Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

Sophie screamed when the new sound came, the beckoning , the clicking of the murmur-cane of the One.

She was sitting hunched over the southwestern corner of the work table, reading about the ultra-light crane which was bundled away in the Material Room. Before this, she had given less than zero consideration to one confounding riddle, one whose lack of a solution could well have proven fatal: she had no idea how she would ever move hundreds of pounds of survival gear out of the shelter, back up the vertical ladder-shaft and out into the cave.

Salvation came to conceptual light in the shape of a series of triangles, an unlikely aluminum and titanium skeleton made of gears. The crane would be the answer.

The ultra-light could be rolled out from the Material Room and into the Great Room, if the pressure seal between the corridor and the Great Room itself were to be detached. Tom had installed a camouflaged aluminum crane head high up within the blackest recess of the cavern’s ceiling. This head was poised directly above the ladder-shaft, and if the crane and its nylon mesh and ropes were set up with pulleys just so, the entire miraculous contraption could indeed save Sophie’s life. It might even be possible to stand at the bottom of the shaft and to pivot the first few loads so that they would drop off onto the slanted cave floor high above, without her even needing to climb the ladder every time. The Outside would no longer be a dream.

But yes, all the more, it will forever be a nightmare.

But even still. She could work in the hazmat suit for many hours if she had to. She had already been practicing in the shelter. With meticulous care, stubborn momentum and an exhausting amount of toil, it certainly would be possible to lift considerable amounts of supplies out of the shelter and up into the H4 if it was still —

Tap tap tap. Tap.

“Ai!” Sophie’s arms wheeled as she jolted at the sound. Something was pinging and clacking away at the vault door.

Holy… that’s coming from outside!

She struggled to stay atop her stool.

She covered her mouth, her fingers clutched her cheeks. Her eyes went wide. The only parts of her that moved for the next seventeen seconds were her eyes, staring out toward the hidden entryway.

There was no one out there, of course. The vault had remained sealed and she had strong reasons to suspect that the survivors who had been struggling to break into the shelter were either dead or had taken flight. She had held the blood vigil, she had mourned for dear Sheriff Henniger, and then she had slept in the Sanctuary, had even slept in front of the vault door itself. None of those raging voices had returned. Many a full “night” and a “day” in Sophie-time had passed away.

No, there was no longer anyone out there after all.

And the sound did not come again. Surely she had imagined it. She took in the deep cresting wave of a breath of clam, and began to let it out.

Tap. Tap tap tap.

“Oh my God!”

No imagining. Nightmare. It was real, it was one of the survivors. Still alive. Someone was still out there.

She ran over to the hazmat suit, which she had carefully spread out over the fourth freezer for quick assembly. She had read up over the last several “days” to master the suit’s makeup and the most efficient suit-up procedures, and had even practiced several times putting it on while she counted how many seconds it had taken her to do so. The first time she believed it took her two hundred and eighty-four seconds, but she had been sloppy and careless and she couldn’t be sure she had kept a fair count. The second time, she used her heartbeat as a clock and came up with two hundred and thirteen. The third time, it was only one hundred and seventy-one.

And now, now that she needed to suit up as carefully and quickly as she could, her hands were shaking and she could not even remember where she had left the HK submachine gun.

Sophie’s panic came all in a rush.

They’ve come back. More of them, anyone left alive, they’re all here. No! Worse. What if they’re soldiers? Oh God, the call. The call to Fort Morgan. You fool! They’ve found you. They’re not going to fail to get in this time. Not like the others. Killers. Too clever. They’re doing something to the door, they’re not going to yell, not going to warn you or anything at all. Explosives. Poison through the vents? What if they’ve rechanneled the waterfall pool? What if they’re going try to drown me out? What if —

Tap tap tap.

She suited up as quickly as she could, crested the visor, turned on the re-breather, taped down the mitts so that she had the thin-fingered gloves ready to slip into and over the trigger guard of her weapon. Suited up, she stumble-ran over to the medicine cabinet and looked around for the flashlight. It would be far easier to take out targets in the dark, she had read, if they were partially blinded first.

Where was it? She was certain she had left it there atop the glass case. Spinning to make her way back toward the shelf racks (the flashlight was by the binders then, it had to be), she tripped over the hose, danced two capering steps out past the fallen bulletin board, and then kicked the submachine gun out from under a discarded sweatshirt beside the laundry pile. The gun scraped loudly along the concrete, spinning in a lazy semicircle and coming to rest over the Great Room’s drain.

Oh, fuck.

She let out a trembling breath. If the safety had not been on…

Tap tap.

“Do this. Come on, Sophie. All this, all this practice. You’re ready. You do this.”

Yes. She picked up the gun, extended the stock, checked the clip, and carried it barrel-down as she had read was the proper stance for close-quarter interior fighting.

Her fear was struggling to drive her muscles down into a wet and quaking mess, but the disciplined under-grid of her mind was clacking up from its foundations and beginning to take over. Do this, then this, then this. She would go to the vault door and check the vid screen, and if she could see any of the intruders, she would activate the door pressure wheel, back up to the protective corner of the radiation trap, and crouch with her gun braced over the cinderblock notch made for just such a point defense.

And wait.

She would wait for the door to be pushed open by an intruder, and without a second thought, she would open fire. If the first intruder died horribly in a spray of facial gore, the others were almost certain to back off. Those seconds of chaos and horror would save her life.

Yes. Aim for the core body, walk the gunfire up his throat. If you’re going to live for Lacie, you’ve got to. You’ve got to do this.

She would cover herself with the cinderblock wall as best she could, and she would unload a full clip of ricocheting bullets into the gap and anyone else who dared to enter. And then she would fall back to where the gun safe was.

If she could.

Just remember, Patrice was trilling again in her mind, enthroned and smiling down upon her breathing sister. If you let them do whatever they want out there, they want in. They want to end you, and then to enshrine themselves where you die screaming. Nothing more. You leave them alone, and they will kill you.

“Make this happen, Sophie. Okay.”

She went to the vault door’s vid screen, flexed her gloved fingers and flipped the panel on. An angry burst of white-gray static snowed across the display, following her fingers in LED pools of crystalline afterglow. As she moved her fingers away, the static pulsed and swirled once more into the undulating sine curves of rasterized pixels. There was the black-and-gray blood, pooled and curdled into tendrils around the floor grating. There were Pete’s legs, his outstretched hand, but he was covered by a tarp and his sheriff’s hat was gone. And, in frail and skeletal silhouette looming beside his covered body, there was something else.