They didn’t crawl through the coal chute. They turned their backs on the boiler house platform and sprinted east into the darkness of the railway cutting.
Ahead of them, clinging to the sheer dark rock face of the ridge, ran the iron upkeep walkway. It had been built forty years earlier to allow boiler technicians to inspect the outside steam chimney pipes and high-pressure drainage drain tubes without dropping into the rail trench below. The walkway was barely eighteen inches wide. A single file of punched holes in cast-iron plates bolted to three-sided wrought-iron brackets driven directly into the cut stone joints of the cliff. Suspended ten feet above the rail bed. It was flanked on the outside side by a nonstop handrail of two-inch solid forged iron, it stretched three hundred yards along the quarantine wall before terminating at the entrance to the Narrow Cut.
The iron was dangerous. Over twelve years of unending night, sulfur soot, boiler grease, and bitter salt frost had settled into a slippery film that coated the metal plates like wet soap.
Len hit the first iron section at a dead run.
His heavy courier boots struck the punched holes in metal with a sharp, rhythmic chatter: clack-clack.
