From the Fire III by Kent David Kelly

 
     
    III-1
    THE SLOWING AND THE
MERCILESS
     
    Moist leaves of translucent plastic,
petals of soft and pliant crystal, cast their misted tracers down every
light-touched pane as the left hand of a woman pushed through their entwining
segments, the shivering and bloodless hand of Sophia Ingrid Saint-Germain.
    Sophie’s left arm pushed through to the
shoulder, then her right hand’s fingers spidered in after it, the poise of a
diver committed to the descent. She took a shaky breath, held it in. With her
tongue constricted between her teeth, she braced herself and took one long step
forward. Through the plastic veils she went. Her arms slid free on the other
side, touched by humidity and the other air’s lifeless chill. Her face pushed
through the doorway’s plastic seal, to experience another alien form of touch
entirely — the strange wet plastic of the door, it was silk, it was artificial
skin — while a gunshot sounded from beyond the vault door far behind her.
    She pushed through into the hallway
beyond the Great Room, trying to stop herself from screaming. She fell to the
floor. The bullet had hit home, and Pete’s cry from out of the ladder-shaft was
cut short by yet another gunshot. Sophie could hear only a young man shouting
then — “What the fuck , we needed him! We —” and the other, the huge man:
“Shut up! You’re gone! Get out of here!”
    “Stop!” The girl out there was screaming
at the two men, her voice raw with horror and with pain. “Please, he didn’t do anything! Stop this!”
    Stop.
    Sophie pressed the heels of her bandaged
hands against her ears, pressing in hard until her vision began to star with
beads of scarlet light. Her sobbing drowned out the voices of all of the
survivors, the burning and fallen ones who had tried to break their way into her
locked-down shelter.
    I gave them Pete, he trusted
in me, she thought. Never, never can this be forgiven. I left him
there to die, I ran away. I hate myself. I’m a coward. Worthless. No, more
than even this, she decided. She kept her hands pressing in, she blinked away
her tears. She was not a coward, in leaving Pete to die. She was a traitor.
    She had chosen the future over the
moment, her desperate hope for her own daughter’s survival over the death pleas
of a good and noble man. Pete Henniger had been abducted, tortured and
sacrificed by those of the outside, the shadow people who walked now in the burning
world as wraiths among the ruin.
    A hollow, reedy voice sang to her as
Sophie shut the voices and screams and noises of the world away. She recognized
it at once: the voice of her younger and traumatized sibling who had always
envied her, her beloved sister Patrice. Patrice had died decades ago, her body
crushed and twisted by its impact beneath the angular devastation of a drunk
driver’s truck. She had been the only passenger in her boyfriend’s car that
night. The details had never been shared with Sophie, but she knew — from the
one time that she had seen her father cry — that Patrice had been alive when
the paramedics came, and when the steel jaws had sheared away the pickup’s
window strut to draw her out, the peeling away of the wreckage had caused all
of her pressurized blood to surge forth and to spill away. She had died as she
had lived, opened and frail and strong and unforeseen, a mystery to everyone, a
cipher even to herself.
    Hollowed.
    It was the faltering voice of Patrice
that Sophie had heard when she lost her virginity, and again when she had been
raped against the alley wall of a nightclub in Denver off of Broadway. It was
the tantalizing voice of Patrice that had whispered in her mind all the way
down the aisle, lilies quivering between her hands and a spun sugar of lace and
veil puffed and tufted all around her, hair poised aglow in moistened ringlets,
trembling as her father led her to stand before her Tom. Dead Patrice had
whispered to her, so sweetly:
    Are you sure? Sophie, is he
the one? Sophie, are