Mitch nodded as if to say that was good enough for him. “I’ll take a squad to check it out,” he said. “The sooner we leave, the better. Debating will only waste time.” Cavan agreed but said he’d stay with Alicia, who insisted on remaining to help Dash; in any case, at his age, he said, he would only slow everyone down. Mitch didn’t argue. Charlie Hu had little choice, since he would have been hard put to walk the length of a football pitch. That left Keene and Colby to go with Mitch, which seemed advisable in case their political credentials still carried weight, and Dan as the navigator. Nine fit soldiers remained, including Legermount and Furle. Mitch assigned four who were at least up to marching to stay behind under Furle’s command with the injured and the civilians. The other five would accompany Mitch and his party, Legermount acting as second in command.
Keene saw suspicion in Furle’s eyes as he watched the departing party sorting out supplies and equipment to take with them. “A couple of hours in Texas, then on to Atlanta,” he heard Furle murmur sarcastically to one of the others as they picked up entrenching tools and went back to remove the bodies from the plane for burial along with the others.
When that task was complete, the soldiers began cutting and dragging parts of the plane to bridge a narrow section of the ravine, which they fashioned into a shelter with draped camouflage netting weighted with rocks and sand. Then they got a couple of stoves going, so at least the departing party were able to get a hot meal inside them before setting off.
41
If ever there was a preview of Hades, this had to be it. The nine—Mitch and Dan; Keene and Colby; Corporal Legermount and the four troopers—trudged in single file up the slope, their bodies stiff from hours of lying pressed against the rocks, slipping and sliding on sandy gravel that rolled from under their feet, wind-borne grit stinging their faces and eyes. Around them, a desolation of humps and boulders extended away to shadowy forms of hillsides and mesas outlined dimly in the dust-laden, sulfurous air. The knee that Keene had struck in the landing was throbbing, and after about thirty minutes he had to stop to put a dressing over the burn on his calf, which was chafing painfully. He was grateful that they had accepted the Guard-issue kit in Pasadena, including boots. His civilian shoes wouldn’t have hung together for a mile in this.
At the top of the rise, Dan halted to check his compass bearing. The men stood waiting, adjusting pack straps and repositioning weapons. Then Legermount pointed; Keene looked with the others, his eyes at first narrowing in puzzlement. . . . They were looking down over what seemed to be an expanse of desert extending away into the pall of dust through which something was glowing dull red. Then, as the pattern resolved itself, his jaw fell incredulously. The size and distance were impossible to estimate, since in the murk there was nothing to provide a reference of size—but a part of the desert seemed to be burning. He felt a nudge on his shoulder and turned. Mitch handed him a pair of field glasses. Keene raised them to his eyes, adjusted the focus, and peered.
The ground itself was glowing. . . . A vast, smoldering depression extended back into invisibility, looking like a lake of fire behind a darker dam of boulders and earth mixed with embers. He was looking at a crater. The “dam” was part of the wall. As he studied it more, he made out another glow, dimmer and more distant, with no details discernible, that had been invisible without the glasses. They could be just two of thousands scattered for hundreds of miles. Too stupefied to speak, he passed the glasses to Colby. They resumed moving to cross the head of a valley descending away to their left, and followed the far side around a shoulder of mountain, all the time angling down the slope. After about another mile they came to a track heading in roughly their direction, which made the going easier. Following the track, they came across an abandoned pickup with dents in the roof and a shattered windshield. Legermount tried jumping a wire from the battery to the starter in the hope of getting them a ride, but the pickup was out of gas.
Lower down, they heard screams—not human but shrill and whinnying, which sounded even more blood-chilling. They found horses, dozens of them, in a corral behind an obliterated farm. Most of those not already dead were writhing with smashed legs, burns, broken backs. The soldiers stopped long enough to despatch them with bullets. A handful remained, milling around each other aimlessly, their eyes bulging in terror. Legermount looked at Mitch questioningly. Mitch scowled, then shook his head. “Hell, let ’em have what chance they’ve got.” He waved toward the gate. One of the troopers opened it to turn the surviving animals loose.
Below the farm was a graveyard of cattle piled in heaps around a pond of red sludge. Nearby was what was left of a car that looked as if it had been hurled some distance, its wheels in the air. There were bodies inside, and two more thrown clear. What little light there had been had faded, and Mitch and Dan, leading, had to use flashlamps to find the trail. From somewhere ahead came the sound of an aircraft climbing. At least, it seemed Dan’s sense of direction had been good.
The valley seemed to be opening onto flatter terrain. The ground still rose to their right, but on the other side fell away more gently and broadened. The track merged with another and became gravel now instead of just dirt, though sometimes disappearing beneath mounds of rubble and sand that looked as if they had been thrown by a giant shovel. Light began appearing below on the left, strung at intervals along a still-invisible road. Dan confirmed that it had to be Interstate 10. There didn’t seem to be a lot of movement on it.
