It only takes a moment for the meaning to register. I turn my head to the smoke rising out of the apartment. The tomb. All of them in there, icing over by now. His brothers. I look back at him and he’s going to sleep. You going to answer me? I say, my voice trembling. Don’t you fucking die, I say. Tell me where they are. Russell and Ernest, I yell, tears that I don’t need, wasting from my eyes, warm against everything else that’s dead and cold. I can’t hold it back and I start to cry, but anger takes over quickly, and I smack his face again, trying to keep him from going to sleep, from dying, from taking with him where Ernest is. Russell is.
Say something! I say. But he’s gone. No more voice. No more chest rise and fall. Just a body. Warm meat in the middle of the road, and the white already starting to cover it. Damn it, I say softly, and Voley whimpers. He changes his paws and looks at me confusedly, wondering why we’re staying out here so long, letting ourselves die too. Okay boy, come on, I say calmly, hiding that I don’t know where we’re going. If we can’t get out of the wind—get inside the Nuke building—and have to turn back, we’ll freeze. But I don’t want to go back to the fire. I don’t want to see them, even from the corner of my eye. And then I forget everything and grab the end of the snow walker’s rain suit and lift it up. I see pockets and I dig with my right hand. Nothing in the first. I dive into the other. It’s warm inside and then there’s cold metal. I grab it and pull it out. Bronze keys. I hold them up to the sky. Two of them on a small silver ring. My eyes turn down the long road to the industrial building, and then I see the clouds—faint puffs rising from a thin smoke stack. Barely visible. We’ve been too far away until now. But it’s there. A tiny trail of smoke. Something burning in there. Warmth. And now we have a way inside.
With the rifle and the keys, I start back along the road, leaving red beard to be buried. We’re almost there, I tell Voley, even though I know it’s going to take another half hour. We start our slow steps, and I become Ernest. Voley gets behind me. The wind kicks up and pierces my face, blowing snow into my eyes and keeping them mostly shut, while I pull the lead weight of my thigh up out of the frozen quicksand and use my anger to send the other leg in. The old motion returns to me, and the single mind that I felt when we crossed the last valley in the mountains. I’d done it then behind Ernest, but it’s me. Now I’m him. That’s all there is.
Every few minutes I look up at the building to see how much closer it’s getting and then I look back at Voley to see if he’s okay. I don’t hear whining and he’s walking normal, the warmth of moving keeping us alive now. The slow and steady crawl. My imagination mixes with my eyes as I see the wide open space of white—the emptiness after we pass the last apartments. Behind us, I can’t see the smoke rising from the fire anymore. I can’t even see the body of red beard. Just white and gray and the frosted cement buildings. The thousand dead eyes staring blankly at the Rockies. And to my sides is a plain of fog and nothingness, endlessly stretching away into the peaks that I tell myself are still out there, hidden behind the blank. I see wolves and other animals watching me, waiting for me to slip, so that they can come. They haven’t eaten in days. They’re twice the size of Voley, and they work in packs, hunting together. My mind rationalizes it all, because we’ve seen the fox. And if that’s here, the wolves are here too. Waiting. Any sign of weakness. My right hand holds the rifle up so I can look it over. When I was Indianapolis, I shot one once. A sniper rifle. There were hundreds of looters, and Russell and I were camping on the roofs then. They came in small waves, but it wasn’t my shots that hit them. I didn’t do shit. I’ve never been a good shot. Not anything other than the close range shots I’ve had since Wyoming. But there had been a whole lot of us on top of the city that day, fending them off. They weren’t face eaters. They’re starving and they’ll take everything we’ve got, Russell had said. And that makes them just as dangerous as a face eater. I try to remember the rifle from the roof, all those years ago, and if this one could be any different. It’s light and it rises easily to my eye. I open wide and look down the scope. I can’t believe how far I can see. I pause for a moment and Voley keeps going. He stops where the pack is unbroken, wondering why I have stopped doing my job. The white makes the zoom difficult. Hard to tell where anything really is. It’s all blurry but then I hit the buildings. Up ahead, the tower and the industrial building are looming like gray and tan and white monsters. They look like immortal gods, unaffected by the driving wind and snow and anything that might ever come. They must have stood that way against the rain too. And I have the keys to the monster.
I raise the scope a little bit and find the top of the industrial building. The narrow chute that’s releasing the clumping white smoke fills the crosshairs. Each clump starts up into the air transparently, and then, in the next moment, balls like a wad of cotton in the air, fattening, and then too fat, dissolves into nothing. I almost want to turn around and look back at red beard and see if he’s still there, in case he really wasn’t dead, but I don’t. I know he’s dead. There’s no sense in imagining that he’s stalking me. And I can’t waste any more time with imagination. I lower the rifle and start to move again, still warm enough that it’s no struggle. At least I can use the thing if I have to. It’s no different from the one in Indianapolis. And then, I do my best series of hops to catch up to Voley, who has anxiously tried to start his own path toward the tower.
