From the Fire IV (8 page)

IV-7

EMERGENCE

(This, then, is the very last shelter-oriented section of the
diary which is written out in full.  It was a bare skeleton of notations, once,
the first time there inscribed.  We can see from the many hands, the different
ages of coded cross-writing, that Sophie revisited this tale several times,
adding remembered details as she went.  The resultant record is one of moments,
with black gaps of the unknown dividing each of them.)

(— Alexandria S.-G. C.)

~

Sophie
pushed the last of the cold aluminum supply carts out into the great room.  Her
ammunition-filled hand-sack, one of the most important things of all, was
cradled atop its reflective surface.  The crucial elements for her exit into the
Burning World lay around the sack in a series of circles, like a surgeon’s
tools.  Submachine gun, crowbar, pulley winch, wrench, flashlight, flash-bangs,
bottle of water.

She hoped she would not need to kill anyone.

At least not yet.  Please.

She exhaled, a deep and misted sigh inside her armor.  Reflections
of LED displays danced over her faceplate.  She had not practiced enough,
moving things with the suit on.  She was stronger, yes.  Very strong now.  But her
gloved hands were still fumbling everywhere.

She triple-checked her suit.  She was wearing an adult diaper of
all things, something her humility would not allow her to dwell upon.  Every
seal of the suit was perfect, the gun then carefully hooked to her utility
belt.  Battery power optimal, timer ticking.  She was giving herself one
hundred and seventy minutes of exertion, ninety minutes to load materials and
Silas, eighty minutes to load the car.

Whichever car that might be.
 
Longer than ninety, and she would need to sleep in the underground, one last
time.

She was not certain that she could.

Ignoring this, she tested her gloved grasp on each of the
implements.  The crowbar had a foreboding slipperiness to it.  There was no
grip, no certain leverage if it was needed as a weapon.  The winch, the wrench,
the flashlight, all were fine.

She slipped off the exterior mitt-gloves, down to the thin ones
where she could actually manipulate objects with some certainty.  The gun
trigger, fine.  The winch gauge, good.  Even the line-feed, she could feel a
little tease of its pressure as she ran it between her fingers.  She clicked
the submachine gun’s safety on and off, timing herself.  The flashlight she clicked
on and off six times.  Then she switched the wrench-head setting from ninety
millimeters to sixty, overcompensating the first time that she tried.

Seventeen seconds to calibrate the wrench and back again.  Not
good.

Keep it as sixty, then. 
She
needed to be quicker, in case someone was still up there.  Sixty it was.  She
looked again at the array of implements.  What was she forgetting? 
Oh God,
the car keys.

She cursed at herself.  There they were, on the bottom shelf of
the cart.  These she slipped into a utility pocket directly over her right hip,
taping the key ring inside her suit.

And then, timing herself with the clumsy and horrid mitt-gloves
both back on.

Too slow.  Too fucking slow!

She bit her lip, the wrench clanged down upon the cart’s rail in
frustration.  In the back room, the Sanctuary, she heard Silas murmur in his
sleep.

Calm.  Stay calm, or this will never work.
  She turned her head, sipped at the taped-in line of straws she
had jury-rigged into the hazmat suit’s neck-joint.  The plastic bottle of water
crinkled uncomfortably against her left armpit.

Twelve minutes.  Already, she was sweating.  She packed the bag,
getting angrier with herself all the while, packing the hand-sack and cinching
it shut as best she could.

Concentrate!

This was not going to work.

But it had to.

She walked out past the worktable, toward the entry hall.  Silas
was going to be furious with her, she knew, when he woke and realized that she
had given him a sleeping pill.  He wanted to be there with her, at the bottom
of the shaft on his rolling gurney.  He wanted to guide her, call out to her as
she climbed up into the cave.  Hell, he had even wanted to cradle a pistol so
that she could run back to the ladder under cover if she had to.

But instead, she had put him to sleep and done everything herself.

He has no energy any longer.  That fever, that look.  He knows. 
He isn’t going to make it for very long.

Sophie kept on walking.  She edged her way around a fallen
cinderblock.  She could not remember how long it had been there, or why.

Great, trip over something with no one to help you.  That would be
just fine.  Idiot.

“And should have gone to the bathroom again,” she heard herself
grumbling.  Appalled, feeling fully ridiculous all at once, she almost
giggled. 
Oh, well.  Screw it.

She went around the corner, went to the shelter mouth and ran her
gloved fingers over the bolt-rails of the access door. 
If I can survive
shitting myself during the outbreak of a nuclear war, then I can survive a
little pee running down my diaper.

She giggled again.  She was losing it.

Twenty-one minutes.  How?  How was she going to do this?

And she was going to see Pete’s body.  Would he by lying there
under the tarp Silas had given him?  Would the shotgun be crossed over his
chest, a brotherhood salute to the brave and fallen? 
No.
  The body
would surely be defiled, the shotgun taken, if anyone else had come down to lie
in wait.

But after so many days, wouldn’t they have tried to cut off the
air, to flood the shelter, or at least pound on the door again?

Who is out there?  Can anyone?

She knew.  Someone, someone was still up there.

She could go slower, she could just patrol-sweep the cave, move a
test gurney of supplies and then go in again.  If she had to wait another day,
she could find the time to lift Pete’s body up out of the shaft by winch and
pulley, she could bury him in the cave.

But no.  Somehow, that seemed more a desecration than a ritual of
love.

“Stop this, Sophie,” she cursed herself.  Twenty-three minutes. 
Too slow.  “Just do this.”

