The glass partition drops down from the ceiling, quick and incisive as a guillotine. The duskers, realizing, clatter onto their feet, flash toward us. But the partition closes, clicking shut a second before they smack hard into it. It holds without cracking. They shake their heads as if to flick away the fresh pain in their concussed skulls, then back up to take another running leap. Their brutish bodies bludgeon the glass with even more force, the thump-thump-thump ringing in my ears. The glass bends and shimmers like a sheet of metal but holds. The duskers back up for another run when they are sideswiped by a torrent of bodies flooding through the doorway. Fast and swift, the bodies gush in, filling that half of the Ruler’s chamber to overflowing. Their bodies press up and squeak against the glass as their levels rise, a pale, coagulated sea.
Not that Sissy and I are spectating. On the other side of the glass wall, we’re sliding David into the enclave, being as careful as we can with his battered body, even in our haste. For a second, Sissy and I stare at the remaining space in the enclave, then at each other. It’s going to be tight. But we’ll manage. Somehow.
The duskers continue to pour into the other half of the suite. The glass will break soon. If not from the cumulative pressure of the dozens, now hundreds, of duskers, then surely from the sheer pitch of their strangled screams.
Sissy jumps into the enclave, cradles David in her arms. I squeeze into the remaining space, my head to their feet, lying in the opposite direction. The tablet in my hands. I check the screen one last time, then hit GO.
The enclave’s glass lid slides shut. We start to descend, quickly, the rectangle of gray light above us getting smaller, then altogether disappearing as it closes up. We’re in complete darkness as we travel down the black spine of the obelisk. Screams dart randomly at us, from unseen duskers on the other side of the column as they race up the spiraling staircase. The enclave shakes from side to side as if the whole transportation system is collapsing. We drop, suddenly, almost a free fall, and all I can do is clasp Sissy’s feet in my hands, press her toes against my cheek.
And then gravity crushes me like a giant hand. We take a whiplashing sharp turn, moving horizontally now, the back of my head banging against the glass wall, then slamming forward again as we take another vicious turn.
A minute later, we’re inundated by hot spotlights. We try to stay calm, knowing this will soon be over. Then we’re off again, tearing through the dark.
And finally, the enclave slows down. Ahead, a sliver of light beams through, like a tear in a curtain, widening. Until it is large enough for the enclave to trundle through. Gray light washes over us. The enclave comes to a complete stop, and we bang on the lid, hands frantically slamming on the glass with claustrophobia-fueled intensity. The enclave lid slides open. We fall out. It takes a moment for our oxygen-starved brains to realize where we are. But when we do, Sissy and I, without a second’s delay, pick David up. And start running for the train.
Fifty-eight
WE CLIMB INTO the nearest car, the last on the long chain. David still hasn’t opened his eyes or said a word. But he’s breathing, quick, shallow inhales with even shallower exhales. Dark circles ring under his eyes.
The configuration of the tablet screen has changed. The tablet must have some kind of internal positioning system that sensed the proximity of the train and automatically switched over to that database. More buttons appear on the screen, red circles, blue squares, green ovals. But there’s only one button that matters, and it is the black rectangle MISSION. I press it. Something loud clacks under the long line of train cars. The lead engine car, already revved, lurches forward. We’re moving.
And it is like before, and it is vastly different from before.
It is the emptiness that is most different. Instead of train cars packed with Mission village girls, the train is now hauntingly empty, bereft of any internal movement or sound. Even in our otherwise empty car, Sissy and I sit perfectly still, the only movement being Sissy’s hand stroking David’s hair.
And it is strangely quiet. No sound but the faint rattle of the moving train. No screams, no wails, nothing from above or around or behind us. The train picks up speed and the doors to each car automatically close, yet still no other sound pierces the darkness of the tunnel.
Sissy takes my hand in hers. We grasp tightly, not with fear, for there’s none left in us. It’s all been wrung out.
Five miles from the Palace, we emerge out of the tunnel. The train will be in view of the Palace for only a few minutes before disappearing behind low-slung hills. We stare in silence at the Palace, so small in the distance, as it is overrun like a crumb swarmed by ants. Only the initial wave of the millions-strong horde had earlier reached the Palace. But now the slower yet immensely larger and denser waves pour over it. The obelisk tower begins to wobble, then sway. Just before we round the hills and the Palace is cut off from view, the obelisk tower topples like a matchstick snapped.
Fifty-nine
FOR HALF THE night, the world is ours alone. The train cuts through a desert that is as expansive and empty as the starlit skies above. The duskers do not give chase as we thought they would. Not initially. Perhaps the pandemonium at the Palace is too distracting and they have not detected the faint scent trailing us. Even hours later, the silver-glazed landscape is a motionless vacuum.
