Twentynine Palms
The Passage (Justin Cronin Edition)Twentynine Palms is an old Marine Corps base east of the station, roughly a two-day ride away. Though much of the base had been covered by sand, Demetrius Jaxon found an underground bunker there containing a substantial weapons and vehicle cache. The discovery became a quiet supply line to the station and a piece of the Jaxon family’s concealed history.
The buried cache
The base was difficult to recognize unless a traveler knew where to look. Beneath it, the bunker held boxed weapons kept dry: not only rifles but pistols, mortars, machine guns, and grenades. A garage of vehicles, including a couple of tanks, was also there. The heavier arms could not be moved, and none of the vehicles would run, so the cache’s practical value was limited by transport and condition.
The trips to the station
Demetrius and Willem moved rifles from the bunker toward the station one cartload at a time. They completed three trips before Willem was killed. The account makes the cache more than a hidden stockpile: it was a source that required repeated journeys and cooperation, and its recovery was interrupted by the loss of one of the two men who had been moving it.
What the family knew
Theo Jaxon reveals the cache’s origin during a late-night conversation, answering Peter Jaxon’s question about the guns by identifying them as their father’s. Demetrius had told their mother and a few others; Theo suspects the Colonel and Old Chou also knew. Zander Phillips, who was storing the weapons at the station, must have known as well. The knowledge was therefore neither wholly secret nor widely shared, but held within a small network around Demetrius and the station.
Narrative significance
Twentynine Palms brings the material remains of the old military world into the survivors’ present. Its arsenal suggests considerable potential, but sand, failed vehicles, immovable heavy weapons, and the slow cart-by-cart transfer all place limits on what the discovery can achieve. The account also reaches the reader as family history told by Theo: the cache explains where the guns came from while showing how much of Demetrius’s work and planning had remained outside Peter’s knowledge.
