Kent Kelly - End of Days

She veered left and then right and corrected again. Was she in shock? Her hands and feet were performing, she knew the road by heart from all the times Tom had coaxed or even guilted her into making the drive with him to see his latest completed work on the cave and the survival shelter far below. He was always good-natured about it, and his skills were nothing short of incredible. And he was always so proud when she expressed genuine admiration for his vision and his gifts, the construction, the manuals, the radios, the water, everything; but she could never keep a confused and upturned lilt from the ends of her welcomed words, the words he so longed for. “Oh, Tom, it’s just… wow . It’s overwhelming. It’s… wonderful?”

And he would always furrow his brow, that brief twinge of genuine hurt before his amiable grin could wash all of his secret thoughts away.

“I’m glad,” he would say. “I’m glad you’re starting to see, how important this is to me.”

But whenever she ventured too near to the taboo subjects of their relationship — the National Security Agency, his work, the personal beliefs and sights and sounds which had made him so fervently spend millions of their dollars and thousands of hours on the shelter, always wasting so much for the shelter — his grin would fade and he’d take her by the elbow and offer to drive her back down Fairburn Mountain. Each trip into the cave and its secret shelter, each more revealing and compelling and fascinating in all he had accomplished, each journey up the mountain had ended in this way.

Always, he was hoping. Hurting. Hoping that I would understand, it was time. It was coming. Always. This is always, this is zero day.

She would joke with him about watching that survivalist show on the National Geographic Channel. It was toying with his mind, most men his age were just trying to pick up girls in their rebuilt Corvettes by forty. He would chide her about her Starbucks addiction; she would gamely counter, pointing out that not all fly-fishing poles cost six hundred dollars, only the ones he was entranced by. Such taste! The jokes would always be the same on the way out of the cave and back to the car, but the sincerity, the affection behind their jibes were always resonant and pure.

She loved him. She did. And Lacie, once an idea feared by Tom and later by she herself, a lovely child , the two of them as one, had in their frail touching of faith become everything to her. Oh, she did love her daughter, and Tom, forevermore.

“Twelve minutes and thirty-eight seconds…”

Very near to the shelter now.

Another curve, a fork on the road. Keep right. Asphalt still damaged and rippling with another winter’s freeze and melt and waver, the earth rolling there beneath her wheels in slow and endless contortions, the winter-teethed road now all her own. Surely there would be almost no one on that road until the shelter, perhaps one more car and then never another.

Never another…

A few more rays of sun cast themselves in weightless and beautiful slices of gold upon the meadows far down the mountainside, another gust of wind and the rays of light were lost again.

Another. Never.

Sophie caught a glimpse of her own eyes in the windshield’s reflection before the sunlight could fully fade, and the unexpected vision startled her with its plain and merciless flicker of her flawed beauty. It was always so strange to see herself unexpectedly, to begin to subconsciously criticize that stranger’s features before the realization cast itself upon her reason in its awareness and its shame: You are aging, you are looking at yourself. You are you.

The woman there upon the glass was pale and thin, even bony in a way, with a bit of a sag to her neck and a deep crease at the right where she tucked her chin against her shoulder when she slept. Those nights, she would tilt her head away from Tom, her head facing the bedroom doorway, ready to hear baby Lacie’s cries and to leap up from bed to feed baby before Tom could awaken to the little pleading screams. Even now, when Lacie was six and all the bed monsters were chased away into dustless corners of memory, Lacie still wanted mommy to get her a glass of water in the night, to comfort her when the thunder came.

Then Sophie’s moment, You are looking at yourself, you are you, ended in recognition and the afterimage of her reflection imprinted itself upon the road. Lightning coursed the sky. She gazed straight ahead as the road narrowed and the cliff-wall to one side grew higher on.

Drive faster.

She could not un-see the woman, entirely detached from what Sophie had once believed herself to be. She had seen a study in grief, a stricture of jaw, controlled panic, trembling lip, but surely that wasn’t her . That woman looked cruel, uncaring. And Sophie, did she not love?

Was this some last desperate bid by her mind to hold onto its sanity? Who was she, after all? The answer to that question would never matter. She was Self, Sophie, Her Own Being, a prisoner in a stranger’s body that was acting of its own will. Her body, it was making her drive faster. Very close now.

Get to the shelter

get to the shelter

get to

get

“Fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds…”

A left here. Slow down, don’t stop. Keep traction. Take the left here.

Slower, by necessity. The Hummer jolted as she hit a pothole which certainly hadn’t been there last fall, and the pines were now on both sides again and the setting sun lost far behind her. The road narrowed and the rains caused little rivulets to trickle down the boulders along her right.

She was supposed to be grieving for someone. Someone…

Did someone die? Who was it? What had happened?

A voice broken open and sighed, “Tom.”

Was that anguished voice her own?

A sob wracked her shoulders and contracted her gut, a gasp as she inhaled and the body compelled the mind not to register anything more than the road itself, and rain. And time, zero, zero was coming soon.

Time.

The time for grief is later, said a new voice. A voice only in her mind.

Father?

Grieve later, Sophie. This is now. This is life.

“Fifteen minutes and fifty seconds…”

Sophie shook her head. She felt as if she was shaking free of a liquid veil, a cool gauze of serenity laced over the animal panic that was building in her heart, her lungs, her flesh and the shivering tips of the hairs upon her forearms. She trembled and swallowed, her eyes widening as she realized just how far up the Morrison-Kincaid trailhead road she had already gone. How long had she been driving without even registering what was going on?

This is no dream.

The last asphalt stretch of the park service road was far behind her. The ribbed dirt of the road beyond it had turned to slush. She hit a deep, muddy, ice-rimmed pool at thirty-five and the Hummer lurched as she corrected. A huge splashing wave of mud sloshed up over the H4’s hood. The wipers curved and bent under the strain, their micro-motors whirring and straining to clear away the sopping mess. Sophie was forced to slow down once again. A sick feeling tickled under her ribs as the H4 felt like it was drifting across water, the wheels floundering for purchase in the muddy wheel-ruts. The windshield began to clear, just in time for Sophie to see that she was driving into another and deeper puddle that had formed a stream across the entire road. The wipers lost synch as they struggled to scoop away another gloppy torrent of melting snow and slime.