From the Fire IV (9 page)

* * * * *

Several trips passed uneventfully.  After she had made the shaft
floor crowded with supply pallets, Sophie toke a few moments to cover the
girl’s body.  Each trip in and out, she scanned the brim of the ladder-shaft
every time.  She only tripped over the cinderblock once, but that one time had
nearly ended in an ankle sprain or worse.

She was panting, her lungs were burning.  She had coughed up water
and her faceplate was covered with fitful bouts of mist.

She had fitted pulleys to corner hinges, and moved the five (not
seven) pulley-pallets of supplies out into the shaft in forty-seven minutes,
all told.  A little less.  Silas had not awakened.  She surveyed the absurd
heaps of duct-taped plastic, sheets of gray and interwoven ribbons tangled over
all of the supplies.  Food, water, maps, the radio, most of the binders,
batteries, medicine, the guns of course, ammunition, the lighters, notebooks,
the toilet paper, the tackle kit (if there were any fish up there, still
alive), the lead curtains, so much clothing, so very many
things
...

And so she was ready at last to rise and explore the cave, and
then to raise all the supplies as quickly as possible.

And then Silas ...

When she flashed the light beam up again, searching the ceiling,
she looked for the painted box which hid the utility crane.  She could not see
it.

She felt a thrill of panic.  Tom had completed the crane some
months ago, the binder had said so.  But why couldn’t she see it even if she
was looking for it?

Too far away, too high
.  There
was only one way to find out.

Sophie left the flashlight on, clipping it to her utility belt. 
She took a deep breath, wrapped her gloved hands around the ladder’s slippery
rungs, and she began to climb.

* * * * *

As she raised
herself, with Pete’s body at the edge of sight, with ashen shadows up above her
spun into twisting dances by the ever-reflected waterfall, Sophie was certain
that she was going to die.  Someone was going to pop his head over the brim of
the shaft so high above her, leer down and gloat over her and her sealed fate. 
But only for a moment.  Then, the man above was going to shoot her before she
could do anything at all.

And after she fell,
as she laid at the bottom of the shaft crippled and broken and dying, before
she bled out ... would she feel him? What was he going to do with her body?

No.

Patrice cackled
deep inside her. 
Oh yes, Sophie love.  That’s how it goes, goes, goes. 
First he’ll shoot you in the shoulder, keep the meat fresh.  And then you’ll
fall, and then your back will go snap-crackle-pop, and oh!  Then he will be on
top of you!  And you’ve left him a knife, taped to your suit’s boot.  So good
of you!  He’ll use that instead of the gun.  He’ll slice the suit open to get
at you, and snag you a little and gouge out some flesh from your belly because
he’ll be very eager you see, and ...

“Shut up.”

She kept climbing. 
Somehow, the careful-yet-frantic climb up the shaft was timed by her suit
readout at eighty-seven seconds.  In reality, however, it lasted an eternity.

As Sophie climbed
through the last half of her isolate ascent, painted all over by the glo-lite
reflections, shivering, she quelled her terror by listening to the jingle of
the car keys taped inside her suit.

If the H4 was still
there, if no one had managed to hotwire it or push it or tow it out
(And how
could they, Soph, how could they?)
, then she might well be able to start
the car.

Maybe.

She had recovered
the ring of keys only a few days before, when at last the final pieces of her
plan to leave the Shelter with Silas’s guidance were falling into place.  At
some point she had tacked the ring up on the salvaged bulletin board, and the
poster map of southern Wyoming and northeastern Colorado — of Kersey — had
engulfed the keys and left them dangling there, hidden and forgotten.

No more.  She had
them.  This was actually happening, she was making her escape.

This had all been
planned with Silas, all of it and so many times.  How many vehicles were up
above?  If Silas’s observations still held true, then at least three:  the H4
jammed near to the cave wall (although it had rebounded slightly, if he
recalled), the police car filled with dead bodies, and Silas’s own vehicle. 
Another car in the canyon, or two?  He didn’t think so.  He could not remember. 
But if there were more cars, it would mean …

Keep climbing.

