From the Fire III (6 page)

Chris came on again. “Citizen, please
wait.”

Citizen?
And
not, “Hang on.”
Please wait.

Sophie gripped the power cord a little
tighter.

Kill it,
Patrice was singing,
we’ll find Lacie, we’ll find her on our own. We don’t need
them, we
can’t
need them. They’re men. We —

Something clicked on the line. Had she
pressed anything? No. Had Chris turned something on or off at his end?

Seven seconds after, when Chris came
back on, he was speaking quickly in a breaking whisper. He sounded like a
little boy. “Ah, no time. Lady get me out of here, if you can,
call.
Call
me in, in five or six hours, you don’t
know.
You don’t know. We’re
dumping bodies out the windows. Pieces.
Babies.
First sub-basement is
infected, too much blood and fluids and … and body matter, we had to …”

He began to sob.

Sophie, not knowing if Chris could hear
her, began talking over him and just as rapidly. “Listen to me, I heard you. Before.
I heard you after, just after the … it happened. I just want to let you know,
it’s okay. You did all you could. You tried. You tried to save them.”

Halfway through this, Chris asked her a
question. “Rogue, do you believe in God?”

When Sophie had spoken, she took in a
breath. She didn’t know what to say. In her heart of hearts, she believed that
she did not. She never had, had sometimes wanted to. Sometimes, even with all
her heart. But it wasn’t in her. The crystal, however beautiful, was hollow. After
the rape, the stillbirth, after all the fights and sorrows and even through the
pain and joy of Lacie’s advent and her growing,
aging,
becoming so like
Sophie but graced by Tom’s lopsided and mischievous smile, she never had
believed.

I cannot believe,
she
thought.
If He existed, if He loved, He never would have let this happen.

But there was something else there that Chris
needed to hear, to say. And he was running out of time. There was something
Chris needed to tell her, tell her before he died.

She transmitted, “I do believe. I do.”

And she hated herself.

And Chris asked of her, “Will you hear
my confession?”

Again, Sophie was filled with the
nigh-overwhelming temptation to pop the batteries and pull the plug.
Coward.
Weak.
She took in a breath, ready to tell Chris she was so sorry, ready to
tell him goodbye. Forever.

But Chris had reopened his side of the
channel with another sending, and he began to ask of her, “Please? Will you —”

On his end of the line, a door slammed
open and hit something metallic. Sophie heard the beginnings of a struggle.

Her hands shook up over her mouth, she
was remembering her last call with Tom, remembering it perfectly, every breath,
every cadence,
Pull over and listen to me,
when a deep and hostile voice
came burning into her ears.

“Identify yourself at once. This is a
government frequency.”

Sophie wanted to pull the plug. But her
hands were over her mouth.

“Identify!”

Lowering one trembling hand,
No,
don’t,
she pressed the transmittal key. “I’m, I’m not a soldier. I’m —”

“You have materiel? Identify. Where are
you?”

Sophie said nothing more.

She heard something click on the line, a
beep. Were they trying to trace her? To keep her on long enough to triangulate
her location? She did not even know if that was possible.

“What city are you nearest to?” the man
asked her. “Do you know your long-lat coordinates?” Furious, controlled. Controlled
rage. “Citizen, you are
obligated
to reply. If you are secure in
shelter, if you are in possession of any —”

And Sophie pulled the cord. She popped
the batteries, killed the line. She would never call again.

She lifted the headphones off, pulling
almost casually at the sweaty tendrils of her hair, all caught up in the wires.
And she whispered, “Go be with your God, Christopher. All, all is forgiven. You
did what you had to, to survive. Rest now. Be well.”

She stood, she walked across the Great
Room toward the seal into the corridor, the Sanctuary. She needed to lie down.

“Goodbye. It is well.”

And that night — if it was night, after
all — Sophie cried herself to sleep.

III-5

THE COMING OF THE ONE

Sophie screamed when the new sound came,
the
beckoning
, the clicking of the murmur-cane of the One.

She was sitting hunched over the
southwestern corner of the work table, reading about the ultra-light crane
which was bundled away in the Material Room. Before this, she had given less
than zero consideration to one confounding riddle, one whose lack of a solution
could well have proven fatal: she had no idea how she would ever move hundreds
of pounds of survival gear out of the shelter, back up the vertical
ladder-shaft and out into the cave.

Salvation came to conceptual light in
the shape of a series of triangles, an unlikely aluminum and titanium skeleton made
of gears. The crane would be the answer.

The ultra-light could be rolled out from
the Material Room and into the Great Room, if the pressure seal between the
corridor and the Great Room itself were to be detached. Tom had installed a
camouflaged aluminum crane head high up within the blackest recess of the cavern’s
ceiling. This head was poised directly above the ladder-shaft, and if the crane
and its nylon mesh and ropes were set up with pulleys just so, the entire
miraculous contraption could indeed save Sophie’s life. It might even be
possible to stand at the bottom of the shaft and to pivot the first few loads
so that they would drop off onto the slanted cave floor high above, without her
even needing to climb the ladder every time. The Outside would no longer be a
dream.

