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.
Then Sophie’s moment, You are looking at yourself, you are you, ended in recognition and the afterimage of her reflection imprinted itself upon the road. Lightning coursed the sky. She gazed straight ahead as the road narrowed and the cliff-wall to one side grew higher on.
Drive faster.
She could not un-see the woman, entirely detached from what Sophie had once believed herself to be. She had seen a study in grief, a stricture of jaw, controlled panic, trembling lip, but surely that wasn’t her. That woman looked cruel, uncaring. And Sophie, did she not love?
Was this some last desperate bid by her mind to hold onto its sanity? Who was she, after all? The answer to that question would never matter. She was Self, Sophie, Her Own Being, a prisoner in a stranger’s body that was acting of its own will. Her body, it was making her drive faster. Very close now.
Get to the shelter
get to the shelter
get to
get
“Fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds…”
A left here. Slow down, don’t stop. Keep traction. Take the left here.