Kent Kelly - The Hollow Men

Because I spilled hot tea all down my crotch, and as I shot up screaming with a cat flying off of my shoulder, silver-maned Auntie Jemm with her sea-green glassy eye and her meshed-over widow’s peak had bitten down on her knuckle and had cried out, “Oh, sweet patoo!”

What in the Hell was a ‘sweet patoo’? Sophie laughed and cried some more.

Oh, I was mortified.

Mitch had joked about the two-hundred-mile road trip and social call for a week before they went up in his clattery old Volkswagen Type 34 coupe. All the way up I-25 and over eastbound Highway 34, Mitch had been joking about the anti-comedic potential inherent in their “Hot Victorian courtship ritual.”

“Oh Hell, Tom-Tom,” Mitch had called, his black eyebrows going up-and-down Groucho style as he winked at Sophie who had been hugging her knees in the tiny, spring-squeaky discomfort of that back seat. “Tea time! Can you believe it? Haven’t had God-damned tea time since we were twelve. Hey, you know? This’ll be badass. Maybe sweet ol’ Jemm will even allow you two to blow très petite kisses over your gloves and crumpets or something. Aw, yeah!”

“Hmm. She was always good to us,” came Tom’s oblique reply. His forehead was touched against the side window. He had laced his fingers through Sophie’s own, turning the little silver mood ring he had bought for her at Celebration! in the Springs. “Been too long.”

And Mitch had said, “ Way too long. And her crazy cats raised us a Hell of a lot better than old Uncle Zack’s backhand did. Tom, am I right?”

Tom’s fist had clenched so quickly that Sophie had stared at him in alarm.

“Hey, Mitch, I have an idea about regaling Soph with our family history,” Tom had said. His voice held sun-fire, plains-wind. Controlled, measured and perfectly on the threshold of an indignant rage. “How about you tell the story ‘bout that one day, that one single day, when you remembered how to shut the fuck up?”

And as young people do, as Mitch hit the gas and they sped to ninety miles an hour and passed an Army convoy of ugly new Hummers (“ Never going to own one of those damned things,” Tom had muttered), they had forged a rapid and heady trinity of peace through a single rude, shared outburst of wind-touched sun-glow and laughter.

Mitch had laughed the longest, ending in “Sorry. I don’t know. I don’t how to say things, real things. I just miss him. I miss Zach.” And he had lowered his head, no longer winking at Sophie and dead-set focused upon the wheel as he arced back out of the passing lane and coasted down to a leisurely eighty.

The inch-wide gap of the window blew the wind down through Tom’s hair.

Sophie had stroked the back of Tom’s hand almost absently, wondering why Mitch had begun to cry.

Sophie returned, alone, to her own present and reality.

Aunt Jemm’s house, northeast of Kersey out in the wind-sheltered oaks, out in the Nothing. That house, she thought, that has got to still be standing.

And Mitch’s Morse transmission thrummed in her mind: You know where? Have car. Can’t get out.

Oh, it has to be.

No longer in need of sleep, Sophie rose and rushed out of the Sanctuary. She pushed her way through the door seal and made her way to the work table. How could she contain this, this terrible and glorious secret? Mitch alive, Lacie alive, and she knew where . And they were safe in a secret shelter Mitch had built beneath the house he had inherited from Auntie Jemm.

Oh, the mansion. Was that, then, the secret of the fight that had erupted between Mitch and Tom after their father had died? The golden child, the Harvard graduate bound for work as a government agent, he had been gifted with the family land in Quebec and even more along the flanks of Fairburn Mountain. And the black sheep, Mitch, he had been given a dilapidated mansion filled with circus antiques and fractured dreams, an urn full of Aunt Jemm’s ashes, two hundred miles away from anything…

She wanted nothing more than to call Mitch on the Grundig radio right then. She knew that she could not, it was far too risky. What if any of the survivors within a hundred miles had shortwave radios for themselves?

Channel not secure.

Anyone else who was still alive out there would be cunning, equipped, prepared. Even the dying were almost certain to be in possession of police cars, or armored trucks, or even military vehicles. Many would have shortwaves, and many more would be bristling with weapons. If she gave away too many hints about her location in speaking with Mitch, such people would have no qualms about seeking out her shelter, blowing their way in, killing her and taking over.

No.

She would need to wait even longer before she could dare to call Mitch again. He had said to come in several weeks, but he had surely been guessing about how long it would take the winds to carry the first maelstrom of burning waste and fallout away. Even if she was not certain of the days, if she was late, he would wait for her.

Can’t get out. You know where?

She needed to remain silent awhile longer, until she had learned all that she could about the shelter, her tools, her weapons, her suits, the ultra-light crane. Everything would need to go with her. And if Aunt Jemm’s house was unlivable or Kersey itself had grown too dangerous, she might even need to drive Mitch and Lacie back to live inside Tom’s shelter.

Forever.

That, she could not think about.

But she would need to live until then in secret, perhaps even kill the people who had murdered Pete if they dared to threaten her again or tried to poison her. For all the rest, the strangers and the terrible unknowns, she needed to wait for them to live out their own unthinkable fates.

Give them time to die.

And she could no longer keep her eyes open.

She left the radio where it was. She made her way back and slept on Tom’s cot. It was time to say goodbye to him, to breathe in his scent, to fall asleep staring at the glass-bricked wall reflecting the gun safe in the Sanctuary’s twilight. It was time for the nightmare, for visions of her dead spider-skin crawling toward her over the ceiling.

She had a new dream, overflowing underwater, a curious desire to be nothing but her own memory of herself, to shrivel, to die away and never to know the world again. She swam through the drowning shelter, she confronted the spider-skin. Her old flesh was floating above the shower, a plagued husk of an algae-covered corpse. She woke up, swam to it, and turned it around to stare into its face. She turned her dead flesh over and it was not elder Sophie the dead and venomous, no. It was Patrice.

A burst of bubbles. A drowning scream.

Patrice crawled out of the dead-girl skin, the skin molted like tissues of festering onionskin paper that peeled away as a teenaged Patrice unzipped herself out of the rotting body-cocoon with a black and opalescent claw. It was Patrice as she must have looked after the car accident, just after the rescue team had pulled her out of the wreckage. Her ribcage was shattered and shoved out to either side of her gore-sponged and distended belly, shattered bones stabbing out of her mutilated and breastless torso like wicked white flowers, like spider legs.

Fog of water, fog of blood. And oh, she was smiling.

She dragged Sophie up into her arms, her claws, she kissed her beloved and hated sister’s neck with needle-like fangs all thronging and shivering out from underneath her twelve-inch tongue, so many teeth , and she breathed against Sophie’s neck,