But yes, all the more, it
will forever be a nightmare.

But even still. She could work in the
hazmat suit for many hours if she had to. She had already been practicing in
the shelter. With meticulous care, stubborn momentum and an exhausting amount
of toil, it certainly would be possible to lift considerable amounts of
supplies out of the shelter and up into the H4 if it was still —

Tap tap tap. Tap.

“Ai!” Sophie’s arms wheeled as she
jolted at the sound. Something was pinging and clacking away at the vault door.

Holy ... that’s coming from
outside!

She struggled to stay atop her stool.

She covered her mouth, her fingers
clutched her cheeks. Her eyes went wide. The only parts of her that moved for
the next seventeen seconds were her eyes, staring out toward the hidden
entryway.

There was no one out there, of course. The
vault had remained sealed and she had strong reasons to suspect that the
survivors who had been struggling to break into the shelter were either dead or
had taken flight. She had held the blood vigil, she had mourned for dear
Sheriff Henniger, and then she had slept in the Sanctuary, had even slept in
front of the vault door itself. None of those raging voices had returned. Many
a full “night” and a “day” in Sophie-time had passed away.

No, there was no longer anyone out there
after all.

And the sound did not come again. Surely
she had imagined it. She took in the deep cresting wave of a breath of clam,
and began to let it out.

Tap. Tap tap tap.

“Oh my God!”

No imagining.
Nightmare.
It was
real, it was one of the survivors.
Still alive.
Someone was still out
there.

She ran over to the hazmat suit, which
she had carefully spread out over the fourth freezer for quick assembly. She
had read up over the last several “days” to master the suit’s makeup and the
most efficient suit-up procedures, and had even practiced several times putting
it on while she counted how many seconds it had taken her to do so. The first
time she believed it took her two hundred and eighty-four seconds, but she had
been sloppy and careless and she couldn’t be sure she had kept a fair count. The
second time, she used her heartbeat as a clock and came up with two hundred and
thirteen. The third time, it was only one hundred and seventy-one.

And now, now that she needed to suit up
as carefully and quickly as she could, her hands were shaking and she could not
even remember where she had left the HK submachine gun.

Sophie’s panic came all in a rush.

They’ve come back. More of
them, anyone left alive, they’re
all
here. No! Worse. What
if they’re soldiers? Oh God,
the call.
The call to Fort Morgan. You
fool! They’ve found you. They’re not going to fail to get in this time. Not
like the others. Killers. Too clever. They’re doing something to the door,
they’re not going to yell, not going to warn you or anything at all. Explosives.
Poison through the vents? What if they’ve rechanneled the waterfall pool? What
if they’re going try to drown me out? What if —

Tap tap tap.

She suited up as quickly as she could, crested
the visor, turned on the re-breather, taped down the mitts so that she had the
thin-fingered gloves ready to slip into and over the trigger guard of her
weapon. Suited up, she stumble-ran over to the medicine cabinet and looked
around for the flashlight. It would be far easier to take out targets in the
dark, she had read, if they were partially blinded first.

Where was it? She was certain she had
left it there atop the glass case. Spinning to make her way back toward the shelf
racks (the flashlight was by the binders then, it had to be), she tripped over
the hose, danced two capering steps out past the fallen bulletin board, and
then kicked the submachine gun out from under a discarded sweatshirt beside the
laundry pile. The gun scraped loudly along the concrete, spinning in a lazy
semicircle and coming to rest over the Great Room’s drain.

Oh, fuck.

She let out a trembling breath. If the
safety had not been on …

Tap tap.

“Do this. Come on, Sophie. All this, all
this practice. You’re ready. You
do
this.”

Yes.
She
picked up the gun, extended the stock, checked the clip, and carried it
barrel-down as she had read was the proper stance for close-quarter interior
fighting.

Her fear was struggling to drive her muscles
down into a wet and quaking mess, but the disciplined under-grid of her mind
was clacking up from its foundations and beginning to take over.
Do this,
then this, then this.
She would go to the vault door and check the vid
screen, and if she could see any of the intruders, she would activate the door
pressure wheel, back up to the protective corner of the radiation trap, and crouch
with her gun braced over the cinderblock notch made for just such a point
defense.

And wait.

She would wait for the door to be pushed
open by an intruder, and without a second thought, she would open fire. If the
first intruder died horribly in a spray of facial gore, the others were almost
certain to back off. Those seconds of chaos and horror would save her life.

Yes. Aim for the core body,
walk the gunfire up his throat. If you’re going to live for Lacie, you’ve got
to. You’ve got to do this.

She would cover herself with the
cinderblock wall as best she could, and she would unload a full clip of
ricocheting bullets into the gap and anyone else who dared to enter. And then
she would fall back to where the gun safe was.

If she could.

Just remember,
Patrice
was trilling again in her mind, enthroned and smiling down upon her breathing
sister.
If you let them do whatever they want out there, they want
in.
They want to
end
you, and then to enshrine themselves where you die
screaming. Nothing more. You leave them alone, and they
will
kill you.

