She would not wonder at these things, she would not let them gnaw at her. No. Her determination was building with every moment. She would learn all that needed to be done, she would learn where Aunt Jemm’s house was, she would drive there and Hell to anyone who would stand in her way. She would find her daughter who needed her most of all.
She kept herself busy, pacing, working. Thinking.
She had, with considerable pain, managed to lean the fallen shelving unit onto its narrower side. In doing so she had found the remnants of another binder. This one was untitled, and the dates on the printouts were as recent as October 2013. That must have been Tom’s last visit to the shelter, before the coming of winter had forced him to close everything down.
Perhaps. But one particular point of that did not make sense. The snow-closure gate had still been chained in the up position. Tom had meant to come here, one last time. She remembered their worst fight, last Halloween, and started to piece together what might have happened.
We fought about him coming up here and he left on long-term assignment in Maryland and Virginia the very next day. A kiss and a goodbye to Lacie, but not for me.
“There’s no reason for that to haunt you,” said Sophie. “Forgive. Love.” Her voice was the calmest she had heard it in a very long time.
She sat at the work table by the radio, which she decided to turn off for awhile. Filling her Thermos with water, she started to read the untitled binder and its riddling miscellany.
The first printout was about submachine guns. Tom had a very clear and precise sequence of events listed out for handling the weapons. One, brace the extension stock and remove the ammunition clip. Two, check twice to make sure the clip was absolutely empty. Then cleaning, then safety, loading, bracing, aiming, sweep-firing, point firing…
She stopped reading. Nothing there was useful, not yet. But now that she knew her daughter was surely out there, she was ready to think extraordinary thoughts. Yes, she would learn how to use not only the submachine guns, but the hunting and assault rifles as well.
Yes, she could — if she was going to be raped or taken prisoner. Or to protect her daughter. She could kill if she had to.
The next printout was a crude Word dump of Tom’s own unfiltered notes. It was not procedural, but rather moral in its rambling. It was something about which weapon was best for outside defense, which for shelter defense, which for recon, and which for hunting. It was titled “For Soph.” After this were notes on how best to kill people in a merciful manner, how best to kill men who were leading other men into battle in the bloodiest way possible in order to break the others’ spirits, and how to kill a family member in their sleep.
“No.”
Those pages were ripped out and dropped onto the floor.
Next was a Westword story about Mehrdad Farhadi, the Iranian scientist who had set up a microphone in Denver International Airport last August and announced to everyone that he was a nuclear physicist, that he had been working on nuclear weapons for the Iranian government and that he was surrendering himself to the American people as a matter between himself and his God.
She remembered the incident well. The first stirrings of the Shelter Panic, in retrospect, had started when Iran had sent agents to free Farhadi from FBI confinement and nine people had been killed as the attack was repulsed. The mission failed, but barely. The United States, England and Canada declared war on Iran the day after. None of that was intended to come out in public, but an FBI agent had ended her career to post the security videos of the attack through Wikileaks. It was all there in the article.
After that, another printout concerning the Korean Air Lines Flight KE 007, which had wandered into restricted airspace in 1983 and had been shot down over the Sea of Japan by an Su-15 Soviet interceptor. Sophie frowned as she parsed the old article. It was ancient history. Why had Tom decided it was so important?
She closed the binder and pulled out her notebook, along with a road atlas she had found in the shelving wreckage. It was time to start planning for the future, for her daughter who was everything.
Where was Mitch now? She would figure out the mystery of Aunt Jemm’s house in its own time. Soon, she might even talk to him. But most likely, he was to the north. Mitch was unmarried and deeply devoted to his extended family. Most of the Saint-Germains lived in Quebec, North Dakota and Wyoming. She would need to stick to the mountain roads as long as possible, perhaps 119 up to Nederland, 72 past Boulder or what was left of it. The Rocky Mountains would shield her — she hoped — from the worst radiation to the east, and the fallout storms coming in from the west. Three weeks and come. The radiation would need to disperse itself, and there would be a fragile and narrow window of time before the second wave of storms could rise anew. She would not journey as far as Estes Park or Loveland, for those were surely towns filled with the dead or dying. Perhaps down onto Interstate 25 for awhile, between the annihilated cities. If the H4 was still able to run despite the electromagnetic pulse, she could ram her way through some of the dead traffic, or perhaps even four-wheel through the ditches if they were dry. What of 85 north toward Greeley, itself probably a crater now? What of…
Sophie froze and went perfectly still. Voices.
Not from inside of her head, not behind her, but elsewhere.
And then, a pounding sound. From far away, out beyond the edges of the shelter-world. From the outside.
And that was when Sophie’s second brief life in the High Shelter ended, cut short even as it had begun, and her third life cast her forever into the tortures of the World of the Great Dying, the world that the Archangel remade and was so reborn from out of the White, from the Fire.
II-7
COME THE HELLBOUND
(4-6?-14)
Gong. Gong. Gong.
Someone was pounding on the shelter’s vault door, with a sledge hammer or a crowbar. There had been no time to pull out the H4’s toolbox, when Sophie had run for the shelter and almost fallen down the ladder-shaft. But there was, she knew perfectly well, a tire iron up there in the iron box, a set of wrenches, a crowbar…
Gong.
“Lady!”
A huge man with a deep, hoarse and desperate voice was shouting through the door. Sophie could hear the vault’s pressure wheel being tested, on her side it was jerking half an inch back and forth, over and over again. But the door had auto-sealed itself, locked and pressurized once the floor plate inside the entryway had been activated by Sophie’s stepping through.
“We know you’re in here!” Another voice, a young woman. Sophie had never heard such hopelessness, such animalistic rage.
“Open this God-damned door!” The man again. Gong.
Sophie backed away from the work table, as stealthily as she could manage. There was something running down her legs, something fluid and warm. Her socks were growing moist and she was trailing footprints of wetness as she backed away from the lead-curtained tunnel leading out to the entryway.
The guns. The gun locker was in the back. Turning, she ran for the vinyl pressure seal.
She made it three steps, when a third voice cried out, “Sophie! Don’t open it! I’m sorry!”
Who was that? Who was the old man knew her name? Who had survived, and who knew where the shelter was?
Some kind of struggle erupted outside. Whatever the huge man had been holding to pound on the vault door, something had made him drop it. The man was grunting now, not as if he was fighting, but as if he was punching something — or someone — with all his strength. Again, again.