The land slopes down on the other side of the train station, spreading out into the shallowest of
valleys with barely perceptible rises several miles to either side. It stretches back and back, street
upon street, toward Masons Hill – whose name Seth remembers now – the only real rise for miles
around, a wooded lump on the landscape, with one sheer side that falls fifty feet to the road below, a
place where youths were routinely rousted for dropping rocks on passing cars.
Everything between the train station and that distant hill is a blackened ruin.
Some blocks are nothing more than ash and rubble, others still have husks of brick, their roofs and
doors gone. Even the roads have buckled and bent, in some places indistinguishable from the
buildings they separated. There's a stretch of ground where Seth is pretty sure the sports center was,
and he can see what looks like the remnants of a large square hole that could have been its swimming
pool, now filled with charcoal and weeds.
Though not as many weeds as the streets behind him, he notices. And not as tall. There are weeds
and grasses scattered through the rest of the burn, now that he thinks to look for them, but they're far
scraggier than the ones on his own street, and some of them are just plain dead.
There's no sign at all of the field where the allotments were. He thinks he can see where his
memory tells him it should be, but amongst all the ash and burnt timber and blasted concrete, it could
also just be his imagination trying to make it be there.
The destruction stretches on for what must be miles, as far both to the left and right as he can see in
the hazy sunshine. The fire – or whatever it was; destruction this big may have even been some kind
of bomb – stretches all the way back to Masons Hill, stopping around its base much like it stops at the
rise where the train station sits. Too much bare concrete to cross to actually burn down the station.
He's looking at a wasteland. One that seems as if it might as well go on forever.
It explains all the dust, is the first thing Seth really thinks. The layers upon layers of it, covering
nearly everything in the streets behind him. It's not just dust – it's ash, dropped from whatever this
huge fire was and never cleaned away.
It's also, in a way that troubles him more than he can really say, a past event. Something caught
fire, or was blown up, or whatever happened, and then that fire raged out of control before burning
itself out some time later, taking most of this neighborhood with it.
Which means that there was a time before the fire, a time of the fire, and a time after the fire.
He thinks he's being foolish feeling troubled about this – there are weeds growing everywhere,
obviously, and the food didn't rot in an instant – but those things were just time, time passing in
stillness.
But a fire is an event. A fire happens.
And if there was an event, then there was also a was for it to happen in.
"When, though?" Seth says to himself, shielding his eyes from the sun and scanning up and down
the ruins.
Then he turns back to his own neighborhood on the other side of the tracks.
What if the fire had happened over there rather than here? What if his own house had burnt down,
not all these empty ones of strangers?
Would he have woken up at all?
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?
Because the blackened ground feels like a barrier, doesn't it? Feels like a place where hell stops.
He's gone out exploring and reached an area that might as well have a sign on it saying, DO NOT PASS.
The world, this world, suddenly feels a whole lot smaller.
He suddenly doesn't feel much like exploring anymore today. Silently, he drops his backpack
through the window of the bridge and climbs down after it. He heads back down the stairs, taking care
to tread quietly when he retrieves the torch so as not to disturb that huge, alien boar from the train.
Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders down, and trudges on home.