She yanked the wheel to the right, she had to. She slammed on the brakes to hold traction, to avoid colliding with another parked bus around the bend, a wreck whose windows were jagged over by bolted plates.
The H4 almost tilted up on two wheels. Silas lost hold of the rifle, it fell and clattered out the window. Gone. “Nine!” He was crying out, jubilant, grieving. “Nine of the dead heart bastards, I got nine…”
By the time Sophie managed to swerve out to the cratered down-ramp and back onto I-25, she was going close to forty through the black. She swerved around lumpy metal silhouettes, a line of demolished cars and then a pile of sandbags.
Why isn’t Silas yelling any longer?
She swerved again to the left around a pile of rubble. Silas’ body flopped, hit hard against the door and then back down.
He’s unconscious. Sophie, you killed him.
She looked into the rearview, but it had tilted its face askew. She dared a glance back over her shoulder and Silas was sprawled out in the back, bleeding freely not from a gunshot but from many places, his ruined skin, his own decay. The assault rifle was gone, but the SMG dangled near his hand, his trigger finger tangled in the loop of its nylon sling-strap.
To the end, he tried to save me.
His mouth moved, soundlessly. Pale tongue, red cheeks. His eyes rolled white.
That was all she had time to see.
She heard warped and muffled shouts over the wind, revving engines, the echoes of banging metal in the distance.
Two hundred yards behind. We’re out of Pearson’s Corner. Gehinnom. Why can I still hear them?
“Because they’re coming after you,” she whispered to herself in answer.
She hit a pothole, a tilt in the pavement and the H4 lurched and came back down hard. Silas bounced and groaned. Can barely even see. She did not dare go any faster.
Reaching behind her seat during a clearer stretch of road, swerving out of the breakdown lane and back across the gridline, Sophie yanked the SMG away from Silas’ hand, checked the clip. She was steering with her knees.
The clip was empty.
She glanced down —
An overturned wreck with melted tires loomed directly up in front of the H4. She hit the brakes, still ran over one outstretched arm of a very old and withered body, then a broken crate, some foil trash.
No choice. She needed to stop to do this.
“Stay with me, Silas,” she breathed as she slowed the H4 to a halt. Foot on the brake, she popped out the spent clip of the SMG and let it drop. It clattered off the console. She reached over into the open glove compartment, pulled the last SMG clip out and grimly clicked it home.
Those aren’t trucks. The sound of engines carried over the wind was getting louder, up behind her on the down-ramp. Cars, or jeeps? A motorcycle?
“Dare you to come after me,” she whispered. No one had ever warned her that killing was a drug, a pit, a key. It felt incredible, rapture peeling outward, the black silhouette of ecstasy.
No one but Patrice.
I loved it. And horror.
She clicked the gun’s safety on, stuffed the entire weapon into her torn suit so that it rested across her shaking thighs. Come after me. The adrenaline was still high, electric fire turning into a numb and strangled gel inside her veins. But if she was going to die, never to see her daughter, to love and hold her Lacie, she was going to die fighting. Come on.
And emerging out from the trash piles, accelerating and swerving erratically past the toppled wreckage of a cattle truck still full of black jumbled skeletons, she drove on.
Exodus. Kersey. Mitch. Mama. Lacie.
Thunder. A blue-spliced glimpse, even, of lightning. Again the gray rains began.
It was earlier than she had believed. Twilight. It was the day that would die forever, the gray-blind and radiant day that would never truly end. The worst was by no means behind her.
I swear to you, Lacie.
The H4’s damaged engine growled, fuel blurted out of the still-open gas valve, out of the ruptured gas tank. The wind began to rage again, spinning up gouts of powdered obsidian glass. Wreckage blurred by to either side.
I swear to you I am coming.
The rain-wind surged in from behind, pushing the H4 at a tilt and a little faster. The gas needle wavered. Amber fuel beads sprinkled out over the hood in a glittering, liquid blossom.
A blossom of lovely spray.
Sophie beheld the vision of the headless girl again, the crimson eruption which had been the final ripples of her face inside the cage.
Silas whispered, “Go.”
Alive!
Sophie spared one last tear-fogged glance down at her gun. She looked out east. So near! Northeast, out where Mitch and Lacie might still be. Out there roved the wind, tasting the spinning fuel beads with black and uncounted tongues, swallowing them whole.
She was alive. She was dying. Go.
She gripped the wheel tighter, tighter with both of her radiation-burned and pallid hands.
-
To Be Continued
(The FROM THE FIRE saga shall come to an end with Episode VI, AND THE ASHES, available in the summer of 2013 from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)
The FROM THE FIRE Series
A Post-Apocalyptic Saga
By Kent David Kelly
Episode I: End of Days (2012)
Episode II: The Cage (2012)
Episode III: The Hollow Men (2012)
Trilogy One: Episodes I-III (the first three installments, with additional material) (2012)
Episode IV: Archangel (2013)
Episode V: Gray Rain Exodus (2013)
Episode VI: By Blood Foretold (in preparation, 2013)
Trilogy Two: Episodes IV-VI (the second three installments, with additional material) (in preparation, 2013)
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 Kent David Kelly
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holder.