False Dawn

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Thea! Thea!” he shouted after her. “Don’t!”

  Without thinking she rushed to the creek, sinking down on her knees beside it, trembling uncontrollably now that the full force of her fright was on her. She heard him come up behind her and loathed herself for not having the strength or the will to move.

  He stopped when he was close enough for her to hear him speak. His words were said clearly, calmly. “I’m not going to hurt you, Thea.”

  “Go away.”

  “Not until you tell me what’s wrong.” He squatted down behind her, out of reach. The position was uncomfortably out of balance, but he determined to keep it. “I am not a fool, Thea, and I’m not insensitive. When you saw me, you panicked.”

  “I know.”

  “Why?” The question frightened him much more than he had thought it would. His thighs ached and he welcomed the distraction.

  She made no answer for some moments, then said, “Lastly—”

  “I know what Lastly did.” He had raised his voice and she winced. He forced himself to speak cautiously. “I know what Lastly did. But, Thea, I’m not Lastly.”

  “I know that.”

  This was what bothered her the most: she had seen Lastly in Evan Montague.

  “Then listen to me.” How he wished he could see her face. Talking to her angular hunched back was worse than all his nightmarish childhood memories of the disembodied voice at Confession. “You don’t want to be touched. I shouldn’t have tried. When I touched you all you thought of was Lastly.”

  “I was raped,” she said, and the words were vile.

  Again Evan waited as his muscles knotted. “1 don’t know what it was. There is no way I can know, But I feel guilt because it happened at all. You shouldn’t have had to—”

  “That doesn’t change it,” she whispered bitterly.

  He ground his teeth, breathing deeply. “It’s a bad thing to lose an arm; to watch while part of you is cut away. But when it is gone, it is over. And in a way,” he added, accepting the truth of his admission, “in a crazy way, I wanted Cox to do it. I’m carrying too much evil around in me, this was a compensation, a way to acknowledge my separation from the Pirates. It’s fucked, I know, but—” He shrugged. “So I can’t pretend to know what you’ve been through, and what you’re enduring because of it.”

  “Yes, that’s right. You can’t.” she said, angry now.

  “I should have prevented it. That’s what you think, isn’t it?” He realized he should not say this to her, because it was what he thought, not she.

  “No. It’s not.” She bit her lip. “You can’t undo what’s done, Evan, no matter how much you want to or what you say now. I can’t change it, you can’t change it. It’s too late for that. I should go my own way from here on.”

  “Don’t.” He waited a moment, steadying himself. “Thea, listen to me. Out here alone, neither of us stands a chance, not with Cox coming into the mountains and lepers already here. There are other gangs, too, and Untouchables. Summer is ending, Thea. They’ll all be desperate.”

  The sound of Evan’s voice blended with the running water. She let his words run with the creek, soothing and persuading.

  “Winter comes early up here. That makes it worse. But together we might stand a chance, in spite of Cox and Untouchables and lepers and winter. It’s a long way to Gold Lake, hut we could make it, together. Will come with me, Thea? Travel with me? That’s all I ask of you, that we travel together.”

  “But why?” Much of her fright had faded, and now she felt foolish and abashed. Never in her years alone had she been so utterly frightened. And never in her years alone had she felt the need for companionship as keenly as she did in that moment. She could not bear to he touched; she did not bear to be alone.

  So lost in her thoughts was Thea that she did not see the cold agony that came into Evan’s face at her question. “I was wrong about the Pirates, about survival. I was wrong about so many things. I can’t apologize for them; I can’t atone. But I can do something worthwhile for once. Don’t make me abandon you, Thea.”

  She said nothing as he spoke. The brook was shiny where the moonlight touched it. “Once there were crickets up here, and they chirped,” she said idly, hardly aware that she had spoken aloud.

  “Crickets?” he asked, stung that she had not heard him.

  “There were crickets at Camminsky Creek. I remember them, sometimes. It was a long time ago. Mr. Thompson and his genetic engineering. He thought that was the answer; they all did. But they were playing, that’s all. Playing. Most of them died of it.”

