From the Fire V
Authors: Kent David Kelly
AN
EPISODIC NOVEL
OF THE
NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
EPISODE
V:
GRAY RAIN
EXODUS
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.
On April 4
th
, 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 long-term
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 V: GRAY RAIN EXODUS
is the fifth installment of a serialized novel by Kent David Kelly. It is
preceded by END OF DAYS (I), THE CAGE (II), THE HOLLOW MEN (III) and ARCHANGEL
(IV). This unforgettable novella comprises 27,000 words, 110 printed pages.
From Wonderland Imprints,
Only the Finest Works of Fantasy
.
EPISODE
V:
GRAY RAIN
EXODUS
THE DESCENDING
The woman in the armored suit is driving, trembling. Her gloved
hands are salt-flecked by the sweat shaken from her eyelashes, from out of her
languid hair. She sips from the plastic tip of a well-gnashed straw. Outside
her vehicle’s windshield, glimpsed through gaps gashed in the lead-lined
curtains taped up against the glass, there looms a world of nightmares.
The canyon walls slide by, streaked with gray water and scalded
runnels where the snowmelt from earlier weeks has boiled away in firestorm.
Reddish shadows dance across the road like filaments of spirit, unreflecting
memories of dismembered phantoms, tumbling along in a hallucinatory glaze. A
pilgrimage of those no longer breathing.
She squints, she beholds and disbelieves. She drives on. She can
barely dare to see the canyon as it is.
And what of the byways beneath the mountain and on beyond the
canyon, the labyrinth of Ruin, she wonders? What of the underworld, torn apart
and risen over all that was?
She tunes these impossible questions out, just as she tunes out
the remembrance of dead bodies and sutured wounds and static begging and cries
of pain. Nothing has happened to her, not ever. She is only the moment. She
is newborn.
The past of a spidery husk-self she had once been is now a cocoon
of ruptured and silken memory left far below, and down behind her.
She listens, hearing alien echoes of once-reality as the canyon
walls slide by.
The engine, the tires, Silas’
ragged breathing. And when the gray-spun winds weave high, there reigns above
her the ultimate silence — no birdsong, no traffic, no roar of distant fire
upon that day, only nothingness and the gentle fall of ashen people and incinerated
forests, unchronicled motes falling softly out of the sky.
A man coughs in the back seat, a gurgling cough spliced open by a
gasp of pain. She glances up into the rearview, a glance is all she can
spare. The silhouette is back there, the dying man. And much nearer, in the
mirror, the after-flesh of the one.
Me.
A skeletal thing, reflected, stares back at Sophie from out of the
mirror, beyond judgment, as voiceless and irreproachable as a gliding liquid dream
waterfalling through the shadowed tiers of an erratic mind, the last pale
shadow-flesh of the woman, Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain.
* * * * *
She heard a roar as the winds returned. A moaning cascade of
un-voices beckoned her out to twilight, the breath of the opened world.
What is that?
Come see
, the underworld seemed to
sing.
She drove out of the canyon at last and the debris-spun gales of
mountain wind shook the H4 so hard its suspension coils squeaked. The SUV
rocked back and forth. A light binged on, an alarm began its metronomic
chiming.
Death,
she thought for a
panicked moment,
something is wrong, the fuel
— but no. The wind had
coaxed a CHECK DOOR light on, then blinked it out just as quickly.
Damaged
in the collision,
she guessed,
the wall of the cave.
Flecks of
baked glass, scraps of rubber and incinerated trees pelted the side of the H4,
slithering. It sounded like being buried in sand, like being buried alive.
She turned left at the twisted guardrail, and the vortices of the
disrupted wind circled in behind.
She descended. A fitful spurt of rain fell from the roiling
clouds, followed by veils of gray mist, all-enveloping. More debris twirled upon
the wind, and through the closed (but never quite sealed) air vents crept the
mingled stench of burning, oil, dust. Ebony and ruby clouds crashed over the
fog, claustrophobically low beneath the elder sky. And as the rain faded, the
ashes came raining down all the more.
