From the Fire IV (2 page)

His head bobbed up.  It was as if he had been sleep-talking, and
now his voice was raw and loud as it rang out back and forth along the shower
tiles.  “Jenny!”

Sophie did not speak.

He cried out again.  “Jenny?”  Pleading this time, searching. 
Trying to touch her face.  Looking for her with eyes closed, and finding a
stranger there.  Then:  “Oh, Lord Gabriel.  Gabriel, forgive.”

And Sophie rose straighter with his body cradled up against her. 
“It’s going to be okay.  It’s okay.”

Silas sobbed, his face trapped between her neck and shoulder. 
Water pooled in the cleft there and took his tears.

There was one last part of him to wash, his face.  Sophie turned
Silas’s head beneath the falling waters, and even as he wept he screamed there
all the more.  She braced his wrists, and pinned him there.  He was easy to
conquer, he was nothing.  There was nothing else she could do.

One patch of flannel, toward the end, pulled itself apart in a
fraying line and fell from him.  It swirled around the drain.

IV-2

THE WORDS
MADE OF CINDER

Seven hours after, perhaps.  Or eight?  Such things no longer
mattered.

Silas shivered, despite his bandages, as Sophie layered another of
Tom’s blankets over his cot.  He opened one of his eyes.

She bent her ear to hear his words, to hold them in her memory. 
If he was going to die she was determined to honor him.  She had failed Peter,
she had tried to do this in her love for Tom, but her one-sided sendings to
those dead men had been matters of solitude.  This man, here, she could watch the
beauty wreath itself and all the life go out of him.  She could speak,
reassure, and she could be there.

Silas was the first survivor, perhaps the only, she could ever
usher to his peace.

As she bent to hear his whisper, she waited.  When it came, it was
soft and urgent and it was this: 
“Damn,
I’m hungry.”

She lifted her head back away from him.  Surprise and a born
affection wrinkled their way up her brow.  She smiled, she cupped her hands
over her mouth and almost laughed.  Silas’s other eye opened, just a sliver of burnished
gold reflecting light.  But this time, he tried and failed to prop himself up
on his elbows.

A look of lackadaisical annoyance appeared upon his face.  It was
a mundane expression, a thing of the luxurious world which had just been savaged
away to nothingness.  It almost looked like he was waiting for a bus that was a
few minutes late, and he was about to tell someone standing next to him what a
piss-off irritation that could be.

The man said to Sophie — with no blame, with an almost
conspiratorial tinge of fellowship — “Hot
damn
lady, this.  Am I hungry
or what?  Feel like shit, sorry.  That’s right, but up and there it is.”

And Sophie laughed at last.  His face softened as he stared at
her, around her, trying to interpret the meaning of his surroundings.  He
seemed to realize that he was not in a hospital.  No, perhaps he was even
somewhere underground.

“How am I here?  Is … she?”  He took the strange white woman’s
hand, his bravado fading away into an earnest purity.  His eyes were wide,
needing.  “Where is Jenny?”

Sophie shook her head.  She leaned in and kissed Silas’s balding
head, just over the bandaged knot in his eyebrow, and he winced.

“I’m sorry, Silas.”

“Told you my name, did I?”  His face changed, the annoyed at the
bus-stop play rising over his too-aware expression once again.  “Well, no
matter.  You and me, for now.  We’ll go find my Jenny in awhile.  Am I right?”

“Of course you are.”

“You bet I am.”  He took in one deep breath.

They sat there, Sophie tracing the line of his head’s shadow on
the pillow with her fingertips.  It seemed wrong, of a sudden, to touch him
against his will.

He is alive.

“Well.”  He swallowed, blinked, stared at the curvature of walls
and the storage ducts hollowed within the ceiling.  Whatever he was going to
say, the utterance of it required that he not look straight into her face. 
“Whatever, see, I might been saying, earlier on to you.  When I meet you, I
remember now.  Gracious of you, bringing me in like that.  I was gone.  What
were you thinking?”

“I was … thinking you might be the last.”

The last person alive I might ever see.

He waved all that away.

“Never you mind,” he said then.  “Bringing a stranger down in here
all like that, it means something.  You can’t be
too
mad at me I
suppose.”

He looked at her then and found her smiling, close to tears.

