“Okay,” Henry said. “I’ve seen it.”
He went back.
“The goddamndest thing!” a runner reported breathlessly, as Henry came back,
“happened out Bigelow, beyond Decatur. A train, loaded with people, pulled from downtown and got all the way out there before it smacked a freight. The whole shebang went off the rails.
And nobody even noticed until an hour or so ago! Hardly anyone lived. It was going about ninety when it hit.”
Henry merely nodded.
7
Ted Conner was carrying a walkie-talkie with the mixed gang of firemen, cops and CD people who were trying to crash and beat their way back down James Street to Simmons Park. It was outside his father’s sector, in K. But the Sector K headquarters had been wrecked, and they were borrowing people from adjacent areas. The Wickley Heights section, near where they worked, had been hit hard. Most of the people, the ones who could move, had got out by way of the Golf Course, even people who ran clear across Simmons Park, farther in. But there were undoubtedly plenty more in the big houses, the luxury hotels, the fancy apartments, who couldn’t move, who were there, still—with fires breaking out and a wind that rushed toward the one, municipal flame, tearing loose cornices, ripping off roofs, bringing down walls. You couldn’t leave people there.
Besides, if they reached the park in spite of the fact that a comer of it was enveloped in fire storm (Ted knew that, from Hink Field, which already had planes in the air, reconnoitering and reporting back to the field and thence to CD), the men might be able to cut across the far side, go the long block east, on Jefferson, to the curve in the river and reach the two bridges there. They were the first ones standing, the planes said, and both of them were loaded with people, and mobs had backed into River City from these bridges. They seemed trapped—as well as the men in the planes could tell, flying in the heat, the smoke, the suction and draft and the down-fall of solids.
In fact, Hink Field relayed, River City’s organization had itself collapsed and nobody on that side of the river was doing much officially. The bulk of the population was already on the move, outside town.