Kent Kelly - Archangel

There were bits of gray matter stuck on the girl’s lower lip, and her bluish tongue was peeking out. She must have been choked while she had still been alive. Her panties, Sophie realized, were tied in a gouging knot around her neck.

Perhaps the young man had died defending her. Maybe he had even managed to shoot the bigger man, the door-pounding man, before he had been knifed. Maybe the bigger man had crawled out of the cave to die, after the police car wouldn’t start and he couldn’t find the keys for the H4. Maybe that was why there was no one left alive. Too many maybes. Hopefully. But this… this horrible, miserable sight of grisly innocence, gutted and left out to dry. What had happened exactly?

I don’t want to, I don’t want to oh no I can’t think of it I can’t…

But it was not the Che Guevara girl from the protest, after all. No, it was someone else. Someone older, a stranger Sophie had never seen. And Patrice sang the dead girl a lullaby:

Cry, no, cry no don’t. Don’t ever, never never. Love was yours before the end. You see, Sophie love? This is what happens to women now, should you ever be weak. Kill when you must. Find Lacie, find strength in all this travesty. Take this girl into your heart, let her be your death angel. Think of this girl, what she must have felt, and you will have the power to justify anything you must do. To do anything . Never forget the oatmeal girl, never ever. Ever ever…

And the laughter.

In the end, Sophie was able to look away when the wave of nausea overtook her and she dry heaved inside her suit.

There had been more, of course. There had been the terrible revelation of the seven burned and dead bodies piled in the back of the police car. And perhaps the huge twisted man in the passenger seat — with Pete’s unused shotgun in his lap — perhaps he was the one who had killed the girl. Perhaps he had killed the boy and the boy had killed him in turn, he had something stuck in his neck but who could say? Sophie had been spellbound by the bodies there, the child hugged by the old woman at the bottom of the pile, and something curled up by the police car’s backseat cage, near to the woman’s broken foot.

It had been a baby. Oh, God.

Sophie had looked away before the vision had consumed her. But she heard a voice, the radio-voice of Chris from Fort Morgan, of all things.

“Rogue, do you believe in God? Will you hear my confession?”

Sophie decided that if she wrote it all down, if after this was over she wrote it down five times, six times, nineteen times with more remembered details all the while, perhaps the visions would eventually leave her, like sensual and lamenting demons, exorcised.

Perhaps.

The rest of the “day” was an endless toil of climbing down and hoisting up the flats of supplies, of cramming them into the H4 as best she could. She had loaded the H4 without even testing the ignition, because if it failed, she was not certain if she could find the strength to go on.

But such a thought was a luxury and there was very little time. The suit’s air would run out, after all, and then she would be breathing poison. So she toiled on, endlessly.

Setting up the utility crane had been easier than she had hoped. The cord was pulled taut over the wheel, the hook and filaments secured to the eye hooks at each corner of the supply flats. Flexing nylon nets were strung over and under each flat. The duct-taped bundles of supplies were raised by a flaring shoulder and turn of crank. Simple. A thirty pound test had been near-perfect; the pulleys were fascinatingly leveraged with the hidden counterweights and it was easy to glide fifty, eighty, a hundred pounds of supplies up to the shaft’s ledge. A yank of the guideline released the swiveling load and slid it down along the tilted aluminum armature, and each load tumbled resoundingly off onto the cave floor.

And again, again…

She drank when she could, urinated when she must. She even had time to clean the suit, at faltering intervals, as she regained her breath. The exhaustion was easy to endure, because it was not death. The worst part was looking at the covering over Pete’s corpse while she labored with the last loads of supplies.

Gasoline, water, bandages, lead-lined tapestries to tape over the windows, the medicine and the guns, oh, bring all the guns…

The trial came when the final load needed to be raised, a stretcher with a frail old man smiling and strapped down against it in a cradle of pillows. She had tried to be gentle, believing that this would be her gravest burden. But the alarming thing as she raised him was not how heavy he was, but rather how light and fragile. There had been just enough room to tilt his stretchered feet onto the cave floor, and then Sophie had climbed up after him and pulled the stretcher all the way to safety. Only then did she gently lower him and release the cord to snake down into the pit where she would never go down again.

She dragged the stretcher at a tilt, her breath ragged and her feet stumbling through the mud. Silas was strong for her then, and silent. He pretended that he did not feel any pain.

When it was over, and everything from the below was brought above, he had poised there raised upon his elbows and said, “Well damn, if you ain’t the toughest bird left in the world entire.” She had laughed a little, fending off the worst lure of exhausted sleep to look down into Silas’s eyes, and to comfort him.

Slowly, he was dying. His will however might well make it a matter of weeks. Already he looked better, breathing the humid air.

Hopeless. When I lose you, I will be so alone.

But the only thing Sophie felt, as she knelt down and held his hand, was power. She was choosing to leave the shelter. She had done this. Everything needed from below, was now above. The power was centered within her certainty, not that she was doing the right thing, but rather that she was limitless. No one could stop her. She had the power of choice, of every choice, even if her decisions might lead her and her dear Silas to disaster.

I did this, all alone.

Silas was watching her, he was silent and his head was tilted as her tried to see the motion of the wheels behind her eyes. Sophie gave him a nervous smile.

Victory.

Sophie recharged her suit and changed both the battery and the oxygen tank. They had slept, for a fitful time, side by side upon that stretcher and a blanket. Silas was too weak to move further and Sophie could not have stayed awake any longer if she had tried.

The next “morning,” perhaps three hours later, Sophie had woken to the buzz of her suit’s oxygen supply running into the red. It had been an easy choice to unzip the helmet and to take in a deep breath of the poison all about her. It was not so bad, after all. It was cloyingly warm air, tainted with ash and thick with the yeasty-sweet fire-scent of sickness and of death, yes. But it was air, it was of the world. It was the same air that Silas had been breathing in his sleep.

The supplies had been loaded quickly, after Silas had been positioned. She had diapered him, corded him, cleaned and hydrated him despite all his gentle remonstrations. The man no longer had any modesty, it had been stripped from him along with muscle tissue and shaven hair and burned flesh and a blue jewel of glass that had been bloodily dislodged from off one fingertip.

There was time to care for him and to position him over the back seat of the H4, cradling a pistol and a water bottle. There was all the time left in the world.

Heeding his futile warnings of radiation and ash and being tracked by someone’s scoped rifle of all things, Sophie had carefully taped the lead-lined tapestry sheaths up over the Hummer’s interior windows. There were only a few narrow slits in the taped material, so that she would be able to see enough to drive. The H4’s interior had been packed in every corner, to the brim and then some. More was corded onto the roof and bungeed over. After all, she would be able to jettison loads and throw out anything she needed to, anywhere. But what of the shelter’s riches? What was now priceless, which treasures were irreplaceable?