Instead of shimmering granite, there was blackened heat-torched rock, melted and blasted.
The Old Man knew if he turned off the tank at this moment and simply listened, he would hear nothing. He would hear the absence of everything.
AFTERNOON THUNDERSTORMS began to form out over the gray and foreboding mountains that rose up in hacked and jagged peaks.
The Old Man looked behind him and saw the gray smoke that had been belching up from the engine had grown thicker and more acrid.
He looked down to check the fuel and engine gauges and saw the temperature climbing. He was down to less than half a tank besides what was left in the two fifty-gallon drums. His eyes fell to the dosimeter.
The radiation is very high here.
You would say, What does it matter now, my friend?
But the voice of Santiago, the one he had carried in his head through the wasteland, and listened to, and even at times longed for, was silent and would not come to him.
You would say that to me.
Beyond the valley and into the next, the scorched and broken earth grew worse if such a thing were possible. Trees grew up through the fallen matchsticks of their ancestors and were little better than dark-barked twisted fiends that seemed barren and even tormented.
There were towns ahead but I wonder if even their foundations remain. On the map they were called Starkville and Trinidad, which seem like places my friend in the book might have gone when he was a sailor and sailed to Africa.
And saw the lions on the beach at sunset.
Did you ever go to a place called Trinidad, Santiago?
Silence.
Then perhaps you did.
In what might have once been Starkville, the Old Man saw the rising stumps of buildings and twisted pipe jutting up wildly through the gray ash and furnace-roasted rock. Within the forest of twisted pines the Old Man saw weird and misshapen man-shaped figures wandering through the ash.
Who are they and what do they know?
Now the day was turning dark and gray. The sky overhead seemed swollen. As if it were pulsing.
If it is possible, it is even hotter that it was.
Soon I will need to drain the fuel drums.
The Old Man drove on, leaving Starkville in ash that sputtered up to mix with the heat and belching smoke from the engine.
A few miles later, the highway could be more clearly seen and was not altogether ruined.
There must have been rains here and what covered the highway has been washed away.
The road carved up a small mountain. Alongside the road, through a dark forest of the twisted fiend-trees, the Old Man could see weighted shacks caught in the act of slow collapse. Like drunkards burdened by the weight of their own misery. At the top of the rise he looked down and saw Trinidad.
The blackened and gray remains of the little village lay in the saddle of a small valley. Beyond, leaden plains of ash stretched off to the north.
I am close to the end of this.
Below the Old Man lay brick buildings that had weathered that long-ago, worst-of-all-worst days, when nuclear weapons had fallen like downpours in a thunderstorm. Windowless holes gaped bleakly out upon ash and darkness like a nearsighted man fumbling through the end of the world. Down in the streets the Old Man could see rusting and tire-less cars. A highway bridge that once crossed over the road connecting both halves of the town seemed recently demolished. The stone lay scattered in all directions like bits of protruding white bone jutting up through the fire-blackened skin of a corpse. In front of this, before the idling tank and the Old Man, great logs and machines had been piled to block the road. On a panel truck whose charred side had been brushed mostly clean, there was a message in that sickly neon-green slop-paint.
I could drive over it. I could crash through their makeshift barrier.
But the bad tread. You would tell me to be careful of the bad tread, my friend Santiago.
Yes.
To the right, an off-ramp led down into the remains of Trinidad.
Chapter 51
Narrow streets barely accommodated the tank as it forced its way east through Trinidad. The Old Man crushed long rusting vehicles and machines that had been dragged into the street. Ahead he could see an intersection.
If I turn left, that might lead alongside the highway, and then at some point, I could get back onto it.
Silence.
The Old Man watched the dark buildings that crowded the sides of the street, peering through the cracks and missing windows for sign of an ambush. Crushing a small car, he felt the right tread slip for a moment, and when the Old Man pushed harder to re-engage the gear, he was horribly convinced it never would. A moment later, though, the small car disappeared beneath the treads on a hollow, plastic milk carton note as the right tread re-engaged and pulled the massive Abrams forward.
In the moment before the explosion, the Old Man was thinking about colors. It was as if the landscape, the town, the sky, all of it, had been repainted by an angry lunatic artist with only three oily paints on his sad palette.
Bone white.
Ash gray.
Bloody rust.
That was when the building to his left exploded outward into the street. It was maybe five stories tall, packed tightly against other buildings that must have once been something in the days of gunfights and circuit judges. The explosion came from inside the building, near its supports. Brickwork concussed outward toward the tank. If the brick had been recently made instead of the two-hundred-year-old building material that it was, time rotted by the frontier birth and nuclear death of America, it would have killed him. Instead, it sprayed outward in a dusty rain of red grit that pelted the tank like a sudden downpour. Something large hit the Old Man on the side of his helmeted head, but he felt it disintegrate with a rotten and rusty
The Old Man ducked down inside the hatch, looking upward. As if in slow motion, he could see the roof of the building turning down toward him. Without thinking he reached up, grabbed the hatch, and slammed it shut as the building didn’t so much as fall on the tank, as slide down on top of it. The tank rocked sideways and the Old Man was thrown down onto the loader’s deck.
‘It’s too much for just me,’ was his last thought.
WHEN HE CAME to he got to his feet, feeling weak and shaky. Red light swam eerily across the interior.
He remembered the building falling on him. Its slow-motion fall that seemed like a cresting wave looming over him. The oddness of seeing the building’s roof shifting down toward him as it moved from the horizontal to the vertical.
Am I stuck? Is there so much debris piled on top of the tank that I’ll never be able to get out from under it?
And…
What if the bad tread has finally broken loose having come so close to the end of this journey and yet, I’m still so far away!
