59

 

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.