From the Fire V (2 page)

Such was not, Sophie and Silas had decided, to be imagined.

Never, never go that way.

And so, she and Silas had made their own tentative plan to divert
around the cities as much as they could, favoring the paved roads which passed
through forest instead of canyons, particularly those routes protected by
shielding slopes.  The key was the Peak to Peak Historic Byway, Colorado
Highway 119.

The best way, Silas had believed, might be 119 on toward the
lakeside timber-town of Nederland, then 72 past the sandstone Flatirons of
Boulder, or what was left of them.  Perhaps then 72 to Lyons, or 85 toward
Greeley?  There was no way to know how many missiles had fallen, which cities
had been pulverized and which were hollowed shells, irradiated tombs.  He and
Sophie hoped — prayed — that whatever course they were forced to choose, the
eastern Rockies would shield them from the majority of the radiation; that the
fallout would drift overhead and into the utter east, intangible and distant
lures into oblivion, sent away toward the Atlantic upon the prevailing wind.

But what if the plumes of radioactive dust had already rained down
weeks ago, and had solidified over the wasteland?  What if the rain was
stirring the poison and lacing the air with death? 
The air we’re breathing
now?

The vents could not be sealed.

It was all too immense to comprehend.  She looked back into the
rearview mirror, searching for Silas’ eyes
.  How are we going to do this,
Silas?  How?
  He had fallen asleep, his eyes softly closed, his face
composed in solemn purity as if he were listening, listening in the darkness to
the sudden absence of Eternity.

* * * * *

Lost.

But black luck was with them, a curse of conflicting chance and
fortune.  The slopes of Fairburn Mountain had not collapsed, not entirely. 
Half of the mountain had weathered the horrific blasts, had channeled the fires
and devastation northwest-ward toward Rollinsville.

In finding the way, Sophie had to loop farther south than she
intended, toward the ruins of Black Hawk once again.  The world had been
reforged, unmade, almost sculpted in repurposed potter’s clay yet left without
the veracity of a recognizable second form.  Below the mountain and off the
warped and few paved roads, smudges of desolation were interspersed between
almost pristine islands of withered wilderness.  It was as if a titan had
squeezed the bones of the earth, strangling them in both hands, crushing almost
all to dust.  But lovely and untouched slivers of the Not So Long Ago, the
Once-World, had squelched up between the titan’s knuckles, had been dropped in
random mounds of soil newly turned.

Blindly, four-wheeling through shattered timberland and spinning
out over “roads” which Sophie had never seen, the H4 struggled on.  It was
swallowed by the wasteland.

When Silas once more awoke, dehydrated and terrified and begging
for his Jenny, there was panic, even an argument.  No, there was no way to
reach 119 if 119 refused to be rediscovered.  Even such basic concepts as
“north” and “mile” began to lose their meanings.  Wherever the mud wave-roads
carried them, they had to keep moving.  To stop for too long would be certain
death.  And to idle out in the open?  Or to kill the engine, to crowbar open
the damaged hood and look for leaks?  For both of them to sleep?  Such things
were unthinkable.

God, how are we going to refuel?
 
Sophie drove a little faster, discerning the remnant of the road by assessing
the depth of two tiered swathes of ash. 
How are we going to endure this? 
Impossible.  We’re going to die out here, never knowing how close we were, how
far.

Oh, Lacie.

I am so sorry.

But she kept her foot on the pedal, she steered.  Machine actions,
tap the gas, move the wheel, became instruments of faith.  Refusing to see all,
she kept her eyes wide open, peering out through the gaps in the lead curtains
and gazing out over the murky rind of Hell.

Silas kept two of Tom’s guns at the ready, a .380 Luger
Lightweight Compact Pistol and the Galil ARM 7.62mm assault rifle.  Sophie did
not believe he could really fight if she needed him, but he was there, the
grizzled marksman, sometimes even propped up on one elbow despite delirium and
pain.

He did not speak for the longest time.  The one thing worse than
Silas’s hoarse cries, Sophie realized, was this absolute and hopeless silence.

* * * * *

More black rain.

In searching for 119, chasing the ghost-lit echoes of an
immeasurable and wavering twilight outside of time, Sophie was forced to drive
through old dozer-cleared tracks spidering off the length of something that at
least possessed something like a name:  National Forest Service Road NFSR-857. 
She forced the Hummer to climb through piles of acrid and cracking mud, around
the tangled burn-knots of uprooted pines.  Many of the trees had not been
burned, there on that side of the mountain’s hollow.  But all had been blasted
down and shattered, pointing in the same direction. 
A compass of deceit.
 
The “roads” she toiled over in those first hours of the outside were little
more than trenches in the dirt, runnels formed by the absence of tree-fall,
with bulwarks of hardened and dynamited sludge to either side.