With the halogen high beams on, her visibility over the narrowing
coils of the road tapered off to fifty feet, perhaps less. If the Hummer’s LED
clock was too be trusted, it was 15:04 PM on an unknown and endless day.
Born back into the remnant of the world and oh, the concept of
Time
. She shook her head, a droplet of sweat coursed down the left
side of her nose.
What a strange, remorseless thing. Time is still alive.
She spared a nervous look down at the battery light. The charge
seemed fine. The fluorescent gas needle, however, was wavering. Ten, fifteen
miles an hour. And the seatbelt light was blinking.
Ever descending. She braked and turned on and down through the
first, circuitous hairpin of the road, never daring to look down over the
cliffside. The skirting beams of the headlights glowed, defiant silver blue
vaporized not too far out ahead, warring with undulating streamers of gray
dust, tumbling branches and plastic bags.
There was almost enough after-light to drive by. Almost.
The tortuous road was cratered, warped by unthinkable heat and
cooled again. Tarry bubbles had formed, bloated and popped all along the
asphalt, cooling into ringlets like enormous teardrops caught in freeze-frame.
Boulders had tumbled down the cliffs. Some had bounced off the road and gone
careening down the other side, and some had not.
“Don’t you think none about what you do, now, Mrs. S.-G.,” came
the solemn and failing voice from behind her seat. She tried to smile for
Silas in the mirror, where he truly smiled for her. “Don’t you think now.
Just drive.”
And she did.
All at once she remembered a glimpse of the lost world, another
curve in the winding, a brief blossom of sunlight reflecting off the mountain
road as two wind-parted clouds tossed away in separate directions and the sun
poured down for some few beautiful seconds. And then, from under that stifled
memory of The Day, the voice:
This is not a test.
This is an urgent bulletin from the Emergency Broadcast System.
Seek interior shelter immediately.
Do not remain outside; do not seek cover in or beneath any
vehicle.
Take only the most vital essentials and shelter in place at once.
We repeat ...
* * * * *
Reality, the Experienced, juddered back into its rightful place in
Sophie’s mind as the H4’s front wheel caught a jagged rock and crushed the tip
off of it, sent grainy powder flying. The remainder of the rock went skirling
away, tumbling under the guard rail and off the cliff, clattering down and
gone.
You fool,
she chastised
herself.
You get a flat tire, you have one spare. One! And how far is
Kersey? Ninety miles on a perfect day, if you’re gallivanting through the past
and down through Denver. Nearer to what, two hundred miles through the
mountains, down and around near Loveland? And how far now, assuming the roads
even exists any longer? What about the nuclear missile impact craters? How do
you measure a detour such as that in hours, Sophie? How do you measure that in
days?
There would not be enough morphine, enough water. Silas was going
to die. There was —
There was something black and enormous, a silhouette of death,
immediately around the next bend.
She spun the wheel, avoiding a boulder by going the long way to
the left, over rubble. Almost she had forgotten and veered right, toward the
edge where the melted guardrail leaned askew.
She let out a shaky breath. She could feel that she was driving
much too fast.
When she had steadied, she looked down at the speedometer. Her
speed, downhill with constant use of the brake, was a little over fifteen miles
an hour.
“Come on, now,” said Silas. “Watch careful what you’re doing,
Mrs. S.-G. Don’t be sending us over. You stay with me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just keep watching, now. Be safe.”
“I am. I will.”
And they were driving down into the lost majesty of the great
turn, the scenic semicircle where the rainbows and the silhouettes had thrived
upon a time, the down-slope where the thickest of the forest had once been.
The forest’s remnant might have still been out there, somehow enduring, but if
it was the skeletons of the trees were down too far to see.
The wind began to slow as Sophie tried to look out into the
distance, where the wall of fog was vertical and streaked with wet bolts of
cinder-light. As she looked, the H4 rumbling and unceasing in its never-ending
left turn, the clouds above the vehicle collapsed.
