From the Fire III (7 page)

“No, you good,” he called back to her. “Bless
you, you good and I can see that. You best to be letting me go. I realize that
now. Too dangerous to let me in, Mrs. S.-G. I was wrong to come, I was just …
well. I was wrong as wrong can be. I’ve got no right. Don’t you open that
mighty door to me, ma’am. It’s … it’s terrible out here.”

And he began to climb.

Sophie muttered in a blur,
“Unbelievable-oh-my-God-I, I can’t
believe
he thinks that I would, that
I,
I
…” And she screamed through the door, as loudly as she could: “You
stop right there!”

The man almost jumped out of his skin. He
raised his hands, as if he were about to be mugged, and his blackthorn cane
clattered down to rest over the ladder-shaft’s bloodstained floor grate.

“Un-
fucking
-believable.”

Beneath her breath, Sophie continued to
utilize her vast and comprehensive sailor’s vocabulary as she pumped the vault
door’s pressure wheel counter-clockwise. An alarm klaxon wailed, she punched at
a blinking red light that flashed upon the door. She shook the wheel back and
forth, then kept turning away. The wheel at last relented, rapidly slipping
through her fingers as it continued to spin on ever faster. Droplets of mineral
oil spattered out of a gasket, up over her hazmat suit’s breath-fogged
faceplate.

She watched the change in the
ladder-shaft’s environment through the vid screen. Air puffed out of the
shelter’s tunnel in a square of visible and ballooning streaks. Black clouds of
dust went puffing out around the elderly man’s silhouette. He kept his burned
and slender arms up over his head, even though his head was beginning to loll
toward his chest. Then he turned toward Sophie, not to confront her, but only
to have enough room to bend over and take in a ragged breath. He planted his
scarred hands over his torn-trousered kneecaps and tilted toward the opening
door, coughing and gagging.

The door released, and Sophie shoved it
open on its powered rails. She stepped out of the tunnel and into the shaft,
awash in reflected glo-lites. When Silas had done with coughing he rose and turned
toward her more properly, a shuffling little circle, and she could see that
although he was wearing green leather work boots over his feet, the soles had
melted off. His hole-ridden socks, trailing prints of water, were stained umber
and crimson with emerging and growing tangles of bloody filth. His lower lip
was trembling but he stood his ground, his eyes were wide and bloodshot and
unwavering. His brow furrowed. A dried clot of blood and pus stood out like an
unpolished jewel over his right eyebrow.

He was staring. Not at Sophie, but at
her right hand. She was still holding the HK submachine gun, and it was leveled
in the direction of his shins.

The alarm klaxon’s guttural echoes
finally drained away. Into the relative silence of howling wind gusts and the
waterfall from far above, the old man whispered, “Oh, Lord.”

Sophie sighed. Taking a step backward,
she clipped the gun’s hollow stock-tube to her utility belt and let it dangle
there with the safety on. She spread her gloved hands out to Silas, but he did
not cross the six feet of distance between them. She said, “I’m sorry I
frightened you. Come in. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Through the suit, her voice sounded
alien, the taunting of a machine.

The old man’s eyes roved down to the
swaying gun, then to the digital
flick-flick
of scrolling data imprinted
on Sophie’s visor, and then he stared into her eyes as he discovered them.

“Lady,” he said, his hands slowly coming
down to his sides, “I could be anyone. You
poisoning
yourself out here,
robot armor or no. Don’t you go risk yourself, you’re blessed to be here. Blessed,
now you go turn around, and Hell if I don’t blame you.”

Sophie shook her head, but inside the
suit it made very little difference. She turned her hands palm-upward. “I’m not
leaving you out here.”

“Well. Sorry I dropped your love note from
the good man in his rest,” said Silas, “but you done scared the ever-loving
horseshit out o’ me.”

He toed the paper away so that it would
not fall down through the grate, where the melt-water was trickling down into a
congealing puddle of blood-sludge beneath the floor. “That good man, says I, he
wrote it for
you
and it was pure. I say it true, but you should
see
.”

Silas bent down again.

“Please come to me,” Sophie whispered.

He said, “Don’t you shoot me. Just
reaching down for my cane.”

She let him. He never took his eyes off
of her gun.

“Please.” Louder she said it, this time.
“Please come to me.”

And as Silas Colson rose once more, he took
a faltering step toward her. He shook his head and winced, as if waking from
his own isolate slice of marble-tiered Purgatory and back down into nightmare. His
pupils flared in bloodshot rings of scarlet-white. He said:

“Oh my, oh, I don’t. Maybe … don’t
reckon after all, Mrs. S.-G. That’s a-being … a-being a bad idea a-t’all.”

And he fainted into her arms.

CODA

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings.”

~

— Portia in
The Merchant of Venice

(IV, i, 184-194), W. S.

(The survival story of
Sophie St.-Germain continues, as the stranger from out of the wasteland, Silas,
reveals to her the horrors of the World That Was Lost; and as they leave the
shelter together in order to wage their war in the name of life in
FROM
THE FIRE, EPISODE IV: ARCHANGEL
, to be made available from Wonderland
Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)