From the Fire II (2 page)

There is someone else in here, someone else in here

Someone

Else

Daddy,
no —

Yes. There was someone else inside the shelter, and it was Sophie. Lost Sophie, dead Sophie. She had walked outside of herself, leaving her body far behind. Of course.

The light. The tunnel.

Honey, Lacie, wait for me!

I’m coming

I’m coming

ingggg

She only needed to open the shower door and see.

She could cross the great room once again, open the shower, and see her own wasted corpse there staring back at her, gaping with a shock-wide mouth of horror and wild black eyes staring with sightless revelation into forever, into the mind of God. If she could just cross this room,
Yes, I understand now, I died and this is Hell, let me see myself so I can
understand —

(Fluorescent lights flickering in their cages, like souls, like the negative-imaged eyes of the blackened and burning Archangel himself, O Death, O clarion)

— The room seemed to elongate like a series of endless nightmares made of door and table and shower stall and spinning light,
And in the shower I am dead, I am dead in there, daddy I’m coming out now don’t look at me I’m sorry I used all the hot water,
and the room stretched further until it was an endless hall of broken aluminum shelves and wrecked work tables and morgue freezers, she needed to open the shower, she needed to see her own corpse dead and screaming there in the corner with the water dripping down its breasts and filling up its mouth, she needed to drink that water and touch her own body’s tongue,
Yes,
she needed to drink and touch that tongue with her own, so that she could be reborn ...

* * * * *

What is happening to me?

She froze in place on her way to the shower.

Stop this,
she thought.
Stop it. There’s no one else in here. No one.
Then:
You’re going insane.

Another step, tilting her head to try to discern if there was a huddled body there behind the still-dripping waters, the dead droplets that were misting down inside the shower. Then, the girl-voice, the Sophie of old was singing within:

Tom, Tommy. Oh, Tom. Lovely Tom. He died for us. He died to save us, Sophie, ready to be killed. Knowing. Knowing with all his heart, that we would go and find her, oh our Lacie, we would find her or die in the trying.

And then, out loud, the voice deciding her fate with the trembling cadence of its own insurmountable conviction:

“No, Sophie. You are not that little girl. This is now.” The child-Sophie sang its fear, and yet did not deny this. “You are going to do this. Think of Lacie.” A deep breath, the clutch of the pallid blanket around her shoulders. “Live for Lacie.”

She hugged the damp blanket tighter around her naked body, and marched across the room to the shower stall before the horror could build its walls inside her any higher.

Her right palm slicked away the fog of the shower door, and there (down inside, where dead Sophie should be) there were only glo-lites and streaks of filth and a bloody fingerprint, and nothing more.

There is no one in there.

And so it became true.

She turned her back on the shower, on everything that threatened to drive her out from the in-spiral prison of her own psyche. She sat cross-legged upon the floor, staring at the great room’s own drain, the pipes down the reclamator wall, over to the four metal tubs whose purpose she still did not understand. Were they to wash irradiated tools and clothing? Or something to do with food? Purification? She fought to chase and comprehend these fleeting bits of rational thought, desperate to force away the horrors that were rising again all around her. She needed to breathe, to see, and to clutch onto the meaningless, the mundane, the real.

It’s April. April fourth. It is two thousand fourteen. I lived in the valley behind Black Hawk. Now I am under Fairburn, Fairburn Mountain.

She crawled forward a little, careful to avoid the elusive glass shrapnel from the shattered light tubes. To the center,
Go to the center of the floor. The center of your world, the new world where you shall be reborn.

There.

Become. See.

The drain of the great room, a real thing. She could see bits of feces clogging its grill, a shred of teal silk with a little button attached. One of her shoes that had been blown off in the explosion was sitting next to the drain, with little streaks of mud and vomit on its heel. A garden hose was attached to a wall socket by the work table, and it was dripping. Someone —
It was me, there is only me
— had sprayed the floor down. Sophie’s drenched and stinking clothes were piled on top of a paint can near the shower door.

Focus.

She needed to find her daughter, to know whether Mitch and Lacie had survived. Who in Black Hawk would be able to help her? Or perhaps there would be Jolynn, in Centennial? Surely there would be someone.

No. Jolynn is dead. Mother is dead. Tom, Tom is ...

A new revelation came to her, as she wrapped the blanket closer around her and felt the tickling water droplets falling from her hair onto the floor. It did not matter yet if Lacie was alive, that was a thing for tomorrow. For the moment, the now, even if Lacie was dead —
And she is, she must be, how can she
not
be, no don’t think it or you’ll make it real, don’t
— Sophie needed to pretend, to
insist
that Lacie was still alive. Or else, alone forever, there truly would be nothing. No reason to live at all.

