A look of lackadaisical annoyance appeared upon his face. It was a mundane expression, a thing of the luxurious world which had just been savaged away to nothingness. It almost looked like he was waiting for a bus that was a few minutes late, and he was about to tell someone standing next to him what a piss-off irritation that could be.
The man said to Sophie — with no blame, with an almost conspiratorial tinge of fellowship — “Hot damn lady, this. Am I hungry or what? Feel like shit, sorry. That’s right, but up and there it is.”
And Sophie laughed at last. His face softened as he stared at her, around her, trying to interpret the meaning of his surroundings. He seemed to realize that he was not in a hospital. No, perhaps he was even somewhere underground.
“How am I here? Is… she?” He took the strange white woman’s hand, his bravado fading away into an earnest purity. His eyes were wide, needing. “Where is Jenny?”
Sophie shook her head. She leaned in and kissed Silas’s balding head, just over the bandaged knot in his eyebrow, and he winced.
“I’m sorry, Silas.”
“Told you my name, did I?” His face changed, the annoyed at the bus-stop play rising over his too-aware expression once again. “Well, no matter. You and me, for now. We’ll go find my Jenny in awhile. Am I right?”
“Of course you are.”
“You bet I am.” He took in one deep breath.
They sat there, Sophie tracing the line of his head’s shadow on the pillow with her fingertips. It seemed wrong, of a sudden, to touch him against his will.
He is alive.
“Well.” He swallowed, blinked, stared at the curvature of walls and the storage ducts hollowed within the ceiling. Whatever he was going to say, the utterance of it required that he not look straight into her face. “Whatever, see, I might been saying, earlier on to you. When I meet you, I remember now. Gracious of you, bringing me in like that. I was gone. What were you thinking?”
“I was… thinking you might be the last.”
The last person alive I might ever see.
He waved all that away.
“Never you mind,” he said then. “Bringing a stranger down in here all like that, it means something. You can’t be too mad at me I suppose.”
He looked at her then and found her smiling, close to tears.
“I guess I’m not mad at you, Silas. And good morning.”
“Is it now?”
“I think so.”
“What’s for breakfast?”
A little more of laughter.
Hours earlier, prying away pieces of fabric from Silas’s back with tweezers and watching the red sheets of blood well up through his sponge-holed flesh, Sophie had been certain that every moment would be his ending. As she worked and cried, she knew that she was holding a death vigil over him. But here he was hours after, and although he could not yet fully see her, he was blinking at the bright fluorescent lights and even trying to smile back at her.
The strange eccentric gentleman, prodding and quiescent, was still the man entirely.
“So.” He was gazing at her again then. Deeply, almost blindly. She knew, in that moment, everything that he himself was coming to comprehend. Jenny was dead, the world was dead. It was just the two of them. If Mitch and her daughter were ever to be found, perhaps, perhaps… the four of them could die together.
There was nothing else to hope for.
Silas patted her hand, an old man comforting a girl. Then he gripped it, surprisingly strong. He shook it with emotion. “Thank you.”
“You are an angel, Silas. You came to me before the end. You never need to thank me.” Sophie rose, unguarded. What was she saying? The words were pouring out of her, the urgent knowledge that this was a human who had suffered out there and came to her. He was proof, he was the real. If he could make it to the shelter, and not be swept away by evil as the others were, then there might be hope.
Her daughter could still be alive.
She could speak only a little longer. “Rest now,” she said.
Sophie rose. She went to turn out one bank of the lights.
His arm raised beneath the blanket. “Mrs. S.-G.?” She tilted her head at this, this curious name for a nice white lady he could not quite yet be familiar with. “Let me away to sleep. But watch over me. Please don’t go.”
She moved to turn off the light and said softly, “Call me Sophie, please. This place is quite small. I’m right here.”
“All right.” He almost shrugged, and gave her a brave boy’s smile against the dark.
His energy had been a façade. Even as she reached to turn off the last lights, he faded. His eyes rolled, his head fell away to one side of the pillow.
Sophie’s hand froze over the light switch. She realized, horribly, that she was checking from a distance to see if he was dead. But there he was, fighting sleep. He blinked his delirium away, he was staring right through her.
“Dark’s all right. Makes it easier. But if I promise to call you ‘Sophie’ once or twice, will you? Will you talk to me a little while,” he whispered. Beneath the blanket, his hand patted the side of the dilapidated mattress. “Please.”
She crossed her arms. She wanted to, she did. But if he made her cry she felt as if her entire body would fall apart.
“… All right.” She could not look directly at him any longer, not after all that she had seen in cleansing and caring for him.
I want to listen, Silas. And I want to tell you everything.
There were no social barriers, there was no society. She was starved for human contact, for sanity. Just looking at Silas, a real man, she could feel the voices of Patrice and her father draining away to somewhere much deeper inside her.
She clicked the light off. She walked in nearer.
She poised herself carefully at the foot of his bed, folding her legs so that she was certain not to touch him.
Just being here, Silas. No more spider-skin, no more nightmare. Just being here, being the miracle you are? You’ll keep me alive. I’ll listen, you just be the wonder that you are.
“There now, sit you down where you like. It’s good. Jenny don’t lie when she tell you, I won’t bite,” he reassured her. “Good itches, where I can feel ‘em. Pain’s deep but it’s not the only. You’ve got a sure touch, Mrs. S.-G.”
“Sophie.”
“Right, that’s what I say. Ain’t no arguing with you, I’m certain. You go to medical school, Mrs. S.-G.?”
“Sophie, or I’m leaving you to sleep.” She smiled. “If honesty appeals to you, I did indeed. University of Colorado doctorate no less, just for daddy. And the slim and meager potential for a sliver of his approval.”
“Oh. And?”
“And I flunked out in my second year and almost got married in a barefoot wedding up in the Flatirons, just outside of Boulder. Fell in love with the mountains, there. Not so much the man.”
He smiled. “Damn.”
She shrugged, her eyebrows raised a little. She almost looked at him, in that moment, flicking her gaze toward his pillow. But she was feeling something she had not felt in an eternity.
What was it?
She was shy.
It was fascinating to realize just how quickly her mind could return to those emotions, to the gestures and expressions required for the most primal of togetherness and distance and human communication.
“Almost married to the wrong man, you see,” she said then. “Not my Tom.”
“Oh, Hell. Tom? Who was the first guy, then?” Silas groaned. He coughed, almost admitting the edge of laughter. But his voice would not have it. “Two barefoot bad boys in this story already? Kind of private, isn’t it? You ain’t supposed to tell me either of that, till you done caring for me.”