Kent Kelly - The Cage

Gray sheets of tepid water pulsed out of the motorized wall sockets, spraying down onto radiation traps, waterproofed glo-lites, lead-filtered drains, and the head of the shivering woman who lived, Sophia Ingrid St.-Germain.

She could not remember regaining consciousness, or crawling back into the shower nook just beyond the great room of the fallout shelter, or stripping off her soiled clothes. When she awoke to herself in revelation, she found herself huddled down in a corner of the shower, hugging her knees, with the fragile and intermittent gouts of water cascading down on top of her.

She was sobbing. Her vocal cords were raw and she believed she had been crying out someone’s name, but she could not remember.

She knew only that she was alive, that she was real. The shelter had held, despite the earthshaking violence which had cracked the heart of the mountain all around her. Most of the lights she could see out beyond the translucent shower wall were still functional, casting their false sheets of radiance through the falling dust, turning the ashes into gold. One bank of the caged ceiling lights had fallen, its fluorescent tubes shattered out of their sockets and spread like glittering flowers of razor shrapnel upon the concrete. Another light rack swayed gently back and forth in the air just inches above the floor, strung and held by the threads of a frayed and silvery cable. These last lights flickered madly and spun a strobe of shadows around the room, clockwise and pause and back again.

The woman stared. The water kept falling against her fingers, misting back against her throat.

She blinked. It happened , Sophie thought to herself. She did not dare to speak the words, did not yet want to know if she could dare to hear and understand whatever her own voice might mean, a gift made meaningless in a world without other souls for her to confide in.

They really did it. Damn them. It was all too enormous, too unthinkable. One world, and now the world is burning.

Beyond the surging of her blood, outside her mind, she could hear the drops of falling water. But the sound was distant, as if she were adrift beneath the ocean and just about to crest the surface. The delicate bones within her ears ached and sang with a chime-like cadence of phantom sound.

One world ever only , she mused. One world and there is nothing now.

She could also hear and feel the generators humming out there, beyond the seal which led to the unexplored inner chambers. The shower was damaged but it was working, and somehow she had turned it on without remembering what she had done. She lifted her head — a white flash of pain greeted this unwanted dividing of tangled muscles in neck and shoulder — and slowly opened her mouth. Cringing, digging her fingernails into knees, she tilted her head back to the fractured wall-tiles and let herself swallow the falling water.

It was slightly saline, with a taint of grit and perhaps chlorine. Warm, not hot. But the taste of the water began to tell her many things. The water from the tanks was drinkable, the filtration systems and pumps and ultraviolet purifiers must all be operational. Down by the floor, framed in ghost-light against the other side of the glass, a digital display glowed upon a small iPad-like LCD screen to show the water temperature, tank supply, filtration quality and other trivia, things which now were crucial and imperative measures of her survival.

She could read the last nine lines displayed there as she lowered her eyes, lines which were blinking in digital crimson:

SODIUM IODIDE CRYSTAL DETECTOR

RADIOACTIVITY ::

MAXIMUM CONTAINMENT LEVELS ::

GAMMA PENETRATION

SUBSTRATA SAMPLE ANALYSIS ::

M-SIEVERT / HR. :: 482.66 [+++]

(FLUX :: 36.3% [-], DATA INSUFFICIENCY)

DATA CASCADE RELIABILITY :: 87.3% [+]

ERROR CODE :: 3003.1v

And what does that mean? How soon am I going to die?

She lowered her head between her knees, held her breath. The reclaimers churned and thrummed beneath the shower drains, humming and re-cleaning the draining water.

She still could not remember how she had gotten there. After she had descended the ladder and pressurized the vault door, many of the details were still alien to her memory. How had she managed to lift the aluminum shelving off of herself when she had been in danger of being crushed and asphyxiated? How had she survived the blasts at all?

She had no idea.

Hon, you’re wasting warm water, her father’s voice called out to her.

Strange. Was he at the door? She could not see his misted shadow there. Leave some for Patrice. Despite herself, Sophie felt a tiny smile touch her lips.

“Sorry, daddy,” she whispered.

Despite everything, she welcomed the loving sternness in his words. She had only the phantom voices for company now, a chorus of the burning and the dead, the long-lost and the recently departed all singing within her in their own isolate cathedrals of pain and silence. Echoing. She wondered if she would go mad with the sunlit and rising arcs of all those pleading intonations, so many souls all caught and tangled up in her skein of memory, with no one else to ever remember who the voices’ souls had been. Soon, perhaps, she would need to silence them all, to reinstate herself as a lone woman in sole domain over her own prisoned mind.

You, you are all dead. And I? I live on. I am.

And if she could not bear to silence the purest of those voices? Tom, Daddy, Lacie. If she let them reign and sweep her own voice into the darkness and away, which of those souls would she become before the end?

Oh, no. I am myself. She shivered, bracing her feet against the tiles beneath the shower door. Her toes splayed over her view of the display crystal. You need to get up now, or you’re just going to curl up here and die.

“Too scared. I don’t want to,” she whispered.

So sorry, little star. Father again. Up and all heart, and there’s my girl. You need to. Come on, now.

She got up on one knee. Her muscles burned, her arms ached as she tried to lift herself. Her legs refused to give her anything more than the merest hope of rising.

Come on. Authoritarian, then. The patriarch. Soon he would be angry, and then… You’re wasting all the water.

She stared at the floor, as if the firmament and actuality of its porcelain grid could lend her the strength to try what she had failed to do only a moment before.

Get up. She moaned in pain. A whimper. Weak. Whether that was her own thought or her father’s, she never knew.

She tried again. A cry. She was on both knees, then, and her hands were against the door and spreading the mist away. Faint tracers of grit and blood smeared out of her palms against the glass. The display at her knees blinked brighter, droplets trickling down the misted reflections of its face.

However long she had been there, Cowering, weak , she had been filthy when she had crawled inside. Behind her, a single bloody fingerprint showed on the wall between two furtive jets of water. To her left, trails of urine and dirt and feces showed where her feet had been shoved against the farther wall. One of the shower jets was broken and a cone of filth betrayed the geometric shadow where its water should have been running down. Turning, gasping, Sophie found a green bar of soap behind her back, and began to cleanse herself, grimacing every time her shoulders were forced into motion.