From the Fire III (4 page)

She yanked on a black T-shirt, one of
Tom’s old favorites. An angelic hazy silhouette of Lisa Gerrard was
superimposed over the scripted words,
“Afterglow, Eternity ~ Dead Can Dance
~ Reunion Tour ~ 2012.”

“Irony,” she mumbled. She tugged on a
pair of red sweats, and as she stretched her way in, her knee opened up again. She
limped back toward the shower stall. Soon, she would need to change her
bandages. Her endless and disturbing awareness of skinned and healing hands was
beginning to become a nightmare of sensation in itself. She could scarcely
concentrate without her instincts scraping a whisper down her spine,
“Scratch
them, scratch your hands wide open, yes, bleed, it will hurt and it will bleed,
but it will feel so
good,” with such an insistence that it was becoming
impossible to ignore.

She would shower, stitch her knee, clean
her bandages, perform her toilet, and then she would explore. Read. Understand.
No sleep.
There were too many things she needed to do, now that she knew
that intruders were wanting to kill her, now that she knew her daughter was
alive. As she went through the elaborate and painful ritual of pulling down a
parcel from the ceiling racks, sorting out some toothpaste, a bar of soap and a
handful of napkins to use as washcloths, she tried to let the guilt tear its
way through her faltering spirit.

After all,
she
wondered.
Don’t I deserve this?

She tried to cry for Pete again, to
mourn, but this time there were no more tears.
Too tired.
There was so
much that had to be done, so many insignificant actions for one tiny
unflinching spirit in the world.

* * * * *

As the “days” numbly rolled past and
Sophie explored every corner of the shelter, she accomplished many things. She
prioritized the binders and studied as much of Tom’s bewildering reams of
information as she could. She found herself neck-deep in perplexing manifests
on seed recovery, fecal reclamation, ventilation pressure control, anti-depressive
memorization techniques and self-administered emergency abdominal surgery.

How much of it was idiocy, which isolate
piece of trivia would one day save her life?

What she had not done, however was to
turn the radio on ever again. With the beast-people still out there, the world
was a far less deadened thing than she had first allowed herself to believe. She
feared that if she were to listen to that static drone — especially the
takk-takk
ing
static pulse which was particular to Mitch’s private frequency, more damning
and beguiling to her than the very fruits of Tantalus — she would not be able
to resist trying to call Mitch again.
After all, I know how now.
And
whenever the desire to listen in and to wait for her daughter’s protector to be
on the airwaves became almost unbearable, she would chant to herself in a
sing-song, uneasy whisper:

“Caution. Channel not
secure. We are in shelter. Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where? Have car.
Can’t get out. Soph, come in three week. Three weeks, if you can. Love you.
She’s alive.”

After several minutes, minutes taut with
restrained tears and near to rupture, the need to listen for Mitch’s coded
tapping would finally pass.

Channel not secure.

Who else was out there?

She was tempted to listen again to the
frantic survivors she had heard on the NOAA band for Fort Morgan. But as the
days dredged their way around her senses, her needs changed, her focus changed.
She
changed. The reading, the preparation, the suit-ups and gun lessons
and tallies of matches and body bags in the Material Room, the weight lifting,
the stitch-slicing and scab-pulling, all of these rote and mundane tasks became
as one, like gravity-afflicted constellations in-swarming upon themselves as
burning silhouettes to one sole and all-consuming universe, this:

Lacie is out there. Crying
for you. She needs you.

Embracing this silent mantra, she did
not feel as horrifically alone as she thought she might. She did feel the need
to lock the medicine cabinet and to hide the key-ring from herself at the
bottom of the second freezer. But the guns remained in their place, as did the untouched
computer and the crumpled picture of a grinning three-year-old Lacie, replete
with her toothy smears of chocolate pudding.

Sophie drove the demons away by song, by
murmur, by reading everything that she could find.

Throughout all of this time, she slept
on the one bunk that had clearly been meant for her. The farther one, the one
with the unkempt pile of bed sheets and the tangle of pillows which marked
Tom’s last sleepless night alone there, she wanted to touch that, yes. And yet,
she refused herself this final gesture of intimate isolation. When she would
eventually sit on that bed, when she would breathe in his scent from those
pillows and smooth the creases of those sheets away, he would truly be dead
forever and there would be no more specters of his presence for her to wonder
about.

If she slept where he had slept, the
last of him would die.

