“Accurate?”
“Enough, I think so. Your dear Tom weren’t no meteorologist, he guessed at the course of canyons and peak elevations, looks like. Those winds, they’s why we gotta go. And these brown crosses, those are the places all I told you?”
“Nearly all,” Sophie replied. “I stopped counting.”
He nodded. “My guesses for some few shelters. Under-buildings, nothing that would have made it. Those are all burned out, almost certain. These blue stars? Truck stops, least the ones I remember. A little safer. Yellow bands, now, see, all these?”
“Low radiation pockets. Like we agreed, and some of my guesswork. Yes?”
“Think so. You do good, Sophie. You do good and I see that. Not just low radiation, maybe. Maybe wind shadows, caused by the terrain. That’s, in the end, where you want to be.”
She lifted her eyes away from the rainbowed puzzle grid of the map. “We’re not staying safe. We’re going to Kersey, Silas.” Sophie leveled a steely gaze at him. “We’re finding Mitch, my daughter. And if she is still alive, by some miracle, my… my mother. My mother too.”
He watched her silently.
“So north, we’re decided then,” she said, pretending to study the map of the central mountains once again. Mostly, she was turning her head from him, so that he might not see the brimming of her tears.
“North it is. Yeah, we don’t go east and down until 34 if we can help it. And 34 might all be blocked, too much ruin and traffic pile. Far as you can take the mountains north, without going into Wyoming. Not sure there’s enough radiation shadows, under the wind up there. We use the Rockies and their shields, mother pray.”
“Tom said Yellowstone would be the best place to… to try to live. The caves. The geyser basin.”
“Well maybe you take me there, after I meet your amazing girl.”
She smiled a little, a brave imitation of the belief he wanted to see in her. “Maybe, Silas, I will.”
He swallowed. He took her hand. “We leaving soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well. It’s good, it’s good here. If I… Sophie, if you can’t move me, I understand…”
“Shhh.” She kissed the yellowing bandage over his milky eye, then turned from him. She flipped the chart page in Tom’s scrap-filled binder of promised and suspected Armageddons. Another chart, this one useless. Flu epidemic projections. She turned another page. The picture of Lacie fell out into her fingers.
The picture. The only one, now.
“I’m coming, baby,” she said to the grinning face there. She traced her daughter’s chin. “Mommy is coming to where you are. And all the devils, the monsters, mommy and grampy Silas are going to chase them all away into the night. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Silas whispered. “Woah-damn. I promise you that. Guns and all, we going. She worth the world.”
“Yes. Yes, she is.” Sophie kissed the picture, one last time. “Wait for mommy,” she lilted. “Mommy is coming, very soon.”
IV-7
EMERGENCE
(This, then, is the very last shelter-oriented section of the diary which is written out in full. It was a bare skeleton of notations, once, the first time there inscribed. We can see from the many hands, the different ages of coded cross-writing, that Sophie revisited this tale several times, adding remembered details as she went. The resultant record is one of moments, with black gaps of the unknown dividing each of them.)
Sophie pushed the last of the cold aluminum supply carts out into the great room. Her ammunition-filled hand-sack, one of the most important things of all, was cradled atop its reflective surface. The crucial elements for her exit into the Burning World lay around the sack in a series of circles, like a surgeon’s tools. Submachine gun, crowbar, pulley winch, wrench, flashlight, flash-bangs, bottle of water.
She hoped she would not need to kill anyone.
At least not yet. Please.
She exhaled, a deep and misted sigh inside her armor. Reflections of LED displays danced over her faceplate. She had not practiced enough, moving things with the suit on. She was stronger, yes. Very strong now. But her gloved hands were still fumbling everywhere.
She triple-checked her suit. She was wearing an adult diaper of all things, something her humility would not allow her to dwell upon. Every seal of the suit was perfect, the gun then carefully hooked to her utility belt. Battery power optimal, timer ticking. She was giving herself one hundred and seventy minutes of exertion, ninety minutes to load materials and Silas, eighty minutes to load the car.
Whichever car that might be. Longer than ninety, and she would need to sleep in the underground, one last time.
She was not certain that she could.
Ignoring this, she tested her gloved grasp on each of the implements. The crowbar had a foreboding slipperiness to it. There was no grip, no certain leverage if it was needed as a weapon. The winch, the wrench, the flashlight, all were fine.
She slipped off the exterior mitt-gloves, down to the thin ones where she could actually manipulate objects with some certainty. The gun trigger, fine. The winch gauge, good. Even the line-feed, she could feel a little tease of its pressure as she ran it between her fingers. She clicked the submachine gun’s safety on and off, timing herself. The flashlight she clicked on and off six times. Then she switched the wrench-head setting from ninety millimeters to sixty, overcompensating the first time that she tried.
Seventeen seconds to calibrate the wrench and back again. Not good.
Keep it as sixty, then. She needed to be quicker, in case someone was still up there. Sixty it was. She looked again at the array of implements. What was she forgetting? Oh God, the car keys.
She cursed at herself. There they were, on the bottom shelf of the cart. These she slipped into a utility pocket directly over her right hip, taping the key ring inside her suit.
And then, timing herself with the clumsy and horrid mitt-gloves both back on.
Too slow. Too fucking slow!
She bit her lip, the wrench clanged down upon the cart’s rail in frustration. In the back room, the Sanctuary, she heard Silas murmur in his sleep.
Calm. Stay calm, or this will never work. She turned her head, sipped at the taped-in line of straws she had jury-rigged into the hazmat suit’s neck-joint. The plastic bottle of water crinkled uncomfortably against her left armpit.
Twelve minutes. Already, she was sweating. She packed the bag, getting angrier with herself all the while, packing the hand-sack and cinching it shut as best she could.
Concentrate!
This was not going to work.
But it had to.
She walked out past the worktable, toward the entry hall. Silas was going to be furious with her, she knew, when he woke and realized that she had given him a sleeping pill. He wanted to be there with her, at the bottom of the shaft on his rolling gurney. He wanted to guide her, call out to her as she climbed up into the cave. Hell, he had even wanted to cradle a pistol so that she could run back to the ladder under cover if she had to.
But instead, she had put him to sleep and done everything herself.
He has no energy any longer. That fever, that look. He knows. He isn’t going to make it for very long.
Sophie kept on walking. She edged her way around a fallen cinderblock. She could not remember how long it had been there, or why.
Great, trip over something with no one to help you. That would be just fine. Idiot.