False Dawn

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “I hate being humored, or patronized,” she said. “If you thought that was my intention, you’re wrong,” he said, more sharply than he had intended. “If you tell me so,” she said doubtfully, then brusquely changed the subject. “We must get to the stamp mill.” Then, as they started down the decline to the lake, she stopped him, her face drawn and serious. “No, Evan. That isn’t what I wanted to say, not entirely. I’m cold and frightened. At other times I might not be angry—not very angry. But when I’m frightened, I lash out.”

  “Frightened? Of what? Of me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, not entirely honestly. She took her lip in her teeth, turning toward the lake to resume her descent. Catching herself on the brittle scrub, she had an excuse to ignore his call that followed her along the mountain.

  “Thea!” The word was urgent, but she did not turn. In a while he came down the mountain in her wake, a fine line of worry growing between his brows.

  The old resort had been ransacked some time before, perhaps when the owners left it, well over a decade ago. Animals had been in since, and there was the unmistakable smell of skunk and an old, disorganized pile of ferret dung at the back of an eviscerated lounger in the entertainment room. An old sofa in what had been the lobby yielded tufts of cotton batting and a strong odor of mildew. Most of the linens in the maintenance room were rotting, but two or three blankets were acrylic and were salvageable, if somewhat stiff.

  In the kitchen they found four large pots. Evan seized them happily, seeing his tasks as cook becoming easier.

  “It’s almost dark,” Thea called to him from the dining room where she had found utensils for them. “We must get to the stamp mill or be caught here tonight. I don’t want to spend the night here.” She shifted uneasily. “It’s too open.”

  Grabbing at their bounty, they set out through the dusk to the stamp mill, arriving in the shelter of its steeply slanted roof as the last of the light left the sky. Carefully they made their way up the stairs, testing each riser before they put weight on it. Once the wood gave way, and both cried out as Thea’s foot fell through the new hole, splinters flying around it. But at last they came to the office and infirmary, high against the side of the mill, above the workings of the stamps. They had to smash the lock to get in, and once inside, they searched for a chair to jamb under the knob to hold the door shut.

  In the darkness Evan felt in his pack. “I can’t find them,” he said after a moment. “I should have candles…I picked up a couple boxes of them, back there.”

  She groped her way to his side. “Hold still,” she told him and pulled the pack from his shoulders. “This won’t take long. It’s easier this way.” With a last effort she pulled the flap back, then rummaged around in the pocket. “Wait a minute.” At last there was the scrape of a match and a light flickered in the dark.

  They looked around in silence. The candle wavered, then shone steadily, giving hints of the room. On one side sat a pot-bellied stove, cold for years and growing rusty. Beside it a rack with books and magazines stood, their shiny covers dull and the photographs faded. Beyond the rack were three chairs, then a door. On the far wall were two more chairs and the door to the infirmary, its label still readable. In the wan light of the candle, the walls of the room were mud-colored.

  “Horne sweet home,” Evan said as they stood in the little halo of illumination. The unused smell was strong, but it would disappear quickly. Already the wax scent of the candle was submerging it.

  Thea handed him another candle and lit it from hers. “I’m going exploring,” she said, and disappeared into the inner office. In a few minutes she gave a crow of delight and reappeared smiling. “Evan, there’s a toilet in there, and a sink. And everything.”

  “Is the plumbing still good?” he asked, skeptical. It had been a long time since the stamp mill had been occupied, and with freezing winters, the pipes might have long since burst.

  “I’ll check it,” she said eagerly, stepping back into the adjoining room. A few clangs and then a gurgle and the distant sound of splashing. Some more strange sounds followed this, and Thea called, “It’s one of those made to empty into a midden. There’s a trough outside to catch the dung. We can put a waste-drum there, if you think it’s a good idea, but the toilet will flush. I think there’s a water tank for it on the roof. When it freezes, we can keep a can of water in here, and it’ll be okay.”

