From the Fire II (5 page)

Finding it, she angrily chastised herself again. The board had slid down while she had been asleep, and was lying face-down half under the work table in a pool of water.

She lifted it up, flipped it over, and little leaves of soggy paper went everywhere. She scrambled to keep them out of the puddle. There went a contractor’s business card, a to-do list written in Tom’s hand, a picture of Lacie aged three with chocolate pudding smeared all around her smile.

Oh, my baby.

She slid the picture of Lacie up to the table with one hand and gathered damp leaves of paper with the other. And there, on a blue sheet of crinkled and smoothed-out paper with a piece of electrical tape on its side, was the name “MITCH,” a frequency number, and a call sign.

* * * * *

More reading, quickly. The microphone would have to wait, too much time was going by.

Everyone, dying out there. Now.
Now.
No time.

But she knew how to transmit garbled Morse code now through the Grundig without even resorting to the telegraph. She couldn’t yet send a clear and understandable message out to Mitch, but she could let him know
— If he’s still alive —
that she was out there.

“Okay. Okay.”

She sat back at the table with the newfound pen that had been taped on a string to the side of the bulletin board, and opened to a new page in her notebook. She still didn’t know how much time had passed since the nuclear blast and the sealing of the shelter, but those were trivial matters now. She might just know how to call Mitch. Immediately.

She spun the radio’s broad seek dial, then fine-tuned to Mitch’s frequency. He was shown as preferring to lurk on the amateur low band. She flipped the Morse transmitter key plate open and poised her finger over the key, ready to send a random blur of dots and dashes if Mitch really was out there. Tom’s brother had taken the codename “Itchy,” which had made Sophie smile. That was what Lacie used to call him before she could form her
m
’s with any constancy.
Itchy-one-one.

She flicked to his call sign frequency. Static and nothing. She turned the volume up even higher.

Come on.
She began to cry.
Please.
Drawing in a ragged breath, she propped her elbows on the table, rested her hands on the metal surface and rested her forehead between her arms.

No.

A minute of static. Still, the signal was lifeless. Then suddenly, a very loud
click-click
in her headphones, and:

“Soph oh my God you made it, is Tom, he, oh thank, thank the ... is he ...”

Sophie almost fell off the stool. Her head jerked up and she cried out, “Mitch!”

Of course Mitch could not hear her.

She slipped off the stool, standing on one leg and her hip went
pop
and she tumbled over. The headphones came with her, the Grundig was dragged to the edge of the table and the headphone jack popped out. Mitch’s voice blurted out of the speakers, but the static caused by the ripped-out jack overtook whatever he was saying.

“No!”

Sophie rose and her right leg buckled. She clutched at the stool’s chrome-plated leg and pulled herself up standing, slamming the headphone jack back into the receiver. The speakers went dead as the earphones took over. Another burst of static, wasp-like and coruscating.

Mitch’s voice was very far away now, each word definable only by its frantic length in syllables. Static roars were taking over Mitch’s voice and he was fading away with every second.

Sobbing, Sophie started pounding away at the Morse key. She could hear her own transmission as narrow beeps between pulses of silence. She turned down her volume, the keening beeps were hurting her ears and Mitch’s words were not decipherable any longer. She stopped the frantic pounding and started keying “S. O. S.,” “... — — — ...,” which she had learned from a History Channel special played during the Titanic centenary. Such little pieces of trivia, lifelines into nothingness.

Save me. Please save me.

Mitch went silent. Sophie stopped keying.

She buried her face within her hands.

“No ...”

But Mitch was alive. What of Lacie, her daughter? Was she there, sitting in Mitch’s lap? What was
the place?

Mitch, where? Where?

Then a series of beeps short and long was chirping in her ears, a slow and measured pulse of dots and dashes.

A code. Morse code.

She did not have time to turn the binder page over to the Morse code alphabet, and no experience with deciphering it in the moment. She grasped the string-pen and started writing out the dots and dashes, short beeps and long, as best she could.

She had about two hundred periods and hyphens written in the notebook then, but she had only begun to discern the different lengths of time between letters and words halfway through Mitch’s transmission. And she had only received half of the message.

Three seconds of silence passed. She turned the page. Would Mitch send the same message again?

Yes.

This time, she could tell that he was sending the exact same code word sequence as before. He must have written down a message to send her, one he could keep repeating while she struggled to learn the code.

The ongoing message ended. Three seconds of dead air. Then it began all over again.

By the third time, Sophie felt confident that she had the correct spacing on some of the words. But it was still only a page full of symbolic notation, and she had no idea which letters to write down beside any of the transmissions except “S” for “...” and “— — —” which must be “O.” That left most of the message unknown.

But he would send it again. As Mitch was sending the message a fourth time, Sophie moved on to a new sheet of paper.

The radio signal cut off.

