From the Fire III (2 page)

White Fire. Oh …

But even if no more of the savages would
find her before she left the shelter, Sophie would need to seek
them
. The
hunter would indeed become the hunted. After all, Sophie would be compelled to
leave the vault to in order to find her Lacie. And if any of those damned and
forsaken souls were ever to stand between her and her daughter,
Yes
, she
could fight if she had to.

She would learn, because it was the omen
of necessity. She could do it. She could kill.

And now it was time to learn.

“I will,” she said, and her hands at
last went still and spread before her in the glitter of the air. “I will.”

The damned, they were still hungering
out there.
Pete
was out there and had suffered among them, and if he was
not already dead he was surely dying and in need. In need of her.

I will kill them,
any
of them, if I have to.

But where would the shelter’s guns be? And
even as Sophie asked herself this question, she knew. The wire wall-rack just
outside the shower stall, with its safety scissors and tape and antiseptic
spray, had been arrayed by Tom in precisely the order Sophie preferred it in at
home. Every emergency
thing
that she might have needed access to on split-second
notice in the dead of night would only be in one place. That was the way that
Tom had made things for her, never asking for her approval but always waiting
for her knowing unguarded smiles.

She knew then where the weapons were, in
a gun safe. Beyond the door to the left.
In the Sanctuary.

“Okay. Okay.”

Sophie walked to the Sanctuary side of
the corridor, flexing her fingers. She pulled on the door handle with a double
grip, bracing her balance against the door’s expected massive weight. Nothing. She
pulled harder and almost fell over. The door clicked as she pulled it left
instead of right, toward the bolted hinges. It opened almost effortlessly,
gliding on oiled gear-rails. Pressurized air puffed out and the rubber seals
around the door’s bolstered frame slithered in place, shivering out their mists
of prisoned moisture. The entire door slid out six inches from the wall, and
only then did the door handle shunt itself clockwise like a massive timer dial,
clicking from peg to peg until it clanked to a painted setting marked “ACCESS.”
A digital panel inset just beneath the safety-glass porthole window came
alight, flicking with familiar lines of data in ruby and emerald digits of
liquid crystal:

~

SODIUM IODIDE CRYSTAL DETECTOR

RADIOACTIVITY ::

MAXIMUM CONTAINMENT LEVELS ::

GAMMA PENETRATION

SUBSTRATA SAMPLE ANALYSIS ::

M-SIEVERT / HR. :: 439.58 [+++]

(FLUX :: 11.9% [-], DATA INSUFFICIENCY)

DATA CASCADE RELIABILITY :: 92.6% [+]

~

Sophie did not yet understand precisely
what the radiation counters were measuring, or how accurate the instrumentation
that was set up by the canyon’s radio dish might turn out be. But whatever the
data meant in full, one thing seemed certain: the gamma radiation levels
outside were slowly falling.

The wind? Yes. Wind and rain,
whirlwind, a rain of bone and fire.

The fallout, the pulverized world and
bodies of the Dead. Blowing away, blowing to the east.

And more from the west, to come
to me.  More. More is coming.

It seemed strange to think of this, that
some semblance of nature might still be writhing its way through the tortured
world of the burning, the Outside. But some culmination of natural factors was
causing radioactive material to scatter away to the Great Plains and the
Atlantic, down the shattered crags and obsidian flats and mountain valleys.

A few seconds of this contemplation were
all Sophie could spare. She needed the weapons safe, she needed to save Pete if
there still was time.

“God, I’m so
slow
. Calm down. Think!”

Oh, Sophie. So disappointed
in you. You’re a coward,
came the inner voices again. They were
both Patrice and daddy this time, speaking in unison, a fraction of a second
apart. Then father alone was saying
, You should have died at least trying to
save him, he would have done the same for you,
and Patrice was crying,
No,
live for Lacie, Lacie Anna is everything,
and Sophie cried out “Enough!”
and surged in through the opening beyond the rail-grid door.

