Bad Dream
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’s solution, bandages, blankets. As the column burned, concussion victims and amputees jabbed demerol styrettes into their thighs and arms, soldiers with spilling viscera poured the contents of IV bags down their throats, burn victims swaddled their blackened flesh in blankets. And the army of the maimed limped and hobbled and crawled the half mile to the train station, not stopping to assist those who fell to the side. Overhead, wheeling birds took the place of military jets.
Days passed. No human sound was heard within the station’s stone halls. Pools of urine on the cool floor reflected the sun’s image. Paths of dried blood ended in smeared, crusted puddles. Feces dried in shadowed corners. Rags began to strew the halls, soiled pieces of cotton that had once been bandages, or garments.
They learned to move only at night, when it was cooler, and they could hide. They all hid, but those who died of injuries died soon after the airstrike. Their bodies were not left where they died. None knew when help would arrive.
More days passed. Few survivors remained. None were able to walk, or remembered how. In the main atrium, a high, open space with a vaulted ceiling and one wall entirely of glass, a boy crawled on his side beneath the blank ARRIVE/DEPART boards, dragging his infected leg.