False Dawn (8 page)

Another round of buckshot crashed through the brush, but not as close as the first had been. Thea glanced over her shoulder. “I think they’ve found the guts,” she whispered.

“They’re welcome to them,” Evan laughed softly. Tugging at her sleeve he pulled her farther away from the path of the buckshot.

“There are more of them,” Thea said, pausing long enough to peer down at the track. “They’ve got help. There’s five or six of them now.”

“Shit!” Evan’s fingers sank into her arm. “Look there.”

Ahead of them, where the dirt road crossed the old highway, dust was rising. The sound of wagons coming, drawn possibly by oxen or other heavy, slow animals, grew steadily louder, increasing with the sun.

Dismayed, Thea looked at Evan. “Now what?” she asked, looking from the coiling dust over the road to the armed cyclists on the gravel track.

But Evan motioned her to be silent, squinting impatiently at the road ahead. “I wonder who’s coming?” he murmured aloud, rubbing at his unkempt beard.

The noise on the road grew loud enough for the cyclists to hear it, and there were shouts as the men changed direction, their engines whining as the thick wheels tore into the gravel. With shouts of malicious joy the cyclists rode forward to meet the strangers on the road.

But their delight was short-lived, for as they rounded the bend, Thea and Evan heard a cry of horror go up from the marauders and the words, “Untouchables! Monsters!
Monsters!
”

Gingerly Evan crawled through the brush, motioning Thea to stay where she was so she could keep an eye on the cyclists. She nodded her quick understanding and positioned herself between Evan and the burning buildings, lying flat on the ground with her sharpened file clutched firmly in her hand.

The cyclists careened back to the burning farm, shouting to one another. In their moment of panic, they had dropped one of their shotguns at the crossroad, hut none came to retrieve it.

Slowly the caravan that had frightened the cyclists drew into view; a pathetic band of men and women traveling in rough carts drawn by emaciated cattle. That they could use such livestock and go unmolested by the starving and desperate people who roamed the mountains attested more eloquently than any other thing about them to the horror they carried in their wagons.

Evan beckoned Thea to come nearer, and she made her way in cautious silence through the underbrush to his side.

“Poor bastards,” Evan muttered as he moved closer to the road. His eyes dwelled for a moment on the cart with the children, then he turned away. Even in the years when he had led the Pirates, he had not got used to the terrible deformities that were appearing more and more in the diminishing number of live births of the few surviving men and women. These children in the carts were no exception: only one looked close to normal, all the other seven had defects ranging from a few extra fingers on each hand to hideously stunted bodies, to limbless trunks, to hornlike growths on lead-colored skin. Evan saw that two of the women were pregnant, and wondered, as he had often done before, what could drive them to bear children, with the hopeless testimony of the children riding in the cart.

Thea seemed aware of his thoughts. “What choice is there?” she said to him. “At least they’re fertile. They have that value.” She felt bitterness burn in her. The worth of a female was determined by her fecundity. She had seen women bought and paid for on the merit of a successful pregnancy; never mind that less than half the children survived, or that many of the women died in childbirth.

Behind them the cyclists were loading their loot onto their machines as fast as they could, leaving behind the burning buildings and the women they had fought so determinedly to possess. Ash from the burned-out barns drifted lazily on the air above them as they rushed to escape, and one lonely cock crowed for morning.

“They’re fools. They can’t catch it,” Thea said softly. “They’ve already got it inside of them. We all do.”

Just short of the crossroads the carts stopped and three of the men gathered at the head of the pathetic little band and talked. One of them indicated the smoke overhead with an impatient wave of his hand, and the oldest of the three looked about uneasily, gesturing nervously. Eventually one of the younger men was sent ahead to the crossroad to act as scout. He came back quickly enough and after a few moments of consultation, the carts moved forward again, turning at the crossroad onto the gravel track, toward the burning farm.

Thea and Evan watched in silence, keeping very still as the group of wagons rattled by them, the wheels crunching loudly as they rolled onto the gravel.

When the road was empty once more, Thea asked, “Do you think the fires will spread into the brush?” She did not want to talk about the Untouchables who had gone by. She had experienced for herself the unreasoning fear that mutations engendered in those who felt themselves normal.

