From the Fire II (4 page)

She read the spine titles again, and finally selected (h)OLOCAUST SCENARIO / (i)MPACT EVENT /(n)EMESIS THEORY. Hefting the binder and catching the few three-holed pages that had torn away and were trickling out of its bulky sheaf, she made her way back to the laundry pile and sat down. She surrounded herself with Tom’s jackets and jeans, tightened the bandages around her hands, and she began to read.

* * * * *

Hours, a newfound Thermos of water and a cup of spinach, a can opener and a food heater. It was strange how the world would fall away when she was reading, no matter how grim or daunting the tale set out before her. The only difference in Tom’s writings — as opposed to the horror tales she favored on her own — was that the hypothetical, the unthinkable, had become the real.

She made her way through printed survivalist forum threads, Wikipedia articles, NSA briefs (many still printed “SECRET” and one even “EYES ONLY,” surely it had been criminal in some way to be gathering these outside the agency), and she began to fathom just how the world had ended.

The reports on estimated fallout drift in event of a thermonuclear war were by far the most disturbing. Prevailing winds would come from the west and in high spring, with many winds and temperature changes, air currents would cause wide swathes of radioactive dust to wash over the entire eastern United States. The withering deluge would move in sky-corrupting tides like a sandstorm, like the black choking fog that had roiled out of the Dust Bowl in the Thirties. And what was the dust composed of? Pulverized buildings, molten cars, disintegrated corn, splintered trees, shattered earth, and tiny motes of radioactive flesh and bone and hair, the cinder-remnants of incinerated people.

For two weeks at least, or perhaps for years, cyclones would form and spin their way from west to east, scattering remains out over the Atlantic Ocean and leaving only the Gray Death in their wake, a wasteland where nothing would ever grow again. The more optimistic reports (including a rather idealistic survival book written in the Eighties by an Oak Ridge research engineer) theorized that the fallout cyclones would remain fatal for weeks, and present for several years; while the more menacing reports suggested that the storms would
become
the atmosphere, would coil and lay waste to the entire world for centuries.

Whatever the truth, if there were to be any survivors at all, the message to them was very clear: Keep away from once-populated areas. Avoid cities. Stay on rural roads whenever and wherever you can. Never go east. And, if you happen to be along the eastern face of the north-west spinal Rocky Mountains, go to the plains. Go north to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming.

Go north.

And a note on the last page in Tom’s hand read in scarlet ink, “See (g)RAND TETON / (s)HOSHONE / (y)ELLOWSTONE.” The title of another binder.

She had stopped reading for awhile once she made her way into the binder’s second major section, (i)MPACT EVENT. There was a very “Tom” touch on that section’s inner divider, a taped-in photograph of Bruce Willis thumbs-upping in
Armageddon
, accompanied by Tom’s helpful words,
“Yeah right / As if
.”

The last section was about Nemesis, a highly radioactive brown dwarf star that was supposed to roll its way through the solar system every twenty-six million years, causing mass extinctions and spilling cataclysm across the fractures in reality. There was even an especially erudite and passionate thread-essay which Tom had printed out for the binder and carefully preserved inside vinyl sheet holders, which had been written by an astrophysicist who apparently harbored a half-joking reverence for Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Mythos of Cthulhu.

She began reading with bitterness and bemusement, then grew intrigued as the pieces began to fit together. The theory sounded real, almost
too
real, but all of that was useless now. No fallen star, spitting Apocalyptic cascades of poison down in blood tears upon the waters, would ever spell the end of Man; no. God had been overthrown, Man had grown weary of waiting for the judgment of dark angels. Man had destroyed himself.

And after the Nemesis section, a strange cluster of handwritten pages was stuffed into the binder’s back pocket. Sophie realized that this was Tom’s improbable catastrophe binder. The top yellow sheet in the back had been titled “Evil Endings,” and under it in his own curlicue script — a style which Tom reserved for writing silly notes when he was going out early to golf — Tom had written, “That spells evil. Oh, laws, yes.”

Which meant nothing at all. Surely it was some joke, but for who?

