From the Fire IV (5 page)

“I just had one
thought in that buzzing swarm all my own, don’t let any of them touch you. 
Help?  No.  No one can help them.  Look at them, Silas Colson.  You the most
whole of them all.

“Get away.  Get in
a car.  Find a car,
any
car that still runs somehow.  That’s one of the
secrets, old cars.  Any engine or fuel injection that the electro-magneto-whatever
pulse didn’t kill?  No, not unless it was hidden deep like in your cave.  But a
V8 carb, that might do you.  Or V12 and a prayer.  The older the car the
better.

“You read that?  Right,
I tell you in case I’m not all myself when you come
need
to know.  Computers,
fuel injection, them cars are far more likely to be burnt out.  Keep to the
old.  Get you to the higher mountains, especially if still there’s any trees. 
This place, this place is burning, this place is nothing, get you to the
mountains.

“Like a chant, you
know?  Like your ‘Get to the shelter,’ yeah.  I was, ‘Get to the mountains.’ 
Like I couldn’t say it, but my body with every breath was pulsing with those
words.

“The buzzing was
going quiet, no energy for crying or even screams for some.  Just shock, the
dying.  People was falling all over the place.  Those that go more slowly, they
cradle.  They hug themselves, almost lying, back to back with anyone else that
they can find.

“Well.

“In what used to be
Old Littleton there were so many cars to choose from, most burning, some
melted.  Some stuck between lines of trucks, those ones was still mostly intact. 
But they was ovens.

“The worst was
finding a pregnant woman with half her body burned, her I will ever remember.

“She was sitting in
a car and she was burned black from the waist up.  She must have been wearing a
dress of polyester or silk or something, because her clothes hadn’t burned up,
they’d melted into her skin.  Her body, she looked like a swirly jewel of green
and blue.  Her skin was swirled up too, burned pork and liquid green, the dress
melting into her body.

“What?  Oh.  I’m
not talking about the bodies now.  She was a little alive.

“As she moved, her
skin started to come off.  I saw, I saw a lot of ribs.  In her back, you know? 
She was tilted over what used to be the steering wheel, the seat was pushed
back far because like I said, she was pregnant.  She wasn’t like meat and
blood, she was like jelly.  Cooking, curdling, burning globs of jelly.  And I
didn’t see it, but her baby that I imagined I could hear … oh …

“She looked at me,
she begged me for help, her hand, she touched my leg.  And I was just sobbing.  I
couldn’t say nothing, and after that I just ran.

“She should have
cursed me,
anything
but what she said.  What she said.  Her screaming,
‘Oh
please God, don’t leave me to die here alone, oh my God, my baby, please if you
need to leave me, take her out of me, take my baby,’
and I could see one
little arm her mama did hold out and high and oh, I ran away.

“No one, Mrs.
S.-G.  No one can dare to ever forgive me.”

IV-4

THE
SECOND STORY OF SILAS

(
Explanatory note: 
Between the first and second transcribed
stories of Silas, Sophie wrote a quick and singular margin entry in shorthand
which — when finally decrypted — is found to mention that she had tentatively
diagnosed Silas as having suffered a 6 to 8 Gray (“SC: 6 / 7 / 8 Gy?”) whole-body
radiation exposure dosage.  Such a condition is now well known to be 95-100%
fatal without another’s care, and 50-100% fatal with expert care.  Symptoms
include high fever, diarrhea, disorientation (perhaps explaining Mr. Colson’s
erratic behavior outside the vault door), severe leukopenia, vomiting,
electrolyte disturbance and moderate to severe hypovolemia / hypotension. 
Mortality onset, within 2 to 6 weeks.)

~

(
Further:
  Following this ominous note — which is our only
written entry from Sophie during an unknown period of several days — the
transcription for the
second
story of
Silas continues immediately thereafter.  Clearly, Sophie felt that it was urgent
to record and honor Silas’ tales above all else, and did not expect him to live
for very much longer.  This is almost certainly why the upcoming “SC Chronicle”
travelogue section of the diary is so uneven and sporadic, leaping from what is
known as the
Second Testament of the One
, below, directly into what I
term IV-7, a chronicle of Sophie’s and Silas’s escape and emergence from the
High Shelter and into the Burning World. ~S.-G.C.)

~

“Oh, the world.  Before we go, I will tell you.

“It is blackest night now, sister moon is dead and the sun is
become the crimson moon and he is riding high.

“Yes, let me tell it like I will.  Been thinking about how to tell
you for a very long time.

“Let this be my song.

“It’s like this, the Burning World.  You only know night now, Mrs.
S.-G., when there is nothing but the choke and the twisting black and the
howling of those endless winds.  There’s these mounds with skyward axles
sticking out of them, lumps of melted tires and melted cars, cars all bearded
by their stubble of bone stumps dangling out everywhere.  People.  Dead hands
and faces all lain open on the pavement.   And only once or thrice baby
carriages, crumpled and rolling free in the wind right by you, rolling by at
the edge of night.  Some of them maybe rolling now as more of the buildings
crumble.  Those are the worst, the carriages.  With their laced, burned-up
doll-bundles hanging out.