“Not if they give the women some help, if the women are still alive,” Evan replied, carefully avoiding the mention of Untouchables as well. He listened intently for a moment, then crawled toward the road. Nothing; no one was in sight. He got to his feet and started toward the crossroad, the piglets tied to his belt flapping against his leg as he ran, smearing his pants with the last of their blood.

“Evan,” Thea called after him, alarmed. But her concern turned to surprise as she watched him search the bushes and the crossing and emerge with the shotgun one of the cyclists had dropped. She climbed out of the brush eagerly and was standing waiting for him as he came back with it. “Is it loaded?”

“Both barrels. It won’t take us very far, but we might find some cartridges for it somewhere. Maybe farther upstream.”

She shook her head. “Don’t count on it. But, Evan, we can make a crossbow,” she said with more enthusiasm than she had shown for weeks. “And we can make quarrels from the barrels.”

“Is that how you made the other one?” he asked, starting the long climb back to the ridge. “Come on. We’ve got to smoke these things before the meat turns bad.” He jiggled the rabbit skin thong and the piglets twitched like puppets.

She fell in beside him, her greedy eyes on the piglets and the shotgun. At their backs the smoke diminished, mixing with steam as the Untouchables carried water to the farm compound, working alongside the few women who were alive after the raid. The echo of motorcycles had faded from the canyon, leaving the soft sound of voices and the lowing of cattle to fill the narrow gorge.

Higher up the canyon they crossed the river on the remnants of a railroad bridge and climbed at last to the far rim to a burned-over plateau which hung over the river like a double chin. Knowing that they had food gave them a reserve strength they had not tapped until then and when they found a sheltered outcropping of rock, Thea surprised them both by locating a small, cold spring that dribbled a thin, pure trickle from the rocks.

Against the boulders they made a small lean-to for smoking one the piglets. The Manzanita that covered the old scars from the burning gave them enough dry wood for a fire; while one of the piglets hung in the lean-to in the slow pungent smoke, the other was roasted in the coals of the fire. Evan had found some wild garlic and had smeared the roasting piglet with it, and the steam that rose from the crackling skin put a sharp edge on their hunger.

As they waited for their food to cook, Thea toyed with the shotgun. “It would be more practical to make a crossbow’ she said to Evan when she had been silent for some minutes. “We can’t he sure of finding shot for this, but we can always make quarrels out of scrap metal. There’s all kinds of things that can make good quarrels. Nails. Bits of cars. All kinds of things.”

Looking across the banked fire, he remembered his first sight of her in the deserted silo above Chico. She had had her crossbow strapped to her wrist then, and had hated to leave it behind when Cox and the Pirates got too close. “You’d rather have the crossbow, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course. It’s a good weapon. It doesn’t make a lot of noise and it packs a lot of power. You can put a quarrel through almost anything if the tension is tight enough in the bow, and if you’re close enough to your target.” Her chin had gone up defiantly. showing the clean angles of her face, and lighting her dark, intelligent eyes. She hated being challenged like this, and her cheeks grew bright.

“And can you make this into a crossbow? Quickly?” He hefted the shotgun, balancing it in his hand for a moment, as if weighing its potentials.

Her eyes lit with excitement. “I could. Truly, Evan. I could.” She reached out for it, her hand almost trembling. “I’ll show you.”

He put the shotgun down. “If we found another, could you make one for me as well?”

She nodded happily. Evan handed her the gun, watching as she touched it. “But save the shells for me. We can still use them. Buckshot is a good weapon, too.” He laughed at her absent reply before reaching to pull the roasted piglet from the ashes.

The warm smell spread itself between them like water. Thea tore herself away from the beautiful, deadly shine of the gun barrels, looking feverishly at the piglet. The skin was shiny and crisp, cracked in places with juices running out, and the aroma was sublime.

They ate little bits, and slowly, being too hungry to hold much at first. The flesh was sweet; swallowing it almost hurt, and their stomachs gurgled in anticipation of a proper meal. The taste only made their hunger sharper, reminding them how long it had been since they had eaten enough. The dandelion greens which Evan had used for stuffing were bitter in contrast to the pork, and welcome, off-setting the meat with tartness. Finally Evan stopped both of them, wrapping the remainder of the piglet in part of his shirt to keep it for the morning.

