Read From the Fire for Free Online Page B

casting a garish light directly against the cave wall. Back behind her, outside, the airburst fireball flickered the mirrors once more, and the windows all went dark again. Thousands more nuclear warheads were soon to fall. The real strike, the ground strike, would come down now in mere minutes, with no defense systems or aircraft operational to stop them.
    Everyone in Black Hawk would burn. The world.
    As if disembodied, thinking but unable to act, trembling there with vomit dripping down her silk blouse and down her ankles, Sophie wondered: if millions of people were to scream at once, all crouched down in their basements and their office building shelters, would she be able to hear it there, miles away?
    Soon.
    Soon, soon, soon.
    No time
    no time no time
    Sophie struck herself, her unfeeling thigh, her face. She shook the steering wheel in a frenzy, grunting and sobbing, as if doing so would wake her from the nightmare. A thought was racing like fire inside of her, if she could only concentrate for a moment, hear it, think instead of just feeling this terrible immediacy of panic —
    Get inside
    get inside the shelter
    get get in
    nnnnnnnnnn
    She opened the driver’s door, clicked out of the seatbelt and tumbled down onto the frigid and muddy cave floor. Somehow she had turned off the ignition—but when?—and the keys were clutched in her right hand, the hand that was shaking madly and angled like some strange piece of ivory that was no longer a part of her. Light, an accursed and incredibly hot sheet of crimson light, was shivering through the waterfall from outside and turning the cave into a horrid striped tangle of light and blindness.
    She gagged on the exhaust trapped in the cave. She was still on the ground. Everything was sideways, and cold mud was getting into her mouth and filling up her hair.
    She crawled up on all fours, looked around frantically for the shelter’s entrance, and she could see the pale green glo-lites along the cave floor, their feeble and ceaseless radiance made sickly by the burning fires of the roiling sky outside.
    Shelter!
    She was soaked, freezing, burning, sweating, covered in filth and vomit and tangled up in the door-torn remnant of her skirt. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled for the hidden hollow that led in deep to the shelter’s ladder, guided only by the glo-lites themselves. The scarlet light and unearthly heat burned away behind her.
    There were air shafts piped over her head, vents and grills and tubes, and a huge artificial square in the left cave wall, half-covered by a muddy blue plastic tarp. Yanking the tarp, popping its fringe out of shower-curtain loops, Sophie saw the crude narrow gash in the rock which led down into the shelter far below.
    She was nearly in darkness then, and another wave of thunder rose and tumbled down through the canyon far behind her. Was that the wave of another nuclear detonation in the atmosphere, another airburst, just now reaching her from dozens or hundreds of miles away? Which city had just been blacked out and presaged for destruction? Laramie? Boulder? What if this was being repeated over every city in the nation, every military base, every city in the world?
    Where were Mitch and Lacie?
    Tom?
    She kicked the cold metal activator plate near the floor, encircled with its own emerald ring of glo-lites. Her pupils shrank and her eyes filled with stinging tears as the fluorescent grid lights along the left wall pulsed on, the ones most needing replacement flickering crazily before burning with a false, unwarming light. She edged deeper into the hollow. The claustrophobic shaft was just three feet in front of her, its dripping and icy aluminum ladder leading down into the dark. The oval lights inset between the ladder’s rungs flicked on one at a time, down and down, and somewhere deep behind walls of stone a generator was humming on.
    Did it always run? Had she just activated it?
    Sophie crawled to the ladder, nearly slipped head-first