From the Fire IV (7 page)

“There are many things to see out there, Mrs. S.-G., that are
going to destroy you.  Ain’t no reason to make it worse than the worst already
be.  Behold what you must, seek your daughter.  And if I am blessed to live
awhile longer, then I swear that I will guide you.  Sixty-something-old Hell
and gone, yes.  I will be your soldier.

“Perhaps even you and I will go out together through the
waterfall, you will look up into the sky and see the Archangel of storms.  That
burning sky, you see her soon in her robes of crimson, Sophie love.  You see
her soon.  She the kiss, the soul of death.

“But maybe, for you and not for me, I’m far too gone now ... for
you, she also be the spirit of rebirth.  She the Archangel, she that swirling
whirl of un-creation and remaking, crippled on her throne upon the sky.  Oh,
her face of cloud and drowning.  Her wings of bloodiest black of ever-night.
Oh, love ... I am so afraid ...”

“I am done.  Keep my Mabelie, as I will keep my Jenny.  Know now,
daughter so alike to my Lucille, that I do love you.”

~

(And at the end, as written by another hand, perhaps once the
elder Sophie’s diary had been taken up by the Geyser Basin Tribe as a holy book
in the Lost Age, it is written:  “The Testament of Silas endeth here.”)

IV-5

THE
SHARDS THAT ARE GONE FOREVER

(
A researcher’s notes:
  From this point for a time, the
record begins to fray.  Excruciating detail lies intermittent with the sparsest
of riddles.)

(Following the detailed entries concerning her recorded
conversations with Silas, Mrs. St.-Germain provides us
with only brief and meager anecdotes concerning her ongoing
life within the shelter.  The obsessive and iterative detail provided in earlier
sections of the diary is lacking in this regard.)

(And why?)

(It seems, I believe, that once Sophie had another soul — someone
else within the shelter to confide in — her priorities completely changed.  Her
ultimate goal was still to be reunited with her daughter, but she was no longer
reading and writing endlessly to keep herself from becoming suicidal.  Ergo, she
no longer had the inclination to detail everything she did.  Clearly, care for
Mr. Colson was paramount and preparations for the Gray Rain Exodus were
continuing as she planned for the road journey to Mitch and Lacie and the house
near to the town of Kersey, Colorado.)

(That tale is soon to follow, as best as it can be reconstructed.)

(What she specifically states that she had
not
done, however, was to use the radio to search for survivors
or to contact the emergency fortification in Fort Morgan ever again.  She dared
not attempt to call Mitch and Lacie either, not after the warning that her
channel was not secure.  Others, particularly military splinter force
representatives, were surely listening and desperately striving to find Sophie’s
shelter for themselves.)

(However, she does note that she did find a small digital
recorder, which was used to record the conversations with Silas.  She also
wrote briefly that she would turn the radio on and plug the recorder in near
the speaker when she went to bed, listening.  She would wake to several hours
of recorded static which she could fast-forward through in several minutes,
likely to confirm that Mitch had not tried to contact her.)

(One time, after several days, she did hear a recorded series of
clicks.  She slowed it down.  There, just once and not repeated.  But the words
were sent by Mitch, she was certain of it.  She quickly decoded it in
accordance with her earlier methodology, and found this:  ‘SHE LOVES YOU’ and
another line thereafter, ‘LEAVE IN SEVEN DAYS.’)

(My bare narrative, derived from her few other notes from this
dire time, continues hereafter.)

— S.-G. C.)

~

And what of the time thereafter, before the Gray Rain Exodus?

We know only a little of the interim.  But we can guess.

IV-6

A VISION
OF MISSING PIECES

In her last days in the shelter, Sophie had cared for Silas
whenever he was awake, and when he was not, she was working to gather supplies. 
The planning for the journey was everything.  She barely slept.  Despite her
exhaustion, she felt a fire inside herself, a warmth not quite like flame, but
rather sunlight.  The echoes of the elder world were awakened inside her, and
although she dared not give the frenetic compulsion which drove her the
forbidden name of Hope, she suspected that it might be a shadow, some promise
left behind by that lost spirit in its passing.

She resisted the temptation to call Chris in Fort Morgan, and she
resisted calling Mitch.  But only barely.  She was afraid to even listen for
Mitch now, because his warning about unsecure channels, compounded by her
suspicion that the military survivors in Fort Morgan were trying to trace her,
kept her too afraid to rely on electronics of any kind.

She knew her caution was extreme, but at the same time, such
things were extraneous.  There was Silas, there were the guns, and the maps as
well.  And there was the plotting of the mountain journey.  She was going to be
leaving the shelter soon, with Silas if at all possible, and she was going to
find Lacie or die in the trying.  Everything else paled beyond that one conviction.

And so, near to the end of her time in the shelter she
disconnected the radio.  It was time to pack, time to load stretchers and
mountaineer pallets to be raised up the shaft by the pulley system.  She
bundled the radio and its wooden box of materials, then added its bulk atop one
of the wheeled gurneys from the supply room.

