(Later)
Daddy, if you can truly speak to me beyond the shelter, in my dreams, please do so now. I need you.
Please?
(Later)
So many people, families. Oh, I cannot even tell you what remains here, all along the interstate.
I need you, daddy. I forgive you now. Please speak to me.
(Hereafter, the diary was rewritten by Sophie several times over the years, in order to exhaustively chronicle the foreboding events which she and Silas suffered through upon I-25 and in the siege-hold of “Gehinnom,” Pearson’s Corner. My attempt at a provisional narration now continues. ~ A. S.G.-C.)
V-4
GEHINNOM
Dark greasy ash and bone chips swirled around the H4, scouring its windows, leaving streaks of oily filth across the glass and then scouring it all away. The Hummer shuddered as the black wind gripped it and shook it from side to side. Bodies and parts of bodies tumbled by. The Hummer crawled through endless wreckage, the eye of the endless storm, a mobile vault perfectly centered in a headlighted, almost blinded bubble of revelation.
The garbage-choked air whistled in through cracked panes of glass and found its way out again, flapping the duct-taped window seals like the wings of a diseased bird. The entire cabin reeked of spinach, urine, gas, smoke, body odor and the curdling of blood. Fuel was leaking, rags and diapers were in short supply, candy wrappers blew up in dizzy spirals from between the seats.
But to Sophie, none of this mattered. They were on I-25 at last, heading in the direction the elder world had christened North. The impossible dream of reaching Kersey, of finding Lacie, began for the first time to seem like a reflection of some oblique and future reality.
Halfway home.
And what of fuel? came a panicked voice in answer to this musing. Sophie, there’s nowhere else to stop to find more gas. You must use the last, the plastic cans. You must. Every car you’ve seen east of Loveland is a molten slagheap. Every —
She ignored this. If she did not, she would go mad. Fuel, once a modern annoyance so trivial as to be unthinkable beyond the act of gassing up at some mall-adjacent station, was now becoming a matter of life and death.
“Halfway home indeed,” she whispered, swallowing past the bitter chalk-taste which had over-coated her tongue.
She looked out to the utmost edge of the roadway’s distance, perhaps thirty feet ahead where melted car wrecks rose out of the blackness like spectral shipwrecks locked inside the swells of a petrified sea. The entire interstate was a melted and re-cooled plane of rolling concrete, a rippling thread of hardened quicksand with slagged buses and RVs and semis sunken into its resettled surface. Pressure waves from the blasts had turned the highway into a series of small hills with re-hardened piles of metal and obsidian glass mounded everywhere, things which she had at first not even realized had been cars. There were no tires, very few human remains except for what was blowing out of Loveland to the west. But somehow, the highway was mostly intact. It had turned to liquid, reshaped itself and cooled into this undulating shape, a narrow and natal land filled on and on with popped asphalt blisters and foul-smelling hills.
She closed her eyes, just for a moment. Exhausted. There, she caught a foreign glimpse of childhood in remembrance, a young skirted Sophie in catholic school, learning the lore of the Gentiles. There had been a tale of Gehinnom, cinder-forge of the fallen, glowing valley of the burning sands.
You serpents, she could almost hear the nun’s haunted echo even then, you brood of vipers, how shall you to escape the sentence of Gehenna?
No answer. Two mute souls.
But Silas, before he had fallen asleep (He’s dehydrated and unconscious, storm be damned, you need to check on him right now or he’s going to die, damn it Sophie, you —), had revealed to her that there was still a reason to hope:
“Naw, all this ruin, it’s a lot like Littleton, you know. Like I told, when I was leaving my own home? When I had to find a car to get to Black Hawk. You need to find cars that were in underground garages, Mrs. S.-G., or behind walls, or that were deep in shelter…”
And now, a broken whisper from the back seat was saying, “Pearson.”
Silas? Sophie slowed the H4 to almost zero, looked over her shoulder. Silas’ eyes were closed but his lips were moving. He tried to touch her elbow but only succeeded in scrabbling at the greasy sleeve of her radiation suit.
She put the H4 into park. She took his hand. “Silas, can you hear me?”
“Water.”
She unbuckled herself, half-crawled out of her seat and repositioned his untouched bottle of water beneath his lips. His tongue’s tip emerged and touched in through the bottle’s transparent neck, bloated and gray and searching.
She helped him to drink. The eyes opened, hunting, hunting for Sophie or for Jenny or someone else who could not be imagined.
“Pearson,” he said again.
“Who is Pearson, Silas?”
“No.” He cringed, lifted his neck a little and took another drink. Most of it streaked down around the yellow scabs of his chin. “Place. Pear… Corner.”
“Pearson’s Corner?”
“Yeah,” he whispered.
More water. She waited until he could speak.
“That big old truck stop,” he was able to say at last. “Way to Wyoming. Fortified, 2013, after the Federal Bombing? Yeah. It’s like a fortress now. Need to talk to you about that.” He looked into the toy mirror glued to the back of the driver’s seat, a Big Bird and Elmo mirror that Tom had bought some years ago. Lacie’s mirror. “Oh my,” he said then. He scratched at the stunted white stubble growing over his neck. “Damn, I’m all halfway to handsome, now.”
“I’m sorry.” Sophie smiled for him, but the tears were coming. “I forgot that was there. I’ll take that down.”
“Don’t you do that, please. However I look, it’s proof. I’m still here.”
“Yes you are.” She lifted and kissed the fingertips of his trembling hand. She could not look into his eyes any longer. The death decay, the graying and hollowed cast of his forlorn face, were not easy sights to bear. Worst of all, he was smiling back at her as if it were some sunny Sunday in Cherry Creek. So brave. “Of course you are here with me.”
She held his hand until he pulled it away.
He was trying to sit up all the way, trying to peer out the slits in the lead lining of the passenger window. “Soph,” he whispered, “how long was I down? Land looks like Hell itself. Where are we?”
“The last mile marker I could read was 248,” she said. “Just before you woke.”
He mumbled as he considered this, remembering. Then: “So Little Thompson River? Berthoud?”
“Almost.”
“Well, I’ll be damn. We’re close to Pearson already then. We need to double back to there? Think this through now. Desperately we need gas,” he said.
“We do.”
“Too close to Loveland. Poison, death rays, whatever you like to call. We can’t dare stop.”
“No.”
He considered this. “Well, you got to stop, you know. You just say the word, Mrs. S.-G. Me and my guns? I got you covered always. Ain’t no one ever going to hurt you while I’m here.” He coughed, that guttural rattling inside that started like dead leaves shaking together over the earth, ending in a wet slosh somewhere deeper inside. “Always.”
Oh, Silas. She tried to manage a braver smile, something to offer the rearview mirror, but she was crying. He could not see that. What am I going to do without you? She only nodded, turned and settled the H4 back into four-wheel. And still she drove on.