From the Fire II (3 page)

Not yet.

After long minutes and much wasted water she rose, slowly. She would need to stop all of this frenetic activity very soon, and just sit. Perhaps she would read, learn, begin to understand. After all, she had all the time in the world.

For some reason, the tension, the sheer ridiculous importance of everything she was doing, she shook her head and her fingers tapped against her cheeks. A broken laugh escaped her.

Spider, she’s coming, she’s in the last freezer, spinning, spinning ...

“Stop this,” she said aloud.

I’m going to lose my mind.

She walked back to the pressurized plastic door leading into the deeper rooms. The blue light back there was nebulous, articulate. It was taunting her. Almost, almost she was ready to go back there, to see the bed where Tom had slept when they were fighting; to see the end of her tiny universe.

Something turned her away.

Between the hose and the door seal was a reinforced and refrigerated medicine case. A padlock, of all things, secured the two panels of its Plexiglas covering. The Plexiglas sheets had survived the nuclear blasts and all the seismic shocks, but some of the bottles in on the shelves had shattered and fallen down to the bottom of the case where a rainbow pool of gunk was beginning to solidify into a sickly-looking paste. One bottle was still dripping its contents down into the pool, something amethyst in color, perhaps cough syrup. Worse, the thermometer inside the case had fragmented at the bottom. Liquid mercury stood in quivery beads on a lower shelf.

What medicines had already been lost? Sophie touched the case’s steel frame down by the hose. The case was indeed refrigerated, and cool to the touch. Kneeling there, she wondered if she should clean up the mess at once or rather wait to read the binders, in case there were some types of chemical reactions to worry about, or a cleanup hazard. As she pondered this, she could read the labels on the many intact bottles: penicillin, potassium iodide, Betadine, multivitamins, rubbing alcohol, vomitives, chilled needles, antacid, hypos of some kind, Lidocaine, Loperamide, Glutose paste, Diphenhydramine, Valium, morphine, anesthetics, anti-depressants ...

Her stomach churned. A thrill crept up inside her.

“Ohhh. Oh, yes.”

No.
Her hands were shaking in anticipation.
You can’t. No more.

She thought about throwing away some of the medicines immediately. There was an incinerator in the back, Tom had always been bragging about it. And the waste chute into the deep. But for the immediate future, everything in the shelter was far too precious to destroy.

Even the things that might destroy me.

Stroking the case, touching bloodstained fingers upon the Plexiglas and feeling the coolness there, she realized that she might be looking in at some of the only surviving examples of certain medicines still in existence for hundreds of miles around. Thousands of miles, perhaps. Or perhaps even the only.

She did not know. She could not yet bear to contemplate the world outside.

Everything was precious now. The shelter was the world, the universe had contracted into the galaxy of the great room and the few tunnels and niches radiating from it, a spider-web made of concrete and tinctured steel. She would be this universe’s only explorer. Her reality, not just hers but
all
reality, had become the shelter, there was only ever after the glory of the Cage.

She looked to the Valium again, the vials of anesthetic.

You’re stronger than that. Think of your daughter.

It would be so, so easy. To sleep and to more than sleep, to descend into the netherworld of the self and then deeper into the Black, deep ocean, out and away and nevermore ...

No.

She stood up, too quickly. Her vision turned into black pinpoints as the blood rushed into her head. And as she reeled there, she said, “No. I won’t.” And cried out then, “I won’t!”

She would die, yes. And likely soon. But if it was fated to happen, it would not be a matter of sweets and poisons. She would not die by the needle, nor by her own hand.

All in time. Whether her dead self was stalking her, that was something to be answered when she opened the final door.

II-3

OVERLOAD

She awoke curled up in the pile of clothing that she had dumped from the duffel bag. Her cheek had been resting on her aching hand over a leather motorcycle jacket, and she woke smiling because it smelled of Tom, of sunlight, of memory.

Then reality surged in.