Soon, with Silas gazing through the Sanctuary’s open door every
time she passed him, she would be moving blocks of equipment to the entrance
tunnel.  Very soon it would be time to set up the utility crane, to raise
everything she would need for the journey.

There were five scenarios, one of them impossible.  The first, of
course, was that the Hummer was still operational.  This would be the ideal. 
Worse and second, perhaps the police cruiser could be cleared of dead bodies,
moved from the pool and used as a vehicle instead.  This was unlikely.  Third,
Silas’s black car might still be running, although its windshields were cracked
and its viability unknown.  Fourth, she would wheel Silas on a gurney, bundled
in blankets, out down the mountain road until she either died or found another
means of transportation.  And fifth, she would stay in the shelter.

This perfectly reasonable alternative, this was the forbidden
scenario.

I will not hide and cower here until I die.
  The Patrice voice, the father-song, the old Sophie, even the
voice of Tom all tried to reason with her.  All failed. 
I will not be weak.

Lacie was waiting out there for her.

And so, the endless preparations, the reading, the training.  She
took care of Silas, marveling every day how he lingered and tried his very best
to grow stronger.  The infections were somehow staved off, but the clothing in
his flesh had begun to fester and the radiation, she knew, would inevitably
prove fatal.  Somehow he stayed, he breathed, absolutely determined to see the
beginning of the journey through.

But he was fading, slowly.  And time was not standing still.

These thoughts were always pushed away with lists, with supply
bins, with packaging, tearing apart bundles and resealing them once again.  She
tried in vain to think of every possible thing that she might need, every bulky
and trivial and precious piece that might somehow save her life.  There must be
blank paper, there would be dish soap.  All of the medicine, of course.  All of
the armor, all of the weapons as well.  Toilet paper, fire-starter logs, butane
lighters, wiper fluid, gas cans, bungees to load even more on the car roof than
could ever fit inside of any vehicle.

Perhaps they would find an RV in time.  But what then of gas?  And
how could they find one old enough to still be running?

And yes, Silas told Sophie the deadly serious Army jokes about
WD-40, socks, MREs and duct tape.  None of these crucial and pathetic materials
would go wanting.

Silas would lie there on his side, humming Guthrie and some Elvis
Presley.  Lately he was obsessed with the Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever
specifically.  She could hear him as she pushed through the transparent door
seal between the Sanctuary and the great room.  Every time she entered that
tunnel, he would go silent so that he could hear her work.

And he was drifting, ever drifting.  Sometimes, the pain would be
too much and as he would not ask for morphine, she would hear him from the
supply room or from the corridor, whispering cries for Jenny.  And Sophie would
come to comfort him, and there would be then that silent wisdom in his eyes,
the knowledge that she was preparing for the great exodus and that she was
hoping, almost praying, to take him with her.

This was a fragile thing.  For although a stranger of illusion, that
thing something quite like Hope, had been reawakened in the back of Sophie’s
mind, its reflection was not to be found in Silas’s eyes.  There, there was
only fear, folded behind a strange, unvoiced and pleading acceptance.  She
could feel that he did not think he would live long enough to be able to go
with her.  But when she cleaned the guns, or read military base proximity
charts, or tried to practice moving in her pallid sheaths of armor, his eyes
then still were bright.

He taught her as best he could.

He had beheld the Burning World, experienced it, and he had spoken
his dying words to her.  Having told so many secrets, he had lived.

But to Sophie he seemed hollowed, unwilling to even hint that he
might be able to go on with her.  It was as if his gentle surprise, even shock
at his own survival was so delicately fragile that to even breathe a word of it
out loud would be the end of him.

And so she would perch on the edge of his cot, holding her knees
like a little girl again.  She would smile, and put her unmoving hand over his
shivering own.  There for a time he would close his eyes.  At “night,” he would
hum to her, sweet Creole-tinged lullabies whose names had been lost somewhere
before Sophie’s own childhood had drifted away.

He would flow along with the morphine into sleep, and Sophie would
creep over to her own cot to keep watch over him.  She would plan and read. 
She would listen to the eerie sped-up static of the radio recording.  Bedding
down beside Silas, she would stay in a tight golden ring of light and scheme
away the intricate possibilities of the journey.

Which way over the mountains, north before the ravaged east, could
be the safest?  Maps and guesses and twenty alternate branches of twisting road
all led toward Kersey.  With Silas and his memory of all his mountain travels
driving Jenny and with Lucille, she would have her guide.  She would make the
way.  She had to.

But if he dies ...

Or what if he lingered, unable to be moved, unable yet to die? 
Then there would be an overdose for him, one last kiss, and the mercy.

God forbid, the mercy.

She closed Tom’s binder and shut her eyes.

* * * * *

The last “evening”
before she left the shelter and was lost to the endless rim of the Burning
World, Sophie had known Silas’s truest smile.  He had been braver than usual. 
Although he dared not speak of his own health, or even the possibility of
journeying with her, he did whisper to her of Fort Morgan and the Pawnee
Grasslands and even the forgotten bombing range over the Colorado border,
southeast of Cheyenne.  He told her, if not all had burned, where the Army was
likeliest to be.