Sophie hit what she thought was the volume as she looked up, but it was the broad search dial instead. She flipped past Mitch’s frequency. Keeping herself calm, she glided the needle back to his number again. There was static there, but no voice and no more code.

“Don’t be afraid.” These words were foolish, stupid even. But she needed to hear someone say them. “Don’t be.”

She took off the headphones and left the radio speakers on, in case the signal with Mitch could be reestablished. Until then, she would decode her third pass at the message as best she could. She found the binder page on Morse code letter definitions again and began writing. Some of the questionable gaps between letters, whether they were pauses between words or not, were slowing her down. To work more quickly, she decided to write the letters out in all capitals in clustered groups of three. Then, once she had the code solidified to an alphabet, she would try to make actual words out from the mess.

Fifteen minutes or more had gone by, and still Mitch’s frequency gave only static. She turned down the volume so that she could concentrate.

She looked over what she had written at last, Mitch’s final completed message:

~

CAU TIO NCH ANN OTS

ECU RWE ARN SHE LTU

NDA UNT JEM MSH OUS

EUK NOW WHE REH AVE

CAR CAN TGO UTS OPH

COM EIN THR EEW EEK

IFU CAN LVE USHE SAL

IVE

~

Eventually, she puzzled out the entire message:

~

CAUTION CHAN NOT SECUR

WE AR N SHELT

UND AUNT JEMMS HOUSE

U KNOW WHERE

HAVE CAR

CANT G OUT

SOPH COME

IN THREE WEEK

IF U CAN

LVE U SHE

S A L

IVE

~

She spoke the words like a pleading chant, her voice growing higher and more desperate with the slowness of every questioned syllable.

“Caution. Chan. Channel? Channel not secure. We are in shelt ... shelter? Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where? Have car. Can’t g ... get out? Go out? Can’t get out. Soph, come in three week. Three weeks, if you can. Live? No. Love. Love you. She’s alive.”

Oh my. Oh.

“She’s alive.”

Sophie was crying and laughing, her hands pressed against her face in exhaustion and disbelief. Lacie Anna Saint-Germain, her own beloved daughter, was surely sitting there in Mitch’s arms. Lacie was alive.

II-5

THE DAY AFTER

(4-5/6-14)

She had fallen back asleep on the pile of clothing, with the radio still humming its static canting. If Mitch had been able to re-contact her, she would have heard it. But there had only been the humming sound of the ventilation ducts, the dripping of water, and the slow reliable surge of the latent generator in the back. She had hoped to dream of Tom, but nothing had come to her.

One of her hands was clutching a piece of paper. No, a photograph. She opened her fingers, smiling down at what she knew she was going to see.

Lacie. Smiling, an old Polaroid. One of Mitch’s antiques. He had snapped that on her third birthday.

Alive.

How had they survived? It must have been Tom’s warning call, when he had sent Mitch to grab Lacie from grandma’s. Sophie wondered what Mitch had said in his desperation, what he had done ... why wouldn’t he take Sophie’s mother ...

Don’t think of that.

Was anyone else with them? Sophie’s struggle for sanity was washing away, she had a purpose once again. A meaning. She needed to figure out how to mark time. Would the computer clock keep working without access to the Internet, if she powered it up? Could she make herself a water-clock of some kind with one of the water bottles and some thread, like she and Jolynn had done once for a junior high science project so long ago?

There had to be a way to measure time. She had three weeks to master the shelter and to read everything in the binders, to learn about the weapons, the generator fuel, salvaging cars, the protective suits that would be in the back, the gas masks, travel, all of it and everything.

And she would. She would. She would learn it all and then in three weeks she would open the vault door and go out of the shelter, because Lacie was out there and she was still
alive
.

Aunt Jemm’s house, that still meant nothing to her. She knew very little about Mitch’s extended family, only that he was close to everyone out as far as second cousins. He even had a genealogy website and a Civil War page, tracing back the Saint-Germains to the early Nineteenth Century. Remembering that, she wondered at what had happened between Tom and Mitch after their father’s funeral. Surely, being estranged from his own brother was a deep pain for Mitch. That, she suspected, was why “Uncle Itchy” had distanced himself from Lacie.

Mitch and Tom would never now know peace, would never reconcile. But Sophie swore then that she would make the time to get to know Mitch all over again, to make whatever amends she could. The past would be honored in its way, not as an apology for the way things had been and how that had gone wrong, but as a sacred remembrance for the world that ended, and the man she always loved.

There was more to think about, to question. Mitch had worked at Rocky Flats in his time with the government, assisting with coordination of the hazmat plutonium cleanup. He was always bragging about how he had managed to “permanently borrow” two of the suits after he left the Environmental Protection Agency and the Kaiser-Hill Company.

Was that why he and Lacie were still alive?
The suits
. What other precautions did he possess? Had he built a shelter of his own?

