From the Fire V (7 page)

V-4

GEHINNOM

Dark greasy ash and bone chips swirled around the H4, scouring its
windows, leaving streaks of oily filth across the glass and then scouring it
all away.  The Hummer shuddered as the black wind gripped it and shook it from
side to side.  Bodies and parts of bodies tumbled by.  The Hummer crawled
through endless wreckage, the eye of the endless storm, a mobile vault
perfectly centered in a headlighted, almost blinded bubble of revelation.

The garbage-choked air whistled in through cracked panes of glass
and found its way out again, flapping the duct-taped window seals like the
wings of a diseased bird.  The entire cabin reeked of spinach, urine, gas,
smoke, body odor and the curdling of blood.  Fuel was leaking, rags and diapers
were in short supply, candy wrappers blew up in dizzy spirals from between the
seats.

But to Sophie, none of this mattered.  They were on I-25 at last,
heading in the direction the elder world had christened North.  The impossible
dream of reaching Kersey, of finding Lacie, began for the first time to seem
like a reflection of some oblique and future reality.

Halfway home.

And what of fuel?
came a
panicked voice in answer to this musing. 
Sophie, there’s nowhere else to
stop to find more gas.  You must use the last, the plastic cans.  You
must. 
Every car you’ve seen east of Loveland is a molten slagheap.  Every —

She ignored this.  If she did not, she would go mad. Fuel, once a
modern annoyance so trivial as to be unthinkable beyond the act of gassing up
at some mall-adjacent station, was now becoming a matter of life and death.

“Halfway home indeed,” she whispered, swallowing past the bitter
chalk-taste which had over-coated her tongue.

She looked out to the utmost edge of the roadway’s distance,
perhaps thirty feet ahead where melted car wrecks rose out of the blackness
like spectral shipwrecks locked inside the swells of a petrified sea.  The
entire interstate was a melted and re-cooled plane of rolling concrete, a
rippling thread of hardened quicksand with slagged buses and RVs and semis
sunken into its resettled surface.  Pressure waves from the blasts had turned
the highway into a series of small hills with re-hardened piles of metal and
obsidian glass mounded everywhere, things which she had at first not even
realized had been cars.  There were no tires, very few human remains except for
what was blowing out of Loveland to the west.  But somehow, the highway was
mostly intact.  It had turned to liquid, reshaped itself and cooled into this undulating
shape, a narrow and natal land filled on and on with popped asphalt blisters
and foul-smelling hills.

She closed her eyes, just for a moment. 
Exhausted.
  There,
she caught a foreign glimpse of childhood in remembrance, a young skirted
Sophie in catholic school, learning the lore of the Gentiles.  There had been a
tale of Gehinnom, cinder-forge of the fallen, glowing valley of the burning
sands.

You serpents,
she could almost
hear the nun’s haunted echo even then,
you brood of vipers, how shall you to
escape the sentence of Gehenna?

No answer.  Two mute souls.

But Silas, before he had fallen asleep (
He’s dehydrated and
unconscious, storm be damned, you need to check on him right now or he’s going
to die, damn it Sophie, you
—), had revealed to her that there was still a
reason to hope:

“Naw, all this ruin, it’s a lot like Littleton, you know.  Like I
told, when I was leaving my own home?  When I had to find a car to get to Black
Hawk.  You need to find cars that were in underground garages, Mrs. S.-G., or
behind walls, or that were deep in shelter …”

And now, a broken whisper from the back seat was saying, “Pearson.”

Silas?
  Sophie slowed the H4 to almost
zero, looked over her shoulder.  Silas’ eyes were closed but his lips were
moving.  He tried to touch her elbow but only succeeded in scrabbling at the
greasy sleeve of her radiation suit.

She put the H4 into park.  She took his hand.  “Silas, can you
hear me?”

“Water.”

She unbuckled herself, half-crawled out of her seat and
repositioned his untouched bottle of water beneath his lips.  His tongue’s tip
emerged and touched in through the bottle’s transparent neck, bloated and gray
and searching.