The Deep. The Sanctuary.

The curved room smelled of artificial
cinnamon, the ghost-fragrance of the one un-depleted air freshener. This
incongruous plastic device was strung upon a nail, dangling near the
concrete-ensconced inner access panel. A taped note behind its string read in
Tom’s own rapid scrawl,
“Suit valve ?’s, NucBioChemo — have Sophie call
Mitch?”
and below that,
“Rebook to redeye, Lacie B-day 9-16.”

Tom’s last notes to no one. It felt
icily wrong to be reading these private reminders, meaningless words that had
come to mean so much, now that Tom was gone.

Sophie. Don’t cloud
yourself, all of that. Temptations all,
her father was saying.
Sins,
memory. Don’t slow down now. Go. Save Henniger. He’s bleeding out. Stop wasting
time!

A vent clicked on with another rush of
chill air. Sophie startled as she spun away from the note on a spark of
instinct. She flinched, ready to fight the nothing all around her.

He’s dead. Tom? Patrice,
daddy. Sweet love. You are
all
dead.

Her teeth were bared, the moisture of her
mouth drying away as the misty air quickly dispersed and circulated out into
the hallway to be sucked through the corridor’s gratings. The vent’s air
currents grumbled and slurred down into a disturbing, almost animalistic sigh
as the “bedroom” admitted Sophie in its embrace, as it swallowed her, as the
Sanctuary began to blur and shiver and to come alive and hold her in its
closure forevermore …

The skin, the spider, she’s
scuttling out of the freezer now. She’s coming for me, she closing in and
crawling down from the ceiling. Through the seal, you hear her? She’s crawling
in through the doorway now and up, upside down, flicking her way over the girders
claw by claw, licking her teeth, she’s behind you, right behind you right now, inches
above your head, do you want to look back before her fangs find your neck and
she drags you into her nightmare? O Sophie …

“No. Not real.” Sophie balled her fists and
tapped her cheeks. “Real, not, not
real
. Not real, okay. Okay.”

More of the precious seconds ticked by
as Sophie took in the Sanctuary’s furnishings, searching for the gun safe. How
could something so huge be hard to find?

The walls of the Sanctuary were
in-sloped concrete, hollowed out with hive-like ribs and squares of inset
shelves — not shelves, precisely, but cinderblocks and octagonal glass bricks
set into checkerboards of intermittent and jutting rows. Nooks and wall-hollows
curved everywhere, each shelf sheathed in nylon netting and filled to
overflowing with a seemingly random jumble of objects. Sophie’s eyes flitted
over it all in a scatter of moments, sheaves of paper, notebooks, flashlights,
painters’ filtration masks, glo-sticks, matchboxes, even the anachronistic
charm of a few out-of-place unopened cans of Dr. Pepper and Tom’s cherished cellophane
bags of Hapi wasabi peas.

None of that matters now. Focus.
Look around you.

There were only three cots in the Sanctuary,
two perfectly made up and then another tumbled one up against the far wall, its
mattress disheveled by a crowning tangled pile of sheets and pillows. This,
then, had been Tom’s “sleepover nest” whenever he and Sophie had been fighting.
Three cots and nothing else, all the loose objects were netted away in hollows.
Sophie walked toward the one glass-bricked alcove of the room, hiding the back
left corner away, across from the one disheveled bed. Tom had his own way of
situating things, particularly things which might be needed straight out of
sleep. The guns would surely be back there.

No time, no time.

And the cot in between the other two, so
pathetically small, certainly intended for their daughter, for Lacie. An absurd
thought rushed through Sophie’s mind,
Goldilocks, too small, too big, no-no-yes,
yes, just right,
and as she threaded her way around the short end of Lacie’s
cot she tripped over a collapsible treadmill that was jutting out from beneath
it upon the other side.

