Kent Kelly - End of Days

An incredible roar, the loudest sound she had ever heard, ripped through the mountain and forced its way through widening cracks into the girder-interlaced granite above her head. She could feel her eardrums pop with a blood-inflected squish deep within both sides of her skull. All sound was obliterated while the world shuddered and jolted to the right, replacing her sense of hearing with an eerie, incessant whine of rerouted blood, blood surging in a wild torrent through her veins.

Thrown off her feet, slammed back with arms outstretched and a twisted spine and flung away to one side, Sophie was blown back into the great room’s work table to her right. She rebounded and then was crushed forward into a bank of utility shelves. The aluminum rack crashed over, shelves tilted, and dozens of printout-choked binders flurried out like wounded birds and buried her in a torrent of vinyl and paper. Compact Disc spools tumbled up and cascaded in silver-trailing spirals all around her.

She was crushed, buried.

Blackness and then frantic stripes of fluorescent light flowed over her; she could see the world still shaking out there beyond the shelves, hot shelves which somehow had been piled up on top of her.

The world, still shaking and recoiling unheard, powdering down black dusts and gouts of shrapnel from the mountain’s scorched and twisted heart, fading into a scarlet darkness far away.

Sophie thought, O clarion.

And then there was nothing more.

With a surge of adrenaline and agony, Sophie drew in a frenetic breath. It was like screaming inward, inhaling her own shouts before she could lend them voice. Her lungs filled with concrete dust as she wheezed, coughed, and felt her fingertips spark with trapped blood and pinched-off circulation.

She had no idea what happened next, or how. She just roared and stood up, like a weightlifter heaving a weight that was surely impossible for a mere mortal to ever move.

Muscles tore in her shoulders, her thighs.

Her roar kept building, a breath that depleted every fire within her veins and heart and turned her sight to isolate pinpoints of tilted light. The weight above her moved, and she moved with it.

She merely squatted and stood and the aluminum rack of shelves crashed off of her. Spilled and cracked-opened binders tumbled away from her back and legs. There was a pool of draining urine beneath her, sweat and saliva, but only a little blood. She stood straighter, stumbled, and clutched the tilted work table with one hand.

How did I do that?

Her insides felt like they were crumpling, husks of dehydrated muscle shivering in their hollows along the bone. Her right hip socket cracked back into place as the air in the ball joint squirted out over the cartilage, but she did not hear the pop . She only felt the thrill of pain.

There was only that whining, keening surge of circulating blood within her ears, the silence of the deafened. She cried out, another cascade of soundlessness, but a breath was demanded of her. She took it, her head reeling with the half-seen spectacle of blood-red tracers and fleeting stars. Agony filled her limbs as the blood surged back through her and her heart raced out of control. Electric jolts thrummed up her calves, under her ribs and into her shoulders. Her silk blouse was torn open, buttons popped, her skirt was in shreds and she was drenched in body fluids.

Alive.

Eyes bulging in disbelief, Sophie looked back over her shoulder at the nine-foot-tall aluminum cage of shelves, laying angled and broken on its side.

I moved that. Then, detached, almost clinically: I shouldn’t be able to do that.

The whining in her ears was pulsing now, ringing. She touched her fingers in to either side, there were blood-drops in her ears. Soon there rose a sound of something else, then ringing again, like an ocean tide of waves made of chimes and wind. Slowly she realized that the sound between the whining arcs was her own breathing.

I can hear again. A little.

Standing straight, reeling, Sophie took a deeper breath, and—

Vertigo.

Her arms slowly lifted up into the air, like it was sleepover again and she was playing the “light as a feather” game with Jolynn and Margie and Sara, light as a feather, stiff as a board, catch me, catch me —

What am I thinking? She wondered. And then, worse: Who am I?

She fell to her knees. She convulsed. Her bowels released, she could smell herself.

Can’t breathe.

She lay there, gasping. The floor was thrumming still, somehow, with the massive explosions outside. More? How can there be more?

How long… how long was I…

Her head throbbed, eyes pulsing through light and dark as she looked around. She retched as the stench of her defecation crept up through her sweaty clothing. The great room of the shelter was intact, but hot . Sweltering. She could feel the heat surging through the cracked concrete beneath her body, warming the entire room.

Two of the walls had cracked, framed maps and a bulletin board had fallen out of their bolted sockets onto the work table and the floor. Off in the back rooms, some kind of air conditioner was filling the air with vapor and chemical-tinged moisture, straining and keening into life. Dust was still filtering down, it was pooling on the floor, into the puddle of blood and filth she had left beneath her. Her urine was trickling down a drain.

She tried to say, “Thank God. I’m alive.” But she could not say anything. Her vision faded away.

Lacie. I’m coming.

A light, then. A tunnel. Lacie was there. She was holding her hand back out to mommy, she was running. She was running away.

Lacie my love,

honey no,

stop running.

Stop running away,

for mommy.

Please?

Please wait for me.

Sophie started to run, to run after Lacie, out of her body. Lacie looked back at her, a tragic and poetic smile upon her cherubic face. Golden hair, Tom’s wispy fleece of gold, spread in a wind-spun halo about her face. Somehow, Sophie’s daughter seemed ancient, unfathomably wise. A light around her blossomed brighter.

No! Stay with me. Lacie!

Lacie turned away in tears. Slowly, stuck in the glue-like radiance of the air, Lacie kept running on.

Stay.

Sophie took a faltering breath, and felt something wet, some tangible flesh made all of energy deep inside her snap and squelch back into place. Whatever bodiless part of her had tried to flee, she clutched at it, tapering and squeezing all its threads. She rolled onto her back, brought two closing fists full of “threads” up to her breast, and held that lace of invisible fire, pulling it back inside of her.

Another breath. She opened her eyes.

Think of Lacie. Live for Lacie.

She knew then, she was not going to die. Not as a sacrifice for the hungering White Fire, not on the threshold of Zero Day.

Flesh.

Her thoughts slowly began to coalesce.

This is me, I am me.

This is my body.

I.

Having forced her to stay awake and alert long enough to free herself and to breathe, Sophie’s body at last surrendered the adrenaline surge into a nothingness of exhaustion.

The world is burning now.

She could hear, somewhat. The explosions had turned to silence. The air conditioner growled, something beneath the floor went drip, drip and became a song, a lullaby.