From the Fire II by Kent David Kelly

message a fourth time, Sophie moved on to a new sheet of paper.
    The radio signal cut off.
    Sophie hit what she thought was the volume as she looked up, but it was the broad search dial instead. She flipped past Mitch’s frequency. Keeping herself calm, she glided the needle back to his number again. There was static there, but no voice and no more code.
    “Don’t be afraid.” These words were foolish, stupid even. But she needed to hear someone say them. “Don’t be.”
    She took off the headphones and left the radio speakers on, in case the signal with Mitch could be reestablished. Until then, she would decode her third pass at the message as best she could. She found the binder page on Morse code letter definitions again and began writing. Some of the questionable gaps between letters, whether they were pauses between words or not, were slowing her down. To work more quickly, she decided to write the letters out in all capitals in clustered groups of three. Then, once she had the code solidified to an alphabet, she would try to make actual words out from the mess.
    Fifteen minutes or more had gone by, and still Mitch’s frequency gave only static. She turned down the volume so that she could concentrate.
    She looked over what she had written at last, Mitch’s final completed message:
    ~
    CAU TIO NCH ANN OTS
    ECU RWE ARN SHE LTU
    NDA UNT JEM MSH OUS
    EUK NOW WHE REH AVE
    CAR CAN TGO UTS OPH
    COM EIN THR EEW EEK
    IFU CAN LVE USHE SAL
    IVE
    ~
    Eventually, she puzzled out the entire message:
    ~
    CAUTION CHAN NOT SECUR
    WE AR N SHELT
    UND AUNT JEMMS HOUSE
    U KNOW WHERE
    HAVE CAR
    CANT G OUT
    SOPH COME
    IN THREE WEEK
    IF U CAN
    LVE U SHE
    S A L
    IVE
    ~
    She spoke the words like a pleading chant, her voice growing higher and more desperate with the slowness of every questioned syllable.
    “Caution. Chan. Channel? Channel not secure. We are in shelt ... shelter? Under Aunt Jemm’s house. You know where? Have car. Can’t g ... get out? Go out? Can’t get out. Soph, come in three week. Three weeks, if you can. Live? No. Love. Love you. She’s alive.”
    Oh my. Oh.
    “She’s alive.”
    Sophie was crying and laughing, her hands pressed against her face in exhaustion and disbelief. Lacie Anna Saint-Germain, her own beloved daughter, was surely sitting there in Mitch’s arms. Lacie was alive.

 
     
    II-5
    THE DAY AFTER
    (4-5/6-14)
     
    She had fallen back asleep on the pile of clothing, with the radio still humming its static canting. If Mitch had been able to re-contact her, she would have heard it. But there had only been the humming sound of the ventilation ducts, the dripping of water, and the slow reliable surge of the latent generator in the back. She had hoped to dream of Tom, but nothing had come to her.
    One of her hands was clutching a piece of paper. No, a photograph. She opened her fingers, smiling down at what she knew she was going to see.
    Lacie. Smiling, an old Polaroid. One of Mitch’s antiques. He had snapped that on her third birthday.
    Alive.
    How had they survived? It must have been Tom’s warning call, when he had sent Mitch to grab Lacie from grandma’s. Sophie wondered what Mitch had said in his desperation, what he had done ... why wouldn’t he take Sophie’s mother ...
    Don’t think of that.
    Was anyone else with them? Sophie’s struggle for sanity was washing away, she had a purpose once again. A meaning. She needed to figure out how to mark time. Would the computer clock keep working without access to the Internet, if she powered it up? Could she make herself a water-clock of some kind with one of the water bottles and some thread, like she and Jolynn had done once for a junior high science project so long ago?
    There had to be a way to measure time. She had three weeks to master the shelter and to read everything in the binders, to learn about the weapons, the generator fuel, salvaging cars, the protective suits that would be in the back, the gas masks, travel, all of it and