She goaded the vehicle, and while he was lucid, Silas tried to
improvise a box-brace for his Luger pistol.  The rain cleared most of itself
away again and congealed into oiled mist.  Sometimes, burst carcasses of dead
animals were revealed.

Neither of them saw a living thing.

V-2

THE WORLD
OF DOLLS AND BLACKENED GLASS

After countless hours, they found themselves driving near to the
crater of a vaporized lake, a hollow of once-water surrounded by hills of
clay.  Under the clay and deep, there were chasms gashed out from the
underworld, razor scarps shot through with jet black glass, bearded by stumps
of incinerated pines.  Pale dead fish were scattered around the crater like
silvery confetti.

Silas thought it might have been Dory Lake.  Sophie could not say.

If it was, they had somehow driven over newfound hills and gotten
slightly
east
of 119, never realizing they had crossed on over it. 
How?
 
Had the sets of guardrails been buried in the ash, with new “roads” of baked
mud and sludge cross-hatched over the old by wind and rain?  Was that
possible?  If it was, then she would need to find —
What was the name of
that street, where the Carsons used to live?
— she would need to find Dory
Lakes Drive, yes, that was it, and get pointed … to where?  In what direction?

Downhill.
  There never would
be again a verifiable west, an east.  There was up, and there was down. 
Around
the lake, around the gash of the underworld and down from here.

She remembered a line, a fracture, from Tom’s favorite and endless
poem, the
Paradise
of Milton:

~

Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.

~

Indeed.

Find it, Sophie.

And yes, there were fractured skeletons of houses looming up out
of the yellow dark, demolished playthings of the titan, toys in their splintered
hollows.  By the skew of the molten windows and boiled paint, here and there,
some of the imploded mansions seemed almost familiar.

Driving out over concrete circles, over sidewalks which sometimes
peeked out from the ash-clay in streaks of meaning, Sophie discovered the great
hill where her peers’ and doctors’ mansions had once been.  “Carson Country” as
Tom had called it, a gated wreath of luxuries once home to dinner parties and
fundraisers for the Girl Scouts, had fallen prey to Nihil.

And there is nothing, evermore.

But there was.  Where the mansions had once been whole, there were
blown-apart giant flowers of pipe and timber.  Along the lower scarp of Dory
Hill, there at the edge of sight, shone little cascades of pink and parti-colored
shapes sticking out of the woodpiles.  Rotting bodies, shards of bathtub,
shattered armoires and wardrobes which had spilled out their gouts of clothes.

For some reason, down the slope, the bodies had tumbled down the
hill, the farthest of anything.  Some of the dead were lain in the misted rain
like pallid angels.  Why had they fallen the farthest?  Perhaps some of those
lost souls, refusing in the end the ludicrous sanctuary offered up by basements
or garages, had even begun to leave, to run away.

There in the down-distance, a hand, a face.  Staring up at Sophie,
inkblot eyes.  Old.  It was certainly someone’s grandmother.

You down there. 
Sophie
found herself questioning the silence.
  Did I barely know you?  Did Lacie
ever have a sleepover with your grandchild?

And there, a young black man without arms.
  You, did we ever walk
through the casinos, did I ever walk past you?

Sophie stared down the hill to where the mist cut the rest of the
pallid shapes’ identities away, her foot poised over the brake as the H4
coasted along over a street, a concrete path of the Once-World which was miraculously
almost clear.

Behind her, Silas was groaning.  She realized that his teeth were
chattering.

Downhill.  There was even a bent stop sign still standing.  The
way through the ash was open enough on that windswept bottom end of Dory Lakes
Drive, that she could steer with only one hand.

More torn and desiccated bodies, some of them had first names.  After
awhile, Sophie gently bit her other hand to keep from screaming.

* * * * *

But the hill-tomb of Dory held wisdom, a key.  For beneath the
mud-furrowed mouth of Dory Lakes, there was what was left of 119.

Thank you.  Oh ...

Sophie let out a ragged breath.  She felt a compulsion as she
drove past the last of the mansions’ pavement circles, to change Silas’
bandages, his diaper, to clean him before they would go on.  Once she was on
the relatively smooth undulating stretch of 119, she did not want to stop unless
absolutely necessary.  She put the H4 in park, crawled into the back seat.  She
explained what she was doing to him and when he began to disagree, she said
very clearly that he had no choice.

“You can shoot me if you must, Silas.  But I am going to clean you. 
You are not going to wallow in your own filth and waste away.  Remember our
shower?  No?  I’ve seen it all before.  You are going to stay with me, and your
dignity as well.  You are going to remain a man.  Now
hush
.”

