From the Fire IV (10 page)

And oh, Sophie,
what beautiful wonders will we see?

A giggling inside
her, icy echoes all around her.

She kept moving. 
She went through rote actions, machine actions, shifting her load and readying
herself as best she could.  The knife was pulled a half-inch from its boot
sheath, and then left there at the ready.  The flashlight was poised in her
left hand, the gun with its safety off held firmly in her right.  If forced to
fire, she would need to make a split-second decision to either drop the
flashlight to control the gun, or fire one-handed and likely get spun by the
power of the recoil.  But if there was more than one enemy, more than one man
she needed to kill, she might not have a choice.

Silas can’t protect
you here,
Sophie told herself. 
Your protector is dependent on you until
you can get him out of here.  He can’t do anything to defend you until you get
him moving.  You are the strong one now, you are the only.

The only.

She compelled
herself to walk toward the glittering metallic surface, slowly sweeping her
light from side to side.  Her eye was first drawn to the greasy and looming bulk
of the H4.  The Hummer was shunted off at an angle she did not remember.  The
windshield was starred and cracked where rubble had fallen down and pelted it,
but the safety glass hadn’t shattered.  The chrome bumper and the tubing of the
grille were all badly crunched where the SUV had rebounded off the cave wall,
when Sophie had first sped into the cave and crashed to a halt.  She could see
that one of the four headlights was cracked, another entirely shattered.  But
at least two, possibly three, of the lights might work.  There were still
jagged rocks, some bigger than cinderblocks, resting in ugly divots in the
hood.

The driver’s door
was open.

Sophie put the
flashlight down on the hood and advanced with a gliding sideways gait, pointing
the way with the HK submachine gun held in both gloved hands.  She circled and
looked down at a halo of shattered glass.  There surrounded by crystalline
splinters was lain the body of a boy, badly rotted, crumpled on the muddy
ground.

He must have been
about sixteen.  He was almost in the fetal position, and horribly — or perhaps
mercifully, her buzzing mind could scarcely process what she was seeing and
could not weigh the determination — the boy had managed to bury his face in
both of his pustule-covered hands.  She could not see the death agony etched
across his features, but she could
feel
it.  It was all that remained of
him.

Wind howled
outside.  The reflected light shifted as the wind spun at the waterfall’s
traces, revealing far too many of the details.  The back of the boy’s head was
bashed in and a ghastly, hinged piece of skull was hanging on by a clump of
blood-clotted hair.  It was like a doorway, a tiny little Alice in Wonderland
door, and inside it was most of the boy’s pulverized and rotted brain.

As Sophie forced
herself to look away, searching the shadows for targets
(And who could be
here and not have already killed you?)
, a thought crossed into the chill of
her returning awareness:  why weren’t there any flies here either?

They’re all dead,
Sophie,
Patrice sang patiently to the silence. 
Why don’t you have a
look around?  So, so beautiful. 
Everything
is dead.

Sophie looked
everywhere but the boy’s hands and that horrible, gaping wound.  She stared at
the boy’s arms, his wrists, his pathetically exposed back where the yellow t-shirt
had been yanked up in some kind of struggle.  He had a deep and sloppy knife
gash where one of his kidneys must have been, and a sticky gravity-smear of old
black blood had bubbled out from it and curdled upon the cave floor.  Congealed
defensive wounds covered his forearms like tiger stripes.

Enough.

Raising her gun
higher, following the reflected beam of light, she walked around the H4 and
looked out into the waterfall.  There was the black-and-crystal silhouette of
Pete’s police car, stuck in the muddy pool at the mouth of the cave.  A halo of
roiling crimson radiance shone through the falling waters.

And that was all.  There
was no one left alive inside the cave.

So go see. Why
don’t you go out there and make sure?

Sophie walked out a
little further, getting in front of the patrol car’s grille.  But there,
somehow sitting up against the front left wheel with her knees up and split
apart, there was the body of an older-than-teenage girl.

