From the Fire (2 page)

Pete’s voice bellowed out —
“Just cool it down!”
The crowd was mostly out of the intersection by then, fleeing the site of the gunshot, the growing and smearing pool of blood. It was a dog.

One of the German Shepherds, now with its jaw hanging and pouring forth a slush of blood and gore, was twisting in violent circles on the asphalt. Old Mrs. Claverdale’s station wagon swerved around the dog as she hit the gas and flew up 119, her hands clutched on the wheel, her head hunkered down so that she could barely see over the dash.

Sophie let go of her hair. One of her hands covered her mouth, the other found its way back to the wheel. She edged forward as the Escalade inched up into the intersection. Pete waved it through, the driver gunned it and nearly hit a Hispanic woman who was struggling to keep her daughter from running out to the dying dog.

The man in the pickup truck yelled out to the Hispanic woman as he swerved around Sophie’s Hummer and flew up the road. “Lady, get your kid the
fuck
out of here!”

The girl was pointing at the dog with a jolting finger, reaching out, sobbing.

Brakes squealed. Another car bumped up against the Escalade, then both pulled off into the Ameristar parking lot at Pete’s furious insistence. He wheezed as he shouted. One man parted from the crowd and ran into the middle of the street. The policewoman with the shotgun was
sighting down her barrel
at the old man who was crouching by the dying German Shepherd. Her rain-slick hands shook as she braced the shotgun, ready to fire.

What the Hell, what the
Hell
…

Sophie had seen enough. She floored it.

Pete spun around to face the policewoman who was covering him, so he never saw Sophie that day, or any other thereafter. He slapped down the officer’s shotgun barrel and was shaking her as the crowd began to close in once more.

* * * * *

By the time Sophie was up the mountain highway and a mile out of town, passing the tanker truck and weaving around the other panicked drivers who were hunkered down in their compacts and sedans, she was pushing eighty, then ninety. Tires squealed dangerously as the H4 fought for traction in the splashing rain.

Her mind was buzzing, an insistent jingling of chimes and vibrating plastics.

No. Her phone was ringing.

She took a moment to ease off, to slow down to sixty and get in the right lane as she navigated the curve at the Pearsons’ driveway turnoff. Ponderosa pines and aspens slowed from a blur and back into actual shapes along the cliff-side. Staring out at the snow-fog that was gathering and wreathing the heights of Gray’s and Torrey Peaks off in the distance, striving to calm herself, she picked up the phone just as the call went dead.

The number on the display didn’t mean anything to her. What kind of an area code was that? A negative, -003? There was no such thing.

Having passed all the slower drivers, she eased into a rhythm as the gray and emerald world slurred by her in rain-spun streaks. The wipers slapped and slushed as the rain began to freeze against the windshield.

The phone rang again. Same area code, same mysterious number.
Suddenly eager for a release, for someone real and tangible to get angry at and to let her vent and forget the chaos of fear and violence churning back in the intersection far behind her, Sophie flicked the iPhone to speaker and snapped out before the caller could even begin to speak.

“This is a private number. So what do you think you’re selling?”

“Soph! Oh,
God.
” It was Tom. Her husband’s voice so startled Sophie that she almost pulled off the road into a slick of icy puddles. She corrected her swerve, slowed some more and drove on.

“Tom?” She had never heard him sounding so distressed, so relieved. Not since his father had died. Had he been crying?

Tom’s voice broke. He took a moment with a shaky inhalation, eerily loud and palpable in the Hummer’s interior. Then: “Thank God you picked up.”

“Tom? What’s wrong?”

“No time. Sophie, listen to me.” He sobbed, it was unmistakable this time. A heavy breath, another. Tom had never called her while he was away for work with the NSA,
especially
when he was assigned to NORAD. “Sophie, pull over.”

“I’m up the slope on 119. I can’t pull over yet, it’s raining.” She winced, unable to focus. So
what
if it was raining? If someone had died, if there was some kind of emergency, what did Tom care? “Are you calling from Petersen?”

Whenever Sophie was nervous, she chattered. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I almost didn’t pick up.” Her teeth tugged softly at her upper lip as she went silent, looking on ahead for a pull-off.

“God
damn
it, Soph. Pull the fuck off and
listen
to me.”

