From the Fire IV (11 page)

There could be no
certainty.  The most crucial of things, water, urine and waste bags, morphine,
maps, guns, food, medicine, these were kept on the passenger seat and floor and
well in arm’s reach.  Silas insisted on cradling the pistol still despite his
precarious perch amongst the backseat piles.

And after
everything, starting the H4 had been easy.

For that moment,
Sophie had made herself sing something, something lilting, silly and off-key. 
It was a variation of Pop Goes the Weasel, actually, a stupid little jingle
that Patrice had always loved when they were children.  The only thing certain
to make her sister laugh —
really
laugh, not that horrible cruel
death-growl of gloating.  To fill the silence as Sophie turned the key, she had
needed to be certain that the voice of Patrice and all its demonic omens would
be no more.

But Sophie had her
own mind-song then, as she selected the ignition key from its ring. 
What
if?
  What if the H4 had been burned out by the electromagnetic pulse, or
the engine was damaged by the impact, or the gas had been siphoned off by the
shotgun man, or the oil pan was cracked or the radiator breached or ...

Click.
  She turned the
key.

The engine wheezed,
the dash lumines flickered fitfully.  Then there was a belch of silvery black
exhaust and a startling echo out in the cave, a dragon’s growl as the engine
roared to life and all the dials turned merrily into their proper positions.

It was like a time
machine.

The reek of exhaust
began to filter in through the window cracks.  Behind her, strapped into his
tarps and blankets across the back seat, Sophie heard Silas breathe a
shuddering sigh of abject relief.

She shifted the H4
into reverse, pulled away.  Rubble slithered and clanged off of the hood. 
Keeping her speed at an even five miles an hour, she pushed back into the front
of the police car and pressed down on the gas.

Only the fetal
boy’s and the strangled girl’s bodies had been moved, covered together.  Sophie
had decided that it was a crucial ritual, a testament of peace for two lost
souls.  The girl had died in terror but she would be remembered.  She had the
boy, forever.  There was honor.

“Hang on.”  Sophie
pressed the pedal a little more.

The patrol car
slushed deeper into the pool, where the ground was muddy enough for a slithery
kind of purchase.  The H4 kept pushing and the car tilted back off to one side,
kicking up a brown wave of water that sloshed up the cracked window near to Silas’s
face.  Sediment-thick tears trickled down the inside glass onto his fingers. 
He shifted.

Backing up, pushing
the car out of the way, slurring backward through the pool’s mud and under the
waterfall, getting wet and gagging on the fumes ... these were simple things. 
The hard part came when she backed out of the cave and into the ghostly crimson
light of the ever-reflecting canyon and its ruin.

Lord,
Sophie thought,
I
don’t believe in you.  I don’t think I ever can.  I’m simply not made that
way.  But if you exist, for these tortured souls in their ending, please
shelter them in your arms.  The girl, Pete, the boy.  The grandmother, the
baby.  Even the terrible man if he is here.  Everyone.  Please.  Anything to
take their pain away.

And they were
through.  Wheels spun, mud sloshed up and the gloomy twilight of the cave
turned to a crimson glow.  The dark-light was not brighter, it was
deeper
. 
The world of burning, the world of Ashen and of Gone.

And they left the
dead far behind them.

* * * * *

There had once been
a time, a nothing time, a memory of a bland and beautiful day like and unlike
any other.  A day of the lost and dead world, the Gone-Land, a Paradise which
never would be again.

Sophie remembered
it clearly in that moment.  Tom had taken her on that hike up to Hanging Lake
far off I-70.  A grim and precarious trailhead had taken them up through pine
and granite slabs and bits of summer cloud, with little crow silhouettes flying
up around inside of them.  Some date!  Sophie had been furious with him, every
step a test of faith.  Her legs burning with pain, her lungs raging in the
altitude, and Tom in his cutoff FBI shirt (what a joke that would become
between them, in later days) actually looking back and
laughing
as he
sped up again and again, just out of reach.

“Come on, we’re
almost there, just hold my hand,” he said.  And grinned.

