Wind howled outside. The reflected light shifted as the wind spun at the waterfall’s traces, revealing far too many of the details. The back of the boy’s head was bashed in and a ghastly, hinged piece of skull was hanging on by a clump of blood-clotted hair. It was like a doorway, a tiny little Alice in Wonderland door, and inside it was most of the boy’s pulverized and rotted brain.
As Sophie forced herself to look away, searching the shadows for targets (And who could be here and not have already killed you?), a thought crossed into the chill of her returning awareness: why weren’t there any flies here either?
They’re all dead, Sophie, Patrice sang patiently to the silence. Why don’t you have a look around? So, so beautiful. Everything is dead.
Sophie looked everywhere but the boy’s hands and that horrible, gaping wound. She stared at the boy’s arms, his wrists, his pathetically exposed back where the yellow t-shirt had been yanked up in some kind of struggle. He had a deep and sloppy knife gash where one of his kidneys must have been, and a sticky gravity-smear of old black blood had bubbled out from it and curdled upon the cave floor. Congealed defensive wounds covered his forearms like tiger stripes.
Enough.
Raising her gun higher, following the reflected beam of light, she walked around the H4 and looked out into the waterfall. There was the black-and-crystal silhouette of Pete’s police car, stuck in the muddy pool at the mouth of the cave. A halo of roiling crimson radiance shone through the falling waters.
And that was all. There was no one left alive inside the cave.
So go see. Why don’t you go out there and make sure?
Sophie walked out a little further, getting in front of the patrol car’s grille. But there, somehow sitting up against the front left wheel with her knees up and split apart, there was the body of an older-than-teenage girl.
Sophie beheld much before she was able to look away.
The girl’s head had lolled and frozen at a broken angle. Her pants had been yanked off and thrown into the pool, and they were still swirling fitfully in an endless circle along the spiral current. All of the girl’s fingers had been horribly broken. They were tilted off at angles like snapped twigs.
She had a gunshot to her forehead, and something like old oatmeal had dripped down from that hole, forming a meaty pink streak down the right side of her nose.
Oh look, She has such cute nose. Turned-up nose. Inside Sophie, someone giggled once again.
There were bits of gray matter stuck on the girl’s lower lip, and her bluish tongue was peeking out. She must have been choked while she had still been alive. Her panties, Sophie realized, were tied in a gouging knot around her neck.
Perhaps the young man had died defending her. Maybe he had even managed to shoot the bigger man, the door-pounding man, before he had been knifed. Maybe the bigger man had crawled out of the cave to die, after the police car wouldn’t start and he couldn’t find the keys for the H4. Maybe that was why there was no one left alive. Too many maybes. Hopefully. But this… this horrible, miserable sight of grisly innocence, gutted and left out to dry. What had happened exactly?
I don’t want to, I don’t want to oh no I can’t think of it I can’t…
But it was not the Che Guevara girl from the protest, after all. No, it was someone else. Someone older, a stranger Sophie had never seen. And Patrice sang the dead girl a lullaby:
Cry, no, cry no don’t. Don’t ever, never never. Love was yours before the end. You see, Sophie love? This is what happens to women now, should you ever be weak. Kill when you must. Find Lacie, find strength in all this travesty. Take this girl into your heart, let her be your death angel. Think of this girl, what she must have felt, and you will have the power to justify anything you must do. To do anything. Never forget the oatmeal girl, never ever. Ever ever…
And the laughter.
In the end, Sophie was able to look away when the wave of nausea overtook her and she dry heaved inside her suit.
There had been more, of course. There had been the terrible revelation of the seven burned and dead bodies piled in the back of the police car. And perhaps the huge twisted man in the passenger seat — with Pete’s unused shotgun in his lap — perhaps he was the one who had killed the girl. Perhaps he had killed the boy and the boy had killed him in turn, he had something stuck in his neck but who could say? Sophie had been spellbound by the bodies there, the child hugged by the old woman at the bottom of the pile, and something curled up by the police car’s backseat cage, near to the woman’s broken foot.
It had been a baby. Oh, God.
Sophie had looked away before the vision had consumed her. But she heard a voice, the radio-voice of Chris from Fort Morgan, of all things.
“Rogue, do you believe in God? Will you hear my confession?”
Sophie decided that if she wrote it all down, if after this was over she wrote it down five times, six times, nineteen times with more remembered details all the while, perhaps the visions would eventually leave her, like sensual and lamenting demons, exorcised.
Perhaps.
The rest of the “day” was an endless toil of climbing down and hoisting up the flats of supplies, of cramming them into the H4 as best she could. She had loaded the H4 without even testing the ignition, because if it failed, she was not certain if she could find the strength to go on.
But such a thought was a luxury and there was very little time. The suit’s air would run out, after all, and then she would be breathing poison. So she toiled on, endlessly.
Setting up the utility crane had been easier than she had hoped. The cord was pulled taut over the wheel, the hook and filaments secured to the eye hooks at each corner of the supply flats. Flexing nylon nets were strung over and under each flat. The duct-taped bundles of supplies were raised by a flaring shoulder and turn of crank. Simple. A thirty pound test had been near-perfect; the pulleys were fascinatingly leveraged with the hidden counterweights and it was easy to glide fifty, eighty, a hundred pounds of supplies up to the shaft’s ledge. A yank of the guideline released the swiveling load and slid it down along the tilted aluminum armature, and each load tumbled resoundingly off onto the cave floor.
And again, again…
She drank when she could, urinated when she must. She even had time to clean the suit, at faltering intervals, as she regained her breath. The exhaustion was easy to endure, because it was not death. The worst part was looking at the covering over Pete’s corpse while she labored with the last loads of supplies.
Gasoline, water, bandages, lead-lined tapestries to tape over the windows, the medicine and the guns, oh, bring all the guns…
The trial came when the final load needed to be raised, a stretcher with a frail old man smiling and strapped down against it in a cradle of pillows. She had tried to be gentle, believing that this would be her gravest burden. But the alarming thing as she raised him was not how heavy he was, but rather how light and fragile. There had been just enough room to tilt his stretchered feet onto the cave floor, and then Sophie had climbed up after him and pulled the stretcher all the way to safety. Only then did she gently lower him and release the cord to snake down into the pit where she would never go down again.