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

you can.  Should you drive quick, between that first storm and this Great
One’s rising, you might just behold a Hell-world with a crimson sky and misted
ashes flying.  A brighter, dying twilight.
    “Up here in the mountains, it’s all the little death.  The
great black of Denver is nothing up here; we’re west, wind teething away there
down into the east.  We’s shielded, some.
    “You see, time I got to Black Hawk, stopping and plundering cars
still whole and eating dead people’s sandwiches, emptying out their water
bottles, wrapping my hands up in their gloves, I found me in a world all a-run
of twilight.  Some elder trees still burning, mostly forest and boulders
splashed up over the cliff-sides like boxes of crud and burnt matches thrown up
all over like Pick-Up Sticks, aiming the same direction.  Dead trees pointing
falling down, pointing me to here.  I was reading the passage of wind, you see.
    “So I go in the opposite way, I push over the dead bodies, slurry
and crackle, drawn on by those lifelines, and then those blown-down forests
pointing me the destiny.  Pointing me to you.
    “See, Black Hawk a blessed whore-girl of a gambling town.  She
didn’t get hit, not precisely.  Old girl’s not vital enough to ever be a
target, and she’s shielded by the mountains from all sides.
    “But oh, she got the firestorm.  Those fire cyclones, before I
come, they level that town good.  Ameristar, she gone.  Yeah?  I see you know
the place.  Tumbled-up police cars, one ambulance and even a truck or three. 
Some protest or something, from what few pieces I could see.
    “All right.  We stop awhile now.”
    * * * * *
    “Yeah, Black Hawk I did make it through.  Fewer died in the
streets there right away from what I tell.  But every casino, every hotel,
every parking garage?  The better built, the harder they come down.  The bigger
they stood, the darker the blood- and oil-stains down all that rubble’s sides.
    “Every place not shaken down got burned up, taken up. 
Temperatures like that, Mrs. S.-G., well, it’s like my welding days.  Liquid
glass and metal turn to fire.  Concrete do burn, with all that gunk
running down it’s gullet.  It’s like hot paint and glue made of furniture and
people, hot glue stuck atop a stone.  That stone get baked black, and the glass
and the metal and those poor dead souls, well they’re the glaze.
    “You never can go back there.  This you got here, this buried
castle your Tom build you, is a paradise.  Black Hawk, she’s not like what you
think you might see, with hollowed-out shells of buildings all a-honeycomb,
no.  No Hiroshima there.  Wet and drying ashes everywhere.  She’s more like smooth ,
still-flowing stumps of black crystal with bits of dead people locked inside,
all stuck and tumbling slow, down ditches and down stone-pile, like flies
drowned in amber.
    “The really pathetic thing, see, is on both sides of town, outside? 
The highway.  The air got sucked out of the sky, and all these people, they
asphyxiated.  Didn’t get burned, they just drowned without air, if you know
what I’m saying.  Shockwaves blew all these people into piles and waves, like
corn and heaps of crumbled chaff.  Course those motes of chaff they large,
they’re all heads and hands and pieces stuck in still-tied shoes.
    “Many those unburned bodies, they’re over to west and east of
town, but it’s … I don’t know.  It’s beautiful, if you can understand me in my
blasphemy.  No?  They’re all laid out like patterns made by the wind, like a
painting made from the dead.  A painting for anyone looking down from the sky.
    “A painting by the Archangel.
    “Okay.  So I was going, coming along to you.  Rain starting then,
yeah.  But things aren’t as wet or cold as you might think.  Lot of the
scavengers and flies and such?  All dead, people aren’t rotting so much as
they’re drying out.  All you see when you’re driving, threading through