Which vehicle would
work, if any?  Silas had said the older the better, yes.  All the way up to
Black Hawk, tested newer cars had failed him.  All of their circuitry had been
burned out by the pulse.  But old clunkers?  A few of them worked fine.

She would prefer
the H4 for its familiarity, for its four-wheel drive and strong suspension. 
For its toolbox if it was still there, and for its power enough to ram or push
things off the road whenever she had to.  Yes, if the H4 would work — and there
was reason to hope, after all despite its newness the Hummer had been sheltered
in the cave and was probably better shielded than just about any other
surviving vehicle they could ever hope to find — then it would be ideal.

And if it did not,
well ... perhaps the police car.  Could she bear to pull out all of the bodies
piled up inside it that Silas had described?  What about the trunk?  Was the
shotgun there?  Where was it?  And there was one body at least that he refused
to talk about.  What of that?  Would Pete’s patrol car even start again if it
was mired in the pool beneath the waterfall?  What if she had to walk out along
the canyon to Silas’s car to test its ignition, or to siphon gas?

Stop thinking about
all that.  Just go.

And she did. 
Something would work, anything.  If there was a way to drive to Kersey and find
her Lacie, she would make it work. 
Or die in the trying
...

Her grip began to
slip and she swayed there, a horror of doubt rushing over her all at once: 
Oh
God oh you’re hanging from a ladder with only a dying man to hear you scream if
you fall he can’t save you he’s stuck in bed in the shelter if you break your
legs if you break your legs if you —

And the slurring,
delicious giggling of Patrice began again deep down inside her, riding that
wave of hysteria up through her and lilting into her mind.

Oh, don’t worry,
Soph.  You have your gun with you, you’ll fall and there will be broken bones
and agony but don’t you worry, Sophie love.  You think you’ve loaded the gun to
use on others?  Oh no, no.  See, I’m waiting for you to realize this so that
you can join me here in dancing, dancing, dancing:  sister love, that loaded
gun is just for you.  No need to suffer long.  Just fall and get it over with,
get it over with and come to me!

“Leave me alone,”
Sophie hissed.  Her voice grated with surprising force inside her suit.

Grimacing, she
clutched at the ladder rungs and kept on climbing.

She came to the top
of the ladder, with both hands still on the top rung.  She knew there were
handholds out there, which she could feel about for and clutch and haul herself
over the brim.  But she could not see them, she would need to pad her gloved
fingers about blindly and anyone out there could grab her clumsy hands and haul
her up and pin her there before she could ever raise her gun, and that is the thought
that froze her there.

She had both hands
on the top rung and was in the process of bunching her body up beneath her, her
legs still moving but her hands and arms refusing to obey.

“Help me,” Sophie
whispered.  She closed her eyes and tried with all her strength to envision not
Tom, not Lacie, not even Silas or Patrice, but only her father.

And there he was. 
Poorly shaven, after he had broken his right hand on a hunting trip he had never
quite trusted that hand with the razor any longer, and not even his wife could
touch his throat with any trusted blade.  He was like that.  Silver-scruffed
and poorly shaven, strong and red-jowled and smiling down at his
second-favorite daughter of two.

“Now remember,
love,” he was saying.  “All you need, fire inside you and any hollow man he’ll
burn up just from the fire inside you oh heart of a lioness oh there you are,
remember.  Remember you see anyone up there, you grab the sides of that ladder
and you slide all the way down.  Get your back to the vault door, be ready to
shoot at anyone fool enough to show himself.  Counting on you now.”  One of his
bushy eyebrows arched, a loving patriarchal mixture of favor and disfavor. 
“Counting on you,” he said to her.  “Stay strong for me when I’m gone.  Keep
your sister safe.”

Oh, how that had
been. 
Safe, oh Patrice ...