Sophie beheld much
before she was able to look away.

The girl’s head had
lolled and frozen at a broken angle.  Her pants had been yanked off and thrown
into the pool, and they were still swirling fitfully in an endless circle along
the spiral current.  All of the girl’s fingers had been horribly broken.  They
were tilted off at angles like snapped twigs.

She had a gunshot
to her forehead, and something like old oatmeal had dripped down from that
hole, forming a meaty pink streak down the right side of her nose.

Oh look, She has such
cute nose.  Turned-up nose.
  Inside Sophie, someone giggled once again.

There were bits of
gray matter stuck on the girl’s lower lip, and her bluish tongue was peeking
out.  She must have been choked while she had still been alive.  Her panties,
Sophie realized, were tied in a gouging knot around her neck.

Perhaps the young
man had died defending her.  Maybe he had even managed to shoot the bigger man,
the door-pounding man, before he had been knifed.  Maybe the bigger man had
crawled out of the cave to die, after the police car wouldn’t start and he
couldn’t find the keys for the H4.  Maybe that was why there was no one left
alive. 
Too many maybes.
  Hopefully.  But this ... this horrible,
miserable sight of grisly innocence, gutted and left out to dry.  What had
happened exactly?

I don’t want to, I
don’t want to oh no I can’t think of it I can’t ...

But it was not the
Che Guevara girl from the protest, after all.  No, it was someone else. 
Someone older, a stranger Sophie had never seen.  And Patrice sang the dead
girl a lullaby:

Cry, no, cry no
don’t.  Don’t ever, never never.  Love was yours before the end.  You see, Sophie
love?  This is what happens to women now, should you ever be weak.  Kill when
you must.  Find Lacie, find strength in all this travesty.  Take this girl into
your heart, let her be your death angel.  Think of this girl, what she must
have felt, and you will have the power to justify anything you must do.  To do
anything
.  Never
forget the oatmeal girl, never ever.  Ever ever ...

And the laughter.

In the end, Sophie
was able to look away when the wave of nausea overtook her and she dry heaved
inside her suit.

* * * * *

There had been
more, of course.  There had been the terrible revelation of the seven burned
and dead bodies piled in the back of the police car.  And perhaps the huge
twisted man in the passenger seat — with Pete’s unused shotgun in his lap —
perhaps he was the one who had killed the girl.  Perhaps he had killed the boy
and the boy had killed him in turn, he had something stuck in his neck but who
could say?  Sophie had been spellbound by the bodies there, the child hugged by
the old woman at the bottom of the pile, and something curled up by the police
car’s backseat cage, near to the woman’s broken foot.

It had been a
baby. 
Oh, God.

Sophie had looked
away before the vision had consumed her.  But she heard a voice, the radio-voice
of Chris from Fort Morgan, of all things.

“Rogue, do you
believe in God?  Will you hear my confession?”

Sophie decided that
if she wrote it all down, if after this was over she wrote it down five times,
six times, nineteen times with more remembered details all the while, perhaps
the visions would eventually leave her, like sensual and lamenting demons,
exorcised.

Perhaps.

* * * * *

The rest of the “day”
was an endless toil of climbing down and hoisting up the flats of supplies, of
cramming them into the H4 as best she could.  She had loaded the H4 without
even testing the ignition, because if it failed, she was not certain if she
could find the strength to go on.

But such a thought
was a luxury and there was very little time.  The suit’s air would run out,
after all, and then she would be breathing poison.  So she toiled on,
endlessly.

Setting up the
utility crane had been easier than she had hoped.  The cord was pulled taut
over the wheel, the hook and filaments secured to the eye hooks at each corner
of the supply flats.  Flexing nylon nets were strung over and under each flat. 
The duct-taped bundles of supplies were raised by a flaring shoulder and turn
of crank. 
Simple. 
A thirty pound test had been near-perfect; the
pulleys were fascinatingly leveraged with the hidden counterweights and it was
easy to glide fifty, eighty, a hundred pounds of supplies up to the shaft’s
ledge.  A yank of the guideline released the swiveling load and slid it down
along the tilted aluminum armature, and each load tumbled resoundingly off onto
the cave floor.