Sophie blinked away disbelief. Tom never swore, to anyone, and especially not to her. She pulled off just past the tiny Athanasiou Valley Airport, an unlikely jewel of windswept field and wildflower, poised within the cradle of its gray-misted meadow.

She stopped the Hummer, leaving the engine running. She turned up the heater, shivering, willing herself not to speak. But still, she could not stop talking. Tom was frightening her with his labored breathing, his hushed yet urgent voice.

“Tom, what is it? Is grandma okay? Did Lacie call you? What’s happening?”

“Don’t talk.” He was whispering now. Why? She raised the volume, and she could hear the click of rushing footsteps echoing around wherever Tom was standing. Where
was
he?

“Listen to me,” he went on, his voice hissing in a frantic swirl of shivery words as he tried to keep calm and get it all out at once, “listentomenowSoph they’re going to black, to black out all the comms really quick here, they think they already did them all but I, I got one flip channel three and they won’t notice it yet because they’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off, they …”

He was forced to take a breath. An hysterical breath, like a wounded diver gasping for air as he breached the ocean’s surface once again.

“Tom, what —”

“No!
Listen!
” His voice raised and cracked, some other man’s voice could be heard in response. Then another voice, stern and unmistakable with the authority of command. Angry. Air Force people were looking for Tom, and Tom was
hiding?

Sophie almost cried out as a wave of slush spattered up against her side windows. Someone went flying by on 119 in a Jeep, waving wildly at her out the window. What? An emergency? The Jeep honked and swerved a little, then sped up and went around the curve out of sight.

“Listen,” Tom was saying. “I’m
inside
-inside.” That didn’t mean Petersen. Tom wasn’t at the Air Force base. He was in NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. There were no simple phone lines into there. He was somewhere deep under Cheyenne Mountain, in the war bunkers where the vast computerized early warning system protected the entire nation’s skies.

She found herself whispering in a faltering voice, “Tom, oh, no. No. Oh, no.” But Tom did not stop talking.

“Don’t ask questions, honey. Just do what I tell you. I got one last call into Mitch, okay? He’s at the
place
. Our date. You remember it? He’s going to help you.”

Sophie’s mind was racing. Tom
hated
his older brother. Mitch was something of a hippie with a heart of gold, an anti-military, anti-everything Renaissance man with a wiry beard, gaunt frame, an infectious laugh and far more goodwill than common sense. But somehow, Mitch had made a career for himself inside government, “subverting it from the core” as he liked to put it. He had even served for years with the Department of Energy cleanup of Rocky Flats, and the plutonium contamination there.

But he never did speak to Tom since their father had died, except through Sophie. Mitch and Tom were too different, too passionate, and too alike.

“ — all right?”

Sophie began to chatter again. Her thoughts were flowing in violent channels of here and elsewhere, riptide and whirlpool, she had missed something important Tom was saying. “No, no Tom, I didn’t —”

“Promise me!” He sounded desperate, tottering near some precipice of mind.

“I — I promise.”

“Good. Mitch, Mitch picked up Lacie from grandma’s, he knows what’s going to happen. She’s safe.”

What?

“Tom, slow down. Mitch picked up our
daughter?
What
place
are they in?”

“Listen to me!”

“What’s happening?”

“She’s safe. Get to the shelter as fast as you can. Call Mitch on the way as soon as you lock and seal, do you understand me? He’s waiting for you to call. He’s going to help you, Sophie. He’s going to make … to make sure you get through this. For Lacie. For me.”

Get to the shelter.

Sophie had had nightmares about those very words.
Like a dream.

Those words had been spoken in a variety of ridiculous and nonsensical settings which had all seemed tangible, credible and outright terrifying whenever she was asleep and adrift over the many wastelands of her imagining.
The words, the nightmares.
Spoken in one horror-world under a rising plague, the Ebola virus spiraling out of control and devouring humanity in its thoughtless and bloody coils,
Get to the shelter
. Spoken in an imaginary nation filled with endless tornadoes and spinning houses rising up in gargantuan airy columns like something from out of the Wizard of Oz,
Get to the shelter
. Spoken in a nation on the brink of war, riots, black of midnight, emergency klaxons howling, the nuclear missiles arcing their way through the crystalline night like fireflies …

Get to the shelter.