She crawled up, then decided not to risk rising and making her presence known, not just yet. Someone, something might be hunting her. Dreams were still trickling away from her and her hands were very cold.

“There is no one else,” she said. Somehow, saying it out loud made it seem less true.

She looked around. She had no sense of night or day, only the conviction that some hours had passed, and of course there was no clock to go by. Her iPhone — if it even still worked, which it almost certainly did not — was up on the passenger floor in her Hummer up in the cave, far above in a corner of the sky world, the burning world of eld.

Sophie, your dead skin. Do you hear? Spider. She’s right behind you.

She covered her mouth. Someone had been giggling, the sound was still echoing in the silence.

Already it was happening.

Being trapped in the shelter, entirely disconnected from the rhythms of the world and all its annihilated solemnities, it was changing her. She woke without hunger, without thirst. She was not rested, but she did not require sleep. She would need to go to the bathroom soon, and that would mean trapping herself in a tiny corner. But still she resisted this.

It was no longer merely “the Cage” within her mind, or even the universe. It was a primal limitation, a tripling of strictures upon all three dimensions of the very notion of reality. Here was life-in-death, outside was the endless oblivion. And yet it was so tempting, the longing to go out and to breathe her last, to see what remained of the sky, to die at least standing in the endlessness where there might be red roiling clouds, a rain of ashes and flecks of pulverized bone, perhaps a gentle wind to needle the radioactive poisons beneath her skin ...

She rose. This line of reasoning needed to end, now.

She walked to the “southwest” wall, where the work table loomed. She rested her hands against its sheet-metal surface. It creaked ominously in one leg, and several of its bolts complained through grating sounds of the near-shattering impact they had suffered. Two of the brackets on the weak right leg were loose, but it seemed as if the table would hold for awhile longer. She pulled the toppled stool upright, sat down with a groan, and looked to the plated concrete wall set flush with the table’s farther edge.

There were four aluminum panel doors, each about eighteen inches wide, set into the wall and aligned by rolling racks with the table’s surface. Adrift yet in the last lingering of a dream, flush with urgency, Sophie reached across and slid open the leftmost door.

Greenish fluorescent lights flickered on in the alcove behind the door. There was a violet Plexiglas bell jar in there, lined with copper mesh, and a boxy, olive-green military field phone was locked there inside it. She almost laughed. A protected phone, how wonderful. And who would she call?

Looking closer, she could see that there were a series of double-hooked rings on straps along the phone’s back. It was a pack-phone, she realized. Something to carry out when reemerging. Tom had never meant for his family to stay in the shelter for very long.

But the impossible had happened after all.

She thought again of her cell phone, trying to remember what Tom had taught her about nuclear airbursts. It was very little. The subject of war, and thermonuclear war precisely, touched in too near upon his taboo subjects of NORAD, the National Security Agency, the supposed underground city beneath Denver International Airport, terror intelligence, and all the rest. She tried to think if the iPhone had been destroyed when she had thrown it. The faceplate had cracked. She thought she had seen the crystalline display wink out. But wouldn’t the electromagnetic pulse have flashed out its circuits? Would the cave, the Hummer itself, have protected it at all?

It hardly mattered. There would be no more satellites, not ever again. No cell phone towers, either. She instantly regretted these thoughts, coming face to face with her own technical ignorance. She was brilliant, yes; it was not a matter for modesty, she simply was. But she had always been meticulously old-fashioned in her French Canadian and gentile way, daddy’s way. There were things she did not want to know because they were “men’s things.” And she was a scientist, yes, but she was a
social
scientist. Anthropology, sociology, political science. What need had she ever had to understand how an electromagnetic pulse might warp a cell phone’s circuits? The infrastructure of phones, not just phones but the entire modern world, was for lesser individuals than herself to understand. She had higher thoughts.

All of her electronics? They were slaves, they were things. They simply
worked
, however poorly.

And here we have, still, a very nice military-grade field phone. All right.

