From the Fire II

FROM

THE

FIRE

AN EPISODIC NOVEL

OF THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST

EPISODE II:

THE CAGE

BY

KENT DAVID KELLY

WONDERLAND IMPRINTS

2012

DESCRIPTION

On April 4th, 2014, 6 billion and 783 million people died in the blinding white fireballs of the Pan-Global Nuclear Holocaust. Sophie Saint-Germain, wife and scientist and mother of one, was not among them.

She lived for a time, and so her words endure.

The reclamation of her terrifying story is a miracle in itself. Uncovered during the Shoshone Geyser Basin archaeological excavations of 2316, Sophie’s unearthed diary reveals the most secret confessions of the only known female survivor of the Holocaust in central Colorado. Her diary reveals the truths behind our legends of the High Shelter, the White Fire, the Great Dying, the Coming of the One, and the Gray Rain Exodus, her horrifying journey into the wasteland made with the sole conviction that her daughter, Lacie, was still alive.

For these are the first of words, chosen by the Woman of the Black Hawk:
FROM THE FIRE / GIVE ME SHELTER / THAT I MIGHT ENDURE THE STORM, / GIVE ME THE STRENGTH / TO PRAY MY DAUGHTER WILL PREVAIL.

From the Plague Land, from the Fire. This is the book of the woman who was, this is the codex of our ancestors’ revelation.

~

An episodic narrative, FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE II: THE CAGE is the second installment of a serialized novel by Kent David Kelly. This unforgettable novella comprises 16,600 words, 65 printed pages, and is preceded by the #1 bestselling action/adventure e-book EPISODE I: END OF DAYS (ASIN B0082SJY0O,
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082SJY0O
). It is followed by EPISODE III: THE HOLLOW MEN, also available from Wonderland Imprints (release date June 2012).

INTERLUDE

“... Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong.

Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,

Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,

Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;

But life, being weary of these worldly bars,

Never lacks power to dismiss itself.”

~

— Cassius in
Julius Caesar

(I, iii, 92-98), W. S.

EPISODE II:

THE CAGE

II-1

THE SPIDER AND THE HUSK OF SKIN

Gray sheets of tepid water pulsed out of the motorized wall sockets, spraying down onto radiation traps, waterproofed glo-lites, lead-filtered drains, and the head of the shivering woman who lived, Sophia Ingrid St.-Germain.

She could not remember regaining consciousness, or crawling back into the shower nook just beyond the great room of the fallout shelter, or stripping off her soiled clothes. When she awoke to herself in revelation, she found herself huddled down in a corner of the shower, hugging her knees, with the fragile and intermittent gouts of water cascading down on top of her.

She was sobbing. Her vocal cords were raw and she believed she had been crying out someone’s name, but she could not remember.

She knew only that she was alive, that she was real. The shelter had held, despite the earthshaking violence which had cracked the heart of the mountain all around her. Most of the lights she could see out beyond the translucent shower wall were still functional, casting their false sheets of radiance through the falling dust, turning the ashes into gold. One bank of the caged ceiling lights had fallen, its fluorescent tubes shattered out of their sockets and spread like glittering flowers of razor shrapnel upon the concrete. Another light rack swayed gently back and forth in the air just inches above the floor, strung and held by the threads of a frayed and silvery cable. These last lights flickered madly and spun a strobe of shadows around the room, clockwise and pause and back again.

The woman stared. The water kept falling against her fingers, misting back against her throat.

She blinked.
It happened
, Sophie thought to herself. She did not dare to speak the words, did not yet want to know if she could dare to hear and understand whatever her own voice might mean, a gift made meaningless in a world without other souls for her to confide in.

They really did it. Damn them.
It was all too enormous, too unthinkable.
One world, and now the world is burning.

Beyond the surging of her blood, outside her mind, she could hear the drops of falling water. But the sound was distant, as if she were adrift beneath the ocean and just about to crest the surface. The delicate bones within her ears ached and sang with a chime-like cadence of phantom sound.

One world ever only
, she mused.
One world and there is nothing now.

