From the Fire IV
Authors: Kent David Kelly
AN
EPISODIC NOVEL
OF THE
NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
EPISODE
IV:
ARCHANGEL
BY
KENT
DAVID KELLY
WONDERLAND
IMPRINTS
2013
Copyright © 2013 Kent David Kelly
All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced without the written permission of the copyright
holder, Kent David Kelly.
On April 4th, 2014, 6 billion and 783 million people died in the
blinding white fireballs of the Pan-Global Nuclear Holocaust. Sophie
Saint-Germain, wife and scientist and mother of one, was not among them.
She lived for a time, and so her words endure.
The reclamation of her terrifying story is a miracle in itself.
Uncovered during the Shoshone Geyser Basin archaeological excavations of 2316,
Sophie’s unearthed diary reveals the most secret confessions of the only known
female survivor of the Holocaust in central Colorado. Her diary reveals the
truths behind our legends of the High Shelter, the White Fire, the Great Dying,
the Coming of the One, and the Gray Rain Exodus, her horrifying journey into the
wasteland made with the sole conviction that her daughter, Lacie, was still
alive.
For these are the first of words, chosen by the Woman of the Black
Hawk: FROM THE FIRE / GIVE ME SHELTER / THAT I MIGHT ENDURE THE STORM, / GIVE
ME THE STRENGTH / TO PRAY MY DAUGHTER WILL PREVAIL.
From the Plague Land, from the Fire. This is the book of the woman
who was, this is the codex of our ancestors’ revelation.
An episodic narrative, FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE IV: ARCHANGEL is the
fourth installment of a serialized novel by Kent David Kelly. It is preceded by
END OF DAYS (I), THE CAGE (II) and THE HOLLOW MEN (III). This unforgettable novella
comprises 27,000 words, 110 printed pages. From Wonderland Imprints,
Only
the Finest Works of Fantasy
.
EPISODE
IV: ARCHANGEL
Inside.
The vault door sealed itself with a resonating clang. Sickly
sweet aerosol puffed into the air and the air conditioning hummed into life,
shivering the skeleton-like frames of aluminum ducting. Shadows danced around
the lithe and shaking frame of a girl-like soul, around the fleeing outline of
her faceless silhouette. She was walking backwards, dragging something.
Deeper. Away. Away.
The girl-shape and its burden emerged into fluorescent light. She
stood there, hunched, garbed in her mantle of shadow-white armor. Panting, she
pulled the form of the dying man in behind her, the survivor who was named
Silas-Something and nothing more. She lifted the man and puffed out fits of
moistened breath, the girl no more, Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain.
To the shower.
She
grunted as she repositioned him. His head rolled on a bird-like neck, his eyes
fluttered veined and white.
He’s delirious, he’s dying. Get him to the
shower. Now. Go!
Sophie drag-carried Silas in her arms. He could not have weighed
an ounce over ninety pounds. He draped there, a lolling scarecrow, his head
bobbing from side to side at a sickly angle and upside-down. A trickle of
blackish foam and blood ran from the corner of his mouth and up his hollowed
cheek, into his left ear. He was heavy to her, yes, especially as she was
sheathed in armor and shivering near to panic. But he was nowhere near as
heavy as he should be. He was hot, skeletal, quaking and close to death. His
eyes rolled open, brown for a moment, and he whispered something … something
which Sophie never understood, something he would never remember.
Dead words. Death, so much enough for all of us. Death, death.
And the sister-voice in her sang, trilling down from her perch
upon her throne:
Sing to me, Sophie. Sing for all you have ever lost, sing
for all you never were. Every chance you ever had, every chance that was
stolen from me that you disregarded in your comfortable little bubble of wealth
and shoes and little pills. Sing!
She dragged him into the great room, rolled him onto a blanket
tugged away from the laundry pile where she had made her own vigil-bed for the
entryway. Then she dragged the blanket and its sickly burden, his fingers
trailing in old brackish water meandering toward the drain.
(He’s dead, I know he’s dead, oh God he’s —)
And on, and on, gently toward the shower. She stripped out of her
suit, very mindful of the gun this time, and with scissors and another blanket
she knelt before Silas. She pulled up her shirt over her nose, breathing
slowly, trying not to gag.
Do this. Do this now. Alone. You need to try to save this dying
man or you will never sleep in peace again. Save him.