  “Well,” said Evan to the walls, “that’s one less thing to worry about.”

  “The sink runs off of that tank, too, which means we won’t have to haul in snow to melt; there isn’t any hot water, but that doesn’t matter. We can heat water on the stove if we have to.” “And we can have enough water to drink—that’s important,” he said. She nodded emphatically. “That’s what I think. There won’t be any trouble with getting water, not if we keep the stoves warm all the time; the chimney flue goes up through the water-tank, to keep it from freezing over so long as we can keep the stove warm.” She was genuinely excited as she returned to the outer office, her face showing more color than it had in some time. “What about the infirmary? Have you b een in there yet?”

  “I leave it to you,” he said, and continued to work out how to keep them warm in the coming months.

  The report from there was good as well. There were five beds and although the mattresses were musty, the room had remained closed, and so there was no real damage done. Once the square-fronted stove was set to burning the pinecones they had stuffed into it, the mattresses could be hauled in to dry. Two functioning stoves were genuine treasures. An electric heater in the infirmary was totally useless. They decided to cannibalize it, taking the wire coils and other parts that could be of value. In one of the tall cupboards Thea found more blankets, and luckily these were in good shape aside from needing an airing after so many years in sealed plastic bags.

  “Oh, Evan, it isn’t going to be so bad after all. Not like being outside or in the Valley. We can live here for a while.”

  “If we’re careful,” he agreed, kneeling by his pack and pulling out his bedding. “But tonight, even with the blankets, we’re going to be cold. Listen to the wind.”

  The rising wail made the stamp mill thrum as new gusts pressed over the mountains. Thea gave it a moment’s attention, then went back to the blankets. “I’ve been cold before,” she said, thinking back to the slightly more than ten years she had spent by herself, when she had been grateful for a dry spot under a bridge or in a barn with enough hay to wrap around her.

  “That’s no reason to keep on being cold,” he said. “We’ve got to make plans. I think we’d better confine ourselves to one room. Otherwise we waste heat trying to keep everything warm. We’ll waste candles, too.” As he spoke he dragged the chairs into the center of the room, arranging them so that he could drape a few of the blankets over them, making a kind of tent to insulate them against the freezing night. “We’re on the windward side of the range. There’s a big chill factor. We’ll need to do something about drafts.”

  “We’ll need more than that,” she said, and left him for a moment to return lugging a mattress from the infirmary. She flopped it near the chairs. “It doesn’t smell very good, but we can put a couple down for sleeping on, and pile a few around the chairs. It ought to help some.”

  By the light of their two candles they made up their sleeping place, and when it was finished, crawled, fully dressed, into it. “Thea,” Evan said in the dark, very softly, “Thea.” He felt her shrink from him. “Don’t, Thea. I won’t do anything you wouldn’t like, and that’s not bullshit..I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to. But it’s cold, Thea. We can lie on our sides, back to back, with a couple of blankets over us. It will help keep us warm. Thea?”

  “I know. And you make sense.” She spoke in a still, small voice. “I don’t…” She sought his face in the dark, wishing to see what was in his eyes. “It’s not you, Evan, not you. It’s in me. I just can’t. I can’t.” He reached out his hand to her a
s she spoke and she grasped it for a moment in hers. Then she pulled away once more. “Let’s just sleep. If we get cold, we’ll move closer anyway—won’t we?”

  Morning brought new snow. It fell gently but persistently from the scudding grey clouds, turning the mountains white and masking the ground so that the rocks, and road alike hid under its smooth, treacherous surface. The trees were bearded in white, but as the wind rose they cast off the snow, postponing the inevitable.

  Thea went out early to gather wood, knowing that it would be more and more difficult to find as the winter deepened. She had an ax in her pack now, but it was not designed to bring down full grown trees. At best she could use it for lopping branches and chopping logs. So she searched with care, returning three hours later, heavily laden with boughs, with the news that she had seen bear tracks on the north side of Buck’s Lake. “They’ll hibernate soon. But it’s not going to be easy for them around here. They’re hungry and grouchy.” She dumped the firewood in the office and set out for more, taking some extra quarrels with her for her crossbow.