She could also hear and feel the generators humming out there, beyond the seal which led to the unexplored inner chambers. The shower was damaged but it was working, and somehow she had turned it on without remembering what she had done. She lifted her head — a white flash of pain greeted this unwanted dividing of tangled muscles in neck and shoulder — and slowly opened her mouth. Cringing, digging her fingernails into knees, she tilted her head back to the fractured wall-tiles and let herself swallow the falling water.

It was slightly saline, with a taint of grit and perhaps chlorine. Warm, not hot. But the taste of the water began to tell her many things. The water from the tanks was drinkable, the filtration systems and pumps and ultraviolet purifiers must all be operational. Down by the floor, framed in ghost-light against the other side of the glass, a digital display glowed upon a small iPad-like LCD screen to show the water temperature, tank supply, filtration quality and other trivia, things which now were crucial and imperative measures of her survival.

She could read the last nine lines displayed there as she lowered her eyes, lines which were blinking in digital crimson:

~

SODIUM IODIDE CRYSTAL DETECTOR

RADIOACTIVITY ::

MAXIMUM CONTAINMENT LEVELS ::

GAMMA PENETRATION

SUBSTRATA SAMPLE ANALYSIS ::

M-SIEVERT / HR. :: 482.66 [+++]

(FLUX :: 36.3% [-], DATA INSUFFICIENCY)

DATA CASCADE RELIABILITY :: 87.3% [+]

ERROR CODE :: 3003.1v

~

And what does that mean? How soon am I going to die?

She lowered her head between her knees, held her breath. The reclaimers churned and thrummed beneath the shower drains, humming and re-cleaning the draining water.

She still could not remember how she had gotten there. After she had descended the ladder and pressurized the vault door, many of the details were still alien to her memory. How had she managed to lift the aluminum shelving off of herself when she had been in danger of being crushed and asphyxiated? How had she survived the blasts at all?

She had no idea.

Hon, you’re wasting warm water,
her father’s voice called out to her.

Strange. Was he at the door? She could not see his misted shadow there.
Leave some for Patrice.
Despite herself, Sophie felt a tiny smile touch her lips.

“Sorry, daddy,” she whispered.

Despite everything, she welcomed the loving sternness in his words. She had only the phantom voices for company now, a chorus of the burning and the dead, the long-lost and the recently departed all singing within her in their own isolate cathedrals of pain and silence. Echoing. She wondered if she would go mad with the sunlit and rising arcs of all those pleading intonations, so many souls all caught and tangled up in her skein of memory, with no one else to ever remember who the voices’ souls had been. Soon, perhaps, she would need to silence them all, to reinstate herself as a lone woman in sole domain over her own prisoned mind.

You, you are all dead. And I? I live on. I am.

And if she could not bear to silence the purest of those voices? Tom, Daddy, Lacie. If she let them reign and sweep her own voice into the darkness and away, which of those souls would she become before the end?

Oh, no. I am myself.
She shivered, bracing her feet against the tiles beneath the shower door. Her toes splayed over her view of the display crystal.
You need to get up now, or you’re just going to curl up here and die.

“Too scared. I don’t want to,” she whispered.

So sorry, little star.
Father again.
Up and all heart, and there’s my girl. You need to. Come on, now.

She got up on one knee. Her muscles burned, her arms ached as she tried to lift herself. Her legs refused to give her anything more than the merest hope of rising.

Come on.
Authoritarian, then. The patriarch. Soon he would be angry, and then ...
You’re wasting all the water.

She stared at the floor, as if the firmament and actuality of its porcelain grid could lend her the strength to try what she had failed to do only a moment before.

Get up.
She moaned in pain. A whimper.
Weak.
Whether that was her own thought or her father’s, she never knew.

She tried again. A cry. She was on both knees, then, and her hands were against the door and spreading the mist away. Faint tracers of grit and blood smeared out of her palms against the glass. The display at her knees blinked brighter, droplets trickling down the misted reflections of its face.

However long she had been there,
Cowering, weak
, she had been filthy when she had crawled inside. Behind her, a single bloody fingerprint showed on the wall between two furtive jets of water. To her left, trails of urine and dirt and feces showed where her feet had been shoved against the farther wall. One of the shower jets was broken and a cone of filth betrayed the geometric shadow where its water should have been running down. Turning, gasping, Sophie found a green bar of soap behind her back, and began to cleanse herself, grimacing every time her shoulders were forced into motion.

