From the Fire (4 page)

Time had become so tangible, so weighty and slow. The emergency bulletin was on again.

~

“Twenty-three minutes and fifty seconds …”

“Warning! Impact is imminent …”

~

I’m not going to make it.

Sophie heard herself give a choking cry. She was going to be sick, her stomach was twisting in upon itself, the coffee was gurgling, welling up and burning her esophagus. Her cheeks puffed out with a moan of nausea.

Can’t stop

can’t stop

She hit the gas. Looking down the road, it was right there. The waterfall was real, the shelter, it was actually there.

I’m not going to.

Driving as fast as she dared, she aimed the H4 directly toward the waterfall that marked the road’s dead end. The Hummer swerved of its own accord as its right front wheel caught a rainwater-tumbled rock on the edge of the wheel rut, then came down with a slippery thud and locked itself into the rut again. The Hummer veered toward the right-side canyon wall. Sophie yelped as the passenger-side mirror collided with the rocky face, shattered, and snapped one of its metal supports in two. The mirror there dangled and bumped against the passenger door, as Sophie steadied the H4 away from the wall.

Faster.

Thirty yards away from the waterfall, twenty.

The waterfall was little more than a few stringy gouts of white water cascading down, but they sprayed up enough of a mist to obscure the cave behind to just about anyone, and Tom’s cleverly-painted canvas hid the cave entirely. The only thing strange about the scene, a counterpoint to the icy and guideless waters and misted stone, was the little radio antenna tower propped up on weathered girders far above.

~

“Twenty-five minutes and twenty-six seconds …”

“Warning! Impact is imminent …”

~

The deepening mud caused the H4 to lurch into an engine-throttling crawl. Fifteen yards until the H4 would run its way under the waterfall. Twelve.

No time.

No time

no time no time
—

There was a crackle on the radio, and Sophie took her foot off the gas involuntarily as the emergency bulletin was overtaken by a frantic babble, words coming out in a broken torrent and constricted into a single voice that couldn’t breathe the words out fast enough. She
knew
that voice.

Jake Handler was yelling,
“War! War! Pike’s Peak! I can see the contrail! The warhead is splitting up! Oh, Jesus! Save us! Cover your eyes! Get the fuck away from the windows! Get —”

The H4 lurched to a stop just before the waterfall, in the shallow pool before the cave. Sophie could not control her stomach anymore. Her cheeks puffed out again, her breath rushed out of her nostrils, and she vomited coffee and eggs and the undigested remnant of last night’s dinner over the wheel, over her hands, over the dash and into her lap. She could taste coffee and cream, hot stomach acid and the horrible taste of bile. Of terror. She vomited again, but nothing came out the second time.

Shaking her head, tapping the gas and clutching the dripping wheel with shivering fingers, she edged the H4 under the sheets of icy and pelting water, through the parting seam in the camouflaged tarp, and into the blackness of the cave. She flicked on the headlights, and in that moment the entire world behind her turned shock-white beneath a photonegative sky of tiered and burning clouds.

* * * * *

Airburst.

It’s coming it’s coming —

What if she had not been in the canyon? The cave?

That thought lingered, resonating upon the hovering and fragility-infected length of one, shell-shocked moment that went on and on forever, a moment of blinding light and nothing else, soundless and impossible.

The white light pierced through the waterfall, the darkness, it turned her rear-facing mirrors into squares of snowblind purity, sunburst utter white and utter glory. The radio died in a huge burst of static. The wailing klaxon was silenced upon the mountain.

Some voice of reason deep inside her,
Tom is that you? Are you here? Are you alive?
, was whispering to her in its silence,
Think, Sophie. Not impact yet, it’s airburst. Airburst. Knocking out communications, the —

The blinding light turned scarlet. The one moment fractured.

A wave of heat swelled through the waterfall, spinning its arcs of water into gouts of ice and steam. The H4’s tinted windows flared and turned to deepest black. Sophie hit the brakes to avoid hitting the end wall of the cave. She went blind. She took in a breath to scream, but the shock of it all was stolen from her as an immense thunderclap shook the cave walls, made the mountain groan and set the H4’s windows juddering and quaking in their frames. Somehow the driver’s door lock sprang up and a little dying alarm went off, two chirps then done and gone.

The sonic boom of the airburst nuclear strikes — over Denver and NORAD and the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs — turned into a long, cascading tide of overlapping waves of roar and thunder.

It’s happening. It’s really happening.

Seconds had passed, eternity.

At ten miles an hour, with tinted windows blinded off and doused in the savage light of the aerial nuclear explosion, the H4 crunched into the far wall of the cave. One of the airbags, the
passenger
airbag of all things, went off with a bang and puffed away half of Sophie’s interior space.

She coughed, a gargling sound. She swallowed stomach acid.

The windows began to de-tint themselves. One headlight was broken, the other casting a garish light directly against the cave wall. Back behind her, outside, the airburst fireball flickered the mirrors once more, and the windows all went dark again. Thousands more nuclear warheads were soon to fall. The
real
strike, the ground strike, would come down now in mere minutes, with no defense systems or aircraft operational to stop them.

Everyone in Black Hawk would burn. The world.

As if disembodied, thinking but unable to act, trembling there with vomit dripping down her silk blouse and down her ankles, Sophie wondered: if millions of people were to scream at once, all crouched down in their basements and their office building shelters, would she be able to hear it there, miles away?

Soon.

Soon, soon, soon.

