“Right after that gunshot, I was driving up close behind them, just after they pull away. Think the dust they kicked up peeling out, that barely hid me. They almost left a kid screaming there, that woman was his mommy, I believe. But in the end as they drive away, he limp-run and he got back in. They was sorting out who was living and who was dying, see.
“Somehow, they knew this shelter were here, and that it might not be enough for holding everyone.
“So that police car, your Pete, he slow just a little and he go under the waterfall. I hid that night, sleeping in my own car with one eye open. Yeah, you really can do that after ‘Nam, I do assure you. I hear things, shots and screams, but I keep sleeping lest I die. That I’m sorry.
“I come after them through the waterfall, day after, and that police car is full of the dead. Piled. And the trunk was bulging, I don’t like to think about that.
“But that police car, maybe it still run? Its doors are open and the water now pooling up over the floorboards. Help me, I did see all those dead. I did reach in and pull out one shotgun before I come into your tunnel. Promise you, I left it by that fallen Good Man you name Sheriff Pete. It his gun, his car my guide to find you. I honor him, that gun be his forever now. Brother mine, I honor him that.
“And here I am. Think you can figure out the rest.
“No. No, I do not want to.
“Getting tired. So tired. But Mrs. S.-G., no I will not call you Sophie any longer ma’am, much more now you stop asking me, love. I thank you. Now hear me to the last.
“When you leave this place, with me or without me, the dead out there? After poor Pete who I cover, well the bodies up in that cave, that police car, the one by your SUV? Lady, all I can tell you is look away.
“The Beast is terrible in his decay, no crime of man nor woman too great for him to suffer and to show you. Look away. Ain’t no soul who should have to see what those pathetic creatures became before the end. Just you look away ever after, say your grace, lest you be scarred forever.
“There are many things to see out there, Mrs. S.-G., that are going to destroy you. Ain’t no reason to make it worse than the worst already be. Behold what you must, seek your daughter. And if I am blessed to live awhile longer, then I swear that I will guide you. Sixty-something-old Hell and gone, yes. I will be your soldier.
“Perhaps even you and I will go out together through the waterfall, you will look up into the sky and see the Archangel of storms. That burning sky, you see her soon in her robes of crimson, Sophie love. You see her soon. She the kiss, the soul of death.
“But maybe, for you and not for me, I’m far too gone now… for you, she also be the spirit of rebirth. She the Archangel, she that swirling whirl of un-creation and remaking, crippled on her throne upon the sky. Oh, her face of cloud and drowning. Her wings of bloodiest black of ever-night. Oh, love… I am so afraid…”
“I am done. Keep my Mabelie, as I will keep my Jenny. Know now, daughter so alike to my Lucille, that I do love you.”
(And at the end, as written by another hand, perhaps once the elder Sophie’s diary had been taken up by the Geyser Basin Tribe as a holy book in the Lost Age, it is written: “The Testament of Silas endeth here.”)
IV-5
THE SHARDS THAT ARE GONE FOREVER
(A researcher’s notes: From this point for a time, the record begins to fray. Excruciating detail lies intermittent with the sparsest of riddles.)
(Following the detailed entries concerning her recorded conversations with Silas, Mrs. St.-Germain provides us with only brief and meager anecdotes concerning her ongoing life within the shelter. The obsessive and iterative detail provided in earlier sections of the diary is lacking in this regard.)
(And why?)
(It seems, I believe, that once Sophie had another soul — someone else within the shelter to confide in — her priorities completely changed. Her ultimate goal was still to be reunited with her daughter, but she was no longer reading and writing endlessly to keep herself from becoming suicidal. Ergo, she no longer had the inclination to detail everything she did. Clearly, care for Mr. Colson was paramount and preparations for the Gray Rain Exodus were continuing as she planned for the road journey to Mitch and Lacie and the house near to the town of Kersey, Colorado.)
(That tale is soon to follow, as best as it can be reconstructed.)
(What she specifically states that she had not done, however, was to use the radio to search for survivors or to contact the emergency fortification in Fort Morgan ever again. She dared not attempt to call Mitch and Lacie either, not after the warning that her channel was not secure. Others, particularly military splinter force representatives, were surely listening and desperately striving to find Sophie’s shelter for themselves.)
(However, she does note that she did find a small digital recorder, which was used to record the conversations with Silas. She also wrote briefly that she would turn the radio on and plug the recorder in near the speaker when she went to bed, listening. She would wake to several hours of recorded static which she could fast-forward through in several minutes, likely to confirm that Mitch had not tried to contact her.)
(One time, after several days, she did hear a recorded series of clicks. She slowed it down. There, just once and not repeated. But the words were sent by Mitch, she was certain of it. She quickly decoded it in accordance with her earlier methodology, and found this: ‘SHE LOVES YOU’ and another line thereafter, ‘LEAVE IN SEVEN DAYS.’)
(My bare narrative, derived from her few other notes from this dire time, continues hereafter.)
And what of the time thereafter, before the Gray Rain Exodus?
We know only a little of the interim. But we can guess.
IV-6
A VISION OF MISSING PIECES
In her last days in the shelter, Sophie had cared for Silas whenever he was awake, and when he was not, she was working to gather supplies. The planning for the journey was everything. She barely slept. Despite her exhaustion, she felt a fire inside herself, a warmth not quite like flame, but rather sunlight. The echoes of the elder world were awakened inside her, and although she dared not give the frenetic compulsion which drove her the forbidden name of Hope, she suspected that it might be a shadow, some promise left behind by that lost spirit in its passing.
She resisted the temptation to call Chris in Fort Morgan, and she resisted calling Mitch. But only barely. She was afraid to even listen for Mitch now, because his warning about unsecure channels, compounded by her suspicion that the military survivors in Fort Morgan were trying to trace her, kept her too afraid to rely on electronics of any kind.
She knew her caution was extreme, but at the same time, such things were extraneous. There was Silas, there were the guns, and the maps as well. And there was the plotting of the mountain journey. She was going to be leaving the shelter soon, with Silas if at all possible, and she was going to find Lacie or die in the trying. Everything else paled beyond that one conviction.
And so, near to the end of her time in the shelter she disconnected the radio. It was time to pack, time to load stretchers and mountaineer pallets to be raised up the shaft by the pulley system. She bundled the radio and its wooden box of materials, then added its bulk atop one of the wheeled gurneys from the supply room.
Soon, with Silas gazing through the Sanctuary’s open door every time she passed him, she would be moving blocks of equipment to the entrance tunnel. Very soon it would be time to set up the utility crane, to raise everything she would need for the journey.