She dragged the stretcher at a tilt, her breath ragged and her feet stumbling through the mud. Silas was strong for her then, and silent. He pretended that he did not feel any pain.
When it was over, and everything from the below was brought above, he had poised there raised upon his elbows and said, “Well damn, if you ain’t the toughest bird left in the world entire.” She had laughed a little, fending off the worst lure of exhausted sleep to look down into Silas’s eyes, and to comfort him.
Slowly, he was dying. His will however might well make it a matter of weeks. Already he looked better, breathing the humid air.
Hopeless. When I lose you, I will be so alone.
But the only thing Sophie felt, as she knelt down and held his hand, was power. She was choosing to leave the shelter. She had done this. Everything needed from below, was now above. The power was centered within her certainty, not that she was doing the right thing, but rather that she was limitless. No one could stop her. She had the power of choice, of every choice, even if her decisions might lead her and her dear Silas to disaster.
I did this, all alone.
Silas was watching her, he was silent and his head was tilted as her tried to see the motion of the wheels behind her eyes. Sophie gave him a nervous smile.
Victory.
Sophie recharged her suit and changed both the battery and the oxygen tank. They had slept, for a fitful time, side by side upon that stretcher and a blanket. Silas was too weak to move further and Sophie could not have stayed awake any longer if she had tried.
The next “morning,” perhaps three hours later, Sophie had woken to the buzz of her suit’s oxygen supply running into the red. It had been an easy choice to unzip the helmet and to take in a deep breath of the poison all about her. It was not so bad, after all. It was cloyingly warm air, tainted with ash and thick with the yeasty-sweet fire-scent of sickness and of death, yes. But it was air, it was of the world. It was the same air that Silas had been breathing in his sleep.
The supplies had been loaded quickly, after Silas had been positioned. She had diapered him, corded him, cleaned and hydrated him despite all his gentle remonstrations. The man no longer had any modesty, it had been stripped from him along with muscle tissue and shaven hair and burned flesh and a blue jewel of glass that had been bloodily dislodged from off one fingertip.
There was time to care for him and to position him over the back seat of the H4, cradling a pistol and a water bottle. There was all the time left in the world.
Heeding his futile warnings of radiation and ash and being tracked by someone’s scoped rifle of all things, Sophie had carefully taped the lead-lined tapestry sheaths up over the Hummer’s interior windows. There were only a few narrow slits in the taped material, so that she would be able to see enough to drive. The H4’s interior had been packed in every corner, to the brim and then some. More was corded onto the roof and bungeed over. After all, she would be able to jettison loads and throw out anything she needed to, anywhere. But what of the shelter’s riches? What was now priceless, which treasures were irreplaceable?
There could be no certainty. The most crucial of things, water, urine and waste bags, morphine, maps, guns, food, medicine, these were kept on the passenger seat and floor and well in arm’s reach. Silas insisted on cradling the pistol still despite his precarious perch amongst the backseat piles.
And after everything, starting the H4 had been easy.
For that moment, Sophie had made herself sing something, something lilting, silly and off-key. It was a variation of Pop Goes the Weasel, actually, a stupid little jingle that Patrice had always loved when they were children. The only thing certain to make her sister laugh — really laugh, not that horrible cruel death-growl of gloating. To fill the silence as Sophie turned the key, she had needed to be certain that the voice of Patrice and all its demonic omens would be no more.
But Sophie had her own mind-song then, as she selected the ignition key from its ring. What if? What if the H4 had been burned out by the electromagnetic pulse, or the engine was damaged by the impact, or the gas had been siphoned off by the shotgun man, or the oil pan was cracked or the radiator breached or…
Click. She turned the key.
The engine wheezed, the dash lumines flickered fitfully. Then there was a belch of silvery black exhaust and a startling echo out in the cave, a dragon’s growl as the engine roared to life and all the dials turned merrily into their proper positions.
It was like a time machine.
The reek of exhaust began to filter in through the window cracks. Behind her, strapped into his tarps and blankets across the back seat, Sophie heard Silas breathe a shuddering sigh of abject relief.
She shifted the H4 into reverse, pulled away. Rubble slithered and clanged off of the hood. Keeping her speed at an even five miles an hour, she pushed back into the front of the police car and pressed down on the gas.
Only the fetal boy’s and the strangled girl’s bodies had been moved, covered together. Sophie had decided that it was a crucial ritual, a testament of peace for two lost souls. The girl had died in terror but she would be remembered. She had the boy, forever. There was honor.
“Hang on.” Sophie pressed the pedal a little more.
The patrol car slushed deeper into the pool, where the ground was muddy enough for a slithery kind of purchase. The H4 kept pushing and the car tilted back off to one side, kicking up a brown wave of water that sloshed up the cracked window near to Silas’s face. Sediment-thick tears trickled down the inside glass onto his fingers. He shifted.
Backing up, pushing the car out of the way, slurring backward through the pool’s mud and under the waterfall, getting wet and gagging on the fumes… these were simple things. The hard part came when she backed out of the cave and into the ghostly crimson light of the ever-reflecting canyon and its ruin.
Lord, Sophie thought, I don’t believe in you. I don’t think I ever can. I’m simply not made that way. But if you exist, for these tortured souls in their ending, please shelter them in your arms. The girl, Pete, the boy. The grandmother, the baby. Even the terrible man if he is here. Everyone. Please. Anything to take their pain away.
And they were through. Wheels spun, mud sloshed up and the gloomy twilight of the cave turned to a crimson glow. The dark-light was not brighter, it was deeper. The world of burning, the world of Ashen and of Gone.
And they left the dead far behind them.
There had once been a time, a nothing time, a memory of a bland and beautiful day like and unlike any other. A day of the lost and dead world, the Gone-Land, a Paradise which never would be again.
Sophie remembered it clearly in that moment. Tom had taken her on that hike up to Hanging Lake far off I-70. A grim and precarious trailhead had taken them up through pine and granite slabs and bits of summer cloud, with little crow silhouettes flying up around inside of them. Some date! Sophie had been furious with him, every step a test of faith. Her legs burning with pain, her lungs raging in the altitude, and Tom in his cutoff FBI shirt (what a joke that would become between them, in later days) actually looking back and laughing as he sped up again and again, just out of reach.
“Come on, we’re almost there, just hold my hand,” he said. And grinned.
Seven or eight times, she had just about gotten close enough to belt him one.
But no, not quite. And oh, she was going to break up with him, three month anniversary be damned. For certain, before this fucking bullshit ever got too serious. She was going to get to the top of this God-forsaken trail, catch her breath, take his offered hand and say, “Tom, that was horrible of you. Goodbye.” And then should would leave him, then she would be free. And then…