  “Camminsky Creek?” Evan was bewildered.

  “It was in Mendocino County. Near Cloverdale.”

  Evan knew about Cloverdale—it was the first town completely destroyed by the Pirates, more than five years before he had taken them over. When he first joined the Pirates, their success at Cloverdale gave him the incentive to establish a pattern for less bloody and more efficient raids. He had, as he had admitted to her, seen the potential for an organization that could keep order, and had learned that he had been mistaken. “I see.”

  “No. Not you. You didn’t kill them. The C. D. did, before the Pirates came. It’s more than ten years now.” She shook her head as if clearing the past from it. Holding her breath she turned to face him, and found that her terror was gone. “I’ll travel with you, Evan. Until we get to Gold Lake.”

  He dared to smile at her words. “Good. But let’s stay here a couple of days. It’s a long walk, and we’ll have to go around, through Quincy.”

  She frowned, and the tickle of distrust was back. “Quincy? Why so far north?”

  “To go around the lepers. We’ll have to do that. They’ll kill us if we get too close.”

  “Because we aren’t lepers, you mean,” she said, knowing the answer. “Quincy then. But fall is coming early. We’ll have to travel quickly if we want to get to Gold Lake before the first snows.”

  Evan nodded, unable to express his relief. The tension which had held him so long left him and he toppled clumsily from his cramped position, twisting one of his ankles as he lurched forward.

  Thea moved back fast, and in her hurry to escape him, slid into the creek. The cold water rushed around her, pulling her down.

  By this time Evan had recovered his balance and he scuffled to the bank, holding out his hand. “Come on; I’ll pull you out.”

  She hesitated, then reached up, putting her hand in his, her lean fingers gripping hard. Evan set his teeth, braced his legs, and pulled her from the creek. As she stood shivering beside him, he asked, “How wet are you?”

  She touched her pants and loose shirt. “Wet enough.” She wrung out the tail of her shirt. “And you? Were you hurt?”

  “I’m not wet,” he said, which was no answer. He felt awkward still, all knees and elbow. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea, come to think of it, getting wet. It’s a while since I’ve had a bath. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “For now, soup,” Thea reminded him and they went back to the cabin, walking close to each other, but not touching.

  The next day Thea snared a rabbit, skinning it expertly with a paring knife found in the cabin. She kept the hide to cure it in urine.

  “We won’t starve, not if there are rabbits around,” she said as Evan crumbled sage into the meager rabbit stew.

  “We won’t,” he agreed, longing for carrots and onions, for chicken broth, mustard, and sour cream. Why not go all the way, he thought, and wish for a Pinot or Chardonnay while I’m at it, and baba au rhum for dessert.

  “That smells good,” Thea said a little later while the stew simmered.

  Evan sniffed the air critically, thinking that it smelled dreadful. “Thanks,” he said, wondering what had become of his favorite smorgasbord place in Stockholm. It was gone, very likely. Certainly there was no more smorgasbord.

  “I didn’t know that weeds helped cooking.”

  “Not all weeds do,” he said, trying to remember if he might find rosema
ry at this altitude. “Just some weeds. They’re called herbs then, not weeds.”

  “Herbs,” she said, startled. “My mother used herbs, sometimes. She grew them in a window-box. Oregano. Is that an herb?”

  “Yes,” Evan said, going to the stove to sample the flavorless stew and to shut out the memories that had flooded his senses.

  For a little while Thea watched him, knowing that he had gone deep into his mind, shutting her out as he stirred the pot. She wanted to speak to him, to say that she knew he had his hurt, too. But the words did not come and her mind locked the insight away, keeping it hidden.

  “We eat now,” Evan announced somewhat later.

  “Good. I’m hungry,” she said honestly. “Anyway, we won’t eat like this when we’re traveling.” She was angry again, challenging him to argue.

  “We probably won’t,” he said steadily as he heaped their cracked plastic plates with the stew. “So enjoy this while you have the chance.”