“But they ain’t dolls.

“Driving, oh it’s slow and endless and ever on.  You can’t, you
ain’t even
see
but your own frail and ghosted headlights, beams of a
drowning glow like vapor spider-webs, swirling maybe twenty feet out in front
of you.  And you
behold
, the things them headlights catch in their
failing candlelight, you close your eyes so many times and when you hit
something soft, soft piles you need to go through, you hit the gas and you just
slurry your way through all those bodies and all the low hills that they have
made, Lord receive them, choked body-floods with them cars ring all around.

“The people, it seems so many in their dying wanted only, only to
… they crawled out of their car windows and they held each other until the
end.  Piles in the middle of every street where those people all went fetal,
buried by the other splayed ones up on top of them, all burned and hollowed out
like scarecrows, where all them other burning and dying piled on.

“And oh, the world it is feasting on its ashes.  Hungering,
howling, the ashes of everything.  It’s like the Beast, twisting, dead and
feasting, and he’s disintegrating while he drags himself everywhere on all his
thousand hands.  Phantom hands made of smoke and dust, crawling over all.

“Them ashes, they slither across the road in sticky cables,
tentacles of dust that keep together somehow.  It’s like some glue made of
melted plastic bags that keeps all them ashes together and turns them into
churning snakes.  It is horror to see, those snakes smogging across beneath and
up your headlights, some flying and some crawling, all made of concrete shards
and beads of glass and lumps of dead women’s hair.

“The roads?  They are the hollowed veins of this old earth now,
the termite tracks eaten through the flesh of the endless black.  They’s all
the world is now.  But the
lines
, the lines that those veins are all
cored away and railed on — the breakdown lanes, them yellow dashes for the
passing zones — those are the
lifelines
now.  In the dark, the lines
will guide you.  Those lifelines, they tells you when you’re driving true,
they’s tell you as you’re crawling along, following their last threads up into
the maze of wreckage.

“You think you guided well and on, you go.  But then the wind howl
up, and the ash-snakes come a-winding and the world is all a-swirl, tentacles
of dust.  That sound, them snakes gliding, it’s like dead people sighing all
around you.  I know that don’t make sense, but that’s what it
feels
. 
Endless, endless sighs of the lost, the fingers of that ashen Beast feeling
their way through the dark, clawing away the road in front of you.  They’s
migrating, ever and ever on, ever east.  Them’s fingers crawling all over your
car on their pilgrimage into darkness.

“Hell come to all souls now still alive, those few souls that the
fingers might be crawling to.  No forgiveness, no power going to save them.

“And then you drive on and the dust clear with a great moan and
the gashes in the sky, the sky is
glow-lined
.  The sky is black cloud in
circles, it’s like you’re looking up from the eye of some hurricane straight
into a thousand upside-down drains spiraling ashes into the air, that crimson
sun enthroned over his wasteland of burning dust, oh I don’t even know how to
tell you.

“And the one greatest storm, on high. 
Archangel
.”

* * * * *

“If there was a God, he’s done with us now, his failed
experiment.  The world is all dried out now, all we are is ashes.  The
hourglass is turned over, and the bloody husks of sand, of
us
, are all
flowing out upward into that feasting sky.  That is all.  That is all there
will ever be and you
know
this, you
see
as you drive on in the
endless.  And then the great wind come and then — O thank the spirits — all
your beholding is gone again.

“And a new black crystal storm is coming, oh it’s time to drive a
little faster over the dead and follow those road-lines like strangle-wire into
the ever night, like fragile painted spider-threads high into the mountains.

“And let me tell you, Mrs. S.-G., the blind night?  She is a mercy
laid low compared to all you see in that black and cinder radiance of the day,
the Burning World under the Archangel.

“May we be blind, may we never see the path we played behind us.

“Jesus forsake us.  Jesus, walk away.

“That blackest storm I went through?  She went and gone, on my way
up into the mountain.  Remember, I was gone up into the west, on to Black Hawk
and then to find you.  That storm crawling east on all its claws, He’s got another
storm coming soon, I know.

“You want out of here, you got to hurry.  There be nothing to stop
the wind next time, all the trees done burned up, all the grasses gone, and
without the green the world’s old skin has been peeled back to set free the
fire-blood and the earthen bone.  It’s all become dust now, and the dust be the
dead people and all their Hondas and Infinitis and all their piles of stupid things.

“Oh I know, I lay as guilty as them all.

“That’s what I fear, the next storm with nothing to be held down. 
Only the wreckage might be keeping down what’s left of the elder world, that’s
all there be now.  There’s no forests, no skyscrapers nailing down the tapestry
no more.

