FROM THE FIRE
AN EPISODIC NOVEL OF THE NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
EPISODE III: THE HOLLOW MEN
by
Kent David Kelly
INTERLUDE
III-1
THE SLOWING AND THE MERCILESS
Moist leaves of translucent plastic, petals of soft and pliant crystal, cast their misted tracers down every light-touched pane as the left hand of a woman pushed through their entwining segments, the shivering and bloodless hand of Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain.
Sophie’s left arm pushed through to the shoulder, then her right hand’s fingers spidered in after it, the poise of a diver committed to the descent. She took a shaky breath, held it in. With her tongue constricted between her teeth, she braced herself and took one long step forward. Through the plastic veils she went. Her arms slid free on the other side, touched by humidity and the other air’s lifeless chill. Her face pushed through the doorway’s plastic seal, to experience another alien form of touch entirely — the strange wet plastic of the door, it was silk, it was artificial skin — while a gunshot sounded from beyond the vault door far behind her.
She pushed through into the hallway beyond the Great Room, trying to stop herself from screaming. She fell to the floor. The bullet had hit home, and Pete’s cry from out of the ladder-shaft was cut short by yet another gunshot. Sophie could hear only a young man shouting then — “What the fuck, we needed him! We —” and the other, the huge man: “Shut up! You’re gone! Get out of here!”
“Stop!” The girl out there was screaming at the two men, her voice raw with horror and with pain. “Please, he didn’t do anything! Stop this!”
Stop.
Sophie pressed the heels of her bandaged hands against her ears, pressing in hard until her vision began to star with beads of scarlet light. Her sobbing drowned out the voices of all of the survivors, the burning and fallen ones who had tried to break their way into her locked-down shelter.
I gave them Pete, he trusted in me, she thought. Never, never can this be forgiven. I left him there to die, I ran away. I hate myself. I’m a coward. Worthless. No, more than even this, she decided. She kept her hands pressing in, she blinked away her tears. She was not a coward, in leaving Pete to die. She was a traitor.
She had chosen the future over the moment, her desperate hope for her own daughter’s survival over the death pleas of a good and noble man. Pete Henniger had been abducted, tortured and sacrificed by those of the outside, the shadow people who walked now in the burning world as wraiths among the ruin.
A hollow, reedy voice sang to her as Sophie shut the voices and screams and noises of the world away. She recognized it at once: the voice of her younger and traumatized sibling who had always envied her, her beloved sister Patrice. Patrice had died decades ago, her body crushed and twisted by its impact beneath the angular devastation of a drunk driver’s truck. She had been the only passenger in her boyfriend’s car that night. The details had never been shared with Sophie, but she knew — from the one time that she had seen her father cry — that Patrice had been alive when the paramedics came, and when the steel jaws had sheared away the pickup’s window strut to draw her out, the peeling away of the wreckage had caused all of her pressurized blood to surge forth and to spill away. She had died as she had lived, opened and frail and strong and unforeseen, a mystery to everyone, a cipher even to herself.
Hollowed.
It was the faltering voice of Patrice that Sophie had heard when she lost her virginity, and again when she had been raped against the alley wall of a nightclub in Denver off of Broadway. It was the tantalizing voice of Patrice that had whispered in her mind all the way down the aisle, lilies quivering between her hands and a spun sugar of lace and veil puffed and tufted all around her, hair poised aglow in moistened ringlets, trembling as her father led her to stand before her Tom. Dead Patrice had whispered to her, so sweetly:
Are you sure? Sophie, is he the one? Sophie, are you really sure?
And there beyond the shelter’s pressurized door seal, for the first time in eight years, the first time since the stillbirth of Tom’s son a year before daughter Lacie had ever come to be, the mutilated face forever chained to that beguiling and girlish voice was back again.
Do not ever, no. Patrice pursed her phantom lips, a single index finger poised in the darkness before them. Do not, Sophie. Do not ever be weak.
She smiled in Sophie’s mind, a garland of shattered, bloody, milk-white teeth.
“Pete died.” Sophie was trying to stand. She was whispering as she rocked back and forth on her knees in the concrete hallway, the center of the shelter’s spider-web. “He came here for shelter, for me, he warned me and I left him to die.”
You must be the merciless, my sweet. Patrice was singing to Sophie, sharing her veins, her heartbeats. The voice whorled beneath Sophie’s skin with the electric tingling of gravity, blood falling through arms and fingers and surging back again in pulsing and relentless coils.
This, this is all a mother must do in the time of Fire. You, Sophie, must ever now be the merciless.
“He. Oh, no. Dying. For me. Oh, he was a good man, Patrice.”
Peter was a man, yes, Patrice countered in her mind. And so? Women are life, men are annihilation. This is their ending, this is their one great glory. Let the men burn, they were made for this. This war, this ruin, White Fire of the Archangel? This is what they have always wanted. That is the secret, Sophie. The secret of the Dead, what the Dead have spoken to me, I give to you. We as mortal souls, all of us, in living we destroy ourselves. Women destroy from the inside out, one by one, starting with themselves and then all those souls they dare desire. But men? They, they set fire to this world. The men are lost, as they always longed to be. Souls to the White Fire evermore. There will be others, always they are born for battle. But what of the one? There is one good man. Mitch is not like the others. Go to him. For what of your own beloved child, Sophia Ingrid? What of your only daughter?
“Oh, Lacie…”
Yes. And sister Patrice laughed, bereft of the merest willow-touch of empathy. She laughed in the underflow of Sophie’s thoughts, a cruel and relentless soft-sound, like the snapping of brittle sticks under a boot when the hunter is drawing near. Tom is dead, Patrice sang on. Peter is dead. I am of the Dead. But you? You are the only, Sophie. Chosen. And Lacie, Lacie Anna? She’s out there. Horrified, her only hope is you. She screams for you.
“My baby?”
Oh, yes. You need to be strong. You need to fight, you need to find her. Lacie Anna, now, is everything.