Sophie began to cry.

“Tom, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me. This isn’t happening.”

“Oh, Sophie. My love.”

“Please!”

“I’m so sorry.”

There was nothing she could say.

“You!”
On the line, someone else was speaking over Tom and his ragged breathing. Someone else Sophie could hear, because they were shouting at her husband. “Put it down!”

The phone buzzed with an angry whine as Tom dropped the receiver at his end.

“Get on the floor!” the voice barked. Then a sound, a scuffle, a bang of someone’s knee or elbow hitting something metal, a fall. Something like a wastebasket spiraling across a concrete floor. Muffled curses, clicked-off safeties. And Tom’s voice again, this time deafening as he yelled into the phone inches away from his face.

“Sophie, I love you! Get in! Lock it down!”

And then a single gunshot, coiled echoes of angry metal, the squeal as the iPhone’s speaker overloaded into a cascade of feedback and bristling, wasp-like beats of churning static.

Echoes then, and nothing.

Sophie screamed, her hands clawing up against her throat, her head rebounding against the wheel and then against the driver’s window.
“Tom!”

Labored breathing on the line. Someone else. Not Tom. A voice:
“Who is this?”

“Oh my God,
Tom!”

“Listen.”
Whoever he was, the voice of Tom’s killer was like venom dripping down the line. But he was frightened, his breath and the electric air of his frantic hiss was pulsing with adrenaline from the kill. “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?”

Sophie jolted, shook her head from side to side. She flicked the phone off, ripped it out of its socket, threw it against the passenger window. It ricocheted down onto the air vent, its transparent case flying off in razor shards.

Get to the shelter
, sang her mind. It was the only thing she could think, to keep from running out into the rain and shrieking at the sky.

Get to the shelter

get to the shelter

get to the shelter

get to get to get to —

She kicked the Hummer back into drive, swung a wild U-turn and raced back out onto 119, heading for Tom’s mad private endeavor, his hidden and private survival shelter, far up the canyon of Fairburn Mountain.

I-3

FLIGHT

A curious serenity enveloped Sophie as the Hummer glided up the slick roads of Fairburn Mountain, past pine-sheltered mansions and trailheads and the scars of last decade’s lightning fire. Cliff walls and racing shadows loomed over her as the sky broke into fitful mists of silver-blue, scattering the sleet into isolate bursts of drifting mist and rain. A covey of Blue Grouse fluttered past her just a few feet in the air, the white-flecked birds flitting out of the Hummer’s way in a blur over the road.

Was it shock that instilled its strangling calm, its tranquility over her heart? Disbelief? No, she decided.
Unreality.

That had to be it. None of this was real.

The words have been spoken,
she was telling herself.
All alone now, until you can wake up. This is the End of Days. This is the nightmare.

All she could do was drive, drive until her daughter Lacie kissed her awake and another perfect Sunday morning began as Tom snuck out with a wave and a grin, shifting his golf clubs onto his muscled back while he stretched and breathed in the frigid, sweet mountain air.

Get to the shelter
, sang a girl’s voice in her mind. But it was her own voice from another time, from when she had been innocent, and kind, and giving and unbetrayed, and never raped, never touched, selfless and mousy and loved by momma and tortured by the other girls at Academy.

The shelter. Get to. Get to.

Child-Sophie, no longer real, sang to the bitter woman who had become her. Trilling, a gentle insistence of allure, a girl-melody of urgent secrets.

Get to, get to.

* * * * *

At some point, she must have turned the radio back on. Jake Handler was no longer on the air, but some strange bluegrass and Appalachian jazz piece was lulling her into a surreal and droning flick of scene from scene, highway to forest to mansions back to canyon and rainy blur, all over and back again.

Somehow, in frigid vaults of the nightmare, all the mountain roads were just as they were supposed to be.

Sophie hummed to herself, another tuneless lullaby of the haunted and the broken. Her fingers trembled and flicked through some chilly, curious moisture upon the wheel.

On the radio a dire, piercing klaxon broke over the song, silencing the lilt of fiddles and twang of a mandolin.

