by Starhawk
“That’s it,” Littlejohn said.
“It’s the jungle gym from hell,” Madrone said brightly.
“The beams are the best way to go,” Begood said. “If you can do it. Otherwise we have to shoot the guard.”
The guard paced back and forth on the roadway above them. Yes, it would be unfortunate to shoot him just to save herself the trip across the beams, but it was tempting.
“The lower support beam’s your best bet,” Littlejohn said. “It’s broad enough—about a foot wide. The only problem’s getting on and off it. Or if you freeze up in the middle.”
“If you think you might panic in the middle,” Begood said, “it’d be better to just shoot the guard and get it over with, than to have to peel you off and end up shooting all sorts of guards later, not to mention risking getting our asses fried. Remember the time Oldjohn froze up midway? Shit, we practically had to carry him out to the middle supports, and then he couldn’t get back on the beam and dawn was coming. We ended up stuck out there all day, hiding out behind the overhang until it got dark again. Hijohn had to hike back, steal some rope, shoot the guard after all, and then we had to haul Oldjohn up the side, in broad daylight. There we were, out on the middle of the bridge, with no cover, and a whole platoon of Stewardship troops bearing down on us—”
“I can do it,” Madrone said, “if we just go ahead and don’t think about it. Can we go now?”
Quietly, they crept down the side of the hill to the base of the overpass. Littlejohn climbed the struts that led to the main beam, pulling himself gracefully up from one to the next. Madrone followed, wishing her arms were stronger. Begood came behind, occasionally giving her a welcome push.
The concrete surface of the overpass stretched above them, curving in two gentle arches supported in the center by thick piers anchored in the middle divider of the freeway. A scaffolding of steel framing followed the contours. Littlejohn swung himself onto the central support beam and stood up. Confidently, he walked out, balanced a hundred feet above the roadway.
“Just one thing,” Begood said cheerfully. “If you fall, try not to scream.”
“Sure,” Madrone said, taking a deep breath that choked her with the fumes from below. Don’t think about it, just do it, she told herself, and stepped out.
If she thought of the beam as a line on the ground, she could walk it easily, fearlessly. If there were nowhere to fall, she couldn’t fear falling and wouldn’t fall. And if her heart would just stop that silly pounding, and her stomach stop that twisting sensation …
Every twenty feet or so, a steel pier stretched vertically up from the beam to connect with the support struts that ran beneath the concrete. Littlejohn grabbed them with both hands and swung his body around them. When she reached the first one, she did the same. Not bad, she thought, although her hands were sweaty and slippery and the moment when she had to release her weight from one foot before she could solidly place the other was terrible. She remembered, suddenly, one of those afternoons on the rocks. She was halfway up a cliff, and she stuck fast, couldn’t move up or down. Nita had been her partner, and she was getting excited, yelling down instructions and exhortations. Then Bird had come by and had suggested, very calmly, that she open her eyes and look at where she wanted to go and think how to get there. She did. Remembering that, she was around the second pier. She thought of Bird sitting down at the piano, his hands so clumsy at the keys, and the song he had made for her came back to her as she wiggled onto the concrete supports of the central piers.
“Halfway,” Littlejohn said. “You want to rest?”
“No, let’s get it over with,” Madrone said. The second half, with Bird’s song ringing inside her, was a little easier. But by the time they reached the opposite side, her shirt was soaked through with sweat, and as they touched the ground she noticed her knees were trembling. Begood landed beside her.
“Good girl,” Littlejohn said.
“Let’s go,” Madrone said.
The hills on the east side of the freeway were far more populated than those on the west. They made their way along a roadway lined by enormous estates. From time to time, cars approached, and the three flung themselves into bushes or hid behind trees until the headlights swept past them. All Madrone’s senses were alert. She could smell unseen roses that clambered up walls, she could scent dogs far enough away to skirt the edges of their territory and prevent them from barking.
They walked for what seemed like hours. Madrone was thirsty, but she popped a raw acorn into her mouth and let its astringent bite distract her. The moon sailed over them, a thin, waning crescent. She was tired, so tired she felt she was walking in her sleep. No more cars passed; it was almost dawn.