She would not wonder at these things, she would not let them gnaw at her. No. Her determination was building with every moment. She would learn all that needed to be done, she would learn where Aunt Jemm’s house was, she would drive there and Hell to anyone who would stand in her way. She
would
find her daughter who needed her most of all.

She kept herself busy, pacing, working. Thinking.

She had, with considerable pain, managed to lean the fallen shelving unit onto its narrower side. In doing so she had found the remnants of another binder. This one was untitled, and the dates on the printouts were as recent as October 2013. That must have been Tom’s last visit to the shelter, before the coming of winter had forced him to close everything down.

Perhaps. But one particular point of that did not make sense. The snow-closure gate had still been chained in the up position. Tom had meant to come here, one last time. She remembered their worst fight, last Halloween, and started to piece together what might have happened.

We fought about him coming up here and he left on long-term assignment in Maryland and Virginia the very next day. A kiss and a goodbye to Lacie, but not for me.

“There’s no reason for that to haunt you,” said Sophie. “Forgive. Love.” Her voice was the calmest she had heard it in a very long time.

She sat at the work table by the radio, which she decided to turn off for awhile. Filling her Thermos with water, she started to read the untitled binder and its riddling miscellany.

The first printout was about submachine guns. Tom had a very clear and precise sequence of events listed out for handling the weapons. One, brace the extension stock and remove the ammunition clip. Two, check twice to make sure the clip was absolutely empty. Then cleaning, then safety, loading, bracing, aiming, sweep-firing, point firing ...

She stopped reading. Nothing there was useful, not yet. But now that she knew her daughter was surely out there, she was ready to think extraordinary thoughts. Yes, she would learn how to use not only the submachine guns, but the hunting and assault rifles as well.

Yes,
she could — if she was going to be raped or taken prisoner. Or to protect her daughter. She could kill if she had to.

The next printout was a crude Word dump of Tom’s own unfiltered notes. It was not procedural, but rather moral in its rambling. It was something about which weapon was best for outside defense, which for shelter defense, which for recon, and which for hunting. It was titled
“For Soph.”
After this were notes on how best to kill people in a merciful manner, how best to kill men who were leading other men into battle in the bloodiest way possible in order to break the others’ spirits, and how to kill a family member in their sleep.

“No.”

Those pages were ripped out and dropped onto the floor.

Next was a Westword story about Mehrdad Farhadi, the Iranian scientist who had set up a microphone in Denver International Airport last August and announced to everyone that he was a nuclear physicist, that he had been working on nuclear weapons for the Iranian government and that he was surrendering himself to the American people as a matter between himself and his God.

She remembered the incident well. The first stirrings of the Shelter Panic, in retrospect, had started when Iran had sent agents to free Farhadi from FBI confinement and nine people had been killed as the attack was repulsed. The mission failed, but barely. The United States, England and Canada declared war on Iran the day after. None of that was intended to come out in public, but an FBI agent had ended her career to post the security videos of the attack through Wikileaks. It was all there in the article.

After that, another printout concerning the Korean Air Lines Flight KE 007, which had wandered into restricted airspace in 1983 and had been shot down over the Sea of Japan by an Su-15 Soviet interceptor. Sophie frowned as she parsed the old article. It was ancient history. Why had Tom decided it was so important?

She closed the binder and pulled out her notebook, along with a road atlas she had found in the shelving wreckage. It was time to start planning for the future, for her daughter who was everything.

Where was Mitch now? She would figure out the mystery of Aunt Jemm’s house in its own time. Soon, she might even talk to him. But most likely, he was to the north. Mitch was unmarried and deeply devoted to his extended family. Most of the Saint-Germains lived in Quebec, North Dakota and Wyoming. She would need to stick to the mountain roads as long as possible, perhaps 119 up to Nederland, 72 past Boulder or what was left of it. The Rocky Mountains would shield her — she hoped — from the worst radiation to the east, and the fallout storms coming in from the west.
Three weeks and come.
The radiation would need to disperse itself, and there would be a fragile and narrow window of time before the second wave of storms could rise anew. She would not journey as far as Estes Park or Loveland, for those were surely towns filled with the dead or dying. Perhaps down onto Interstate 25 for awhile, between the annihilated cities. If the H4 was still able to run despite the electromagnetic pulse, she could ram her way through some of the dead traffic, or perhaps even four-wheel through the ditches if they were dry. What of 85 north toward Greeley, itself probably a crater now? What of ...

Sophie froze and went perfectly still.
Voices.

Not from inside of her head, not behind her, but elsewhere.

And then, a pounding sound. From far away, out beyond the edges of the shelter-world. From the
outside
.

And that was when Sophie’s second brief life in the High Shelter ended, cut short even as it had begun, and her third life cast her forever into the tortures of the World of the Great Dying, the world that the Archangel remade and was so reborn from out of the White, from the Fire.