From the Fire II Read Online Free PDF Page A

rested, but she did not require sleep. She would need to go to the bathroom soon, and that would mean trapping herself in a tiny corner. But still she resisted this.
    It was no longer merely “the Cage” within her mind, or even the universe. It was a primal limitation, a tripling of strictures upon all three dimensions of the very notion of reality. Here was life-in-death, outside was the endless oblivion. And yet it was so tempting, the longing to go out and to breathe her last, to see what remained of the sky, to die at least standing in the endlessness where there might be red roiling clouds, a rain of ashes and flecks of pulverized bone, perhaps a gentle wind to needle the radioactive poisons beneath her skin ...
    She rose. This line of reasoning needed to end, now.
    She walked to the “southwest” wall, where the work table loomed. She rested her hands against its sheet-metal surface. It creaked ominously in one leg, and several of its bolts complained through grating sounds of the near-shattering impact they had suffered. Two of the brackets on the weak right leg were loose, but it seemed as if the table would hold for awhile longer. She pulled the toppled stool upright, sat down with a groan, and looked to the plated concrete wall set flush with the table’s farther edge.
    There were four aluminum panel doors, each about eighteen inches wide, set into the wall and aligned by rolling racks with the table’s surface. Adrift yet in the last lingering of a dream, flush with urgency, Sophie reached across and slid open the leftmost door.
    Greenish fluorescent lights flickered on in the alcove behind the door. There was a violet Plexiglas bell jar in there, lined with copper mesh, and a boxy, olive-green military field phone was locked there inside it. She almost laughed. A protected phone, how wonderful. And who would she call?
    Looking closer, she could see that there were a series of double-hooked rings on straps along the phone’s back. It was a pack-phone, she realized. Something to carry out when reemerging. Tom had never meant for his family to stay in the shelter for very long.
    But the impossible had happened after all.
    She thought again of her cell phone, trying to remember what Tom had taught her about nuclear airbursts. It was very little. The subject of war, and thermonuclear war precisely, touched in too near upon his taboo subjects of NORAD, the National Security Agency, the supposed underground city beneath Denver International Airport, terror intelligence, and all the rest. She tried to think if the iPhone had been destroyed when she had thrown it. The faceplate had cracked. She thought she had seen the crystalline display wink out. But wouldn’t the electromagnetic pulse have flashed out its circuits? Would the cave, the Hummer itself, have protected it at all?
    It hardly mattered. There would be no more satellites, not ever again. No cell phone towers, either. She instantly regretted these thoughts, coming face to face with her own technical ignorance. She was brilliant, yes; it was not a matter for modesty, she simply was. But she had always been meticulously old-fashioned in her French Canadian and gentile way, daddy’s way. There were things she did not want to know because they were “men’s things.” And she was a scientist, yes, but she was a social scientist. Anthropology, sociology, political science. What need had she ever had to understand how an electromagnetic pulse might warp a cell phone’s circuits? The infrastructure of phones, not just phones but the entire modern world, was for lesser individuals than herself to understand. She had higher thoughts.
    All of her electronics? They were slaves, they were things. They simply worked , however poorly.
    And here we have, still, a very nice military-grade field phone. All right.
    She pulled out the bell jar on its sliding tray regardless. Lifting the dome on its oiled hinges, she could see that the phone was and reinforced and