From the Fire IV (3 page)

She touched his hand, a brief interlacing of fingers.  “I can’t
talk about that anymore.”

He seemed to understand.

“Well, let’s talk about something else, then.  Painful is fine,
I’m losin’ …”  He did not manage to finish his sentence, and then he looked
confused.  He focused on her, as if he believed she had asked a question he had
not heard.

“What do you want to talk about?” she asked.

“Hmm?”  His eyes rolled.  Soon, she would need to let him sleep.

And what of tonight, Sophie?  What if he dies?  Will you go mad at
last, if after all of his suffering, this miracle of his arrival, you find him
dead there lying beside you?  What if you wake alone?

“We’ll talk about whatever you like.  Not the bodies, or the
shaft,” she said.  “Don’t tell me any of that.”  That seemed to bring him
back.  He blinked, trying to focus on the unlit bank of lights above the
honeycombed slopes of concrete.

“No?”

“No. Tell me about anything else, my Hummer.  Your car.  Your way
up here.  Tell me
something
.  Please?  I have no idea what’s out there.”

“Oh?”  In the wave of his delirium, the returning, he almost
rolled upon his side.  She held him down, firmly but gently.  “Yeah.  Want to
tell you my story,” he said.  “Need to.  Not ready yet.”

And if you die tonight, Silas?  If you die?
  Without meaning to she suddenly remembered Chris, the terrified
boy-soldier in Fort Morgan, the evil she had committed in giving him a false
absolution without faith.

That boy-voice, professional and terrified.  A soldier dying out
in the world, locked and lost in one of the last fortresses of Man.

Will you hear my confession?

She shivered.  As if linked, Silas touched upon this and he
shivered as well.  He clutched his blankets closer.

“Who knows?” he asked her then.

“Sorry?”

“Who else knows about this place?”

“Oh.”  She searched her memory.  It seemed strange, to ponder the
existence of other souls in a world so long alone.  “There were … I don’t
know.  Tom used a lot of labor to create the shelter.  Quiet handshake deals. 
But mostly, he kept that, ah.  He kept that from me.  There was Mitch, and
Pete’s son, and Jake and Tomas and Paulo, and ...”

“Your husband built all this, though?”

“He did.”

And Silas sighed.  “What a glory of a man.  Oh, he love you.”

Unexpected.  Sophie held back her tears.

“What can you tell me about the ravine?” she asked.  She coughed,
her voice was thickening.  Soon, she would not be able to speak out without
crying.

And then I won’t be able to stop.

“You really?  You really want to know.”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s hard to say.  To explain.  All the rubble?  There’s
...”

She waited a moment, another.  “There’s what, Silas?”

Silas was snoring gently.

All right.  The night, alone.  Perhaps I can do this once again.

She rose, turned away from Silas.  The reflected light from the
tunnel would be enough to show her the way.  She could crawl into her own cot,
should she choose to.  She could sleep there and watch over him.  She hugged
herself, tapped her elbows with her fingers.  A strange gesture which Tom
always called “The Fidget.”

Her hands fell to her sides in indecision.

Can’t sleep.

Should she read, study the binders, prepare maps for the journey
to Kersey, Colorado?  Should she stay there with Silas, awake beside him?

Oh Silas, please don’t die.

Then his voice, frail and high like a child’s, rose up over her
shoulder.

“Sophie?”

“Yes?”

“Do I look like a monster?”

She was angry, at first.  Outraged that he could dishonor himself
with such a fear.  Such a
name
.  What did his appearance matter?

But these were foolish feelings, the emotions of the exhausted.  She
gathered herself and sighed.  She kept the sound as quiet as she could.

“No, Silas,” she said at last.  “You … you look like an angel.”

“Sophie?”

“Yes.”

“Why did this happen?”

The unanswerable.

You know, Silas, I study the binders every day.  Printouts, even
printouts of Eyes Only things.  Tom had so many thoughts scrawled down in the
margins.  The Chinese, I think now.  I don’t know, I don’t want to hate.  I
don’t think that we will ever know.  I think … I believe … that
we
may have started it. Americans, ourselves.  Or some spy was
caught with nuclear contraband, or something happened on the border of China and
Mongolia or where, I don’t know, where the Kazakhstanian cities were being
evacuated.  There were reports and redactions, theories.  Fear-mongering. 
Something terrible, is all.  It’s all nothing.  Nothing matters now.

