From the Fire (3 page)

Then Sophie’s moment,
You are looking at yourself, you are you,
ended in recognition and the afterimage of her reflection imprinted itself upon the road. Lightning coursed the sky. She gazed straight ahead as the road narrowed and the cliff-wall to one side grew higher on.

Drive faster.

She could not un-see the woman, entirely detached from what Sophie had once believed herself to be. She had seen a study in grief, a stricture of jaw, controlled panic, trembling lip, but surely that wasn’t
her
.
That
woman looked cruel, uncaring. And Sophie, did she not love?

Was this some last desperate bid by her mind to hold onto its sanity? Who
was
she, after all? The answer to that question would never matter. She was Self, Sophie, Her Own Being, a prisoner in a stranger’s body that was acting of its own will. Her body, it was making her drive faster. Very close now.

Get to the shelter

get to the shelter

get to

get

~

“Fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds …”

~

A left here. Slow down, don’t stop. Keep traction. Take the left here.

Slower, by necessity. The Hummer jolted as she hit a pothole which certainly hadn’t been there last fall, and the pines were now on both sides again and the setting sun lost far behind her. The road narrowed and the rains caused little rivulets to trickle down the boulders along her right.

She was supposed to be grieving for someone. Someone …

Did someone die? Who was it? What had happened?

A voice broken open and sighed,
“Tom.”

Was that anguished voice her own?

A sob wracked her shoulders and contracted her gut, a gasp as she inhaled and the body compelled the mind not to register anything more than the road itself, and rain. And time, zero, zero was coming soon.

Time.

* * * * *

The time for grief is later,
said a new voice. A voice only in her mind.

Father?

Grieve later, Sophie. This is now. This is life.

~

“Fifteen minutes and fifty seconds …”

~

Sophie shook her head. She felt as if she was shaking free of a liquid veil, a cool gauze of serenity laced over the animal panic that was building in her heart, her lungs, her flesh and the shivering tips of the hairs upon her forearms. She trembled and swallowed, her eyes widening as she realized just how far up the Morrison-Kincaid trailhead road she had already gone. How long had she been driving without even registering what was going on?

This is no dream.

The last asphalt stretch of the park service road was far behind her. The ribbed dirt of the road beyond it had turned to slush. She hit a deep, muddy, ice-rimmed pool at thirty-five and the Hummer lurched as she corrected. A huge splashing wave of mud sloshed up over the H4’s hood. The wipers curved and bent under the strain, their micro-motors whirring and straining to clear away the sopping mess. Sophie was forced to slow down once again. A sick feeling tickled under her ribs as the H4 felt like it was drifting across water, the wheels floundering for purchase in the muddy wheel-ruts. The windshield began to clear, just in time for Sophie to see that she was driving into another and deeper puddle that had formed a stream across the entire road. The wipers lost synch as they struggled to scoop away another gloppy torrent of melting snow and slime.

Cursing, Sophie shifted the H4 into four-wheel.
Should have done this ten minutes ago. Come on,
feel
you idiot,
think —

~

“Seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds …”

~

Don’t think, don’t feel,

get to shelter

get to the shelter
—

The H4’s engine lurched as it shunted control to all four wheels. Thick and silted water ran in runnels down the Hummer’s sides as Sophie guided it down the left and downhill edge of the slanted road, where the flow of water had lessened for a time. The pine forest overhead gave way to even steeper walls of rock. The further she went, the walls loomed ever higher, until they offered only a meager shaft of snowy sky where the winds churned the gloom away into a rind of darkness.

Don’t do it Sophie,
father whispered.
Don’t look at the sky. Don’t look up at the sky now, hon. Keep going.

“Daddy?” She shifted in her seat and bent over the wheel, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Why not, daddy?” she murmured. “Why
can’t
I look at the sky?”

The voice did not answer her.

~

“Nineteen minutes and two seconds …”

“Warning! Impact is imminent and will occur in approximately five to nine minutes, dependent upon your location. Shelter in place. Move away from windows immediately.”

~

Oh, God.

She drove as fast as she dared. The left wheel-rut snapped at her tires as she hugged the side of the narrowing road, trying to keep the H4 from lurching through the now-endless, cascading series of puddles on the right. The cliffs loomed higher still to either side. Chain-link drapings, massive metal nets staked up against the cliff walls, rose high above her and seemed to fade away into the sky. She knew these chain-sheaths were meant to control falling rock, to keep “small” boulders from tumbling down onto the road. But what would she do if there was a
huge
rock in the middle of the narrows, too big for her to lift with the H4’s toolkit crowbar, with no room to either side for her to drive around?

Lacie? Lacie, will you wait for mommy?

What if I die here?

A boulder could be there. She knew it was perfectly possible on a mountain road like this, especially during a spring storm during the early melt, when the weather was unpredictable and the temperature ever-changing. Why, there was that one time up in Glacier National Park — had it been 2005? 2006? — when Lacie wasn’t even born yet but they both
knew
that she was coming, when she and Tom had been driving up the Highway to the Sun, the most beautiful and terrifying Rocky Mountain road that Sophie had ever seen. Tom had been driving and
laughing
and she had been white-knuckled the entire way, holding her breath at one last hairpin turn near the summit when the sun flared around the mountainside and there up ahead was a monstrous beige RV of all things, stuck in the road in both lanes.