There was only a little more. After that first page in the back there were only tables of hastily-written columns, “Revision,” “Update,” “Sync,” “Refute” and a series of hundreds of page numbers. One last Post-It note reading “Shift to New” was stuck on the last page. And there, oddly, Tom had also written a date: September 11, 2013. With a question mark.

Move to new binder. Update. Revise.
Tom had had some reason to believe that the nuclear holocaust scenario had become much more likely.

The last seven months of Sophie’s life began to make sense. Last September. That was when Tom’s mood had shifted and he had almost never been at home, always on NSA assignment. Whenever he was home he was always packing and preparing to drive up to the shelter, or planning on the drafting table. That was when he had started yelling at Lacie, when the fights had begun, when Lacie had started crying and not been able to sleep through the night without hugs and water, when she had started wanting to stay with grandma, when Sophie had turned back to the pills ...

Sophie closed the binder.

She looked down at her left hand spread open upon the cover, and saw that at some point she had tucked a corner of bloody gauze beneath her wedding ring as an anchor.

And that was when she started crying.

She slid her way off the clothes, and pressed her face against the floor. Her crying turned to sobbing, uncontrollable, her chest heaving, she was crawling then and her hands were moist with spilled water and pierced by invisible bits of glass. She cried out, “Not alone. No. I can’t, I
can’t
...”

And only the echoes were there to answer.

II-4

DYING CRIES

She woke once more, lying on her back against the concrete floor. Her left-hand fingers were curled around an empty Thermos, and a leather jacket was tucked underneath her head.

She had been dreaming of Tom, not a fantasy-dream but a real one, a memory of experiences recently in ending, experiences made all the worse by the understanding that she was asleep and living the past all over again; that the past was now, and her suffering would be redoubled in its judgment, and she would never be able to change a single detail of what had been.

~

She was sitting in the H4 by the Athanasiou Valley Airport, with her hands clutching the wheel and the spring rain sleeting down a mist of gray and rainbow. Tom was on the phone. He was yelling at her.

“Promise me!” He sounded desperate, tottering near some precipice of mind.

“I — I promise.”

“Good. Mitch, Mitch picked up Lacie from grandma’s, he knows what’s going to happen. She’s safe.”

What?

“Tom, slow down. Mitch picked up our
daughter?
What
place
are they in?”

“Listen to me!”

“What’s happening?”

“She’s safe. Get to the shelter as fast as you can. Call Mitch on the way as soon as you lock and seal, do you understand me? He’s waiting for you to call. He’s going to help you, Sophie. He’s going to make … to make sure you get through this. For Lacie. For me.”

Get to the shelter.

Sophie had had nightmares about those very words.
Like a dream.

~

A dream.

Sophie began to stand. She almost fell when her right hip socket popped, but she went to all fours, clenched her teeth and stood there over the drain clamped into the great room floor. She walked over the hose, around the shattered light fixture, and sat down on the stool before the work table.

Call Mitch,
Tom had said.
Call Mitch when you get to the shelter.

She looked again at the four little doors set into the wall. Telephone, computer, radio, telegraph. How did a telegraph work, didn’t it need to be cabled into something? What was she supposed to do? She looked back at the binders she had arrayed, but did not want to revisit any of them. The last reading, the revelation of all that had been and all that yet must be, had nearly been more for her than she could bear.

She turned back to the four doors. The phone was dead with nothing to connect to. She resisted powering up the computer. If it worked, and it likely did, she would have access to Word and Excel, any unprinted files Tom had written, and digital family photographs. Far too many photographs, and she could not yet steel herself to have them there so near to her fingers’ touch, one click away from seeing all the loved ones who now were lost to her.

Of course there would be no Internet, no Skype. Not ever again. The computer was a tomb, and she refused to violate it.

But there was still the radio, and there was the telegraph. Which would be easier?

She stretched, then bent to look at the binders once again. Her limbs were stiff and a latent fire burned in toes and fingertips where her nerve endings had been. But now that she was moving once again, the pain was turning from liquid fire into a stiff mobility as the lactic acid crystals in her stretching muscles began to break apart.