She helped him to drink.  The eyes opened, hunting, hunting for
Sophie or for Jenny or someone else who could not be imagined.

“Pearson,” he said again.

“Who is Pearson, Silas?”

“No.”  He cringed, lifted his neck a little and took another
drink.  Most of it streaked down around the yellow scabs of his chin.  “Place. 
Pear … Corner.”

“Pearson’s Corner?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

More water.  She waited until he could speak.

“That big old truck stop,” he was able to say at last.  “Way to
Wyoming.  Fortified, 2013, after the Federal Bombing?  Yeah.  It’s like a
fortress now.  Need to talk to you about that.”  He looked into the toy mirror
glued to the back of the driver’s seat, a Big Bird and Elmo mirror that Tom had
bought some years ago.  Lacie’s mirror.  “Oh my,” he said then.  He scratched
at the stunted white stubble growing over his neck.  “Damn, I’m all halfway to
handsome, now.”

“I’m sorry.”  Sophie smiled for him, but the tears were coming. 
“I forgot that was there.  I’ll take that down.”

“Don’t you do that, please.  However I look, it’s proof.  I’m
still here.”

“Yes you are.”  She lifted and kissed the fingertips of his
trembling hand.  She could not look into his eyes any longer.  The death decay,
the graying and hollowed cast of his forlorn face, were not easy sights to
bear.  Worst of all, he was smiling back at her as if it were some sunny Sunday
in Cherry Creek. 
So brave.
  “Of course you are here with me.”

She held his hand until he pulled it away.

He was trying to sit up all the way, trying to peer out the slits
in the lead lining of the passenger window.  “Soph,” he whispered, “how long
was I down?  Land looks like Hell itself.  Where are we?”

“The last mile marker I could read was 248,” she said.  “Just
before you woke.”

He mumbled as he considered this, remembering.  Then:  “So Little
Thompson River?  Berthoud?”

“Almost.”

“Well, I’ll be damn.  We’re close to Pearson already then.  We
need to double back to there?  Think this through now.  Desperately we need
gas,” he said.

“We do.”

“Too close to Loveland.  Poison, death rays, whatever you like to
call.  We can’t dare stop.”

“No.”

He considered this.  “Well, you
got
to stop, you know.  You
just say the word, Mrs. S.-G.  Me and my guns?  I got you covered always. 
Ain’t no one ever going to hurt you while I’m here.”  He coughed, that guttural
rattling inside that started like dead leaves shaking together over the earth,
ending in a wet slosh somewhere deeper inside.  “Always.”

Oh, Silas.
  She tried to manage
a braver smile, something to offer the rearview mirror, but she was crying.  He
could not see that. 
What am I going to do without you?
  She only
nodded, turned and settled the H4 back into four-wheel.  And still she drove
on.

She four-wheeled over the median in a place where the divider
fence had been knocked down into the ditch.  The black dunes of ash were
sifting away, revealing too much.  The slag-wrecks she could see in the
northbound lane were getting much worse.

Those were cars.  Tombs for people.

She navigated over into the southbound lanes, driving around the
back-axle heap left behind by a tanker whose warped and tinctured wreckage was
sprawled off into the breakdown lane.  The huge wreck had created a
shelter-shadow, a halo of relative unburned ruin.  There were clotted mounds
there in the road, where the windborne dust had choked on something wet and
kept on sticking, creating sloppy clumps of oily residue.  Part of a woman’s
torso was lodged between two surviving tires, still flapping a scrap of crimson
skirt.  One connected leg had a pink pump still upon its foot.  Blackened toenails
peeked out.

Sophie, swallowing bile, stared at her dashboard as she drove by.

The gas needle bobbed erratically as she hit a deep pothole.  The
mis-calibrated needle bobbed, adrift between one quarter and empty.

How much gas do we really have?  How much is leaking?  How can we
even know?

She gritted her teeth.