They were still high on the ridge as the light from the soon-to-rise sun made a pink smear on the basin’s eastern rim. High bushes of feathery chamise gave them some cover, and Madrone could look through their concealing spires and see the panorama spread out below.
The vast flat plain of the basin was dust dry. A haze hovered over the jumbled forms of cracked buildings and crumbling structures. No discernible lines of roads or streets and no spots of green relieved the patchwork of gray and brown. Only here and there, towering black stumps of dead palm trees marched in uneven lines, the ragged sentinels of ancient avenues.
A narrow band of green hugged the base of the hills and sent tendrils up into some of the eastern canyons. Compared to the drab of the plain, the green looked almost obscene, too bright, somehow, almost artificial. She could see, on the nearer slopes, rich houses surrounded by terraced and landscaped gardens. Far to the east, the towers of downtown rose in vertical spires of metal and glass.
“Hurry,” Littlejohn said, motioning them down a side road that soon dead-ended at a wire fence. Beyond, a dirt road led into a canyon. They climbed the fence and scrambled down the road, reaching the cover of brush around the dry streambed just as the sun rose full in the sky.
The word “camp,” Madrone thought, was a gross exaggeration for what they found, which consisted of two men and one woman huddled in the hollow under a bush.
“Drink deep,” they murmured, a greeting which more and more sounded to Madrone like pure sarcasm. Littlejohn uncorked a water bottle and passed it around for a carefully measured swallow.
“Go easy,” he warned Madrone. “You guys have any water?”
“A cup or two’s all we got left,” said the man closer to Madrone. He was short and slight, hardly more than a boy, but his brown, leathery skin made him look ancient. “They call me Big John,” he said, winking. “This here’s Joan Dark and Johnny Come Lately.”
Lately was dry and dark as a bean that’s lain too long in the sun, but he had a wide friendly grin and green eyes that looked speculatively into Madrone’s. Joan Dark was silent, and Madrone smelled sickness on her, and pain.
“You the healer?” Lately asked.
“Yes, I’m Madrone.”
“Can you look at Joan? She took a bullet graze a couple of nights ago, and now it’s infected.”
Joan was thin to the point of emaciation, and her half-moon eyes were shrouded, wary. Madrone unwrapped a bandage of rough, dirty cloth from the woman’s stringy thigh. The stench assaulted her. The wound was shallow, but the flesh around it was inflamed and an ominous red streak went up her thigh into her groin.
“Can we spare any water for washing?”
The others exchanged glances.
“We don’t have much,” Littlejohn said.
“She can have mine,” Lately said.
“We’ll all share a bit,” Littlejohn said. “But go easy on it.”
Madrone nodded, pulled out one of the clean rags she had stashed in her pack, and wet it gingerly. Carefully, she swabbed out what she could of the dirt that clogged the wound. What did they want from her? Wave a magic wand and make everything better, when there was nothing, nothing to work with, not even the most basic necessities? Oh, she was angry, not at these men, not even at the lawn-envelo
ped mansions that clung to the hill above them, but at the sheer greed and waste of it all.
“I’ll be all right by tonight,” Joan murmured.
“No, you won’t,” Madrone said. “You have a very serious infection, and you need to lie still and quiet and rest.”
“Can’t you heal it?”
Madrone sighed. “I can give you some energy and relieve some pain. But without being able to wash it properly—even if I could magically kill off this batch of microbes, the dirt in the wound would reinfect it.”
“What can we do?” Lately whispered.
“Look for anti-infectins when we raid the pharmacy. Isn’t there anywhere we can take her where she could be cared for?”
“There’s Katy’s place, down in the city,” Littlejohn said.
“How far is that?”
“Ten, fifteen miles.”
“That’s too far.”
Littlejohn shrugged. Madrone bit her lips again. It wasn’t their fault that all these warm and comfortable houses perched so blithely on the ridge were closed to them.
“She frets,” Begood explained to Big John. “Where she comes from, this doesn’t happen.”
