Free From the Fire V by Kent David Kelly

storm.
    She was certain
then, as she looked around at the lighter wreckage.  A good number of people
had survived here for quite some time.  Some might still be alive, irradiated,
poisoned, broken, sheltered and still in the business of dying.  There in the
inner circle of all those parked trucks, the curve of the concrete valley’s far
horizon made not of metal but of mist, more trucks had been backed up against
each other to forge an iron fortress.  Semis were fused together by
haphazardly-welded metal plates, bumpers were wreathed with barbed wire.  More
than one truck had brown and foreboding stains spattered up across the grille. 
Pieces of a tattered flannel shirt fluttered from a tractor’s smokestack, a
scarlet banner of grid and cross.
    No gas pumps yet.   Sophie shivered.  God, where are the buildings?  The fuel bays?  We need to get out of here.
    She turned her head
and took a sip of salty water from her gnawed straw, her eyes never leaving the
blackened spectacle of trucks streaming in the H4’s lights,
concrete-metal-tire-glass.  And what if some of the men here are still
walking, Sophie?  What if you need to fight for fuel?
    Then she would need
Silas, there at the end of all things.
    She wanted to check
her own gun again, but she dared not take her hands off of the wheel.  The
corridor created by the trailers and welded plates to either side was getting
narrower, constricted as she edged out deeper into the open concrete valley,
the Eye .
    Shapes flew by,
plastic bags and shadows.  Her senses were uncertain, amped and haunted and
conflicted.  Unbidden, she remembered a grim and claustrophobic book of elegies
Tom had once encouraged her to read, the Alighieri, the Inferno of
Virgil and Dante and his descent into the Iron City of Dis, the spiral
labyrinth of lovely Lucifer himself.
    ~
    Here are the Heresiarchs ...
    And much more than thou thinkest,
    Laden are the tombs.
    ~
    Farther in, coasting.  Ruins loomed at last upon the left.  The long
and roofed gas island for passenger cars had tilted and collapsed, a wildly
angled scarp of roofing, bent girders and melted plastic letters dripping and
frozen down the signs.  Bulky mounds of roofing showed where crushed cars and
SUVs lay beneath it.  Further to the right loomed a pile of molten tires,
ringed around with the bodies of dead pigeons and crumpled aluminum siding.
    Farther into the Eye.
    There’s nothing to help you here.  No fuel.  Hopeless.  Get out,
get —
    There were three sledge-hammered vending machines beyond the end
of the gas island, their gaping glass-shrapnel faces open, their backs shoved
at precarious angles against a burned-out RV.  One was half-filled with
shattered bottles, the other two were completely emptied.
    The headlights’ illumination rebounded back as she coasted
nearer.  A reflection?  Was that a window?
    Beyond the machines, shrouding by blowing obsidian dust and dunes
of wreckage, appeared the massive diner facility.  Its signs were blown apart,
its doors covered by plywood, its windows choked off behind splintered jumbles
of nail and lumber.  This registered with Sophie for a moment as an icy thrill,
battling with her insistence to find the fuel, to find her Lacie:  … Did
someone have time to repair things?  To cover shattered windows? …   And
then the thought was gone, suppressed and shunted, held down deep to drown away
in silence.
    She drove by the last of the huge low building, its half-collapsed
lobby and blown-out ducting.  A wall of tires, all chained together, was piled
along the wall of its farther side.  There in the gaps were lodged sandbags,
feedbags, even mailbags and Fed Ex gurneys, steel carts piled high with
bricks.  Movable walls.   There were narrow gaps at intervals in the
not-quite-disarrayed vertical piles.  View holes?  Gun ports?
    Silas let in a rattling breath, as if had not been breathing for
many seconds.  He exhaled words:  “Soph get us out of here, get us