From the Fire V (11 page)

The last bullets flew through the space where his head had been. 
His shattered body blew back.  The men behind him fell to earth, cowering and
screaming.  Other men were diving to the ground, leaping back into the fuel
bays, limp-leaping behind stacked tires or dented barrels.

Sophie’s gun fired for almost two seconds.  The thrumming barrel clanged
as it hit the top of the H4’s window frame, still firing until it bucked and
juddered out of her hand.  She reflexively flipped her sweating hand around to
catch it —
You fool
— and while she could not grasp it, she slapped its butt-stock
with her fingertips.  It flew farther back into the H4, bounced off the center
console and back into Silas’ shoulder.

He cried out in surprise.

The H4 had completed its careening turn, was almost aimed back at
the opening between the lines of trucks where they had first driven in.  Sophie
had less than a hundred feet to correct her course at thirty miles an hour.

Some of the men behind were back up and firing then, but not at
her.  No.  Sophie gaped at the flaring light of crimson imagery in her side
mirror.  Two of the naked women had somehow secured a dead man’s bloody rifle,
and both had lain hands on it.  One was firing it at a man’s face, the other
woman was getting stabbed in the belly.

Off to the right, dozens more men were storming out of the gusty
fog, where the truck stop ruin was turning into a labyrinth of doorways.  They
were wearing winter parkas, cut ponchos, rags, duct tape, garbage bags.

Surely there were other women trapped inside.  Were any of these
men innocent?  Yes, almost certainly.  Was there anyone there who could hope to
overthrow the others’ tyranny?  Were there children?

Any, I cannot save you,
Sophie
thought.  She tried to melt the infernal vision of the girl’s staggering,
headless body out of her mind.  She never would. 
Can’t save any of you,
any, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Lacie, my Lacie —

She pressed the brake, somehow steered the H4 into the gap between
the trucks, swung a hard right.  Silas grunted as he hit one of the windows.

Blindness, a glare of sparkling light.  More men, a flatbed
trailer off to the left.  Shotguns and capped-off emergency flares were popping
off, gold and scarlet.  Holes blew open in the back of the H4, shattering
supplies.

Silas was sitting up, with blood and opened bandages spilled down into
his lap.  He had lowered the left back window all the way and he was cracking
off shots with the fully-loaded assault rifle.

Sophie’s ears rang as the deafening shots erupted behind her head.

Screams blew in from the flatbed trailer.  Sophie caught frantic
glimpses of the carnage Silas was causing, one man going down without a face,
another without a throat, more men whose legs had all been flensed into scarlet
clouds and strips of shattered bone.

Godless,
she thought without any
coherence,
I thought people were made of meat, just flesh and bone but they
explode,
Patrice.  They explode, like paint balloons.

There was giggling, guttural sobbing under the gunfire.  Sophie
realized that until then, she had been screaming.

That horrible weeping, choking, suppressed vomit struggling to
find its time.  Gagging. 
Is that me?

Still twenty miles an hour, much too fast for blind and spiral
tunnels.  She raced between the lines of semis, almost colliding with a
crumpled and black delivery truck. 
No!

She yanked the wheel to the right, she had to.  She slammed on the
brakes to hold traction, to avoid colliding with another parked bus around the
bend, a wreck whose windows were jagged over by bolted plates.

The H4 almost tilted up on two wheels.  Silas lost hold of the
rifle, it fell and clattered out the window.  Gone. 
“Nine!”
  He was
crying out, jubilant, grieving.  “Nine of the dead heart bastards, I got
nine
…”

* * * * *

By the time Sophie managed to swerve out to the cratered down-ramp
and back onto I-25, she was going close to forty through the black.  She
swerved around lumpy metal silhouettes, a line of demolished cars and then a
pile of sandbags.

Why isn’t Silas yelling any longer?

She swerved again to the left around a pile of rubble.  Silas’
body flopped, hit hard against the door and then back down.

He’s unconscious.  Sophie, you killed him.

She looked into the rearview, but it had tilted its face askew. 
She dared a glance back over her shoulder and Silas was sprawled out in the
back, bleeding freely not from a gunshot but from many places, his ruined skin,
his own decay.  The assault rifle was gone, but the SMG dangled near his hand,
his trigger finger tangled in the loop of its nylon sling-strap.

To the end, he tried to save me.

His mouth moved, soundlessly.  Pale tongue, red cheeks.  His eyes
rolled white.

