FROM THE FIRE
AN EPISODIC NOVEL OF THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
EPISODE IV: ARCHANGEL
by
Kent David Kelly
IV-1
LAST RITES
Inside.
The vault door sealed itself with a resonating clang. Sickly sweet aerosol puffed into the air and the air conditioning hummed into life, shivering the skeleton-like frames of aluminum ducting. Shadows danced around the lithe and shaking frame of a girl-like soul, around the fleeing outline of her faceless silhouette. She was walking backwards, dragging something.
Deeper. Away. Away.
The girl-shape and its burden emerged into fluorescent light. She stood there, hunched, garbed in her mantle of shadow-white armor. Panting, she pulled the form of the dying man in behind her, the survivor who was named Silas-Something and nothing more. She lifted the man and puffed out fits of moistened breath, the girl no more, Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain.
To the shower. She grunted as she repositioned him. His head rolled on a bird-like neck, his eyes fluttered veined and white. He’s delirious, he’s dying. Get him to the shower. Now. Go!
Sophie drag-carried Silas in her arms. He could not have weighed an ounce over ninety pounds. He draped there, a lolling scarecrow, his head bobbing from side to side at a sickly angle and upside-down. A trickle of blackish foam and blood ran from the corner of his mouth and up his hollowed cheek, into his left ear. He was heavy to her, yes, especially as she was sheathed in armor and shivering near to panic. But he was nowhere near as heavy as he should be. He was hot, skeletal, quaking and close to death. His eyes rolled open, brown for a moment, and he whispered something… something which Sophie never understood, something he would never remember.
Dead words. Death, so much enough for all of us. Death, death.
And the sister-voice in her sang, trilling down from her perch upon her throne: Sing to me, Sophie. Sing for all you have ever lost, sing for all you never were. Every chance you ever had, every chance that was stolen from me that you disregarded in your comfortable little bubble of wealth and shoes and little pills. Sing!
She dragged him into the great room, rolled him onto a blanket tugged away from the laundry pile where she had made her own vigil-bed for the entryway. Then she dragged the blanket and its sickly burden, his fingers trailing in old brackish water meandering toward the drain.
(He’s dead, I know he’s dead, oh God he’s —)
And on, and on, gently toward the shower. She stripped out of her suit, very mindful of the gun this time, and with scissors and another blanket she knelt before Silas. She pulled up her shirt over her nose, breathing slowly, trying not to gag.
Do this. Do this now. Alone. You need to try to save this dying man or you will never sleep in peace again. Save him.
Working quickly, fingers ginger-quick and eggshell-white, she clipped the trash bag and his clothing off. As she rolled him the black foam of drying blood dripped out of his face. A horrible and enticing smell puffed up, so sweet like smoke-enwreathed Chinese food, like vinegar and yogurt and burning pork. She covered her face, trying not to vomit. Acid roiled from side to side up inside her stomach and crept up into her esophagus.
Oh, God still alive. Oh, Silas, you’re a miracle. How are you not dead? How?
He did not move, agony was a phantom which commanded of him but he could not obey. A mystery. He had no tale that he could tell. Not yet.
She rolled his unconscious form onto another blanket, and hissed. His back was not covered with burns and blisters like his arms, no. The flesh was patched, patterned in lovely colors. Looking closer, Sophie realized that the parti-colored overlapping squares were not patches of skin, they were scorched and embedded pieces of a flannel shirt. Silas’s shirt had burned deeply into the soft pulp to either side of his spine, all down his back. The cloth’s pattern was now a part of his flesh, a part of him.
This is a science project. Sophie did not cry. This is not a man yet, someone’s lover, someone’s grandpa, someone’s grocer or the nice man who picks gourds for someone else down the street. This is not a soul, this is no one. She kept to business, working, plucking at his wounds. Deal with the flesh, as you can. Render forth the spirit. It’s meat. The man, the man comes after.
His burns were second-degree, if not third. She was not certain how to tell. But everywhere that the shirt-pattern was not, his skin was shining between barely-unexposed bones like a rack of honey-glazed meat, scarlet beneath the fluorescent lights. She tried to remember what little she knew of burn treatment from reading the binders.
People who were dying of burns, they would dehydrate themselves refusing water, shivering and freezing to death. Sometimes, even before their nerve endings would recover enough to wake them to experience their own agony, they would simply shrivel away and die. They —
Silas groaned. A dark hand reached up, sorting the shadows of the caged lights away above him, touching the sheaves of radiance. “Beautiful,” he whispered. The hand plopped down again.
She rolled him onto his side, wondering how best to drag him into the shower stall without hurting him anymore. There was a four-inch-higher lip of concrete with an aluminum slider atop it, a simple matter crafted to hold the shower door in its place. A half-step, nothing for her to remember on any day. Inconsequential detail. But that lip of biting concrete could cut him and split him open. It —
No. Meat. This is just meat, Sophie. This is just a problem to solve, the solution will create a man. A miracle. Keep working.
She looked down, assessing. The plaid-shreds and burned-in pieces of boxer shorts barely covered him. He looked pathetic lying crumpled there in the nude, almost beautiful, a disheveled and mortal angel.
A man.
“Oh, Silas. I’m going, I’m going. To save you. I can.” The tears, the tears were threatening to begin and if they did there would never be an end to them. “Do this. I promise.”
She ran to the med cabinet, pulled it open. Little beads of mercury from the broken thermometer went flying. She grabbed a morphine hypo and went back to the crumpled shape, not knowing where to put the needle in the vein. The neck? No. Too dangerous, and her hands were moving in circles beneath her. Searching, like birds. She stilled them.
Look. Think.
There was a large and snaky vein in the back of his right arm’s joint, opposite the elbow and shining beneath the light, scarlet-umber beneath his skin. She decided that one was as good as any. She did not know the proper dose, but if the man was not already dead from his burns, one miracle had already graced the shelter with its presence. Why not another?
She gave him half of the syringe’s morphine, wincing as she did so. What judgment had she passed on him? Death? Peaceful drifting? Agony? Resurrection?
No response.
She stood, leaned and put the needle up in the shampoo bottle slot of the shower rack, out of reach.
There was only one way to try to save him, to begin to care for him. The concrete lip was a barrier, nothing more. It needed to fall to Sophie’s will. Surmount it. Make it unreal, if you have to. But how?
Let us see, let us see what happens if we try. It’s a game, sister Sophie. Lift him, the sister-voice trilled.
Again? I can’t. He’ll die.
Lift him, Sophie. Cackling from the throne, a cruel sweetness tinged with envy. Oh, he is an angel! A beautiful old soul! Lift him lift him lift him —