Kent Kelly - The Cage

She remembered the incident well. The first stirrings of the Shelter Panic, in retrospect, had started when Iran had sent agents to free Farhadi from FBI confinement and nine people had been killed as the attack was repulsed. The mission failed, but barely. The United States, England and Canada declared war on Iran the day after. None of that was intended to come out in public, but an FBI agent had ended her career to post the security videos of the attack through Wikileaks. It was all there in the article.

After that, another printout concerning the Korean Air Lines Flight KE 007, which had wandered into restricted airspace in 1983 and had been shot down over the Sea of Japan by an Su-15 Soviet interceptor. Sophie frowned as she parsed the old article. It was ancient history. Why had Tom decided it was so important?

She closed the binder and pulled out her notebook, along with a road atlas she had found in the shelving wreckage. It was time to start planning for the future, for her daughter who was everything.

Where was Mitch now? She would figure out the mystery of Aunt Jemm’s house in its own time. Soon, she might even talk to him. But most likely, he was to the north. Mitch was unmarried and deeply devoted to his extended family. Most of the Saint-Germains lived in Quebec, North Dakota and Wyoming. She would need to stick to the mountain roads as long as possible, perhaps 119 up to Nederland, 72 past Boulder or what was left of it. The Rocky Mountains would shield her — she hoped — from the worst radiation to the east, and the fallout storms coming in from the west. Three weeks and come. The radiation would need to disperse itself, and there would be a fragile and narrow window of time before the second wave of storms could rise anew. She would not journey as far as Estes Park or Loveland, for those were surely towns filled with the dead or dying. Perhaps down onto Interstate 25 for awhile, between the annihilated cities. If the H4 was still able to run despite the electromagnetic pulse, she could ram her way through some of the dead traffic, or perhaps even four-wheel through the ditches if they were dry. What of 85 north toward Greeley, itself probably a crater now? What of…

Sophie froze and went perfectly still. Voices.

Not from inside of her head, not behind her, but elsewhere.

And then, a pounding sound. From far away, out beyond the edges of the shelter-world. From the outside .

And that was when Sophie’s second brief life in the High Shelter ended, cut short even as it had begun, and her third life cast her forever into the tortures of the World of the Great Dying, the world that the Archangel remade and was so reborn from out of the White, from the Fire.

Gong. Gong. Gong.

Someone was pounding on the shelter’s vault door, with a sledge hammer or a crowbar. There had been no time to pull out the H4’s toolbox, when Sophie had run for the shelter and almost fallen down the ladder-shaft. But there was, she knew perfectly well, a tire iron up there in the iron box, a set of wrenches, a crowbar…

Gong.

“Lady!”

A huge man with a deep, hoarse and desperate voice was shouting through the door. Sophie could hear the vault’s pressure wheel being tested, on her side it was jerking half an inch back and forth, over and over again. But the door had auto-sealed itself, locked and pressurized once the floor plate inside the entryway had been activated by Sophie’s stepping through.

“We know you’re in here!” Another voice, a young woman. Sophie had never heard such hopelessness, such animalistic rage .

“Open this God-damned door!” The man again. Gong.

Sophie backed away from the work table, as stealthily as she could manage. There was something running down her legs, something fluid and warm. Her socks were growing moist and she was trailing footprints of wetness as she backed away from the lead-curtained tunnel leading out to the entryway.

The guns. The gun locker was in the back. Turning, she ran for the vinyl pressure seal.

She made it three steps, when a third voice cried out, “Sophie! Don’t open it! I’m sorry!”

Who was that? Who was the old man knew her name? Who had survived, and who knew where the shelter was?

Some kind of struggle erupted outside. Whatever the huge man had been holding to pound on the vault door, something had made him drop it. The man was grunting now, not as if he was fighting, but as if he was punching something — or someone — with all his strength. Again, again.

The young woman was shrieking, and as each shriek ended the metal thing hit the door again. She was not as strong as the man, but she sounded as if she could claw her way through the door if she had to.

Seven strikes, and the pounding stopped. There was an argument out there. A fourth voice arose, a young man’s. He was little more than a boy.

“For God’s sake lady, we have wounded, we have women! This girl here, her skin is falling off! My mother, my mother died on the way up here! You hear me? We’re dying out here! Open this fucking door!”

The huge man was shouting again. “Open it, or I swear, I swear I’ll kill him!”

The man, whoever had been pounded down, was yelling then as well. His voice was old, gurgling, gurgling blood. But he knew her, he knew her name.

“Don’t open it, Sophie! They tortured me to find out where this place is!”

And then she knew.

Pete.

Old Pete Henniger, Black Hawk’s retired sheriff. Years ago, he had given Tom unofficial and winking clearance to mark some of the road up to the shelter as private property. In return, he had simply wanted to know what Tom was up to, in his own good-natured and gentle way. In those early springs and on the weekends, he had even borrowed his grown son’s diesel-powered Cat and helped to bulldoze rubble off the canyon road.

He knew where the shelter was, and what it was. He knew quite well.

Sophie remembered him with perfect clarity. It had been a lifetime, it had been only days.

She remembered him from the intersection, outside the Ameristar Casino. She had driven through that chaos when he was in danger, when he had been keeping that policewoman from firing her shotgun. Just minutes before everything had happened to end the world, Sophie had smiled back at that bald man with the cigar, she had finished her latte and she had driven up through, leaving Pete there with that furious girl in the Che Guevara T-shirt, that hulking bouncer who was yelling in his face…

Sophie was whispering, “Oh, Pete. Don’t be. Don’t ever be sorry.” She took a tearful breath, and said: “Forgive me. Forgive me.”

Pete was still yelling, “I swear, I told them they could only come in if there was no one here! But you, you made it, you —”

A gunshot ended Pete’s entreaties.

But they didn’t kill him, no. Sophie could hear him cry out, he was stifling his agonized cries and the huge man was yelling through the door again.

“She friend of yours, yeah? Lady, if you don’t open this door in the next thirty seconds, I swear I’ll kill him!”

I cannot let Pete die. Not for me.

Sophie had stopped running long before this. She was not only listening, she was turning. And as the huge man picked up the thing of metal again, Gong, gong, she was walking toward the shelter entry and staring at the illuminated keypad sequencer which was situated at her end of the radiation trap’s tunnel, the tunnel leading out to the ladder-shaft.

No. She could never let them in.

Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.