It was the voice of a perfectly cultured young woman, something like the automated train announcer at Denver International Airport, or perhaps the submissive intonation of a Star Trek computer. Pleasant, dignified, absurdly calm, utterly without terror despite the urgent precision of the woman’s words.

Sophie was forced to listen as the whistling klaxon buzzed its way into silence. Unreality began to melt away.

This was real.

~

“This is not a test.

This is an urgent bulletin from the Emergency Broadcast System.

Seek interior shelter immediately.

Do not remain outside; do not seek cover in or beneath any vehicle.

Take only the most vital essentials and shelter in place at once.

We repeat, this is not a test.

If you are currently situated in a building that is equipped with a fallout, earthquake or tornado shelter, go to the shelter immediately.

If you are driving, pull aside at once and seek shelter in the nearest concrete building, with your face pressed down and your hands interlocked behind your head.

Do not shelter in doorways, or near windows.

Seek as much cover as possible, disregarding unauthorized access signage or restrictions of any kind.

If you can greatly improve your shelter by running for less than sixty seconds, do not panic or delay in evacuating your current location.

Should you have immediate access to water, food, battery-powered light sources or medical supplies, take as much as you can carry with all haste.

A thermonuclear launch has been confirmed by NORAD with an estimated impact time of twenty-five to twenty-eight minutes following the beginning of this message.

One minute and seventeen seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.

We repeat, this is not a test.

This is an urgent bulletin from the Emergency Broadcast System.”

~

The klaxon on the radio once again, this time broken by three horrible droning buzzes more felt than heard, the harbinger sounds of a tornado approaching, or a flash flood thundering down the canyon.

Real. Tom is dead. Alone and oh, this is oh it can’t be oh God, this is real.

An unfamiliar, incongruous smile spread across Sophie’s face.

Lacie, Mitch, grandma, me. Pete, Jake, Mrs. Claverdale. Mrs. Claverdale’s grandson, deaf and waving from the driveway. Home-baked cookies, lemonade. Signing, thank you. Thank you, Michael.

Someone was giggling, then crying. Sophie drew in a spasming gulp of air. The crying stopped.

We’re all going to die.

As she drove the same emergency bulletin repeated, every beat and lilt of the young woman’s voice a pulse of calm and panic, each reiteration changing only in its time signature at the end.

~

“Three minutes and twelve seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.”

~

“Four minutes and forty-eight seconds have now elapsed.”

~

“Six minutes and twenty-four seconds …”

~

Time seemed to blur as Sophie guided the H4 up roads which were both familiar and unknown to her, misted and rain-spun tiers of isolate forest and asphalt which blurred together and away, away, seeming to coruscate along the radiant and uncoiling absence of her senses.

No touch no sight no sound, no, I, there is no one here,
her mind sang.
I am no one. There is no one inside me any longer.

Reality shunted aside the fleeting visions of curves and trees, and Sophie hit the brakes as she flew around a curve at too high a speed, wheels squealing and mud flicking up against the guardrail, and almost veered into a police car that was pulled up into a muddy turnaround.

How fast had she been driving? Where
was
she? She blinked as she passed the police car at fifty, looking back into her rearview to see if the officer was going to pull her over.

What she saw didn’t make any sense at all. The officer was sitting in the
back
seat of his own car, staring at his shotgun over the front seat and running his fingers over his balding head. His shoulders were shaking. Was he sobbing?

The road curved to the right, a constant ascent now, forcing her to pay attention to its course. The police car faded into the mist and sleet curling far behind her.

What was happening to her?

~

“Nine minutes and twenty-six seconds have now elapsed since the beginning of this bulletin.”

~

It can’t, it can’t happen, no. I’m going mad. We’re all, we’re all going. Going to.

“Focus,” Sophie whispered. “Three. Three six nine twelve, fifteen eighteen twenty-one. My name, name, is Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain. I am thirty-eight years old. I live in, I live … my … my Social Security Number is five three one —”

Another curve, a brief blossom of sunlight reflecting off the mountain road as two wind-parted clouds tossed away in separate directions and the sun poured down for some few beautiful seconds. Sophie slowed again. Some kind of Lexus, flying toward her in the opposite lane doing at least eighty, swerved on the road, corrected and whipped by her. Sophie caught a glimpse of a young woman with shell-shocked eyes and thin, silver-ringed hands clenching the steering wheel.