“You need sleep, Silas,” she whispered.  “Tell me everything tomorrow.”

He did not answer for several seconds.  Sophie looked over her
shoulder, terrified, trying to discern the rising and falling of his chest. 
She could not see him.

Then he murmured, “Jenny, that sound so fine.  But did you?”

She waited.

“Did you ask?” Silas went on.  “Ben, if he was coming?  That boy. 
Sweet as rain, nothing his fault.  Nothing.  Boy, he needs his daddy.”

Sophie was almost going to ask,
Who is Ben, Silas?
  But
Silas had already drifted off into the reluctant and inescapable gravity of
sleep.

And perhaps, for a time, the man christened Silas Colson would struggle
on in fitful and jesting heroism.  Perhaps for awhile yet, he would live.

IV-3

THE FIRST
STORY OF SILAS

(
Explanatory note:
  As researcher and historian, it is
imperative that I intercede at this point in my attempted narrative restoration
to clarify that Sophia St.-Germain used a digital recorder to imprint the voice
of Silas, and that in later days or years she printed his words verbatim before
the device itself ceased to remain operational.  As such, the testament of
Silas hereafter is an exceedingly rare primary document of the White Fire and
its horrifying after-effects.

The actual recording itself — wherever the electronic device may
be dead and buried now — is surely demagnetized and lost unto the ages.  Yet,
the words of Silas himself remain.  In all of Sophie’s diary, with its faltering
and claustrophobic shorthand toward the end, its crowded margins and thrice-layered
pages of cramped and flowing remembrances laced in with corrections, the long
stories of Silas stand as the only two unaltered entries.

She wrote these stories once, in his words, and never touched them
again.

As Sophie clearly believed this survival of the
voice
of Silas to be of vital importance, as if a spirit, I
have retained his testament here in full as it was originally preserved.  Any
inferences of events to be guessed at from the context must be an exercise to
be made solely by the reader.  I, myself, shall not corrupt the holy record.

— Alexandria S.G.-C. / 2319)

~

“How I got here?  Well, Mrs. S-G.  See, now that’s a funny thing.

“I was working in my wood shop, what the grand-kits called ‘Adventureland’
… and what Jenny call, ‘That Husbandly Atrocity in What
Supposed
to Be
Our Basement.’

“So.  I had my noise suppressor headphones on.  And oh, my tinted
safety goggles, for my clear ones were up and shatter-spangled by a chip just
couple week last Tuesday, I think it was.  Ha, Tuesday.  What a world.

“What I’m saying is, if I wasn’t so stupid stubborn as to be down
there circle-sawing on a length of pine for no real reason at all, while Jenny
was baking and the grand-kits were watching Disney Channel, well ... I would be
deaf and blind now, or worse.  Or maybe it would be better, Hell.  I don’t know
how to say.

“I don’t deserve to be here, cared for you and all Mrs. S.-G.,
while my Jenny, my Jenny ...”

* * * * *

“All right.  I’m ready again, and thank you for cleaning up over
me.  Too much pride to let you do what you done and I have no choice, and so I
thank you.

“Down there in the basement I was … well.  Not listening to the
radio that morning, but having it on to try to
not
listen to it, see? 
That goddamn Shelter Panic Bulletin, I was addicted just like everyone else. 
Because it was horrible, horrible.

“Well, that radio is what got me upset enough to work on the
nothing-pine on my saw.  Good ol’ Jake Handler on the airwaves.  Oh, you know? 
You listen to him?  Oh Lord, I’m sorry.  I can see I cut you deep and I don’t
know what I say wrong to do so, I am sorry.  Don’t you cry, I can’t go on now
if you cry.

“There’s my smile.  There’s a girl.  Lord, if you aren’t the
strongest woman I ever did see and I hope you don’t mind me saying so.

“Sophie.  Of course I call you Sophie.

“Well, see now, that’s just it.  I don’t know how to tell you what
came next.  I powered down, and I put my face mask up to keep out the choke of
sawdust, then I put my WD-40 away.  My saw blade was smoking, I was looking for
the extinguish-foam, that damn can, and I never even knew how close to fire and
how stupid I was being.  Like a zombie a-cutting away.