She fell hard with her knee banging
against her own cot’s sharp aluminum frame. A wing-nut screw below the mattress
gashed through her soiled jeans and into her knee cap, digging a hole in the
thick fabric, and a fresh spout of blood spattered up over the starched sheets.
Hissing in pain, Sophie hauled herself up and limped to the wall of glass.

Beyond the clusters of octagonal glass
brick there loomed a reflection-stained depression, an alcove whose floor was
layered with lime-green tiles and a single bleach-stained grating. A
seven-foot-tall black gun safe stood there, with a jewel-buttoned number pad glittering
beneath a Plexiglas chamber on its face.

Sophie flicked the chamber open,
entering “2524” without even thinking. Tom had always kept the same PIN on
everything, his credit cards, his Facebook security question, even their
fishing cabin’s front door, of all things. An agent, an
NSA
agent no
less, with a fetish for a
lack
of security on all his most personal
things, now Tom
really
, no matter how many times she chided him he
insisted on that one absurd indulgence of rebellion, and oh that
laugh
as she got so angry and she pointed this out,
every time
, he —

Beep.

The safe clanked open. The black steel
door swung out of its own accord, and a ghostly white faceless body tumbled out
into Sophie’s arms.

She was certain then that the
spider-skin had found her.

She screamed.

The body in her arms was a weightless husk
without a skeleton, just flesh and nothing more, white as ivory and that face,
oh
the face
of crystal glistening,
Caught, don’t look, the skin, the self
and all her claws, she is here, here, she —

No. Not a body, but a vapor-tight Dupont
Plasmesh hazmat suit.

“Oh,
God
.”

Sophie tried to say this, but she could
not. Her frantic exhalation of relief came out in a tapering scream, and as she
struggled not to pass out from the rush of blood to her head, she dropped the hazmat
suit in a pile onto her feet.

There were two other suits hung inside
the gun safe, one quite small, both half-tilted off their hangers by the impact
of the blasts. Behind them stood a deadbolt frame with nine ominous firearms
socketed in its cage, each with its own fluorescent identity plate:

~

[SMG-1] HK UMP40 Universale

[SMG-2] HK UMP40 Universale/Silent

[HR-3] T/C .300 WM BOLT Hunter

[HR-4] FORBES 24B .30/06 SEMI Hunter

[SG-5] R12P TACTICAL 12-G Shotgun

~

And, in a separate section marked “FFL
VIOLATOR /// C-RED /// OPS EMERG ONLY”:

~

[MP-6] Magpul FMG-Mk IIa M-Pistol

[AR-7] AK-47 / GDR MPi-KMS-72 Assault

[AR-8] IMI Galil ARM 7.62mm Assault

[SR-9] DTA 014 .50 BMG Sniper

~

When she had found the guns at last, she
realized that she had not given any thought to how she would use them.

No idea,
she
thought. Ten seconds of staring, reading, processing.
Are any of these
loaded? What the Hell do I do now?

She had no idea what she was doing. But
the binder she had been reading earlier, Tom’s last untitled one, had had a
section on submachine guns which she had quickly glossed over.

And knowing a little is
better than knowing nothing. Right? Christ, Sophie, you’re going to get
yourself killed ...

“Do this, Sophie. Come on, it’s a
gun
.
Do
this.”

Pressing the crimson button beneath the
[SMG-1] identity plate, she felt the double
click-click
as the HK UMP40
Universale submachine gun’s bracket whirred out smoothly and at a ready angle. She
pressed a stud on the gun’s stock bracket, grasped the long, sinister foregrip
and slid the cool steel assault weapon out of its case.

The gun was sleek, threatening, seemingly
ice-cold. It was loaded, she was certain from the heft of its curved ammunition
clip.

And now that you have it
out, you have to drop it. Wonderful.

Cursing herself, she set the gun upon
Tom’s cot, pushed in against the pile of tumbled linens, and quickly stripped
out of her soiled and bloody jeans. After she had taken three seconds to dry
herself of blood and urine with a bed-sheet, as she began to step her way into
the suit, another rapid staccato of gunfire echoed outside.