“But through all that Great Dying, from the Fire, I made it here,
oh I did.  All the way to Black Hawk, sweet way up known to my heart because
the missus, Jenny she like to gamble, see?  And pray that I don’t mind.

“Deep dark over mountain, to Black Hawk I knew the way even at
twenty feet a span, even the glow and gaslight crawl of my old burned-out car. 
Plowing through those piles.  Headlights all aglow forever on.

“But I
did
stop and out to look back once, to try to loose
my bowels upon the road.  What I did see?  First nothing.  There was only a
sound like the cries of dragons welling up from beyond the horizon make me
look, bellowing of those dragons given birth out to the east.  I had stopped
just before I made my black car crawl up that pass, there was horrible sounds
below all where Denver once was.

“And those roars did push a little moonlight and burning cloud to
light the way for some time.

“And let me tell you what I saw:  that wind, that cyclone with
everything in its belly but the rain, she was so strong she was pulling up
cars, flipping dead bodies into cartwheels, tumbling Mack trucks like they was
toys.  That cyclone and her dragon’s hoard, that pile of twisted everything,
they’s all rolled up in piling hills now out to Kansas and left out to decay.  Huge
piles of death and tumble, all waiting for the rain.

“I not tell you?  The rain, she starting when I come in.  Yes,
still somehow it rains.  Dark and thick as greasy ice and warm upon your face,
leaving stains on you so deep you never will come clean.

“And when she rain, I believe that whole range of wreckage hills,
that endless ash out to Kansas is going to turn itself to mud.  And that mud,
that’s going to bake out and harden into concrete, a concrete made of cars and
skulls and torsos without legs and all our ashes, that concrete going to set
itself hard as stone.

“So next the storm, the Great Storm, it going to start all over
again.  Beat that concrete with the thunder, hammer those bones with blackest
rain.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  I bet you anything, best part of this
God-lost world going to be buried ten feet deep in another hundred years.

“Who knows?  Maybe, somewhere a hundred years from now, a flower
dare to grow.  Maybe somewhere too, some young hand be there to pick that
flower, and some mind to dream.  To wonder what lie beneath.

“But that’s all, that’s all yesterday.  You won’t see as I have
seen, if you journey through the storm-eye.  Go soon.  Keep to the mountains
best you can.  Should you drive quick, between that first storm and this Great
One’s rising, you might just behold a Hell-world with a crimson sky and misted
ashes flying.  A brighter, dying twilight.

“Up here in the mountains, it’s all the
little
death.  The
great black of Denver is nothing up here; we’re west, wind teething away there
down into the east.  We’s shielded, some.

“You see, time I got to Black Hawk, stopping and plundering cars
still whole and eating dead people’s sandwiches, emptying out their water
bottles, wrapping my hands up in their gloves, I found me in a world all a-run
of twilight.  Some elder trees still burning, mostly forest and boulders
splashed up over the cliff-sides like boxes of crud and burnt matches thrown up
all over like Pick-Up Sticks, aiming the same direction.  Dead trees pointing
falling down, pointing me to here.  I was reading the passage of wind, you see.

“So I go in the opposite way, I push over the dead bodies, slurry
and crackle, drawn on by those lifelines, and then those blown-down forests
pointing me the destiny.  Pointing me to you.

“See, Black Hawk a blessed whore-girl of a gambling town.  She
didn’t get hit, not precisely.  Old girl’s not vital enough to ever be a
target, and she’s shielded by the mountains from all sides.

“But oh, she got the firestorm.  Those fire cyclones, before I
come, they level that town good.  Ameristar, she gone.  Yeah?  I see you know
the place.  Tumbled-up police cars, one ambulance and even a truck or three. 
Some protest or something, from what few pieces I could see.

“All right.  We stop awhile now.”

* * * * *

“Yeah, Black Hawk I did make it through.  Fewer died in the
streets there right away from what I tell.  But every casino, every hotel,
every parking garage?  The better built, the harder they come down.  The bigger
they stood, the darker the blood- and oil-stains down all that rubble’s sides.

“Every place not shaken down got burned up, taken up. 
Temperatures like that, Mrs. S.-G., well, it’s like my welding days.  Liquid
glass and metal turn to fire.  Concrete
do
burn, with all that gunk
running down it’s gullet.  It’s like hot paint and glue made of furniture and
people, hot glue stuck atop a stone.  That stone get baked black, and the glass
and the metal and those poor dead souls, well they’re the glaze.

“You never can go back there.  This you got here, this buried
castle your Tom build you, is a paradise.  Black Hawk, she’s not like what you
think you might see, with hollowed-out shells of buildings all a-honeycomb,
no.  No Hiroshima there.  Wet and drying ashes everywhere.  She’s more like
smooth
,
still-flowing stumps of black crystal with bits of dead people locked inside,
all stuck and tumbling slow, down ditches and down stone-pile, like flies
drowned in amber.