Chapter Eight
When Garrett through the robotic eyes of his mechanical crawler caught his first distant sight of a fellow human being since that terrible morning when the sky burned, and then the earth and the very people upon it, the shocked man could only gape with the same incredulity as if he had seen his chair stand up and shake his hand and begin to speak. For these were not a cracked-open skull flash-burned clean and empty inside behind its hideously staring eye sockets, not a scattering of broken bones over which his machine’s treads crunched and clattered, not a twisted bundle of burned meat wrapped in the greasy fat and the shrunken sinews of its terrible cooking—they were living human beings who stood and moved and thought.
But this made sense, he told himself shakily. Of cours