  Thea gave the meat long enough to cool, then she took morsels in her fingers. She chewed eagerly at the tough rabbit, and found it strange that Evan did not consider the meal delicious.

  The strips of rabbit hide held the small pack to his back in fair comfort. Thea inspected the knots before tying her own pack on. “You’ll do,” she said as she made a last minor adjustment. In the week they had rested she had made pack frames for them, and was pleased to see how well she had done.

  Evan shifted his pack so that it did not impede his mutilated arm. He wished that the stump would stop itching.

  “Don’t do that,” Thea said sharply as she caught him scratching the orange band of skin. “Give it a chance to heal. Let it grow.”

  3

  Evan’s arm grew back as fall came on. It sprouted slowly as they left the contamination behind them, beginning as a tawny spatulate paddle below the angry cicatrix marking the path of the saw, and stretching out to bud fingers as flowers had once stretched toward the sun.

  The cruel desolation above the Feather River canyon offered them scant shelter and less food, plaguing them with heat that made the rocks sing in the day, and insect-ridden nights—for here there were insects—that turned their sleep to torment. Occasionally they killed a rattlesnake, rationing its meat with desperate caution. There were no more rabbits. The granite soon made ruins of their shoes, so that the tracks that marked their passing were rusty with blood. Around them, clinging to rising mountains, pines brooded, poking forlorn fingers at the sky, needles shading to russet as they fought for life.

  Gold Lake was a long way off.

  Evan had made light of their danger at first, hut as hunger etched hard lines into his face and Thea’s eyes took on the haunted shadow of starvation, he admitted, at least to himself, that they had come a long way to die.

  For Thea, hunger was a specter dogging her steps, hut an unreal one. Far more real, more threatening, was the possibility of Pirates or lepers, who would make their dying long and messy. Anxiously she watched the rocks around them, and the dark shadows under the trees.

  As the river rose in the floor of the steep canyon, they climbed high on the ridge above it, far from the thunder of the river and the danger of being trapped in the narrow gorge. Occasionally they caught a glimpse of buildings huddled against the canyon walls, some deserted, some carefully guarded. It was these buildings with their promise of food and shelter that made Evan feel the full weight of their distress, and in time he grew reckless. Knowing that he would make the attempt without her if she refused to help him, he outlined his plan to Thea as they crouched on the crest of the ridge above a small compound of houses and barns nestled inside wooden fortification.

  “We’ll have to wait a day’ he said at the end. “We’ll have to see how they schedule the patrol of the walls. It looks like they’ve got shotguns, and we can’t go up against that kind of weapon.”

  Does he truly think he can succeed here? Thea wondered, saying aloud, “One more day won’t matter.” Her voice was listless. Knowing how discouraged she was, Evan went on quickly, “They’ll be most vulnerable just before dawn. The animals won’t be awake then and the guards will be sleepy. We’ve got a good chance, Thea,” he added, as much to reassure himself as her.

  “Why not?” she answered, her lean hands clinging to the frayed denim of her jacket, touching the fur tufts left on the rabbit skin thongs securing her pack. “If we fail the worst we’ll be is dead.”

  “There is that crossroad.” He pointed it out, looking upstream to the bridge and the dusty tracks that met there. “It increases the chance of traffic, if there is any traffic now. It might be tricky getting away from here if that road is still used.” It was his one note of prudence, so that she would know that he recognized the risks.

  “If the road isn’t overgrown, then it’s used sometimes,” she said. “Maybe they still use it. Maybe someone else does. The Pirates don’t come this far yet.” She said the last with little conviction.

  “Yes. But they will. That’s why we have to keep going.” He spoke with calm certainty. He had planned to increase the range of the Pirates years ago, and Cox was more ruthless than he had ever been. “I taught them, remember that. They’re following my orders, even though Cox gives them.”

