Kent Kelly - Archangel

“Perhaps even you and I will go out together through the waterfall, you will look up into the sky and see the Archangel of storms. That burning sky, you see her soon in her robes of crimson, Sophie love. You see her soon. She the kiss, the soul of death.

“But maybe, for you and not for me, I’m far too gone now… for you, she also be the spirit of rebirth. She the Archangel, she that swirling whirl of un-creation and remaking, crippled on her throne upon the sky. Oh, her face of cloud and drowning. Her wings of bloodiest black of ever-night. Oh, love… I am so afraid…”

“I am done. Keep my Mabelie, as I will keep my Jenny. Know now, daughter so alike to my Lucille, that I do love you.”

(And at the end, as written by another hand, perhaps once the elder Sophie’s diary had been taken up by the Geyser Basin Tribe as a holy book in the Lost Age, it is written: “The Testament of Silas endeth here.”)

( A researcher’s notes:From this point for a time, the record begins to fray. Excruciating detail lies intermittent with the sparsest of riddles.)

(Following the detailed entries concerning her recorded conversations with Silas, Mrs. St.-Germain provides us with only brief and meager anecdotes concerning her ongoing life within the shelter. The obsessive and iterative detail provided in earlier sections of the diary is lacking in this regard.)

(And why?)

(It seems, I believe, that once Sophie had another soul — someone else within the shelter to confide in — her priorities completely changed. Her ultimate goal was still to be reunited with her daughter, but she was no longer reading and writing endlessly to keep herself from becoming suicidal. Ergo, she no longer had the inclination to detail everything she did. Clearly, care for Mr. Colson was paramount and preparations for the Gray Rain Exodus were continuing as she planned for the road journey to Mitch and Lacie and the house near to the town of Kersey, Colorado.)

(That tale is soon to follow, as best as it can be reconstructed.)

(What she specifically states that she had not done, however, was to use the radio to search for survivors or to contact the emergency fortification in Fort Morgan ever again. She dared not attempt to call Mitch and Lacie either, not after the warning that her channel was not secure. Others, particularly military splinter force representatives, were surely listening and desperately striving to find Sophie’s shelter for themselves.)

(However, she does note that she did find a small digital recorder, which was used to record the conversations with Silas. She also wrote briefly that she would turn the radio on and plug the recorder in near the speaker when she went to bed, listening. She would wake to several hours of recorded static which she could fast-forward through in several minutes, likely to confirm that Mitch had not tried to contact her.)

(One time, after several days, she did hear a recorded series of clicks. She slowed it down. There, just once and not repeated. But the words were sent by Mitch, she was certain of it. She quickly decoded it in accordance with her earlier methodology, and found this: ‘SHE LOVES YOU’ and another line thereafter, ‘LEAVE IN SEVEN DAYS.’)

(My bare narrative, derived from her few other notes from this dire time, continues hereafter.)

And what of the time thereafter, before the Gray Rain Exodus?

We know only a little of the interim. But we can guess.

In her last days in the shelter, Sophie had cared for Silas whenever he was awake, and when he was not, she was working to gather supplies. The planning for the journey was everything. She barely slept. Despite her exhaustion, she felt a fire inside herself, a warmth not quite like flame, but rather sunlight. The echoes of the elder world were awakened inside her, and although she dared not give the frenetic compulsion which drove her the forbidden name of Hope, she suspected that it might be a shadow, some promise left behind by that lost spirit in its passing.

She resisted the temptation to call Chris in Fort Morgan, and she resisted calling Mitch. But only barely. She was afraid to even listen for Mitch now, because his warning about unsecure channels, compounded by her suspicion that the military survivors in Fort Morgan were trying to trace her, kept her too afraid to rely on electronics of any kind.

She knew her caution was extreme, but at the same time, such things were extraneous. There was Silas, there were the guns, and the maps as well. And there was the plotting of the mountain journey. She was going to be leaving the shelter soon, with Silas if at all possible, and she was going to find Lacie or die in the trying. Everything else paled beyond that one conviction.

And so, near to the end of her time in the shelter she disconnected the radio. It was time to pack, time to load stretchers and mountaineer pallets to be raised up the shaft by the pulley system. She bundled the radio and its wooden box of materials, then added its bulk atop one of the wheeled gurneys from the supply room.

Soon, with Silas gazing through the Sanctuary’s open door every time she passed him, she would be moving blocks of equipment to the entrance tunnel. Very soon it would be time to set up the utility crane, to raise everything she would need for the journey.

There were five scenarios, one of them impossible. The first, of course, was that the Hummer was still operational. This would be the ideal. Worse and second, perhaps the police cruiser could be cleared of dead bodies, moved from the pool and used as a vehicle instead. This was unlikely. Third, Silas’s black car might still be running, although its windshields were cracked and its viability unknown. Fourth, she would wheel Silas on a gurney, bundled in blankets, out down the mountain road until she either died or found another means of transportation. And fifth, she would stay in the shelter.

This perfectly reasonable alternative, this was the forbidden scenario.

I will not hide and cower here until I die. The Patrice voice, the father-song, the old Sophie, even the voice of Tom all tried to reason with her. All failed. I will not be weak.

Lacie was waiting out there for her.

And so, the endless preparations, the reading, the training. She took care of Silas, marveling every day how he lingered and tried his very best to grow stronger. The infections were somehow staved off, but the clothing in his flesh had begun to fester and the radiation, she knew, would inevitably prove fatal. Somehow he stayed, he breathed, absolutely determined to see the beginning of the journey through.

But he was fading, slowly. And time was not standing still.

These thoughts were always pushed away with lists, with supply bins, with packaging, tearing apart bundles and resealing them once again. She tried in vain to think of every possible thing that she might need, every bulky and trivial and precious piece that might somehow save her life. There must be blank paper, there would be dish soap. All of the medicine, of course. All of the armor, all of the weapons as well. Toilet paper, fire-starter logs, butane lighters, wiper fluid, gas cans, bungees to load even more on the car roof than could ever fit inside of any vehicle.

Perhaps they would find an RV in time. But what then of gas? And how could they find one old enough to still be running?

And yes, Silas told Sophie the deadly serious Army jokes about WD-40, socks, MREs and duct tape. None of these crucial and pathetic materials would go wanting.

Silas would lie there on his side, humming Guthrie and some Elvis Presley. Lately he was obsessed with the Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever specifically. She could hear him as she pushed through the transparent door seal between the Sanctuary and the great room. Every time she entered that tunnel, he would go silent so that he could hear her work.