False Dawn (24 page)

“Booby trap?” Thea asked.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Evan answered, but he did not put his chain down. He knew that if he were in one of the houses, he would not show himself. He would wait silently, holding back, keeping his peace, his invisibility, until he could pick off the invaders without disclosing his presence. Traps and deadfalls would be his protections of choice.

“Shall we go in?” she said, giving her crowbar an experimental heft.

He nodded as he made up his mind. The few yards to the back door were all that they had to cover. He went ahead and pushed carefully on the weathered wood. The door swung open. It had not been locked or even latched.

Inside they found what was left of the householders: four partly decayed bodies lay sprawled in the living room, a strange phosphorescent mold on their peeling skins.

“Chemical contamination. They must have tried to farm the forest after it had been sprayed,” Evan said as he knelt by one of the bodies. “Too bad. It doesn’t look like anything else went wrong, though. This isn’t leprosy. It isn’t cancer.”

“It doesn’t have to be—they’re dead just the same,” Thea said dryly. She had raided the kitchen for knives and found two or three with fine sharp blades, as well as the bonus of a meat cleaver. “There’s also some canned food,” she reported carefully. “Home canned. No dates.”

Evan rose from the side of the nearest body. “It could be contaminated too, of course. That’s what you’re saying? If they did the canning after the forest was sprayed. And there’s no way to tell.”

She nodded her confirmation before turning back to the kitchen. “No way.”

Evan followed her, furtively rubbing his hands on his fraying habit. “We’ll have to take a chance and eat. There isn’t much choice.”

“What if we don’t eat?”

He opened his hands hopelessly. “Look out there. It’s a long way to other food, and no guarantee it’ll be any safer than this. If we don’t eat, we starve.”

“I see.” She leaned against the kitchen table, looking at the disorder around her. “There’s no wood. We’ll have to break up furniture if we want any heat. And the water doesn’t work. I tried that already.”

He put down the chain. “We don’t have to stay here very long. Only until we’re out of our chains and our feet heal a bit. Let’s hope we can find boots while we’re here.”

“Or until we die, like the others.”

So it was settled.

In the house they found saws and files and after long work they were free of the manacles. A salve in a tube left in the bathroom turned out to be good medication for the abrasions on their wrists and ankles: after a few days they felt better and the marks began to fade.

They buried the bodies they found, then set to work sorting out the food jars, and worked out a program for a systematic raid on the other houses for boots and clothes, ending up with a choice and variety that was almost intoxicating. Evan found proper scissors and trimmed his hair and beard. After some powerful persuasion he talked Thea into letting him cut her hair.

“You can’t want to have it all matted and flopping in your eyes,” he said gently, touching her head. “It’s silly, Thea.”

“I like it. Besides, we have combs now.” Her chin was out mulishly and there was deep discomfort in the back of her eyes. She said truculently, “You don’t have to do it. I can manage.”

Then he understood. “Look, Thea, I’m not going to trap you. I’m not trying to force you to do anything you don’t want to. It’s your hair, and you can wear it any way you want. It’s also very dirty and scraggly and a damn nuisance. You said so yourself. But if you want to keep it, fine. I know I want mine cut off.”

“Good. All I’ve got to do is wash and comb mine and it will be fine.”

He handed her the comb he had found and watched as she tried to drag it through the tangles.

“Let me cut your hair, Thea,” he said once more when the comb had broken.

“I just want to make crossbows,” she mumbled, but Evan could see that his suspicions had been right, and that she still feared his touch, even his nearness. Her body kept an uneasy truce with itself and she went on this precarious way to avoid the fear which still lived in her. The scar on her cheek where Brother Roccus had hurt her was only a pale line, and her breast had long since healed. But there were other wounds, wounds of the soul, still open, festering, hidden deep inside her. Evan wished then that he did not want her as much as he did, that he was indifferent to her, that he could hold back from her without regret.

She sat stonily as Evan wielded the scissors.

Six days later, with new clothes and canned food and newly made crossbows, they set out to the south again, for Truckee and the mountains around Lake Tahoe. Two days brought them near Truckee, but the drifting soot on the wind told its own story, as did the eight impaled bodies of men at the entrance to the town. They had not been dead long and the oppressive stench was ghastly.