“Never mind, Thea. We can eat again, tomorrow. We can eat for a week on what we have here,” he said softly, seeing fright return to her face, and hearing the one quick gasp she made as she reached convulsively for the meat. “We’ll be sick if we eat too much at first.”

“I know. I know. It’s just that…” She let her words trail off as she watched Evan put the wrapped piglet in the smoking lean-to with the other. Sighing, she sank down by the rocks, close to the fire. It was getting cold and the circle of warmth was precious.

Evan lay down near her, perceiving his own regret that Thea held off from him. He knew that her hurt was still in her, raw as ever, and that watching the raiding party at the farm had brought back all the pain, the invasion. She slept away from him, curled around herself, separate, shutting him out. He wondered as he watched the stars slide over the sky how long he could go on not touching her. Their desolate world ate the heart from him, pulling him away from the dreadful thing his life had become, wholly divorced from the cultured success he had enjoyed when he was young. Thea had the courage to live on in the ruins, to shore herself up against the terrible future, Maybe at Gold Lake, with others, they could hold off the bleak years ahead. He took hope from that thought, though he had little faith in it. As they were now, if this was all they would ever know, he feared what would become of them. He looked toward her huddled form once again. It would have been a solace, to lose himself in her body. But Thea did not want him. She cringed at his touch. There would be no comfort in her, not even a momentary satisfaction. There would be only more desolation, greater guilt. So he lay silently, and breathed in the smell of the piglets in the lean-to, trying not to recall other times and better food.

Late in the night Thea murmured, saying, “Evan?”

“I’m here.”

“Good.” Then she was asleep again, and Evan was not sure that she had ever been awake.

With the morning they decided to cut across the mountains, leaving the river to wind slowly out of its canyon. The passage would be hard, but they faced no danger from men on motorcycles or stray Pirates away from the roads. There had been no sign of lepers for almost a week. There was a certain risk, of course—from animals as well as other humans—but that risk remained no matter which route they took, and this way they would cut down the time to Quincy by nearly three days.

Away from the river second growth pines rose in spindly protest from the brush, their needles brick red. They had once been Ponderosa pines, but had been forced to change. Botany no longer had a name for them; they were on their own.

Striking east across the mountain ridge, Thea and Evan came on the old Pineleaf Mine Road winding up out of the gully where the mine had been. It was overgrown and rutted, showing ancient potholes through the weeds, but it marked a path through the mountains, skirting Smith and Snake Lakes. Here there were more trees, some of them still standing green, a testament to the pure water left in these high lakes. But it was a futile gesture, for poison moved in the air and fell with the rain. It would not be long before the trees succumbed.

Pineleaf Mine Road merged with the Snake Lake Road, though neither of those pitiful trails deserved to be called a road. It led them over the last shoulder of the high country. Below them and to the east lay Quincy, protected by mountains, in the warm pocket of the American Valley. From their vantage point, Thea and Evan watched the small cluster of houses, remembering that they had less than a quarter of a piglet left, and knowing that in houses there were meals.

“It looks peaceful,” Evan said doubtfully. “Not even armed gates.”

“Then there’s something wrong,” said Thea. “They’re on a highway; they must have had trouble before now.”

Evan weighed the paring knife in his hand thinking it a travesty of a weapon “A trap? What are the chances it is?” He was thinking aloud. “Were taking a big risk going down there without knowing more about the place.”

A horse-drawn buggy moved down the main road of the town unremarked and unhampered. “They aren’t starving that’s certain. They still have horses, big ones,” Thea observed. She cradled her crossbow with a grimace. “That means they must have food for themselves and feed for their animals Why?”

Frowning, Evan watched the town. Food and horses meant they were prosperous, given how little passed for prosperity in these days. It made even less sense for them to be unguarded and open to attack No leper flag hung red and yellow over the roofs, no pesthouses huddled outside the town, their doors painted telltale black. There was no sign of contamination in the color of the trees.