From the Fire by Kent David Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

translucent vinyl strips, and the welcoming ice-blue light of sanctuary glowed out from behind it.
    There was a deep niche in the concrete wall, with another strip covering its hollow. Sophie peered into the niche and saw an red aluminum flashlight, socketed in its charger. Despite the ceiling lights and the assurance of the shelter’s many automated systems, Sophie reached in, grabbed the chilly flashlight, and flicked it on. She leashed its plastic ribbon onto her wrist, just as Tom had taught her.
    Because what if the lights go out?
    Something made her think, “Grid priorities,” but she could not remember what that might mean. She knew only that she was hyperventilating, freezing despite the warm gushes of air, and close to shock. The terror-drone in her mind was filtering the mantra Get to the shelter, get to the shelter into Don’t get caught in the dark , and that was all.
    Don’t. Calm. You need to think, Sophie.
    Time refused to accelerate. She seemed to drift, to release herself into a thin fleshly resonance of activity of response.
    Think!
    She did not know how many of the shelter’s systems were automatic, or what more she would need to do to survive. She only knew that all of Tom’s emergency manuals were stacked in the binders on the utility shelves by the entryway, where they could be quickly accessed if the light had failed to come on. The racks of shelves loomed over her, bolted into the interior-facing wall.
    One of the ceiling lights just above the left-hand bank of shelves refused to stop flickering. It strobed fluorescent washes of ice-light down over Sophie’s glistening face. She stared at it, then gasped as a keening squeal announced that the vault door behind her had finished pressurizing.
    What if I never get out of here?
    She looked up at the walls of the cluttered entryway, up at the aluminum shelving filled with the binders and CD-R spools, over the fuel barrels all stacked beneath their oily tarps. Shivering, hugging herself and biting her lower lip to keep from crying out, Sophie edged her way beyond the claustrophobic entry and deeper into the shelter proper.
    She had not seen the “great room” since her last tour with Tom, three years ago. She could see where the thousands of labored hours had gone, hours she had complained about more times than she cared to remember. Over the years Tom’s weekend hobby had quickly become an obsession. Whenever he came back home from working in Virginia or in NORAD, he had been here. When he came back to “the mountain” he always invited her to come along, and nine times out of ten she had refused to join him. Now, regarding all of his accomplishments and standing there in a haunted nothingness of sanctuary, Sophie could hardly recognize the shelter she had once endured and secretly despised.
    The great room was fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long, an “underground mansion” according to Tom. The reinforced ceiling with its interlaced girders was new to her. She cringed, fighting the urge to cower beneath the rectangular grids of light. The girdered reinforcement, with all of the plastic water cylinders and canvas bundles stacked up there in netted rows against the roof, made the great room’s ceiling seem even lower than before. The room stood filled up on every side with plastic-covered stacks of supplies lined up in labeled and fluorescent containers: generator fuel, meds, glo-sticks, flares, matches, recycled paper.
    And what was that strange contraption, an iron spider-like thing standing inside a square concrete tub that looked like some kind of shower-stall? Some kind of advanced water pump? What was the purpose of the two-by-two square of aluminum sinks set into the concrete floor?
    Time was speeding up again. She had a sense that precious seconds were ticking away.
    Away to what?
    But her shivering selflessness would only let her think: Don’t make me stay, stay so long in here, that I learn everything before the end. Sophie