Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

She knew then where the weapons were, in a gun safe. Beyond the door to the left. In the Sanctuary.

“Okay. Okay.”

Sophie walked to the Sanctuary side of the corridor, flexing her fingers. She pulled on the door handle with a double grip, bracing her balance against the door’s expected massive weight. Nothing. She pulled harder and almost fell over. The door clicked as she pulled it left instead of right, toward the bolted hinges. It opened almost effortlessly, gliding on oiled gear-rails. Pressurized air puffed out and the rubber seals around the door’s bolstered frame slithered in place, shivering out their mists of prisoned moisture. The entire door slid out six inches from the wall, and only then did the door handle shunt itself clockwise like a massive timer dial, clicking from peg to peg until it clanked to a painted setting marked “ACCESS.” A digital panel inset just beneath the safety-glass porthole window came alight, flicking with familiar lines of data in ruby and emerald digits of liquid crystal:

Sophie did not yet understand precisely what the radiation counters were measuring, or how accurate the instrumentation that was set up by the canyon’s radio dish might turn out be. But whatever the data meant in full, one thing seemed certain: the gamma radiation levels outside were slowly falling.

The wind? Yes. Wind and rain, whirlwind, a rain of bone and fire.

The fallout, the pulverized world and bodies of the Dead. Blowing away, blowing to the east.

And more from the west, to come to me. More. More is coming.

It seemed strange to think of this, that some semblance of nature might still be writhing its way through the tortured world of the burning, the Outside. But some culmination of natural factors was causing radioactive material to scatter away to the Great Plains and the Atlantic, down the shattered crags and obsidian flats and mountain valleys.

A few seconds of this contemplation were all Sophie could spare. She needed the weapons safe, she needed to save Pete if there still was time.

“God, I’m so slow . Calm down. Think!”

Oh, Sophie. So disappointed in you. You’re a coward, came the inner voices again. They were both Patrice and daddy this time, speaking in unison, a fraction of a second apart. Then father alone was saying , You should have died at least trying to save him, he would have done the same for you, and Patrice was crying, No, live for Lacie, Lacie Anna is everything, and Sophie cried out “Enough!” and surged in through the opening beyond the rail-grid door.

The Deep. The Sanctuary.

The curved room smelled of artificial cinnamon, the ghost-fragrance of the one un-depleted air freshener. This incongruous plastic device was strung upon a nail, dangling near the concrete-ensconced inner access panel. A taped note behind its string read in Tom’s own rapid scrawl, “Suit valve ?’s, NucBioChemo — have Sophie call Mitch?” and below that, “Rebook to redeye, Lacie B-day 9-16.”

Tom’s last notes to no one. It felt icily wrong to be reading these private reminders, meaningless words that had come to mean so much, now that Tom was gone.

Sophie. Don’t cloud yourself, all of that. Temptations all, her father was saying. Sins, memory. Don’t slow down now. Go. Save Henniger. He’s bleeding out. Stop wasting time!

A vent clicked on with another rush of chill air. Sophie startled as she spun away from the note on a spark of instinct. She flinched, ready to fight the nothing all around her.

He’s dead. Tom? Patrice, daddy. Sweet love. You are all dead.

Her teeth were bared, the moisture of her mouth drying away as the misty air quickly dispersed and circulated out into the hallway to be sucked through the corridor’s gratings. The vent’s air currents grumbled and slurred down into a disturbing, almost animalistic sigh as the “bedroom” admitted Sophie in its embrace, as it swallowed her, as the Sanctuary began to blur and shiver and to come alive and hold her in its closure forevermore…

The skin, the spider, she’s scuttling out of the freezer now. She’s coming for me, she closing in and crawling down from the ceiling. Through the seal, you hear her? She’s crawling in through the doorway now and up, upside down, flicking her way over the girders claw by claw, licking her teeth, she’s behind you, right behind you right now, inches above your head, do you want to look back before her fangs find your neck and she drags you into her nightmare? O Sophie…

“No. Not real.” Sophie balled her fists and tapped her cheeks. “Real, not, not real . Not real, okay. Okay.”

More of the precious seconds ticked by as Sophie took in the Sanctuary’s furnishings, searching for the gun safe. How could something so huge be hard to find?

The walls of the Sanctuary were in-sloped concrete, hollowed out with hive-like ribs and squares of inset shelves — not shelves, precisely, but cinderblocks and octagonal glass bricks set into checkerboards of intermittent and jutting rows. Nooks and wall-hollows curved everywhere, each shelf sheathed in nylon netting and filled to overflowing with a seemingly random jumble of objects. Sophie’s eyes flitted over it all in a scatter of moments, sheaves of paper, notebooks, flashlights, painters’ filtration masks, glo-sticks, matchboxes, even the anachronistic charm of a few out-of-place unopened cans of Dr. Pepper and Tom’s cherished cellophane bags of Hapi wasabi peas.

None of that matters now. Focus. Look around you.

There were only three cots in the Sanctuary, two perfectly made up and then another tumbled one up against the far wall, its mattress disheveled by a crowning tangled pile of sheets and pillows. This, then, had been Tom’s “sleepover nest” whenever he and Sophie had been fighting. Three cots and nothing else, all the loose objects were netted away in hollows. Sophie walked toward the one glass-bricked alcove of the room, hiding the back left corner away, across from the one disheveled bed. Tom had his own way of situating things, particularly things which might be needed straight out of sleep. The guns would surely be back there.

No time, no time.

And the cot in between the other two, so pathetically small, certainly intended for their daughter, for Lacie. An absurd thought rushed through Sophie’s mind, Goldilocks, too small, too big, no-no-yes, yes, just right, and as she threaded her way around the short end of Lacie’s cot she tripped over a collapsible treadmill that was jutting out from beneath it upon the other side.

She fell hard with her knee banging against her own cot’s sharp aluminum frame. A wing-nut screw below the mattress gashed through her soiled jeans and into her knee cap, digging a hole in the thick fabric, and a fresh spout of blood spattered up over the starched sheets. Hissing in pain, Sophie hauled herself up and limped to the wall of glass.

Beyond the clusters of octagonal glass brick there loomed a reflection-stained depression, an alcove whose floor was layered with lime-green tiles and a single bleach-stained grating. A seven-foot-tall black gun safe stood there, with a jewel-buttoned number pad glittering beneath a Plexiglas chamber on its face.

Sophie flicked the chamber open, entering “2524” without even thinking. Tom had always kept the same PIN on everything, his credit cards, his Facebook security question, even their fishing cabin’s front door, of all things. An agent, an NSA agent no less, with a fetish for a lack of security on all his most personal things, now Tom really , no matter how many times she chided him he insisted on that one absurd indulgence of rebellion, and oh that laugh as she got so angry and she pointed this out, every time , he —