From the Fire II (6 page)

II-7

COME THE HELLBOUND

(4-6?-14)

Gong. Gong. Gong.

Someone was pounding on the shelter’s vault door, with a sledge hammer or a crowbar. There had been no time to pull out the H4’s toolbox, when Sophie had run for the shelter and almost fallen down the ladder-shaft. But there was, she knew perfectly well, a tire iron up there in the iron box, a set of wrenches, a crowbar ...

Gong.

“Lady!”

A huge man with a deep, hoarse and desperate voice was shouting through the door. Sophie could hear the vault’s pressure wheel being tested, on her side it was jerking half an inch back and forth, over and over again. But the door had auto-sealed itself, locked and pressurized once the floor plate inside the entryway had been activated by Sophie’s stepping through.

“We know you’re in here!” Another voice, a young woman. Sophie had never heard such hopelessness, such animalistic
rage
.

“Open this God-damned door!” The man again.
Gong.

Sophie backed away from the work table, as stealthily as she could manage. There was something running down her legs, something fluid and warm. Her socks were growing moist and she was trailing footprints of wetness as she backed away from the lead-curtained tunnel leading out to the entryway.

The guns.
The gun locker was in the back. Turning, she ran for the vinyl pressure seal.

She made it three steps, when a third voice cried out, “Sophie! Don’t open it! I’m sorry!”

Who
was
that? Who was the old man knew her name? Who had survived, and who knew where the shelter was?

Some kind of struggle erupted outside. Whatever the huge man had been holding to pound on the vault door, something had made him drop it. The man was grunting now, not as if he was fighting, but as if he was punching something — or someone — with all his strength. Again, again.

The young woman was shrieking, and as each shriek ended the metal thing hit the door again. She was not as strong as the man, but she sounded as if she could
claw
her way through the door if she had to.

Seven strikes, and the pounding stopped. There was an argument out there. A fourth voice arose, a young man’s. He was little more than a boy.

“For God’s sake lady, we have wounded, we have women! This girl here, her skin is falling off! My mother, my mother
died
on the way up here! You
hear
me? We’re
dying
out here! Open this
fucking
door!”

The huge man was shouting again. “Open it, or I swear, I swear I’ll kill him!”

The man, whoever had been pounded down, was yelling then as well. His voice was old, gurgling, gurgling blood. But he
knew
her, he knew her name.

“Don’t open it, Sophie! They tortured me to find out where this place is!”

And then she knew.

Pete.

Old Pete Henniger, Black Hawk’s retired sheriff. Years ago, he had given Tom unofficial and winking clearance to mark some of the road up to the shelter as private property. In return, he had simply wanted to know what Tom was up to, in his own good-natured and gentle way. In those early springs and on the weekends, he had even borrowed his grown son’s diesel-powered Cat and helped to bulldoze rubble off the canyon road.

He knew where the shelter was, and what it was. He knew quite well.

Sophie remembered him with perfect clarity. It had been a lifetime, it had been only days.

She remembered him from the intersection, outside the Ameristar Casino. She had driven through that chaos when he was in danger, when he had been keeping that policewoman from firing her shotgun. Just minutes before everything had happened to end the world, Sophie had smiled back at that bald man with the cigar, she had finished her latte and she had driven up through, leaving Pete there with that furious girl in the Che Guevara T-shirt, that hulking bouncer who was yelling in his face ...

Sophie was whispering, “Oh, Pete. Don’t be. Don’t ever be sorry.” She took a tearful breath, and said: “Forgive me. Forgive me.”

Pete was still yelling, “I swear, I told them they could only come in if there was no one here! But you, you
made
it, you —”

A gunshot ended Pete’s entreaties.

But they didn’t kill him, no. Sophie could hear him cry out, he was stifling his agonized cries and the huge man was yelling through the door again.

“She friend of yours, yeah? Lady, if you don’t open this door in the next thirty seconds, I swear I’ll kill him!”

I cannot let Pete die. Not for me.

Sophie had stopped running long before this. She was not only listening, she was turning. And as the huge man picked up the thing of metal again,
Gong, gong,
she was walking toward the shelter entry and staring at the illuminated keypad sequencer which was situated at her end of the radiation trap’s tunnel, the tunnel leading out to the ladder-shaft.

No. She could never let them in.

Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.

Not ever, not even if dear Peter Henniger had to die.

“You have fifteen seconds!”

Forgive me.

She turned away, heading back for the gun lockers beyond the pressure-seal, deeper into the shelter’s insides. Walking back through her warm wet footprints, Sophie went to the seal and pressed her way into the back rooms, toward the very end of the shelter, farther on unto the borderland of her own solitary world.

CODA

“Why give you me this shame?

Think you I can a resolution fetch

From flowery tenderness? If I must die

I will encounter darkness as a bride,

And hug it in mine arms.”

~

— Claudio in
Measure for Measure

(III, i), W. S.

(The survival story of Sophie St.-Germain continues, as she endures the trials of other survivors’ horrors and she experiences the Coming of the One in
FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE III: THE HOLLOW MEN
, also available from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)