“But suddenly it had struck me and I
knew
.  Oh, Lord, no.  That’s
all I can tell you.

“Like, like a purring cat who wake straight up and run and jump
out the window before the earthquake, see?  That’s how I knew that it was
coming.  Like lightning bolt from the shock of blue.

“
Somehow
I
knew.  I covered my eyes and put my hands over my face.”

* * * * *

“The funny thing
was, there was no sound.  I’m sure there
was
, but whatever it did to me,
it’s like it was so deafening, so mighty and all-powerful booming that I never
even hear it.  It was all, it was all
light
.

“Oh, the light. 
There is no God within that light, no mercy.  Only the everlasting fire.

“The walls melted. 
Turned bright red.

“The blinding light
outside was blood.  Blood and it was pouring both out and from inside of me.  I
swear to you, I saw that through closed eyes, and … I saw the bones in my
hands, surrounded by red.  Through closed eyes I beheld my flesh and the
firmament who holds.  Last thing I saw was the blood in my own veins, coursing
through my fingers.

“It was only after
the light, eternal seconds after, that the heat wave come.

“The air on fire,
breath on fire.  Like walking out of a walk-in freezer and running out into the
desert sun.

“Shivering, so hot
it was icy cold.  Felt hot on my cheeks, then my face, then my entire body.

“How do I describe
it?

“I saw this movie
once, that Titanic kid, Leon someone.  Not
that
movie, though.  One of
the forgotten ones.  It was ol’ Musketeer France, and they bolted this iron
mask onto his face and the camera, they showed you what it looked just like to
get that bolted onto you, what it would
feel
like.

“And that was just
like it.  I tell you only that iron mask was red hot as it clamped down, and it
was burning.

“I woke like that,
my vision turned to waves of not just red and rainbow, but
jewels
.  Ruby
was all that I behold, and opal, see?  Like there was no sun, like the sun had
fallen and was burning apart and disintegrating all around me.

“Like I was lying
at the bottom of a crimson ocean, endless tons of pressure up upon me, looking up,
up through miles of transparent and whirling waves, up into a ruin once the
sky.

“The sky, she not
die easy.  She
still
dying.  Archangel, writhing in her dance upon the
high.

“She was still
roaring and afire, and these waterfalls of liquid heat were washing their way
over me.

“Live cables were
sparking somewhere at the edge of sight, like some monstrous and ogrish welder
was working his way through the neighborhood and getting caught up in telephone
poles and shattered foundations everywhere. 
Everywhere
.

“Flashes at the
edges of once-my-basement, the heart of all that burning hollow, like what? 
Like when you’re watching one of those old science movies in school, and the
projector breaks, and the faces freeze mid-smile and then all melt apart to
shock-white right in front of you.

“That’s what it was
like.  That was everything.

“I saw a burning
dog fall into once-my-basement.  I smelt it, too.  It was making a horrible
sound, a squealing, ‘til I realized what it was.  Already dead.  That was just
the sound of its insides, baking and popping.  Bubbling up out of its stomach
which was just a burnt-out hole.”

* * * * *

“Right.  Let’s go
again.

“See, I didn’t
understand what I was looking at once I came to again.  There was no grief, no
weeping, only a little pain.  Just this confusion, this terrified wonderment of
a newborn orphan trying to make sense of the Hell, the wilderness and the
wasteland.

“Like being born in
a furnace, all it was.  Like trying to understand.

“I was gazing up
through rafters and debris angled all atop of me.  Powder was trickling down,
cement and dirt and crystallized blood and what I later realized was hoverin’
chips of bone.  Ashes.  Make you want to stick out your tongue like a kid ‘til
you realize what it was, so stupid and so beautiful.

“People, it was
raining burning scraps of people on my face.

“I sat up somehow,
somehow I pushed all this mess of paneling and cinderblock and tire-shit off of
me and I looked around.  Like some idiot waking up in some Cocteau movie, you
know him?  What?  Oh, French, his stuff was good.  Too cultured for me to
know.  But Jenny, oh she loved him.  Funny how movie dates turn out when you in
love.

“Yeah, like a
Cocteau actor, see.  Knowing he’s in some surreal place that’s filled up with
evil clowns or something.  I expected stupid music at any moment, but all I
could hear was the raging of the firestorm.

