He had cursed her softly, through tears and with no small amount of affection in his voice.
He was dying. They both knew, and his last days of agony, laced away by the morphine, would not be many. But his eyes were still twinkling bright and true, and he could move his arms. He could even sit up, roll over, test a weapon, if Mrs. S.-G. would only let him.
Mrs. S.-G. flatly refused.
When he demanded to know why, insisting that he could serve as sentry better if he was buckled upright in his seat, she explained in clinical terms the condition of his back, the fabric and garbage bag plastic embedded beneath his skin, the burns and blisters around his genitals. She said at best, he would need to lie still for at least an hour (And what was an hour any longer, after all?) so that his new pliant bandages could firm and settle, so that the fluids and sanies and the blood all trickling out of him could crystallize and form a resin to line the bandages, so that her work could set him a little more solidly (Like a husk, she thought, like an insect husk, like the chemical sludge of a molting butterfly inside a cocoon, Christ, stop it Sophie), or else he could start bleeding uncontrollably. And there he would die.
After that, he no longer questioned her.
Between cleanings of the guns, vigils elbowed up “on watch,” prayers and mumbled scraps of song, Silas tried his best to sleep. While he did so, Sophie left the engine running. In one of Tom’s barely-used composition books she scribbled out the beginning of their journey, sparse shadows of directions. At first, her account was little more than terse descriptions of estimated elevation, identities of landmarks (Was a boulder in the road a landmark? A melted truck?), lefts and rights taken, hazards avoided and clear ways found.
She told herself that she could make her way back to the shelter if she had to. But in striving to remember every detail, Sophie soon realized that returning to the shelter would be impossible.
And so we go on ahead, she thought. Goodbye. Get on 119, you’re just avoiding it now because you don’t want to see. But what if we need more food, what if something runs out, something you forgot? And what of fuel?
They had not yet passed enough wrecked vehicles for her to feel confident that she could siphon gas if she had to. She had the barrels, the plastic containers, but there was no simple answer to the need. And the H4 was a gas guzzler, especially in the mountains and in four-wheel. She would need to stop the car, probably even stop the engine, hoist a fuel can out of the back or worse, a barrel off the roof. She would need to funnel gas in at least twice on the way to Kersey.
God, two hundred miles at best. At best!
Could she lift a barrel on her own, without the winch? Could she move Silas without hurting him? Could she risk digging through the supplies from the back hatch, while Silas could not watch over her and anyone might be watching?
Siphoning might well be easier.
She looked down at her notebook, the last word underlined: “Fuel???”
That is when the shape of her writing began undulate. That is when the logistic-notes began to turn away from landmarks and coordinates, threads through the Apocalyptic maze, and to re-weave themselves into a diary of travel.
Exodus, she named this.
Silas moved very little. He groaned, he checked his guns and their safeties, he even drank a little water by turning his head toward the clever taped straw and bottle which Sophie had made for him. But he had nothing else to say.
I shouldn’t have told him, the way his body really is.
And this, remembered from long ago: Sophie, do I look like a monster?
She did not write for much longer. Long minutes had already passed. The wind and rain were pushing filth into streams, revealing the last of the Dory way down to 119. And Silas was breathing more easily, and quieting.
A rise in the wind was mistaken — for one panicked moment — as the sound of a car’s engine, and Silas was listening too.
What was that?
Silas had his pistol braced, his trembling fingers were on the latch to the power window. His eyes were wide.
A distant rumbling, nearer and above, behind. It was an engine after all.
Driving, some car shielded from the EMP, still running. Someone up behind us, Sophie realized. Someone from up on Dory Lake.
That was when Sophie closed her notebook. It was time to drive onto 119, to finally get moving.
Whoever you are, I’m sorry. I am no one’s angel. No one but Lacie’s.
They turned out onto the highway, defined by the remains of guardrail beneath the piled gravel. The rain spat itself dry, the wind carried on and on. Strange little whirlwinds, like dust devils, spread out in pirouetting silhouettes through the stark wash of the headlights. These whirlwinds were filled with scorched clothing, paper and shredded cardboard boxes, testaments to abruptly ended lives swirling over the road, scattering through the ditches and out to ruin.
A doll without a leg went tumbling across the highway, head over belly, head over belly over and over again.
Follow me, it sang in Sophie’s mind, borrowing the elder voice of a tortured girl.
Patrice?
Follow me.
(Here there remains a later, unattributed notation within the recovered record:
V-3
THE DIARY OF THE EXODUS
(For the consideration of the Archivist-Legatus, note bene: Sophie’s original diary-chronicle entries, numbered by her as 1 through 531 [with numerous internal conflicts of organization], have all been researched and expanded upon by myself, A. S.G.-C., to form the speculative narrative which comprises the preceding papers which I have entitled for serial journal publication as I — End of Days, II — The Cage, III — The Hollow Men, and IV — Archangel [with Sophie noting the “Hollow Men” herself, apparently being a reference to a surviving poem once beloved by her Tom, a poem eerily prescient to the Burning, written by one Thomas Steams Eliot sometime in the early 20th century. Refer to Appendix E.])
(Due to the circumstances of her travel through the wasteland, there is at this crucial juncture not sufficient detail to the primary material — especially regarding Sophie’s own thoughts and musings — to continue to form a narrative representative of the several days following. And, it is clear, she inserted these pages into the diary later and only intermittently updated entries 532-719 throughout her later survival at the Geyser Basin. Much of this woman’s mysterious and fragile life, a sliver of hope encased in amber, remains to us unknown.)
(Therefore, to continue the story of Sophie and Silas and to provide the reader with an understanding of the nature of the diary itself, the following section has been taken verbatim from Sophie’s shorthand, beginning with entry 532. — A. S.G.-C.)