From the Fire III (5 page)

III-4

ECHOES

She had a new dream, overflowing
underwater, a curious desire to be nothing but her own memory of herself, to
shrivel, to die away and never to know the world again. She swam through the
drowning shelter, she confronted the spider-skin. Her old flesh was floating
above the shower, a plagued husk of an algae-covered corpse. She woke up, swam
to it, and turned it around to stare into its face. She turned her dead flesh over
and it was not elder Sophie the dead and venomous, no. It was Patrice.

A burst of bubbles. A drowning scream.

Patrice crawled out of the dead-girl
skin, the skin molted like tissues of festering onionskin paper that peeled
away as a teenaged Patrice unzipped herself out of the rotting body-cocoon with
a black and opalescent claw. It was Patrice as she must have looked after the
car accident, just after the rescue team had pulled her out of the wreckage. Her
ribcage was shattered and shoved out to either side of her gore-sponged and
distended belly, shattered bones stabbing out of her mutilated and breastless
torso like wicked white flowers, like spider legs.

Fog of water, fog of blood. And oh, she
was smiling.

She dragged Sophie up into her arms, her
claws, she kissed her beloved and hated sister’s neck with needle-like fangs
all thronging and shivering out from underneath her twelve-inch tongue, so many
teeth
, and she breathed against Sophie’s neck,

“Sister mine. Be underneath with
me now, now and forever. Breathe. Touch me as only father ever touched me. Oh,
love me ...”

And Sophie woke screaming.

* * * * *

Screaming, stumbling. By the time she
was fully awake, she had run, tripped over the treadmill, fallen over Lacie’s
cot, crawled out through the corridor and the door seal, and she was sobbing in
a fetal embrace by the Great Room’s black-ringed floor drain.

She was going mad, mad all alone and her
reality was crumbling away. Monoliths of impossible horror were rumbling out of
fissures and they were rising, causing earthquake and tidal surge, blotting out
the sun. And all of this horror was so, so welcome, because the only thing more
unbearable than Sophie’s nightmare was the truth.

What had happened, what would never
happen. What all they had done to the world.

Oh God, this is real. They
burned it all.

She needed another voice. Another
someone. The Valium, the guns, the morphine, it was all too close, all too
deliciously tempting. She could not survive much longer without speaking to
another, sharing secrets with someone else.

Knowing that someone else was out there,
one who would not want to butcher her. Someone listening, someone
understanding. Someone whose suffering would make her seem real again.

And she went to the work table, and she
readied the radio.

If she could not speak to Mitch, she
could still speak to
someone
. Perhaps even only listen. She just needed
to be gravely, imperiously careful.

She put on the headphones, powered up,
opened her notebook, and went through all of the intricate steps to listen in
on the Fort Morgan survivor’s signal.

* * * * *

He was there.

It was the same voice Sophie had heard
long before, the panicked voice when she had first learned how to scan on the
Grundig radio. But that voice was lingering now, broken, and it was dying. The
young man sounded exhausted, his voice hoarse and emotionless as he was
obviously reading from a transcript. Reading, perhaps, for the hundredth time.

“—rict Justice Center. Nor, nor the
Plains Medical —”

A burst of static sent his droning voice
into oblivion. Sophie took her fingers off the broad scanner dial, and used the
fine-tune scanner to move through the signal and return to it with more
precision.

When she found him once again, the young
man was almost whispering:

“—ot, I repeat do not turn off Platte
Thirty-Four or approach to within one hundred meters, either on foot or in
vehicles, without raising your hands behind your head and kneeling, to wait. To.
To wait for weapons search. Triage measures are in extreme effect. Skills are —
required skills in order of emergency priority are …”

The signal began to fade away. Sophie
took her hands off of her headphones and shifted the heavy radio around on the
metal table, wondering if this had any effect on the transmission or its
clarity. Most likely not. But she wanted to hear this man, to apologize for not
letting him know that she had been out there listening through all the terror
just after the impacts, to —

The hoarse whisper faded in again.

“—or if your fam- … your group … is
unwilling to be divided, do not, I repeat do not approach. All materiel is
subject to seizure. Citizens, citizens of Asian descent, up to and including
purported Air Force or Army personnel, can no longer be admitted.”

Sophie frowned. Had she heard that
right? It didn’t make any sense. She had believed with all her heart that the
Russians or Ukrainians had started the war. Perhaps the Iranians. But what if
she was wrong? Had there been anyone left alive long enough to actually invade
the continental United States?
Asian?
Did he mean the Chinese?

And as she struggled to puzzle through
this, the voice droned on without her:

“You must, must immediately answer all
questions in English. Silence, regardless of trauma or injury, will be interp-
… interpreted as hostility. Ah.” The man sounded delirious, tormented. “Ah,
God.” It was several seconds before the broadcast continued. “Hostile. Hostility.
If you make eye contact with anyone on our premises, you kneel. Do not approach
dead bodies. Do not attempt looting, do not force doors, or, or investigate
barricades. Attempts to use rubble as cover will be regarded as enemy incursion
and met with immediate and lethal force. All, all weapons will be confiscated. That’s
all. I … I know there’s no one else, no one else going to come, but if you —”

Sophie could not stand it any longer. She
adjusted her microphone and pressed her transmittal key.

“Fort Morgan,” she said, “NOAA Fort
Morgan, this is Rogue. Please respond.”

She released the key and waited. She was
met with silence. Had she somehow broken the connection? Was her outgoing
volume on? She was still far less than confident with the radio and all its
technicalities. She took in a breath to speak again, but the young man — far
more alert, his voice quavering with emotion — was broadcasting again before
she could transmit a second time.