“I guess I’m not mad at you, Silas.  And good morning.”

“Is it now?”

“I think so.”

“What’s for breakfast?”

A little more of laughter.

* * * * *

Hours earlier, prying away pieces of fabric from Silas’s back with
tweezers and watching the red sheets of blood well up through his sponge-holed
flesh, Sophie had been certain that every moment would be his ending.  As she
worked and cried, she knew that she was holding a death vigil over him.  But
here he was hours after, and although he could not yet fully see her, he was
blinking at the bright fluorescent lights and even trying to smile back at her.

The strange eccentric gentleman, prodding and quiescent, was still
the man entirely.

“So.”  He was gazing at her again then.  Deeply, almost blindly. 
She knew, in that moment, everything that he himself was coming to comprehend. 
Jenny was dead, the world was dead.  It was just the two of them.  If Mitch and
her daughter were ever to be found, perhaps, perhaps … the four of them could
die together.

There was nothing else to hope for.

Silas patted her hand, an old man comforting a girl.  Then he
gripped it, surprisingly strong.  He shook it with emotion. 
“Thank you.”

“You are an angel, Silas.  You came to me before the end.  You
never need to thank me.”  Sophie rose, unguarded.  What was she saying?  The
words were pouring out of her, the urgent knowledge that this was a human who
had suffered out there and came to her.  He was proof, he was the real.  If he
could make it to the shelter, and not be swept away by evil as the others were,
then there might be hope.

Her daughter could still be alive.

She could speak only a little longer.  “Rest now,” she said.

Sophie rose.  She went to turn out one bank of the lights.

His arm raised beneath the blanket.  “Mrs. S.-G.?”  She tilted her
head at this, this curious name for a nice white lady he could not quite yet be
familiar with.  “Let me away to sleep.  But watch over me.  Please don’t go.”

She moved to turn off the light and said softly, “Call me Sophie,
please.  This place is quite small.  I’m right here.”

“All right.”  He almost shrugged, and gave her a brave boy’s smile
against the dark.

His energy had been a façade.  Even as she reached to turn off the
last lights, he faded.  His eyes rolled, his head fell away to one side of the
pillow.

Sophie’s hand froze over the light switch.  She realized,
horribly, that she was checking from a distance to see if he was dead.  But
there he was, fighting sleep.  He blinked his delirium away, he was staring
right through her.

“Dark’s all right.  Makes it easier.  But if I promise to call you
‘Sophie’ once or twice, will you?  Will you talk to me a little while,” he
whispered.  Beneath the blanket, his hand patted the side of the dilapidated
mattress.  “Please.”

She crossed her arms.  She wanted to, she did.  But if he made her
cry she felt as if her entire body would fall apart.

“… All right.”  She could not look directly at him any longer, not
after all that she had seen in cleansing and caring for him.

I want to listen, Silas.  And I want to tell you everything.

There were no social barriers, there was no society.  She was
starved for human contact, for sanity.  Just looking at Silas, a real man, she
could feel the voices of Patrice and her father draining away to somewhere much
deeper inside her.

She clicked the light off.  She walked in nearer.

She poised herself carefully at the foot of his bed, folding her
legs so that she was certain not to touch him.

Just being here, Silas.  No more spider-skin, no more nightmare. 
Just being here, being the miracle you are?  You’ll keep me alive.  I’ll
listen, you just be the wonder that you are.

“There now, sit you down where you like.  It’s good.  Jenny don’t
lie when she tell you, I won’t bite,” he reassured her.  “Good itches, where I
can feel ‘em.  Pain’s deep but it’s not the only.  You’ve got a sure touch,
Mrs. S.-G.”

“Sophie.”

“Right, that’s what I say.  Ain’t no arguing with you, I’m
certain.  You go to medical school, Mrs. S.-G.?”

“Sophie, or I’m leaving you to sleep.”  She smiled.  “If honesty
appeals to you, I did indeed.  University of Colorado doctorate no less, just
for daddy.  And the slim and meager potential for a sliver of his approval.”

“Oh.  And?”

“And I flunked out in my second year and almost got married in a
barefoot wedding up in the Flatirons, just outside of Boulder.  Fell in love
with the mountains, there.  Not so much the man.”

He smiled.  “Damn.”