I love her with all my heart. Therefore, she is alive. Because she must be.

With that resolved, she needed to take care of herself. The shelter would become the entirety of cosmos and so her home, the only home.
Womb.
A child, she needed to learn everything all over again. She needed to relearn how to survive in a world of immolation, a world that had followed its own principles to destruction.

And how?

The doubts welled up as quickly as she dismissed them. A cold, utterly practical side of her asked a simple question:
Sophie, slow down. Think about this again. Can you kill yourself?

No.
The girl-Sophie sang again, a cadence of wistful sadness.

And why not?

For Lacie. We said so.

And if she is dead? What is there in this burning world that is left for us, if Lacie is not alive?

But she is.

Is she?

You said so.

“I did. I did.”

The cold slice, the ice-white reflection of her own promise for survival, the dead self left in the shower stall just out of sight, had no reply.

Not yet.
The dead Sophie skin would walk, it would hunt her into nightmare. It would wait for her, for sleep and dreams.

She stared at the goose-bumps upon her forearms, the strangely indented veins where her adrenaline-shocked muscles had given her the strength to lift four hundred pounds of metal and boxes off her body. Her torn muscles pulsed with weary, faltering surges in time with her every heartbeat.

Need water.

Sophie crossed to the hose socket, thought of drinking the water there. Surely it was connected to the same water tanks as the shower was. But the head of the hose was resting on a piece of blouse-silk by the drain, and the filth she had washed from herself was still swirling there.

She turned the hose off and looked around.

She was shivering, the air conditioning and venting were fighting with the incredible heat that had coiled inside the shelter, and the cold was beginning to win. She believed that this was good.

She smeared the back of her hand across her face. At some point, she had stopped crying. Another breath, this one steady and at peace.

And that was all. Life would no longer be a series of inconveniences and annoyances interspersed with brief intervals of joy; life had constricted into a dual-dimensional existence, only the moment, rigid lines of sense and the senses’ disintegration. Each moment, every breath would die and the next born from its ashes, each cascading after and filling the previous dying, a pointless and tiny miracle of persistent vitality. The one moment and its death, convergent unity. The next, the next. Without the sun, without hope, tomorrow became so infinitely far away that it did not exist.

The future was nothing, an infinite chain of fractured revelations, each mote of time larger than the one before, knowing the implications of itself but nothing more.

II-2

SELECTIONS OF SUICIDE

As Sophie’s body slowly began to heal, she busied herself with simplistic things, crafting ornate weaves of complexity from the most clear-cut of actions. She found the standard-metric wrench that had fallen to the floor, calibrated its hook jaw to precisely half an inch and then two centimeters and back again. She not only pulled out many of the binders from the wreckage of the shelves, she stood them on end upon the floor and then she alphabetized them. She took up the rediscovered flashlight, scuffed off the piece of plastic that had splintered off from its broken tail cap, and strung it upon a hook that was bolted into the wall. The wrist strap had broken during the blasts, and the flashlight must have flown from her wrist and rolled off across the floor. Blessedly, it was still on, and therefore operational. She clicked it off to save the precious batteries.

The dark. The dark is coming.

“Sophie. Don’t think about that.” She shook her head, as if to clear it from the unsettling shadows which were layering her thoughts with other people’s voices once again.

There was a challenge as she struggled to remember which order she had done things in, which things still required a ritual of initiation and which were fated to be redone a second time. She knew that if she did not keep moving nonstop until she collapsed, in perfect order of destined motion, she would stop everything — stop thinking, stop hoping, stop breathing and that would be the end of her.

The work table, there’s panels behind it,
she thought.
You know this. You need to get on the radio. The phone. The computer. Something. Mitch, the others, you need to reach out and to learn what is left of the world, you —

“No. Not yet.”

This is vital!

“I can’t face that yet. Not all of it at once. Not now.”

No reason to talk, you know. You don’t even need your own name any longer. Be nothing, be no one.

As she warred with herself she kept cleaning, straightening, measuring.

As her actions threatened to flow from exacting precision into obsession, she cleaned up the shattered light fixture with a broom and utility scoop she had discovered beneath the table. She did not yet trust herself to attempt a righting of the collapsed utility shelves, but she did pull a pair of bolt cutters out from the wreckage. With sudden resolve, she paced toward the center of the room.