“Repeat?” The young man swallowed. “Can
you r-repeat that?”

“This is Rogue,” Sophie sent again. “I
hear you.”

The effect was immediate. The man said,
“Oh my God.” There was a clack and rustle as he must have dropped his
headphones or his microphone onto a papered surface. Then, whether he intended
to send or simply did not realize he had left his channel open, he was speaking
to someone else in a distant and ghostly voice. “Frank! I have another one! Thirteen
days. She’s …” More rustling. The voice grew indeterminate. And when it
returned, coming nearer: “No, no Morse.
Voice.
Far? I don’t know,
I
don’t know.
Go. Go get the Commander.”

Then the voice was in her ears again, much
louder.
Too
loud. Sophie turned her volume down. The young man spoke
strangely, as if he was inhaling a shuddering breath at the same time. He said,
“Rogue? Rogue, are you there? Can you identify yourself on white?”

On white?
She
didn’t know what that meant. She transmitted. “I don’t think I can.”

“I, ah. I understand.” The young man did
not seem to know what to say. “Take … take your time.”

Sophie said nothing. She waited.

Some seconds later, the man sent,
“Rogue, listen. I’m being recorded. Okay?”

His voice broke open. Sophie was not
certain she could fathom the implications of this exceedingly strange thing to
say. The man sounded more than exhausted, he sounded hurt and terrified. Was he
dying?

Regarding her silence as something
unsurprising, the young man rustled his papers. He cleared his throat and asked
her in that odd, dead tone she had first heard from him: “Are there any, any other
female survivors with you, Rogue?”

What?

Blinking away her confusion, she
replied, “I’ll answer that if you answer me first.”

Silence. She could almost feel the doubt
coming down the line, the electric uncertainty. But when the young man spoke
again, he sounded relieved. “All …” Static took the rest. He tried again. “All
right.”

“Good.”

All right, Sophie.
She
rubbed her left eye, she bit the inside of one of her cheeks.
This may be
your only chance to get some answers.

Sophie made her voice gentle, serene. It
was almost as if she were talking to Lacie in deep of night, trying to coax her
back into sleep. “What is your name?”

The man responded at once, but he
stammered and then tried again. “I don’t … I don’t think I’m authorized to —”

Sophie spoke gently over him. “I see.” She
let ice creep into her voice. It was one of the talents she despised in
herself, but her tone was perfect to lure the young man into speaking in a
different timbre, his own, something closer to the truth. “In that case, I
cannot answer any of your questions. Godspeed. Signing off.”

She muted the line and made a click with
the Morse key.

“Wait!” The young man sounded frantic.

Sophie waited.

“It’s Chris,” he whispered. “Just Chris,
okay?”

“Who are you, Chris?
Where
are
you?”

“Off white, I’m not giving our exact
location any longer.” That told her nothing, but the fact that he replied
immediately with his tone echoing her own let Sophie know that he was off his
guard. For the moment. “I’m a NOAA intern,” he said. “I’m nineteen.”

Nineteen. Christ.
Sophie
closed her eyes.

“Chris? Where is your supervisor?”

The silence again. Sophie wondered if
she should ask in a gentler way, or come at it after words of reassurance, or
if she had simply gone too far.

How close are you to my
Lacie? What is Fort Morgan like? The world? Were you hit? How many of you are
left? Are you all dying?
Her thoughts blurred, too many questions
leaping out in front of themselves.
How many other people are alive out
there? There’s people on the roads? Or are they walking? I know you’re under
orders not to tell me. But I know that you
can.

“He’s … he’s down in medical,” Chris
responded at last. “He’s de-suiting. He’s coming up.”

Up where? Above ground,
inside?

“What
can
you tell me, Chris?” Sophie
waited a moment, forced herself to keep her voice level and melodious. “What is
going on out there?”

He did not answer.

“Oh, no,” she muttered to herself after
she had ended her transmittal. She had said “out there.” Whoever would soon be
listening to her, they would start to wonder if she was in a secure building of
some kind, a place with no view of the outside, a place with resources.

She sat there shivering, standing
half-off the stool, wondering if she should disconnect. But a haunting voice —
a
real
voice — stopped her, its emotionless beat layered with a nuance
of authority and laced with sugared venom. It was the same young man, she
realized, but perhaps someone was standing behind him now. Or
several
someones.

“I need you to answer my question,
ma’am.”

Sophie. Stop. Disconnect
now.

But she wanted to learn more about the
outside, anything that might help her to plan a route to Kersey and her
daughter. She needed as much foreknowledge as she could gather. She needed to
know
.

“I am alone,” she said, very slowly. “No
others. No other survivors.”

Five seconds of silence. When the young
man’s voice came back on, it was still authoritarian but it was higher, more
brittle. Sophie caught a moment of some other man talking near to Chris,
perhaps behind him.

“And where?” Chris asked her. “Where are
you, ma’am? Colorado? Wyoming? Kansas?”

Stop. Now.

Sophie put her left hand around the
radio’s power cord and closed it tightly. Her right hand went to the Grundig’s
back panel, ready to pop the lithium batteries. She spoke again. “I’m not going
to say.”

“Hang on.” Chris’s line went dead.

Sophie kept the line active, the voices
inside of her rising to war with one another.
Tell them where you are,
her
father was saying.
They’re your fathers now. You’re too weak to do this all
alone, Sophie. Too weak.
And Tom, Tom so silent until then, was whispering,
No, love. Never.
And Patrice,
Kill it. Kill the line now. They’ll
kill
you.