From the Fire III by Kelly Kent David

Author:Kelly, Kent David [Kelly, Kent David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wonderland Imprints
Published: 2012-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

As the “days” numbly rolled past and Sophie explored every corner of the shelter, she accomplished many things. She prioritized the binders and studied as much of Tom’s bewildering reams of information as she could. She found herself neck-deep in perplexing manifests on seed recovery, fecal reclamation, ventilation pressure control, anti-depressive memorization techniques and self-administered emergency abdominal surgery.

How much of it was idiocy, which isolate piece of trivia would one day save her life?

What she had not done, however was to turn the radio on ever again. With the beast-people still out there, the world was a far less deadened thing than she had first allowed herself to believe. She feared that if she were to listen to that static drone — especially the takk-takking static pulse which was particular to Mitch’s private frequency, more damning and beguiling to her than the very fruits of Tantalus — she would not be able to resist trying to call Mitch again. After all, I know how now. And whenever the desire to listen in and to wait for her daughter’s protector to be on the airwaves became almost unbearable, she would chant to herself in a sing-song, uneasy whisper:

“Caution. Channel not secure. We are in shelter. Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where? Have car. Can’t get out. Soph, come in three week. Three weeks, if you can. Love you. She’s alive.”

After several minutes, minutes taut with restrained tears and near to rupture, the need to listen for Mitch’s coded tapping would finally pass.

Channel not secure.

Who else was out there?

She was tempted to listen again to the frantic survivors she had heard on the NOAA band for Fort Morgan. But as the days dredged their way around her senses, her needs changed, her focus changed. She changed. The reading, the preparation, the suit-ups and gun lessons and tallies of matches and body bags in the Material Room, the weight lifting, the stitch-slicing and scab-pulling, all of these rote and mundane tasks became as one, like gravity-afflicted constellations in-swarming upon themselves as burning silhouettes to one sole and all-consuming universe, this:

Lacie is out there. Crying for you. She needs you.

Embracing this silent mantra, she did not feel as horrifically alone as she thought she might. She did feel the need to lock the medicine cabinet and to hide the key-ring from herself at the bottom of the second freezer. But the guns remained in their place, as did the untouched computer and the crumpled picture of a grinning three-year-old Lacie, replete with her toothy smears of chocolate pudding.

Sophie drove the demons away by song, by murmur, by reading everything that she could find.

Throughout all of this time, she slept on the one bunk that had clearly been meant for her. The farther one, the one with the unkempt pile of bed sheets and the tangle of pillows which marked Tom’s last sleepless night alone there, she wanted to touch that, yes. And yet, she refused herself this final gesture of intimate isolation.

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