From the Fire IV

From the Fire IV Read Free

Book: From the Fire IV Read Free
Author: Kent David Kelly
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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

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