There were five scenarios, one of them impossible. The first, of course, was that the Hummer was still operational. This would be the ideal. Worse and second, perhaps the police cruiser could be cleared of dead bodies, moved from the pool and used as a vehicle instead. This was unlikely. Third, Silas’s black car might still be running, although its windshields were cracked and its viability unknown. Fourth, she would wheel Silas on a gurney, bundled in blankets, out down the mountain road until she either died or found another means of transportation. And fifth, she would stay in the shelter.
This perfectly reasonable alternative, this was the forbidden scenario.
I will not hide and cower here until I die. The Patrice voice, the father-song, the old Sophie, even the voice of Tom all tried to reason with her. All failed. I will not be weak.
Lacie was waiting out there for her.
And so, the endless preparations, the reading, the training. She took care of Silas, marveling every day how he lingered and tried his very best to grow stronger. The infections were somehow staved off, but the clothing in his flesh had begun to fester and the radiation, she knew, would inevitably prove fatal. Somehow he stayed, he breathed, absolutely determined to see the beginning of the journey through.
But he was fading, slowly. And time was not standing still.
These thoughts were always pushed away with lists, with supply bins, with packaging, tearing apart bundles and resealing them once again. She tried in vain to think of every possible thing that she might need, every bulky and trivial and precious piece that might somehow save her life. There must be blank paper, there would be dish soap. All of the medicine, of course. All of the armor, all of the weapons as well. Toilet paper, fire-starter logs, butane lighters, wiper fluid, gas cans, bungees to load even more on the car roof than could ever fit inside of any vehicle.
Perhaps they would find an RV in time. But what then of gas? And how could they find one old enough to still be running?
And yes, Silas told Sophie the deadly serious Army jokes about WD-40, socks, MREs and duct tape. None of these crucial and pathetic materials would go wanting.
Silas would lie there on his side, humming Guthrie and some Elvis Presley. Lately he was obsessed with the Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever specifically. She could hear him as she pushed through the transparent door seal between the Sanctuary and the great room. Every time she entered that tunnel, he would go silent so that he could hear her work.
And he was drifting, ever drifting. Sometimes, the pain would be too much and as he would not ask for morphine, she would hear him from the supply room or from the corridor, whispering cries for Jenny. And Sophie would come to comfort him, and there would be then that silent wisdom in his eyes, the knowledge that she was preparing for the great exodus and that she was hoping, almost praying, to take him with her.
This was a fragile thing. For although a stranger of illusion, that thing something quite like Hope, had been reawakened in the back of Sophie’s mind, its reflection was not to be found in Silas’s eyes. There, there was only fear, folded behind a strange, unvoiced and pleading acceptance. She could feel that he did not think he would live long enough to be able to go with her. But when she cleaned the guns, or read military base proximity charts, or tried to practice moving in her pallid sheaths of armor, his eyes then still were bright.
He taught her as best he could.
He had beheld the Burning World, experienced it, and he had spoken his dying words to her. Having told so many secrets, he had lived.
But to Sophie he seemed hollowed, unwilling to even hint that he might be able to go on with her. It was as if his gentle surprise, even shock at his own survival was so delicately fragile that to even breathe a word of it out loud would be the end of him.
And so she would perch on the edge of his cot, holding her knees like a little girl again. She would smile, and put her unmoving hand over his shivering own. There for a time he would close his eyes. At “night,” he would hum to her, sweet Creole-tinged lullabies whose names had been lost somewhere before Sophie’s own childhood had drifted away.
He would flow along with the morphine into sleep, and Sophie would creep over to her own cot to keep watch over him. She would plan and read. She would listen to the eerie sped-up static of the radio recording. Bedding down beside Silas, she would stay in a tight golden ring of light and scheme away the intricate possibilities of the journey.
Which way over the mountains, north before the ravaged east, could be the safest? Maps and guesses and twenty alternate branches of twisting road all led toward Kersey. With Silas and his memory of all his mountain travels driving Jenny and with Lucille, she would have her guide. She would make the way. She had to.
But if he dies…
Or what if he lingered, unable to be moved, unable yet to die? Then there would be an overdose for him, one last kiss, and the mercy.
God forbid, the mercy.
She closed Tom’s binder and shut her eyes.
The last “evening” before she left the shelter and was lost to the endless rim of the Burning World, Sophie had known Silas’s truest smile. He had been braver than usual. Although he dared not speak of his own health, or even the possibility of journeying with her, he did whisper to her of Fort Morgan and the Pawnee Grasslands and even the forgotten bombing range over the Colorado border, southeast of Cheyenne. He told her, if not all had burned, where the Army was likeliest to be.
The Army, perhaps, could be the enemy. There was no way to know.
He knew the town of Kersey, although he had not been there since the seventies. He dimly recalled the courses of 34 and Colorado Road 54 1/2, the intricate little grid of shop-streets and farm-stations laid out like a tilted heart upon the plains. He even remembered Mabel’s place, Mabel Painter. She ran a little trailer counter and she baked a mean cherry pie.
A smile, one more for Sophie. He winced away the pain. Mabel Painter was the great-great-something grand niece of John Kersey Painter, who founded that bump of a village in 1908. Silas seemed to know all of the haggard old towns of Colorado’s eastern plains, and the older and smaller they were, the more he knew of their people.
All dead now. All gone.
He had told her insistently, never go to a city. Never again. The airbursts had surely been everywhere a city had once been, his stories from Amelia at the airport had told him that. The radiation would kill long before any highway through a city could be exploited. Something quite like a father-daughter argument had arisen between them.
“So we go northeast.”
“No. Give me the sticker map,” he said to her. He frowned, winced and pinched the upper bridge of his nose. Sophie realized then that Silas had once worn glasses. What had happened to them? How well could he see?
And he promises he can take a quail at fifty paces.
He moved one of the red stickers on Tom’s projected chart. “There, I think. Look at this one.” He tapped the strike map’s line north and south along the Front Range. “See those red circles? Those are direct hits. Orange are airbursts. Your husband, you tell me had connections. In deep. He had damn dreaded reason to guess this good. See this one? That’s NORAD. This one, Air Force Academy. These two Fort Carson, red-orange. Hell, I trained there before I was assigned to First Infantry for ‘Nam, you know that? Didn’t last, lots of KP. They didn’t like coloreds then.” He grinned. “Space Command, these two oranges and that red. Colorado Springs, three red and one orange for good measure and gone. Now look at these wind arrows, west-east all down the mountains.”