“— fuel pumps,” groaned a voice.  Swallowing.  Coughing.  Silas
was trying to talk to her again.

“Sorry?”

“I say, Pearson’s Corner.  We
got
to stop there.  Special
emergency, emerg ... fuel pumps …”  He trailed off.

“There’s an emergency pumping station there?  But wouldn’t that be
a likely place?  For survivors, I mean.”

“You think there any more?”

Sophie shook her head.  They both knew that away from Denver,
further north and east, there were many more survivors than they had before
imagined.  But were they people?  She could not get the image of the black
toes, the flapping skirt out of her mind. 
Run over or did she crawl under
at the last, there was some of her leg and some of her belly, it was pulling
apart, in the wind, she was …

“Don’t you know, no.  How many people can there be.  Nor do I.” 
Silas was tapping something.  The mirror.  He was staring at himself in the
mirror.  “Pearson’s though.  That place is huge, see?  RV park, showers,
sleepers, everything else.  Big, with a Hell of a lot of fuel pumps.  And
full-on FEMA-funded fuel bays with high roofs and emergency backups, regular
and diesel and more if I recall.  All kinds of fail-safes, after the Federal Bombing. 
Was all over the news, I drove Jenny up once just to check it out, all that
buildup.  She didn’t care.  Naw, she was just after truck stop shopping and
cinnamon rolls.  You see what I’m saying?”

Sophie frowned.  “I don’t think so.”

“Advanced fuel bay pumps are fast as Hell.  Gas might still be
there,” he said all in a rush.  His eyes were wide, excited. 
Alive.
  “Gas
is always underground, it defies gravity, right?  You got backups, especially
at a big fortified truck stop like that.  Even if there’s power overload, and
that happens with too many trucks through and forest fire crews and army
convoys and thunderstorms and all, see, pressure plates auto the backup
generators and the fuel’s just
always on
.  Transfer switches.  You pull
into a sheltered bay, you fill, you go.  Costs a little more but it goes
straight to the fireman fund.  You pay on the way out.”

Always on.
  The images in
Sophie’s mind began to whirl, struggling to sync with Silas’ understanding. 
Sheltered
fuel bays.  FEMA funding.  You pay on the way out …

“So …”  She chewed her lower lip, a scab there.  “You think these
special pumps might still be working.”

“Yeah, if they’re still there.”  Silas groaned again.  “All built
up, protected.  Got to try.”

Sophie’s mind was reeling, shifting into determined focus,
calculating.

Pearson’s Corner, that’s just a few miles off if I remember.  Might
still have the gas.  Might have survivors, too.  The lake did, Fort Morgan did. 
But even if there’s dying people there, the fuel bays are away from the
restaurant, and always on.  We go in, we gas, get out … 
The truck stop might well be ruined, or wiped entirely off the
map.  But it was fortified, and what if it was still there?

The plan was not perfect.  But oh, it was.  It was the only
chance, unless Sophie wanted to try to siphon gas from some other slagheap wreck
that they might find.

In this storm?  And when’s the last intact wreck that you could
see?

How much gas did they really have?  There was no way to know, the
damage from the bullet, the worse damage to the chassis from going over rubble,
and the instrument shake-up caused when the H4 collided with the cave wall were
all conspiring against her in a merry game of “You could run out now, you
know.  Why wonder?  Empty soon.  Why, you could die at any time.”

She made a decision.  She gripped the wheel.

“Silas,” she said, “it’s perfect.  Damn the danger.  Help me find
it, we’re going to try.  If we see anyone, cover me.  If we hear anyone, we’ll
make a getaway, try to get as much fuel as we can first.  Which exit?”

“Two fifty-four, if I recall.”

Sophie had no idea where they were, not precisely.  But she knew she
was somewhere near to Highway 60, near to US Route 34 or what was left of it.

Even at a five to ten mile an hour crawl, Pearson’s was very
close.  And after all, there was very little choice.

