From the Fire (5 page)

Breathing in furtive gasps of barely-controlled panic, Sophie followed the narrow entry tunnel. It edged off to the left, its angle engineered by Tom so that the vault door could be defended if need be. There were submachine guns in here, somewhere. Hunting rifles. Assault rifles. Despite Tom’s repeated urgings, she had refused to ever learn just how to fire them.

She passed through the second angle of the passage, a lead-sheeted narrow which Tom had called the radiation trap, and came to the shelter’s true entry at last. She pushed through a doubled veil of hanging strips of lead, plated tiles locked away in a thick plastic curtain. Beyond the lead curtain was hung a second tapestry of translucent vinyl strips, and the welcoming ice-blue light of sanctuary glowed out from behind it.

There was a deep niche in the concrete wall, with another strip covering its hollow. Sophie peered into the niche and saw an red aluminum flashlight, socketed in its charger. Despite the ceiling lights and the assurance of the shelter’s many automated systems, Sophie reached in, grabbed the chilly flashlight, and flicked it on. She leashed its plastic ribbon onto her wrist, just as Tom had taught her.

Because what if the lights go out?

Something made her think,
“Grid priorities,”
but she could not remember what that might mean. She knew only that she was hyperventilating, freezing despite the warm gushes of air, and close to shock. The terror-drone in her mind was filtering the mantra
Get to the shelter, get to the shelter
into
Don’t get caught in the dark
, and that was all.

Don’t. Calm. You need to think, Sophie.

Time refused to accelerate. She seemed to drift, to release herself into a thin fleshly resonance of activity of response.

Think!

She did not know how many of the shelter’s systems were automatic, or what more she would need to do to survive. She only knew that all of Tom’s emergency manuals were stacked in the binders on the utility shelves by the entryway, where they could be quickly accessed if the light had failed to come on. The racks of shelves loomed over her, bolted into the interior-facing wall.

One of the ceiling lights just above the left-hand bank of shelves refused to stop flickering. It strobed fluorescent washes of ice-light down over Sophie’s glistening face. She stared at it, then gasped as a keening squeal announced that the vault door behind her had finished pressurizing.

What if I never get out of here?

She looked up at the walls of the cluttered entryway, up at the aluminum shelving filled with the binders and CD-R spools, over the fuel barrels all stacked beneath their oily tarps. Shivering, hugging herself and biting her lower lip to keep from crying out, Sophie edged her way beyond the claustrophobic entry and deeper into the shelter proper.

She had not seen the “great room” since her last tour with Tom, three years ago. She could see where the thousands of labored hours had gone, hours she had complained about more times than she cared to remember. Over the years Tom’s weekend hobby had quickly become an obsession. Whenever he came back home from working in Virginia or in NORAD, he had been here. When he came back to “the mountain” he always invited her to come along, and nine times out of ten she had refused to join him. Now, regarding all of his accomplishments and standing there in a haunted
nothingness
of sanctuary, Sophie could hardly recognize the shelter she had once endured and secretly despised.

The great room was fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long, an “underground mansion” according to Tom. The reinforced ceiling with its interlaced girders was new to her. She cringed, fighting the urge to cower beneath the rectangular grids of light. The girdered reinforcement, with all of the plastic water cylinders and canvas bundles stacked up there in netted rows against the roof, made the great room’s ceiling seem even lower than before. The room stood filled up on every side with plastic-covered stacks of supplies lined up in labeled and fluorescent containers: generator fuel, meds, glo-sticks, flares, matches, recycled paper.

And what was that strange contraption, an iron spider-like thing standing inside a square concrete tub that looked like some kind of shower-stall? Some kind of advanced water pump? What was the purpose of the two-by-two square of aluminum sinks set into the concrete floor?

Time was speeding up again. She had a sense that precious seconds were ticking away.

Away to what?

But her shivering selflessness would only let her think:
Don’t make me stay, stay so long in here, that I learn everything before the end.
Sophie balled her fists together in an effort to stop her fingers from shaking.
Don’t make me.

She could hear the main generator humming away in the back room. Two ceiling fans were whirring, casting geometric shadows across the metal shelves. The translucent plastic seal over the doorway into the next room beckoned her further on, but there was a disturbing alien cast to the light that was glowing from inside that pressurized chamber, as if its seal were some kind of spider-web or the mouth of a Venus flytrap, its interlocking plastic fingers beckoning her to come inside.

Forever.

Alone. I could alone here, forever.

Why haven’t the missiles fallen?

How much time has passed?

She had no idea. The seconds were become tenuous once more, breaths were becoming hours.

She struggled to remember what Tom had told her on the phone, before,
before
. His brother Mitch was with Lacie, he had said, in the
place
.
The place?
Surely, Tom had spoken in code because he knew that if he had given an address or some other identifier, the Air Force security personnel would have killed him for the breach. And what would they have done to Lacie, if there was time?

“Oh, Tom.”

None of that mattered now.

The place.
The date? She needed to remember what that could be.