Dropping her soaking blanket for balance, standing nude, she pushed the wet linen under the dangling light fixture and cinched the lights’ frayed cable between the chrome-vanadium pincers of the cutters. Closing her eyes, she powered the quick-snap on the battery-powered cutters and almost cried out in surprise when the cable cut loose on the first try. The light cage thumped down onto the floor and rolled off the blanket with a clang. The bulbs remained unfractured, glass-embraced spider threads of enmeshed argon and phosphor. Sophie pushed the light cage away with her foot, toward the hose socket, where it would be out of the way.

There was still much to learn about the great room, a tiny labyrinth made of choice. A bank of freezers stood between the shower stall and the one still-upright bank of shelves, and a medicine cabinet was bolted near to the transparent seal which led into the deeper rooms behind her.

She steeled herself, turning and taking a step toward the seal. She fully intended to press her way through into the pressurized chamber just beyond —

(Someone else is in here, spider, don’t turn your back on the shower ever, no don’t go, crawling, crawling on the ceiling, don’t you dare go in there)

— But she could not yet will herself to go into the back and see the utmost edge of her tiny world. What would she do? If she were to go back there and stare at another newfound wall; if the claustrophobic panic that was already gnawing at her fraying self-control was unleashed back there, blossoming out of her like a bloody flower from the flesh, forcing her to confront the horrid truth of just how limited her existence had become?

While the pressure seal was still untouched, the back of the shelter was a place of hope, a horizon of possibility. But once she went in and saw just how small it was, that would be the edge of the world, perhaps the edge of the entire world forever.

The world in spiral,

ever circling in.

In on itself, forever,

ever tighter, spider-web,

crawling,

who is huntress who the hunted,

I and I,

feeding from myself I’m in,

I’m in

the Cage.

“Stop it.”

She laid the bolt cutters down and smoothed the blonde hairs rising upon her forearms. Returning to the wall farthest from the entryway — the north wall, perhaps, if the concept of “north” meant anything at all any longer — she moved away a plastic tarp that was pinned up against the concrete there. Behind it, baling hooks of some kind were hung in a rack, like pool cues. She pulled one out. It was surprisingly light, flexible and plastic. She pressed a button and a little levered hook popped out of the farther end with a
click
. She turned the baling hook to hold it by its molded foam grip, and in doing so discovered a label on the chromium tube:
Macy’s.

It was a retail garment hook, a tool of the ended world.

And then she remembered what it was for. Tom had showed her this, several years ago. She looked up, saw the stuffed duffel bags racked up against the ceiling in their swathes of heavy nylon mesh. Lifting the hook, gasping in pain, she maneuvered one of the bags by hooking one of its rugged handles. She pulled it down and it fell in front of her with an unceremonious
whumph
. The dust in the air whirled, adrift in the unpleasant and intermingled odors of laundry detergent and mothballs. Slotting the hook back into its rack, Sophie hefted the bag by its end-handle and spilled its contents onto the floor.

She recognized some of the clothes. Tom had brought hundreds of sweats and shirts back from a trip to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. At the time, she had chided him: “Recruiting an army, love? They’re not going to be very fashionable now, are they?” And his answer with that sly and boyish grin, “Ha. An army, instead of me? Hopefully you won’t need one.”

Jeans, flannels, T-shirts, hoodies, underwear. And some of Tom’s old favorites as well, things she had told him to get out of the house. Out!

She smiled, a slight quirk of the lips, and the tears were near again. He had followed the letter of her law, if not the spirit. Out of the house, and here all they were. She could not bear to go through Tom’s old clothes yet, looking at the bundled flannels and leather jackets and black jeans with the holes in the cuff or knee. They would only remind her of him.

Ignoring the burning of exhausted muscles deep in her back and shoulders, she sifted through the unisex clothes and pulled out boxers, bundled tube socks, over-large sweats and a baggy green hooded shirt that read “GO ARLINGTON! ~ Barcroft Fitness ~ Amateur Indoor Soccer League.”

“Oh, Tom.” Another half-formed smile.

Closing her eyes, going by feel alone and forcing herself into the tedium of slow motions and measured breaths, Sophie dressed herself. A precarious scab on her index finger fell off as she pushed her right hand up through the sleeve, and a bead of deep crimson blood streaked down the cusp-line of her fingernail. Bringing the finger up to her lips to lick off the blood, she stopped short as she happened to gaze down into the palm of her hand. Her entire hand was pink and finely pulped with the texture of raw meat, and blisters were rising where the heel of her hand had surged against the concrete floor, back when she had awakened from the nuclear blast and shoved the shelves off of her body.

The pain there was new and terrible, born only as she beheld it.