V-5

THE TOMB
OF MANY CIRCLES

With Silas’ guidance, a crossing of the median and the chance
revelation of a downed and fire-bleached highway sign (“… TTRACTION – EXIT 255
– MARIANA GOLF COUR …”), Sophie slowly found her way toward the sheltered ruin
of Pearson’s Corner Truck Stop, Café and Bakery.

They made their way off the interstate and four-wheeled onto the
trash-strewn frontage road, where the wrecks were fewer and the land a little
lower.  In some places, there were even identifiable remnants of the dead:  skulls
with faces, shoes, briefcases, leather jackets which had only blackened instead
of melted.  Bone piles and tire chains littered the byway, festooning the
drifts of wind-trapped gravel.  Almost-identifiable cars emerged from the
blinding smog and the dunes of asphalt, garish silhouettes at the edge of
sight.  Trash and pieces of debris, aluminum siding and shreds of tire, blew
overhead in tumbling gouts, buffeted by black wind.

Once the interstate was left behind, the lower ground gave way to
decipherable vestiges and slaughter, the playthings of a recently exhausted
Armageddon.  After the first impacts over Colorado Springs and NORAD and
Denver, survivors had fled along the interstate, bogged down, and taken to the
frontage roads and even the fields in a desperate and futile attempt to flee. 
And then the second-wave missile impact at Loveland, and the end of everything.

There were lines of blackened RVs and burned-out buses, semi
trailers, multiple lines of a never-ending traffic jam.  “Lanes” through the
labyrinth were nothing more than sizable gaps where later fires had gorged
their way through, where gas tanks or coal trailers or even entire tankers had
exploded.  But some of the bigger trucks were almost whole, even readable as
effigies of yesterday’s mundanity.

Home Depot,
read one truck’s side,
Wal Mart
said another.
 United Parcel, Con-Way Transportation, North
American Van Lines, Thompson School District …

As Sophie drove, ash-stained trucks loomed up on either side, gray
monoliths, pillars in the wasteland tumbled over end.

Silas was sitting up in the back seat, panting, scratching at an
open sore over his left knee where the bandage joints had opened.  “There,” he
said.  He scrabbled at the shoulder of Sophie’s suit.  “That say?”

Sophie edged the H4 nearer to the half-toppled steel of the
highway sign.  One panel read “POSTILLON RV PARK,” the other “CAMPION, 60
WEST.”  Further back in the gloom shone the pathetic remains of a splintered
Sinclair gasoline sign, its green sauropod logo still discernible on the blistered
slab of its crackled porcelain face.

“Yeah, down there,” said Silas.  His voice was edged with hope,
with fervency.  “No.  Back on.  Turn back a little.”

“Back the way we came?”

“Some little, yeah.”

Sophie backed the H4 around in an awkward circle, rounding the
collision of an upended Lexus and some kind of blown-out station wagon.  And
looming out of the darkness there rose a pile of split-open sandbags, tilted in
a haphazard cascade like the remnants of a pyramid wreathed in sand.  Still
standing amidst the drifting ash, a huge tilted sign proclaimed in a jaunty
hand-painted font:

~

WELCOME ROAD LOVERS

1,300 FEET TO PARADISE

FREE WIFI

GRAB AND GO

CHAPEL — SHOWERS — SOUVENIRS

REFUEL IN SECURITY

BEST CINNAMON ROLLS IN 700 MILES

GOD BLESS AMERICA

~

The scoured face of the sign was streaked with black plastic
tears.  A huge plastic tarp had constricted around the pole, and was blowing up
in tatters up across its throat like a necklace of shadowy tentacles.

And sandbags. 
Sophie’s
tongue poked out at the corner of her mouth in concentration.  How old were
these haphazard piles of reinforcement?  People had survived here, long enough
to build a makeshift guard post looking out over the interstate.  Or rather,
survivors from elsewhere had gathered here, a truck stop being a logical place
of pilgrimage for anyone hoping for food, gas or shelter.  But how long could
anyone have survived after the firestorm, so close to the Loveland impact
crater?  How many days?

