From the Fire V Read Online Free PDF Page A

of them in greasy tatters, arms
with fingers still outspread, scraps of once-people and their pathetic husks
all blowing on the wind.  Dead blackened and bloated cows in burned-out fields,
and then the town of Gilpin.
    Oh.
    Sped through, mostly ruins but piles of bodies that had been burned ,
not by the White Fire, perhaps with gasoline.
    By whom?
    There are people out there.  They do not want to be seen.
    (Later)
    Sour in my mouth.  Sick to my stomach.
    Siphoned gas from a wreck, Silas watching, coaching.  The suit
resisted spills, but I ruined a shirt and both gloves before I understood what
I was doing.  Helpless!
    We didn’t need the fuel, not yet, but I needed to know how.
    (Again later?)
    First survivors seen.
    Fired at by someone, no hits.  Possibly warning shots.  I almost wanted
to fire back out the window, but at what?  Oh, godless, Patrice.  How dearly I
wanted to.
    Shouting something.  I dared not roll the window down.
    We fled away immediately, pushing vehicles aside.
    ~
    [536.]
    I have promised not to kill myself.  Yes, Silas forced this from
me.
    (Later)
    Violent wind.  A vision, nearly a mile before the smog closed in
again.  Sheltering mountain peaks near to Rollinsville, even some glacial
stashes of snow unmelted upon them.  After everything afire, sacred snow!
    And mud, and filth, and torrents of umber ash.  Gargantuan black
streaks of brutal landslides.  Fierce slices of the wind, hot-frozen, liquid
fog and fire.  These impossible entwinings of the elements, giving only
a glimpse of mountain horizon and stealing it back again.
    But I saw the mountains, the distance.  I wish I had
someone to pray too, I would pray not to see.
    The world is Nihil, oblivion.
    But only that one moment of the miles, the seeing , then
vast sheets of gray and brown windstorms crashing back down and drowning it all
away.
    Yet somehow, the valley west of Rollinsville looks sheltered. 
Some trees, even buildings unburned.  Someone might survive in there.  We
cannot search, we cannot stop.
    We can’t.
    Lacie, you are my only home and I am coming to you now.
    Mommy loves you more than life.
    ~
    [537.]
    Rollinsville, once a rainbow-haloed and bustling village of dirt
roads.  Now, there are hills of molten and cooling glass, all veined through
with mud and upturned stumps of shattered trees.  All turned to slag and taken
by the fire, the firestorm after the strike, or perhaps later.  There is
something left of the wilderness, but wherever there were buildings (besides
the few south I saw earlier), there are only these horrible mounds of
bone and rubber and molten cars.
    Infernal pyres, all burned out, seemingly long ago.
    No survivors.
    ~
    (Day 2 continued?)
    [538.]
    Did I write of this?
    Forced off 119 for some miles, onto Old Stagecoach.
    North, Manchester Lake, shallow but still of water.  There was a
boat drifting out there bobbing up and down.  But we could not see anyone. 
Pieces of wreckage and bed-sheets floating on a muddied scarlet pool.
    A floating baby.  I whispered this to Silas, he could not rise to
see.  He insisted a body would have sunk, it must have been another doll.
    It must have been.
    (Later)
    On 119 again, navigating the piles of cars around the Sayle Road
junction, a tire-puddled and scorched-out labyrinth of un-survival stories
never to be told.
    Soon after that oh Tom, my love, a moment you would have loved — a
wild wind, then:  the startling beauty of the faded and crimson Sun (!!)
breaking through over the lake, and then lost again.
    I never believed I would see the sun again.
    Remembering love.  Hiking, waterfalls.
    Do you remember?
    Memories and bittersweet.
    ~
    [539.]
    Slowing, dozens upon dozens of wrecked and molten cars and I am
trying my guilt-wracked best never to look inside them any longer.  15 mph.  Finally
past the fork of Shoshoni Road.  Unburned trees over the slopes of Sayre Road,
thank God at last, true forest which seems untouched.
    I do not believe in