Across the horizon’s desert shimmer, the train station alone. Weathered yellow brick and smooth dark glass, set back a half-mile from the eight-lane freeway, surrounded on the other three sides by arid wasteland, dunes of dead sand that stretched to the horizon. On the side opposite the highway, three train-sized portals yawned dark and high. Three corresponding quarter-mile lengths of track had been set forty feet past these openings, six parallel streaks of bright steel, too hot to touch. Beyond them, rough tar-covered ties slick and sticky in the heat stacked some distance away, and heaps of gravel. From the adjacent side, facing southward, a platform stretched to the sand, from which a wide set of concrete steps — bordered on either side by an iron railing, and divided down the middle by a third — descended the face of a long, steep dune.
There were no trains.
The station was abandoned, unscathed by the bombings, scorpions and kangaroo mice its first and primary denizens. They fed on the garbage of long-gone laborers, building nests of blue-printed wiring diagrams, hiding in the cool stone halls from wind-blown styrofoam cups. Water dripped. Dust drifted. Sometimes, the ground shook, and there came a muted rumble from far away.
And black smoke rose from the highway. An ambulance convoy burned, sixty-two vehicles the target of an airstrike. The only survivors were wounded, but — further — the wounded had been the only survivors: the ones whose maiming had been a preexisting condition, the litter and stretcher patients. A trail of the dead led from the scorched and twisted vehicles to the train station.
Those who were conscious and ambulatory raided the first-aid lockers: no medics to guard the caches of morphine, Ringer
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