And the Ashes

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Splinters of umber and scarlet evening sky flickered in and out of focus over the highway, coruscating haze and glimmers of crystal-clear horror — dead and twisted bodies, garbage, spinning wheels and bloodstained metal panels. The black wind gusted clumps of ashes off the road and into the air, breaking the remnants of lost souls into powder and withering them all away. East, forever east they flowed afar, to where their endless graves would lie for centuries.

The gusts tore and pulled down fragments of greater light, one last flare of radiance before the ultimate darkness. She could see the obsidian wasteland of highway wreckage, silhouettes of overpasses and fallen columns. She smeared the girl’s blood out of her eyelashes and re-gripped the wheel with radiation-burned and poisoned hands, the woman pursued and haunted, Sophia Ingrid St.-Germain.

Under the glare of the racing H4’s three un-shattered high beams, the blurring car and pickup wrecks seemed to animate in garish frames of flickering light, a lurid spectacle of melted engines with people fused inside of them. The debris seemed endless — puddles of glass, rubble piles, trash heaps, crumbled barricades, the silhouettes of half-crushed bodies dangling from splinter-frame door and windshield.

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