Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

She muted the line and made a click with the Morse key.

“Wait!” The young man sounded frantic.

Sophie waited.

“It’s Chris,” he whispered. “Just Chris, okay?”

“Who are you, Chris? Where are you?”

“Off white, I’m not giving our exact location any longer.” That told her nothing, but the fact that he replied immediately with his tone echoing her own let Sophie know that he was off his guard. For the moment. “I’m a NOAA intern,” he said. “I’m nineteen.”

Nineteen. Christ. Sophie closed her eyes.

“Chris? Where is your supervisor?”

The silence again. Sophie wondered if she should ask in a gentler way, or come at it after words of reassurance, or if she had simply gone too far.

How close are you to my Lacie? What is Fort Morgan like? The world? Were you hit? How many of you are left? Are you all dying? Her thoughts blurred, too many questions leaping out in front of themselves. How many other people are alive out there? There’s people on the roads? Or are they walking? I know you’re under orders not to tell me. But I know that you can.

“He’s… he’s down in medical,” Chris responded at last. “He’s de-suiting. He’s coming up.”

Up where? Above ground, inside?

“What can you tell me, Chris?” Sophie waited a moment, forced herself to keep her voice level and melodious. “What is going on out there?”

He did not answer.

“Oh, no,” she muttered to herself after she had ended her transmittal. She had said “out there.” Whoever would soon be listening to her, they would start to wonder if she was in a secure building of some kind, a place with no view of the outside, a place with resources.

She sat there shivering, standing half-off the stool, wondering if she should disconnect. But a haunting voice — a real voice — stopped her, its emotionless beat layered with a nuance of authority and laced with sugared venom. It was the same young man, she realized, but perhaps someone was standing behind him now. Or several someones.

“I need you to answer my question, ma’am.”

Sophie. Stop. Disconnect now.

But she wanted to learn more about the outside, anything that might help her to plan a route to Kersey and her daughter. She needed as much foreknowledge as she could gather. She needed to know .

“I am alone,” she said, very slowly. “No others. No other survivors.”

Five seconds of silence. When the young man’s voice came back on, it was still authoritarian but it was higher, more brittle. Sophie caught a moment of some other man talking near to Chris, perhaps behind him.

“And where?” Chris asked her. “Where are you, ma’am? Colorado? Wyoming? Kansas?”

Stop. Now.

Sophie put her left hand around the radio’s power cord and closed it tightly. Her right hand went to the Grundig’s back panel, ready to pop the lithium batteries. She spoke again. “I’m not going to say.”

“Hang on.” Chris’s line went dead.

Sophie kept the line active, the voices inside of her rising to war with one another. Tell them where you are, her father was saying. They’re your fathers now. You’re too weak to do this all alone, Sophie. Too weak. And Tom, Tom so silent until then, was whispering, No, love. Never. And Patrice, Kill it. Kill the line now. They’ll kill you.

Chris came on again. “Citizen, please wait.”

Citizen? And not, “Hang on.” Please wait.

Sophie gripped the power cord a little tighter.

Kill it, Patrice was singing, we’ll find Lacie, we’ll find her on our own. We don’t need them, we can’t need them. They’re men. We —

Something clicked on the line. Had she pressed anything? No. Had Chris turned something on or off at his end?

Seven seconds after, when Chris came back on, he was speaking quickly in a breaking whisper. He sounded like a little boy. “Ah, no time. Lady get me out of here, if you can, call. Call me in, in five or six hours, you don’t know. You don’t know. We’re dumping bodies out the windows. Pieces. Babies. First sub-basement is infected, too much blood and fluids and… and body matter, we had to…”

He began to sob.

Sophie, not knowing if Chris could hear her, began talking over him and just as rapidly. “Listen to me, I heard you. Before. I heard you after, just after the… it happened. I just want to let you know, it’s okay. You did all you could. You tried. You tried to save them.”

Halfway through this, Chris asked her a question. “Rogue, do you believe in God?”

When Sophie had spoken, she took in a breath. She didn’t know what to say. In her heart of hearts, she believed that she did not. She never had, had sometimes wanted to. Sometimes, even with all her heart. But it wasn’t in her. The crystal, however beautiful, was hollow. After the rape, the stillbirth, after all the fights and sorrows and even through the pain and joy of Lacie’s advent and her growing, aging, becoming so like Sophie but graced by Tom’s lopsided and mischievous smile, she never had believed.

I cannot believe, she thought. If He existed, if He loved, He never would have let this happen.

But there was something else there that Chris needed to hear, to say. And he was running out of time. There was something Chris needed to tell her, tell her before he died.

She transmitted, “I do believe. I do.”

And she hated herself.

And Chris asked of her, “Will you hear my confession?”

Again, Sophie was filled with the nigh-overwhelming temptation to pop the batteries and pull the plug. Coward. Weak. She took in a breath, ready to tell Chris she was so sorry, ready to tell him goodbye. Forever.

But Chris had reopened his side of the channel with another sending, and he began to ask of her, “Please? Will you —”

On his end of the line, a door slammed open and hit something metallic. Sophie heard the beginnings of a struggle.

Her hands shook up over her mouth, she was remembering her last call with Tom, remembering it perfectly, every breath, every cadence, Pull over and listen to me, when a deep and hostile voice came burning into her ears.

“Identify yourself at once. This is a government frequency.”

Sophie wanted to pull the plug. But her hands were over her mouth.

“Identify!”

Lowering one trembling hand, No, don’t, she pressed the transmittal key. “I’m, I’m not a soldier. I’m —”

“You have materiel? Identify. Where are you?”

Sophie said nothing more.

She heard something click on the line, a beep. Were they trying to trace her? To keep her on long enough to triangulate her location? She did not even know if that was possible.

“What city are you nearest to?” the man asked her. “Do you know your long-lat coordinates?” Furious, controlled. Controlled rage. “Citizen, you are obligated to reply. If you are secure in shelter, if you are in possession of any —”

And Sophie pulled the cord. She popped the batteries, killed the line. She would never call again.

She lifted the headphones off, pulling almost casually at the sweaty tendrils of her hair, all caught up in the wires. And she whispered, “Go be with your God, Christopher. All, all is forgiven. You did what you had to, to survive. Rest now. Be well.”

She stood, she walked across the Great Room toward the seal into the corridor, the Sanctuary. She needed to lie down.

“Goodbye. It is well.”

And that night — if it was night, after all — Sophie cried herself to sleep.