She looked at the door console.  She flipped the dead-grid cage
over the punch numbers, opened the access panel, clicked in the timed
exit/entry code.  Accepted.  If the door were to both open and close in the next
three hundred and sixty second interval, the alarms would not go off and the
shelter would not go into protective mode.  If she took any longer, on any of
seven estimated trips to shuffle out the supplies, there would be some very
serious problems to troubleshoot.  The door would lock itself, and the motion
detectors which sensed if someone was in the way had never been fully tested.

Enough.  Go.
  Go!

She gripped the vault wheel, and twisted.  Hydraulic mist hissed
out, the vault door whirred its way open.

* * * * *

She swept the submachine gun over the shaft-scape of the
darkness.  Silhouettes of bodies, yes.  But no one moving.

She tried her best not to look.  She turned, pulling the first
supply cart there behind her.

She had forgotten one very simple, one very deadly thing.  If
anything went wrong, or she fell, or her timing was too far off, she could not
delay re-closure.  She could not prop the door.

Almost in those few seconds of panic, almost she went back to awaken
Silas, to wheel his gurney out and to wedge him in the door, pistol cradled in
his arms.  But she had made her way into the shelter the first time, she had
studied the binder about the security controls twenty times if not thirty.  The
door, when she needed to, she could get open again.  After her first entry long
ago, it was all about the access cards.

But if any of the mechanisms had failed, or had been sabotaged? 
And Silas was not only asleep, he was incapable of walking even if he needed
to.  If she screamed and woke him, if she became trapped outside and needed him
to open the door, what would she do?

Well, shit.

Then she remembered the cinderblock.  Would it hold, if the door
were to spin itself shut?

Yes. 
But she doubted it. 
Because
it has to.

Still shielding her gaze from the twisted bodies, she went back in
and to the verge of the great room, lifted the cinderblock with a grunt and
went out to the door again.

* * * * *

Fumbling off the
translucent red-band cap, the night filter, Sophie shone the full unfiltered beam
of the flashlight up against the rim of the ladder-shaft.  She needed to blind
them, anyone who was still waiting up there.

She cast the light
beam from side to side.  There was no one.

Garish shadows,
tilted twice-reflected beams bounced over the cave walls high above.  Beads of
hovering waterfall mist danced in pallid rainbows up inside the rays of
light.   The shaft seemed much deeper than it had before.  Had she really
climbed down all that way, adrenaline surging, with a nuclear blast just
seconds away from impact?  How?

Using her other
hand, she swept the submachine barrel along with the light, tracing the
direction of its beam.

Nothing.  No one.

She looked around
at the floor of the shaft itself.  She could not see anything immediately
around her, not yet.  She had blinded herself.

You fool.

As she stared out
at the damaged and flickering glo-lites between the ladder’s rungs, she waited
for her eyes to readjust.

Stilling herself
there, listening, she noticed the grim silence of it all.  She had unknowingly
grown accustomed to the nightmarish, dull cacophony of the shelter ... its
generators, hums, drips, crackles, clanks, the whirr of air conditioning and
recycling of gurgling toilet water, all of it.  Now, there were just the frail
and relentless second-beeps of the suit and the purr of its filtration, backed by
a strange reverberating growl of sound from far up above and away.  The wind?

No.  The waterfall.

The outside, the
real.  The beyond and all its corpses there, in pieces.  Ashes of rainforests,
ashes made of everything.  After so much time cradled inside the shelter,
Sophie felt a wave of panic as she tried to envision the sky that Silas had
described.  The outside was dying, roiling in windstorm and blackest rain.  The
Burning World was endless.  Could she do this?

Dead shapes in the
darkness came back into focus.  Some of the glo-lites were unfaltering, most
were sickly and flickering with a fitful greenish radiance.  And there, fading
back into sight, the silhouetted body of Pete.

The tarp was there,
the shotgun as well.  She could not bring herself to touch it. 
This is a
grave.  The grave of the friend you left to die here.

She was spared the
stench of death by the suit’s filtration system, but not the sight.  One of his
purplish hands was uncovered, and it was bulbous like a cluster of over-ripened
plums.  It was glistening.  She dared not move the tarp, it was barely over his
head and the top of it was curling back and forth in the waterfall’s whirling
breeze, exposing the topmost crown of his sandy hair.

“Pete.  I am so
sorry you had to suffer.”

She could say no
more.  Not yet.  There was too much danger here, too much that she needed to
do.

The suit beeped
again, a longer tone.  A full minute had passed.

Sophie spun the
flashlight beam around.  The wild shadows she was making poured around Pete’s
body, giving way to more garish details.  There was a pile of dried feces near
the ladder, certainly human.  But there were no flies to buzz around it.  There
were dried strings of what might be vomit on the lower ladder rungs, and there
were huge, spattered bloodstains up the curvature of the wall.

Whose blood was
it?  Sophie had no idea.  There were bullet holes, scars where something heavy
and metal had hit the wall and rebounded.  Beneath the stain was a crumpled
something, down where Sophie’s faceplate had hidden a brutal revelation.

The body of the
girl was twisted, emaciated.  Her face was down, buried in broken hands.  Her
head had been bashed in.

There was an
intermittent thread of water trickling down from the cave above, wetting the
wall opposite the glo-lites, and along this vertical streamlet were stuck
pieces of things, little chunks of skull with thin trails of once-blonde hair
still attached to them.

Sophie
backpedaled.  She almost vomited in her suit.  She remembered something, a
mantra of pain and sorrow, something rather similar to Silas’s earnest words: 
You
just look away.

She did so.

Swallowing,
glancing up at the lip of the ladder-shaft one last time, Sophie backed toward
the shelter door.  Having decided there was no one watching her up over the brim
of the shaft, she went back inside again.