“This is a new wrinkle,” Evan said as they saw the ominous stakes with their grisly burdens.

“Pirates?”

He looked at the impaled men, but there was little human left in their faces. “I don’t know. Maybe. But they can’t have come from Graeagle, Maybe Nyack. Maybe from Auburn. Auburn’s a real possibility. Cox wanted to have a base there last year. It was one of the things that he promised when he took over. If these are Pirates, they might be at Tahoe ahead of us as well as behind us.” He gave a scowl to the stakes. “They mean to keep people out. These are warnings not to go any farther. They will probably have patrols out. They mean it, Thea—they won’t tolerate newcomers, and certainly not anyone like me, or you.” He could see Cox again, his face reddened by the sun so that the freckles were lost under the burn. He was so inoffensive-looking, Cox was, until you took the time to watch his eyes and saw the muddy hatred there. If Cox had ordered the impalement, it was because he enjoyed watching it.

“I don’t like this: let’s go, Evan.” Thea started down the road toward the town. “We can make it if we’re careful.”

Evan remained where he was. “No, not that way. We can bypass the center of town and cross the highway this side of Donner Lake. There’s a long bend in the road, according to the maps we’ve seen. They can’t watch every inch of the road all the time, and they’ll be sticking close to the town.” He looked at the sky. “It might snow soon. They’ll stay indoors.”

“Snow or rain,” Thea corrected him as she studied the clouds gathering overhead, shoved one on top of the other by a south wind.

“Or rain.” He adjusted his sack slung over his back and got his crossbow ready. “Slot up a quarrel. If we have to fight, there won’t be any warning.” He looked one last time at the hideous pales. “I wonder who taught them that?”

Thea had fitted a quarrel to the slot and set the trigger, then fell in beside him. They went silently, keeping away from the patches of snow that would leave tracks. The sun crept across the glowing sky, and they marked their progress by it, that bright smear behind the clouds.

Finally they approached the highway that lay curving below them. There were a few building shells, long ago destroyed, and the rusted remains of cars between them and the highway. “What do you think?” Evan asked as he watched the road, tense, alert.

“I can’t hear anything. There’s nothing moving.”

“Ummm,” He tightened his crossbow another notch.

In a moment she said, “That business with the stakes that wasn’t your idea, was it?” She looked at him for an answer.

“Impalement?” He raised his sandy brows, more surprised than anything else. “You think that I would do that?”

She shook her head, relieved and guilty at once.

“I knew about it. Anyone who’d read history knew about it. But I never used it. Never.” He looked down at her, at the white in her dark hair, at her face that never smiled. He knew deep sadness for her, that she should be born into the world where men impaled one another, where joy was gone and only the hardship remained, where even hope was impractical.

“I’m glad you never did that. I’m glad someone else taught them to do that,” she said, meeting his horrified eyes only fleetingly before she fell silent once more, her face closed to him, remote, alone.

He could think of nothing to say to her. Raising his crossbow he moved toward the highway.

It turned out to be easier to get across the road than they had thought it would be. There was no one about, and in a while it began to rain, a slow, sleety mizzle that reduced all the world to shades of gray.

On the far side of the highway they found what had been a hospital, gutted and looted, a grim testament to the presence of the Pirates.

“I think they might have left medicine in here—not drugs, but salves and antibacterial scrubs. We could use those, if there’re any left.”

“Even bandages, we need bandages.” She turned to him.

“Splints, too, and emergency packs.” He was not as hopeful as he sounded; Pirates often took all the first-aid supplies they could find and a small hospital like this one was a treasure-trove for them.

“Should we look? Do you think anything’s left?”

He considered the possibilities. “We’ve got a couple of hours until nightfall, we might as well use them here. We’ll be indoors, at least.” Keeping his crossbow ready, he led the way through the shattered doors into what was once an emergency room, Three partitions separated gurneys from each other, and shelves, although raided and pulled apart, the smallest one still had bandages and a few basic first aid supplies. In one corner an armored door stood open, crazily askew on its hinges where the explosives had ripped it away. Obviously it had at one time contained drugs.