“Now open your
eyes,” he said.  “Goodbye.”

She did so.  There
was nobody up there.  She reached about, felt the aluminum-gridded handhold up
over the shaft’s edge, and hauled herself upward while her father’s image
melted away inside of her.

* * * * *

She peered over the
edge as she rose. Her breath misted out and pulsed against her faceplate. 
Reflections of mist played on the faceplate’s farther side, puffs of shifting
air and dewdrops caught in the endless wave of humidity pouring in from the
waterfall.  Strange crimson reflections shifted over the walls above her,
turning the black stone to ever-shifting patterns that writhed like images of
flesh.

She could not feel
whether her surroundings were hot or cold, but there were unsettling clots of
moist ash dolloped all about her and across the cave floor, smashed dough-balls
of congealed dust and burnt matter bound up by some greasy substance.  The
mud-balls had been sculpted into piles where they had been scuffed aside by
booted feet, and smeared footprints showed in hardened craters all along the
floor.

They came in.  They
died.  The last one left.  There’s no one here.

A catch in Sophie’s
breathing told her otherwise.

Feeling all at once
how precarious her position was, she heaved off from the rungs, got a knee over
the rim and belly-crawled away from the shaft.  Mud greased her suit and
spattered her fingers.  Her left foot kicked off of the last rung with a sickly
tilt, and a surge of vertigo swept through her as she twisted along the cave
floor and spun onto her back.  The gun jumbled up under her gut, still hinged
to her utility belt, and nearly got stuck beneath her.

Careful, now. 
Someone is out there.

She raised herself
up into a spidery crouch and swept the flashlight’s beam further into the
darkness.  The beam’s frayed edges caught the glitter of some broad metallic
surface out in the farther cave.  Was that the H4 at the edge of sight?

She spared a look
to the ceiling. 
There.
  At the angle she had assumed, it was actually
quite easy to tilt the beam of light and to beckon forth the shadows, forcing
them to reveal the hidden outline of the painted crane socket indented above
the shaft.  Tom had cored away some of the ceiling stone so that the
crane-hinge was actually flush within its hole up there, flat with the planed
and carved-out surface of the ceiling.  Looking more closely, Sophie noticed
for the first time that all of the stone in the narrow had been spray-painted
the same dull hue, almost certainly for the sole purpose of concealing the
crane from unwanted eyes.

Right, then.

She stood fully,
glancing over her shoulder to look behind her.  A foolish gesture, for without
pivoting at the waist she only caught a better glimpse of her own suit’s
interior and her breath’s humidity streaking down the insides.  If anyone
wanted to ambush her, seize her, this was the perfect time for them to do it.

She stood up on
tiptoe, reached, and just barely caught the tip of the crane’s hidden hook with
two fingers.  Her glove slipped easily off the steely surface, but a squeak of
the crane’s joist told her that the assembly was ready to move.

One thing working
perfectly,
she mused. 
At last.

Solo-operating the
crane, from what she had read, would be exhausting after awhile but fairly
easy.  By fully snapping down the two levers and snap-locking the aluminum
joint in place, by swiveling the hook-and-pulley over the shaft’s center, she
would be able to drape plastic cording or even a chain over the pulley wheel
and begin the work.  She could winch up the flats of supplies in a matter of a
couple hours or even less.

Satisfied that her
position was not hopeless, Sophie held her breath and turned away from the
crane assembly once again.  It was time to search the cave.

She knew all at
once then, chilled by a trickle of certainty:  if no one had yet attacked her,
there would be many more dead bodies.  There would be horrible things she would
need to see.  But she had to keep moving.  She had no choice.

She cinched her
flashlight between her left elbow and hip as she repositioned, unclipping her
gun.  She crept out of the tunnel and into the wider cave, following the
fractured glo-lites, the dancing crimson radiance of the outside world spun
into whorls by the endless cascading of the waterfall.  The world went a little
brighter, running with a glow too much like blood.