From the Fire V by Kent David Kelly

Author:Kent David Kelly [Kelly, Kent David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wonderland Imprints
Published: 2013-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

V-5

THE TOMB OF MANY CIRCLES

With Silas’ guidance, a crossing of the median and the chance revelation of a downed and fire-bleached highway sign (“… TTRACTION – EXIT 255 – MARIANA GOLF COUR …”), Sophie slowly found her way toward the sheltered ruin of Pearson’s Corner Truck Stop, Café and Bakery.

They made their way off the interstate and four-wheeled onto the trash-strewn frontage road, where the wrecks were fewer and the land a little lower. In some places, there were even identifiable remnants of the dead: skulls with faces, shoes, briefcases, leather jackets which had only blackened instead of melted. Bone piles and tire chains littered the byway, festooning the drifts of wind-trapped gravel. Almost-identifiable cars emerged from the blinding smog and the dunes of asphalt, garish silhouettes at the edge of sight. Trash and pieces of debris, aluminum siding and shreds of tire, blew overhead in tumbling gouts, buffeted by black wind.

Once the interstate was left behind, the lower ground gave way to decipherable vestiges and slaughter, the playthings of a recently exhausted Armageddon. After the first impacts over Colorado Springs and NORAD and Denver, survivors had fled along the interstate, bogged down, and taken to the frontage roads and even the fields in a desperate and futile attempt to flee. And then the second-wave missile impact at Loveland, and the end of everything.

There were lines of blackened RVs and burned-out buses, semi trailers, multiple lines of a never-ending traffic jam. “Lanes” through the labyrinth were nothing more than sizable gaps where later fires had gorged their way through, where gas tanks or coal trailers or even entire tankers had exploded. But some of the bigger trucks were almost whole, even readable as effigies of yesterday’s mundanity.

Home Depot, read one truck’s side, Wal Mart said another. United Parcel, Con-Way Transportation, North American Van Lines, Thompson School District …

As Sophie drove, ash-stained trucks loomed up on either side, gray monoliths, pillars in the wasteland tumbled over end.

Silas was sitting up in the back seat, panting, scratching at an open sore over his left knee where the bandage joints had opened. “There,” he said. He scrabbled at the shoulder of Sophie’s suit. “That say?”

Sophie edged the H4 nearer to the half-toppled steel of the highway sign. One panel read “POSTILLON RV PARK,” the other “CAMPION, 60 WEST.” Further back in the gloom shone the pathetic remains of a splintered Sinclair gasoline sign, its green sauropod logo still discernible on the blistered slab of its crackled porcelain face.

“Yeah, down there,” said Silas. His voice was edged with hope, with fervency. “No. Back on. Turn back a little.”

“Back the way we came?”

“Some little, yeah.”

Sophie backed the H4 around in an awkward circle, rounding the collision of an upended Lexus and some kind of blown-out station wagon. And looming out of the darkness there rose a pile of split-open sandbags, tilted in a haphazard cascade like the remnants of a pyramid wreathed in sand. Still standing amidst the drifting ash, a huge tilted sign proclaimed

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