Some distance ahead, the lights became more numerous, fading into the darkness along a line veering left as if the road curved suddenly in that direction. But interstates didn’t change direction that abruptly. An area beyond was still glowing. They could feel the heat on their faces, even at that distance. It seemed that something sizable had impacted square across the highway. Mitch and Dan conferred briefly. The choice was either to head directly down to the road now and follow it to what appeared to be workings in progress to create a traffic road around the far side of the crater; or alternatively, to stay above the road and head right of the crater, which while more direct could mean having to negotiate the broken rim in the darkness and possibly being driven farther uphill again. Deciding not to risk any further unknowns they went with the first, taking the next track they came to pointing directly down toward the lights. From somewhere in the direction of the highway, the muffled whop-whop-whop of a helicopter rotor came distantly through the night.
In the darkness and with all the dust in the air, the road turned out to be closer than they had thought. They passed several houses, some stores, and a gas station, all ruined and partly buried in rocky debris. There were more wrecked vehicles, some thrown topsy turvy, others pinning bodies of people who had apparently tried to shelter under them. And then lights and activity, accompanied by the sounds of voices and motors, were immediately ahead. Approaching, they found there were more vehicles than they had realized; the lights were from just a few with engines running that were being used to illuminate rescue operations in progress among more houses and commercial premises built along a service road paralleling the interstate, now discernible beyond. Workers were shining lamps among collapsed timbers and shoveling away rubble. One building, lit by the headlamps of a couple of trucks in front, had been adapted as an aid station, with casualties being helped and carried in out of the surrounding darkness. A group of hooded and hatted figures approached, presumably having seen the flashlamps coming down the road off the hill. The one leading had a bandage showing below his hat and was wearing a sheriff’s deputy’s badge with a storm coat.
“Looks like we’ve got some fit people here. You boys wanna enlist? We need all the help here we can get.”
Mitch answered. “We need help ourselves. Bunch of people in a plane crashed back over in the next valley, some of them hurt.”
“Are you serious? They’re only just starting pulling bodies out of what’s left of Phoenix. Right here we’ve got wrecks backed up into California that nobody’s gotten to y
et and probably won’t for days. There’s about a couple of hundred thousand people in line ahead of you already.” The voice was weary, not prepared to debate the obvious. Mitch sighed and nodded. It was obvious that they didn’t have a case.
“Military mission. We have to try and see it through.”
The deputy shrugged. “Well . . . good luck.”
“Which way’s the reception center?” Mitch nodded in the direction of the crater ahead. “That way, past where the big one hit?”
“Right—about two miles farther on.” The deputy’s face showed for a moment in the light of a turning car: young, crusted with dust, streaked on one side with congealed blood that had trickled down from the bandage. He wiped his mouth with the back of a gloved hand. “Say . . . would you guys have any spare water? We’ve been waiting two hours for our truck to get back. Can’t take any from these people. The ones that thought to bring some are gonna need it.”
Mitch passed his water bottle over. Several of the other troopers did likewise. The deputy took a modest swig, washed it around, swallowed, and nodded gratefully. “Oh boy. You’ve no idea . . .”
“Is that where the chopper we heard would have come from?” Mitch asked.
“Right.”
“Who’s operating them?”
“I couldn’t tell you. The Army’s in charge now, trying to get some organization together. Where are you guys heading?”
“Texas.”
“Texas? Jeez! I’m not sure there is a Texas anymore. It might be part of the Gulf. Everybody else is coming the other way.”
“Like I said, it’s an official mission.”
“Well, I’m glad something’s still functioning. Just follow along where they’re leveling a road around the crater—there’s no way you can miss it; you’ve got a mountain blocking the road. You can see the lights they’ve got set up from here. Then pick up the interstate again on the other side.”
It was like a scene out of a war. There were hundreds of wrecked and damaged vehicles there in the darkness, stretching in a gigantic tailback from the crater, they realized as they came out onto the highway. Thousands. Standing amid a litter of glass and debris, roofs and hoods buckled by falling rocks, some apparently unscathed, others flung or pushed off the roadway completely. A number were burning. Twisting lines jammed nose to tail showed where drivers had weaved as far as they could before being brought to a halt. Many were helping each other check among the vehicles with flashlights and in headlamp beams, pulling out the injured and doing what they could for the ones trapped. Others just sat along the verge, in shock and bewildered, waiting for direction. Farther along, a tractor trailer had somehow balanced itself on end. A woman was wandering among the cars, frantically calling someone’s name. A headless body hung from the window of a Chevrolet, dripping blood onto the asphalt. A dog whimpered at the door of a stove-in Nissan van full of tangled forms, none of them moving.
Keene walked by it all at the center of the silent column, unable to suppress a feeling of callousness, yet mindful that nothing they could have done would alter anything materially. Millions of people were dying, millions no doubt already had, and many more millions would still, and nothing was going to change it.
Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . He followed Legermount’s tirelessly swinging heels ahead of him and let his mind sink into numbness, shutting out the groans, the cries, the shouts of the rescuers, the bodies laid out in rows under blankets and tarpaulins. Others who were part of their own microworld were depending on them, he told himself, and for now nothing more mattered beyond that. Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . In such a way was life reducing to minor achievements and small things taking on immense significance; that kept you alive and got you through to tomorrow. And that was good enough. Both his legs hurt. The boots were chafing his heels, and he could feel blisters starting to form. He hadn’t hiked like this for years. He would have to get used to it again soon. There would be plenty of it in store when gasoline stocks started running out.
Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . Crunch . . . And so it went until the mounds of rocks and debris rose to become a huge rampart of earth and boulders standing fifty to a hundred feet high in the light of arc lamps running from a mobile generator. In places, crushed and partly buried vehicles protruded from the slope. Police, military, and emergency vehicles were clustered along a strip that had been leveled to the left of the crater wall, beyond which more lamps illuminated earth-moving machines and road gangs making an earth-and-gravel road to reconnect the severed portions of the interstate. Mitch led the way along the foot of the crater wall, at the top of which figures were clambering about, taking photographs of the other side and making observations with various instruments. The object that gouged the crater had come in from the east, throwing most of the ejecta westward in the direction that Keene and the others had come from. As they progressed along the edge, the wall gradually became lower until they were walking almost on the rim itself. The ground underfoot was hot, and the heat radiating from inside was intense enough to keep them several yards back from the actual edge, in the shadow of the lip. Even so, every now and again one or a couple of them would venture closer for a few seconds to get a glimpse of the crater floor, glowing eerily red. Red was shining above them, too, reflected down through the dust pall by the cloud blanket. What was left of Phoenix was on fire.
A sound came of distant freight trains in the sky, followed minutes later by the rumbling of explosions somewhere to the north.
The reception center was another oasis of light and activity involving trucks and earthmovers, located a short distance from the interstate beside a small airfield littered with wrecked planes. It looked like an original cluster of buildings from a one-time military base of some kind, expanded probably within the last few days to the beginnings of a minicity by the addition of scores of portable huts and cabins, only to be flattened by the meteorite storm. The work going on currently was to clear the devastation and convert as many of the buildings as were salvageable into earth-covered dugouts and sandbagged shelters. Refugee arrivals were already being moved into one part, where food was being dispensed from a field kitchen. In another area, bodies were being carried from where they had been laid out in lines numbering dozens and loaded onto a truck, presumably for burial or disposal elsewhere.
Everything was improvised and chaotic, and Mitch’s initial queries yielded mixed answers as to who was in charge. No one seemed to be, exactly, but different individuals were running different things, which they seemed to have taken charge of on their own initiative. Hopes were that it should all get more coordinated tomorrow. Eventually, they found an Army major who had set up with a small staff in a sandbagged trailer equipped with a telephone exchange operating over landlines. Apparently, he was in touch with the regional command center being established at El Paso.
Colby Greene produced his government credentials and explained that people who were involved in a vital official mission were stranded up in the hills about ten miles west where their plane had crashed, and he needed assistance. The major regarded him with much the same look as the sheriff’s deputy had given them back along the interstate.
“Well, I’m not sure that kind of authority means too much anymore,” he said. “And even if it did, we’ve got our hands kind of full right now to be worrying about a few more people ten miles up in the hills. And even if we didn’t, we don’t have any way of getting anyone there.”
“You’ve got choppers,” Dan said. “We heard one ourselves, coming in—when we were back the other side of the crater.”
“No av-gas,” the major told him. “A plane that went out of here earlier took the last we had. Two road tankers were on their way here to fill our tanks, but they didn’t make it through Phoenix. We’re supposed to be getting an emergency load flown in tomorrow morning, but until it gets here nothing’s going out. So why don’t you and your boys get something to eat, find a corner to bed down,
and rest up for the night? You all look as if you could use it.”
42
The tanker flight was diverted elsewhere. Back in the trailer the next morning, Keene listened with Mitch, Colby, and Dan while the major talked on the line with somebody in El Paso.
“Look, we’ve got half of California coming in off the interstate this morning. I need food, I need doctors, and I need medical supplies. But I can’t have anything flown in, because until I’ve got something to refuel them with, nothing that brings any of it can get out again. . . . Base facilities? What are you talking about, base facilities? There aren’t any base facilities. They got wiped out yesterday. What planet have you been on? We’re having to dig ourselves holes in the ground here.”
He listened a while longer, then replaced the receiver and looked at the four who were waiting. “All I can tell you is that this isn’t the only area that got pounded. It’s still going on in some places. Everywhere’s a mess. They said they’ll do what they can. We might be able to get a supply through by road from a depot I’ve located in California. What else do you want me to say?”
It seemed there was nothing more to be done, probably for the rest of that day. The group vacated the space they had been using in one of the previously prepared shelters, and Mitch detailed Legermount and three troopers to begin constructing one of their own. He outlined a plan for a rectangular pit five feet deep, the excavated material being used for sandbags to build up the sides, with a roof of alloy beams and corrugated steel sheet from some wreckage nearby, topped with four feet of sand. With that task under way, he left for a tour of the center, accompanied by Dan and the two other men to see what else was happening and if they could be of help. Thousands of people were beginning to appear now, jammed into their own vehicles or brought in by emergency trucks, many others walking. There simply weren’t the facilities or staff to take care of the horrendous numbers of injured; trucks stacked with bodies left regularly for the mass graves that had been bulldozed behind a hill a mile or so from the center.
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