Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

Okay. She took a deep swallow. If he’s alive alone, you drag him in. If anyone else is out there, you kill them.

“No mercy,” she was saying. “You can’t . You’ve got to kill them, they tortured Pete, they threatened to kill you. You’ve got to.”

She would need to figure out the gun’s safety along the way.

Float-walking out of the Sanctuary, struggling awkwardly through the corridor’s vinyl door seal, Sophie checked the submachine gun’s safety for what seemed like the twentieth time. But as she began to calm down, to steel herself for the kill, the weapon began to make sense to her. The safety was actually part of the weapon’s fire selector, and it was currently on lock. Safe. It won’t fire. That needed to change, and soon.

She braced the gun barrel against her right hip — she was doing this wrong, surely, and she’d probably bruise or break her hip if forced to fire on split-second notice — and she crossed the Great Room, trembling as the adrenaline once more burned its way into her bloodstream.

Do this. Do this now.

The adrenaline surge tingled, a poisonous thrill. It coursed like misted fire inside her veins. Her heartbeat thudded. Her breath flitted against the visor’s faceplate, pulses of mist whisked away by the inner re-breather’s icy air and back again.

As she crossed over the Great Room to the entryway, she pushed through the lead-lined plastic curtains and made her way toward the radiation trap. Time was moving very quickly, then. She could not even remember how she had pushed her way through the door seal with the loaded gun.

Once she was free of the dangling lead-lined strips, one curtain flap still trailing its tip over her left shoulder, she clicked the safety off at last.

Good, good girl. Now call to Pete, her father’s voice was saying. He answers, you go. You kill. You understand me?

“Daddy. What if I can’t , what if I…”

Enough. You do this for Patrice, who never got the chance. You do this for me. Sheriff Henniger out there, he earned this from you. You be brave, it’s all you now. Shout out twice. He don’t answer, you stay. Any answer, his or theirs, you go out there and be ready to fight. Do you hear me?

“Okay. Okay.”

It is time, the voice insisted. The other voice, the reedy teenager’s whisper. Terrified and angry. Oh, the hate.

“Patrice?”

They need to learn, Patrice sang. Anything, Sophie. Anything is what you will do to live, to kill and to be strong enough, to go to your beloved daughter.

Slow pulses of time became waterfalls of rush and Now, this moment only, cascading into life. Time accelerated . It was almost a relief, to be free of that quicksand, the nightmare-lethargic slowness of numbing fear.

Sophie walked through the last of the tunnel and out to the entry before the vault door itself, its titanium girder-bracings forming triangles of glinting metal to either side of her, casting faint silver rainbows up across the faceplate of her suit. She leaned against the left-side bracing, pushed her visor up against the door and yelled through the vault door’s seam.

“Leave him alone! Leave him alone or I’ll kill you!”

Her voice coruscated with purpose, panic, rage. The suit’s filters muffled it, but they also turned her voice into something spectral, something dreadful to hear. Her yelling echoed in a slithering out beyond her.

Oh, yes. Delicious vengeance, Sophia mine. Kill them. Kill!

Patrice, enthroned in Sophie’s imagination with ankles crossed and clenching fingernails dug into her knees, leaned forward to taste Sophie’s unleashed hatred, to revel in the birth of a kindred and newborn Fury, cackling.

The laughter in her brain, Sophie could not stand it. To silence it, she yelled again. “Pete!” Again. “Pete, can you hear me?”

Still nothing. What in the Hell was she going to do?

He was almost certainly dead. Sophie bit her lip, breathing through her nose. She fought back tears, she forced herself not to shift the gun to one hand and pound on the door in blind frustration.

“Pete!”

I was too slow, I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready for any of this. All my fault. All my fault…

And yet, a savage yet somehow quiescent aspect of Sophie’s psyche was insisting that not only was it not her fault that Peter Henniger had died, it was an inevitability. The other survivors in their malice and depravity had taken his police car and tortured him, forcing him to disclose the shelter’s location. And the leader of the group had been threatening to kill Pete if Sophie refused to open the vault door and then to stand there, completely at their mercy.

If she had complied before Pete himself had been killed, unarmed as she had been, she would surely have been imprisoned or beaten or raped or even worse. And in the end, how likely would Pete himself have been to survive such people if the shelter had been unoccupied, if she had not been there?

They would have killed him, regardless of circumstance. They would have eventually broken their way into the shelter, or died in the trying. And finding how claustrophobic and confining the shelter was, what was there to stop the intruders from turning on their own kind, slaying amongst themselves until they were sliced and gunned down to a core population of bloodthirsty alphas served by their dying slaves?

The truth in all of this was cutthroat, inexorable and unrelenting. This persistent web of reason — filaments spun of guesswork, laced tight with logic in an ever-stronger mesh of understanding — caused Sophie to breathe more easily.

Not your fault, no. He never had a chance.

In that silence, listening to the easing of her own breath and staring at her oblique and fluid reflections dancing against the fluorescent-banded door, Sophie noticed one strange thing… a thing which she had never detected when she had first rushed through the tunnel and into the shelter. There was a crystal-covered video screen, right there, hidden below the vault door’s metallic transom.

Of course. Tom would have set a camera somewhere into the curved wall of the ladder-shaft. Its lens might even have been disguised as one of the glo-lites between the ladder rungs. What could the camera eye see that Sophie herself could not? If it was still operational, she could hold vigil over the shaft and at least see if there were any survivors. Or bodies. She might even be able to determine if Pete was still alive out there without breaching the shelter’s seal.

She slid the sapphire-acrylic panel open and watched. The digital screen was tufted with erratic lines of rasterized gray pixels, waving in undulating sine curves across the view. Powdery tendrils of static flourished and puffed across the image, then died away again. It took Sophie several seconds to decipher what she was seeing.

The black-and-white view was not sourced from the ladder, but somewhere much lower. The camera seemed to be positioned perhaps three feet above the grated floor, which meant that it was somehow disguised to look like something else. Was it part of the door itself? No. It was somewhere in the shaft at an acute angle to the vault entry. Sophie stroked the panel, looking for pan/tilt/zoom controls, but there was nothing of the kind. The display was inert. But what the view revealed to her, after the static had died away, was clear enough.

She could see starry constellations of pulverized concrete, where bullets had impacted in the walls. She could see a shattered glo-lite, a ladder rung scuffed to a brighter silver by a ricochet. Below this, she discerned the black-and-white hazy negative of a man’s boot, a pool of blood dripping down the drain, and a sheriff’s cowboy hat lying open end up by a pallid and unmoving hand. She could not see his face or his body, but she did not need to. She knew.