“My Social, my Social is five three one, six two, two …”

Her voice tapered out as the tears came again. She could not stop them this time.

War.

~

“Eleven minutes and two seconds …”

~

Surely the news was just about everywhere by now. She continued doing all that she could, the only thing. She kept driving, kept breathing, kept thinking as little as she dared to keep her comprehension of the world and its forthcoming annihilation to the merest sliver of awareness, motor skills and rote memory taking over, knowing that any moment should could collapse into full realization —
Nuclear war
— and curl away into a ball, helpless, useless, veering toward the cliff-side with only the guardrail to keep the Hummer from plunging down into —

She veered left and then right and corrected again. Was she in shock? Her hands and feet were performing, she knew the road by heart from all the times Tom had coaxed or even guilted her into making the drive with him to see his latest completed work on the cave and the survival shelter far below. He was always good-natured about it, and his skills were nothing short of incredible. And he was always so
proud
when she expressed genuine admiration for his vision and his gifts, the construction, the manuals, the radios, the water, everything; but she could never keep a confused and upturned lilt from the ends of her welcomed words, the words he so longed for. “Oh, Tom, it’s just …
wow
. It’s overwhelming. It’s … wonderful?”

And he would always furrow his brow, that brief twinge of genuine hurt before his amiable grin could wash all of his secret thoughts away.

“I’m glad,” he would say. “I’m glad you’re starting to see, how important this is to me.”

But whenever she ventured too near to the taboo subjects of their relationship — the National Security Agency, his work, the personal beliefs and sights and sounds which had made him so fervently spend millions of their dollars and thousands of hours on the shelter, always wasting so much for the
shelter
— his grin would fade and he’d take her by the elbow and offer to drive her back down Fairburn Mountain. Each trip into the cave and its secret shelter, each more revealing and compelling and fascinating in all he had accomplished, each journey up the mountain had ended in this way.

Always, he was hoping. Hurting. Hoping that I would understand, it was time. It was coming. Always.
This
is always, this is zero day.

She would joke with him about watching that survivalist show on the National Geographic Channel. It was toying with his mind,
most
men his age were just trying to pick up girls in their rebuilt Corvettes by forty. He would chide her about her Starbucks addiction; she would gamely counter, pointing out that not
all
fly-fishing poles cost six hundred dollars, only the ones he was entranced by. Such taste! The jokes would always be the same on the way out of the cave and back to the car, but the sincerity, the affection behind their jibes were always resonant and pure.

She loved him. She did. And Lacie, once an idea feared by Tom and later by she herself, a lovely
child
, the two of them as one, had in their frail touching of faith become everything to her. Oh, she did love her daughter, and Tom, forevermore.

~

“Twelve minutes and thirty-eight seconds …”

~

Very near to the shelter now.

Another curve, a fork on the road.
Keep right.
Asphalt still damaged and rippling with another winter’s freeze and melt and waver, the earth rolling there beneath her wheels in slow and endless contortions, the winter-teethed road now all her own. Surely there would be almost no one on that road until the shelter, perhaps one more car and then never another.

Never another …

A few more rays of sun cast themselves in weightless and beautiful slices of gold upon the meadows far down the mountainside, another gust of wind and the rays of light were lost again.

Another. Never.

Sophie caught a glimpse of her own eyes in the windshield’s reflection before the sunlight could fully fade, and the unexpected vision startled her with its plain and merciless flicker of her flawed beauty. It was always so strange to see herself unexpectedly, to begin to subconsciously criticize that stranger’s features before the realization cast itself upon her reason in its awareness and its shame:
You are aging, you are looking at yourself. You are you.

The woman there upon the glass was pale and thin, even bony in a way, with a bit of a sag to her neck and a deep crease at the right where she tucked her chin against her shoulder when she slept. Those nights, she would tilt her head away from Tom, her head facing the bedroom doorway, ready to hear baby Lacie’s cries and to leap up from bed to feed baby before Tom could awaken to the little pleading screams. Even now, when Lacie was six and all the bed monsters were chased away into dustless corners of memory, Lacie still wanted mommy to get her a glass of water in the night, to comfort her when the thunder came.