Some might still be alive.

She didn’t know.  She wanted to ask Silas, but when she looked
back into the rearview, he had changed.  A grizzled soldier was poised in her
back seat.  He was vigilant, alert, trembling and silent.  A trickle of fluid
was running down from an open sore in his neck, down to his shivering hand and
he did not seem to notice.  He was fingering the Luger pistol’s trigger,
licking his parched lips.

Get the fuel and get out of here.

For the first time, Sophie turned off the H4’s headlights.  The
enveloping cloud of isolate and claustrophobic blackness choked in and took her
breath away.  She thought for a moment of Patrice’s favorite movie, that
horrifying movie she loved as a child
because
it scared her, of Dorothy
in the farmhouse as it lifted up in the tornado, chaos and wreckage whirling by
in a living nightmare out the window.

And here we are.  This isn’t Kansas ...

There were deep gouges of parallel scrape marks in the blacktop,
where truck wrecks had been dragged, towed, reorganized.  A tow truck with
shattered windows loomed nearby, its secured chains rattling in the wind. 
Behind it was the ruin of a makeshift temporary building which had blown over,
its dilapidated frontage still clearly reading:  “CDL PHYSICALS, WALK-INS
WELCOME.”

Welcome, indeed.

“Sophie, that truck.  Did you see?”

“I saw.”  She looked down at her gun instead of nodding.  “I
know.”

“There damn well might be people.”

“We don’t have a choice.  Get both of your guns ready, Silas,”
said Sophie.  “We’re going to try this.”

They turned into a paved and devastated enclosure framed by
shattered concrete walls, its entrance bracketed by guardrails that had been
turned into vertical curlicues, as if they had been the rejected toys of some
furious, monstrous child.

Sophie did not blink as the wind wove clearer and the darkness
streamed into almost-light.  She waited, then was forced to turn the headlights
on again.  She peered out into an inky stew of smog and cartwheeling fragments,
looking for the restaurant, the showers, the stores, the fuel bays,
Anything
. 
But she could not see the buildings of Pearson’s Corner.  There were too many
bus and semi wrecks, pulled together to make walls and aisles of alternating
trash and sand.  Further on, trucks were parked in concentric rings, a maze of
ways leading into a deeper, more tranquil darkness.

The winds howled overhead.  There was no one to be seen.

“Silas,” asked Sophie, “here we go.  Are you with me?”

“Course I am.”  He popped out the pistol’s clip, checked his round
and reloaded it.  “Just be quick, all right?  Get us gassed and out of here,
quick as you can.”

“I plan to.”

Sophie put her foot on the brake, tied a water-moistened rag just
below her face.  The helmet would decrease her visibility too much outside, her
awareness.  She glanced down at the HK UMP40 Universale submachine gun,
pocketed in her suit on its utility cord.  She was suited, both she and Silas
were well-armed.  If anyone was still alive out there, she almost wished they
would confront her.

Just try to get between me and Kersey, between me and my Lacie,
she thought.  She slowly lifted the gun from its pocket, hefted
it.  The clip was full. 
Just try.

Yes,
a sibilant voice
whispered inside her, the waking scrape of dead leaves rising upon a coil of
the wind. 
Yes, try.
  Somewhere deep inside, the beast which had once
been Sophie’s sister purred in the heart, trembling with shivers of
expectation.

The wind slowed
again, re-gathering.  Sophie could hear the rhythm of something broken into
disparate echoes, beats, a pulse beneath the gale that sounded almost
mechanical. 
What
is
that?
  She dared to crack the window half an
inch.  The roiling stench of smoke, burnt grease and molten rubber swirled in
as an almost tangible, blurring fume.

There was the echo
again.  Was that an engine she was hearing? 
How can there be —

“Generator,” Silas
murmured.  Sophie looked down at the gas gauge needle, afraid to look up into
the whirling clouds enveloping the H4 and its light streams.  What if she saw
someone standing out there?

