And then suddenly Rowan was running, dazed and blind with terror, down the street toward the east, between the flaming lines of buildings and over the crushed fragments of humanity which lay there. Down the street's length he ran, and out between its last buildings, and on and on into the night, crazedly, aimlessly. The roar of flames and thunderous din of the town behind him dwindled as he ran, but he did not look back, throwing himself blindly forward through the darkness, weeping and wringing his hands, stumbling, staggering on.
3
How long it was before the mists of terror that clouded his brain finally cleared and lifted, how long he stumbled blindly through the night, Rowan could never guess. When he finally came back to realization of his surroundings he found himself standing knee-deep in water and mud, standing in a thick forest whose dark trees formed over him a great canopy of twisted foliage, and whose floor was a swampy expanse of shallow pools and yielding sands. Far behind him there glowed feebly in the sky a glare of ruddy light, half glimpsed through the rifts in the foliage overhead, and as his eyes took in that crimson glare sudden memory came to his dazed brain.
"God!" he whispered. And again, the single syllable: "God!"
For minutes he stood there, paying no attention to his own surroundings, his mind on that tremendous and unthinkable attack which had crashed upon Brinton from the outside night, of the terrible dinosaurs and their strange riders who had descended upon the town. Whence had they come, those gigantic reptilian monsters whose like earth had not seen for hundreds of millions of years? And who, what, were those lizard-shapes who had ridden and directed them, whose pale rays had swept fiery death across the town?
Abruptly Rowan's mind snapped back to consideration of his own predicament, and swiftly he looked about him. The thick forest around him, the mud and stagnant water in which he stood, the odor of rotting vegetation in his nostrils—in a moment he recognized them.
"The swamp!" he whispered. "I came eastward from the town, and this——"
A moment he paused, glancing around and back toward the glare of red light in the sky behind, then turned and began to move forward. Through stagnant, scummy pools he splashed, feeling himself sinking once into treacherous sands but jerking out of them in swift panic, clambering over fallen trees and across ridges and mounds of solid ground, through thick tangles of shrubs and briars. Once he lay for moments on one of the mounds, panting for breath, and staring up through the twisted branches above to where the shining, unchanging constellations marched serenely across the heavens. Then he rose and pressed on, conscious only of the desire to put more and more distance between himself and the inferno of terror which Brinton had become.
Abruptly he stepped out of the close forest into a wide clear space, a broad pathway cut through that forest by some great force, in which the trees and bushes had been ground down into crushed and splintered masses. Rowan stepped into this broad lane of destruction, wonderingly, and saw that it ran east and west, apparently across the swamp. Then into his mind leapt remembrance of those great pathways of smashed trees which the searchers for Morton had found near the swamp's edge. Could it be that——?