From the Fire V (4 page)

~

[536.]

I have promised not to kill myself.  Yes, Silas forced this from
me.

(Later)

Violent wind.  A vision, nearly a mile before the smog closed in
again.  Sheltering mountain peaks near to Rollinsville, even some glacial
stashes of
snow
unmelted upon them.  After everything afire, sacred
snow!

And mud, and filth, and torrents of umber ash.  Gargantuan black
streaks of brutal landslides.  Fierce slices of the wind, hot-frozen, liquid
fog and fire.  These impossible
entwinings
of the elements, giving only
a glimpse of mountain horizon and stealing it back again.

But I
saw
the mountains, the distance.  I wish I had
someone to pray too, I would pray not to see.

The world is Nihil, oblivion.

But only that one moment of the miles, the
seeing
, then
vast sheets of gray and brown windstorms crashing back down and drowning it all
away.

Yet somehow, the valley west of Rollinsville looks sheltered. 
Some trees, even buildings unburned.  Someone might survive in there.  We
cannot search, we cannot stop.

We
can’t.

Lacie, you are my only home and I am coming to you now.

Mommy loves you more than life.

~

[537.]

Rollinsville, once a rainbow-haloed and bustling village of dirt
roads.  Now, there are hills of molten and cooling glass, all veined through
with mud and upturned stumps of shattered trees.  All turned to slag and taken
by the fire, the firestorm after the strike, or perhaps later.  There is
something left of the wilderness, but wherever there were buildings (besides
the few south I saw earlier), there are only these horrible
mounds
of
bone and rubber and molten cars.

Infernal pyres, all burned out, seemingly long ago.

No survivors.

~

(Day 2 continued?)

[538.]

Did I write of this?

Forced off 119 for some miles, onto Old Stagecoach.

North, Manchester Lake, shallow but still of water.  There was a
boat drifting out there bobbing up and down.  But we could not see anyone. 
Pieces of wreckage and bed-sheets floating on a muddied scarlet pool.

A floating baby.  I whispered this to Silas, he could not rise to
see.  He insisted a body would have sunk, it must have been another doll.

It must have been.

(Later)

On 119 again, navigating the piles of cars around the Sayle Road
junction, a tire-puddled and scorched-out labyrinth of un-survival stories
never to be told.

Soon after that oh Tom, my love, a moment you would have loved — a
wild wind, then:  the startling beauty of the faded and crimson
Sun
(!!)
breaking through over the lake, and then lost again.

I never believed I would see the sun again.

Remembering love.  Hiking, waterfalls.

Do you remember?

Memories and bittersweet.

~

[539.]

Slowing, dozens upon dozens of wrecked and molten cars and I am
trying my guilt-wracked best never to look inside them any longer.  15 mph.  Finally
past the fork of Shoshoni Road.  Unburned trees over the slopes of Sayre Road,
thank God at last, true forest which seems untouched.

I do not believe in you, God, I cannot.  But still I am praying.

Trees and even some withered grass.  Thank you, let not the poison
take this land.  Thank you.

~

[540.]

Los Lagos Reservoirs, unreflecting mirrors all clouded over by the
ashes.  Stench of burning pork and plastic through the air vents.  I’ve closed
them tighter, but a greasy dust is somehow creeping in.  Stopping, idling to
re-tape Silas’ window, his “sniper-hole.”  Yes, he again made certain I leave
him wider view seams for gunfire.

“Naw, I just like the view,” he whispers.

He’s smiling, but will not often speak.  He’s weakening.  Where
his joints peak through the bandages, his skin is coming off in strands.

(Later)

Found a hiding place off the road.  One watching, the engine
running, for some hours we are going to sleep!

~

(Day 3?)

[541.]

Engine ragged.  Gas a little over half, and the plastics in the
back.  The two spare barrels I could fit up top are still sealed, racked and
ready to go.

Is it morning?

The sky a little brighter, black and then to crimson.  The wind is
ever-changing.  Passed the turnoff onto East 72, Coal Creek Canyon.  Fewer
wrecks than I anticipated, even out to the west.  Surely Aspen was destroyed?

Started exploring 72, east and down, but at Silas’ insistence — he
had a terrible feeling about it, said he heard an echo of weeping on the wind —
we turned around.

~

(Much later scrawl, chronologically, apparently in a much older
Sophie’s hand:)

The Valley of Weeping, as told.

My beloved Silas.

He probably saved our lives.

(No elaboration upon this curious distinction is given in the
diary.)

~

[542.]

Magnolia Road crossing.  In the scorched and rutted mud by another
still-standing stop sign, three melted-paint SUVs were parked side by side, and
around them circled a line of dead bodies all holding hands.  At least a dozen
of them, two were children.  All shot, and I do not think that they were
executed.  They chose this, they
let
someone do this to them.

One or two weeks ago, is Silas’ guess.  He is guessing by their
decay.

And I was pining, sipping tea, I was in the shelter all along.

~

[543.]

Sundance Stables, nearer in toward Nederland now.

(Later)

Past the city limit sign, elevation 8,236 feet above sea level:  I
couldn’t believe it.  Our first true sighting of a loner. 
A walker!
  A
lone woman with soulless eyes.

She stared right through me.