  Evan re-enforced the door with a drop bolt of heavy planking taken from the mouth of the stamp mill. He found a good supply of candles in three large boxes in the infirmary and five kerosene lamps, all gone dry. He felt relieved to have the candles although the lamps would have been better.

  Soon he had the stove fired up, filling the rooms with the dusty stench of disuse until the heat at last burned it off. The mattresses were dragged in near the stove and were aired along with the blankets. Then Evan found another, even larger stove in the shed where ore had been sluiced, and with a great deal of effort and a makeshift block-and-tackle, he got it to the office and set it up where the desk had been. With Thea’s help he attached the chimney of the second stove to that of the first. He felt a first inkling of hope, and said to Thea, “We aren’t off to a bad start. We might make it through the winter, with a little luck.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed. “We’ll be warm when we starve; I guess that’s something.”

  Thea caught no fish that first day, nor the second. She was patient, persistent, but she warned Evan that they would have to find food soon. The cans and jars the Zimmermanns had given them would not last much longer, even if they rationed the food more strictly than they were doing already.

  “There are more of those strange deer around—the ones with the humps,” she said when they had been at Buck’s Lake for several days. The snow was almost a foot deep now, piling up in deceptive drifts. Evan found bark strips and improvised snowshoes for them.

  “Strange deer?” he asked as he finished wrapping wire around the heel of the last shoe. It was not a very expert job, but the things worked, and he was no longer that concerned now about the cosmetic effect.

  “You know, like the one we saw outside of Quincy.”

  “Oh, yes; those.”

  Their living quarters were cozily warm, having come to a kind of truce between utility and neatness. Twine stretched between coat hooks had become their clothesline; it held two gently steaming shirts at the moment.

  “I’ve seen a small herd of them, over on the north side of the lake.”

  “What was strange about that?”

  “Their humps. They all had that hump? Something like cattle, but heavier. Well, there are more like them around here. No mule deer anywhere, not the animals, and not their tracks. I’ve looked.”

  “You said the same thing on our way up the mountain,” he reminded her.

  “I thought there would be some mule deer left.” She found it hard to explain why this bothered her so much. “I saw a couple of the hump-backed ones at a distance this morning, a doe and a fawn. They were feeding on scrub. Maybe I can trap them. I couldn’t get close enough for a good shot at them. They’d give a lot of meat, wouldn’t they, Evan?’

  Evan nodded. “We might look for traps in the resort. I already checked the stamp mill. Nothing there. But the resort might have had traps around the kitchen supply cabinet, to keep the animals away from the food and maybe pick up a little money on the side from the pelts. Strange that we haven’t seen any raccoons. I’d have thought there’d be a fair number of them in a place like this.” He held out two finished snowshoes to Thea. “There. I think it will hold now.”

  She came closer, bending over his work with him. “They look heavy enough. I guess they’ll do. They better?’ It was getting dark, the twilight coming early as the snow-laden clouds crowded the sky. “Can we see about the traps tomorrow? The snow is getting deep and we’d better put them out soon. We need to find a place they won’t get buried.”

  “If that’s what you want. Any fish?” He was gathering up his supplies, prepared to store them in the infirmary.

  “Not today. There were cat tracks on the ice. We’ve got competition for the fish.”

  “A cat? What kind? Puma?”

  “No,” she shook her head, frowning a little as she visualized the paw prints she had found in the snow. “Not big enough for a puma. It looks more like a bobcat, or a lynx. There’re probably some of them left around here.”

  “A bobcat can raid traps,” he reminded her, feeling cautious.

  “Not before I do.”

