarred asphalt and followed it east through the last of the collapsing palaces.
AT DAWN, IN the shadows among the pink light of first morning, the Old Man watched the ancient city refuse to illuminate in color. He had the tank backed up against a wall in a vacant lot beyond the casinos, watching the leaning towers and fallen arcades, waiting for the Boy.
There isn’t much fuel left.
I’ll give him until noon and then we must leave.
His granddaughter was asleep.
He’d had to explain a lot of what had happened. What she had seen. What she should’ve never seen.
And there was much he could not explain.
So he told her about ice cream.
She’d never had ice cream.
“One day we’ll find an ice cream maker, one with a hand crank. All we need is some milk, maybe we can get some from our goats, and then we only need to find some salt. Then we can have ice cream. You will love it.”
Sugar. You will need sugar, my friend.
There is the sugar from the date palms. We could use that.
“I know I will, Poppa. I just know I’ll love it.”
“There are even flavors.” And the Old Man began to name as many as he could remember.
Soon she was asleep.
I hope she dreams only of ice cream.
Ice cream dreams.
You were wrong to bring her with you, my friend.
I know that now.
In time, he saw the Boy limping across an abandoned lot of glittering broken glass, crossing a gray and dusty road, and cutting through a fallen mesh fence. Heading for the tank.
He was alone.
Chapter 29
As the morning sun began to bake the quiet destruction between the empty spaces and cracked parking lots of Vegas, the Old Man climbed down from the tank and handed the last of a half-filled canteen to the Boy.
The Boy began to drink, holding the canteen with his powerful right hand. The Old Man looked at the dried blood covering the Boy’s arms, still staining the tomahawk.
There is no need to ask him what happened in there.
He left the Boy to drink water alone in the silence of the place.
Inside the tank, he started the APU and radioed General Watt. Natalie.
“We’re on the other side of Las Vegas now.”
“Good.” Her voice was warm and clear. Like she’d just had a cup of morning coffee. Like there might be a cup waiting for him, wherever she was.
As if such good things exist anymore.
As if there are such moments left in this world.
“It’s a good thing you got us to that Radiation Shielding Kit,” he said. Then he told her what he could of the night. He told her about the three. How they’d made a way when there seemed none. And how each had died in doing so. He could not tell the one without the other. When he told General Watt of the bomb crater they’d come upon, she asked about the shielding kit. “We needed it to cross through a bomb crater.”
“You’ve used it already?”
There wasn’t exactly alarm in her voice. Not exactly. But something.
Concern?
“Yes.” Then, “Is that going to be a problem?” asked the Old Man, hearing the sudden worry in his own voice. “Should we… is there something else ahead…”
Pause.
“It won’t be a problem,” said Natalie, her voice gentle and calm. “We’ll find a way to keep you safe. If you had to use it to survive, then it had to be used.”
“I hope we didn’t… I hope that was all right,” stammered the Old Man. “I hope…”
“It’s all right.”
Her voice is like the voice of someone who knows that eventually everything is going to be just fine, no matter how bad it looks right now. No matter what you’ve done to mess things up.
You need that, my friend, so take it because it is being given away for free and also because you are too poor to disagree.
Yes.
“There is nothing to worry about at this present time,” said General Watt. Natalie. “It’ll be all right. We will find a way to get you here.”
But the Old Man knew that it wasn’t all right. That some change had taken place in the wind and weather, the current and tide, and finally as it must, the last port at journey’s end.
And.
There is always a price to pay for such things.
Yes.
Always.
And someone will have to pay for it.
Someone will.
In the hatch, beneath the sun, the Old Man felt cold.
THE ROAD UP and out of southern Las Vegas climbed through tired rocks and vast crumbling urban sprawls of falling houses and collapsed roadways. A barely readable sign indicated the way to Lake Mead.
