Kent Kelly - Archangel

There could be no certainty. The most crucial of things, water, urine and waste bags, morphine, maps, guns, food, medicine, these were kept on the passenger seat and floor and well in arm’s reach. Silas insisted on cradling the pistol still despite his precarious perch amongst the backseat piles.

And after everything, starting the H4 had been easy.

For that moment, Sophie had made herself sing something, something lilting, silly and off-key. It was a variation of Pop Goes the Weasel, actually, a stupid little jingle that Patrice had always loved when they were children. The only thing certain to make her sister laugh — really laugh, not that horrible cruel death-growl of gloating. To fill the silence as Sophie turned the key, she had needed to be certain that the voice of Patrice and all its demonic omens would be no more.

But Sophie had her own mind-song then, as she selected the ignition key from its ring. What if? What if the H4 had been burned out by the electromagnetic pulse, or the engine was damaged by the impact, or the gas had been siphoned off by the shotgun man, or the oil pan was cracked or the radiator breached or…

Click. She turned the key.

The engine wheezed, the dash lumines flickered fitfully. Then there was a belch of silvery black exhaust and a startling echo out in the cave, a dragon’s growl as the engine roared to life and all the dials turned merrily into their proper positions.

It was like a time machine.

The reek of exhaust began to filter in through the window cracks. Behind her, strapped into his tarps and blankets across the back seat, Sophie heard Silas breathe a shuddering sigh of abject relief.

She shifted the H4 into reverse, pulled away. Rubble slithered and clanged off of the hood. Keeping her speed at an even five miles an hour, she pushed back into the front of the police car and pressed down on the gas.

Only the fetal boy’s and the strangled girl’s bodies had been moved, covered together. Sophie had decided that it was a crucial ritual, a testament of peace for two lost souls. The girl had died in terror but she would be remembered. She had the boy, forever. There was honor.

“Hang on.” Sophie pressed the pedal a little more.

The patrol car slushed deeper into the pool, where the ground was muddy enough for a slithery kind of purchase. The H4 kept pushing and the car tilted back off to one side, kicking up a brown wave of water that sloshed up the cracked window near to Silas’s face. Sediment-thick tears trickled down the inside glass onto his fingers. He shifted.

Backing up, pushing the car out of the way, slurring backward through the pool’s mud and under the waterfall, getting wet and gagging on the fumes… these were simple things. The hard part came when she backed out of the cave and into the ghostly crimson light of the ever-reflecting canyon and its ruin.

Lord, Sophie thought, I don’t believe in you. I don’t think I ever can. I’m simply not made that way. But if you exist, for these tortured souls in their ending, please shelter them in your arms. The girl, Pete, the boy. The grandmother, the baby. Even the terrible man if he is here. Everyone. Please. Anything to take their pain away.

And they were through. Wheels spun, mud sloshed up and the gloomy twilight of the cave turned to a crimson glow. The dark-light was not brighter, it was deeper . The world of burning, the world of Ashen and of Gone.

And they left the dead far behind them.

There had once been a time, a nothing time, a memory of a bland and beautiful day like and unlike any other. A day of the lost and dead world, the Gone-Land, a Paradise which never would be again.

Sophie remembered it clearly in that moment. Tom had taken her on that hike up to Hanging Lake far off I-70. A grim and precarious trailhead had taken them up through pine and granite slabs and bits of summer cloud, with little crow silhouettes flying up around inside of them. Some date! Sophie had been furious with him, every step a test of faith. Her legs burning with pain, her lungs raging in the altitude, and Tom in his cutoff FBI shirt (what a joke that would become between them, in later days) actually looking back and laughing as he sped up again and again, just out of reach.

“Come on, we’re almost there, just hold my hand,” he said. And grinned.

Seven or eight times, she had just about gotten close enough to belt him one.

But no, not quite. And oh, she was going to break up with him, three month anniversary be damned. For certain, before this fucking bullshit ever got too serious. She was going to get to the top of this God-forsaken trail, catch her breath, take his offered hand and say, “Tom, that was horrible of you. Goodbye.” And then should would leave him, then she would be free. And then…

And then a turn in the path, and he waited for her. He did. He was panting, at least. But his face was not lined with mischief, and the sun that made him squint, he was letting it all fall fully upon his face there in its waves of gold. And the pool, Hanging Lake, it was turquoise, emerald, cerulean. Grassed-over and fallen trees slumbered in its shallows, waterfalls poured in silver freshets into the purest of Rocky Mountain waters.

And she had stared in disbelief, and she had been close to tears. When was the last time that she had been able to cry? Had it been over Patrice? Had it been that long?

And he had taken her in his arms, and whispered, “Someday. Someday, I’d like to build a home under a waterfall. You know? Something just for you. For you with me.”

As she backed the H4 out all the way, she caught a tear-crested glimpse at Silas in the rearview mirror, shivering there in the back seat. Duct-taped racks of munitions boxes and water bottles and MRE packs were piled all around him. And he, blessed angel in defiance of all reality, he was smiling at her.

He gave her a little wave.

Sophie backed the H4 slowly and deliberately into the canyon wall. There was a thud, a firmness there. She cranked the wheel and shifted into four-wheel and low gear. The drive began with a crawl over rubble, a jolting bobble back and forth as the vehicle began to prowl and find its way. The piles of boulders and shattered stones were painted with un-light, fire-light pouring down from the seam of canyon-rimmed clouds so high above. Sophie bent in her seat, peered up out of a strip left in the taped-over windshield.

She gazed up into the sky, and she felt her fingers on the wheel trembling against her will. She beheld the black and crimson Archangel, the four-limbed cyclone still tumbling and burning, a coiled hollow upon the sky. An endless storm was seething there deep inside. Crimson whirlwinds wheeled about in blindness, the limbs of some titanic and emaciated angel, a burning spirit of all ending enthroned upon the sky.

“We’re coming, Lacie,” she whispered. She arced her right arm out of her unzipped suit, back behind her, taking Silas’s fingers in her own.

“Damn right,” he said, and he gripped her fingers tighter. He was shivering. “You just drive, Sophie, ’til we need the gas can. I guide the way. Leave the all else to me. Give me your HK there. Got this laser-sight pistol figured out, best as I can see. But that one, you give that back here, if it please?”

And she let his hand go. She pulled the submachine gun off the passenger seat, checked the safety, and passed it back to him.

“Let’s get moving,” she said. The H4 tumbled forward over the ruin. And so they went. And the dead and shattered world, it embraced them.

The remnant of Kersey-town, by highway and trial and horror and endless circuit of wreckage and wasteland, was less than a month away. They never returned to the shelter, they never had any need to. They had each other.