Why haven’t the missiles fallen?
How much time has passed?
She had no idea. The seconds were become tenuous once more, breaths were becoming hours.
She struggled to remember what Tom had told her on the phone, before, before. His brother Mitch was with Lacie, he had said, in the place. The place? Surely, Tom had spoken in code because he knew that if he had given an address or some other identifier, the Air Force security personnel would have killed him for the breach. And what would they have done to Lacie, if there was time?
“Oh, Tom.”
None of that mattered now.
The place. The date? She needed to remember what that could be.
Call Mitch.
And how was she supposed to do that?
She pressed her fists against either side of her head, and her hands spread open across her cheeks. To silence her thoughts, to focus, she spoke into the silence. She meant to say something slight, calming, but what she heard was this:
“Do I want to live?”
And inside her, No. Oh, Tom. Oh, no.
Don’t make me.
“Lacie,” she whispered, already afraid to hear her own voice reverberating within this sterile tomb.
Lacie is alive and she’s with Mitch. I need, I need to find her. She’s out there somewhere, somewhere safe. Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.
The last words she spoke before the missiles came down were these: “Tom, I’m so scared.”
But there was no reason to speak at all. There was no one to answer her, and perhaps there never would be.
I-4
IMPACT
Without the radio, the daylight, the snow, the pulses of fleeting cloud and falling water, Sophie had lost all familiarity with time. She had entered the shelter and beheld the great room. Two minutes had passed in an all-consuming drowning wave, a series of frantic impressions that felt like years.
She remembered Tom grimly saying—once and never again—that there would be no clocks within the shelter, that installing one would lead to “dark thoughts” which he refused to give any life to.
Sophie began to understand that perhaps two minutes had passed since she had entered the shelter, but it could have been two hours, two years, two lifetimes.
(The narrative is fractured here, for Sophie herself was not certain what she remembered.
And the truth is this: as Mrs. St.-Germain spoke her last recorded words upon Zero Day, three Russian R-36 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, each with a payload of ten warheads and thirty penetration drones, impacted in intersecting clusters, a triad of interlocking rings of death and fire, raining down over the entire Denver metro area. In forty-three seconds three million people died, the skin peeling away in shock-blasts and burning to vapor in the air, their eyes melting down their cheeks, their teeth turning to black and powdered glass.
The Rocky Mountains were a wall, a granite bastion separating American humanity into two fated tribes for the wrath of Holocaust: those to the east, of the plains, who burned and died quickly; and those to the west, of the spires, who died slowly and far more horribly. This we know of the region of Black Hawk, and little else. From other testaments I have reconstructed all I can; the diary of St.-Germain shall tell us a little more.
Impact.
However long Sophie had stood within the shelter, that eternity ended as she spoke the words “So scared.” In that moment, she felt a shock like an invisible thunderbolt all over her body. Her flesh rippled with the impact, her hair whirled up in coils, her tongue peeked out as her cheeks were pushed by the shockwave into a wild rictus of a grin. Then the world entire was flung sideways.
An incredible roar, the loudest sound she had ever heard, ripped through the mountain and forced its way through widening cracks into the girder-interlaced granite above her head. She could feel her eardrums pop with a blood-inflected squish deep within both sides of her skull. All sound was obliterated while the world shuddered and jolted to the right, replacing her sense of hearing with an eerie, incessant whine of rerouted blood, blood surging in a wild torrent through her veins.
Thrown off her feet, slammed back with arms outstretched and a twisted spine and flung away to one side, Sophie was blown back into the great room’s work table to her right. She rebounded and then was crushed forward into a bank of utility shelves. The aluminum rack crashed over, shelves tilted, and dozens of printout-choked binders flurried out like wounded birds and buried her in a torrent of vinyl and paper. Compact Disc spools tumbled up and cascaded in silver-trailing spirals all around her.
She was crushed, buried.
Blackness and then frantic stripes of fluorescent light flowed over her; she could see the world still shaking out there beyond the shelves, hot shelves which somehow had been piled up on top of her.
The world, still shaking and recoiling unheard, powdering down black dusts and gouts of shrapnel from the mountain’s scorched and twisted heart, fading into a scarlet darkness far away.
Sophie thought, O clarion.
And then there was nothing more.
I-5
RISING
With a surge of adrenaline and agony, Sophie drew in a frenetic breath. It was like screaming inward, inhaling her own shouts before she could lend them voice. Her lungs filled with concrete dust as she wheezed, coughed, and felt her fingertips spark with trapped blood and pinched-off circulation.
She had no idea what happened next, or how. She just roared and stood up, like a weightlifter heaving a weight that was surely impossible for a mere mortal to ever move.
Muscles tore in her shoulders, her thighs.
Her roar kept building, a breath that depleted every fire within her veins and heart and turned her sight to isolate pinpoints of tilted light. The weight above her moved, and she moved with it.
She merely squatted and stood and the aluminum rack of shelves crashed off of her. Spilled and cracked-opened binders tumbled away from her back and legs. There was a pool of draining urine beneath her, sweat and saliva, but only a little blood. She stood straighter, stumbled, and clutched the tilted work table with one hand.
How did I do that?
Her insides felt like they were crumpling, husks of dehydrated muscle shivering in their hollows along the bone. Her right hip socket cracked back into place as the air in the ball joint squirted out over the cartilage, but she did not hear the pop. She only felt the thrill of pain.
There was only that whining, keening surge of circulating blood within her ears, the silence of the deafened. She cried out, another cascade of soundlessness, but a breath was demanded of her. She took it, her head reeling with the half-seen spectacle of blood-red tracers and fleeting stars. Agony filled her limbs as the blood surged back through her and her heart raced out of control. Electric jolts thrummed up her calves, under her ribs and into her shoulders. Her silk blouse was torn open, buttons popped, her skirt was in shreds and she was drenched in body fluids.
Alive.
Eyes bulging in disbelief, Sophie looked back over her shoulder at the nine-foot-tall aluminum cage of shelves, laying angled and broken on its side.
I moved that. Then, detached, almost clinically: I shouldn’t be able to do that.
The whining in her ears was pulsing now, ringing. She touched her fingers in to either side, there were blood-drops in her ears. Soon there rose a sound of something else, then ringing again, like an ocean tide of waves made of chimes and wind. Slowly she realized that the sound between the whining arcs was her own breathing.