Kent Kelly - Gray Rain Exodus

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.”