No time

no time no time

Sophie struck herself, her unfeeling thigh, her face. She shook the steering wheel in a frenzy, grunting and sobbing, as if doing so would wake her from the nightmare. A thought was racing like fire inside of her, if she could only concentrate for a moment, hear it,
think
instead of just feeling this terrible immediacy of panic —

Get inside

get inside the shelter

get get in

nnnnnnnnnn

She opened the driver’s door, clicked out of the seatbelt and tumbled down onto the frigid and muddy cave floor. Somehow she had turned off the ignition—but when?—and the keys were clutched in her right hand, the hand that was shaking madly and angled like some strange piece of ivory that was no longer a part of her. Light, an accursed and incredibly hot sheet of crimson light, was shivering through the waterfall from outside and turning the cave into a horrid striped tangle of light and blindness.

She gagged on the exhaust trapped in the cave. She was still on the ground. Everything was sideways, and cold mud was getting into her mouth and filling up her hair.

She crawled up on all fours, looked around frantically for the shelter’s entrance, and she could see the pale green glo-lites along the cave floor, their feeble and ceaseless radiance made sickly by the burning fires of the roiling sky outside.

Shelter!

She was soaked, freezing, burning, sweating, covered in filth and vomit and tangled up in the door-torn remnant of her skirt. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled for the hidden hollow that led in deep to the shelter’s ladder, guided only by the glo-lites themselves. The scarlet light and unearthly heat burned away behind her.

There were air shafts piped over her head, vents and grills and tubes, and a huge artificial square in the left cave wall, half-covered by a muddy blue plastic tarp. Yanking the tarp, popping its fringe out of shower-curtain loops, Sophie saw the crude narrow gash in the rock which led down into the shelter far below.

She was nearly in darkness then, and another wave of thunder rose and tumbled down through the canyon far behind her. Was that the wave of another nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, another airburst, just now reaching her from dozens or hundreds of miles away? Which city had just been blacked out and presaged for destruction? Laramie? Boulder? What if this was being repeated over every city in the nation, every military base, every city in the world?

Where were Mitch and Lacie?

Tom?

She kicked the cold metal activator plate near the floor, encircled with its own emerald ring of glo-lites. Her pupils shrank and her eyes filled with stinging tears as the fluorescent grid lights along the left wall pulsed on, the ones most needing replacement flickering crazily before burning with a false, unwarming light. She edged deeper into the hollow. The claustrophobic shaft was just three feet in front of her, its dripping and icy aluminum ladder leading down into the dark. The oval lights inset between the ladder’s rungs flicked on one at a time, down and down, and somewhere deep behind walls of stone a generator was humming on.

Did it always run? Had she just activated it?

Sophie crawled to the ladder, nearly slipped head-first into the shaft. It was far, far deeper than she remembered. She righted herself, slipped with her bare foot onto a low rung and caught herself with her other foot kicking and curling,
Get down, down,
she looped her elbows into the ladder, coughed vomit, began to climb down into the shelter’s entryway.

She fell off the ladder near the bottom, dropped six inches and tilted into the shaft wall.

Seconds later, shivering so hard that she could barely control her arms and legs, Sophie hunched down upon the landing in front of the steel-plated vault door. Her toes curled around the drainage grill that was gurgling with frigid water at her feet.

She spun the door’s auto-locking wheel, her hands slipping off the condensation droplets, beads of water stuck between the grooves of the wheel’s inner rubber ring. The wheel squealed, spun, stuttered and then jammed.

No!

She pushed harder in the opposite direction, then counter-clockwise again. The wheel jammed in the same position with an angry screeching of hidden gears.

Sophie screamed, throwing all of her weight into the wheel.
Come on!
Harder.

Something gave way, little ice chips sprinkled down into the grating. She stumbled off her feet into the wall again as a hydraulic whine took over and the wheel spun itself counter-clockwise with a hiss and a purr, rolling the vault door inward on unseen hinges. Mist sheeted up as the warmer, stale air inside the shelter puffed out.

Sophie ran into the tiny entry. The narrow inside there smelled sterile, a mixture of rubber and cleaning solution and dead air.
Clang.
The door thudded and clanked shut behind her, seals pressurized. Something electronic beeped twice and gave a stuttering whirr, then clicked back into place. Sophie barely registered a frantic thought —
How do I get back out?
— and the wheel spun itself back in the other direction.

Echoing tremors of metal on metal. Silence.

As Sophie’s eardrums popped and she worked her jaw, new noises swirled up in every direction. The noise was sudden and jarring, unmuffled generators humming, fuses flitting
click-click
as light banks began to spark, plastic streamers somewhere fluttering where a vent was spilling out new air, and something metal like a wrench or a screwdriver was clattering up on one of the utility shelves. Whatever it was, it fell off a vibrating surface and clanged onto the concrete floor in the farther room.

Warmth began to puff in tangible currents around the shelter. There was the whisper of whirring air, a bitter taste of dust, the shunting of power and twinkling of lights in aluminum cages as Sophie’s
entering
spun a hundred things into motion.

Air, light, oh thank God …

Sophie hugged herself, bent over as the first cramp of nausea crawled through her belly and down into her legs.

* * * * *

I remember now.

Some.

There’s beds, beds for three, three of us … ?

No. I. Me.

And how long?

How long will I be alone here?

She fought to regain herself, to understand. Something was still happening. The floor rumbled.

Stone dust peppered down from between the plates in the low and claustrophobic ceiling just above her head. She heard her father’s voice again,
“Hon, don’t you dare look at the sky!”
so loudly that she covered her ears.