She pulled out the bell jar on its sliding tray regardless. Lifting the dome on its oiled hinges, she could see that the phone was and reinforced and camouflaged. It was bulky, at least eight pounds, and spray painted with the codes “TA-838A/TT :: iv.1-2013,” whatever that meant. Clicking the thing on and holding the antiquated receiver to mouth and ear, she listened. Of course there was nothing. No dial tone, not even the pulse of a lost line. But the unit was humming as its batteries were spinning themselves to life.

What the Hell can I do with a phone of all things?

But still, this phone was familiar. For some reason. Resting her head with her fingers steepled at the back of her neck, she closed her eyes and tried to remember. Another world, another day long ago.

~

“Nice phone, Tom. So very stylish. Surplus City?”

“Something like that.”

“Ah. So if this world ends, we call the next planet. Hopefully collect. Better rates at night. Right?”

“Hey, you’re really funny! No. See, it’s for … a lesser disaster.”

“A
lesser
disaster? Is this one your ‘military intelligence’ jokes?”

“No, see? Like ... like a fire, or earthquake, or pandemic or something.”

“A pandemic is ‘
lesser’
?”

“Ha. Okay, you’re tired. Slide it back, it’s okay. See, it wouldn’t be any good in a nuclear war, God forbid. You know. I just thought … for Lacie …”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t —”

“Huh? No, it’s fine. Look, let’s just go, okay?”

~

Let’s just go.

And here she was. She clicked the field phone off, lowered the dome and pushed it back onto its tray.

She decided, in that moment as the green fluorescents flickered down and died, not to feel anything. Not unless she truly couldn’t help it.

The second aluminum panel door revealed a compact Intel computer, which she harbored even fewer hopes for than she had the useless phone. The third panel stuck on its hinge, but she levered it open with both hands. She cursed as the gauze of a trailing bandage snagged in the door-joint and bit into her tender fingers. Levering the panel open further, she saw a Grundig radio, an ominous-looking technical beast socketed into a conical faraday cage, replete with a headset and a wooden box full of gadgets.

Wooden? Interesting. Then she remembered. The box had belonged to Tom’s father, he had been a shortwave radio man in Vietnam long ago.

Perhaps the radio would be her answer. But first, she needed to see all of her potential options, her array of four tissue-thin hopes hidden behind the doors, sacred keys with which to reach out to an outer world which was probably already in its death throes.

The thing behind the fourth door, it took her awhile to identify.

What in the world?

It was a telegraph. Mouth open in disbelief, shaking her head at how little she really knew about survival or shelters or any of those things which were never supposed to happen in a world filled with sane human beings, her gaze wandered to the black binders she had stacked upon the floor. Each binder had a separate title card inserted beneath the vinyl spine, with Tom’s characteristic inverse capital-letter formatting in evidence on every single one.

Turning, she slid off the stool, and sat on the floor with all of the vertical-standing binders arrayed in a semicircle before her. There was so much to read, so much to know if she was going to live on and find her daughter. It was overwhelming:

~

(a)NIMAL HUSBANDRY / (l)IVESTOCK SUMMARY / (r)EGIONAL SPECIES.

(a)RCHITECTURE / (r)EINFORCEMENT / (u)NFINISHED EXCAVATION.

(b)UCKLEY / (p)ETERSEN / (a)CADEMY.

(c)ABLING / (p)IPING / (w)IRING / (p)LUMBING.

(c)ARSON / (f)ITZSIMMONS / (p)UEBLO.

(c)LOTHING / (s)EWING / (w)EAVING.

(c)OMMUNICATION / (e)NCRYPTION / (s)TEGANOGRAPHY.

(c)OMPUTER / (d)ATA RESTORATION / (d)EEP INTERNET.

(c)RAFT / (w)OODWORKING / (l)EATHERWORKING / (p)OTTERY / (t)EXTILES.

(d)EFENSE / (o)BFUSCATION / (r)ECON.