Some potbellied man and his wraith-like, shaky wife were standing out there in the left lane, staring at a massive craggy boulder which had a ring of little mountain-shards all around it. The road had become a crater, the boulder a squat emperor in the middle of the severed lane-line. And these two idiots from out of the RV were gaping at this thing like it was an
elephant
, so very entertaining, like a performing circus elephant sitting there for their pleasure, taking a shit in the middle of their road …

(Sophie giggled, the drive became frantic and delirious once more)

… and people in both directions were gaping and shunting forward in their car seats, and a line of cars was screeching to a halt very, very close behind the RV and Tom was still
laughing
of all things, he could hardly breathe, and …

Don’t think about that. Don’t think at all. Turn here. Turn here.

~

“Twenty minutes and thirty-eight seconds …”

“Warning! Impact is imminent and will occur in approximately four to seven minutes, dependent upon your location. Shelter in place. Move away from windows immediately.”

~

One more road even narrower than the last, a mining road blasted through the cliff with dynamite back in the eighteen hundreds when Colorado was little more than a territory of untamed peaks and windswept plains, with cavalry and settlers and Indian tribes all vying with their own untenable dreams, killing one another for gold, for hunting grounds, for shelter.

Shelter.

One more turn and
very
close now. The road was unmarked and shadowed, a gravel vein gouged into the cliff-side, little more than a tiered series of muddy waterfalls with borders of ragged thorn-brush. Icicles dripped, wings flitted and red-throated birds rose into flight.

She turned at the final intersection, little more than a mash-up of two bumpy paths, each wide enough for a single car.

The canyon, deeper. Cave. This way.

She blasted past the red-and-white striped snow-closure gate. Its bars were chained in the up position for spring, steel arms outspread as if in ironic welcome, a farewell for the ending of a blessedly mild winter. Two rusty steel barrels stood on either side of the road’s next curve, one spray-painted “PRIVATE” and the other “KEEP OUT.”

Tom had done that. How many years ago?

Another curve, deeper up into the canyon. She drove past the old-fashioned water pump, the flipped-over bucket Tom had sat on only the autumn before, making sure all was ready for winter freeze. Sunlit raindrops pattered off the length of the pump’s icicled bar, light and water in restless turmoil, conflicting spirits of the seasons.

She was driving east up into the heart of Tom’s land, her own land,
father’s
land. The road-sand turned into slurries of melt-water and mud. Cliff walls, ever higher. There was very little snow down inside this canyon. The storm was gusting off to the east, but streams of water were trickling down the cliff faces, their flows skewed into oddly geometric zig-zags by the chain-link drapings staked into the stone. No more trees loomed along the road in front of her, only a few stubborn bushes high overhead, tilted out into the sky.

The sky … no. Don’t look.

~

“Twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds …”

“Warning! Impact is imminent and will occur in approximately three to six minutes, dependent upon your location. Shelter in place. Move away from windows immediately.”

~

One more road sign, this one shiny and cobalt with its newness, stenciled by Tom just last year, stating in ominous block capitals:

“D EA D

EN D.”

One last turn, and there it was.

The waterfall. The cave. The shelter.

Awareness, a fiery surge of immediacy, of the desperate compulsion for survival, filled Sophie’s veins. Where was Lacie? She could not remember. By reflex, she rose in her seat and looked up into the rearview mirror but there was only the terrified and pallid aging woman there, quivering with terror and glaring back at her. Tears were streaming down the woman’s cheeks.

Me.

Even as the Hummer neared the little waterfall, Sophie kept staring into that stranger’s eyes. She could no longer look away.

Tom? Lacie? Lacie is … is she? Where is she?

~

“Warning! Impact is —”

~

Mid-sentence, the emergency bulletin on the radio went silent.

Outside, a horrible, enormous sound welled up over the mountains, covering endless miles in a moment with its deafening wail. Sophie could hear it perfectly through the windows. Her frantic and colliding thoughts, unable to place the sound or why it was so important, told her in unison that it was an Archangel unseen above the sky, and the Archangel was mourning. Screaming.

The siren.

Death. The Angel of Death. O, clarion.

The siren.

The emergency klaxon sounded, on and on. Far off behind the town of Black Rock, toward Rollinsville and up by the ranger’s tower, it sounded that keening signal which Sophie had always loathed, but had learned in time to ignore. The klaxon that always made Lacie cry, that startled her from napping. It was the one siren that was always tested on the first Wednesday of every month, meant to presage tornadoes and forest fires, simple and tiny disasters from a yesterday-world that soon would be burned to ashes.

The cry of the siren, it raged in Sophie. It spoke to the most primal part of her.

Flee. Flee.

There would be no more tornado warnings, no more warnings for wildfire. This was the final cry of war,
This is war, this is really happening
, and the missiles were coming down.

Halfway around the world and they’re almost here.

We’re going to die, Tom is dead, we’re all going to die.

Oh, Lacie. Oh, Lacie I’m sorry I ever gave birth to you.

I never meant for this to happen to you.

This isn’t the ending I promised you, oh I love you.

I’m sorry for the world, for bringing you here, oh I am so sorry.

Never did I believe they would ...

they would actually

never

never never