One of the binders was entitled (t)ELEGRAPH / (m)ORSE / (e)LECTROMAGNETIC COILS. She lifted it, sifted through its schematics and was instantly overwhelmed. No. Instead, she decided on (r)ADIO / (c)ODE LISTS / (i)DAHO. Still waking from the dream, hoping that Tom had personalized
something
that she could connect with before she would be forced to learn the radio’s labyrinthine controls, Sophie began to read the second binder from the back.

Tom had written few notes for this particular sheaf of printouts. Apparently there were survivalist militia groups based in Idaho, Lightfoots and Border Corps and Constitutionalists, hard and competent men who were intractable in their own beliefs. Men who Tom did not seem to trust. But apparently, from his few notations on some of the printouts summarizing these groups and their facility locations, Tom must have believed that some of them might be the only viable barter and trade partners in a world where sex and food and shelter would become currencies, where women would be fought over, where warlords and migratory clans of ...

This isn’t helping.

She flipped to the front and began to read how to operate the Grundig radio instead. If anyone was out there, she was going to find them.

* * * * *

All right.
Sophie put down her Thermos and blew warm air between her fingers.
I can do this.

She opened the shortwave radio’s aluminum faraday cage and pulled it out. The shield panel read “RADIO /// TRANSCEIV” in the same spray-painted stencils that Tom had used on the steel barrels which were situated outside the snow-closure gate of the waterfall canyon.

She pulled the Grundig out of its spring-sockets, and readied a new pair of lithium-ion batteries in case the current batteries were dead. If the contacts were corroded or if the batteries had ruptured, she would clean and replace them. She believed she had learned how.

Okay.

She flipped a switch, and a glaring white LED light came on.
Wrong one.
But it was good to know, the radio had an emergency flashlight embedded in its side. She flipped it off and hit a switch on the other edge. The radio came on. The redline in the power indicator whirred right up to three-quarters strength, batteries still operational.

Yes!

There was no sound coming out yet. She flipped the next page in the open binder and checked the radio’s speakers and connectors, all were solid. Turning the unit, she saw what the problem was and she felt a little ashamed at its obviousness: the volume was fine, the headphones were plugged in. She unplugged them, and a shrill, piercing cascade of white noise and static assailed her already-bloodied ears.

Cursing, she turned the volume down from 7.7 to 2.0. Static screams, pulses of electronic thunder and sibilant hisses, never-ending. Such was become the voice of the burning world.

She flipped the band selector, then looked again at Tom’s tape with the many arrow marks pasted carefully adjacent to the radio’s primary dial array — he had the default set to the citizens’ band at twenty-seven megahertz. But there would not be anything out there.

Taking in a deep breath and holding it, Sophie pulled out the notebook and the single pen she had found, then plugged the headphones back in and placed the foam ear-pad cushions over her still-ringing ears.

It was too quiet. She pushed the volume up to 2.5 then 3.0, and the low static murmur of
nothing out there
seemed to growl its approval.

So, then.
It was time to start hunting for survivors.

She was still holding her breath. She couldn’t help it. She referred to the binder again, flipping to Tom’s list of resident National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Radio stations. If anyone from the government was still alive and somehow had the power and infrastructure remaining to broadcast, they would be out there on NOAA. Those stations were the country’s network of FCC Emergency Alert System broadcasters in case of any catastrophe. Hopefully, the radio dish and antenna above the waterfall were still intact. The alternatives, if the nuclear blasts’ shockwaves had rebounded down into the canyon and destroyed the array, did not bear thinking about.

Okay. You can’t help them, they can’t help you. You can figure out the microphone later if you find someone you need or want to talk to. Focus, Sophie.
She breathed again into her trembling hands, then put her fingers back to the controls. She upped the volume to 3.5 and was good to go.
Just listen. Take notes. Listen.

There were twenty-seven Colorado transmitting stations listed in Tom’s printout, starting at frequency 162.400. With power set to 300, it was time to go searching.

Dillon transmitter, 162.400-300, WFO Boulder. Nothing.

She used the fine tuning knob to crawl across the sub-decimal frequencies as slowly as she could, making certain that no opportunity for contact would be missed.