He had cursed her softly, through tears and with no small amount
of affection in his voice.

He was dying.  They both knew, and his last days of agony, laced
away by the morphine, would not be many.  But his eyes were still twinkling
bright and true, and he could move his arms.  He could even sit up, roll over,
test a weapon, if Mrs. S.-G. would only let him.

Mrs. S.-G. flatly refused.

When he demanded to know why, insisting that he could serve as
sentry better if he was buckled upright in his seat, she explained in clinical
terms the condition of his back, the fabric and garbage bag plastic embedded
beneath his skin, the burns and blisters around his genitals.  She said at
best, he would need to lie still for at least an hour (And what was an hour any
longer, after all?) so that his new pliant bandages could firm and settle, so
that the fluids and sanies and the blood all trickling out of him could
crystallize and form a resin to line the bandages, so that her work could set
him a little more solidly (
Like a husk,
she thought,
like an insect husk,
like the chemical sludge of a molting butterfly inside a cocoon, Christ, stop
it Sophie
), or else he could start bleeding uncontrollably.  And there he
would die.

After that, he no longer questioned her.

* * * * *

Between cleanings of the guns, vigils elbowed up “on watch,”
prayers and mumbled scraps of song, Silas tried his best to sleep.  While he
did so, Sophie left the engine running.  In one of Tom’s barely-used
composition books she scribbled out the beginning of their journey, sparse shadows
of directions.  At first, her account was little more than terse descriptions
of estimated elevation, identities of landmarks (Was a boulder in the road a
landmark?  A melted truck?), lefts and rights taken, hazards avoided and clear
ways found.

She told herself that she could make her way back to the shelter
if she had to.  But in striving to remember every detail, Sophie soon realized
that returning to the shelter would be impossible.

And so we go on ahead,
she
thought. 
Goodbye.  Get on 119, you’re just avoiding it now because you
don’t want to see.  But what if we need more food, what if something runs out,
something you forgot?  And what of fuel?

They had not yet passed enough wrecked vehicles for her to feel
confident that she could siphon gas if she had to.  She had the barrels, the
plastic containers, but there was no simple answer to the need.  And the H4 was
a gas guzzler, especially in the mountains and in four-wheel.  She would need
to stop the car, probably even stop the engine, hoist a fuel can out of the
back or worse, a barrel off the roof.  She would need to funnel gas in at least
twice on the way to Kersey.

God, two hundred miles at best.  At best!

Could she lift a barrel on her own, without the winch?  Could she
move Silas without hurting him?  Could she risk digging through the supplies
from the back hatch, while Silas could not watch over her and anyone might be
watching?

Siphoning might well be easier.

She looked down at her notebook, the last word underlined: 
“Fuel???”

That is when the shape of her writing began undulate.  That is
when the logistic-notes began to turn away from landmarks and coordinates,
threads through the Apocalyptic maze, and to re-weave themselves into a diary
of travel.

Exodus,
she named this.

Silas moved very little.  He groaned, he checked his guns and
their safeties, he even drank a little water by turning his head toward the
clever taped straw and bottle which Sophie had made for him.  But he had
nothing else to say.

I shouldn’t have told him, the way his body really is.

And this, remembered from long ago: 
Sophie, do I look like a
monster?

She did not write for much longer.  Long minutes had already
passed.  The wind and rain were pushing filth into streams, revealing the last
of the Dory way down to 119.  And Silas was breathing more easily, and quieting.

A rise in the wind was mistaken — for one panicked moment — as the
sound of a car’s engine, and Silas was listening too.

What
was
that?

Silas had his pistol braced, his trembling fingers were on the
latch to the power window.  His eyes were wide.

A distant rumbling, nearer and above, behind.  It was an engine
after all.

Driving, some car shielded from the EMP, still running.  Someone
up behind us,
Sophie realized. 
Someone
from up on Dory Lake.

That was when Sophie closed her notebook.  It was time to drive
onto 119, to finally get moving.

Whoever you are, I’m sorry.  I am no one’s angel.  No one but
Lacie’s.

They turned out onto the highway, defined by the remains of
guardrail beneath the piled gravel.  The rain spat itself dry, the wind carried
on and on.  Strange little whirlwinds, like dust devils, spread out in
pirouetting silhouettes through the stark wash of the headlights.  These
whirlwinds were filled with scorched clothing, paper and shredded cardboard
boxes, testaments to abruptly ended lives swirling over the road, scattering
through the ditches and out to ruin.

A doll without a leg went tumbling across the highway, head over
belly, head over belly over and over again.

Follow me,
it sang in Sophie’s
mind, borrowing the elder voice of a tortured girl.

Patrice?

Follow me.