Kent Kelly - Archangel

Almost in those few seconds of panic, almost she went back to awaken Silas, to wheel his gurney out and to wedge him in the door, pistol cradled in his arms. But she had made her way into the shelter the first time, she had studied the binder about the security controls twenty times if not thirty. The door, when she needed to, she could get open again. After her first entry long ago, it was all about the access cards.

But if any of the mechanisms had failed, or had been sabotaged? And Silas was not only asleep, he was incapable of walking even if he needed to. If she screamed and woke him, if she became trapped outside and needed him to open the door, what would she do?

Well, shit.

Then she remembered the cinderblock. Would it hold, if the door were to spin itself shut?

Yes. But she doubted it. Because it has to.

Still shielding her gaze from the twisted bodies, she went back in and to the verge of the great room, lifted the cinderblock with a grunt and went out to the door again.

Fumbling off the translucent red-band cap, the night filter, Sophie shone the full unfiltered beam of the flashlight up against the rim of the ladder-shaft. She needed to blind them, anyone who was still waiting up there.

She cast the light beam from side to side. There was no one.

Garish shadows, tilted twice-reflected beams bounced over the cave walls high above. Beads of hovering waterfall mist danced in pallid rainbows up inside the rays of light. The shaft seemed much deeper than it had before. Had she really climbed down all that way, adrenaline surging, with a nuclear blast just seconds away from impact? How?

Using her other hand, she swept the submachine barrel along with the light, tracing the direction of its beam.

Nothing. No one.

She looked around at the floor of the shaft itself. She could not see anything immediately around her, not yet. She had blinded herself.

You fool.

As she stared out at the damaged and flickering glo-lites between the ladder’s rungs, she waited for her eyes to readjust.

Stilling herself there, listening, she noticed the grim silence of it all. She had unknowingly grown accustomed to the nightmarish, dull cacophony of the shelter… its generators, hums, drips, crackles, clanks, the whirr of air conditioning and recycling of gurgling toilet water, all of it. Now, there were just the frail and relentless second-beeps of the suit and the purr of its filtration, backed by a strange reverberating growl of sound from far up above and away. The wind?

No. The waterfall.

The outside, the real. The beyond and all its corpses there, in pieces. Ashes of rainforests, ashes made of everything. After so much time cradled inside the shelter, Sophie felt a wave of panic as she tried to envision the sky that Silas had described. The outside was dying, roiling in windstorm and blackest rain. The Burning World was endless. Could she do this?

Dead shapes in the darkness came back into focus. Some of the glo-lites were unfaltering, most were sickly and flickering with a fitful greenish radiance. And there, fading back into sight, the silhouetted body of Pete.

The tarp was there, the shotgun as well. She could not bring herself to touch it. This is a grave. The grave of the friend you left to die here.

She was spared the stench of death by the suit’s filtration system, but not the sight. One of his purplish hands was uncovered, and it was bulbous like a cluster of over-ripened plums. It was glistening. She dared not move the tarp, it was barely over his head and the top of it was curling back and forth in the waterfall’s whirling breeze, exposing the topmost crown of his sandy hair.

“Pete. I am so sorry you had to suffer.”

She could say no more. Not yet. There was too much danger here, too much that she needed to do.

The suit beeped again, a longer tone. A full minute had passed.

Sophie spun the flashlight beam around. The wild shadows she was making poured around Pete’s body, giving way to more garish details. There was a pile of dried feces near the ladder, certainly human. But there were no flies to buzz around it. There were dried strings of what might be vomit on the lower ladder rungs, and there were huge, spattered bloodstains up the curvature of the wall.

Whose blood was it? Sophie had no idea. There were bullet holes, scars where something heavy and metal had hit the wall and rebounded. Beneath the stain was a crumpled something, down where Sophie’s faceplate had hidden a brutal revelation.

The body of the girl was twisted, emaciated. Her face was down, buried in broken hands. Her head had been bashed in.

There was an intermittent thread of water trickling down from the cave above, wetting the wall opposite the glo-lites, and along this vertical streamlet were stuck pieces of things, little chunks of skull with thin trails of once-blonde hair still attached to them.

Sophie backpedaled. She almost vomited in her suit. She remembered something, a mantra of pain and sorrow, something rather similar to Silas’s earnest words: You just look away.

She did so.

Swallowing, glancing up at the lip of the ladder-shaft one last time, Sophie backed toward the shelter door. Having decided there was no one watching her up over the brim of the shaft, she went back inside again.

Several trips passed uneventfully. After she had made the shaft floor crowded with supply pallets, Sophie toke a few moments to cover the girl’s body. Each trip in and out, she scanned the brim of the ladder-shaft every time. She only tripped over the cinderblock once, but that one time had nearly ended in an ankle sprain or worse.

She was panting, her lungs were burning. She had coughed up water and her faceplate was covered with fitful bouts of mist.

She had fitted pulleys to corner hinges, and moved the five (not seven) pulley-pallets of supplies out into the shaft in forty-seven minutes, all told. A little less. Silas had not awakened. She surveyed the absurd heaps of duct-taped plastic, sheets of gray and interwoven ribbons tangled over all of the supplies. Food, water, maps, the radio, most of the binders, batteries, medicine, the guns of course, ammunition, the lighters, notebooks, the toilet paper, the tackle kit (if there were any fish up there, still alive), the lead curtains, so much clothing, so very many things …

And so she was ready at last to rise and explore the cave, and then to raise all the supplies as quickly as possible.

And then Silas…

When she flashed the light beam up again, searching the ceiling, she looked for the painted box which hid the utility crane. She could not see it.

She felt a thrill of panic. Tom had completed the crane some months ago, the binder had said so. But why couldn’t she see it even if she was looking for it?

Too far away, too high . There was only one way to find out.

Sophie left the flashlight on, clipping it to her utility belt. She took a deep breath, wrapped her gloved hands around the ladder’s slippery rungs, and she began to climb.

As she raised herself, with Pete’s body at the edge of sight, with ashen shadows up above her spun into twisting dances by the ever-reflected waterfall, Sophie was certain that she was going to die. Someone was going to pop his head over the brim of the shaft so high above her, leer down and gloat over her and her sealed fate. But only for a moment. Then, the man above was going to shoot her before she could do anything at all.

And after she fell, as she laid at the bottom of the shaft crippled and broken and dying, before she bled out… would she feel him? What was he going to do with her body?