“Peter,” Sophie said. She raised her head, opened her unblinking eyes and stared up to the cracked and girdered ceiling. “If I had been brave, I would… I would have saved you, too. As you certainly would have done for me. I am weak. I could only save one. I had to choose my Lacie. I am so, so sorry.”
All the interlaced shadows of Patrice breathed uneasily, stepping away inside of her. The black truths had been spoken, the damage had been done.
Patrice could not counter such sincerity. Sophie was left alone.
She dropped her hands away from the side of her head, to cover her mouth. Tears streaked down into her bandages. Looking down at last, recognizing herself and the spirit caged within her flesh, she saw that her pulped and meaty palms were bleeding once again.
She waited there enveloped by long moments, a breathing and aware eternity, until the real voices of the man and the boy and the girl out in the burning world once more faded away.
Alone.
When at last she could stand again, she found that the air in this other place was cool and intricate with water beads, a mist filtering down from a vinyl-ensconced ceiling grate. This pure air smelled of a not-unpleasing and fragrant aerosol laced with something like black licorice, redolent with undercurrents of utility paint and ozone. Socketed and inset halogen lights along every girder made the moist air sparkle, reflecting upon itself. Everything she could see there in the corridor had an otherworldly clarity, a firmness which seemed too crisp and shadowless, almost digital in its slightly-askew perfection.
I go deeper, ever deeper into the mountain. No further, soon. Now there will be nowhere else to go.
There was very little damage there. Everything was painted green, even the girders and their filament hanger-sheets were covered with contoured panes of painted vinyl. These radiant plastic webs lent the corridor an illusion of welcome, an ironic afterglow mirroring the effect of ornate salons and galleries once enshrined in the world above.
All those places surely had turned to dust.
There were four doors along the shelter’s deepest corridor, solemn windowed monoliths of bolted steel. The nearest to Sophie’s right was stenciled in shock-white brick letters as “GENERATOR BANK” and the next beyond it, “TOILET,” the second bathroom in the shelter. The third door to the corridor’s farthest end was marked “MATERIAL ROOM” and the sole door to Sophie’s left, “SANCTUARY.”
Not bedroom, no. Not here. Sanctuary.
Sophie smoothed her wounded and sweating hands against her jeans. When the survivors had first come and started pounding on the vault door she had urinated over herself in fear. She was still very near to panic, her ears popped as her jaw clenched and unclenched itself seemingly of its own accord. Her trembling hands juddered back and away from her thighs like wounded birds.
“Come on,” she said. “Breathe. Come on, now.”
She needed to think, to regain control, to act. How many survivors were there outside, desperate then to claw their way into her shelter, and how many of them were still alive? Would they endure and lurk in wait in the relative refuge of the cave as they plotted how to draw Sophie out, or would they return to their cars, the boiling and crumbling labyrinth of molten roads, seeking some other place of solace? There were few places that Sophie could think of which were more secure and enclosed than the waterfall canyon, its cavern and its end. She began to believe that anyone who came to the cave and then found the vault door would remain there, if only to die. And if three or more survivors had already found her, more people would be coming.
Soon.
And what of the men of the Air Force, of the National Security Agency? They cannot all be dead. Was this shelter a secret after all? How long would it take the military to find and seize the shelter as their own, and what would Sophie mean to men who took the Sanctuary from her?
She remembered the last voice on Tom’s phone, Tom’s murderer, that venom tinged with the sweet of ice, “Listen very carefully, Mrs. St.-Germain. You tell anyone any of what you heard, and we will execute you for treason. We will kill your daughter before your eyes. Right in fucking front of you. Do you understand me?”
And, oh yes, Sophie, sounded the distant taunting of Patrice. The clever men, the savage men, will ever come for more. Oh, delicious you.
“No.”
Perhaps there would come a time when a group of those men would be hopeless and senseless enough to use explosives on the door, a folly that would surely destroy the ladder-shaft and entomb Sophie in her hollow of the world. And that design flaw, one Tom had known well and had always meant to remedy (And oh, sweet Sophie, you fought with him over money at every turn, you guilted him, shamed him with faint praise and tiny smiles, you pushed your beloved Tom away, forever), that was not the shelter’s only vulnerability. There were pipes and venting and water gaskets all along the cave’s shadowed ceiling, and despite their black-painted camouflage it would not take long for a searching individual to realize that Sophie could be poisoned, or fumigated, or perhaps even deprived of water and simply killed. Perhaps she herself could even be made desperate enough to open the door at last. And then?
Tom had always been worrying about the indefensibility of the cave itself, and Sophie had grown so weary of his subtle extractions from savings that she had finally closed off her own bank accounts to his access. The final straw, she recalled, had been his “mutual procurement golfing buddy” and the gray market assault weapons. The very weapons she was now seeking.
You shamed him and still he loved you.
But that was a foolish regret, one minted in the lost and liquid gold of another age, an age already ended. Survival, its glaring and ceaseless need, had become the lord over the moment. Every moment. Sophie had no idea how many people had survived the nuclear devastation, or how many more would fall prey to disease, murder or irradiation. Billions must have perished. But the few who survived, the wretched and still-breathing would indeed — without even the specter of a doubt — be driven to become something far, far worse than merely beasts. They would be savages, bereft of fifty centuries of injected lethargy and the comforts of the civil. The human spirit, locked in an oubliette of torpor and tranquility for thousands of years, was about to shine through, burning more fiercely than ever before.
White Fire. Oh…
But even if no more of the savages would find her before she left the shelter, Sophie would need to seek them. The hunter would indeed become the hunted. After all, Sophie would be compelled to leave the vault to in order to find her Lacie. And if any of those damned and forsaken souls were ever to stand between her and her daughter, Yes, she could fight if she had to.
She would learn, because it was the omen of necessity. She could do it. She could kill.
And now it was time to learn.
“I will,” she said, and her hands at last went still and spread before her in the glitter of the air. “I will.”
The damned, they were still hungering out there. Pete was out there and had suffered among them, and if he was not already dead he was surely dying and in need. In need of her.
I will kill them, any of them, if I have to.
But where would the shelter’s guns be? And even as Sophie asked herself this question, she knew. The wire wall-rack just outside the shower stall, with its safety scissors and tape and antiseptic spray, had been arrayed by Tom in precisely the order Sophie preferred it in at home. Every emergency thing that she might have needed access to on split-second notice in the dead of night would only be in one place. That was the way that Tom had made things for her, never asking for her approval but always waiting for her knowing unguarded smiles.