That was all she had time to see.

She heard warped and muffled shouts over the wind, revving
engines, the echoes of banging metal in the distance.

Two hundred yards behind.  We’re out of Pearson’s Corner. 
Gehinnom.  Why can I still hear them?

“Because they’re coming after you,” she whispered to herself in
answer.

She hit a pothole, a tilt in the pavement and the H4 lurched and came
back down hard.  Silas bounced and groaned. 
Can barely even see.
  She
did not dare go any faster.

Reaching behind her seat during a clearer stretch of road,
swerving out of the breakdown lane and back across the gridline, Sophie yanked
the SMG away from Silas’ hand, checked the clip.  She was steering with her
knees.

The clip was empty.

She glanced down —

An overturned wreck with melted tires loomed directly up in front
of the H4.  She hit the brakes, still ran over one outstretched arm of a very
old and withered body, then a broken crate, some foil trash.

No choice.
  She needed to stop
to do this.

“Stay with me, Silas,” she breathed as she slowed the H4 to a
halt.  Foot on the brake, she popped out the spent clip of the SMG and let it
drop.  It clattered off the console.  She reached over into the open glove
compartment, pulled the last SMG clip out and grimly clicked it home.

Those aren’t trucks.
  The
sound of engines carried over the wind was getting louder, up behind her on the
down-ramp. 
Cars, or jeeps?  A motorcycle?

“Dare you to come after me,” she whispered.  No one had ever
warned her that killing was a drug, a pit, a key.  It felt incredible, rapture
peeling outward, the black silhouette of ecstasy.

No one but Patrice.

I loved it.
  And horror.

She clicked the gun’s safety on, stuffed the entire weapon into
her torn suit so that it rested across her shaking thighs. 
Come after me.
 
The adrenaline was still high, electric fire turning into a numb and strangled gel
inside her veins.  But if she was going to die, never to see her daughter, to
love and hold her Lacie, she was going to die fighting. 
Come on.

And emerging out from the trash piles, accelerating and swerving
erratically past the toppled wreckage of a cattle truck still full of black jumbled
skeletons, she drove on.

Exodus.  Kersey.  Mitch.  Mama.  Lacie.

Thunder.  A blue-spliced glimpse, even, of lightning.  Again the gray
rains began.

It was earlier than she had believed.  Twilight.  It was the day
that would die forever, the gray-blind and radiant day that would never truly end. 
The worst was by no means behind her.

I swear to you, Lacie.

The H4’s damaged engine growled, fuel blurted out of the
still-open gas valve, out of the ruptured gas tank.  The wind began to rage
again, spinning up gouts of powdered obsidian glass.  Wreckage blurred by to
either side.

I swear to you I am coming.

The rain-wind surged in from behind, pushing the H4 at a tilt and
a little faster.  The gas needle wavered.  Amber fuel beads sprinkled out over
the hood in a glittering, liquid blossom.

A blossom of lovely spray.

Sophie beheld the vision of the headless girl again, the crimson eruption
which had been the final ripples of her face inside the cage.

Silas whispered, “Go.”

Alive!

Sophie spared one last tear-fogged glance down at her gun.  She
looked out east. 
So near!
  Northeast, out where Mitch and Lacie might
still be.  Out there roved the wind, tasting the spinning fuel beads with black
and uncounted tongues, swallowing them whole.

She was alive.  She was dying. 
Go.

She gripped the wheel tighter, tighter with both of her radiation-burned
and pallid hands.

This is the Holy Book

Of Gehinnom,

Of the Tomb of Many Circles,

Of the Gray Rain,

Of the Exodus.

(The
FROM THE FIRE
saga
shall come to an end with Episode VI,
AND THE ASHES
, available in the
summer of 2013 from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)

The FROM THE FIRE Series

A Post-Apocalyptic
Saga

By Kent David Kelly

Episode I:  End of
Days
(2012)

Episode II:  The
Cage
(2012)

Episode III:  The
Hollow Men
(2012)

Trilogy One: 
Episodes I-III
(the first three installments, with additional material) (2012)

~

Episode IV: 
Archangel
(2013)

Episode V:  Gray
Rain Exodus
(2013)

Episode VI:  By
Blood Foretold
(in preparation, 2013)

Trilogy Two: 
Episodes IV-VI
(the second three installments, with additional material) (in
preparation, 2013)