Kent Kelly - Archangel

“No. Not Kenny. There was hair, I knew it was hers.

“Oh, Lord. Oh, I cannot say any more of what I saw there. I could tell you, could immortalize my Jenny inside you, but I need her soon to be with me and she is mine.

“She is mine.

“I did climb. What did I see?

“You cannot possibly understand. You will behold it for yourself. For Lacie.

“Littleton was gone.

“How I explain what the world is now? One of Mabelie’s favorites from art class, Hieron-a-bus something. What? Yeah, that’s it. Hieronymus Bosch. I was in a Bosch painting, see? You know those medieval horror-scapes with bodies tangled everywhere and Apocalypse horses reigning on high, cackling skeletons, sky all burning, endless miles of mountains set afire?

“That was Old Littleton, that was everywhere I could see for miles all along the Rocky Mountains, except for the way up to Black Hawk. Lord knows the science, what blast pattern, what fire spread, what wind current made it happen, but up this direction? The forest was still green right then, through smoke and black waves all of maelstrom, blackest and burning smoke was washing the untouched miracle of those narrow mountains away to a deathly fog.

“Before I lost sight of the mountains, I knew: If ever I were to survive, up the pass toward Black Hawk and beyond, that would surely be the only way.

“I could barely understand what I was seeing so I didn’t see much o’ Black Hawk’s pass. I was staring down at the ground to avoid the light. Harsh shadows, blackest shadows you’ve ever seen. Dancing, firelight shifting them all to wave as one, like wheat blown in a field.

“Oh, that heat. I got outside of the borders of what my yard used to be, and there was the sound of burning, but there also was this strange sound of buzzing.

“The buzzing?

“It was rising and coming closer from all around, and then I realized — it was the murmurs of all the shocked people coming out of their buildings, bloody wrecks babbling, people all hunched over and holding hands with strangers, just guiding one another to nowhere, crawling, naked people with all the hair burned off their heads, mothers holding dead babies and men cradling their wives’ heads or their own severed arms, all those wretched people who still had a couple of minutes or terrible hours yet to live, to look upon the shredded corpses of their loved ones, before they themselves would vomit and shit their insides out and die.”

“No, I’m done with that. I don’t want to talk anymore about that now.

“You understand. You don’t need to know everything, and some things I just need to let die inside of me. I’ll never forget my neighbors, friends, always love them, and that will be enough for me to go on. Because it has to be.

“I just had one thought in that buzzing swarm all my own, don’t let any of them touch you. Help? No. No one can help them. Look at them, Silas Colson. You the most whole of them all.

“Get away. Get in a car. Find a car, any car that still runs somehow. That’s one of the secrets, old cars. Any engine or fuel injection that the electro-magneto-whatever pulse didn’t kill? No, not unless it was hidden deep like in your cave. But a V8 carb, that might do you. Or V12 and a prayer. The older the car the better.

“You read that? Right, I tell you in case I’m not all myself when you come need to know. Computers, fuel injection, them cars are far more likely to be burnt out. Keep to the old. Get you to the higher mountains, especially if still there’s any trees. This place, this place is burning, this place is nothing, get you to the mountains.

“Like a chant, you know? Like your ‘Get to the shelter,’ yeah. I was, ‘Get to the mountains.’ Like I couldn’t say it, but my body with every breath was pulsing with those words.

“The buzzing was going quiet, no energy for crying or even screams for some. Just shock, the dying. People was falling all over the place. Those that go more slowly, they cradle. They hug themselves, almost lying, back to back with anyone else that they can find.

“Well.

“In what used to be Old Littleton there were so many cars to choose from, most burning, some melted. Some stuck between lines of trucks, those ones was still mostly intact. But they was ovens.

“The worst was finding a pregnant woman with half her body burned, her I will ever remember.

“She was sitting in a car and she was burned black from the waist up. She must have been wearing a dress of polyester or silk or something, because her clothes hadn’t burned up, they’d melted into her skin. Her body, she looked like a swirly jewel of green and blue. Her skin was swirled up too, burned pork and liquid green, the dress melting into her body.

“What? Oh. I’m not talking about the bodies now. She was a little alive.

“As she moved, her skin started to come off. I saw, I saw a lot of ribs. In her back, you know? She was tilted over what used to be the steering wheel, the seat was pushed back far because like I said, she was pregnant. She wasn’t like meat and blood, she was like jelly. Cooking, curdling, burning globs of jelly. And I didn’t see it, but her baby that I imagined I could hear… oh…

“She looked at me, she begged me for help, her hand, she touched my leg. And I was just sobbing. I couldn’t say nothing, and after that I just ran.

“She should have cursed me, anything but what she said. What she said. Her screaming, ‘Oh please God, don’t leave me to die here alone, oh my God, my baby, please if you need to leave me, take her out of me, take my baby,’ and I could see one little arm her mama did hold out and high and oh, I ran away.

“No one, Mrs. S.-G. No one can dare to ever forgive me.”

( Explanatory note:Between the first and second transcribed stories of Silas, Sophie wrote a quick and singular margin entry in shorthand which — when finally decrypted — is found to mention that she had tentatively diagnosed Silas as having suffered a 6 to 8 Gray (“SC: 6 / 7 / 8 Gy?”) whole-body radiation exposure dosage. Such a condition is now well known to be 95-100% fatal without another’s care, and 50-100% fatal with expert care. Symptoms include high fever, diarrhea, disorientation (perhaps explaining Mr. Colson’s erratic behavior outside the vault door), severe leukopenia, vomiting, electrolyte disturbance and moderate to severe hypovolemia / hypotension. Mortality onset, within 2 to 6 weeks.)

( Further:Following this ominous note — which is our only written entry from Sophie during an unknown period of several days — the transcription for the second story of Silas continues immediately thereafter. Clearly, Sophie felt that it was urgent to record and honor Silas’ tales above all else, and did not expect him to live for very much longer. This is almost certainly why the upcoming “SC Chronicle” travelogue section of the diary is so uneven and sporadic, leaping from what is known as the Second Testament of the One, below, directly into what I term IV-7, a chronicle of Sophie’s and Silas’s escape and emergence from the High Shelter and into the Burning World. ~S.-G.C.)

“Oh, the world. Before we go, I will tell you.

“It is blackest night now, sister moon is dead and the sun is become the crimson moon and he is riding high.

“Yes, let me tell it like I will. Been thinking about how to tell you for a very long time.

“Let this be my song.

“It’s like this, the Burning World. You only know night now, Mrs. S.-G., when there is nothing but the choke and the twisting black and the howling of those endless winds. There’s these mounds with skyward axles sticking out of them, lumps of melted tires and melted cars, cars all bearded by their stubble of bone stumps dangling out everywhere. People. Dead hands and faces all lain open on the pavement. And only once or thrice baby carriages, crumpled and rolling free in the wind right by you, rolling by at the edge of night. Some of them maybe rolling now as more of the buildings crumble. Those are the worst, the carriages. With their laced, burned-up doll-bundles hanging out.