Free Eldorado by Jay Allan Storey Page B

the number of homeless dropped off considerably this far from town. What he could see of the station was covered with the usual aging graffiti. There was no sign indicating the name, but it must be the right place. There was nothing beyond this station – it was the end of the line.
    There was an open space underneath – probably once a parking lot or a bus turnaround. It too was completely overgrown – so much so that he would have had to hack his way through the shoulder-high brush to reach the stairs. Since the station itself wasn’t his final destination anyway, there was no point in trying to get any closer. Instead, he sat down in a clear area and hunted through his pack for the notes he’d made from Danny’s journal.
    So whatever it was he found is nine blocks east and twenty blocks north of this spot, he thought, re-reading the entries.
    He headed north and east, trying, sometimes with difficulty, to keep track of where one block ended and the next began. Few of the street signs were still intact, but there was usually a metal post, or the remnants of a street light – some landmark to indicate a new block.
    He moved through the remains of crumbling retail stores and strip malls. There wasn’t an unbroken window anywhere, and most accessible walls were covered with the inevitable fading graffiti, more ominous and desperate than what he’d seen closer to ‘civilization’. One line scrawled in huge letters across the side of a building read, Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here . Another read, Behold the Wrath of God . Another, The Kingdom of Hell is At Hand .
    In a few buildings, the windows had been boarded up, evidence that someone either lived there now or had lived there in the past. He hadn’t seen another soul for more than an hour – he wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. Finally, according to his count, he reached the spot.
    “Nine blocks east, twenty blocks north,” he said. “I hope.”
    It resembled every other block he’d passed – empty buildings and dusty streets. After twenty minutes scouring the area he’d found nothing. There was no indication that Danny had ever been there, and no sign of any of the landmarks Danny described in his journal.
    Richard sat down on a broken curb with his head in his hands. All that had happened – the train, Keller’s shooting, the trek through the wilderness – all for nothing. There was the possibility that he’d gotten the block count wrong. He considered returning to King George station to try again.
    Another thought occurred to him – a horrifying one. What if he’d been mistaken about the initials – KG? What if they didn’t stand for King George after all? The journal never explicitly mentioned King George. What if the journal entries had nothing to do with this place? He sat for several minutes, a black cloud of disappointment and failure descending on his mind.
    Finally he made a decision. He was here. If he was right about the initials and had just gotten the block count wrong, the place he was searching for should be nearby. If he was wrong he’d have to deal with that, but first he’d exhaust every option. He chose a direction at random – north – and started walking. After about ten minutes he came across several gravel hills topped with crumbling cement structures. He climbed the nearest one to scout around.
    Below him, to the north and west, were a series of lanes and abandoned buildings – a mixture of private residences and storefronts. To the east was a distinctive section of open ground that might once have been a parking lot or bus stop. In one corner stood the remains of a tiny boxlike structure fronted by a cement slab, and in the center of the slab lay a pile of unrecognizable debris. A few yards to the left of the debris stood a rusting metal pole about twenty feet tall.
    Nothing matched any of the entries in Danny’s journal, but he climbed down anyway. He walked around the boxlike building which,