Working quickly, fingers ginger-quick and eggshell-white, she clipped
the trash bag and his clothing off. As she rolled him the black foam of drying
blood dripped out of his face. A horrible and enticing smell puffed up, so
sweet like smoke-enwreathed Chinese food, like vinegar and yogurt and burning
pork. She covered her face, trying not to vomit. Acid roiled from side to
side up inside her stomach and crept up into her esophagus.
Oh, God still alive. Oh, Silas, you’re a miracle. How are you
not dead? How?
He did not move, agony was a phantom which commanded of him but he
could not obey.
A mystery
. He had no tale that he could tell. Not
yet.
She rolled his unconscious form onto another blanket, and hissed.
His back was not covered with burns and blisters like his arms, no. The flesh
was patched, patterned in lovely colors. Looking closer, Sophie realized that
the parti-colored overlapping squares were not patches of skin, they were scorched
and embedded pieces of a flannel shirt. Silas’s shirt had burned deeply into
the soft pulp to either side of his spine, all down his back. The cloth’s
pattern was now a part of his flesh, a part of him.
This is a science project.
Sophie
did not cry.
This is not a man yet, someone’s lover, someone’s grandpa,
someone’s grocer or the nice man who picks gourds for someone else down the
street. This is not a soul, this is no one.
She kept to business,
working, plucking at his wounds.
Deal with the flesh, as you can. Render
forth the spirit. It’s meat. The man, the man comes after.
His burns were second-degree, if not third. She was not certain
how to tell. But everywhere that the shirt-pattern was not, his skin was
shining between barely-unexposed bones like a rack of honey-glazed meat,
scarlet beneath the fluorescent lights. She tried to remember what little she
knew of burn treatment from reading the binders.
People who were dying of burns, they would dehydrate themselves
refusing water, shivering and freezing to death. Sometimes, even before their
nerve endings would recover enough to wake them to experience their own agony,
they would simply shrivel away and die. They —
Silas groaned. A dark hand reached up, sorting the shadows of the
caged lights away above him, touching the sheaves of radiance.
“Beautiful,”
he whispered. The hand plopped down again.
She rolled him onto his side, wondering how best to drag him into
the shower stall without hurting him anymore. There was a four-inch-higher lip
of concrete with an aluminum slider atop it, a simple matter crafted to hold
the shower door in its place. A half-step, nothing for her to remember on any
day. Inconsequential detail. But that lip of biting concrete could cut him
and split him open. It —
No. Meat. This is just meat, Sophie. This is just a problem to
solve, the solution will create a man. A miracle. Keep working.
She looked down, assessing. The plaid-shreds and burned-in pieces
of boxer shorts barely covered him. He looked pathetic lying crumpled there in
the nude, almost beautiful, a disheveled and mortal angel.
A man.
“Oh, Silas. I’m going, I’m going. To save you. I can.” The
tears, the tears were threatening to begin and if they did there would never be
an end to them. “Do this. I promise.”
She ran to the med cabinet, pulled it open. Little beads of
mercury from the broken thermometer went flying. She grabbed a morphine hypo and
went back to the crumpled shape, not knowing where to put the needle in the
vein. The neck? No. Too dangerous, and her hands were moving in circles
beneath her. Searching, like birds. She stilled them.
Look. Think.
There was a large and snaky vein in the back of his right arm’s
joint, opposite the elbow and shining beneath the light, scarlet-umber beneath
his skin. She decided that one was as good as any. She did not know the
proper dose, but if the man was not already dead from his burns, one miracle
had already graced the shelter with its presence. Why not another?
She gave him half of the syringe’s morphine, wincing as she did
so. What judgment had she passed on him? Death? Peaceful drifting? Agony?
Resurrection?
No response.
She stood, leaned and put the needle up in the shampoo bottle slot
of the shower rack, out of reach.
There was only one way to try to save him, to begin to care for
him. The concrete lip was a barrier, nothing more. It needed to fall to
Sophie’s will.
Surmount it. Make it unreal, if you have to
. But how?
Let us see, let us see what happens if we try. It’s a game,
sister Sophie. Lift him,
the sister-voice
trilled.
Again? I can’t. He’ll die.
Lift him, Sophie.
Cackling from the throne, a cruel sweetness tinged with envy.
Oh, he is an
angel! A beautiful old soul! Lift him lift him lift him —
“Enough!”
If she did not act at all, he would die. If he died as a result
of her actions, she would tell herself that it was inevitable, that she had
done good work and done no wrong, and she would forgive herself. Somehow.
There is no one to hear your sins, Sophie.