Seven or eight
times, she had just about gotten close enough to belt him one.

But no, not quite. 
And oh, she was going to break up with him, three month anniversary be damned. 
For certain, before this fucking
bullshit
ever got too serious.  She was
going to get to the top of this God-forsaken trail, catch her breath, take his
offered hand and say, “Tom, that was horrible of you.  Goodbye.”  And then
should would leave him, then she would be free.  And then ...

And then a turn in
the path, and he waited for her.  He did.  He was panting, at least.  But his
face was not lined with mischief, and the sun that made him squint, he was
letting it all fall fully upon his face there in its waves of gold.  And the
pool, Hanging Lake, it was turquoise, emerald, cerulean.  Grassed-over and
fallen trees slumbered in its shallows, waterfalls poured in silver freshets
into the purest of Rocky Mountain waters.

And she had stared
in disbelief, and she had been close to tears.  When was the last time that she
had been able to cry?  Had it been over Patrice?  Had it been that long?

And he had taken
her in his arms, and whispered, “Someday.  Someday, I’d like to build a home
under a waterfall.  You know?  Something just for you.  For you with me.”

* * * * *

As she backed the
H4 out all the way, she caught a tear-crested glimpse at Silas in the rearview
mirror, shivering there in the back seat.  Duct-taped racks of munitions boxes
and water bottles and MRE packs were piled all around him.  And he, blessed
angel in defiance of all reality, he was smiling at her.

He gave her a
little wave.

Sophie backed the
H4 slowly and deliberately into the canyon wall.  There was a thud, a firmness
there.  She cranked the wheel and shifted into four-wheel and low gear.  The
drive began with a crawl over rubble, a jolting bobble back and forth as the
vehicle began to prowl and find its way.  The piles of boulders and shattered
stones were painted with un-light, fire-light pouring down from the seam of
canyon-rimmed clouds so high above.  Sophie bent in her seat, peered up out of
a strip left in the taped-over windshield.

She gazed up into
the sky, and she felt her fingers on the wheel trembling against her will.  She
beheld the black and crimson Archangel, the four-limbed cyclone still tumbling
and burning, a coiled hollow upon the sky.  An endless storm was seething there
deep inside.  Crimson whirlwinds wheeled about in blindness, the limbs of some
titanic and emaciated angel, a burning spirit of all ending enthroned upon the
sky.

“We’re coming,
Lacie,” she whispered.  She arced her right arm out of her unzipped suit, back
behind her, taking Silas’s fingers in her own.

“Damn right,” he
said, and he gripped her fingers tighter.  He was shivering.  “You just drive,
Sophie, ‘til we need the gas can.  I guide the way.  Leave the all else to me. 
Give me your HK there.  Got this laser-sight pistol figured out, best as I can
see.  But that one, you give that back here, if it please?”

And she let his
hand go.  She pulled the submachine gun off the passenger seat, checked the
safety, and passed it back to him.

“Let’s get moving,”
she said.  The H4 tumbled forward over the ruin.  And so they went.  And the
dead and shattered world, it embraced them.

The remnant of Kersey-town,
by highway and trial and horror and endless circuit of wreckage and wasteland,
was less than a month away.  They never returned to the shelter, they never had
any need to.  They had each other.

“Mother of God,”
Silas whispered.  He was looking out again up to the Archangel in the sky.

Sophie rubbed at
her eyes, unbelieving of the canyon’s ruin.  Entire trees had fallen to the
road from high above and burned to ash.  She plowed the H4 through drifts of
blackest flurry.  The windshield wipers purred, three of the four headlights
came on.

“We’re coming,
Lacie love.  Feel me sing this. 
Feel
.  Tell Uncle Mitch we’re coming
soon,” she intoned serenely.

They drove on.

(The saga of Sophie
St.-Germain continues, as she and Silas name themselves as guardian to one
another and traverse the mountains of the burning and revelation in
FROM THE FIRE,
EPISODE V:  GRAY RAIN EXODUS
, also available from Wonderland Imprints.)