I may be weak, daddy. I may have always disappointed you after you lost Patrice. But I am Sophie. I’m alive.

She tried to rise up off her knees, and failed again.

Alive.

She grieved for Tom, but the horrible guilt welling in her heart felt like its own hollow of all-consuming nothingness, a dead star of gravity where her sorrow and love should be. The enormity of what she
should
be feeling, the honor she should be giving that great and undying love, engulfed what little she could give and made a mockery of its frailty. She was hollowed, defiled. Shamed.

So ashamed,
she thought.
So unworthy. I lived, and all the others? All the good people, all the deserving ones, Tom and Jake and all the rest, they all died. In flame, in horror. Souls for the White Fire, ashes for the Archangel.

She moved her head back under the water, ran her fingers through her hair. And what, she wondered, was she truly guilty of for being there? Survival? Life itself? She did not know. She knew only that she should
feel
more, that the numbness spreading through her mind was threatening to destroy her.

Another minute below the water, another. Time was nothing there and neither day nor night could reign where only the false lights glowed against the shelves and concrete slabs, where the dust powdered down and the servo-motors whirred.

So many. Ashes, all.

A strange sound crept out from behind her, where her back had shifted and smeared the waters upon the wall. She slipped and the pain went straight up into her shoulder.

Get up, hon. Now. I’m counting to ten. Don’t make me shut off that water.

A wild thought flicked into her mind, that if she failed to rise again this time, her father would be standing there with the belt. From death, from the finality of the real. He would rise and she would see that clenched and solid hand against the glass, the hand that —

No.

She had the strength, then. She had to. The pain no longer mattered. It was simply something that was a part of her now, something to be sacred and ignored, like her beating heart, like seeing, like breathing. She rose, teeth clenched, refusing to cry out again. The falling waters clicked off as she pressed the aluminum plate beneath the spigot. The glass door tilted open, seemingly of its own accord.

There’s someone out there.

“Don’t be a fool,” she whispered. She had not yet decided if talking to herself was the key to her salvation, or merely another path toward her annihilation.

There’s no one. No one.

She left the shower, walked around the hanging light and its strobe of lazy shadows still twirling back and forth.
Slowly.
And what did ‘slowly’ mean? What could be the nature, then, of unrelenting time in a world of one?

* * * * *

In the great room she found a clean blanket beneath the work table. She lifted it, shook it out like a great white flower upon the air, and wrapped it around her shoulders. She stood there oblivious to all but the most primal sensations of her surroundings, shallow breathing, dripping water, sparks dancing somewhere in a blown-out socket. The smell of ozone, the coppery taste of her own blood where she had bitten into her tongue.

All of this, all of this under my control. What am I supposed to do? How can I do this all alone?

Perhaps, she thought with a disconcerting idleness, she would press her way through the vinyl seal into the back rooms, devolving, moist and shriveled and disintegrating, pushing through the leaves of plastic and so crawling back into the womb,
Failure, you’re nothing if you are alone, nothing,
find the gun locker there and select the easiest gun barrel to push into her mouth.

And why not?

She would die for Tom, if she could keep herself from thinking long enough to pull the trigger. Yet even as she thought this, a greater clarity washed through her, purifying her grief with the frost of its fading purity and leaving only a solemn resonance in her mind:

He is dead.

There is nothing left of me.

Nothing left of the person

I was this morning.

Mother, bride, anthropologist.

No more.

Like a spider, I need

to walk out of my own skin

and be reborn.

I need to be skinless,

fragile,

to be new again.

But without Tom, without anyone, what did any of this matter, after all? The entirety of Sophie, the past-self who had been fractured yet threaded together and nearly made whole purely through the joy of Lacie’s love for her —

(You can’t survive this all alone, you were and now you are not, don’t remember)

— The strong and bitter woman who could grieve, who could mourn and feel in secret, had been torn into tatters, winged remnants fused into the lost cinders of a world that was returning now to ashes, a once-world that lived no longer and was burning, burning.

For the unsettling arc of several seconds, seconds which seemed to stretch into unbreakable filaments of eternity, Sophie believed she understood where her old self had died: the shower. She had left herself there to rot, behind. She had walked out of her skin and the door had closed itself. Or had she done that?