I don’t look up again until I’m practically underneath the windows of the industrial building. I grab my knees and bend over. A sharp knife is cutting through my stomach and I clench my muscles to try to stop the pain. My breathing is short and fast and I feel like I might pass out, but something wakes me up again. A sensation of pain in my hand. I’m gripping the rifle so hard that my right hand’s cuts have reopened, the slices from the glass knife. New red is coming through the gloves. Voley watches me in confusion, hoping we’re finally getting out of the snow. His entire body is white speckled with brown, and he shakes again and again, but hardly any of it comes off. What he does manage to shake free covers him again in the next moment. We’re almost in, come on, I say, and we push up to the building wall. I start to search the front for the door, praying it’s not buried. There is a block of windows above me that goes up about four floors. I see the front door, off to the left. It has the same water-tight frame that the apartment building had. Part of the structure above the roof keeps going, like its rising on stilts, until there’s a wide rectangular room with windows in it. Like some kind of lookout tower, a secret fifth floor. Behind that is the smoke. Everything is gray and white except for a small narrow plaque above the entrance. We make our way over, climbing up and then down into snow that someone’s been digging out to keep the door free. We sink down until we’re right on the doorstep. Nothing to dig out. I read the plaque overhead: New Saint Vrain Nuclear Control Station – East Gate Compound.
Something tells me I’m in the heart of the invisible death. That I’m breathing it in, and that even the fog I’m breathing out isn’t the same color anymore. It’s already eating away at my insides. But then I think of red beard, and that he seemed okay. Except for his limp. And the others—his brothers. They didn’t seem affected. They all must have been living here for a while. I forget everything else when I see the keyhole—smooth and brass. The key fits and turns. I pull the handle and the door slides open like magic. The whine of the wind dies the moment we step inside. Voley shakes and shakes again, and this time, the snow starts to stay off. I look around at the new darkness, and shut the door behind us.
The space feels enormous, like a wide open cavern of metal rods and staircases. Two doors lead off to some other room. The ground is snowless, and Voley runs forward, detecting scents that the outside kept from him. A row of dead computers lines one of the walls at the other side of the room. Pictures of high windows reflect on the screens, the endless see-through ceiling above me. And on the second floor, above our heads through the grating, light beams wander down. Everything in here is half visib
le, like an in between world. But there is a lived in smell. And already, I can feel warmth coming from somewhere deep in this place.
It’s dead silent except for Voley’s nails on the cement floor. When I take a step, the clop reverberates everywhere. Part of me knows that someone is listening. The thought that I’m going to stumble across Ernest’s body triggers bloody pictures in my mind. I start to sniff the air like Voley is, trying to detect rotting bodies, the putrid decay I’ve smelled too many times. But the air here is stale and warm. I take a few steps in and begin the search, to find anything at all. I have to trust that we came all this way for supplies, and not to find more bodies—food, fuel, more papers, any kind of history about what the hell happened here. I hear a creaking sound, and then another, and it stops altogether and fades to silence. It came from one of the far doors, the only portals that lead deeper into this cave, unless I take the metal stairs into the unending ceiling. I check Voley because he’ll have heard it too, but he’s on the ground, wandering off the other way toward some cabinet shelves. Maybe I hallucinated it. But then I convince myself it’s the building. It’s the frames. Old and loose and under too much weight. Beams that weren’t meant to hold this kind of snow. And the whole place will fall down on us any second. Come on, boy, I tell Voley, and we walk.
Chapter 13
The darkness and the vastness of the Nuke heart surround us and make us slow and cautious—metal skeletons and girders and ceiling beams are question marks hanging in each direction. I walk over to the computers and try to find buttons on them, imagining that the nuclear power might still be running. I find a few circles that protrude and hit them repeatedly but nothing happens. No magic answer. A desk is filled with paper and clutter and I lift a piece up to read, anxious to find something, a clue, anything new about the evacuation. I can barely see because there’s barely any light, so I walk around to catch a thin ray coming down from a second story window. I read what’s written on the paper and then do it again because I can’t make any sense out of it. It’s all code, a bunch of numbers. I think that somehow Dusty would have known what it meant. Maybe even been able to figure out how to get these computers working again. Maybe on battery power. But I shut the thought out just as soon as it comes. I place the rifle down on one of the desks—it looks like it must have been a help desk in some ancient past—and I stop to examine more papers. Then I pause and something familiar runs into my brain like electricity. It’s the same smell from the apartment—fish or oil or something. A strange chemical scent. I look at Voley like he’ll notice it too and sign to me where it’s coming from, but he doesn’t. I can’t tell where or what it is. I drop the papers and roam to the depths of the dark corners but I can’t see anything and the smell is the same everywhere. The clear poison air. I take my pistols out of my pockets and watch Voley investigate, letting him lead me to the far side of the room where three shafts of dim light filter down from the high windows. It looks like there is a door above. I see it’s rectangular rise, right through the grated floor overhead. Voley sniffs to the end of the room and back and I find more papers on another desk. I pick them up in case any of them have something I can read. They’re all the same nonsense, but then I notice something I can make sense of. They all have tiny print along the bottom. A day. The paper in my hand says May 20th. I keep searching faster, throwing more on the floor, crumpling them into balls and chucking them, looking for some sign of a date after the evacuation, proof that this place kept going, that some stayed behind. Each paper comes up earlier and earlier though, all the way back to January. And what May was it? I hit myself. I hadn’t thought of that. Some May from years ago. When it rained here. Before snow walkers lived here, the ghosts of this settlement. But where did Leadville go?
