From the Fire V Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hours mean nothing now, we measure everything by the
burning of gas.  Having siphoned once again, the “time” is three-quarters full.
    Changed Silas, much worse.  Diarrhea, caked with blood, and not
nearly enough urine.  I hydrated him despite his delirium.  Nearly choked him,
I fear.  He woke halfway through and called me Jenny, and asked me, Why, my love? 
Why?
    I shushed him back to sleep.
    Still some morphine vials, but not much more that I dare to
spare.  I fear I am losing him.  He cannot eat.  His scrotum is swollen and something
is wrong with the burn-flesh curdle over his left thigh.  He smells ... sweet . 
Bittersweet, of yeast.  He is hiding the left side of his abdomen.  He would
not let me see.
    I cannot care for him much longer.
    I’m going faster, love.
    Oh, my Lacie.  I swear to you I’m coming.
    ~
    [546.]
    And Nederland.  I ... don’t understand exactly what happened here.
    It appears an airliner, a United flight (from the surviving tail
jutting up out of the ashen waves), tried to do a water landing on Barker
Reservoir just to the east of town.  Wreckage all over everything, and the
great white frontage of the plane smeared over the highway, into the sundered ruin
of some kind of store.  And the wind, rolling pieces of airplane in the
gutters.  Torsos and half-cloven bodies everywhere, dried intestines wavering
in the trees.
    I did see one blackened crow, blind and gaunt yet still alive. 
Pecking.  It was feeding.
    ~
    [547.]
    Into and through what was left of Nederland.  I could not dare to
sleep there.
    So much death there, so many bodies.  I couldn’t make myself
search the cars.  It was all I could do to stop and pour some of our own gas
into the tank.  When I stepped outside, I did not close my door all the way.
    I heard.  Silas began sobbing.
    But he stopped himself, choking.  Pretending to cough into his
hands.  He wanted to talk about his daughter, his granddaughter, and Lacie.
    (Later)
    Hard to sleep, had to open up the suit despite the risk.  My helmet
seal is faulty in some way.
    (Later)
    Through town past Navajo Trail.  North, ever on.  Did not take East
119 to Boulder, I understand now that any city will be a Hellhole, a deathtrap
entire.
    Someone is watching out for us, some dark angel.  Someone (it
appears) has driven through here, and even returned.  Because there was a spray-painted
scrawl on a black stop sign ahead:  “DEATH,” with an arrow pointing ahead, toward
Boulder and beyond.
    Whoever you are, whoever has gone and returned and written this in
paint, I saw.  And I believe you.
    ~
    (Day 4?)
    [548.]
    Woke trembling.
    Peak to Peak Highway still onward, sometimes even driving through
the trees (many of them are browned and dying, perhaps from radiation), west
and then north.  Diverted off a little around a terrible wreck, two school
buses, one collapsed inside the other.
    And then past Mud Lake, a split-rail fence was still standing
there.  As it has been for decades.
    Somehow this gave me strength.  Something, at least, has survived
untouched. A legacy of things once made.  It is as if humanity is finishing its
poem.
    And who will read of us when we are gone?
    ~
    [549.]
    Two dead horses in the middle of the highway, the corpse of an
obese woman still holding her suicide rifle, slumped over one’s belly.  Silas
asked me to stop and search the packs piled atop the other horse, a palomino
with its side torn open.
    I could not bring myself to do this.
    ~
    [550.]
    A little greenery past Sugarloaf (?), even a hint again of sunlight .
    Tom, I am always thinking of you and our time together.
    But what is seeing now?  Is it worse to behold?  Blackest
night in the midst of day, the wind and the burning of the Archangel high
above.
    The warmongers, they scorched the sky.
    Oblivion and yet, a little sagebrush, a few surviving trees.  Waving
grasses in crimson mist.
    I’m so tired.  I don’t know if I’m making sense.
    (Later)
    Silas awake again,