“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just keep watching, now. Be safe.”
“I am. I will.”
And they were driving down into the lost majesty of the great turn, the scenic semicircle where the rainbows and the silhouettes had thrived upon a time, the down-slope where the thickest of the forest had once been. The forest’s remnant might have still been out there, somehow enduring, but if it was the skeletons of the trees were down too far to see.
The wind began to slow as Sophie tried to look out into the distance, where the wall of fog was vertical and streaked with wet bolts of cinder-light. As she looked, the H4 rumbling and unceasing in its never-ending left turn, the clouds above the vehicle collapsed.
Thunder rolled. The breaking-open clouds crawled up into themselves, heading “east” (And where was east without a sun? Where was anything?), colliding with the mountainside and splitting apart to reveal a somber line of crags on high above.
The Shelter High, forever lost to us.
The Archangel of radiance, the whorls of the sun’s reflections, its wings and limbs were lost up there in twilight gone to gray. The Hell-furnace of churning sky, an un-glow, gave some twisted mockery of sunlight. Far below, the world of Ruin was vivid yellow, cinder-gold. It was like looking down over a devastated train set through a thick pane of old warped glass, like looking over an avalanched ski village through amber-tinted goggles. Smoke churned far down there, curdling clouds of ash clogged the edges of what was real, billowing air snaking over everything and reflecting still-smoldering fires from far away.
The air below was seething, the breath of the dying earth was solid and alive. Up above, higher than that strange glowing landscape, a little higher than the H4 upon its thread of road, the sky was a horrible and swirling yellow-gray, fading up into crimson dark.
After the grand turn, an eternity, the world below had loomed a little larger.
And down she drove, perhaps toward what remained of Black Hawk. The fields were filled with husks, the discarded dolls of peoples’ bodies. Something caused the bodies to decay very slowly. Sophie knew quite well about autolysis, the entropic breakdown of a body’s liquefying enzymes. But what of putrefaction, the wasting of flesh feasted upon by bacteria? What had happened to the bacteria, what had changed?
The fields wavered, dunes of scorched dirt choking away dead tufts of grass. Flower-like white hands and feet — feet with burned sneakers still hanging from them — peeked out here and there, a garden of idle slaughter. The bodies had a strange, withered appearance, like bundles of sticks.
“Where in the Hell are we?” murmured Silas.
“By Black Hawk,” Sophie answered. “We’re by—”
“No. Never saw these other fields. We’re somewhere else.”
And Sophie realized that he was right.
Already, we’re lost. She gritted her teeth, she drove a little faster as if that would erase the welling panic inside her belly. We’re lost and I’ve no idea where we might be. Everything in dying, all is changed.
“Don’t think of it,” said Silas, as if reading her mind. He even gave her a little wave. “Just you drive.”
Nowhere. The descending, the fields of the dead in fading.
The plan she and Silas had worked out over Tom’s folded and highlighted maps of Colorado, calculated to angle their way toward Kersey north and east in a series of many-miled zags, had been bold, outrageously bold and impossible. She could see that now. Two hundred miles, perhaps more? There was no way to know how many times they would need to loop back, to drive around traffic jams or piles of the dead, to account for craters and wind, radiation and landslides. With conditions as they were, twenty miles would consist of an improvisatorial stitching together of twenty consecutive miracles. A hundred miles would be a journey of many days.
And what of the survivors?
But Silas had driven to the shelter, all on his own, while terribly wounded and with far less equipment or preparation. All the way from Littleton, Sophie, up through Black Hawk and to you.
It could be done, Fate be willing. Could it not?
Die trying, was all she could tell herself. Get to Kersey or die trying. There is nothing else to hope, nothing else to live for.
She took a deep breath, remembering. There would be bomb funnels in this natal terrain, impact hollows and blast shadows. The north-south spine of the unsundered Rocky Mountains would have spliced the blast waves into coils, half each to west and east. The emerald and umber fabric of the world had been unraveled. They would need to thread a thousand needles to weave the way, they would need to adhere to the mountain roads for as long as possible.
Using I-70 would be completely out of the question, the tunnels and canyons under the ski resorts would make the interstate’s remnants virtually impossible to pass. Glenwood Springs down to Idaho Springs would surely be impassable as well. How many dead were knotted along that way, how many corpses locked inside their melted cars, buried under rockslides from the nuclear detonations?
Such was not, Sophie and Silas had decided, to be imagined.
Never, never go that way.
And so, she and Silas had made their own tentative plan to divert around the cities as much as they could, favoring the paved roads which passed through forest instead of canyons, particularly those routes protected by shielding slopes. The key was the Peak to Peak Historic Byway, Colorado Highway 119.
The best way, Silas had believed, might be 119 on toward the lakeside timber-town of Nederland, then 72 past the sandstone Flatirons of Boulder, or what was left of them. Perhaps then 72 to Lyons, or 85 toward Greeley? There was no way to know how many missiles had fallen, which cities had been pulverized and which were hollowed shells, irradiated tombs. He and Sophie hoped — prayed — that whatever course they were forced to choose, the eastern Rockies would shield them from the majority of the radiation; that the fallout would drift overhead and into the utter east, intangible and distant lures into oblivion, sent away toward the Atlantic upon the prevailing wind.
But what if the plumes of radioactive dust had already rained down weeks ago, and had solidified over the wasteland? What if the rain was stirring the poison and lacing the air with death? The air we’re breathing now?
The vents could not be sealed.
It was all too immense to comprehend. She looked back into the rearview mirror, searching for Silas’ eyes. How are we going to do this, Silas? How? He had fallen asleep, his eyes softly closed, his face composed in solemn purity as if he were listening, listening in the darkness to the sudden absence of Eternity.
Lost.
But black luck was with them, a curse of conflicting chance and fortune. The slopes of Fairburn Mountain had not collapsed, not entirely. Half of the mountain had weathered the horrific blasts, had channeled the fires and devastation northwest-ward toward Rollinsville.
In finding the way, Sophie had to loop farther south than she intended, toward the ruins of Black Hawk once again. The world had been reforged, unmade, almost sculpted in repurposed potter’s clay yet left without the veracity of a recognizable second form. Below the mountain and off the warped and few paved roads, smudges of desolation were interspersed between almost pristine islands of withered wilderness. It was as if a titan had squeezed the bones of the earth, strangling them in both hands, crushing almost all to dust. But lovely and untouched slivers of the Not So Long Ago, the Once-World, had squelched up between the titan’s knuckles, had been dropped in random mounds of soil newly turned.