  They found the traps they needed, old rusty metal devices, with cruel teeth already the color of blood. A good scrubbing and oiling put them back in operation, and Thea set them out near the edge of the lake and around the resort. Each morning the two of them made their rounds of the line, taking their crossbows with them. But it was a lean winter already, and their take was disappointingly small: only one badger the first week and a maimed fox. There were no more signs of any deer.

  The catch from the lake was not much better. There were fish in the lake, that was certain. But they were wary and wise. They avoided the holes in the ice, keeping to the deep water.

  One snowy afternoon Thea found a bobcat, near starvation, scrambling at the nearest ice hole after a fish. As she watched, the bobcat overbalanced and fell thrashing into the freezing water. It yowled, making the sound more hideous in its terror. Knowing that she could do nothing, Thea watched as the bobcat lost its strength, growing feeble in its battle, until it slipped under the ice, keening while his head disappeared. She felt an unfamiliar regret in the death of the bobcat, and fell silent then, her thoughts far away, back in the destruction of the settlement on Camminsky Creek, and her own narrow escape from a fiery death. For eleven rootless years she had been on the move, keeping away from the Pirates when she could, sliding through the wake of their destruction when they passed her. And it all led to this. She stared at the hole in the ice for a long time.

  She remembered the small, protected community outside Cloverdale tucked into the folds of the hills amid orchards and vineyards; it was warm there, and pleasant, they were prosperous enough. The men who led the group had known from their teaching days at Davis that it would take more than determination to survive what was wrong with the world. They had decided to adapt, to get the jump on nature. They adapted their children. Viral modification, they had called it, when it worked. When it didn’t work, it was because of environmental factors. She slid the nictitating membranes over her eyes, her most obvious and most successful modification. In those slow years at Camminsky Creek they had waited, smug in the belief that they would ride the horror out, that the people would come to their senses, make laws and institutions to monitor and protect the environment. It was assumed that in a generation or two at most, they would be among those to emerge as the guiding force of the new world.

  Then the C. D. had come, and though they were not Pirates and Montague did not lead them, it was the end of the small, protected community, and the beginning of her wandering. She was wandering still.

  The next time she went to the ice hole she thought she saw the bobcat die again. She sat on the ice and wept.

  When they finally found one of the deer, it was by accident. They had been without food for two days. The deer, wallowing trapped in a snowdrift on the leeward
side of the mountain crest, was much larger and heavier than they had anticipated, about the size of a wildebeest. At last Evan rigged a sling and between them they dispatched the animal with Thea’s crossbow and dragged it out of the drift. They left the guts there for the badgers to fight over; by making a rude harness, they hauled the deer back to the stamp mill.

  They hung the carcass in the stamp room, hacking up the joints on the big wooden supports that had once held the rockers. With an improvised counterweight, they hung the meat from the ceiling in the freezing air, out of the reach of hungry animals that stalked the mountains. They were all too desperate to do otherwise.

  Evan took the upper ribs and with fishing twine rolled a standing roast, reflecting ironically that when he was a child, a standing rib roast of venison was a luxury, available only to the very rich and the privileged. Now it was the best he could find, because most cattle had been slaughtered long ago.

  In the wreckage of the resort kitchen he had found bottled herbs, and used them now to make the gamy meat more palatable. “I wish we had some greens, anything green,” he complained as he stuffed the meat with the last of the juniper berries. Greens were long under the snow, and he had hurt his new hand digging for them. “Miner’s lettuce would do, or watercress.”

  “It’s this or fish,” Thea said, feeling the lack of vegetables as much as he did. “If you like, I’ll try digging tomorrow.”

  He thought it over. “If you have the time, we could use it. There’s sure to be dandelions up here somewhere.”

  “Dandelions. Sure,” she agreed quickly, and kept her real opinion to herself.

  Sometime toward the end of December the worst blizzard of the winter rolled in out of the north, an angry torrent of snow and ice that buried the world in its wrath, howling down the mountains in demented fury. For three days it clawed at the mountains, wounding them and bandaging them at the same time.