Thunder rolled. The breaking-open clouds crawled up into
themselves, heading “east” (And where was east without a sun? Where was
anything?), colliding with the mountainside and splitting apart to reveal a
somber line of crags on high above.
The Shelter High, forever lost to us.
The Archangel of radiance, the whorls of the sun’s reflections,
its wings and limbs were lost up there in twilight gone to gray. The Hell-furnace
of churning sky, an un-glow, gave some twisted mockery of sunlight. Far below,
the world of Ruin was vivid yellow, cinder-gold. It was like looking down over
a devastated train set through a thick pane of old warped glass, like looking
over an avalanched ski village through amber-tinted goggles. Smoke churned far
down there, curdling clouds of ash clogged the edges of what was real,
billowing air snaking over everything and reflecting still-smoldering fires
from far away.
The air below was seething, the breath of the dying earth was
solid and alive. Up above, higher than that strange glowing landscape, a
little higher than the H4 upon its thread of road, the sky was a horrible and
swirling yellow-gray, fading up into crimson dark.
After the grand turn, an eternity, the world below had loomed a
little larger.
And down she drove, perhaps toward what remained of Black Hawk.
The fields were filled with husks, the discarded dolls of peoples’ bodies.
Something caused the bodies to decay very slowly. Sophie knew quite well about
autolysis, the entropic breakdown of a body’s liquefying enzymes. But what of
putrefaction, the wasting of flesh feasted upon by bacteria? What had happened
to the bacteria, what had changed?
The fields wavered, dunes of scorched dirt choking away dead tufts
of grass. Flower-like white hands and feet — feet with burned sneakers still
hanging from them — peeked out here and there, a garden of idle slaughter. The
bodies had a strange, withered appearance, like bundles of sticks.
“Where in the Hell are we?” murmured Silas.
“By Black Hawk,” Sophie answered. “We’re by —”
“No. Never saw these other fields. We’re somewhere else.”
And Sophie realized that he was right.
Already, we’re lost.
She
gritted her teeth, she drove a little faster as if that would erase the welling
panic inside her belly.
We’re lost and I’ve no idea where we might be.
Everything in dying, all is changed.
“Don’t think of it,” said Silas, as if reading her mind. He even
gave her a little wave. “Just you drive.”
* * * * *
Nowhere. The descending, the fields of the dead in fading.
The plan she and Silas had worked out over Tom’s folded and
highlighted maps of Colorado, calculated to angle their way toward Kersey north
and east in a series of many-miled zags, had been bold, outrageously bold and
impossible. She could see that now. Two hundred miles, perhaps more? There
was no way to know how many times they would need to loop back, to drive around
traffic jams or piles of the dead, to account for craters and wind, radiation
and landslides. With conditions as they were, twenty
miles
would
consist of an improvisatorial stitching together of twenty consecutive
miracles
.
A hundred miles would be a journey of many days.
And what of the survivors?
But Silas had driven to the shelter, all on his own, while
terribly wounded and with far less equipment or preparation.
All the way
from Littleton, Sophie, up through Black Hawk and to you.
It could be done, Fate be willing. Could it not?
Die trying,
was all she could
tell herself.
Get to Kersey or die trying. There is nothing else to hope,
nothing else to live for.
She took a deep breath, remembering. There would be bomb funnels
in this natal terrain, impact hollows and blast shadows. The north-south spine
of the unsundered Rocky Mountains would have spliced the blast waves into
coils, half each to west and east. The emerald and umber fabric of the world
had been unraveled. They would need to thread a thousand needles to weave the
way, they would need to adhere to the mountain roads for as long as possible.
Using I-70 would be completely out of the question, the tunnels
and canyons under the ski resorts would make the interstate’s remnants
virtually impossible to pass. Glenwood Springs down to Idaho Springs would
surely be impassable as well. How many dead were knotted along that way, how
many corpses locked inside their melted cars, buried under rockslides from the
nuclear detonations?