Once you caught your first glimpse of the refinery towers you were no longer in the city. There were freeways and interchanges and overpasses and then there was the sprawl of the airport and then you crossed the river and left it all behind and there was just the one straight road running south through the industrial scrub.
The Kingdom of Nah, Lester called it. Oz after the apocalypse. The dark place. The place of lonely men. Find a cheap place out there to hide and in the middle of winter you could convince yourself that you were somewhere in Russia.
...
The spectacle of the refinery was Ruskin's Pathetic Fallacy on the grandest and most wrenching scale, a place that mirrored the way Lester felt and the way he saw the world, and it was no metaphor: the smoke and fires of the refinery towers at night and the stench and soot and the tens of thousands of light towers did nothing but demonstrate how pervasive and impenetrable the darkness was.
It was like like living in the furnace room of hell. Every place that did any sort of business out the catered to people who'd had the light beat out of them. Fifteen or so miles in any direction from the refinery was like a resettlement zone for all the extras from
Night of the Living Dead. Just as you entered this zone coming from the north there was a sign along the road that read:
Toward Zero Deaths.
Lester didn't have any idea what the sign was supposed to mean, but it meant something, and he noticed it every time.
 |
| [The refinery in Rosemount.] |