“Here,” said Thea as she gathered up the bandages. “There’s tape, too, and some doctor’s knives. We could use them. We still need knives and they make good tips for quarrels.”

He picked up the scalpels without comment, packing them away with the blankets he found. Then, quite by accident, he found two crank-charged flashlights, obviously the sort that had been used by nurses.

“Will they work?” Thea asked him when she saw him testing the crank on one of the flashlights.

“I’m going to see.” He knew he was trusting to luck and was very much afraid that the reason they had been overlooked by the Pirates was that they were useless. But to his amazement the flashlight did produce a feeble beam. “Here,” he said, handing her the first flashlight and shoving the other into one of the pockets of his anorak, “only use it for emergencies. You’ll be glad to have it then.”

She took the flashlight wonderingly. “I haven’t seen one of these since”—she thought about it—”years.” The word was lame, as if she wanted to shut the memory away. She had been seventeen when she had last had a working flashlight. She had left it in a steel culvert that fed an irrigation canal. She had clung to that flashlight as its beam faded, then sat in the dark, listening to the farmers searching for her outside. There had been rats in the pipe, and once the flashlight had died, she had used it as a club to fend them off. She shuddered as she recalled it.

“Keep it with you,” Evan said flatly. He had seen her face change and knew that he must not force her to share her thoughts with him.

They made a last search of the hospital, hoping to find something more that had been left behind. And it was then that Evan found the bodies stuffed in a closet. They had been dead for many weeks and had died terribly.

“Pirates?” Thea asked as Evan moved back from the closet, gagging.

“Yes,” he said when he could speak. “That one, the one with the skin off his arms, the one with the extra finger”—he pointed to a viciously mangled body—”that’s Cox.”

Thea stared. “Cox? But I thought …”

“So did I. But I guess the mutations have caught up with them.” He studied the rotten corpses, willing himself to be impassive. Along with the burns, the abrasions, the marks of torture, he saw new fingers, and regrown tissue, still its tawny-new color in spite of decay. “This changes things,” he said.

Late the next day they heard the sound of engines. They had chosen to follow the highway south to Lake Tahoe, hoping to find Squaw Valley, for if crazy Margaret Cornelia had been right, they might be safe there. And if Margaret Cornelia had been wrong, they could be no worse off than they were already.

“Vans?” Thea said, uncertain.

“I think so.” He was already heading into the underbrush sprouting by the road. “Quickly, Thea. Keep your head down.”

“Do you think we’ll have to fight our way out?”

“I hope not,” he said with strong emotion; he realized they would not get far.

In a few moments a pair of vans sped into view, each with a driver and a man riding shotgun. They went up the broken road with grim efficiency, making only a few necessary signals from one van to the other. Evan watched the signals carefully and when the vans had rumbled out of sight, he said to Thea, “It seems they’re taking over parts of Tahoe. Most of the north shore.”

“What does that mean?” She was cold with fear inside.

“It means that we stay away from the lake until we know more.” He thought of Margaret Cornelia and her madness again, locked away in the mountains as surely as she would have been locked away in an asylum decades ago, swathed in soft restraints and the fog of anti-psychotic drugs. “I hope she was right about Squaw Valley. We need a place like that. We can take a few days to comb the mountains west of here. It’s got to be around here somewhere. We can find it, check it out. Maybe we can stay there.”

“But what will we find? Will we be able to defend it from those Pirates you taught so well?” Even as she said it, she knew it was not fair to him, but the words were out; there was no recalling them.

More than he wanted to admit she had hit home. “They were my Pirates once, but not now. Remember Chico, Thea?”

She wanted very much to apologize, to ask him to forgive her, but she avoided his eyes and said, “If we’re going to find that valley, we’d better start looking now.”

He made a gesture of agreement, and wondered what she expected of him now.

That night as they ate a frugal meal, he tried again to sound her out, to discover what had upset her, but she remained stubbornly silent. She slept as far away from him as she could and still be near the warmth of the embers of their small fire, her back turned toward him.