“No? Wounds don’t get infected?”
“People are cared for,” Madrone said, “whatever happens. And nobody lacks water for something as basic as washing.” And then she had to tell them again about the running streams, and the streets planted with fruit trees, and the gardens. My fairy tale, she thought. The sun rose higher, and she was overwhelmed by exhaustion after doing what she could for Joan. They curled into the shadow of the brush and slept.
They woke at sunset, ate some acorns dipped in honey, drank. When darkness fell, Madrone washed Joan’s wound again. She was weak and feverish and didn’t even argue when they left her alone, wrapped in a blanket and provided with all the food and water they could spare. They headed up the path, stopping as Big John and Lately removed a pair of shotguns from a cache in the side of the canyon. Littlejohn and Begood were carrying their laser rifles. Lately handed Madrone a pistol but she just stood, looking at it, feeling its cold weight in her hand.
“I can’t take it,” she said.
“I’ll show you how to fire it,” Littlejohn said. “It’s the simplest thing we’ve got.”
She shook her head. “I know how to shoot a pistol. We learned in school. Our teachers said we had to be familiar with guns to understand history. I just don’t want to kill anyone.”
“Nobody wants to kill anyone,” Littlejohn said patiently. “If all goes well, we won’t. This is just a precaution.”
She remembered the feel of the guns they’d practiced with, the recoil as bullets exploded out, the challenge of hitting a target and the horror at the thought of what that force could do to living flesh. Could she pull the trigger, end some unknown person’s life? If it were a choice, between that and the pens? Or losing her own life? Her hand was shaking.
“I can’t take it.”
“Then you’re an added danger to all of us,” Big John said. “If you won’t defend yourself, and you won’t defend us—”
“I just don’t think I could do it.”
“You don’t know until you try,” Begood said.
“I can’t.”
“Don’t push her,” Littlejohn said. “She’ll be a worse danger to us all if she gets jumpy with a gun in her hand. Leave her be. This is gonna be cake, right? Nobody’s gonna shoot nobody tonight.”
She was grateful to Littlejohn but she still felt shaken, oddly ashamed. Because this is not so much a stand I take from conviction, she admitted, but from some instinctive revulsion. If I’m really such a pacifist, I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be working with them and supporting their fight. But I don’t know that I am, that I would go to the pens rather than let these men kill another man to protect me. And if I feel that way I should defend myself.
But I can’t.
“Come on, then,” Big John said.
The pharmacy was on the edge of the valley on the north side of the mountains. Two hours of fast hiking brought them to a sheltered hollow on the lower slopes of the last hill, where they could look down on a huge metal warehouse, surrounded by chain-link fence with barbed wire strung on top. Armed guards patrolled the gate. Madrone and her companions sat in the dark, reeking of wariness and excitement.
“What are we waiting for?” Madrone whispered.
“Guard change,” Littlejohn said. “Ah, there it comes.”
Below them, two new men approached the gate guards, talked for a moment, and then took their places.
“Who’s our friend?” Littlejohn whispered.
“The tall one,” Lately said.
The taller of the two guards left his post and began making the rounds of the perimeter inside the chain-link fence.
“What’s happening?” Madrone asked.
“He’s supposed to unlock the back gate for us and deactivate the alarm,” Big John said. “He’s part of the Web.”
They waited. Madrone tried to calm herself. She suspected the others were enjoying themselves. But I’m not made for this sort of thing, she thought. I’m not like Cleis, who craved danger and died for it. I don’t want to die or kill.
After a wait that seemed endless, the tall guard returned to the front gate.
“Okay,” Lately whispered. “Littlejohn, you stay here, cover the front entrance. Don’t shoot anyone unless you have to, and don’t shoot our friend whatever you do. If there’s trouble, give the call. Begood, you come down with us, cover the side gate. Any trouble coming, try to get in, give us a warning. Okay, let’s go.”
They ran silently, crouching in the shadows, around the line of the fence to the southeast corner, out of sight of the gate on the west side. A small door opened into the chain-link fence, and cautiously, Lately pushed on it. It opened.
