A bone-shaking blast shook the western wall of the tram shed, a dull, underground roar that seemed to strike directly through the soles of Len’s boots rather than traveling through the air. It wasn’t the sharp crack of black powder or the dry report of a carbine. It was the terrifying, uncompressible violence of high-pressure hammer. Thousands of gallons of white-hot water slamming into a closed bronze check valve thirty feet beneath the track bed.
The blast wave tore through the brick chimney pipes with the force of an underground eruption. Three seconds after the first impact, a twenty-foot plume of scalding vapor erupted through the pine decking near the abandoned baggage office. Floorboards eight inches wide and two inches thick were shattered into kindling, thrown twenty feet into the rafters like splintered laths. The air, already choked with sulfur dust, instantly became a solid, blinding fog of boiling mist that smelled of scalded iron, burnt machine grease, and decaying hemp heat padding.
Len threw his right arm across his eyes, stumbling back as the wave of heat washed over Platform Two. His Road Sense registered the violent popped joint of the underlying stonework. Two massive granite foundation blocks beneath the rail bed, laid half a century ago to carry the weight of freight locomotives, shifted four inches along their mortar beds with a grinding screech that shook through his teeth. The ground felt unstable, elastic, as though the bedrock had turned to animal fat beneath the high-pressure surge.
