The dark. The dark is coming.
“Sophie. Don’t think about that.” She shook her head, as if to clear it from the unsettling shadows which were layering her thoughts with other people’s voices once again.
There was a challenge as she struggled to remember which order she had done things in, which things still required a ritual of initiation and which were fated to be redone a second time. She knew that if she did not keep moving nonstop until she collapsed, in perfect order of destined motion, she would stop everything — stop thinking, stop hoping, stop breathing and that would be the end of her.
The work table, there’s panels behind it, she thought. You know this. You need to get on the radio. The phone. The computer. Something. Mitch, the others, you need to reach out and to learn what is left of the world, you —
“No. Not yet.”
This is vital!
“I can’t face that yet. Not all of it at once. Not now.”
No reason to talk, you know. You don’t even need your own name any longer. Be nothing, be no one.
As she warred with herself she kept cleaning, straightening, measuring.
As her actions threatened to flow from exacting precision into obsession, she cleaned up the shattered light fixture with a broom and utility scoop she had discovered beneath the table. She did not yet trust herself to attempt a righting of the collapsed utility shelves, but she did pull a pair of bolt cutters out from the wreckage. With sudden resolve, she paced toward the center of the room.
Dropping her soaking blanket for balance, standing nude, she pushed the wet linen under the dangling light fixture and cinched the lights’ frayed cable between the chrome-vanadium pincers of the cutters. Closing her eyes, she powered the quick-snap on the battery-powered cutters and almost cried out in surprise when the cable cut loose on the first try. The light cage thumped down onto the floor and rolled off the blanket with a clang. The bulbs remained unfractured, glass-embraced spider threads of enmeshed argon and phosphor. Sophie pushed the light cage away with her foot, toward the hose socket, where it would be out of the way.
There was still much to learn about the great room, a tiny labyrinth made of choice. A bank of freezers stood between the shower stall and the one still-upright bank of shelves, and a medicine cabinet was bolted near to the transparent seal which led into the deeper rooms behind her.
She steeled herself, turning and taking a step toward the seal. She fully intended to press her way through into the pressurized chamber just beyond —
(Someone else is in here, spider, don’t turn your back on the shower ever, no don’t go, crawling, crawling on the ceiling, don’t you dare go in there)
— But she could not yet will herself to go into the back and see the utmost edge of her tiny world. What would she do? If she were to go back there and stare at another newfound wall; if the claustrophobic panic that was already gnawing at her fraying self-control was unleashed back there, blossoming out of her like a bloody flower from the flesh, forcing her to confront the horrid truth of just how limited her existence had become?
While the pressure seal was still untouched, the back of the shelter was a place of hope, a horizon of possibility. But once she went in and saw just how small it was, that would be the edge of the world, perhaps the edge of the entire world forever.
The world in spiral,
ever circling in.
In on itself, forever,
ever tighter, spider-web,
crawling,
who is huntress who the hunted,
I and I,
feeding from myself I’m in,
I’m in
the Cage.
“Stop it.”
She laid the bolt cutters down and smoothed the blonde hairs rising upon her forearms. Returning to the wall farthest from the entryway — the north wall, perhaps, if the concept of “north” meant anything at all any longer — she moved away a plastic tarp that was pinned up against the concrete there. Behind it, baling hooks of some kind were hung in a rack, like pool cues. She pulled one out. It was surprisingly light, flexible and plastic. She pressed a button and a little levered hook popped out of the farther end with a click. She turned the baling hook to hold it by its molded foam grip, and in doing so discovered a label on the chromium tube: Macy’s.
It was a retail garment hook, a tool of the ended world.
And then she remembered what it was for. Tom had showed her this, several years ago. She looked up, saw the stuffed duffel bags racked up against the ceiling in their swathes of heavy nylon mesh. Lifting the hook, gasping in pain, she maneuvered one of the bags by hooking one of its rugged handles. She pulled it down and it fell in front of her with an unceremonious whumph. The dust in the air whirled, adrift in the unpleasant and intermingled odors of laundry detergent and mothballs. Slotting the hook back into its rack, Sophie hefted the bag by its end-handle and spilled its contents onto the floor.
She recognized some of the clothes. Tom had brought hundreds of sweats and shirts back from a trip to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. At the time, she had chided him: “Recruiting an army, love? They’re not going to be very fashionable now, are they?” And his answer with that sly and boyish grin, “Ha. An army, instead of me? Hopefully you won’t need one.”
Jeans, flannels, T-shirts, hoodies, underwear. And some of Tom’s old favorites as well, things she had told him to get out of the house. Out!
She smiled, a slight quirk of the lips, and the tears were near again. He had followed the letter of her law, if not the spirit. Out of the house, and here all they were. She could not bear to go through Tom’s old clothes yet, looking at the bundled flannels and leather jackets and black jeans with the holes in the cuff or knee. They would only remind her of him.
Ignoring the burning of exhausted muscles deep in her back and shoulders, she sifted through the unisex clothes and pulled out boxers, bundled tube socks, over-large sweats and a baggy green hooded shirt that read “GO ARLINGTON! ~ Barcroft Fitness ~ Amateur Indoor Soccer League.”
“Oh, Tom.” Another half-formed smile.
Closing her eyes, going by feel alone and forcing herself into the tedium of slow motions and measured breaths, Sophie dressed herself. A precarious scab on her index finger fell off as she pushed her right hand up through the sleeve, and a bead of deep crimson blood streaked down the cusp-line of her fingernail. Bringing the finger up to her lips to lick off the blood, she stopped short as she happened to gaze down into the palm of her hand. Her entire hand was pink and finely pulped with the texture of raw meat, and blisters were rising where the heel of her hand had surged against the concrete floor, back when she had awakened from the nuclear blast and shoved the shelves off of her body.