She had a briefcase strapped to her back with bungee cords, and
she was pushing a rusty shopping cart.  I looked into her bloodshot eyes,
hidden away behind a slit, mole-eyes framed between two yellow bandages.  She
had cut herself a “mouth” in the lower bandage, for breathing.

She stared and then looked away from me.  Silas was urging me to
drive on, to go — “She’s already dead,” he promised me — but I could not leave
her there.  I
could
not.

I slowed, I rolled down the window, I called a common name (did I
choose Mary?  Marie?) and the woman left her cart behind and hobbled away from
us across the fire-ravaged fields, limping into darkness.

~

[544.]

Shameful.  I so wanted to go back for her.  She left her cart and
supplies behind, by calling out and terrifying her, I could have killed her.

Silas said she had a butcher’s cleaver strapped to the back of her
belt, I do seem to remember this.  But did she?  Truly?

I cannot remember.

He talked me out of searching for her again.  What could we have
done?  Would she have been pleasant, grateful, eloquent, profound?  What
stories of survival could she share?  Would she love?  Grieve?  Would she have
come with us all the way?

Would she have murdered us in our sleep?

Silas is the stronger one, Lacie.  If you ever are sitting reading
this, my daughter,
honor him
.  He got me through this, despite his
delirium, his agony.

He was always the stronger.

~

[545.]

Evening, I believe.  A little exhausted rest once I had hidden the
Hummer off the road.  Hours mean nothing now, we measure everything by the
burning of gas.  Having siphoned once again, the “time” is three-quarters full.

Changed Silas, much worse.  Diarrhea, caked with blood, and not
nearly enough urine.  I hydrated him despite his delirium.  Nearly choked him,
I fear.  He woke halfway through and called me Jenny, and asked me,
Why, my love? 
Why?

I shushed him back to sleep.

Still some morphine vials, but not much more that I dare to
spare.  I fear I am losing him.  He cannot eat.  His scrotum is swollen and something
is wrong with the burn-flesh curdle over his left thigh.  He smells ...
sweet
. 
Bittersweet, of yeast.  He is hiding the left side of his abdomen.  He would
not let me see.

I cannot care for him much longer.

I’m going faster, love.

Oh, my Lacie.  I swear to you I’m coming.

~

[546.]

And Nederland.  I ... don’t understand exactly what happened here.

It appears an airliner, a United flight (from the surviving tail
jutting up out of the ashen waves), tried to do a water landing on Barker
Reservoir just to the east of town.  Wreckage all over everything, and the
great white frontage of the plane smeared over the highway, into the sundered ruin
of some kind of store.  And the wind, rolling pieces of airplane in the
gutters.  Torsos and half-cloven bodies everywhere, dried intestines wavering
in the trees.

I did see one blackened crow, blind and gaunt yet still alive. 
Pecking.  It was feeding.

~

[547.]

Into and through what was left of Nederland.  I could not dare to
sleep there.

So much death there, so many bodies.  I couldn’t make myself
search the cars.  It was all I could do to stop and pour some of our own gas
into the tank.  When I stepped outside, I did not close my door all the way.

I heard.  Silas began sobbing.

But he stopped himself, choking.  Pretending to cough into his
hands.  He wanted to talk about his daughter, his granddaughter, and Lacie.

(Later)

Hard to sleep, had to open up the suit despite the risk.  My helmet
seal is faulty in some way.

(Later)

Through town past Navajo Trail.  North, ever on.  Did not take East
119 to Boulder, I understand now that any city will be a Hellhole, a deathtrap
entire.

Someone is watching out for us, some dark angel.  Someone (it
appears) has driven through here, and even returned.  Because there was a spray-painted
scrawl on a black stop sign ahead:  “DEATH,” with an arrow pointing ahead, toward
Boulder and beyond.

Whoever you are, whoever has gone and returned and written this in
paint, I saw.  And I believe you.

~

(Day 4?)

[548.]

Woke trembling.

Peak to Peak Highway still onward, sometimes even driving through
the trees (many of them are browned and dying, perhaps from radiation), west
and then north.  Diverted off a little around a terrible wreck, two school
buses, one collapsed inside the other.

And then past Mud Lake, a split-rail fence was still standing
there.  As it has been for decades.

Somehow this gave me strength.  Something, at least, has survived
untouched. A legacy of things once made.  It is as if humanity is finishing its
poem.

And who will read of us when we are gone?

~

[549.]

Two dead horses in the middle of the highway, the corpse of an
obese woman still holding her suicide rifle, slumped over one’s belly.  Silas
asked me to stop and search the packs piled atop the other horse, a palomino
with its side torn open.

I could not bring myself to do this.

~

[550.]

A little greenery past Sugarloaf (?), even a hint again of
sunlight
.

Tom, I am always thinking of you and our time together.

But what is
seeing
now?  Is it worse to behold?  Blackest
night in the midst of day, the wind and the burning of the Archangel high
above.

The warmongers, they scorched the sky.

Oblivion and yet, a little sagebrush, a few surviving trees.  Waving
grasses in crimson mist.

I’m so tired.  I don’t know if I’m making sense.

(Later)

Silas awake again, thank God.  He even tried to eat some of the
spinach.

(Later)

Passed the turnoff east, Silas did not feel we were yet far north
enough from Boulder.  Hard to believe we’ve come as far as we have, over these
endless days.

It’s as if I never lived.  He knows these roads so much better
than I do.

Without him, would I already be dead?