“Come on.”
Madrone followed Lately and Big John, running quickly across the twenty feet of open space that separated the gate from a small side entrance into the warehouse.
“Pray that our friend really turned off the alarm,” Lately said, flashing a grin at Madrone as he pressed against the blank metal door. It opened inward.
“Home free,” he said.
Inside, the smells of a thousand chemicals assaulted her. She felt dizzy, almost numb with overload. Forests of high metal racks surrounded them, stacked high with boxes and bottles and containers.
“Where do they get all this? Where does it come from?” she whispered, astounded at the sheer abundance. There were more pills here, in this one warehouse, than in all the storehouses of the Bay Area combined.
“They have factories all over the Valley, strictly under military control,” Lately told her. “And farms, up and down the coast, where they grow some of the materials. A few of them are free farms, but a lot of them are labor camps. You can sign on if you’re unemployed, work seven days a week in the hot sun for three years, and live like a dog, but you get all the highs and lows you can swallow. Those houses with their green lawns that you passed up in the hills, this is where a lot of them get their money. And the black market in highs and lows is especially profitable.”
“Nothing is labeled!” Madrone said. “How do we know what anything is?”
“Big John’s gone to get the scanner,” Lately said. “You just sit tight here, let us bring you things. We’re looking for boosters, for highs and lows, and you tell us what else.”
“Why highs and lows?”
“To sell. And give to our friends, keep them happy. We got to finance this somehow.”
She wasn’t at all happy with the answer, but there was nothing she could do about it. Big John returned with the scanner, which looked like a square magnifying glass on a stick.
“Here’s how it works,” Lately said, taking down a box of pills from a shelf. “The labels are all in dot code on the front, see?” He pointed out a pattern of black dots, and she nodded. “Hold the scanner up and look through.”
When she looked into the lens, a name and a price appeared.
“Well, this would be very helpful if I knew what any of these things were,” Madrone said.
“Don’t you? I thought you knew about medications.”
“Some. We use drugs back home that we can culture or distill from what we grow, antibiotics and antivirals and anti-infectins. They’re more effective for some conditions than herbs or acupuncture or our other methods. But the Stewards have things I only know about in theory, and then by their Latin names or their chemical structure, not their brand names. Maybe I can make some guesses.”
“A lot of stuff, we can recognize,” Lately said.
“Can you find me some boosters? I’d like to examine them.”
“Sure. But if you want something for Joan, you’ll have to tell us what to look for.”
“I have no idea what it would look like,” Madrone said, dismayed. “Capsules, probably, not tablets—if that’s any help.” Her head was beginning to ache with the smells around her. If she could focus her bee sense, put it to use somehow.…
“Wait a minute, I’ve thought of something I could try. Bring me some things, and I’ll see if I can find out what they are.”
She sat down in a corner, with a pen Big John found for her. Touching her bee spot, she let herself go into the trance, but not all the way. I need to keep my human mind intact, to think and name and write, while I open the other senses. Melissa, can I do this?
“Here’s some capsules,” Lately said, placing a box on her knees. She broke one open, sniffed a few grains of powder, touched her tongue to them delicately.
Taste and smell exploded in her brain, she was flying through orange groves, lemons blossomed, fruited, sweated through their pungent skin.
She touched her bee spot again, wrote Vitamin C on the box of capsules, and held out her hand for Lately’s next offering.
By the time she had sorted through fifteen or twenty different drugs, her head was throbbing and the gray metal shelves and boxes swam in kaleidoscopic patterns in front of her eyes. There was so much here, she found herself infected with a kind of greed. Drugs to ease pain and drugs to stimulate tissue growth and drugs to reduce tumors. Drugs to undo the effects of other drugs. If she could only study them, analyze them, know exactly how they worked. Her bee sense could help her recognize drugs that she knew, but there were tantalizing hints of other things here, antidotes to the epidemics maybe, advances as yet unfamiliar in the North. But without more time, more equipment, more backup, she couldn’t know.