Durango, 162.425-300, WFO Grand Junction. Too far across the mountains, perhaps? She still did not quite understand the limitations of the shortwave radio’s range. And nothing.

Franktown, 162.450-300, WFO Boulder once again. Nothing.

Was she doing this right? She sighed and flipped through the binder, keeping her bandaged index finger marking the NOAA call sign page. There was too much information about linked repeaters, radio scanners, transceiver settings, short-wave propagation, QSL cards, VHF transmissions, Skywave propagation ...

“Just tell me how the
fuck
to operate this thing,” she muttered. She gave up on the binder and crawled the frequencies a little further.

Mead-Longmont, 162.475-300. She gasped.

Was that a voice? A voice made of screams and static?

Her finger, still moving, sifted the fine tuner up and onward, over to 162.500. The human-like cries of static from Mead-Longmont went away.

“Damn it.”

She turned the volume up to 3.5, tuned back down to 162.475 to listen again. Nothing.

She waited.
Turn the volume up. Louder.
She held her breath.

Still nothing, only that inhuman cascade of static and silence. No cries for help, or anything else resembling a human voice.

Furious with herself, she wrote down the figures in the notebook. The pen’s ink was red, and the pen itself so old that the fill tube had yet to scratch more than a trace of red out across the page. She licked an unbandaged finger and touched it to the tip of the ballpoint, as if that would do any good. She was scratching at the paper more than she was writing, but the impression left on the page was still readable in the light.

Still nothing on 162.475. She would try there again later, when she had a better understanding of what the hell she was doing.

Next station on the list. She checked Tom’s table, saw that it would be 162.525-300 Fort Morgan, halfway to Colorado’s borders with Kansas and Nebraska. Fort Morgan was well out in truckers’ paradise, out there in what Sophie always thought of as the middle of nowhere. Too far, perhaps, to even try. What did it matter? She turned the dial —

“—eet Jesus, can anyone hear us? Help us, if you, if you are anywhere near us! God help us, please, we have at least six hundred wounded here and rad sickness triage, so many dying, children, babies, a woman just gave birth and now she’s gone, we don’t, we ...”

A burst of static. And seconds later:

“—egging you, anyone, we’ve got, we’ve got one doctor and three nurses and seven emerg —”

Sophie pulled off the headphones, her mouth gaping open in a silent scream of disbelief.

“Oh God.” That was her own voice, in tears. Her breath was frantic. “Oh, oh God. No. Oh, no.”

She couldn’t do this. She was trying. But ...

Okay, I
can
. But not all at once. Please.

“They’re all dying,” she was saying to herself, arguing with her fear. “Give them the honor of being there, even if they don’t know you’re there. Listen to them. If not now, when? When, Sophie?”

They were out there, dying horribly. Innocent people, mothers, children. And what could she do about it?

Okay. I’m trying. Trying.

She needed to calm down. She would write down 162.525 for later, when she had the microphone operational and when she had decided if she should make contact with someone. But what could she say to such a person? There was no help that she could give. Six hundred people, all dying in one place? She looked around the shelter, its air vents, its water tanks and electricity, and felt once again ashamed.

All for me alone.

When she put the headphones back on, she had deliberately switched from the fine tuner to the broad tuner and flipped the frequency,
Coward, weak,
well beyond the screams on 162.525.

God help them.

She wrote down the Fort Morgan information for later, when she could steel herself to listen to more. Halfway through the first word, the ballpoint pen gave out.

Gritting her teeth, yanking the headphones off and twisting her way up from the stool, Sophie looked around the shelter and its many shelves. She knew there would be more pens in the back, if she could only find the courage to go back there. But she still believed, in the unreasoning and primal underflow of her mind, that she was a ghost and her dead body was in the shower, or in the unopened freezer. Dead Sophie was waiting somewhere for ghost-Sophie to find her, to drag her down in horror and make her one with the rotting flesh, forever and ever. And daddy, daddy might be back there ...

“Stop it.”

The Valium. She really could not do this.

Where could she find another pen? How long would it take to find one? She got up, remembering the bulletin board that had fallen off the wall during the initial blast. She looked for it and realized that she had propped it up by the hose, sometime between regaining consciousness and crawling into the shower.