Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

Sophie sighed. Taking a step backward, she clipped the gun’s hollow stock-tube to her utility belt and let it dangle there with the safety on. She spread her gloved hands out to Silas, but he did not cross the six feet of distance between them. She said, “I’m sorry I frightened you. Come in. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Through the suit, her voice sounded alien, the taunting of a machine.

The old man’s eyes roved down to the swaying gun, then to the digital flick-flick of scrolling data imprinted on Sophie’s visor, and then he stared into her eyes as he discovered them.

“Lady,” he said, his hands slowly coming down to his sides, “I could be anyone. You poisoning yourself out here, robot armor or no. Don’t you go risk yourself, you’re blessed to be here. Blessed, now you go turn around, and Hell if I don’t blame you.”

Sophie shook her head, but inside the suit it made very little difference. She turned her hands palm-upward. “I’m not leaving you out here.”

“Well. Sorry I dropped your love note from the good man in his rest,” said Silas, “but you done scared the ever-loving horseshit out o’ me.”

He toed the paper away so that it would not fall down through the grate, where the melt-water was trickling down into a congealing puddle of blood-sludge beneath the floor. “That good man, says I, he wrote it for you and it was pure. I say it true, but you should see .”

Silas bent down again.

“Please come to me,” Sophie whispered.

He said, “Don’t you shoot me. Just reaching down for my cane.”

She let him. He never took his eyes off of her gun.

“Please.” Louder she said it, this time. “Please come to me.”

And as Silas Colson rose once more, he took a faltering step toward her. He shook his head and winced, as if waking from his own isolate slice of marble-tiered Purgatory and back down into nightmare. His pupils flared in bloodshot rings of scarlet-white. He said:

“Oh my, oh, I don’t. Maybe… don’t reckon after all, Mrs. S.-G. That’s a-being… a-being a bad idea a-t’all.”

And he fainted into her arms.

(The survival story of Sophie St.-Germain continues, as the stranger from out of the wasteland, Silas, reveals to her the horrors of the World That Was Lost; and as they leave the shelter together in order to wage their war in the name of life in FROM THE FIRE, EPISODE IV: ARCHANGEL , to be made available from Wonderland Imprints and the Kindle Store on Amazon.com.)

Copyright © 2012 Kent David Kelly

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