And again, again
...

She drank when she
could, urinated when she must.  She even had time to clean the suit, at
faltering intervals, as she regained her breath.  The exhaustion was easy to
endure, because it was not death.  The worst part was looking at the covering
over Pete’s corpse while she labored with the last loads of supplies.

Gasoline, water,
bandages, lead-lined tapestries to tape over the windows, the medicine and the
guns, oh, bring all the guns ...

The trial came when
the final load needed to be raised, a stretcher with a frail old man smiling
and strapped down against it in a cradle of pillows.  She had tried to be
gentle, believing that this would be her gravest burden.  But the alarming
thing as she raised him was not how heavy he was, but rather how light and
fragile.  There had been just enough room to tilt his stretchered feet onto the
cave floor, and then Sophie had climbed up after him and pulled the stretcher
all the way to safety.  Only then did she gently lower him and release the cord
to snake down into the pit where she would never go down again.

She dragged the
stretcher at a tilt, her breath ragged and her feet stumbling through the mud. 
Silas was strong for her then, and silent.  He pretended that he did not feel
any pain.

When it was over,
and everything from the below was brought above, he had poised there raised
upon his elbows and said, “Well damn, if you ain’t the toughest bird left in
the world entire.”  She had laughed a little, fending off the worst lure of
exhausted sleep to look down into Silas’s eyes, and to comfort him.

Slowly, he was
dying.  His will however might well make it a matter of weeks.  Already he
looked better, breathing the humid air.

Hopeless.  When I
lose you, I will be so alone.

But the only thing
Sophie felt, as she knelt down and held his hand, was power.  She was choosing to
leave the shelter.  She had done this.  Everything needed from below, was now
above.  The power was centered within her certainty, not that she was doing the
right thing, but rather that she was limitless.  No one could stop her.  She
had the power of choice, of every choice, even if her decisions might lead her
and her dear Silas to disaster.

I did this, all
alone.

Silas was watching
her, he was silent and his head was tilted as her tried to see the motion of
the wheels behind her eyes.  Sophie gave him a nervous smile.

Victory.

* * * * *

Sophie recharged
her suit and changed both the battery and the oxygen tank.  They had slept, for
a fitful time, side by side upon that stretcher and a blanket.  Silas was too
weak to move further and Sophie could not have stayed awake any longer if she
had tried.

The next “morning,”
perhaps three hours later, Sophie had woken to the buzz of her suit’s oxygen
supply running into the red.  It had been an easy choice to unzip the helmet
and to take in a deep breath of the poison all about her.  It was not so bad,
after all.  It was cloyingly warm air, tainted with ash and thick with the
yeasty-sweet fire-scent of sickness and of death, yes.  But it was air, it was of
the world.  It was the same air that Silas had been breathing in his sleep.

The supplies had
been loaded quickly, after Silas had been positioned.  She had diapered him,
corded him, cleaned and hydrated him despite all his gentle remonstrations. 
The man no longer had any modesty, it had been stripped from him along with
muscle tissue and shaven hair and burned flesh and a blue jewel of glass that
had been bloodily dislodged from off one fingertip.

There was time to
care for him and to position him over the back seat of the H4, cradling a
pistol and a water bottle.  There was all the time left in the world.

Heeding his futile
warnings of radiation and ash and being tracked by someone’s scoped rifle of
all things, Sophie had carefully taped the lead-lined tapestry sheaths up over
the Hummer’s interior windows.  There were only a few narrow slits in the taped
material, so that she would be able to see enough to drive.  The H4’s interior
had been packed in every corner, to the brim and then some.  More was corded
onto the roof and bungeed over.  After all, she would be able to jettison loads
and throw out anything she needed to, anywhere.  But what of the shelter’s
riches?  What was now priceless, which treasures were irreplaceable?