  Thea said nothing, looking at the farm below. The sounds from the barnyard, the cackle of chickens, tantalized her, making hunger twist in her like a trapped animal. Smoke rose, lamb-flavored, from the main house, and the armed men patrolling the wall turned toward the smell. Thea closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

  “I know,” Evan said, realizing that the tang in the air meant that the meat was wine-basted. Each delicious entity of that smoke stirred memories in him. There had been lamb that night in Barcelona; he couldn’t have been more than fifteen, and his father was accepting yet another honor. A Portuguese rosé was served with the lamb, and the man beside him was a somber Egyptian who smelled of sandalwood and something else …

  “Evan!” Thea said sharply, and he was back on the ledge over-looking a walled farm in the canyon.

  In a short while a bell rang and the guards changed. Thea turned to Evan and shrugged. It was decided.

  They awoke in the end of the night to the sound of shooting and a roar of engines. Scrambling to the edge of the ridge, they could see the fight below them A gang of perhaps twenty men on motorcycles was circling the high wall enclosing houses and barns As Thea and Evan watched, the defenders blasted one rider from his cycle with a shotgun The machine crashed into the wall dragging its bleeding rider behind it. The reserve gas cans exploded as the cycle hit, sending fire speeding up the walls The rider twitched once as he began to burn.

  “Pirates?” Thea asked in a whisper.

  Evan shook his head. “Nope. They’re no one I know. They must be one of the independents, looking for excitement as well as food or loot. Under their beards, they’re kids. And sloppy ones at that.”

  The fire was spreading, tonguing the roof of the nearest barn and panicking the stock inside Women ran from the main house toward the fire, the sounds of their voices carrying over the terrified cries of the animals.

  Now one of the cyclists broke through the burning wall trailing sparks as he roared by the defenders His snub nosed shotgun caught the nearest defender full in the chest. By the time the farmers killed him he had run down two of the women and clubbed them with the butt of the shotgun.

  “They’re low on ammunition,” Evan remarked critically.

  Thea said nothing, thinking of all the burning towns she had seen, all the bodies festering in the open, unmourned. She closed her eyes, but this did not help, for though she shut out the horror below her, the other images were brighter in her mind.

  Soon the fire had a full hold on one barn and was spreading down the wall to the next building. Two more of the men on cycles had breached the walls and were chasing after the farmers, yelling with the joy of slaughter. The fire colored their faces red, turning their features to devil masks.

  O
ne woman waited as she was ridden down, then calmly tossed a lighted oil lamp into the reserve gas cans as the cycle careened into her. She, her attacker, and his motorcycle erupted in flames.

  “Come on,” Evan said to Thea, pulling her toward him. As always, she drew back, but he kept his grip on her arm. “We’re going down there. It’s our only chance.”

  Thea nodded, taking hold of the sharpened file that was her only weapon. “The second barn,” she told him, sliding in his wake down the steep wall of the canyon. They clutched the brush around them to slow their descent, watching the battle below with growing concern, If they were discovered, it would be impossible to escape… They would be easy targets for the people below them, and their vulnerability was increasing with the daylight that hung expectantly in the east, making ghosts of the granite rising upriver.

  One of the houses was on fire now, sending heavy smoke rolling up the canyon toward the crossroad. Four horses had escaped from the larger of the barns and were lunging about, mad with fright, adding to the confusion that was already making the farmers’ defense a farce.

  More than half of the marauders on their motorcycles were inside the walls, running down the farmers, clubbing those who ran, capturing others. Two of them confidently dismounted from their machines and ran after a woman who had come out of a burning house. One of the men threw himself onto the farm woman, tearing at her clothes. She screamed, pushing against his chest and hammering at his face with a trowel, drawing blood and cracking bone in her wild resistance.

  Halfway up the slope above the battle, Thea blanched, stifling a scream in sympathy as she jammed her knuckles into her mouth. She stopped moving, watching and hating to watch what was happening below.

  “Thea,” Evan breathed anxiously. “Come. It’s only another twenty-five feet.”

  But Thea shook her head, her face rigid with fear.

  “Thea.” Evan looked down, seeing what she saw. Then he reached out again and deliberately pulled her off balance, wrenching her attention away from the compound. “Don’t look.”