Kent Kelly - The Cage

Don’t think about how deep you are.

Little anthill-sized piles of black granite had already fallen onto the top of the freezer’s surface. She looked behind the second freezer, and found that neither was plugged in. There were two more wall sockets back behind there and a utility jack, and coils of heavy cording. Freezers three and four, both unplugged. Perhaps the freezers drew too much power to be plugged in all the time? Would plugging them all in short something out? She would need to read the binders before she dared decide on this. Tiny actions could have devastating consequences.

A darker thought crossed her mind. The freezers were each deep and broad enough to hold a wrapped body, perhaps even two.

Perhaps she was a ghost after all, and her dead body wasn’t coiled upon the floor back there in the shower, nor crawling up to the ceiling. No. It was in here, daddy had stuffed her dead skin down in here to spin its web, and it was waiting for her here. Down, deep down in the cold. For using all the hot water, yes. The last punishment at last, and now to see herself. To feed, to be fed upon. Of course.

She began to open the first freezer. She wondered if she could hear dead legs skittering up inside.

“Don’t,” she said aloud.

Don’t scare yourself like that. Don’t listen.

Too late. She opened the freezer.

There was no dead body. No refrigeration, no ice, no mist. The dead air in there was warm. The freezer was filled to the brim with dry and packaged foods. There were huge stacks of canned spinach. She thought she remembered hearing that spinach absorbed radiation, and would pass it out through the body, but that might have been merely some foolishness she had witnessed on TV. There were military surplus MREs, bags of rice, sacks of corn starch and row upon row of canned dehydrated food.

She could see then that the freezers were actually designed to be set inside the wall, to help with cooling. The door-mounting section was only half of the freezer’s length. Back there in the dark were wicker-and-canvas bins, piled high with food heaters, Bunsen burners, matches, some odd variety of translucent tubing and many other things. But there was no microwave in the shelter that she had found. She knew, however, there was at least one lodged between the girders up above, the spare microwave from their old cabin in Estes Park. When she was stronger, healed, perhaps she would find it and pull it down.

She left the other freezers as they were. Moving on down the wall back toward the vault’s entryway, she noticed another tarp set on shower curtain rings against the wall. She lifted it and draped its length over the fourth freezer. The tarp revealed a narrow corridor, filled from floor to ceiling with five-gallon water cooler bottles. There was no water cooler that she could remember. She tried to recall whether she had argued with Tom about this “extravagance.”

For so long, I’ve been a fool.

Flexing her bandaged hands, she lifted a water bottle out of the utility rack. She faltered under the weight. It was easily forty pounds, if not more. The massive plastic bottle bounced off the nearest freezer and rolled onto the floor, sloshing all the while. Maneuvering herself to sit on the floor with her legs to either side of it, she gingerly pulled off its plastic seal. Where were the cups? The glasses? No matter. Tilting the bottle carefully toward her chest, she managed to slosh some warm water into her cupped hand. The gauze bandage turned pink as the congealing blood of her skinned palm welled up. She drank, tasted pure water and her own blood.

She sat there for awhile, picking bits of glass out of her left knee. She could not remember how that had happened. She would have to be more careful. The consequences of a deeper cut, of an infection or something even worse, were things she could not bring herself to brood over.

Not yet.

After long minutes and much wasted water she rose, slowly. She would need to stop all of this frenetic activity very soon, and just sit. Perhaps she would read, learn, begin to understand. After all, she had all the time in the world.

For some reason, the tension, the sheer ridiculous importance of everything she was doing, she shook her head and her fingers tapped against her cheeks. A broken laugh escaped her.

Spider, she’s coming, she’s in the last freezer, spinning, spinning…

“Stop this,” she said aloud.

I’m going to lose my mind.

She walked back to the pressurized plastic door leading into the deeper rooms. The blue light back there was nebulous, articulate. It was taunting her. Almost, almost she was ready to go back there, to see the bed where Tom had slept when they were fighting; to see the end of her tiny universe.

Something turned her away.

Between the hose and the door seal was a reinforced and refrigerated medicine case. A padlock, of all things, secured the two panels of its Plexiglas covering. The Plexiglas sheets had survived the nuclear blasts and all the seismic shocks, but some of the bottles in on the shelves had shattered and fallen down to the bottom of the case where a rainbow pool of gunk was beginning to solidify into a sickly-looking paste. One bottle was still dripping its contents down into the pool, something amethyst in color, perhaps cough syrup. Worse, the thermometer inside the case had fragmented at the bottom. Liquid mercury stood in quivery beads on a lower shelf.

What medicines had already been lost? Sophie touched the case’s steel frame down by the hose. The case was indeed refrigerated, and cool to the touch. Kneeling there, she wondered if she should clean up the mess at once or rather wait to read the binders, in case there were some types of chemical reactions to worry about, or a cleanup hazard. As she pondered this, she could read the labels on the many intact bottles: penicillin, potassium iodide, Betadine, multivitamins, rubbing alcohol, vomitives, chilled needles, antacid, hypos of some kind, Lidocaine, Loperamide, Glutose paste, Diphenhydramine, Valium, morphine, anesthetics, anti-depressants…

Her stomach churned. A thrill crept up inside her.

“Ohhh. Oh, yes.”

No. Her hands were shaking in anticipation. You can’t. No more.

She thought about throwing away some of the medicines immediately. There was an incinerator in the back, Tom had always been bragging about it. And the waste chute into the deep. But for the immediate future, everything in the shelter was far too precious to destroy.

Even the things that might destroy me.

Stroking the case, touching bloodstained fingers upon the Plexiglas and feeling the coolness there, she realized that she might be looking in at some of the only surviving examples of certain medicines still in existence for hundreds of miles around. Thousands of miles, perhaps. Or perhaps even the only.

She did not know. She could not yet bear to contemplate the world outside.

Everything was precious now. The shelter was the world, the universe had contracted into the galaxy of the great room and the few tunnels and niches radiating from it, a spider-web made of concrete and tinctured steel. She would be this universe’s only explorer. Her reality, not just hers but all reality, had become the shelter, there was only ever after the glory of the Cage.

She looked to the Valium again, the vials of anesthetic.

You’re stronger than that. Think of your daughter.

It would be so, so easy. To sleep and to more than sleep, to descend into the netherworld of the self and then deeper into the Black, deep ocean, out and away and nevermore…

No.

She stood up, too quickly. Her vision turned into black pinpoints as the blood rushed into her head. And as she reeled there, she said, “No. I won’t.” And cried out then, “I won’t!”