Kent Kelly - End of Days

Soon.

Soon, soon, soon.

No time

no time no time

Sophie struck herself, her unfeeling thigh, her face. She shook the steering wheel in a frenzy, grunting and sobbing, as if doing so would wake her from the nightmare. A thought was racing like fire inside of her, if she could only concentrate for a moment, hear it, think instead of just feeling this terrible immediacy of panic—

Get inside

get inside the shelter

get get in

nnnnnnnnnn

She opened the driver’s door, clicked out of the seatbelt and tumbled down onto the frigid and muddy cave floor. Somehow she had turned off the ignition—but when?—and the keys were clutched in her right hand, the hand that was shaking madly and angled like some strange piece of ivory that was no longer a part of her. Light, an accursed and incredibly hot sheet of crimson light, was shivering through the waterfall from outside and turning the cave into a horrid striped tangle of light and blindness.

She gagged on the exhaust trapped in the cave. She was still on the ground. Everything was sideways, and cold mud was getting into her mouth and filling up her hair.

She crawled up on all fours, looked around frantically for the shelter’s entrance, and she could see the pale green glo-lites along the cave floor, their feeble and ceaseless radiance made sickly by the burning fires of the roiling sky outside.

Shelter!

She was soaked, freezing, burning, sweating, covered in filth and vomit and tangled up in the door-torn remnant of her skirt. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled for the hidden hollow that led in deep to the shelter’s ladder, guided only by the glo-lites themselves. The scarlet light and unearthly heat burned away behind her.

There were air shafts piped over her head, vents and grills and tubes, and a huge artificial square in the left cave wall, half-covered by a muddy blue plastic tarp. Yanking the tarp, popping its fringe out of shower-curtain loops, Sophie saw the crude narrow gash in the rock which led down into the shelter far below.

She was nearly in darkness then, and another wave of thunder rose and tumbled down through the canyon far behind her. Was that the wave of another nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, another airburst, just now reaching her from dozens or hundreds of miles away? Which city had just been blacked out and presaged for destruction? Laramie? Boulder? What if this was being repeated over every city in the nation, every military base, every city in the world?

Where were Mitch and Lacie?

Tom?

She kicked the cold metal activator plate near the floor, encircled with its own emerald ring of glo-lites. Her pupils shrank and her eyes filled with stinging tears as the fluorescent grid lights along the left wall pulsed on, the ones most needing replacement flickering crazily before burning with a false, unwarming light. She edged deeper into the hollow. The claustrophobic shaft was just three feet in front of her, its dripping and icy aluminum ladder leading down into the dark. The oval lights inset between the ladder’s rungs flicked on one at a time, down and down, and somewhere deep behind walls of stone a generator was humming on.

Did it always run? Had she just activated it?

Sophie crawled to the ladder, nearly slipped head-first into the shaft. It was far, far deeper than she remembered. She righted herself, slipped with her bare foot onto a low rung and caught herself with her other foot kicking and curling, Get down, down, she looped her elbows into the ladder, coughed vomit, began to climb down into the shelter’s entryway.

She fell off the ladder near the bottom, dropped six inches and tilted into the shaft wall.

Seconds later, shivering so hard that she could barely control her arms and legs, Sophie hunched down upon the landing in front of the steel-plated vault door. Her toes curled around the drainage grill that was gurgling with frigid water at her feet.

She spun the door’s auto-locking wheel, her hands slipping off the condensation droplets, beads of water stuck between the grooves of the wheel’s inner rubber ring. The wheel squealed, spun, stuttered and then jammed.

No!

She pushed harder in the opposite direction, then counter-clockwise again. The wheel jammed in the same position with an angry screeching of hidden gears.

Sophie screamed, throwing all of her weight into the wheel. Come on! Harder.

Something gave way, little ice chips sprinkled down into the grating. She stumbled off her feet into the wall again as a hydraulic whine took over and the wheel spun itself counter-clockwise with a hiss and a purr, rolling the vault door inward on unseen hinges. Mist sheeted up as the warmer, stale air inside the shelter puffed out.

Sophie ran into the tiny entry. The narrow inside there smelled sterile, a mixture of rubber and cleaning solution and dead air. Clang. The door thudded and clanked shut behind her, seals pressurized. Something electronic beeped twice and gave a stuttering whirr, then clicked back into place. Sophie barely registered a frantic thought — How do I get back out? — and the wheel spun itself back in the other direction.

Echoing tremors of metal on metal. Silence.

As Sophie’s eardrums popped and she worked her jaw, new noises swirled up in every direction. The noise was sudden and jarring, unmuffled generators humming, fuses flitting click-click as light banks began to spark, plastic streamers somewhere fluttering where a vent was spilling out new air, and something metal like a wrench or a screwdriver was clattering up on one of the utility shelves. Whatever it was, it fell off a vibrating surface and clanged onto the concrete floor in the farther room.

Warmth began to puff in tangible currents around the shelter. There was the whisper of whirring air, a bitter taste of dust, the shunting of power and twinkling of lights in aluminum cages as Sophie’s entering spun a hundred things into motion.

Air, light, oh thank God…

Sophie hugged herself, bent over as the first cramp of nausea crawled through her belly and down into her legs.

I remember now.

Some.

There’s beds, beds for three, three of us…?

No. I. Me.

And how long?

How long will I be alone here?

She fought to regain herself, to understand. Something was still happening. The floor rumbled.

Stone dust peppered down from between the plates in the low and claustrophobic ceiling just above her head. She heard her father’s voice again, “Hon, don’t you dare look at the sky!” so loudly that she covered her ears.

Breathing in furtive gasps of barely-controlled panic, Sophie followed the narrow entry tunnel. It edged off to the left, its angle engineered by Tom so that the vault door could be defended if need be. There were submachine guns in here, somewhere. Hunting rifles. Assault rifles. Despite Tom’s repeated urgings, she had refused to ever learn just how to fire them.

She passed through the second angle of the passage, a lead-sheeted narrow which Tom had called the radiation trap, and came to the shelter’s true entry at last. She pushed through a doubled veil of hanging strips of lead, plated tiles locked away in a thick plastic curtain. Beyond the lead curtain was hung a second tapestry of translucent vinyl strips, and the welcoming ice-blue light of sanctuary glowed out from behind it.

There was a deep niche in the concrete wall, with another strip covering its hollow. Sophie peered into the niche and saw an red aluminum flashlight, socketed in its charger. Despite the ceiling lights and the assurance of the shelter’s many automated systems, Sophie reached in, grabbed the chilly flashlight, and flicked it on. She leashed its plastic ribbon onto her wrist, just as Tom had taught her.