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By
all appearances, Haycraft was now piloting a rocking train—at one
to two MPH—across the surface of the ocean itself, and even he had
begun to despair. How
could anyone survive, he wondered.
For that matter, how could he?
Then,
sudden shouts from his crewmen brought him out of his reverie. As if in an awful dream, Haycraft caught sight of
desperate faces flashing past the engine bays, the hands of men,
women, and children clutching toward the train that was passing them
by.
Haycraft
brought his engine to a halt some 1,500 feet south of the Islamorada
station and watched as the crowd stumbled down the rails toward him:
women at the front of the pack, as it should be, many of them
clutching children by the hand, others pressing infants to their
breasts. Something would
come of all this effort, then, he thought.
Some precious few lives could be saved, after all.
He
would load up this band of human cargo and steam northward out of
watery hell, and not let himself think about what wretched others
might be
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clustered on down the line.
It was time to cut the losses, get out while the getting was
good…
And
then, he felt the iron grip of his fireman upon his shoulder, and
sensed the panic in the man’s unintelligible shouts.
Haycraft turned to see what had possessed the fireman, then
caught sight of it out of the corner of his own disbelieving eye.
At the same instant, he felt the rumble rising up from beneath
his feet, a growling that overwhelmed even that of the 447’s mighty
engines.
A
dark wall was rushing toward them, a swath of blackness and evil that
seemed to swallow the dim illumination of the locomotive’s
headlamps. Nearly twenty feet tall, it was, and stretched across
the horizon from end to end like the sweep of doom itself.
A
tidal wave. The worst
that had ever struck American shores.
Then, and now.
“Lord,
have mercy,” J.J. Haycraft murmured, his hand going instinctively
for the throttle. And
everything was dark.
@2002,
Les Standiford
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