Kent Kelly - And the Ashes

Dust clouds from the murky and blackened south threatened to overtake the H4 a few miles on, and so she made her way north around the glow-laced dunes just beyond a mud-washed railroad crossing and there onto 257. There, seeking Colorado Road 64, several miles beyond a tangled line of flatbed railcars and spilled piles of ransacked cargo containers, she discovered a huge and seemingly ancient barn with only one of its narrow sides collapsed out into the fields. Unable to continue any farther, she off-roaded the H4 into the barn, cared for the unconscious Silas, and even dared to turn the engine off. Gas was still leaking, but not nearly as badly as before. The field repairs — despite many of the hoped-for welds being too dangerous to perform — had quieted the damaged H4’s struggles to a stubborn, erratic squeal and the hashing of grit-filled belts.

In some unknowable hour before the dawn, Sophie cared for her burned hands as best she could and the finally collapsed across the console in a deep and suffocating sleep.

She awoke with a start, shook her head, felt around for the SMG and found its handgrip jutting up from beside the passenger door. Forcing Silas awake — he was delirious, blind, he tried to speak but could not and he did not know her — she gave him water, a re-bandaging, and morphine.

It’s not going to be long now. She stroked his hand, followed the impacted tracers of hollowed veins running beneath his skin like enormous, pruning wrinkles. Dying. She had no idea how she was going to go on without him.

This close to Kersey, she compelled her mind into a contorted semblance of calm rigidity, focusing only on the miles. She backed out of the barn and back onto 257. She had been driving for several miles before she realized there had been just been another miracle, three minutes earlier on: the H4, despite almost failing to turn over and thereby ushering disaster, had started again on only the second try.

A road of dancing tumbleweeds and painted scraps of dawn enticed her on. She found herself on the verge of a nearly undamaged, more ashen wild, which she could almost believe had endured the cataclysm without even being touched by war or the farther seething fingers of the White Fire. There were still the ubiquitous monuments of random death every few miles to remind her, an overturned Greyhound charter bus, a heap of swollen cattle whose skulls were beginning to show through from parched and angular piles of collapsing skin. But as she teased a path along unnamed dirt roads, weaving her way between the ruins of Windsor and Greeley, she beheld the glorious sun in its sickly rising. It was nothing more than a bleary line of orange that wavered strangely close and yet untouchably far away, painted up against the haze-truncated horizon like an inadvertent masterpiece.

She made her way to 392 East, but there were many more tractor-trailer and pickup wrecks along its blighted course, and once even the echo of distant gunfire. And so, relinquishing the maps, she made her way on bleaker roads once again. She peeled more of the lead linings away from the windshields, marveling as the orange elliptic smear of sun became a radiant streak of gray. It was like beholding the pale and distant day-star through the wild blear of a winter storm. Twice, the H4’s windshield was speckled with fleeting bird shadows, frail survivors lost from a world afar, crying music and darting on the wing.

Somewhere east of Greeley she drove through what had once been a sparse and cottony forest, an unnatural and spidery landscape now rendered in black and leafless branches, branches all wreathed by streamers of black plastic and curlicue strips of desiccated bark. Near the shell of a blown-out tanker truck, a few of the greener trees still standing revealed many stranger tentacles dangling from them, wavering in the tease of wind: strands of gluey solidifying ash, of molten and cooled steel, the telltale pinkish strings of incinerated people. A little farther, she drove over a shallow river — she had no idea if this muddied course had ever once known a name — and down there were clogs and dams made of decaying cattle, carcasses floating down over sandbars from somewhere far away.

She siphoned gas from a station wagon once, stopped and rested twice, put Silas at his ease. He could not rise, his blind eyes were flickering but never closed. Regardless of the few and distant un-toppled signs, she was very near to Kersey now. She could feel it.

Beyond a swathe of ashen dunes, she drove the last of the way and saw the telltale lines of trailer park horizons, gutted warehouses, and grain silos standing like broken sentinels against the sky.

At last!

She found to her surprise that she had actually crossed into the undamaged nexus with 34 East in the last of that evening, having somehow approached the ruin of Kersey from the north.

“Oh, my Lacie,” she whispered. “Oh my Lacie I am so close, if only I can remember, Auntie Jemm’s house, the memory…”

With her return in that twilight to the drying husks of civilization, there was much more of death for her to behold. Just beyond 34 Junction and the remnants of a burned-down Conoco station stood a collapsed liquor store, strangled by the remains of its own fencing, with a ruined bus sticking halfway out of the pile of lumber and clump-filled mounds of drifting ash. Atop the roofless bus was an incredible layer of human corpses, at least twenty people stacked on top of one another, burned planks made of sundered ribcage and tangled leg bone. Hands were sticking out of every shattered window, black hands, red hands, dripping hands and fingerless stumps with still-congealing chunky pools on the roads beneath them. There was one head sticking out, perhaps a woman’s. It had no eyes and the teeth had been blasted out, leaving a huge hole that had blossomed over half of its tilted face.

You don’t see, she was chanting to herself in silence, you drive, you breathe, you search for your remembrance, there is nothing more, you do not see…

She drove along the frontage road east, Hill Street it was named, skirting the dune-swallowed ruins of Kersey on their northern fringe. At one point there was an intact billboard swathed in tangles of peeling vinyl, and when the wind subsided the torn sheaves all fell down to read in spray-painted crimson capitals: SAVE DMITRI ALTUKHOV.

The name was vaguely familiar. She realized after she had passed that it was the name of the last Russian ambassador, the man at the United Nations riot. An age ago, an entire world ago.

And who started the war? Sophie wondered. Does it matter any longer? Will it ever? With dread, she realized that it might. Centuries from now, if there were survivors enough to forge themselves into vernal nations, there would be superstition, and skeletal constructs of religion, and vengeance.

She looked to the south and marveled at just how much ash from the Rocky Mountains’ incinerated forests had fallen over Kersey and the eastern horizon’s fields. The few standing houses were half-buried in gray and umber sand. Street signs, jutting out at angles, appeared to be only three or four feet tall. Many were already wind-scoured, others were perfectly readable. She drove her way past Kersey’s tiny street-grid, seeking something, anything, that looked like the way to Jemm’s house of long ago.

4th, 5th, 9th…

The town was ending. Clustered at an unnamed and oversized garage, there were protective circles of bumper-locked cars with the remains of the dead inside of them. There, perhaps in a fuel explosion or the edge of an after-flash fire, people had burned to death in their seats — but not so quickly that they hadn’t tried to escape. There were dried strings dripping down from fingers, cheekbones, even toes where feet had kicked out car windows and the soles of work boots and sneakers were still crumbling off.