She slid the sapphire-acrylic panel open and watched. The digital screen was tufted with erratic lines of rasterized gray pixels, waving in undulating sine curves across the view. Powdery tendrils of static flourished and puffed across the image, then died away again. It took Sophie several seconds to decipher what she was seeing.
The black-and-white view was not sourced from the ladder, but somewhere much lower. The camera seemed to be positioned perhaps three feet above the grated floor, which meant that it was somehow disguised to look like something else. Was it part of the door itself? No. It was somewhere in the shaft at an acute angle to the vault entry. Sophie stroked the panel, looking for pan/tilt/zoom controls, but there was nothing of the kind. The display was inert. But what the view revealed to her, after the static had died away, was clear enough.
She could see starry constellations of pulverized concrete, where bullets had impacted in the walls. She could see a shattered glo-lite, a ladder rung scuffed to a brighter silver by a ricochet. Below this, she discerned the black-and-white hazy negative of a man’s boot, a pool of blood dripping down the drain, and a sheriff’s cowboy hat lying open end up by a pallid and unmoving hand. She could not see his face or his body, but she did not need to. She knew.
There were no other bodies. Peter Henniger was dead.
“Oh, Pete.” She closed her eyes.
And somehow, she accepted this. She had already known, but her cowardice and her responsibility for his death had conspired to refuse her the comprehension of the reality. Only in seeing his dead body there was she finally compelled into an understanding. Her grief was there in a sudden wash of black and vacuous guilt, but it was not nearly the tormenting shame which she had borne earlier, fleeing across the Great Room.
Pete was gone, but he was at peace and bereft of a world that would likely never know true peace again for as long as the remnants of shattered humanity endured.
Lost. And it was better this way.
“I’m sorry.” She ran her fingertips over the vid screen, outlining his frozen hand. “I’m sorry you had to suffer.”
She looked at the display of the ladder again, searching for shadows. Now, she was not dreading that Pete’s killers were out there at all. She wanted them to be. She wanted to make them pay. She stood there on vigil, staring at the screen, willing the huge man or the younger intruder to appear again.
But what if it would be the girl instead? She had been screaming, perhaps dying. What had they done to her? Would Sophie be able to will herself to open the door and kill that girl, who may or may not have had anything to do with Peter’s suffering?
No.
Still, she waited. The silver-static minutes clicked away, the incalculable crescent-beginnings of an hour waxing full.
She knew then the angry buzz of a dull and meaningless descent and comedown, the anticlimactic thrill of almost-battle, the soldier’s curse which no one ever talks about. Suiting up, gearing up, locked and loaded and on edge, can’t breathe, terrified to die, ready to kill, ready to fire and… nothing. Nothing happens, nothing is out there, not this time. And no one will ever care to hear that the great almost-fight was merely one soul coming unto the threshold, ready to give her all and finding that the world, without mockery, without artifice of fate, had chosen to ignore her.
Only the fear would still remain.
So tired.
The adrenaline shock forced by the survivors in approaching, by their attack upon the door, their murder and their flight, had left Sophie’s nerves in a tattered fray. How long had she been going now? Time was still impossible to restrict into any significance of rhythm or calculation. It had no intricacy, only a coruscation. It was an almost-visible and never-ending song composed of whispered screams, all resonating endlessly without the need for breath.
And on. And on.
Her eyes began to close. She clicked the submachine gun’s safety back on. She could not keep going like this.
She needed to listen, to know when the intruders would come back. It was highly doubtful that they would ever leave. There had been an entire series of gunshots, and she doubted that the pooling blood she could see spattered along the shaft’s floor was entirely Pete’s own. Had some other of the survivors died above? Why were they not still fighting amongst themselves? Perhaps there had been some kind of uneasy truce. She wondered if there were three or five of them or fifty, far out of sight, plundering the H4 the tugging down ventilation piping, conspiring toward Sophie’s own destruction.
If anyone were too clever, they could drown me down here.
Until she had reason to believe that she was truly alone, Sophie needed to plan, to prepare, to defend. If she smelled poison or carbon monoxide coming in through the ventilation, she would need to act quickly. And she would need to remove her hazmat visor to able to detect any poisoning at all.
Oh, paradox. Knowing that they were out there, she could not dare to sleep.
Sighing and cursing under her breath, Sophie unzipped the hazmat suit’s helmet and filtration mask. She gasped in a series of full breaths, and her head swam with a rapid flush of oxygen. She almost fainted. She had been so intent upon preparing for battle that she had scarcely been breathing at all. Flinching from the suit’s sudden oppressiveness of touch, she wanted to strip out of its confines. Her gashed knee was a pain-jolting, gluey mess. There were a dozen itches she could not scratch, and spider-lines of sweat were trickling down from her armpits and down her flanks. The worst feeling of all was the unrecognizable, sensuous amplification of her own touch as she stripped off the gloves and touched her own fingertips together. She touched her wedding ring and it felt like a wreath of glass. Her senses were overblown, unsettling.
But it would be too dangerous to take the suit off entirely so soon after the intruders had hidden themselves away. You can’t take the suit off, Sophie.
“Want to.”
You can’t.
And as she fought the onrush of exhaustion and her adrenaline’s last edge ached back away into its secret coil, the last words Sophie chided herself with were these:
“Stay awake. Please.”
Still in the entryway.
She woke shivering and drenched in her own sweat, the suit and the clothing beneath it twisted around her arms and legs in sheets of contorted discomfiture. She gasped, looked up at the vault door she had been dreaming of. It was still sealed. The dead world was out there, the nuclear holocaust had burned her entire existence away. And suddenly the sleep, the faceless nightmare she had been suffering through seemed more tempting and alluring than the real.
She closed her eyes again. But something metal was sticking into her leg, and below the kneecap her leg was tingling in a painful, blood-starved swathe of angry and distant feeling.
She stretched her right leg out, grimacing, and looked down. None of the blood had leaked through the suit, at least. But she had been sleeping propped against the concrete wall, with the HK submachine gun’s barrel pressed against her right knee.
How in the Hell? You idiot. Gingerly, she lifted the gun, observed its fire control setting and set it aside. Sophie, you fool. If anything had happened to scare you, if you were sleepwalking like you used to when Tom was first away, or after the pregnancy, when, when the withdrawals were coming for you, you…