Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

Beep.

The safe clanked open. The black steel door swung out of its own accord, and a ghostly white faceless body tumbled out into Sophie’s arms.

She was certain then that the spider-skin had found her.

She screamed.

The body in her arms was a weightless husk without a skeleton, just flesh and nothing more, white as ivory and that face, oh the face of crystal glistening, Caught, don’t look, the skin, the self and all her claws, she is here, here, she —

No. Not a body, but a vapor-tight Dupont Plasmesh hazmat suit.

“Oh, God .”

Sophie tried to say this, but she could not. Her frantic exhalation of relief came out in a tapering scream, and as she struggled not to pass out from the rush of blood to her head, she dropped the hazmat suit in a pile onto her feet.

There were two other suits hung inside the gun safe, one quite small, both half-tilted off their hangers by the impact of the blasts. Behind them stood a deadbolt frame with nine ominous firearms socketed in its cage, each with its own fluorescent identity plate:

[SMG-1] HK UMP40 Universale

[SMG-2] HK UMP40 Universale/Silent

[HR-3] T/C .300 WM BOLT Hunter

[HR-4] FORBES 24B .30/06 SEMI Hunter

[SG-5] R12P TACTICAL 12-G Shotgun

And, in a separate section marked “FFL VIOLATOR /// C-RED /// OPS EMERG ONLY”:

[MP-6] Magpul FMG-Mk IIa M-Pistol

[AR-7] AK-47 / GDR MPi-KMS-72 Assault

[AR-8] IMI Galil ARM 7.62mm Assault

[SR-9] DTA 014 .50 BMG Sniper

When she had found the guns at last, she realized that she had not given any thought to how she would use them.

No idea, she thought. Ten seconds of staring, reading, processing. Are any of these loaded? What the Hell do I do now?

She had no idea what she was doing. But the binder she had been reading earlier, Tom’s last untitled one, had had a section on submachine guns which she had quickly glossed over.

And knowing a little is better than knowing nothing. Right? Christ, Sophie, you’re going to get yourself killed…

“Do this, Sophie. Come on, it’s a gun . Do this.”

Pressing the crimson button beneath the [SMG-1] identity plate, she felt the double click-click as the HK UMP40 Universale submachine gun’s bracket whirred out smoothly and at a ready angle. She pressed a stud on the gun’s stock bracket, grasped the long, sinister foregrip and slid the cool steel assault weapon out of its case.

The gun was sleek, threatening, seemingly ice-cold. It was loaded, she was certain from the heft of its curved ammunition clip.

And now that you have it out, you have to drop it. Wonderful.

Cursing herself, she set the gun upon Tom’s cot, pushed in against the pile of tumbled linens, and quickly stripped out of her soiled and bloody jeans. After she had taken three seconds to dry herself of blood and urine with a bed-sheet, as she began to step her way into the suit, another rapid staccato of gunfire echoed outside.

God! She cursed herself again. Soph, you’re pathetic. If you were a soldier and had wakened to battle, you would have died three minutes ago.

“Faster. Come on!”

More wild gunfire.

Whoever was firing, and at what, they didn’t seem to be hitting anything. Sophie could hear the sound of bullets pinging and ricocheting wildly off metal and off stone. What was going on? Were the survivors out there again, only to be fighting amongst themselves?

Something out there at last hit home. One shock-pulse of quick, frantic gulping screams came through the vault door, a wraithlike sound, wailing and decaying as if from very far away. Then another, the girl was screaming, the one who had hammered on the door with the piece of metal, and her terrified cries were melting like falling ice, away, rising, turning into liquid with the distance.

Learn it now. Do this now. Faster. No more weakness, Sophie thought, no more fear or frailty. No fucking more. I’m going out there.

And if by some dark and luckless miracle Pete was still alive, she was going to save him.

She suited up as quickly as she could. She had only worn the hazmat suit once before, when she and Tom and Mitch had celebrated Mitch’s retirement from working with Kaiser-Hill. That had been years ago. But the steps to the process seemed rote to her, almost reassuring even with their methodical simplicity. A fluorescent duplex sheet taped inside the weapons safe showed her all that needed to be done.

“Chest zipper FIRST, overlay Velcro LAST.

Seals already calibrated, DO NOT adjust.

Breathe through NOSE, NOT mouth,

Until neck joint LED (left shoulder) turns GREEN.

Join WHITE and BLUE tabs over LEFT wrist,

THEN right AFTER, repeat…”

She pulled the accordion-necked transparent visor up from her throat, then ensconced her head in its claustrophobic casing. She clicked the cycler button at her right wrist, and the battery-powered re-breather began to push currents of saline and chilly air throughout the suit. Her shins tingled, the hairs on her forearms rose and brushed against the suit’s inner lining. A tiny, hyper-technical digital display was flipping wild screens of information past her left eye, much too fast to read. Like booting up some damn supercomputer. God, what am I doing?

She shuffled from boot foot to boot foot, wondering how long she still had. How long Pete had, until she could come to save him.

No bullets, now. No screams.

“Too slow.”

It no longer mattered to her. Saving Pete was becoming secondary to finding an outlet for all her sorrow, all her rage. If Pete was dead, Sophie would find her own cold and remorseless comfort in threatening his murderers with death.

I need to learn, for my Lacie. I need to learn how to kill.

But for two or three minutes, ever since the last whirl of gunfire and the girl’s fading and then gurgling screams, the outside had remained silent.

When the soft vinyl of the suit visor began to mist over with Sophie’s breath, when the neck-joint LED shunted from red to green, she at last lifted the HK submachine gun from its rest. She was struggling to remember the gun preparation sequence. From all her years, from college to Poli-Sci, iterative and systematic articles had always been second-nature to her, Gun or no, you should be faster at this , her memory always cataloging thousands of steps throughout her life . But like a fool, she had glossed over Tom’s binder article on because it had seemed distasteful, a vicious and meaningless little thing in a world that was occupied by only a single soul.

But now, she was not alone. She never would be, she never would sleep easily ever again.

She found the ammunition clip’s release, slipped the clip casing out partway and saw the stark, fluorescent-gilded bullets arrayed there in a grim crescent all inside their transparent sheaths. She shoved the clip back in, too hard, and cringed as she almost fumbled the weapon out of her suit’s white-mitted hands.

Trying to slip her finger into the trigger’s loop, she found that it was impossible. The suit was mitted, with her fingers were spread in pairs within cushioned slots, with only the opposable thumb in isolation. The three-clawed design was intended for maximum-safety hazmat cleanup, not for fighting. Looking back to the bottom of the duplex sheet, Sophie read what she had to do.

She pulled the hidden plastic zipper tabs at each wrist, and the heavy mitts each unfolded like weighty and pale flowers, enslaved by gravity. Beneath the mitts were thick Nomex-fabric fireproofed gloves, four-fingered.

Yes. The gloves would certainly be thin enough to allow her to use the gun. She slipped her right index finger onto the trigger.