“I don’t care. I’m alive. Let
me
deal with the living.”
Silence at last within her mind.
“All right, then.” She considered. Silas would need to be
sanitized, bathed. A shock to the system. The water might kill him and it
might not. But the filth and septic toxins of his burn-flesh surely would. His
torso would need to be slathered in burn ointment, and then she would need to
start sewing shut any open wounds that would reveal themselves as his burned
skin sloughed off.
“Sewing,” she mumbled, not realizing she was using her sister’s
voice. “Like Girl Scouts, Sophie.” She giggled once, to keep from screaming.
If any of the fabric of the shirt or the boxer shorts was ever
going to come off — and, by coming off, reduce the one hundred percent chance
of fatal infection — it would have to be now.
The logistics of this were still confounding. There was no time.
She opened the shower, turned the water spigot’s indicator more
toward hot than cold. Then, holding her breath, slipping her hands gently
under Silas’s armpits, she pulled him standing.
The flesh beneath his arms was hot, pulpy and pliant with blisters
both ruptured and unopened. His head lolled again and he did not regain
consciousness, but he gave a moaning sigh. The black foam bubbled out and
trickled down his chest. She lifted him all the way upright; no resistance.
How could he be lighter than only minutes ago?
Because you are in Hell, because this is eternity.
“No.”
In. She stood with him in the shower, sharing the cascade, one
final rite before the end.
The water pulsed over him, over Sophie’s face as she tried to
cradle him up against the wall. He crumpled and fell against her. Sweet-smelling
mist puffed up, flitting little bits of black burned flesh and the shreds of
moistened scabs into the air.
Sophie gagged, a stark inhalation turned into a rush of stomach
acid from the other direction. She vomited over her shoulder, fell, and landed
on crackling knees, struggling to balance Silas down between her legs.
He twisted as he fell with her, crying out, and she turned him so
that his back would be cleansed by the pure cascading water.
There.
He screamed.
His arms went around Sophie’s neck, and his fingers dug into her
back. “Stop,” he begged her.
“Stop. Please. Puh. Puh …”
He fell unconscious once more, a merciful oblivion.
Tears and water and disgorged bile ran down Sophie’s face as she
quickly turned him, cleansing his shedding flesh as best she could. His skin
was not only blistering then, shedding, it was turning from African American
brown to lobster red. Turning hard and shiny. There was not as much blood as
she had hoped. Hardly any of the shirt was coming off. Where there were
creases, the folds betweens his fingers, and in the clefts of his skeletal
armpits, the layers of tissue were turning to jeweled translucent sheets of
once-flesh, surfaces which shone like melting plastic. Skin fell off his back in
sheets. Pus leaked out of soft spots which hardened around the divots between each
of his vertebrae.
He barely woke in her arms, then. And he murmured, “
Itches.
Jenny, can you scratch that?” An almost-scream thereafter, a breath turned
into a wheeze. A cough of something greenish mixed with spittle over her
shoulder. “Jenny? So
cold
.”
Sophie shushed him, turned him, and the burnt remnants of the man
swirled down the drain. His sloughing flesh smelled like burning cinnamon pried
up sweet from beneath the rind, whirling in little tendrils down to darkness.
Shreds of wasted human being sucked away, deep beneath the world.
He’s melting. Oh, he’s melting down the drain.
Sophie giggled madly. She bit her lip, stifling herself.
The fingers of Silas splayed out toward the end, when there was
nothing more of him that was liquid, when all the blood and pus and sanies
(Or
filth, or stink, or whatever you call it)
had washed away. Something
glittering emerged between his shaking fingers. A blackened and
partially-melted wedding ring was perched upon one finger, and a dark crescent
hollow beneath it showed where the finger that bore it had once been much
larger.
The waters fell. Sophie stared at that crescent, that hollow
between his bony finger and promise gold, for a very long time.
The ring, it wanted to come off. Even in delirium, barely
conscious, Silas kept the ring from washing away by clasping it with his thumb.
“Oh, God,
hurts
.”
She shushed him, held him as she would her only child.
“Help me hold,” he said. He palmed the ring. She held the hand
that kept it.
The most curious detail came into focus then as Sophie, crying,
interlaced Silas’s fingers with her own. Some of his fingernails were
beautiful, crystal blue. It took her a moment to realize that these were beads
of molten glass, something he had touched when it was hot, perhaps a melting
window or a vase. These sapphire beads of melting glass had fused with his
fingertips, and each had cooled there. The glass, too, was a part of him now.