“No, you good,” he called back to her. “Bless you, you good and I can see that. You best to be letting me go. I realize that now. Too dangerous to let me in, Mrs. S.-G. I was wrong to come, I was just… well. I was wrong as wrong can be. I’ve got no right. Don’t you open that mighty door to me, ma’am. It’s… it’s terrible out here.”
And he began to climb.
Sophie muttered in a blur, “Unbelievable-oh-my-God-I, I can’t believe he thinks that I would, that I, I…” And she screamed through the door, as loudly as she could: “You stop right there!”
The man almost jumped out of his skin. He raised his hands, as if he were about to be mugged, and his blackthorn cane clattered down to rest over the ladder-shaft’s bloodstained floor grate.
“Un-fucking-believable.”
Beneath her breath, Sophie continued to utilize her vast and comprehensive sailor’s vocabulary as she pumped the vault door’s pressure wheel counter-clockwise. An alarm klaxon wailed, she punched at a blinking red light that flashed upon the door. She shook the wheel back and forth, then kept turning away. The wheel at last relented, rapidly slipping through her fingers as it continued to spin on ever faster. Droplets of mineral oil spattered out of a gasket, up over her hazmat suit’s breath-fogged faceplate.
She watched the change in the ladder-shaft’s environment through the vid screen. Air puffed out of the shelter’s tunnel in a square of visible and ballooning streaks. Black clouds of dust went puffing out around the elderly man’s silhouette. He kept his burned and slender arms up over his head, even though his head was beginning to loll toward his chest. Then he turned toward Sophie, not to confront her, but only to have enough room to bend over and take in a ragged breath. He planted his scarred hands over his torn-trousered kneecaps and tilted toward the opening door, coughing and gagging.
The door released, and Sophie shoved it open on its powered rails. She stepped out of the tunnel and into the shaft, awash in reflected glo-lites. When Silas had done with coughing he rose and turned toward her more properly, a shuffling little circle, and she could see that although he was wearing green leather work boots over his feet, the soles had melted off. His hole-ridden socks, trailing prints of water, were stained umber and crimson with emerging and growing tangles of bloody filth. His lower lip was trembling but he stood his ground, his eyes were wide and bloodshot and unwavering. His brow furrowed. A dried clot of blood and pus stood out like an unpolished jewel over his right eyebrow.
He was staring. Not at Sophie, but at her right hand. She was still holding the HK submachine gun, and it was leveled in the direction of his shins.
The alarm klaxon’s guttural echoes finally drained away. Into the relative silence of howling wind gusts and the waterfall from far above, the old man whispered, “Oh, Lord.”
Sophie sighed. Taking a step backward, she clipped the gun’s hollow stock-tube to her utility belt and let it dangle there with the safety on. She spread her gloved hands out to Silas, but he did not cross the six feet of distance between them. She said, “I’m sorry I frightened you. Come in. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Through the suit, her voice sounded alien, the taunting of a machine.
The old man’s eyes roved down to the swaying gun, then to the digital flick-flick of scrolling data imprinted on Sophie’s visor, and then he stared into her eyes as he discovered them.
“Lady,” he said, his hands slowly coming down to his sides, “I could be anyone. You poisoning yourself out here, robot armor or no. Don’t you go risk yourself, you’re blessed to be here. Blessed, now you go turn around, and Hell if I don’t blame you.”
Sophie shook her head, but inside the suit it made very little difference. She turned her hands palm-upward. “I’m not leaving you out here.”
“Well. Sorry I dropped your love note from the good man in his rest,” said Silas, “but you done scared the ever-loving horseshit out o’ me.”
He toed the paper away so that it would not fall down through the grate, where the melt-water was trickling down into a congealing puddle of blood-sludge beneath the floor. “That good man, says I, he wrote it for you and it was pure. I say it true, but you should see.”
Silas bent down again.
“Please come to me,” Sophie whispered.
He said, “Don’t you shoot me. Just reaching down for my cane.”
She let him. He never took his eyes off of her gun.
“Please.” Louder she said it, this time. “Please come to me.”
And as Silas Colson rose once more, he took a faltering step toward her. He shook his head and winced, as if waking from his own isolate slice of marble-tiered Purgatory and back down into nightmare. His pupils flared in bloodshot rings of scarlet-white. He said:
“Oh my, oh, I don’t. Maybe… don’t reckon after all, Mrs. S.-G. That’s a-being… a-being a bad idea a-t’all.”
And he fainted into her arms.
CODA
To Be Continued
(The survival story of Sophie St.-Germain continues, as the stranger from out of the wasteland, Silas, reveals to her the horrors of the World That Was Lost; and as they leave the shelter together in order to wage their war in the name of life in FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE IV: ARCHANGEL, to be made available from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Kent David Kelly
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the copyright holder.