The train sat at the Islamorada station on Upper Matecumbe Key and the world around it was disintegrating.
The eleven cars — passenger coaches and boxcars coupled behind the locomotive — stood on the track at the station platform while the veterans who could reach them through the wind and the water climbed aboard. The boarding was not orderly. Order requires conditions in which human systems of organization — lines, instructions, the cooperative behavior of people who believe the system protecting them is functioning — can operate. The conditions on Upper Matecumbe at 8:20 in the evening did not permit order. The wind was at sustained hurricane force, violent and still rising, the gusts beyond what any instrument on the island could measure. The water was above the station platform, running across the track, swirling around the wheels of the cars. The debris field — timber, roofing, coral rock, sand, the disassembled components of every structure the wind had already destroyed on the island — was moving through the air and through the water with a velocity that made the space between the train and the nearest shelter a corridor of lethality.
The men came through it anyway.
They came from the camp structures that were still standing, bent double against the wind, wading through the surge water, holding onto each other and onto whatever fixed objects the wind had not yet torn from the ground. They came from behind the railroad embankment where they had been sheltering against the leeward side of the fill, feeling the water rise against their backs as the bay surge climbed the embankment’s face. They came from the ruins of structures that had failed while they were inside — men who had been sheltering in the barracks and the mess hall and the camp buildings and who had found themselves suddenly in the open when the walls went and the roof lifted and the wind took everything that was not fastened to the coral foundation.
They boarded the cars. The cars offered walls. The cars offered a roof. The cars offered, in the specific context of that moment, the illusion of salvation — the sense that they were now inside the rescue instrument that had been sent for them, that the train would carry them north across the bridges and the causeways to the mainland, that the worst of the night was behind them.
The illusion required the train to move. The train did not move.
* * *
The engineer assessed the conditions from the locomotive cab and understood what the conditions meant for the return journey.
The track north — the route the train had taken to reach Islamorada — was now impassable. The water on the embankment approaches was deep enough to submerge the rails by a foot or more in places. The wind had intensified beyond what the train had encountered on its southbound run. The bridges between Islamorada and the mainland — the open-water crossings where the train was most exposed to the crosswind — would present the full force of the hurricane’s eye wall against the broadside of eleven cars standing on narrow rails above churning water.
The train could not go back.
It could not go forward — the track south toward Lower Matecumbe ran into the teeth of the storm’s approach, toward the quadrant where the eye wall’s most intense winds were already executing against the corridor.
The train was fixed in place. It had become not a vehicle of rescue but a stationary shelter — better than the camp structures that were failing around it, worse than the concrete buildings where the permanent Keys residents were riding out the storm, and in a position that the engineer could not improve by any action available to him. The locomotive and tender were heavy enough that the wind, even at its present intensity, could not move them. The passenger cars and boxcars were not.
The men inside the cars did not know this. They knew the train had stopped moving. They knew the wind was louder than anything they had heard. They knew the water was visible through the car windows, rising across the landscape outside, running between the rails, covering the platform, approaching the level of the car floors. They knew that the structures they could see through the rain-blurred glass — or the places where structures had been, now marked only by foundations and debris — were gone.
* * *
On Lower Matecumbe, a mile and a half south, the veterans of Camp 3 and Camp 5 were beyond the train’s reach.
The conditions between the two keys had passed from difficult to impossible hours before the train arrived. The road was submerged. The wind was carrying debris at velocities that killed. The men in the lower camps had received word that a train was coming, but the train had stopped at Islamorada and the distance between Islamorada and Lower Matecumbe was a distance that no human being could cross in the conditions that now prevailed.
The lower camps had the same structures the upper camps had — temporary barracks, mess halls, administrative buildings of wood frame and tarpaper construction, designed for seasonal habitation, not for the sustained force of a storm whose wind field exceeded the structural capacity of anything on the island by an order of magnitude. The structures were failing. The men inside them were being ejected into the open. The men in the open were in the surge and the wind and the sand that the wind was scouring from the island’s surface.
Some found the railroad embankment and pressed against it. Some found trees and lashed themselves to the trunks with rope or wire or their own belts. Some found nothing and the water took them.
The separation between Upper and Lower Matecumbe — between the men who had reached the train and the men who had not — was the final expression of the corridor’s geometry. A mile and a half. A distance that a man could walk in twenty minutes on a calm afternoon. A distance that the storm had converted into an uncrossable boundary between survival and exposure, between the relative shelter of eleven railroad cars on the track and the absolute exposure of open coral islands at five feet above sea level in the path of the most intense hurricane the United States had ever recorded.
The eye wall was arriving.
The wind was shifting from northeast to east.
The shift marked the transition from the storm’s outer circulation to the inner core — the zone where the wind would reach its maximum velocity and the surge would reach its maximum height and the corridor would receive what the Council had been calculating since the storm crossed the Gulf Stream.
The men on the train waited.
The men on Lower Matecumbe held on.