But at last, the solidity of her renewed
convictions lured her to sit upon that bunk and to smooth Tom’s sleepless struggles
at last away, and in doing so she came face to face with her own dead younger
self’s reflection.

For the secret of Lacie’s hideaway,
after all, had been hidden there down in the crumpled dark beside her all
along.

III-3

ONE CRYSTAL MEMORY

That fated “night,” she did decide that
she would sleep in Tom’s own bunk. Once. She moved the blankets and his
uppermost pillow, intending to straighten them and to curl underneath the
sheets with her face toward the wall, her breath reflecting off the glass
bricks in a phantom intimation of Tom’s own breathing.

As her bandaged fingers slipped under
the pillow, she found a slick and pliant square of material in the cotton
casing. She pulled it out, and was greeted by a slick greenish-white square of
blankness, 3.5 inches wide and 4.25 inches high. Intuitively knowing those
dimensions and struggling to quiet a thrill of recognition, Sophie cried out
and flipped the Polaroid over so she could see the antique image upon its face.

What she found was herself, aged
nineteen with her arms poised over her head, glorying in the impossibly distant
faerie-realm of Yesterday, the torrid summer of 1992. An endearingly skinny and
sharp-elbowed Thomas was grinning behind her with his hands around her waist,
and her arms were lifted behind her to hug the back of his head. Tom’s
then-golden halo of wind-spun hair was tangling in the sunlight through her
fingers, frozen forever in a moment of idle joy.

Sophie laughed and cried as she stared
at this one picture Tom had slept with, the sounds and emotions coming out of
her all at once.

But that
house
. She had
completely forgotten all about it. It was a sun-bleached Victorian mansion of
the Gilded Age, built upon the windblown plains of northeastern Colorado as the
harbinger of a gingerbread-porched suburbia for wealthy ranchers and their romanticized
ideals, dead dreams blossoming over the wake of Colorado’s dying gold rush and
the merciless riot age of the Coal Strikes. But that one house only had been
built, and the other dreamers and all their children and burnished fortunes had
never come. In the thirties at last, the Dust Bowl arose and as far north as
the Rocky Mountains the dreams had all been choked away.

The unlikely wasteland mansion had been
built by a French Canadian industrialist named Conrad Henry Saint-Germain,
passed down through the generations for a single-threaded bloodline of lonely
authors and highly eccentric ladies. Sophie had only been there once, when
Mitch had “forced” his dear annoying brother to introduce his new girlfriend,
Sophie, to the odd spinster great aunt who lived out toward Kersey amongst her
cats in that gingerbread monstrosity.

Jemm. Auntie Jemm.

“Oh my God!”

Sophie dropped the Polaroid and laughed
into her hands. She knew, with an absolute and burning sun of conviction
flaring over her heart in a surge of revelation, where Mitch had built his own survival
shelter.

Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You
know where?

“Oh,
oh
.”

Sophie rocked back and forth, her bare
heels pushing off the metal frame of Tom’s old cot. It was all she could do to
force herself not to throw together a pile of gear, suit up and go out into the
cave and try to start up the H4 and drive headlong out to Kersey.

The memory of that illumined day came
back to her in a rush. How had she ever forgotten it?

Because I spilled hot tea
all down my crotch, and as I shot up screaming with a cat flying off of my
shoulder, silver-maned Auntie Jemm with her sea-green glassy eye and her meshed-over
widow’s peak had bitten down on her knuckle and had cried out, “Oh, sweet
patoo!”

What in the Hell was a ‘sweet patoo’? Sophie
laughed and cried some more.

Oh, I was mortified.

~

Mitch had joked about the
two-hundred-mile road trip and social call for a week before they went up in
his clattery old Volkswagen Type 34 coupe. All the way up I-25 and over
eastbound Highway 34, Mitch had been joking about the anti-comedic potential
inherent in their “Hot Victorian courtship ritual.”

“Oh Hell, Tom-Tom,” Mitch had called,
his black eyebrows going up-and-down Groucho style as he winked at Sophie who
had been hugging her knees in the tiny, spring-squeaky discomfort of that back
seat. “Tea time! Can you believe it? Haven’t had God-damned
tea time
since we were twelve. Hey, you know? This’ll be badass. Maybe sweet ol’ Jemm
will even allow you two to blow
très petite
kisses over your gloves and crumpets
or something. Aw, yeah!”