Wincing, she opened her other palm. The same. Her hands were crisscrossed with trembling gashes, pruned pink where the shower-water had been running in. Bubbles of flesh were turning white where the moisture of her body was rising up in fragile beads beneath the skin. Surprisingly, there was very little blood.

Crossing back over to the wire wall-rack mounted to the left of the shower stall, she found a roll of gauze bandage. Safety scissors, tape. Antiseptic. A gray towel. Her hands knew just where to go.

(
He arranged this, Sophie,
her mind was whirring, purling,
he arranged this all exactly the way you keep your bathroom cabinet at home, all but the mirror that you hate, all perfectly set out, he knew you so well he loved you so much, he took you in here and you laughed at him, you, you
...)

She wrapped and taped her skinned hands, one after the other. As she finished dressing, the panic threatened to overwhelm her. She hummed it away off-tune, as she always did.

Live for Lacie.
So much more needed to be done.
Keep control.
She looked around.

The wall to her right, past the shower stall, had four huge freezers lined up against it side by side. She brushed up against one, it was warm, the metal still radiating the incredible heat of the nuclear blasts outside. Stone dust sifted down onto Sophie’s left forearm as she leaned over the first freezer. She looked up past a bank of wall sockets, and saw that one of the largest wall cracks was there, in the seam between two concrete slabs. Each slab was stenciled, “/// WATER TANK /// ACCESS PANEL ///.” The crack ran up through the entire length of concrete and up into the ceiling, and so on higher, ever higher, into the mountain.

Don’t think about how deep you are.

Little anthill-sized piles of black granite had already fallen onto the top of the freezer’s surface. She looked behind the second freezer, and found that neither was plugged in. There were two more wall sockets back behind there and a utility jack, and coils of heavy cording. Freezers three and four, both unplugged. Perhaps the freezers drew too much power to be plugged in all the time? Would plugging them all in short something out? She would need to read the binders before she dared decide on this. Tiny actions could have devastating consequences.

A darker thought crossed her mind.  The freezers were each deep and broad enough to hold a wrapped body, perhaps even two.

Perhaps she
was
a ghost after all, and her dead body wasn’t coiled upon the floor back there in the shower, nor crawling up to the ceiling. No. It was in here, daddy had stuffed her dead skin down in here to spin its web, and it was waiting for her here. Down, deep down in the cold. For using all the hot water, yes. The last punishment at last, and now to see herself. To feed, to be fed upon. Of course.

She began to open the first freezer. She wondered if she could hear dead legs skittering up inside.

“Don’t,” she said aloud.

Don’t scare yourself like that. Don’t listen.

Too late. She opened the freezer.

There was no dead body. No refrigeration, no ice, no mist. The dead air in there was warm. The freezer was filled to the brim with dry and packaged foods. There were huge stacks of canned spinach. She thought she remembered hearing that spinach absorbed radiation, and would pass it out through the body, but that might have been merely some foolishness she had witnessed on TV. There were military surplus MREs, bags of rice, sacks of corn starch and row upon row of canned dehydrated food.

She could see then that the freezers were actually designed to be set
inside
the wall, to help with cooling. The door-mounting section was only half of the freezer’s length. Back there in the dark were wicker-and-canvas bins, piled high with food heaters, Bunsen burners, matches, some odd variety of translucent tubing and many other things. But there was no microwave in the shelter that she had found. She knew, however, there was at least one lodged between the girders up above, the spare microwave from their old cabin in Estes Park. When she was stronger, healed, perhaps she would find it and pull it down.

She left the other freezers as they were. Moving on down the wall back toward the vault’s entryway, she noticed another tarp set on shower curtain rings against the wall. She lifted it and draped its length over the fourth freezer. The tarp revealed a narrow corridor, filled from floor to ceiling with five-gallon water cooler bottles. There was no water cooler that she could remember. She tried to recall whether she had argued with Tom about this “extravagance.”

For so long, I’ve been a fool.

Flexing her bandaged hands, she lifted a water bottle out of the utility rack. She faltered under the weight. It was easily forty pounds, if not more. The massive plastic bottle bounced off the nearest freezer and rolled onto the floor, sloshing all the while. Maneuvering herself to sit on the floor with her legs to either side of it, she gingerly pulled off its plastic seal. Where were the cups? The glasses? No matter. Tilting the bottle carefully toward her chest, she managed to slosh some warm water into her cupped hand. The gauze bandage turned pink as the congealing blood of her skinned palm welled up. She drank, tasted pure water and her own blood.

She sat there for awhile, picking bits of glass out of her left knee. She could not remember how that had happened. She would have to be more careful. The consequences of a deeper cut, of an infection or something even worse, were things she could not bring herself to brood over.