As I’m about to give up looking through the papers, there’s a new noise. This time it’s coming from above. It’s the opening of the door. I crouch to the floor and crunch my way across the wadded papers. I scurry behind the desk and glance up. All I can see are dark rails running in a long line across the whole ceiling. And then I hear someone walk through the door. Each step sounding through the Nuke body like dynamite.
The only thing I can think about is Voley. He’s across from me on the other side of the room. If I call to him the person above will hear me. And if I don’t, they might see him. Shoot him on sight. The image of Voley getting shot forms in my head. The last piece of Dusty. And then I think of the rifle I left out on the desk. They’ll see it all from up there and I’m screwed no matter what. The footsteps continue, no slower and no faster.
Voley hears it too now and he turns and growls. Without thinking I jolt forward, my arms raised, searching for the dark form that I know is walking above us. I need a target. As soon as my head rises past the desk I see: it’s a woman. A jacket and heavy pants, her hood down and her hair running past her shoulders. I take a slow step, cock my eye across the room to see Voley ready to charge up the steps, and then I look at her again. She’s watching Voley, and as my feet pound the floor to get a clearer shot, she swings her head around, trying to see what else has invaded her home. As she sees me it’s too late and I spring out. I don’t know if my bullets will go through the grating and hit her, but my gut stops me from firing when I see both of her hands are empty.
“Don’t Move!” I shout. “Move and you die!” I sidestep out around the base of the metal stairs and tell Voley it’s okay, to calm down. Hands up so I can see them, I say. I ask who else is here, because it makes sense now that the first noise I heard was someone else, behind one of the two doors on the first floor, and they’ll try to come up behind me and shoot us in the back. But I can’t keep my eyes on two directions at once, and I don’t hear any more noises. She doesn’t say a word, just raises her hands slowly. She watches me, studying my face, like I shouldn’t be possible. A teenage girl and a dog, phantoms from the white mountains, invading to kill her. I see it all written on her face. Higher, I say, and she cooperates, raising her hands up. They start to tremble and I tell her to relax as I edge my way onto the bottom stairs. My brain runs in circles, asking why I’m not shooting right away. No risk is worth it, kill her. And half of me really does want to pull the trigger, gun her dead like red beard. Search her pockets, and let them talk for her. But I remember red beard. And how he couldn’t answer me. And how much I need her to answer my questions because they’re all I have now. My heart flutters to hope again, that maybe she does know something. I’ll make her tell me everything. She moves her foot and steps into the light and I curse at her and tell her to stay still or I’ll blow her chest in. I keep both guns long and stretched like swords, plain in front of her. Why would she move? Her trembling hands and face must all be an act. One more move without my permission and I shoot. Voley senses the frustration in my rising voice. He growls to let me know he’s working things out with me. That he has my back. Good boy, I tell him. I don’t look at him but I hear him walk up to my legs. She has four eyes on her now.
Just don’t shoot, I’m not going to move. You’ve got to help me get out of here, she says. Her voice is wobbly. I have a flash about how Russell would handle this, and I think he’d probably shoot her in the leg. Keep her downed, and then question her. I aim one of my guns at her leg, ready to fire. I almost pull the trigger and then second guess myself, thinking it might be too loud. If there are others, maybe they’ll come. In either case, she’s a liar. From wherever in this deep, dark building she came, she isn’t looking to escape. I stare up from the bottom of the stairs, aiming again at her chest. How many others are here? I ask.
Just one other. He’s hurt though. Tied to the chair.
Everything in me freezes up. Black beard? I ask. She nods her head. Ernest is here. Still alive. They kept him alive. Who else? I yell. Something happened, she says. They all went out. They could be back any minute, she says. I tell her if she doesn’t want to die, that she should tell me everything that’s going on here. That I know she’s lying to me. She tells me that’s it, just
the guy who’s hurt and the others, but they’re all out in the snow. Take me to him, I order her. Slowly, hands high. She starts down the stairs toward me and I yell for her to move slower because her speed jumps for a second on the steps. She says the others could be back and we have to get out of here. I ignore her, keeping it to myself that they’re all dead. I back up as she reaches the floor and I let her pass by. I calm Voley enough so that he doesn’t jump on her, and she starts toward the two doors at the far end. I heard something from there, was it him? She turns slowly and looks at me, nods her head. If it’s anyone else, even if they shoot me dead, my dying breath will be to put two into your back, you understand? She nods again. Are you sure you want to take us this way? I ask. She says yes and if I want to see him, this is the way. And again she says there’s not a lot of time. Then we move on to the door.
The Snow (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 12