Kent Kelly - The Cage

She would die, yes. And likely soon. But if it was fated to happen, it would not be a matter of sweets and poisons. She would not die by the needle, nor by her own hand.

All in time. Whether her dead self was stalking her, that was something to be answered when she opened the final door.

She awoke curled up in the pile of clothing that she had dumped from the duffel bag. Her cheek had been resting on her aching hand over a leather motorcycle jacket, and she woke smiling because it smelled of Tom, of sunlight, of memory.

Then reality surged in.

She crawled up, then decided not to risk rising and making her presence known, not just yet. Someone, something might be hunting her. Dreams were still trickling away from her and her hands were very cold.

“There is no one else,” she said. Somehow, saying it out loud made it seem less true.

She looked around. She had no sense of night or day, only the conviction that some hours had passed, and of course there was no clock to go by. Her iPhone — if it even still worked, which it almost certainly did not — was up on the passenger floor in her Hummer up in the cave, far above in a corner of the sky world, the burning world of eld.

Sophie, your dead skin. Do you hear? Spider. She’s right behind you.

She covered her mouth. Someone had been giggling, the sound was still echoing in the silence.

Already it was happening.

Being trapped in the shelter, entirely disconnected from the rhythms of the world and all its annihilated solemnities, it was changing her. She woke without hunger, without thirst. She was not rested, but she did not require sleep. She would need to go to the bathroom soon, and that would mean trapping herself in a tiny corner. But still she resisted this.

It was no longer merely “the Cage” within her mind, or even the universe. It was a primal limitation, a tripling of strictures upon all three dimensions of the very notion of reality. Here was life-in-death, outside was the endless oblivion. And yet it was so tempting, the longing to go out and to breathe her last, to see what remained of the sky, to die at least standing in the endlessness where there might be red roiling clouds, a rain of ashes and flecks of pulverized bone, perhaps a gentle wind to needle the radioactive poisons beneath her skin…

She rose. This line of reasoning needed to end, now.

She walked to the “southwest” wall, where the work table loomed. She rested her hands against its sheet-metal surface. It creaked ominously in one leg, and several of its bolts complained through grating sounds of the near-shattering impact they had suffered. Two of the brackets on the weak right leg were loose, but it seemed as if the table would hold for awhile longer. She pulled the toppled stool upright, sat down with a groan, and looked to the plated concrete wall set flush with the table’s farther edge.

There were four aluminum panel doors, each about eighteen inches wide, set into the wall and aligned by rolling racks with the table’s surface. Adrift yet in the last lingering of a dream, flush with urgency, Sophie reached across and slid open the leftmost door.

Greenish fluorescent lights flickered on in the alcove behind the door. There was a violet Plexiglas bell jar in there, lined with copper mesh, and a boxy, olive-green military field phone was locked there inside it. She almost laughed. A protected phone, how wonderful. And who would she call?

Looking closer, she could see that there were a series of double-hooked rings on straps along the phone’s back. It was a pack-phone, she realized. Something to carry out when reemerging. Tom had never meant for his family to stay in the shelter for very long.

But the impossible had happened after all.

She thought again of her cell phone, trying to remember what Tom had taught her about nuclear airbursts. It was very little. The subject of war, and thermonuclear war precisely, touched in too near upon his taboo subjects of NORAD, the National Security Agency, the supposed underground city beneath Denver International Airport, terror intelligence, and all the rest. She tried to think if the iPhone had been destroyed when she had thrown it. The faceplate had cracked. She thought she had seen the crystalline display wink out. But wouldn’t the electromagnetic pulse have flashed out its circuits? Would the cave, the Hummer itself, have protected it at all?

It hardly mattered. There would be no more satellites, not ever again. No cell phone towers, either. She instantly regretted these thoughts, coming face to face with her own technical ignorance. She was brilliant, yes; it was not a matter for modesty, she simply was. But she had always been meticulously old-fashioned in her French Canadian and gentile way, daddy’s way. There were things she did not want to know because they were “men’s things.” And she was a scientist, yes, but she was a social scientist. Anthropology, sociology, political science. What need had she ever had to understand how an electromagnetic pulse might warp a cell phone’s circuits? The infrastructure of phones, not just phones but the entire modern world, was for lesser individuals than herself to understand. She had higher thoughts.

All of her electronics? They were slaves, they were things. They simply worked , however poorly.

And here we have, still, a very nice military-grade field phone. All right.

She pulled out the bell jar on its sliding tray regardless. Lifting the dome on its oiled hinges, she could see that the phone was and reinforced and camouflaged. It was bulky, at least eight pounds, and spray painted with the codes “TA-838A/TT :: iv.1-2013,” whatever that meant. Clicking the thing on and holding the antiquated receiver to mouth and ear, she listened. Of course there was nothing. No dial tone, not even the pulse of a lost line. But the unit was humming as its batteries were spinning themselves to life.

What the Hell can I do with a phone of all things?

But still, this phone was familiar. For some reason. Resting her head with her fingers steepled at the back of her neck, she closed her eyes and tried to remember. Another world, another day long ago.

“Nice phone, Tom. So very stylish. Surplus City?”

“Something like that.”

“Ah. So if this world ends, we call the next planet. Hopefully collect. Better rates at night. Right?”

“Hey, you’re really funny! No. See, it’s for… a lesser disaster.”

“A lesser disaster? Is this one your ‘military intelligence’ jokes?”

“No, see? Like… like a fire, or earthquake, or pandemic or something.”

“A pandemic is ‘ lesser’ ?”

“Ha. Okay, you’re tired. Slide it back, it’s okay. See, it wouldn’t be any good in a nuclear war, God forbid. You know. I just thought… for Lacie…”

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t —”

“Huh? No, it’s fine. Look, let’s just go, okay?”

Let’s just go.

And here she was. She clicked the field phone off, lowered the dome and pushed it back onto its tray.

She decided, in that moment as the green fluorescents flickered down and died, not to feel anything. Not unless she truly couldn’t help it.

The second aluminum panel door revealed a compact Intel computer, which she harbored even fewer hopes for than she had the useless phone. The third panel stuck on its hinge, but she levered it open with both hands. She cursed as the gauze of a trailing bandage snagged in the door-joint and bit into her tender fingers. Levering the panel open further, she saw a Grundig radio, an ominous-looking technical beast socketed into a conical faraday cage, replete with a headset and a wooden box full of gadgets.