Call Mitch.

And how was she supposed to do that?

She pressed her fists against either side of her head, and her hands spread open across her cheeks. To silence her thoughts, to focus, she spoke into the silence. She meant to say something slight, calming, but what she heard was this:

“Do I want to live?”

And inside her,
No. Oh, Tom. Oh, no.

Don’t make me.

“Lacie,” she whispered, already afraid to hear her own voice reverberating within this sterile tomb.

Lacie is alive and she’s with Mitch. I need, I need to find her. She’s out there somewhere, somewhere safe. Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.

The last words she spoke before the missiles came down were these: “Tom, I’m so scared.”

But there was no reason to speak at all. There was no one to answer her, and perhaps there never would be.

I-4

IMPACT

Without the radio, the daylight, the snow, the pulses of fleeting cloud and falling water, Sophie had lost all familiarity with time. She had entered the shelter and beheld the great room. Two minutes had passed in an all-consuming drowning wave, a series of frantic impressions that felt like years.

She remembered Tom grimly saying—once and never again—that there would be no clocks within the shelter, that installing one would lead to “dark thoughts” which he refused to give any life to.

Sophie began to understand that perhaps two minutes had passed since she had entered the shelter, but it could have been two hours, two years, two lifetimes.

~

(The narrative is fractured here, for Sophie herself was not certain what she remembered.

And the truth is this: as Mrs. St.-Germain spoke her last recorded words upon Zero Day, three Russian R-36 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, each with a payload of ten warheads and thirty penetration drones, impacted in intersecting clusters, a triad of interlocking rings of death and fire, raining down over the entire Denver metro area. In forty-three seconds three million people died, the skin peeling away in shock-blasts and burning to vapor in the air, their eyes melting down their cheeks, their teeth turning to black and powdered glass.

The Rocky Mountains were a wall, a granite bastion separating American humanity into two fated tribes for the wrath of Holocaust: those to the east, of the plains, who burned and died quickly; and those to the west, of the spires, who died slowly and far more horribly. This we know of the region of Black Hawk, and little else. From other testaments I have reconstructed all I can; the diary of St.-Germain shall tell us a little more.

~ S.-G.C.)

~

Impact.

However long Sophie had stood within the shelter, that eternity ended as she spoke the words
“So scared.”
In that moment, she felt a shock like an invisible thunderbolt all over her body. Her flesh rippled with the impact, her hair whirled up in coils, her tongue peeked out as her cheeks were pushed by the shockwave into a wild rictus of a grin. Then the world entire was flung sideways.

An incredible roar, the loudest sound she had ever heard, ripped through the mountain and forced its way through widening cracks into the girder-interlaced granite above her head. She could feel her eardrums pop with a blood-inflected
squish
deep within both sides of her skull. All sound was obliterated while the world shuddered and jolted to the right, replacing her sense of hearing with an eerie, incessant whine of rerouted blood, blood surging in a wild torrent through her veins.

Thrown off her feet, slammed back with arms outstretched and a twisted spine and flung away to one side, Sophie was blown back into the great room’s work table to her right. She rebounded and then was crushed forward into a bank of utility shelves. The aluminum rack crashed over, shelves tilted, and dozens of printout-choked binders flurried out like wounded birds and buried her in a torrent of vinyl and paper. Compact Disc spools tumbled up and cascaded in silver-trailing spirals all around her.

She was crushed, buried.

Blackness and then frantic stripes of fluorescent light flowed over her; she could see the world still shaking out there beyond the shelves, hot shelves which somehow had been piled up on top of her.

The world, still shaking and recoiling unheard, powdering down black dusts and gouts of shrapnel from the mountain’s scorched and twisted heart, fading into a scarlet darkness far away.

Sophie thought,
O clarion.

And then there was nothing more.

I-5

RISING

With a surge of adrenaline and agony, Sophie drew in a frenetic breath. It was like screaming inward, inhaling her own shouts before she could lend them voice. Her lungs filled with concrete dust as she wheezed, coughed, and felt her fingertips spark with trapped blood and pinched-off circulation.

She had no idea what happened next, or how. She just roared and stood up, like a weightlifter heaving a weight that was surely impossible for a mere mortal to ever move.

Muscles tore in her shoulders, her thighs.

Her roar kept building, a breath that depleted every fire within her veins and heart and turned her sight to isolate pinpoints of tilted light. The weight above her moved, and she moved with it.

She merely squatted and stood and the aluminum rack of shelves crashed off of her. Spilled and cracked-opened binders tumbled away from her back and legs. There was a pool of draining urine beneath her, sweat and saliva, but only a little blood. She stood straighter, stumbled, and clutched the tilted work table with one hand.

How did I do that?

Her insides felt like they were crumpling, husks of dehydrated muscle shivering in their hollows along the bone. Her right hip socket cracked back into place as the air in the ball joint squirted out over the cartilage, but she did not hear the
pop
. She only felt the thrill of pain.

