I cannot believe, she thought. If He existed, if He loved, He never would have let this happen.
But there was something else there that Chris needed to hear, to say. And he was running out of time. There was something Chris needed to tell her, tell her before he died.
She transmitted, “I do believe. I do.”
And she hated herself.
And Chris asked of her, “Will you hear my confession?”
Again, Sophie was filled with the nigh-overwhelming temptation to pop the batteries and pull the plug. Coward. Weak. She took in a breath, ready to tell Chris she was so sorry, ready to tell him goodbye. Forever.
But Chris had reopened his side of the channel with another sending, and he began to ask of her, “Please? Will you —”
On his end of the line, a door slammed open and hit something metallic. Sophie heard the beginnings of a struggle.
Her hands shook up over her mouth, she was remembering her last call with Tom, remembering it perfectly, every breath, every cadence, Pull over and listen to me, when a deep and hostile voice came burning into her ears.
“Identify yourself at once. This is a government frequency.”
Sophie wanted to pull the plug. But her hands were over her mouth.
“Identify!”
Lowering one trembling hand, No, don’t, she pressed the transmittal key. “I’m, I’m not a soldier. I’m —”
“You have materiel? Identify. Where are you?”
Sophie said nothing more.
She heard something click on the line, a beep. Were they trying to trace her? To keep her on long enough to triangulate her location? She did not even know if that was possible.
“What city are you nearest to?” the man asked her. “Do you know your long-lat coordinates?” Furious, controlled. Controlled rage. “Citizen, you are obligated to reply. If you are secure in shelter, if you are in possession of any —”
And Sophie pulled the cord. She popped the batteries, killed the line. She would never call again.
She lifted the headphones off, pulling almost casually at the sweaty tendrils of her hair, all caught up in the wires. And she whispered, “Go be with your God, Christopher. All, all is forgiven. You did what you had to, to survive. Rest now. Be well.”
She stood, she walked across the Great Room toward the seal into the corridor, the Sanctuary. She needed to lie down.
“Goodbye. It is well.”
And that night — if it was night, after all — Sophie cried herself to sleep.
III-5
THE COMING OF THE ONE
Sophie screamed when the new sound came, the beckoning, the clicking of the murmur-cane of the One.
She was sitting hunched over the southwestern corner of the work table, reading about the ultra-light crane which was bundled away in the Material Room. Before this, she had given less than zero consideration to one confounding riddle, one whose lack of a solution could well have proven fataclass="underline" she had no idea how she would ever move hundreds of pounds of survival gear out of the shelter, back up the vertical ladder-shaft and out into the cave.
Salvation came to conceptual light in the shape of a series of triangles, an unlikely aluminum and titanium skeleton made of gears. The crane would be the answer.
The ultra-light could be rolled out from the Material Room and into the Great Room, if the pressure seal between the corridor and the Great Room itself were to be detached. Tom had installed a camouflaged aluminum crane head high up within the blackest recess of the cavern’s ceiling. This head was poised directly above the ladder-shaft, and if the crane and its nylon mesh and ropes were set up with pulleys just so, the entire miraculous contraption could indeed save Sophie’s life. It might even be possible to stand at the bottom of the shaft and to pivot the first few loads so that they would drop off onto the slanted cave floor high above, without her even needing to climb the ladder every time. The Outside would no longer be a dream.
But yes, all the more, it will forever be a nightmare.
But even still. She could work in the hazmat suit for many hours if she had to. She had already been practicing in the shelter. With meticulous care, stubborn momentum and an exhausting amount of toil, it certainly would be possible to lift considerable amounts of supplies out of the shelter and up into the H4 if it was still —
Tap tap tap. Tap.
“Ai!” Sophie’s arms wheeled as she jolted at the sound. Something was pinging and clacking away at the vault door.
Holy… that’s coming from outside!
She struggled to stay atop her stool.
She covered her mouth, her fingers clutched her cheeks. Her eyes went wide. The only parts of her that moved for the next seventeen seconds were her eyes, staring out toward the hidden entryway.
There was no one out there, of course. The vault had remained sealed and she had strong reasons to suspect that the survivors who had been struggling to break into the shelter were either dead or had taken flight. She had held the blood vigil, she had mourned for dear Sheriff Henniger, and then she had slept in the Sanctuary, had even slept in front of the vault door itself. None of those raging voices had returned. Many a full “night” and a “day” in Sophie-time had passed away.
No, there was no longer anyone out there after all.
And the sound did not come again. Surely she had imagined it. She took in the deep cresting wave of a breath of clam, and began to let it out.
Tap. Tap tap tap.
“Oh my God!”
No imagining. Nightmare. It was real, it was one of the survivors. Still alive. Someone was still out there.
She ran over to the hazmat suit, which she had carefully spread out over the fourth freezer for quick assembly. She had read up over the last several “days” to master the suit’s makeup and the most efficient suit-up procedures, and had even practiced several times putting it on while she counted how many seconds it had taken her to do so. The first time she believed it took her two hundred and eighty-four seconds, but she had been sloppy and careless and she couldn’t be sure she had kept a fair count. The second time, she used her heartbeat as a clock and came up with two hundred and thirteen. The third time, it was only one hundred and seventy-one.
And now, now that she needed to suit up as carefully and quickly as she could, her hands were shaking and she could not even remember where she had left the HK submachine gun.
Sophie’s panic came all in a rush.
They’ve come back. More of them, anyone left alive, they’re all here. No! Worse. What if they’re soldiers? Oh God, the call. The call to Fort Morgan. You fool! They’ve found you. They’re not going to fail to get in this time. Not like the others. Killers. Too clever. They’re doing something to the door, they’re not going to yell, not going to warn you or anything at all. Explosives. Poison through the vents? What if they’ve rechanneled the waterfall pool? What if they’re going try to drown me out? What if —
Tap tap tap.
She suited up as quickly as she could, crested the visor, turned on the re-breather, taped down the mitts so that she had the thin-fingered gloves ready to slip into and over the trigger guard of her weapon. Suited up, she stumble-ran over to the medicine cabinet and looked around for the flashlight. It would be far easier to take out targets in the dark, she had read, if they were partially blinded first.
Where was it? She was certain she had left it there atop the glass case. Spinning to make her way back toward the shelf racks (the flashlight was by the binders then, it had to be), she tripped over the hose, danced two capering steps out past the fallen bulletin board, and then kicked the submachine gun out from under a discarded sweatshirt beside the laundry pile. The gun scraped loudly along the concrete, spinning in a lazy semicircle and coming to rest over the Great Room’s drain.