She closed the
window and the sound melted away.

“You hear anything
else?”  Silas tried to sit up a little straighter.  He peered out one of the
view slits in the duct-taped lead curtains, his eyelids trembling as he
narrowed his eyes.  He let in a shaking breath.  “Soph?”

“Yes, Silas?”

“Give me that other
magazine.”

Not good.
  But the fuel, the
need to keep moving, was paramount. 
Paradox, we can’t stop we have to keep
moving, we have to stop so we can keep moving, we can’t —

Her hands twitched
over the seven-round extended pistol magazine, testing the heft of the bullets
inside.  In the rearview, Silas shook his head at her.

“No,” he said. 
“The rifle one I cleaned.  The long seven-sixty.”

She lifted the bulky
assault rifle magazine with grim distaste, fishing it gingerly out from its
paper nest in the open glove compartment.  She palmed it and passed it back to
him.  He took it with shaky fingers.  Sophie heard the ominous
click-chuck
as Silas changed the assault rifle’s ammo feed and readjusted the forward lip.

What did he think
he saw?
  She pressed her foot down on the brake, harder than before. 
If
there wasn’t anyone, do you think he would be readying both weapons?

“I’m scared,
Silas,” she whispered.

“Me too.”  He
coughed softly against his shoulder, a wet and lingering sigh.  “You listen, if
you please.  You my private, right?  We get our fuel and gone, you hear me? 
And if the pump ain’t working no more?  We get the Hell out of here.  Then we …
yeah.  We figure something out.  We soldier this.”

She nodded, trying
not to dwell on the insinuations beneath his words.  This was the most
forceful, the most alert she had ever seen him.

“There we are.  Ready
as I’ll ever be,” he said.  “Go in now.  Coast as much as you can.”

She eased her foot
off the brake again.  The H4 crept forward.

Moving at a crawl,
wishing she could silence the damaged engine, Soph guided the H4 between the
lines of trucks and paint-blistered RVs.  Gouts of shattered glass showed where
an impact had occurred after some of the trucks had been parked in place. 
And
what does that mean?

She gripped the
wheel tighter, holding her breath, eyes wide, afraid to blink.  The shadowy
monoliths of wreckage crawled by to either side, dark metallic waves, the
iron-sheeted walls of Hell’s in-spiral city.

And down.  And
down.

She tapped the
brake to stay under five miles an hour.

Where are these
fuel bays?
  She leaned in toward the windshield, her gaze struggling to look
for human shapes in the twisting and tumbling garbage on the wind.

“Where?” asked
Silas, and she jumped a little.  She hadn’t realized that she had murmured the
question aloud.  “With this many trucks, these walls of flatbeds and tankers
and all, I just don’t know.  There’s a fork in the ways up there.  God, it’s
like tunnels made of wrecks.  Go right, I think.”

She turned.  A
darker, more garish and somehow wider vista met the H4’s lights.  The wind was
quieter in the spiral deep.  A few plastic bags with still-identifiable store
names emblazoned on the sides were blowing and lilting endlessly like the
ghosts of gulls.

Here, here solace
we will find.  In the eye of the storm.

She was certain
then, as she looked around at the lighter wreckage.  A good number of people
had survived here for quite some time.  Some might still be alive, irradiated,
poisoned, broken, sheltered and still in the business of dying.  There in the
inner circle of all those parked trucks, the curve of the concrete valley’s far
horizon made not of metal but of mist, more trucks had been backed up against
each other to forge an iron fortress.  Semis were fused together by
haphazardly-welded metal plates, bumpers were wreathed with barbed wire.  More
than one truck had brown and foreboding stains spattered up across the grille. 
Pieces of a tattered flannel shirt fluttered from a tractor’s smokestack, a
scarlet banner of grid and cross.

No gas pumps yet.
  Sophie shivered. 
God, where are the buildings?  The fuel bays?  We need to get out of here.