Kent Kelly - And the Ashes

Splinters of umber and scarlet evening sky flickered in and out of focus over the highway, coruscating haze and glimmers of crystal-clear horror — dead and twisted bodies, garbage, spinning wheels and bloodstained metal panels. The black wind gusted clumps of ashes off the road and into the air, breaking the remnants of lost souls into powder and withering them all away. East, forever east they flowed afar, to where their endless graves would lie for centuries.

The gusts tore and pulled down fragments of greater light, one last flare of radiance before the ultimate darkness. She could see the obsidian wasteland of highway wreckage, silhouettes of overpasses and fallen columns. She smeared the girl’s blood out of her eyelashes and re-gripped the wheel with radiation-burned and poisoned hands, the woman pursued and haunted, Sophia Ingrid St.-Germain.

Under the glare of the racing H4’s three un-shattered high beams, the blurring car and pickup wrecks seemed to animate in garish frames of flickering light, a lurid spectacle of melted engines with people fused inside of them. The debris seemed endless — puddles of glass, rubble piles, trash heaps, crumbled barricades, the silhouettes of half-crushed bodies dangling from splinter-frame door and windshield.

Forty miles an hour, forty-five. The H4’s damaged engine growled, fuel blurted out of the still-open gas valve. The wind swirled up more gouts of powdered glass, and in the tiny whirlwinds garbage bags and scoured trash rebounded and billowed up to either side.

The black rain was falling thickly, a sap-like mess of dusty water, flesh motes and foamy ash. Greasy smears whorled back and forth over the cracked and bullet-holed windshield as the wipers juddered beneath their sodden burden.

Sophie yanked the wheel and rounded her way around the wreck of a side-tumbled, articulated Caterpillar truck. She heard the squeal of brakes perhaps fifty yards behind her as the lead pickup truck in pursuit was forced to slow, with the H4’s muddy dust plume wrapping around its shattered windshield. More vehicles farther on behind the pickup slammed on their brakes, each forced to navigate their way through the narrow gap in a single constricted line. But the motorcycles raced on ahead.

The men of Pearson’s Corner had lost much in underestimating their prey. At least a dozen were dead, their already-imprisoned women had staged a revolt, and there could be no doubt that one side was massacring the other even as Sophie and Silas raced away. Sophie had counted at least two of the pickup trucks, several cars and a dozen motorcycles as she bolted her way down the on-ramp and back onto I-25. As she shot another glance back and hit the accelerator, the rains thickened in her mirror and smeared all the pursuing vehicles’ silhouettes and headlights away. The trucks and buses and RVs, however few of them might still be running, were far too slow to give chase. Many of the men had already abandoned the pursuit, likely ordered back to deal with the insurrection. But as Sophie was forced to slow and circle her way around another smashup in the breakdown lane, she caught a glimpse of the lead pickup there behind her once again, and the glowing Cyclopean eyes of six of the motorcycles as well.

Relentless.

Not only was her stash of medicine and food and machinery a treasure trove, but she had bested Zachary and the others, had stolen fuel, killed and gotten away. Worst of all, she had left one priceless gift behind for the imprisoned girls and women, the many fighting victims she could not save: Hope.

She would pray for the prisoners’ victory if she could. This night, if I survive, she promised. There was no time. She stole one glance back into the interior via the rearview mirror, looking for Silas’ face, before she was forced to look away. More wreckage spun by. She gunned the Hummer down the clearway, racing beyond another steely hillock made of fused-together wrecks. But she had only seen Silas’ unmoving and shadowed hand, the fingers spread as if longing to touch in death upon something beyond the H4’s ceiling.

Faster again, fifty. The rains were clearing the dust down from the air, the high beams could pick out the silhouettes of still more wrecks some sixty yards out. She was traveling about seventy-five feet a second, and the H4 was threatening to hydroplane with every rapid correction as she wove around ever thicker piles of debris. If she went any faster, she would never have enough time to react to one of the big wrecks, or a crater, and then it would all be over.

She nudged the HK submachine gun, still stuck down in her torn hazmat suit, with the tensing plane of her muscled thigh. She wondered if she would still be able to draw it out if she suddenly found herself reeling from the force of a head-on collision. And deeper, a more reptilian part of her mind mused about what it would feel like when Zachary walked around to her window and raised the double-barreled shotgun at her face and…

No.

Faster, fifty-five. Practically suicide. The lead pickup truck with the overburdened window wipers was losing ground, she could hear its engine fading. But at least six of the motorcycles were fast approaching.

Something sharp and tumbling, maybe a piece of heavy garbage, winged by and knocked the Hummer’s side mirror askew. Sophie could barely see as the rains went angling there in the wild wind, pelting across her windshield. And now I’m almost blind. She strained to listen to the motorcycles’ engines over the H4’s own, trying to discern which side the cycle gunmen were going to mount their assault from. The rearview — due to all of the remaining piled supplies — could only show her Silas’ hand, garbage and ammo boxes, the swirl of blood-speckled candy wrappers. The most crucial of the side mirrors had been scraped off long ago, and the driver’s mirror was now tilted and filthy with syrupy globs of rain.

Can’t see anything! She bit the inside of her mouth, heard a strange keening in the back of her throat. A guttural sound, a trapped and hunted animal coming to terms with an inevitable death. What? she thought. What more can I do?

In gauging the chase, Sophie was forced to listen more intently to the echoing engines, to decode the beams of headlights bouncing off the wrecks and signs around her, to estimate the distance of the riders and gunmen by their hooting catcalls and shouted orders.

A shot cracked out and Silas gasped, torn for a moment from the riptide depths of his own oblivion.

He’s still alive!

Sophie lifted one of her blood-spattered hands up off the wheel for just a moment, hoping to adjust her mirror to see either Silas or the cycles, but there were two puddle-filled craters up ahead she needed to deal with in two seconds’ time. She spat a curse as she forced the H4 in a sagging course around them.

No, too hard. Too far!

There was a delirious, panic-slickened moment of swirling weightlessness as the Hummer lurched and then slid at an angle across the lanes, hydroplaning. An eerie fluid whirr and the squealing of disrupted water sheets sang out as the vehicle’s tires completely lost contact with the surface of the road. She clenched the wheel with both fists once again, practically yanking the leather wheel-cover off in her white-knuckled grip. With slow and deliberate movements, she forced herself to turn the wheel gently not against but rather along with the vehicle’s angling momentum. Every instinct screamed at her to overreact, to yank the wheel in the other direction to immediately stop the slide.