“Make this happen, Sophie. Okay.”

She went to the vault door’s vid screen,
flexed her gloved fingers and flipped the panel on. An angry burst of
white-gray static snowed across the display, following her fingers in LED pools
of crystalline afterglow. As she moved her fingers away, the static pulsed and
swirled once more into the undulating sine curves of rasterized pixels. There
was the black-and-gray blood, pooled and curdled into tendrils around the floor
grating. There were Pete’s legs, his outstretched hand, but he was covered by a
tarp and his sheriff’s hat was gone. And, in frail and skeletal silhouette
looming beside his covered body, there was something else.

No.

Some
one
else.

Sophie gasped.

An elderly black man was standing out
there, sweating and shivering. He frowned at the vault door and then at Peter
Henniger’s uncovered hand and back again. There were pulpy ropes of burn tissue
bulging out on his throat. Cables of fresh scar tissue stood out upon his
forearms. His chest must have been burned as well — he was wearing lumpy work boots
and corduroy trousers, but instead of a work-shirt or a jacket, he was wearing
something else entirely.

He shifted and rolled his shoulders,
wincing in pain. And as he moved, Sophie realized what it was. The man was
wearing a black and loose-fitting plastic trash bag over his torso, with ripped
and duct-taped holes plucked outward to let his arms peek through. Atop his bald
and burned head there glinted a cracked pair of ski goggles, and two stubborn
gun-cotton tufts of white hair were puffed out over his ears.

The man did not seem to be carrying any
weapons, or tools, or even any water. He was leaning his meager weight upon a
polished blackthorn cane, an antique and well-worn masterpiece, crowned with a
silver fox head which glinted its sparkling eyes from between his bloated
fingers.

The man shuffled forward, tapping the
cave wall at random, and as he did so a fresh gust of static blizzarded across
the video display.

Tap tap.

When Sophie could speak, she whispered
to the screen. “Oh my.” She swallowed past the dryness that was creeping up her
throat. “Oh, oh goodness, how did you … how —”

The man scratched the side of his nose. He
bent down and scowled at something to his left, where the edged cuts of
radiance from the glo-lites cast their deepest shadows. He tapped there once,
and the vid screen puffed up a blossom of pearlescent static once again.

Sophie cleared her throat. She lowered
the HK submachine gun and pressed one of her gloved hands against the door. She
called out loudly through the door seam: “Who are you?”

The tapping stopped. On the vid screen,
the old man took a jerky step back and then stood very straight, peering over
his left shoulder and then over his right. His lower lip jutted out, and then he
idly stuffed a pinky into his ear. Then, almost casually, he decided to address
the vault door itself.

He said the words very clearly, but
still, they did not register with Sophie because they were impossible. “Name’s
Silas, ma’am. Silas Colson, of Ol’ Littleton. Oh you know, down out west o’ Denver,
down by Little’s Creek? Well. You don’t know me. Lady, you got dead people out
here. And this, oh this man. Are you — are you Mrs. Sophie? Sophie S.-G.?”

And how in the Hell does he
know that?

When she did not answer, he lifted a
gray scrap of bloodstained notebook paper and rustled it toward the camera. He
called out, “Because this good man, this good man o’ the law who pass away down
here, well now. He wrote you a note if you are, if you
are
her, that
Sophie, see? He wrote it out to the last, I reckon. Was balled up in his hand
when I climb down here. Me, I put that hat upon his chest, for he had a good
heart and I can see that, writing you love and apologies and all, and I cover
him best I can. Cut-up plastic tent from the trunk of that police car. Oh,
those poor souls piled up high in there. Didn’t mean to find you, see? I’s just
looking for a place … a place to lie down. To find mine
own
last.”

Still in shock, Sophie could not reply.

And the man named Silas, he leaned with
both of his hands laced over his fox-head cane and with his toes pointed
outward, rocking back and forth. He was too proud to do anything but grimace
away the pain. He almost looked like a somber, indefatigable Charlie Chaplin. And
he shrugged — he
shrugged
of all things — and he said: “Well-up. Reckon
I understand. And so? I’s sorry to bother you and all. I’ll be going now.”

And he turned, giving the body of Peter
Henniger the widest berth the shaft’s confines would allow, and he limped his
way back toward the ladder.

What am I seeing? Is this
real? Is
he
real?

Sophie tried to breathe out a laugh of
humorless disbelief, but her mouth hung open and her jaw worked futilely for
purchase. She was no longer in shock. She was flabbergasted.

The man plucked at the garbage bag over
his right shoulder blade, and winced a little as he pried it free of his
scarred and peeling skin. He crooked his cane under his left armpit, then
smoothed the sweat off of his palms in preparation for the climb.

Pounding on the door, Sophie found her
voice at last. “Wait!”

And the elderly man did not turn, but he
cocked his head to gaze at the vault door over his shoulder. One of his pulpy
hands spread out, its fingertips each covered with some kind of reflective and hardened
glaze. He was
waving
.