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

balled her fists together in an effort to stop her fingers from shaking. Don’t make me.
    She could hear the main generator humming away in the back room. Two ceiling fans were whirring, casting geometric shadows across the metal shelves. The translucent plastic seal over the doorway into the next room beckoned her further on, but there was a disturbing alien cast to the light that was glowing from inside that pressurized chamber, as if its seal were some kind of spider-web or the mouth of a Venus flytrap, its interlocking plastic fingers beckoning her to come inside.
    Forever.
    Alone. I could alone here, forever.
    Why haven’t the missiles fallen?
    How much time has passed?
    She had no idea. The seconds were become tenuous once more, breaths were becoming hours.
    She struggled to remember what Tom had told her on the phone, before, before . His brother Mitch was with Lacie, he had said, in the place . The place? Surely, Tom had spoken in code because he knew that if he had given an address or some other identifier, the Air Force security personnel would have killed him for the breach. And what would they have done to Lacie, if there was time?
    “Oh, Tom.”
    None of that mattered now.
    The place. The date? She needed to remember what that could be.
    Call Mitch.
    And how was she supposed to do that?
    She pressed her fists against either side of her head, and her hands spread open across her cheeks. To silence her thoughts, to focus, she spoke into the silence. She meant to say something slight, calming, but what she heard was this:
    “Do I want to live?”
    And inside her, No. Oh, Tom. Oh, no.
    Don’t make me.
    “Lacie,” she whispered, already afraid to hear her own voice reverberating within this sterile tomb.
    Lacie is alive and she’s with Mitch. I need, I need to find her. She’s out there somewhere, somewhere safe. Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.
    The last words she spoke before the missiles came down were these: “Tom, I’m so scared.”
    But there was no reason to speak at all. There was no one to answer her, and perhaps there never would be.

 
     
    I-4
    IMPACT
     
    Without the radio, the daylight, the snow, the pulses of fleeting cloud and falling water, Sophie had lost all familiarity with time. She had entered the shelter and beheld the great room. Two minutes had passed in an all-consuming drowning wave, a series of frantic impressions that felt like years.
    She remembered Tom grimly saying—once and never again—that there would be no clocks within the shelter, that installing one would lead to “dark thoughts” which he refused to give any life to.
    Sophie began to understand that perhaps two minutes had passed since she had entered the shelter, but it could have been two hours, two years, two lifetimes.
    ~
    (The narrative is fractured here, for Sophie herself was not certain what she remembered.
    And the truth is this: as Mrs. St.-Germain spoke her last recorded words upon Zero Day, three Russian R-36 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, each with a payload of ten warheads and thirty penetration drones, impacted in intersecting clusters, a triad of interlocking rings of death and fire, raining down over the entire Denver metro area. In forty-three seconds three million people died, the skin peeling away in shock-blasts and burning to vapor in the air, their eyes melting down their cheeks, their teeth turning to black and powdered glass.
    The Rocky Mountains were a wall, a granite bastion separating American humanity into two fated tribes for the wrath of Holocaust: those to the east, of the plains, who burned and died quickly; and those to the west, of the spires, who died slowly and far more horribly. This we know of the region of Black Hawk, and little else. From other testaments I have reconstructed all I can; the diary of St.-Germain shall tell us a little more.
    ~ S.-G.C.)
    ~
    Impact.
    However long Sophie had stood within the shelter, that eternity ended as she spoke the words “So