Kent Kelly - Archangel

And he was drifting, ever drifting. Sometimes, the pain would be too much and as he would not ask for morphine, she would hear him from the supply room or from the corridor, whispering cries for Jenny. And Sophie would come to comfort him, and there would be then that silent wisdom in his eyes, the knowledge that she was preparing for the great exodus and that she was hoping, almost praying, to take him with her.

This was a fragile thing. For although a stranger of illusion, that thing something quite like Hope, had been reawakened in the back of Sophie’s mind, its reflection was not to be found in Silas’s eyes. There, there was only fear, folded behind a strange, unvoiced and pleading acceptance. She could feel that he did not think he would live long enough to be able to go with her. But when she cleaned the guns, or read military base proximity charts, or tried to practice moving in her pallid sheaths of armor, his eyes then still were bright.

He taught her as best he could.

He had beheld the Burning World, experienced it, and he had spoken his dying words to her. Having told so many secrets, he had lived.

But to Sophie he seemed hollowed, unwilling to even hint that he might be able to go on with her. It was as if his gentle surprise, even shock at his own survival was so delicately fragile that to even breathe a word of it out loud would be the end of him.

And so she would perch on the edge of his cot, holding her knees like a little girl again. She would smile, and put her unmoving hand over his shivering own. There for a time he would close his eyes. At “night,” he would hum to her, sweet Creole-tinged lullabies whose names had been lost somewhere before Sophie’s own childhood had drifted away.

He would flow along with the morphine into sleep, and Sophie would creep over to her own cot to keep watch over him. She would plan and read. She would listen to the eerie sped-up static of the radio recording. Bedding down beside Silas, she would stay in a tight golden ring of light and scheme away the intricate possibilities of the journey.

Which way over the mountains, north before the ravaged east, could be the safest? Maps and guesses and twenty alternate branches of twisting road all led toward Kersey. With Silas and his memory of all his mountain travels driving Jenny and with Lucille, she would have her guide. She would make the way. She had to.

But if he dies…

Or what if he lingered, unable to be moved, unable yet to die? Then there would be an overdose for him, one last kiss, and the mercy.

God forbid, the mercy.

She closed Tom’s binder and shut her eyes.

The last “evening” before she left the shelter and was lost to the endless rim of the Burning World, Sophie had known Silas’s truest smile. He had been braver than usual. Although he dared not speak of his own health, or even the possibility of journeying with her, he did whisper to her of Fort Morgan and the Pawnee Grasslands and even the forgotten bombing range over the Colorado border, southeast of Cheyenne. He told her, if not all had burned, where the Army was likeliest to be.

The Army, perhaps, could be the enemy. There was no way to know.

He knew the town of Kersey, although he had not been there since the seventies. He dimly recalled the courses of 34 and Colorado Road 54 1/2, the intricate little grid of shop-streets and farm-stations laid out like a tilted heart upon the plains. He even remembered Mabel’s place, Mabel Painter. She ran a little trailer counter and she baked a mean cherry pie.

A smile, one more for Sophie. He winced away the pain. Mabel Painter was the great-great-something grand niece of John Kersey Painter, who founded that bump of a village in 1908. Silas seemed to know all of the haggard old towns of Colorado’s eastern plains, and the older and smaller they were, the more he knew of their people.

All dead now. All gone.

He had told her insistently, never go to a city. Never again. The airbursts had surely been everywhere a city had once been, his stories from Amelia at the airport had told him that. The radiation would kill long before any highway through a city could be exploited. Something quite like a father-daughter argument had arisen between them.

“So we go northeast.”

“No. Give me the sticker map,” he said to her. He frowned, winced and pinched the upper bridge of his nose. Sophie realized then that Silas had once worn glasses. What had happened to them? How well could he see?

And he promises he can take a quail at fifty paces.

He moved one of the red stickers on Tom’s projected chart. “There, I think. Look at this one.” He tapped the strike map’s line north and south along the Front Range. “See those red circles? Those are direct hits. Orange are airbursts. Your husband, you tell me had connections. In deep. He had damn dreaded reason to guess this good. See this one? That’s NORAD. This one, Air Force Academy. These two Fort Carson, red-orange. Hell, I trained there before I was assigned to First Infantry for ‘Nam, you know that? Didn’t last, lots of KP. They didn’t like coloreds then.” He grinned. “Space Command, these two oranges and that red. Colorado Springs, three red and one orange for good measure and gone. Now look at these wind arrows, west-east all down the mountains.”

“Accurate?”

“Enough, I think so. Your dear Tom weren’t no meteorologist, he guessed at the course of canyons and peak elevations, looks like. Those winds, they’s why we gotta go. And these brown crosses, those are the places all I told you?”

“Nearly all,” Sophie replied. “I stopped counting.”

He nodded. “My guesses for some few shelters. Under-buildings, nothing that would have made it. Those are all burned out, almost certain. These blue stars? Truck stops, least the ones I remember. A little safer. Yellow bands, now, see, all these?”

“Low radiation pockets. Like we agreed, and some of my guesswork. Yes?”

“Think so. You do good, Sophie. You do good and I see that. Not just low radiation, maybe. Maybe wind shadows, caused by the terrain. That’s, in the end, where you want to be.”

She lifted her eyes away from the rainbowed puzzle grid of the map. “We’re not staying safe. We’re going to Kersey, Silas.” Sophie leveled a steely gaze at him. “We’re finding Mitch, my daughter. And if she is still alive, by some miracle, my… my mother. My mother too.”

He watched her silently.

“So north, we’re decided then,” she said, pretending to study the map of the central mountains once again. Mostly, she was turning her head from him, so that he might not see the brimming of her tears.

“North it is. Yeah, we don’t go east and down until 34 if we can help it. And 34 might all be blocked, too much ruin and traffic pile. Far as you can take the mountains north, without going into Wyoming. Not sure there’s enough radiation shadows, under the wind up there. We use the Rockies and their shields, mother pray.”

“Tom said Yellowstone would be the best place to… to try to live. The caves. The geyser basin.”

“Well maybe you take me there, after I meet your amazing girl.”

She smiled a little, a brave imitation of the belief he wanted to see in her. “Maybe, Silas, I will.”

He swallowed. He took her hand. “We leaving soon?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Well. It’s good, it’s good here. If I… Sophie, if you can’t move me, I understand…”

“Shhh.” She kissed the yellowing bandage over his milky eye, then turned from him. She flipped the chart page in Tom’s scrap-filled binder of promised and suspected Armageddons. Another chart, this one useless. Flu epidemic projections. She turned another page. The picture of Lacie fell out into her fingers.