“And should have gone to the bathroom again,” she heard herself grumbling. Appalled, feeling fully ridiculous all at once, she almost giggled. Oh, well. Screw it.
She went around the corner, went to the shelter mouth and ran her gloved fingers over the bolt-rails of the access door. If I can survive shitting myself during the outbreak of a nuclear war, then I can survive a little pee running down my diaper.
She giggled again. She was losing it.
Twenty-one minutes. How? How was she going to do this?
And she was going to see Pete’s body. Would he by lying there under the tarp Silas had given him? Would the shotgun be crossed over his chest, a brotherhood salute to the brave and fallen? No. The body would surely be defiled, the shotgun taken, if anyone else had come down to lie in wait.
But after so many days, wouldn’t they have tried to cut off the air, to flood the shelter, or at least pound on the door again?
Who is out there? Can anyone?
She knew. Someone, someone was still up there.
She could go slower, she could just patrol-sweep the cave, move a test gurney of supplies and then go in again. If she had to wait another day, she could find the time to lift Pete’s body up out of the shaft by winch and pulley, she could bury him in the cave.
But no. Somehow, that seemed more a desecration than a ritual of love.
“Stop this, Sophie,” she cursed herself. Twenty-three minutes. Too slow. “Just do this.”
She looked at the door console. She flipped the dead-grid cage over the punch numbers, opened the access panel, clicked in the timed exit/entry code. Accepted. If the door were to both open and close in the next three hundred and sixty second interval, the alarms would not go off and the shelter would not go into protective mode. If she took any longer, on any of seven estimated trips to shuffle out the supplies, there would be some very serious problems to troubleshoot. The door would lock itself, and the motion detectors which sensed if someone was in the way had never been fully tested.
Enough. Go. Go!
She gripped the vault wheel, and twisted. Hydraulic mist hissed out, the vault door whirred its way open.
She swept the submachine gun over the shaft-scape of the darkness. Silhouettes of bodies, yes. But no one moving.
She tried her best not to look. She turned, pulling the first supply cart there behind her.
She had forgotten one very simple, one very deadly thing. If anything went wrong, or she fell, or her timing was too far off, she could not delay re-closure. She could not prop the door.
Almost in those few seconds of panic, almost she went back to awaken Silas, to wheel his gurney out and to wedge him in the door, pistol cradled in his arms. But she had made her way into the shelter the first time, she had studied the binder about the security controls twenty times if not thirty. The door, when she needed to, she could get open again. After her first entry long ago, it was all about the access cards.
But if any of the mechanisms had failed, or had been sabotaged? And Silas was not only asleep, he was incapable of walking even if he needed to. If she screamed and woke him, if she became trapped outside and needed him to open the door, what would she do?
Well, shit.
Then she remembered the cinderblock. Would it hold, if the door were to spin itself shut?
Yes. But she doubted it. Because it has to.
Still shielding her gaze from the twisted bodies, she went back in and to the verge of the great room, lifted the cinderblock with a grunt and went out to the door again.
Fumbling off the translucent red-band cap, the night filter, Sophie shone the full unfiltered beam of the flashlight up against the rim of the ladder-shaft. She needed to blind them, anyone who was still waiting up there.
She cast the light beam from side to side. There was no one.
Garish shadows, tilted twice-reflected beams bounced over the cave walls high above. Beads of hovering waterfall mist danced in pallid rainbows up inside the rays of light. The shaft seemed much deeper than it had before. Had she really climbed down all that way, adrenaline surging, with a nuclear blast just seconds away from impact? How?
Using her other hand, she swept the submachine barrel along with the light, tracing the direction of its beam.
Nothing. No one.
She looked around at the floor of the shaft itself. She could not see anything immediately around her, not yet. She had blinded herself.
You fool.
As she stared out at the damaged and flickering glo-lites between the ladder’s rungs, she waited for her eyes to readjust.
Stilling herself there, listening, she noticed the grim silence of it all. She had unknowingly grown accustomed to the nightmarish, dull cacophony of the shelter… its generators, hums, drips, crackles, clanks, the whirr of air conditioning and recycling of gurgling toilet water, all of it. Now, there were just the frail and relentless second-beeps of the suit and the purr of its filtration, backed by a strange reverberating growl of sound from far up above and away. The wind?
No. The waterfall.
The outside, the real. The beyond and all its corpses there, in pieces. Ashes of rainforests, ashes made of everything. After so much time cradled inside the shelter, Sophie felt a wave of panic as she tried to envision the sky that Silas had described. The outside was dying, roiling in windstorm and blackest rain. The Burning World was endless. Could she do this?
Dead shapes in the darkness came back into focus. Some of the glo-lites were unfaltering, most were sickly and flickering with a fitful greenish radiance. And there, fading back into sight, the silhouetted body of Pete.
The tarp was there, the shotgun as well. She could not bring herself to touch it. This is a grave. The grave of the friend you left to die here.
She was spared the stench of death by the suit’s filtration system, but not the sight. One of his purplish hands was uncovered, and it was bulbous like a cluster of over-ripened plums. It was glistening. She dared not move the tarp, it was barely over his head and the top of it was curling back and forth in the waterfall’s whirling breeze, exposing the topmost crown of his sandy hair.
“Pete. I am so sorry you had to suffer.”
She could say no more. Not yet. There was too much danger here, too much that she needed to do.
The suit beeped again, a longer tone. A full minute had passed.
Sophie spun the flashlight beam around. The wild shadows she was making poured around Pete’s body, giving way to more garish details. There was a pile of dried feces near the ladder, certainly human. But there were no flies to buzz around it. There were dried strings of what might be vomit on the lower ladder rungs, and there were huge, spattered bloodstains up the curvature of the wall.
Whose blood was it? Sophie had no idea. There were bullet holes, scars where something heavy and metal had hit the wall and rebounded. Beneath the stain was a crumpled something, down where Sophie’s faceplate had hidden a brutal revelation.
The body of the girl was twisted, emaciated. Her face was down, buried in broken hands. Her head had been bashed in.
There was an intermittent thread of water trickling down from the cave above, wetting the wall opposite the glo-lites, and along this vertical streamlet were stuck pieces of things, little chunks of skull with thin trails of once-blonde hair still attached to them.
Sophie backpedaled. She almost vomited in her suit. She remembered something, a mantra of pain and sorrow, something rather similar to Silas’s earnest words: You just look away.