“And oh, the
legion, the dying.  The screaming.  Everyone was still burning, everyone in
hiding.  It takes awhile when you all protected, for the fire-tongue to find
you.

“All around me, my
own house —
Jenny’s
house, mercy — thirty years paid, our beloved home
had fallen in all around the basement line.  Like a collapsed cake, a perfect
rectangle.

“I don’t know how
else to say it.  Funny thing about that basement, you know those are rare in
Denver-land because of the shifting sediment, but I chose
good
land way
back when and that basement, we had a good one.

“But it required
more foundation to be used as a living space, you understand?  Well, my
daughter and I, we’d
built
all that.  Bonded over that for years and hauling
lumber and burning our hands on pulley ropes and bitching up a storm at each
other, daddy your fault, nope was
your
fault girl.  You want a
whoopin’?  Ha!  Paul Harvey and Dick Clark and Casey Kasem on the radio, good
times.  Yeah.

“Never again.

“We built that all
up in the center so that my woodshop was like its own concrete control room in
the heart of it all, with sound-dampening and such.  Surrounded by a bigger
room that was all the rest of the basement, see?  Shell within a shell.  Used
to be where the water heater and the furnace were,
that
was a project
let me tell you.

“Yeah, old house,
damn good house.  Water and heat got moved out safer a second time by
contractors, out to the dry southwest corner when we renovated in ’02.  And why
is all this important?

“I do believe my
daughter’s work, our life’s love and our labor,
that’s
all to only save
me.  There’s almost
no
one, Sophie.  Every one survival is a miracle.

“Or curse.

“Believe me, I saw
no one dead or living intact as I myself was.  Anywhere,
anywhere
, until
I got up to west of Black Hawk.  Everyone else in Littleton, Denver and all the
rest, millions all.  All had been shattered and broken and mutilated and only
finished off then by the mercy of the burning, but not me.

“No.  Do believe I
was made to suffer.  You write that down later, I don’t care.  S’all right.  I
live on so with pride, I do in the name of love.  I live so that all those who
are gone who I remember,
they
live on inside of me.

“I am the ship of
all the loved ones I have lost.  I’m a sinner but I done right.  I sail on, I suffer
well.

“I give them to
you, Sophie.  Never let them go.  I give you every soul, and to you in my heart
I hold.  You listen and you receive them, to you I give these souls who were my
people.  Every one.”

* * * * *

“Well, that ol’
basement room did save me.  But the saw blade had crashed down about six inches
over my head and was buried in what was left of my northwest corner.  How I
stood up around that blade, I have no idea.

“But that,
that’s
how I knew Denver had gotten its closest bomb hit from the
southeast
.  I
knew I needed to go west, but only that glimpse of Black Hawk up above before
the almost-blinding had given me any hope.

“If anything up the
mountains had survived, Black Hawk’s all it was.

“Getting there
without being burned, oh, now that was the tricky thing.  That’s a story for
tomorrow in the even, Mrs. S.-G., if I don’t die tonight.

“Hey, now.  You so
like my daughter, Lucille.  No.  You listen to me, I’m going to tell you as you
are.

“People see you
cold
,
don’t they?  They see you cruel, spoiled.  But me, I see the secret, the
sweetest heart of you.  You cold because you care
too
much and you hide
it all away.  Like you bitter, like it hurt too much to love the world.

“I understand.  You
distant in yourself, because you hurt, because you can’t fix everything so
every time you love, you love in secret.  Your Tom.  Your Lacie-love.

“Don’t you cry,
Mrs. S.-G.  Oh, Sophie.  See, I call you Sophie even though it pains me as a
gentleman to do so.

“Yeah, there’s my
smile.  Almost, even a good one.  There we go.

“It’s all right …
Sophie.  For now, I can.  I can promise you.  I promise I won’t leave you, good
Lord willing.

“Pray, I know you
don’t pray but pray with me.  May we have a little time.”

* * * * *

(Having followed
over multiple days, the above session continues after approximately three hours. 
Sophie recorded a time-index here, perhaps indicating an accidental erasure in
the record.  A slight portion of the transcript is blank, implying some seconds
of material were over-recorded or otherwise lost.)