From the Fire by Kent David Kelly Read Free Book Online

into the shaft. It was far, far deeper than she remembered. She righted herself, slipped with her bare foot onto a low rung and caught herself with her other foot kicking and curling, Get down, down, she looped her elbows into the ladder, coughed vomit, began to climb down into the shelter’s entryway.
    She fell off the ladder near the bottom, dropped six inches and tilted into the shaft wall.
    Seconds later, shivering so hard that she could barely control her arms and legs, Sophie hunched down upon the landing in front of the steel-plated vault door. Her toes curled around the drainage grill that was gurgling with frigid water at her feet.
    She spun the door’s auto-locking wheel, her hands slipping off the condensation droplets, beads of water stuck between the grooves of the wheel’s inner rubber ring. The wheel squealed, spun, stuttered and then jammed.
    No!
    She pushed harder in the opposite direction, then counter-clockwise again. The wheel jammed in the same position with an angry screeching of hidden gears.
    Sophie screamed, throwing all of her weight into the wheel. Come on! Harder.
    Something gave way, little ice chips sprinkled down into the grating. She stumbled off her feet into the wall again as a hydraulic whine took over and the wheel spun itself counter-clockwise with a hiss and a purr, rolling the vault door inward on unseen hinges. Mist sheeted up as the warmer, stale air inside the shelter puffed out.
    Sophie ran into the tiny entry. The narrow inside there smelled sterile, a mixture of rubber and cleaning solution and dead air. Clang. The door thudded and clanked shut behind her, seals pressurized. Something electronic beeped twice and gave a stuttering whirr, then clicked back into place. Sophie barely registered a frantic thought — How do I get back out? — and the wheel spun itself back in the other direction.
    Echoing tremors of metal on metal. Silence.
    As Sophie’s eardrums popped and she worked her jaw, new noises swirled up in every direction. The noise was sudden and jarring, unmuffled generators humming, fuses flitting click-click as light banks began to spark, plastic streamers somewhere fluttering where a vent was spilling out new air, and something metal like a wrench or a screwdriver was clattering up on one of the utility shelves. Whatever it was, it fell off a vibrating surface and clanged onto the concrete floor in the farther room.
    Warmth began to puff in tangible currents around the shelter. There was the whisper of whirring air, a bitter taste of dust, the shunting of power and twinkling of lights in aluminum cages as Sophie’s entering spun a hundred things into motion.
    Air, light, oh thank God …
    Sophie hugged herself, bent over as the first cramp of nausea crawled through her belly and down into her legs.
     
    * * * * *
     
    I remember now.
    Some.
    There’s beds, beds for three, three of us … ?
    No. I. Me.
    And how long?
    How long will I be alone here?
    She fought to regain herself, to understand. Something was still happening. The floor rumbled.
    Stone dust peppered down from between the plates in the low and claustrophobic ceiling just above her head. She heard her father’s voice again, “Hon, don’t you dare look at the sky!” so loudly that she covered her ears.
    Breathing in furtive gasps of barely-controlled panic, Sophie followed the narrow entry tunnel. It edged off to the left, its angle engineered by Tom so that the vault door could be defended if need be. There were submachine guns in here, somewhere. Hunting rifles. Assault rifles. Despite Tom’s repeated urgings, she had refused to ever learn just how to fire them.
    She passed through the second angle of the passage, a lead-sheeted narrow which Tom had called the radiation trap, and came to the shelter’s true entry at last. She pushed through a doubled veil of hanging strips of lead, plated tiles locked away in a thick plastic curtain. Beyond the lead curtain was hung a second tapestry of