She did look him in the eye, then. She couldn’t help it. “Shush, you. I’m confiding.”
“Oh, I’m shushed.” A wave of pain went through him, something he could not hide.
Slowly he is dying. Sophie restrained herself from touching him once again. If she relented, showed him just how certain she was that he was fading, what would that do to his miraculous fire?
I cannot let you, Silas. Don’t leave me. I cannot let you go.
“So.” He forced himself to speak and his voice was broken, yet stronger all the same. “So, number one. This Wrong Man.” Silas licked his lips. “Barefoot Not-Tom. What you do with him?”
“Do with him? Nothing, that’s just it. He was too much like daddy, underneath it all in secret. I realized it, so I ran. That was the end of my life in Boulder, but not the end. I commuted to classes a bit yet, hiding from… from my ex-fiancé all the while. Crept about campus after I’d told him I’d be gone. It was terrible, he kept trying to find me.”
“Oh, you didn’t.”
“Oh, I did. I even grasped at one last very unenthusiastically proffered lifeline, from my very disappointed father, and I became an anthropologist, in time.”
Silas frowned, misunderstood. “No, not that part.”
“Not what?” Sophie uncrossed her legs.
“Tell me what you guys did, I mean not anything, but…” said Silas. His lips quirked a little. “Woah-damn. Listen to me, how rude was that?” Then, over a frown: “But what about that poor guy? Barefoot Not-Tom, what you do to get rid of him?”
“Why, I introduced him to my worst enemy,” said Sophie. “Clarice Carpenter. Sweet, beautiful young thing. Exquisite teeth. Like a horse. They were married thirteen years, last I checked.”
“Oh, damn! Horsie hot girl in the end? That’s just mean. Ain’t no messing with you now, is there? Barefoot Not-Tom and a thirteen-year sentence without parole to boot? That poor damn girl got hammered. Teach a man to follow you around.”
Sophie giggled. Silas cackled, and instantly regretted it. He tried to clutch his ribs.
She was off the bed at once. She knelt before him, one hand upon his sweat-beaded brow and the other going to the medical kit under the cot’s metal foreleg. She felt around for the capped and hidden morphine needle by touch. “Hold still.”
“I’m holding.” He flinched, expecting a needle at any moment.
“Hold more still.”
“Like this?”
“Like you can’t talk,” said Sophie.
“Right.”
“Shhh.”
Looking sidelong but not moving, he gave her a pained and well-studied expression, one which Sophie was quite certain had been formerly tendered solely for his wife. He spoke through gritted teeth: “Well, can I look at what you trying to do?”
“Well sure you can, if you quiet,” said Sophie, in her best white-girl-Creole lilt and drawl. “Woah-damn.”
And Silas tried very hard not to laugh again. He failed, yet the needle found its mark.
As the morphine took hold and Silas was fading back, down, into its icy fingers, they talked and smiled for a little while more.
“I didn’t mean for him to die,” said Sophie. They both knew who she was speaking of. “He was a dear friend.”
“S’all… it’s all right,” said Silas. His voice was beginning to slur, a pooling rumble, seeking the edges of a deeper brook flowing down inside of him. “I understand, I’m sure that he did too. He was retired sheriff. Trying to help people, making choices led him into bad. Not your fault. You good people, Sophie.”
She touched his hand, a brief interlacing of fingers. “I can’t talk about that anymore.”
He seemed to understand.
“Well, let’s talk about something else, then. Painful is fine, I’m losin’…” He did not manage to finish his sentence, and then he looked confused. He focused on her, as if he believed she had asked a question he had not heard.
“What do you want to talk about?” she asked.
“Hmm?” His eyes rolled. Soon, she would need to let him sleep.
And what of tonight, Sophie? What if he dies? Will you go mad at last, if after all of his suffering, this miracle of his arrival, you find him dead there lying beside you? What if you wake alone?
“We’ll talk about whatever you like. Not the bodies, or the shaft,” she said. “Don’t tell me any of that.” That seemed to bring him back. He blinked, trying to focus on the unlit bank of lights above the honeycombed slopes of concrete.
“No?”
“No. Tell me about anything else, my Hummer. Your car. Your way up here. Tell me something. Please? I have no idea what’s out there.”
“Oh?” In the wave of his delirium, the returning, he almost rolled upon his side. She held him down, firmly but gently. “Yeah. Want to tell you my story,” he said. “Need to. Not ready yet.”
And if you die tonight, Silas? If you die? Without meaning to she suddenly remembered Chris, the terrified boy-soldier in Fort Morgan, the evil she had committed in giving him a false absolution without faith.
That boy-voice, professional and terrified. A soldier dying out in the world, locked and lost in one of the last fortresses of Man.
Will you hear my confession?
She shivered. As if linked, Silas touched upon this and he shivered as well. He clutched his blankets closer.
“Who knows?” he asked her then.
“Sorry?”
“Who else knows about this place?”
“Oh.” She searched her memory. It seemed strange, to ponder the existence of other souls in a world so long alone. “There were… I don’t know. Tom used a lot of labor to create the shelter. Quiet handshake deals. But mostly, he kept that, ah. He kept that from me. There was Mitch, and Pete’s son, and Jake and Tomas and Paulo, and…”
“Your husband built all this, though?”
“He did.”
And Silas sighed. “What a glory of a man. Oh, he love you.”
Unexpected. Sophie held back her tears.
“What can you tell me about the ravine?” she asked. She coughed, her voice was thickening. Soon, she would not be able to speak out without crying.
And then I won’t be able to stop.
“You really? You really want to know.”
She nodded.
“Well, it’s hard to say. To explain. All the rubble? There’s…”
She waited a moment, another. “There’s what, Silas?”
Silas was snoring gently.
All right. The night, alone. Perhaps I can do this once again.
She rose, turned away from Silas. The reflected light from the tunnel would be enough to show her the way. She could crawl into her own cot, should she choose to. She could sleep there and watch over him. She hugged herself, tapped her elbows with her fingers. A strange gesture which Tom always called “The Fidget.”
Her hands fell to her sides in indecision.
Can’t sleep.
Should she read, study the binders, prepare maps for the journey to Kersey, Colorado? Should she stay there with Silas, awake beside him?
Oh Silas, please don’t die.
Then his voice, frail and high like a child’s, rose up over her shoulder.
“Sophie?”
“Yes?”
“Do I look like a monster?”
She was angry, at first. Outraged that he could dishonor himself with such a fear. Such a name. What did his appearance matter?