Tom had done that. How many years ago?
Another curve, deeper up into the canyon. She drove past the old-fashioned water pump, the flipped-over bucket Tom had sat on only the autumn before, making sure all was ready for winter freeze. Sunlit raindrops pattered off the length of the pump’s icicled bar, light and water in restless turmoil, conflicting spirits of the seasons.
She was driving east up into the heart of Tom’s land, her own land, father’s land. The road-sand turned into slurries of melt-water and mud. Cliff walls, ever higher. There was very little snow down inside this canyon. The storm was gusting off to the east, but streams of water were trickling down the cliff faces, their flows skewed into oddly geometric zig-zags by the chain-link drapings staked into the stone. No more trees loomed along the road in front of her, only a few stubborn bushes high overhead, tilted out into the sky.
The sky… no. Don’t look.
“Twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds…”
“Warning! Impact is imminent and will occur in approximately three to six minutes, dependent upon your location. Shelter in place. Move away from windows immediately.”
One more road sign, this one shiny and cobalt with its newness, stenciled by Tom just last year, stating in ominous block capitals:
One last turn, and there it was.
The waterfall. The cave. The shelter.
Awareness, a fiery surge of immediacy, of the desperate compulsion for survival, filled Sophie’s veins. Where was Lacie? She could not remember. By reflex, she rose in her seat and looked up into the rearview mirror but there was only the terrified and pallid aging woman there, quivering with terror and glaring back at her. Tears were streaming down the woman’s cheeks.
Me.
Even as the Hummer neared the little waterfall, Sophie kept staring into that stranger’s eyes. She could no longer look away.
Tom? Lacie? Lacie is… is she? Where is she?
“Warning! Impact is—”
Mid-sentence, the emergency bulletin on the radio went silent.
Outside, a horrible, enormous sound welled up over the mountains, covering endless miles in a moment with its deafening wail. Sophie could hear it perfectly through the windows. Her frantic and colliding thoughts, unable to place the sound or why it was so important, told her in unison that it was an Archangel unseen above the sky, and the Archangel was mourning. Screaming.
The siren.
Death. The Angel of Death. O, clarion.
The siren.
The emergency klaxon sounded, on and on. Far off behind the town of Black Rock, toward Rollinsville and up by the ranger’s tower, it sounded that keening signal which Sophie had always loathed, but had learned in time to ignore. The klaxon that always made Lacie cry, that startled her from napping. It was the one siren that was always tested on the first Wednesday of every month, meant to presage tornadoes and forest fires, simple and tiny disasters from a yesterday-world that soon would be burned to ashes.
The cry of the siren, it raged in Sophie. It spoke to the most primal part of her.
Flee. Flee.
There would be no more tornado warnings, no more warnings for wildfire. This was the final cry of war, This is war, this is really happening, and the missiles were coming down.
Halfway around the world and they’re almost here.
We’re going to die, Tom is dead, we’re all going to die.
Oh, Lacie. Oh, Lacie I’m sorry I ever gave birth to you.
I never meant for this to happen to you.
This isn’t the ending I promised you, oh I love you.
I’m sorry for the world, for bringing you here, oh I am so sorry.
Never did I believe they would…
they would actually
never
never never
Time had become so tangible, so weighty and slow. The emergency bulletin was on again.
“Twenty-three minutes and fifty seconds…”
“Warning! Impact is imminent…”
I’m not going to make it.
Sophie heard herself give a choking cry. She was going to be sick, her stomach was twisting in upon itself, the coffee was gurgling, welling up and burning her esophagus. Her cheeks puffed out with a moan of nausea.
Can’t stop
can’t stop
She hit the gas. Looking down the road, it was right there. The waterfall was real, the shelter, it was actually there.
I’m not going to.
Driving as fast as she dared, she aimed the H4 directly toward the waterfall that marked the road’s dead end. The Hummer swerved of its own accord as its right front wheel caught a rainwater-tumbled rock on the edge of the wheel rut, then came down with a slippery thud and locked itself into the rut again. The Hummer veered toward the right-side canyon wall. Sophie yelped as the passenger-side mirror collided with the rocky face, shattered, and snapped one of its metal supports in two. The mirror there dangled and bumped against the passenger door, as Sophie steadied the H4 away from the wall.
Faster.
Thirty yards away from the waterfall, twenty.
The waterfall was little more than a few stringy gouts of white water cascading down, but they sprayed up enough of a mist to obscure the cave behind to just about anyone, and Tom’s cleverly-painted canvas hid the cave entirely. The only thing strange about the scene, a counterpoint to the icy and guideless waters and misted stone, was the little radio antenna tower propped up on weathered girders far above.
“Twenty-five minutes and twenty-six seconds…”
“Warning! Impact is imminent…”
The deepening mud caused the H4 to lurch into an engine-throttling crawl. Fifteen yards until the H4 would run its way under the waterfall. Twelve.
No time.
No time
no time no time—
There was a crackle on the radio, and Sophie took her foot off the gas involuntarily as the emergency bulletin was overtaken by a frantic babble, words coming out in a broken torrent and constricted into a single voice that couldn’t breathe the words out fast enough. She knew that voice.
Jake Handler was yelling, “War! War! Pike’s Peak! I can see the contrail! The warhead is splitting up! Oh, Jesus! Save us! Cover your eyes! Get the fuck away from the windows! Get—”
The H4 lurched to a stop just before the waterfall, in the shallow pool before the cave. Sophie could not control her stomach anymore. Her cheeks puffed out again, her breath rushed out of her nostrils, and she vomited coffee and eggs and the undigested remnant of last night’s dinner over the wheel, over her hands, over the dash and into her lap. She could taste coffee and cream, hot stomach acid and the horrible taste of bile. Of terror. She vomited again, but nothing came out the second time.
Shaking her head, tapping the gas and clutching the dripping wheel with shivering fingers, she edged the H4 under the sheets of icy and pelting water, through the parting seam in the camouflaged tarp, and into the blackness of the cave. She flicked on the headlights, and in that moment the entire world behind her turned shock-white beneath a photonegative sky of tiered and burning clouds.