She shrugged, her eyebrows raised a little.  She almost looked at
him, in that moment, flicking her gaze toward his pillow.  But she was feeling
something she had not felt in an eternity.

What was it?

She was shy.

It was fascinating to realize just how quickly her mind could
return to those emotions, to the gestures and expressions required for the most
primal of togetherness and distance and human communication.

“Almost married to the
wrong
man, you see,” she said then. 
“Not my Tom.”

“Oh, Hell.  Tom?  Who was the first guy, then?”  Silas groaned. 
He coughed, almost admitting the edge of laughter.  But his voice would not
have it.  “Two barefoot bad boys in this story already?  Kind of private, isn’t
it?  You ain’t supposed to tell me
either
of that, till you done caring
for me.”

She did look him in the eye, then.  She couldn’t help it.  “Shush,
you.  I’m confiding.”

“Oh, I’m shushed.”  A wave of pain went through him, something he
could not hide.

Slowly he is dying. 
Sophie
restrained herself from touching him once again.  If she relented, showed him
just how certain she was that he was fading, what would that do to his
miraculous fire?

I cannot let you, Silas.  Don’t leave me.  I cannot let you go.

“So.”  He forced himself to speak and his voice was broken, yet
stronger all the same.  “So, number one.  This Wrong Man.”  Silas licked his
lips.  “Barefoot Not-Tom.  What you do with him?”

“
Do
with him?  Nothing, that’s just it.  He was too much
like daddy, underneath it all in secret.  I realized it, so I ran.  That was
the end of my life in Boulder, but not
the
end.  I commuted to classes a
bit yet, hiding from … from my ex-fiancé all the while.  Crept about campus
after I’d told him I’d be gone.  It was terrible, he kept trying to find me.”

“Oh, you didn’t.”

“Oh, I did.  I even grasped at one last very unenthusiastically
proffered lifeline, from my
very
disappointed father, and I became an
anthropologist, in time.”

Silas frowned, misunderstood.  “No, not that part.”

“Not what?”  Sophie uncrossed her legs.

“Tell me what you guys
did
, I mean not
anything
, but
…” said Silas.  His lips quirked a little.  “Woah-damn.  Listen to me, how rude
was that?”  Then, over a frown:  “But what about that poor guy?  Barefoot Not-Tom,
what you do to get rid of
him
?”

“Why, I introduced him to my worst enemy,” said Sophie.  “Clarice
Carpenter.  Sweet, beautiful young thing.  Exquisite teeth.  Like a horse. 
They were married thirteen years, last I checked.”

“Oh, damn!  Horsie hot girl in the end?  That’s just mean.  Ain’t
no
messing with you now, is there?  Barefoot Not-Tom and a thirteen-year sentence
without parole to boot?  That poor damn girl got
hammered
.  Teach a man
to follow you around.”

Sophie giggled.  Silas cackled, and instantly regretted it.  He
tried to clutch his ribs.

She was off the bed at once.  She knelt before him, one hand upon
his sweat-beaded brow and the other going to the medical kit under the cot’s
metal foreleg.  She felt around for the capped and hidden morphine needle by
touch.  “Hold still.”

“I’m holding.”  He flinched, expecting a needle at any moment.

“Hold
more
still.”

“Like this?”

“Like you can’t talk,” said Sophie.

“Right.”

“Shhh.”

Looking sidelong but not moving, he gave her a pained and
well-studied expression, one which Sophie was quite certain had been formerly
tendered solely for his wife.  He spoke through gritted teeth:  “Well, can I
look
at what you trying to do?”

“Well
sure
you can, if you quiet,” said Sophie, in her best
white-girl-Creole lilt and drawl.  “Woah-damn.”

And Silas tried very hard not to laugh again.  He failed, yet the
needle found its mark.

* * * * *

As the morphine took hold and Silas was fading back, down, into
its icy fingers, they talked and smiled for a little while more.

“I didn’t mean for him to die,” said Sophie.  They both knew who
she was speaking of.  “He was a dear friend.”

“S’all … it’s all right,” said Silas.  His voice was beginning to
slur, a pooling rumble, seeking the edges of a deeper brook flowing down inside
of him.  “I understand, I’m sure that he did too.  He was retired sheriff.  Trying
to help people, making choices led him into bad.  Not your fault.  You good
people, Sophie.”