But in the hour when the moon begins to dim and the sky lightens to gray, we hear it. A rasping sound, like the rib cage of night rattling across the desert plains. The train by that point, especially with so little cargo, is traveling at a fast clip, so the sound of the duskers’ approach gains on us only gradually.
The rasp festers into a deep rumble, and an hour later we see the first sign of not only their approach but also their sheer size. A wall of dust, almost as tall as that which rose out of the metropolis hours ago, lifts darkly from the land. Disjointed shouts cannonball out of the dark haze. Sissy and I sit against the bars of the train car and gaze dispassionately at the chasing winds. It is not that we are unafraid. We aren’t.
It’s only that trapped here in our only vehicle of escape there is little we can do. If they come, they come. If they reach us, they eat us. It’s that simple. They’ll cling to the caged walls, the swiftest few at first, then by the hundreds. Their aggregate mass will derail the train, and then their cumulative weight will crumple the cages inward. And then they will have at us, and perhaps by then we will be mercifully already dead, our bodies crushed under their weight. But there is nothing to do to avoid this end, or to delay it, or even to expedite it. If they come, they come. And so we lean back against the bars, my arm over Sissy’s shoulders, holding hands, David’s head cradled in Sissy’s lap. We don’t speak.
An hour passes and their approach has grown thunderous. Many thousands are racing on the tracks themselves, and the train car glides along less smoothly, juddering from side to side. They are drawing close.
Dawn catches everyone by surprise. As if we have forgotten the natural and unbreakable sequence of time, the inevitability of the moon’s death and the sun’s rise. Only when the dark sky becomes glazed over with a pearly gray do Sissy and I stand up, pillowing David’s head with my shoes.
The front edge of the horde is about a mile away. But they’ve stopped gaining on us. The duskers’ disintegration in those first timid dawn rays is barely perceptible at first, their pace dropping off only a notch. Muscles less robust, lungs just a little less stout. But as the darkness cedes to gray, and the gray to violet, their bodies begin to drastically wilt, their energy flagging even more. Still they press forward, our odor egging them on, the sight of the fleeing train taunting them.
The moon fades; the awakening sun burns crimson the edges of the horizon.
And when the rim of the sun breaks through and splashes its rays over the land, there is a collective scream from the moiling masses. The sky rips open. More light, the color of blood, gushes out. A critical threshold is suddenly, viciously passed; they begin to melt. Within the half hour, a lake, a mile wide, yellow and sticky, shapes itself in the desert, at first chunky and moving, then, a half hour later, liquid and still.
Sissy and I lie down on the floor of the train car. She places her head on my shoulder, wraps herself against my side. The rising sun casts long shadows of the bars slantways across our bodies.
I feel something wet trail down my chest. Sissy’s tears. She doesn’t shake or sob, but the tears continue to flow for many minutes. Later, after her tears have dried under the sun, I will see the residue of salt crusted on my chest, thick and jagged like a scar.
We gaze up, through the bars of the train, at the sky. A fatigue that feels heavy as death settles on us. By the time the sky deepens into the pure cobalt blue of the afternoon, we have been asleep for hours. The train cuts through the vast desert, unseen and unwitnessed, toward the eastern mountains etched in the far distance.
Sixty
ON THE THIRD day of the journey, David dies.
He held out longer than we expected. But his death still shakes us hard, Sissy especially. We had done what little we could on the train, cupping him with our bodies during the cold nights, or wringing our damp clothes for a few drops of water into his parched mouth. But it is not enough. The cruel irony, that his death, after days and nights submerged in a watery prison, would be caused by dehydration.
In those first few days on the train, Sissy hummed to him the same lullabies she sang when he was a baby. She brushed his hair back, over and over, the way she used to comfort him whenever he sobbed as a toddler, after he’d stubbed his toe, or scraped his knee.
He never really came to. There were only a few moments of lucidity, when his eyes opened but for a few seconds. He’d stare with unresponsive and glazed eyes, at the desert, and, later, at the brown blur of forests. But never at us. Then he’d close his eyes and not open them again for hours.
Nightmares raged behind those closed eyelids. He shouted, random, nonsensical words. Sometimes he whimpered. Or begged. Sissy could only cradle his head during those fraught moments, her face racked with grief, her hand trying to stroke away his dreams, away her guilt. When he flailed his arms, lashing out into the night, she did not dodge out of the way but let his hand smack into her face. Her penance to pay.