(d)ESIGN CHRONOLOGY / (f)UTURE UPGRADES.

(f)ALLBACK / (c)ONTINGENCY.

(f)OOD / (r)EGENERATIVES / (s)EEDS.

(f)UEL / (e)THANOL / (p)UMPJACK.

(f)UNGI / (l)ICHEN / (e)XPERIMENTAL SUSTENANCE.

(f)URNACE / (h)EATERS.

(g)AS MASKS / (l)EAD SHEATHS / (e)NVIRONMENTAL SUITING.

(g)ENERATORS / (f)LYWHEEL / (t)READMILL.

(g)OVERNMENT / (e)NFORCEMENT / (p)OTENTIAL INTERFERENCE.

(g)RAND TETON / (s)HOSHONE / (y)ELLOWSTONE.

(h)OLOCAUST SCENARIO / (i)MPACT EVENT /(n)EMESIS THEORY.

(h)UNTING / (f)ISHING / (g)ATHERING / (h)ERBALSM.

(i)NFRASTRUCTURE / (s)YSTEMS TRIAGE.

(l)IGHTS / (e)LECTRICITY / (g)RID PRIORITIES.

(m)APS / (t)ERRAIN / (h)YDROLOGY.

(m)EDICAL / (d)ETOXIFICATION / (f)AMILY HISTORY.

(n)EWS / (f)ORUMS / (i)NTEL.

(r)ADIATION / (b)IO / (c)HEM.

(r)ADIO / (c)ODE LISTS / (i)DAHO.

(r)ECLAIMERS / (s)UB-TANKS / (g)RATING SCHEMATIC.

(r)EDUNDANCIES / (o)VERLOAD PROTOCOLS.

(s)ALVAGE / (f)ACILITY PROXIMITY.

(s)CENARIOS / (p)AN / (f)IRE / (f)LOOD / (l)OADOUTS.

(s)CHEMATICS.

(s)HELTER (OVERVIEW).

(s)HELTER (PORTABLE).

(s)UPPLIES.

(t)ELEGRAPH / (m)ORSE / (e)LECTROMAGNETIC COILS.

(t)ELEPHONE / (c)ONTACTS / (o)UTREACH (POTENTIAL).

(t)OOLS / (r)ETOOLING.

(v)ENTILATION / (a)IR COMPRESSION / (o)XYTRANS.

(w)ASTE DISPOSAL / (g)LASS / (p)LASTICS / (r)ECYCLING PARAMETERS.

(w)ATER / (f)ILTRATION / (w)ELLSPRING.

And, at the rightmost end of the line of volumes standing upon the floor, the sole red binder:

(w)EAPONRY / (m)ERCY …

~

Tom’s voice arose within her mind, so pure in its reluctance to speak the words, it was as if he was just behind her and whispering into her ear: “God forbid if ever, the mercy.”

So that’s what he always meant.
Sophie sighed.
Killing me, killing our daughter if it was hopeless. I have a lot of reading to do. And nothing I want to, nothing I can bear, nothing I can, I.

Nothing …

And what else, Sophie, if not reading? What else are you going to do?

Again, the horror began to trickle in around the walls that she was still frantically reinforcing in her mind. She felt too much like a beast reduced to slinking on all fours from corner to corner, a fantastical monster reduced to an actuality beyond its own control, a mind-death coiled inside the stone and steel of the ever-constricting Cage.

She stood up and turned away from the semicircle of binders, pacing. She left the work table. She was limping, she realized. Her right hip socket clicked every time she took a step.

The spinning,

the spinning is almost done.

Girder to girder,

she’s crawling upon the ceiling.

If you look up, the feasting.

And only then.

It’s a game, Sophie.

How long

can you keep from looking

at the ceiling, seeing

the spider-skin of yourself

shivering up there and gazing down at you?

How long can you keep from seeing

the smile of the feast?

“I am alone.” She pounded the wall. “Alone!”

Pacing would accomplish nothing. She went back to the binders.