“Alone,” Sophie whispered. “Leave me alone.”
She expected the spider-voice, the laughter, but the ghost once deep inside of her had nothing else to say.
VI-2
The Crossing of the War Ground
Darkest hour, the deep of night. There were no stars to behold, no moon that she could find. There was only the endless purple-gray, an untraceable radiance of lingering twilight that seemed to be nothing more than afterimages caused by the high-speed ghosting of the H4’s high beams. Rising in the mist, the windborne streams of ashes turned to gluey swirls, spattering the fractured windshield.
Much more fuel had been lost, despite Sophie’s closing of the gas valve before she got moving again. She wasn’t sure how much longer the engine could keep her and Silas moving. She coasted through fog banks, and whenever the wind rose and thinned all the mist away, she would race on at sixty miles an hour. This far north of Denver and Loveland and Pearson’s Corner, toward Wyoming, there were fewer wrecks and many more straight-aways. Once, even, the terrifying glimpse of a sodden and limping horse crossing over the road. But after that, nothing and no one. Far beyond the wreck-clog of death of Colorado’s major cities, the northern wasteland seemed to be a dead zone.
When she had halted, finally convinced that the men of Pearson’s Corner had given up their pursuit, she had not only cared for Silas. She had finally wiped the last of the girl’s blood and bone chips off the front of her suit, had thrown the gore-stained rags out of the window. She wondered if there was any brain matter still in her hair, decided not to search for it. Every time now she looked in the rearview back at Silas, making certain he was still breathing, she absolutely refused to meet her own gaze.
What if I still have that girl all over my hair, my face?
She armed the sweat off her brow, her cheeks, and kept on driving.
Silas had regained consciousness perhaps an hour after she had re-bandaged him, had even spoke and begged for water. But he could not open his eyes. Sophie had cleaned and cared for him as best she could, but he was losing blood he could not afford to spare. She had forced a little water down his parched and eager throat, had cleaned his face, had touched his hands as he reached blindly out for her. One of his hands was almost fine, though trembling; the other had been clutched behind his back with a nasty sprain, almost broken.
“Go, naw, go. Don’t wait on me,” he had managed to whisper. She had kissed his brow, shifted him (and he had almost screamed), supported his back with a pillow so that his breathing would be less ragged. A sickly sweet smell had emerged from his back when she had lifted him to put a cleaner blanket underneath. The one she pulled out was sodden with pus and sweat and the stains of bloody feces.
She had allowed herself perhaps thirty more minutes to clean him, then had gotten out, sealed the gas cap, and made one pacing circuit around the H4 looking at all the battle damage (and it was bad, and the blood, the blood), and then gotten back in.
The endless driving. Sophie did not even know what exhaustion was any longer, it was simply the unbroken and almost senseless mode of lingering existence. Silas’ groans of pain, the sound of him coughing up water from the straw and trying again to drink all on his own, these sounds were gratefully received and reassuring. He might not last another day beyond this night, but for now, he was somehow still alive.
“Tough old bird,” she whispered.
Somehow, he had heard her.
“Damn right, this bird in hand be far, far better than any two weaklings down in the bush,” he had murmured back to her. “So don’t you let me go, Mrs. S.-G. Not just yet.”
And she laughed, more in relief than joy. “That’s my Silas.”
He told her to keep moving, before the fuel leak could run them dry. She reached back and took his faltering hand. She even sat up straighter, craned her neck and managed to smile at him. But he could not see her. His barely-opened eyes were white with the first glimmerings of radiation cataracts, he knew or at least suspected that he was going blind. But Sophie, letting his fingers go, said only, “Rest, my sweet. Rest.” She decided not to tell him that what little was left of his silver hair had fallen out.
She was able to drive faster as he slept again, crossing over I-25 at a turnaround gap in the mid-wall and using the near lane of southbound where the wrecks were fewer. Toward the end, it seemed, no one had been driving toward Loveland or Boulder or Denver. Almost everyone had been driving north.
But many of the wrecks were in the middle, hugging either side of the guard rail, heaped high in the water-filled ditches. There in the sunken ground, it appeared that people had parked their cars in the final moments and crawled under them. Those bodies were floating in grisly masses. The middle of the morass had turned into a kind of haphazard floating wall of trash, and the rain-driven debris gathered there as well. That left the southbound lanes of I-25 as the fastest way north and into the unknown. There were bodies here and there sprawled out in the gravel, fetal figures and some still eerily sitting up, crumpled along the divider wall. But the road itself was almost clear.
Sophie dared to edge the H4 up to fifty, and the engine complained loudly. Sometimes, even, it sputtered and slowed before it powered its way through again with a delayed and guttering roar. It would not ever go much faster now. She drank water, let it splash over her cheek, shook her head to stay awake. She wondered what would happen to Pearson’s Corner, now that the women had staged their revolts and Zachary was left dead on the highway. Who could be left alive? Perhaps, with so many of the men having departed to chase after Sophie, the women had managed to take over the truck stop, or even to escape. Perhaps they had holed themselves up in one of the outbuildings, or reached a hostage-truce in which they could finally leave the accursed place.
And go where?
She sighed. She wondered if there would ever be a time when people would be able to band together once again in any numbers without violence, or without dominance, or threats of torment. The women. She wished she could have saved them all. But she was one person, a mother who had sworn herself to her daughter. Or at least, to her daughter’s memory.
You can’t control what the Fates shall will for them. Not any of that, not for anyone. Hopefully in the future, there would be a time when she could save others. She had killed, endured, survived. She still feared death, but somehow not nearly as much as she had even three days and nights ago.
Days. Those mere, predictable units of measured and fading time now seemed impossible. She wanted to believe that someday, she would be able to help other men, shelter children, men like Silas, girls like the caged one, families like the peaceful and dying survivors she had met briefly near Calvary Chapel outside of the ruined town of Ward. But that was only a hazy future, one that she might never touch.
In the deeper night the rains began to thin, turning to low curls of mist that glided along the road, pooling and even revealing with furtive circles where the potholes and craters were. This, along with the spread of distance as the slowing winds grew clearer, allowed her to drive even faster. But the engine could not hold fifty for very long.
She could not stop and care for Silas again. Not yet. It was time for her to whisper soundlessly to herself, saying nothing but forcing her mind to stay awake, time to put as much distance between the ravaged Hummer and Pearson’s Corner as she could.
Perhaps half an hour later, there was a sudden and drastic change in the very nature of the road. It was not lightly littered, or barely warped, or speckled by only occasional human remains. Gashes of it were clear, perfectly. There were furrowed lines of sodden ash, grease streaks, piles of rubble and melted tires compressed together in blob-like heaps along the center guard rail, yes. But everything large, entire wrecks, dunes, the corpses and skeletons of cattle and of people, had all been crushed and pushed off to one side. By what? Bulldozers? There were snakes of wispy ash spreading across the still-dampened road, but they were faint there beneath the mist, like teasing and ghostly fingers. Entire stretches and narrows within the road had been cleared, perhaps only a night before.