Save me. Please save me.
Mitch went silent. Sophie stopped keying.
She buried her face within her hands.
“No…”
But Mitch was alive. What of Lacie, her daughter? Was she there, sitting in Mitch’s lap? What was the place?
Mitch, where? Where?
Then a series of beeps short and long was chirping in her ears, a slow and measured pulse of dots and dashes.
A code. Morse code.
She did not have time to turn the binder page over to the Morse code alphabet, and no experience with deciphering it in the moment. She grasped the string-pen and started writing out the dots and dashes, short beeps and long, as best she could.
She had about two hundred periods and hyphens written in the notebook then, but she had only begun to discern the different lengths of time between letters and words halfway through Mitch’s transmission. And she had only received half of the message.
Three seconds of silence passed. She turned the page. Would Mitch send the same message again?
Yes.
This time, she could tell that he was sending the exact same code word sequence as before. He must have written down a message to send her, one he could keep repeating while she struggled to learn the code.
The ongoing message ended. Three seconds of dead air. Then it began all over again.
By the third time, Sophie felt confident that she had the correct spacing on some of the words. But it was still only a page full of symbolic notation, and she had no idea which letters to write down beside any of the transmissions except “S” for “. . .” and “— — —” which must be “O.” That left most of the message unknown.
But he would send it again. As Mitch was sending the message a fourth time, Sophie moved on to a new sheet of paper.
The radio signal cut off.
Sophie hit what she thought was the volume as she looked up, but it was the broad search dial instead. She flipped past Mitch’s frequency. Keeping herself calm, she glided the needle back to his number again. There was static there, but no voice and no more code.
“Don’t be afraid.” These words were foolish, stupid even. But she needed to hear someone say them. “Don’t be.”
She took off the headphones and left the radio speakers on, in case the signal with Mitch could be reestablished. Until then, she would decode her third pass at the message as best she could. She found the binder page on Morse code letter definitions again and began writing. Some of the questionable gaps between letters, whether they were pauses between words or not, were slowing her down. To work more quickly, she decided to write the letters out in all capitals in clustered groups of three. Then, once she had the code solidified to an alphabet, she would try to make actual words out from the mess.
Fifteen minutes or more had gone by, and still Mitch’s frequency gave only static. She turned down the volume so that she could concentrate.
She looked over what she had written at last, Mitch’s final completed message:
CAU TIO NCH ANN OTS
ECU RWE ARN SHE LTU
NDA UNT JEM MSH OUS
EUK NOW WHE REH AVE
CAR CAN TGO UTS OPH
COM EIN THR EEW EEK
IFU CAN LVE USHE SAL
IVE
Eventually, she puzzled out the entire message:
CAUTION CHAN NOT SECUR
WE AR N SHELT
UND AUNT JEMMS HOUSE
U KNOW WHERE
HAVE CAR
CANT G OUT
SOPH COME
IN THREE WEEK
IF U CAN
LVE U SHE
S A L
IVE
She spoke the words like a pleading chant, her voice growing higher and more desperate with the slowness of every questioned syllable.
“Caution. Chan. Channel? Channel not secure. We are in shelt… shelter? Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where? Have car. Can’t g… get out? Go out? Can’t get out. Soph, come in three week. Three weeks, if you can. Live? No. Love. Love you. She’s alive.”
Oh my. Oh.
“She’s alive.”
Sophie was crying and laughing, her hands pressed against her face in exhaustion and disbelief. Lacie Anna Saint-Germain, her own beloved daughter, was surely sitting there in Mitch’s arms. Lacie was alive.
II-5
THE DAY AFTER
(4-5/6-14)
She had fallen back asleep on the pile of clothing, with the radio still humming its static canting. If Mitch had been able to re-contact her, she would have heard it. But there had only been the humming sound of the ventilation ducts, the dripping of water, and the slow reliable surge of the latent generator in the back. She had hoped to dream of Tom, but nothing had come to her.
One of her hands was clutching a piece of paper. No, a photograph. She opened her fingers, smiling down at what she knew she was going to see.
Lacie. Smiling, an old Polaroid. One of Mitch’s antiques. He had snapped that on her third birthday.
Alive.
How had they survived? It must have been Tom’s warning call, when he had sent Mitch to grab Lacie from grandma’s. Sophie wondered what Mitch had said in his desperation, what he had done… why wouldn’t he take Sophie’s mother…
Don’t think of that.
Was anyone else with them? Sophie’s struggle for sanity was washing away, she had a purpose once again. A meaning. She needed to figure out how to mark time. Would the computer clock keep working without access to the Internet, if she powered it up? Could she make herself a water-clock of some kind with one of the water bottles and some thread, like she and Jolynn had done once for a junior high science project so long ago?
There had to be a way to measure time. She had three weeks to master the shelter and to read everything in the binders, to learn about the weapons, the generator fuel, salvaging cars, the protective suits that would be in the back, the gas masks, travel, all of it and everything.
And she would. She would. She would learn it all and then in three weeks she would open the vault door and go out of the shelter, because Lacie was out there and she was still alive.
Aunt Jemm’s house, that still meant nothing to her. She knew very little about Mitch’s extended family, only that he was close to everyone out as far as second cousins. He even had a genealogy website and a Civil War page, tracing back the Saint-Germains to the early Nineteenth Century. Remembering that, she wondered at what had happened between Tom and Mitch after their father’s funeral. Surely, being estranged from his own brother was a deep pain for Mitch. That, she suspected, was why “Uncle Itchy” had distanced himself from Lacie.
Mitch and Tom would never now know peace, would never reconcile. But Sophie swore then that she would make the time to get to know Mitch all over again, to make whatever amends she could. The past would be honored in its way, not as an apology for the way things had been and how that had gone wrong, but as a sacred remembrance for the world that ended, and the man she always loved.
There was more to think about, to question. Mitch had worked at Rocky Flats in his time with the government, assisting with coordination of the hazmat plutonium cleanup. He was always bragging about how he had managed to “permanently borrow” two of the suits after he left the Environmental Protection Agency and the Kaiser-Hill Company.
Was that why he and Lacie were still alive? The suits. What other precautions did he possess? Had he built a shelter of his own?