She nodded, trying not to dwell on the insinuations beneath his words. This was the most forceful, the most alert she had ever seen him.
“There we are. Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said. “Go in now. Coast as much as you can.”
She eased her foot off the brake again. The H4 crept forward.
Moving at a crawl, wishing she could silence the damaged engine, Soph guided the H4 between the lines of trucks and paint-blistered RVs. Gouts of shattered glass showed where an impact had occurred after some of the trucks had been parked in place. And what does that mean?
She gripped the wheel tighter, holding her breath, eyes wide, afraid to blink. The shadowy monoliths of wreckage crawled by to either side, dark metallic waves, the iron-sheeted walls of Hell’s in-spiral city.
And down. And down.
She tapped the brake to stay under five miles an hour.
Where are these fuel bays? She leaned in toward the windshield, her gaze struggling to look for human shapes in the twisting and tumbling garbage on the wind.
“Where?” asked Silas, and she jumped a little. She hadn’t realized that she had murmured the question aloud. “With this many trucks, these walls of flatbeds and tankers and all, I just don’t know. There’s a fork in the ways up there. God, it’s like tunnels made of wrecks. Go right, I think.”
She turned. A darker, more garish and somehow wider vista met the H4’s lights. The wind was quieter in the spiral deep. A few plastic bags with still-identifiable store names emblazoned on the sides were blowing and lilting endlessly like the ghosts of gulls.
Here, here solace we will find. In the eye of the storm.
She was certain then, as she looked around at the lighter wreckage. A good number of people had survived here for quite some time. Some might still be alive, irradiated, poisoned, broken, sheltered and still in the business of dying. There in the inner circle of all those parked trucks, the curve of the concrete valley’s far horizon made not of metal but of mist, more trucks had been backed up against each other to forge an iron fortress. Semis were fused together by haphazardly-welded metal plates, bumpers were wreathed with barbed wire. More than one truck had brown and foreboding stains spattered up across the grille. Pieces of a tattered flannel shirt fluttered from a tractor’s smokestack, a scarlet banner of grid and cross.
No gas pumps yet. Sophie shivered. God, where are the buildings? The fuel bays? We need to get out of here.
She turned her head and took a sip of salty water from her gnawed straw, her eyes never leaving the blackened spectacle of trucks streaming in the H4’s lights, concrete-metal-tire-glass. And what if some of the men here are still walking, Sophie? What if you need to fight for fuel?
Then she would need Silas, there at the end of all things.
She wanted to check her own gun again, but she dared not take her hands off of the wheel. The corridor created by the trailers and welded plates to either side was getting narrower, constricted as she edged out deeper into the open concrete valley, the Eye.
Shapes flew by, plastic bags and shadows. Her senses were uncertain, amped and haunted and conflicted. Unbidden, she remembered a grim and claustrophobic book of elegies Tom had once encouraged her to read, the Alighieri, the Inferno of Virgil and Dante and his descent into the Iron City of Dis, the spiral labyrinth of lovely Lucifer himself.
Farther in, coasting. Ruins loomed at last upon the left. The long and roofed gas island for passenger cars had tilted and collapsed, a wildly angled scarp of roofing, bent girders and melted plastic letters dripping and frozen down the signs. Bulky mounds of roofing showed where crushed cars and SUVs lay beneath it. Further to the right loomed a pile of molten tires, ringed around with the bodies of dead pigeons and crumpled aluminum siding.
Farther into the Eye.
There’s nothing to help you here. No fuel. Hopeless. Get out, get —
There were three sledge-hammered vending machines beyond the end of the gas island, their gaping glass-shrapnel faces open, their backs shoved at precarious angles against a burned-out RV. One was half-filled with shattered bottles, the other two were completely emptied.
The headlights’ illumination rebounded back as she coasted nearer. A reflection? Was that a window?
Beyond the machines, shrouding by blowing obsidian dust and dunes of wreckage, appeared the massive diner facility. Its signs were blown apart, its doors covered by plywood, its windows choked off behind splintered jumbles of nail and lumber. This registered with Sophie for a moment as an icy thrill, battling with her insistence to find the fuel, to find her Lacie: …Did someone have time to repair things? To cover shattered windows?… And then the thought was gone, suppressed and shunted, held down deep to drown away in silence.
She drove by the last of the huge low building, its half-collapsed lobby and blown-out ducting. A wall of tires, all chained together, was piled along the wall of its farther side. There in the gaps were lodged sandbags, feedbags, even mailbags and Fed Ex gurneys, steel carts piled high with bricks. Movable walls. There were narrow gaps at intervals in the not-quite-disarrayed vertical piles. View holes? Gun ports?
Silas let in a rattling breath, as if had not been breathing for many seconds. He exhaled words: “Soph get us out of here, get us out of here, right now.”
She looked down again at the bobbing needle. “I thought I was your private. Is this my decision?”
“You’re promoted to equal. I say out now. You decide.”
He’s certain we’re going to see someone. Is there any other way? She eased her jaw, wetted her upper lip, pushed her tongue against her teeth. No. We need this.
“You know we need this,” she said, wanting to close her eyes. The last edge of the restaurant building hovered off to the left, away. “We have no choice. Protect me, Silas.”
“All right, we look a little longer.” He sighed. “Protect you to the death. Swear to God and all his demons,” he said to her. “Damn them all.”
She thought she could see the farthest edge of the concrete clearing up ahead, another wall of trailers. Wanting to be as far away from the ruined building as she could, she drifted the H4 to the right.
More ruins, more denied gasoline. They drove past the almost-intact diesel islands, the meadow-gold signs warning “CLEARAN—” and “— NGAGE BRAKE HE—” and “— AIT FOR SIGNA —,” the drive-ups for the CAT scales, the squarish wreck of a crumpled forklift on its side.
“We can do this,” she said. Her voice sounded rattling, frail. Perhaps if she said it again, she could mean it.
“I’m covering you, Soph.”
Another long, rectangular building arose in darkness. There. That must be it. Please.
Opposite the diesel islands, she could see brick walls and a slate gray roof. Downed gutters and tilted signage showed the way. Closer.
“That’s it. That’s it! Leave the engine on while you fuel,” Silas was saying. “God’s sake, you know how dangerous this is going to be even if we’re alone. No choice but to leave the engine on, never get it going again.” He was stuttering his words, slurring, trying to slow himself. “Make, you, you make one hundred and fifteen percent sure you ground yourself, you hear me true. No static electric, no?”