The Army, perhaps,
could be the enemy.  There was no way to know.

He knew the town of
Kersey, although he had not been there since the seventies.  He dimly recalled
the courses of 34 and Colorado Road 54 1/2, the intricate little grid of
shop-streets and farm-stations laid out like a tilted heart upon the plains. 
He even remembered Mabel’s place, Mabel Painter.  She ran a little trailer counter
and she baked a mean cherry pie.

A smile, one more
for Sophie.  He winced away the pain.  Mabel Painter was the
great-great-something grand niece of John Kersey Painter, who founded that bump
of a village in 1908.  Silas seemed to know all of the haggard old towns of
Colorado’s eastern plains, and the older and smaller they were, the more he
knew of their people.

All dead now.  All
gone.

He had told her
insistently, never go to a city.  Never again.  The airbursts had surely been
everywhere a city had once been, his stories from Amelia at the airport had
told him that.  The radiation would kill long before any highway through a city
could be exploited.  Something quite like a father-daughter argument had arisen
between them.

“So we go
northeast.”

“No.  Give me the
sticker map,” he said to her.  He frowned, winced and pinched the upper bridge
of his nose.  Sophie realized then that Silas had once worn glasses.  What had
happened to them? How well could he see?

And he promises he
can take a quail at fifty paces.

He moved one of the
red stickers on Tom’s projected chart.  “There, I think.  Look at this one.” 
He tapped the strike map’s line north and south along the Front Range.  “See
those red circles?  Those are direct hits.  Orange are airbursts.  Your
husband, you tell me had connections.  In deep.  He had damn dreaded reason to
guess this good.  See this one?  That’s NORAD.  This one, Air Force Academy. 
These two Fort Carson, red-orange.  Hell, I trained there before I was assigned
to First Infantry for ‘Nam, you know that?  Didn’t last, lots of KP.  They
didn’t like coloreds then.”  He grinned.  “Space Command, these two oranges and
that red.  Colorado Springs, three red and one orange for good measure and gone.
 Now look at these wind arrows, west-east all down the mountains.”

“Accurate?”

“Enough, I think
so.  Your dear Tom weren’t no meteorologist, he guessed at the course of
canyons and peak elevations, looks like.  Those winds,
they’s
why we
gotta go.  And these brown crosses, those are the places all I told you?”

“Nearly all,”
Sophie replied.  “I stopped counting.”

He nodded.  “My
guesses for some few shelters.  Under-buildings, nothing that would have made
it.  Those are all burned out, almost certain.  These blue stars?  Truck stops,
least the ones I remember.  A little safer.  Yellow bands, now, see, all these?”

“Low radiation
pockets.  Like we agreed, and some of my guesswork.  Yes?”

“Think so.  You do
good, Sophie. You do good and I see that.  Not
just
low radiation, maybe. 
Maybe wind shadows, caused by the terrain.  That’s, in the end, where you want
to be.”

She lifted her eyes
away from the rainbowed puzzle grid of the map.  “We’re not staying safe. 
We’re going to Kersey, Silas.”  Sophie leveled a steely gaze at him.  “We’re
finding Mitch, my daughter.  And if she is still alive, by some miracle, my ...
my mother.  My mother too.”

He watched her
silently.

“So north, we’re
decided then,” she said, pretending to study the map of the central mountains once
again.  Mostly, she was turning her head from him, so that he might not see the
brimming of her tears.

“North it is.  Yeah,
we don’t go east and down until 34 if we can help it.  And 34 might all be
blocked, too much ruin and traffic pile.  Far as you can take the mountains
north, without going into Wyoming.  Not sure there’s enough radiation shadows,
under the wind up there.  We use the Rockies and their shields, mother pray.”

“Tom said
Yellowstone would be the best place to ... to try to live.  The caves.  The
geyser basin.”

“Well maybe you
take me there, after I meet your amazing girl.”

She smiled a
little, a brave imitation of the belief he wanted to see in her.  “Maybe,
Silas, I will.”

He swallowed.  He
took her hand.  “We leaving soon?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Well.  It’s good,
it’s good here.  If I ... Sophie, if you can’t move me, I understand ...”

“Shhh.”
  She kissed the yellowing
bandage over his milky eye, then turned from him.  She flipped the chart page
in Tom’s scrap-filled binder of promised and suspected Armageddons.  Another
chart, this one useless.  Flu epidemic projections.  She turned another page. 
The picture of Lacie fell out into her fingers.

The picture.
  The only one,
now.

“I’m coming, baby,”
she said to the grinning face there.  She traced her daughter’s chin.  “Mommy
is coming to where you are.  And all the devils, the monsters, mommy and grampy
Silas are going to chase them all away into the night.  Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, that’s
right,” Silas whispered.  “Woah-damn.  I promise you that.  Guns and all, we
going.  She worth the world.”

“Yes.  Yes, she
is.”  Sophie kissed the picture, one last time.  “Wait for mommy,” she lilted. 
“Mommy is coming, very soon.”