There was only that whining, keening surge of circulating blood within her ears, the silence of the deafened. She cried out, another cascade of soundlessness, but a breath was demanded of her. She took it, her head reeling with the half-seen spectacle of blood-red tracers and fleeting stars. Agony filled her limbs as the blood surged back through her and her heart raced out of control. Electric jolts thrummed up her calves, under her ribs and into her shoulders. Her silk blouse was torn open, buttons popped, her skirt was in shreds and she was drenched in body fluids.

Alive.

Eyes bulging in disbelief, Sophie looked back over her shoulder at the nine-foot-tall aluminum cage of shelves, laying angled and broken on its side.

I moved that.
Then, detached, almost clinically:
I shouldn’t be able to do that.

The whining in her ears was pulsing now, ringing. She touched her fingers in to either side, there were blood-drops in her ears. Soon there rose a sound of something else, then ringing again, like an ocean tide of waves made of chimes and wind. Slowly she realized that the sound between the whining arcs was her own breathing.

I can hear again. A little.

Standing straight, reeling, Sophie took a deeper breath, and —

* * * * *

Vertigo.

Her arms slowly lifted up into the air, like it was sleepover again and she was playing the “light as a feather” game with Jolynn and Margie and Sara,
light as a feather, stiff as a board, catch me, catch me
—

What am I thinking?
She wondered. And then, worse:
Who am I?

She fell to her knees. She convulsed. Her bowels released, she could smell herself.

Can’t breathe.

She lay there, gasping. The floor was thrumming still, somehow, with the massive explosions outside.
More? How can there be more?

How long … how long was I …

Her head throbbed, eyes pulsing through light and dark as she looked around. She retched as the stench of her defecation crept up through her sweaty clothing. The great room of the shelter was intact, but
hot
. Sweltering. She could feel the heat surging through the cracked concrete beneath her body, warming the entire room.

Two of the walls had cracked, framed maps and a bulletin board had fallen out of their bolted sockets onto the work table and the floor. Off in the back rooms, some kind of air conditioner was filling the air with vapor and chemical-tinged moisture, straining and keening into life. Dust was still filtering down, it was pooling on the floor, into the puddle of blood and filth she had left beneath her. Her urine was trickling down a drain.

She tried to say,
“Thank God. I’m alive.”
But she could not say anything. Her vision faded away.

Lacie. I’m coming.

* * * * *

A light, then. A tunnel. Lacie was there. She was holding her hand back out to mommy, she was running. She was running away.

Lacie my love,

honey no,

stop running.

Stop running away,

for mommy.

Please?

Please wait for me.

Sophie started to run, to run after Lacie, out of her body. Lacie looked back at her, a tragic and poetic smile upon her cherubic face. Golden hair, Tom’s wispy fleece of gold, spread in a wind-spun halo about her face. Somehow, Sophie’s daughter seemed ancient, unfathomably wise. A light around her blossomed brighter.

No! Stay with me. Lacie!

Lacie turned away in tears. Slowly, stuck in the glue-like radiance of the air, Lacie kept running on.

Stay.

* * * * *

Sophie took a faltering breath, and felt something wet, some tangible flesh made all of energy deep inside her snap and squelch back into place. Whatever bodiless part of her had tried to flee, she clutched at it, tapering and squeezing all its threads. She rolled onto her back, brought two closing fists full of “threads” up to her breast, and held that lace of invisible fire, pulling it back inside of her.

Another breath. She opened her eyes.

Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.

She knew then, she was not going to die. Not as a sacrifice for the hungering White Fire, not on the threshold of Zero Day.

~

Flesh.

Her thoughts slowly began to coalesce.

This is me, I am me.

This is my body.

I.

Having forced her to stay awake and alert long enough to free herself and to breathe, Sophie’s body at last surrendered the adrenaline surge into a nothingness of exhaustion.

The world is burning now.

She could hear, somewhat. The explosions had turned to silence. The air conditioner growled, something beneath the floor went
drip, drip
and became a song, a lullaby.

A strange thought, not one of vengeance but merely one of morbid serenity, was the last thing Sophie contemplated on that day. The men who had shot her husband, who had murdered him for trying to save her life and that of Lacie, all of them would be dead by now.

All burning.

Goodbye.

A strange smile crept upon Sophie’s face, one twitching end of it tilting up and then the other, where a little blood had burbled through.

And then she fell into the black mercy of unknowing. Everything, every thought and every part of her turned to liquid and cascaded down into the darkness.

Lacie.

That day, unlike six billion and seven hundred and eighty-three million other souls, Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain lived on.

Goodbye.

Her daughter smiled. In the fading radiance, Lacie waved to her mother one last time before she ran out of sight.

Goodbye.

Staring at the crumbling ceiling, Sophie smiled back.

I will come to you, Lacie.

I promise you I will find you.

Alone, exalted, sheltered for rebirth and so fallen in preconception of the Awakening, Sophie of the Black Hawk touched unfeeling fingers to her lips, and with a gentle smile she closed her eyes.