The descent from the signal overhead frame into the central belly of Tram Ward was a painful progression measured in single, painful paces.
Len didn’t remember crossing the final two rail cuts. His mind had narrowed to a tiny, burning tunnel of survival. The smell of Bram Ash’s grease-stained wool coat beside his shoulder, the rough drag of his river boots across the frozen ballast. The fierce, pulsating heat streaming outward from his chest bone that seemed to synchronize with every step he took.
They slipped through the heavy service wicket beneath the raised railway sheds. Then, the shift from the freezing bitter salt gale of the melted rock waste slopes to the warm, humid shelter of the communal kitchens struck him like a heavy wool blanket.
The kitchen smelled of boiled yellow turnips, scorched barley silver coins, damp peat smoke, and the clean, healing bitterness of antiseptic wash.
It was the only space in the seven wards of Rookvale that kept the living pulse of a human community.
Along the three-hundred-foot shed, beneath the massive arched timber roof beams of the former railway repair shop, three hundred people were huddled. Families sat on benches of salvaged sleeper wood. Women mended children’s woolen socks by the light of copper reflectors. Mechanics with arms bound in greasy slings drank chicory tea. And in the center of the hall, raised on a brick hearth six feet wide, three huge cast-iron soup vats bubbled with the evening ration.