“Hmm. She was always good to us,” came
Tom’s oblique reply. His forehead was touched against the side window. He had
laced his fingers through Sophie’s own, turning the little silver mood ring he
had bought for her at Celebration! in the Springs. “Been too long.”

And Mitch had said, “
Way
too
long. And her crazy cats raised us a Hell of a lot better than old Uncle Zack’s
backhand did. Tom, am I right?”

Tom’s fist had clenched so quickly that
Sophie had stared at him in alarm.

“Hey, Mitch, I have an idea about
regaling Soph with our family history,” Tom had said. His voice held sun-fire,
plains-wind. Controlled, measured and perfectly on the threshold of an indignant
rage. “How about you tell the story ‘bout that one day, that
one
single
day, when you remembered how to shut the fuck up?”

And as young people do, as Mitch hit the
gas and they sped to ninety miles an hour and passed an Army convoy of ugly new
Hummers (“
Never
going to own one of those damned things,” Tom had
muttered), they had forged a rapid and heady trinity of peace through a single
rude, shared outburst of wind-touched sun-glow and laughter.

Mitch had laughed the longest, ending in
“Sorry. I don’t know. I don’t how to say things, real things. I just miss him. I
miss Zach.” And he had lowered his head, no longer winking at Sophie and
dead-set focused upon the wheel as he arced back out of the passing lane and
coasted down to a leisurely eighty.

The inch-wide gap of the window blew the
wind down through Tom’s hair.

Sophie had stroked the back of Tom’s hand
almost absently, wondering why Mitch had begun to cry.

~

Sophie returned, alone, to her own
present and reality.

Aunt Jemm’s house, northeast
of Kersey out in the wind-sheltered oaks, out in the Nothing. That house,
she
thought,
that has
got
to still be standing.

And Mitch’s Morse transmission thrummed
in her mind:
You know where? Have car. Can’t get out.

Oh, it has to be.

No longer in need of sleep, Sophie rose
and rushed out of the Sanctuary. She pushed her way through the door seal and
made her way to the work table. How could she contain this, this terrible and
glorious secret? Mitch alive, Lacie alive, and
she knew where
. And they
were safe in a secret shelter Mitch had built beneath the house he had
inherited from Auntie Jemm.

Oh, the mansion. Was that, then, the
secret of the fight that had erupted between Mitch and Tom after their father
had died? The golden child, the Harvard graduate bound for work as a government
agent, he had been gifted with the family land in Quebec and even more along
the flanks of Fairburn Mountain. And the black sheep, Mitch,
he
had been
given a dilapidated mansion filled with circus antiques and fractured dreams,
an urn full of Aunt Jemm’s ashes, two hundred miles away from anything ...

She wanted nothing more than to call
Mitch on the Grundig radio right then. She knew that she could not, it was far
too risky. What if any of the survivors within a hundred miles had shortwave
radios for themselves?

Channel not secure.

Anyone else who was still alive out
there would be cunning, equipped, prepared. Even the dying were almost certain
to be in possession of police cars, or armored trucks, or even military
vehicles. Many would have shortwaves, and many more would be bristling with
weapons. If she gave away too many hints about her location in speaking with
Mitch, such people would have no qualms about seeking out her shelter, blowing
their way in, killing her and taking over.

No.

She would need to wait even longer
before she could dare to call Mitch again. He had said to come in several
weeks, but he had surely been guessing about how long it would take the winds
to carry the first maelstrom of burning waste and fallout away. Even if she was
not certain of the days, if she was late, he would wait for her.

Can’t get out. You know
where?

She needed to remain silent awhile
longer, until she had learned all that she could about the shelter, her tools,
her weapons, her suits, the ultra-light crane. Everything would need to go with
her. And if Aunt Jemm’s house was unlivable or Kersey itself had grown too
dangerous, she might even need to drive Mitch and Lacie back to live inside
Tom’s shelter.

Forever.

That, she could not think about.

But she would need to live until then in
secret, perhaps even kill the people who had murdered Pete if they dared to
threaten her again or tried to poison her. For all the rest, the strangers and
the terrible unknowns, she needed to wait for them to live out their own
unthinkable fates.

Give them time to die.

And she could no longer keep her eyes
open.

She left the radio where it was. She
made her way back and slept on Tom’s cot. It was time to say goodbye to him, to
breathe in his scent, to fall asleep staring at the glass-bricked wall
reflecting the gun safe in the Sanctuary’s twilight. It was time for the
nightmare, for visions of her dead spider-skin crawling toward her over the
ceiling.