False Dawn
Authors: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Contents
for
Bonnie Dalzell
Jane Robinson
and
Diana Thatcher
who remember what happened to the dinosaur
1
Most of the bodies were near the silos and storage tanks, where the defenders had retreated in the end. Caught between the Pirates and the Sacramento, they had been wiped out to a man. Mixed in with the few Pirate dead Thea saw an occasional C. D. uniform. The cops had gone over at last.
She moved through the stench of the tumbled, looted corpses, cautiously, carefully. She had not survived for her twenty-seven years being foolhardy.
Orland had been a shambles, heavy with the smell of burning and death. After dark she had made her way east into Chico—what was left of it. Here the Pirates had revenged themselves on the few remaining townspeople. There were men, terribly mutilated men, hanging by their heels from lampposts, turning as they swung. And there were women.
One of the women wasn’t dead yet. Her ravaged body hung naked from a broken billboard. Her legs were splayed wide and anchored with ropes; legs and belly were bloody, there were heavy bruises on her face and breasts, and she had been branded with a large “M” for mutant.
When Thea came near her, she jerked in her bonds and shrieked laughter that ended in a shuddering wail. Don’t let me get like that ever, Thea thought, watching the woman’s spasmodic thrusts with her hips. Not like that.
There was a movement down the street and Thea froze. She could not run without being seen and she could not wait where she was if it were Pirates. She moved slowly, melding into the shadow of a gutted building, disappearing into the darkness as she kept watch.
The creatures that appeared then were dogs; lean, wretched things with red-rimmed eyes and raised hackles. Thea had seen enough of the wild dogs now raiding farms and towns to know that these were hunting meat. In the woman they found it. The largest of the dogs approached her on his belly, whining a little. He made a quick dash and nipped at the leg nearest him. Aside from a long howl of laughter the woman did nothing: there was nothing she could do.
Emboldened, the dog came toward her, taking a more decisive bite from the leg. The response was a jerk and a scream followed by low laughter. The blood running over her foot excited the rest of the pack and the other dogs grew bolder. Each began to make quick, bounding attacks, taking token bits of flesh from her legs and feet, growing more confident when they met with no resistance.
Thea watched stonily from the shadows, fitting a quarrel to her makeshift crossbow. Then she braced her forearm and pulled the trigger.
The high sobbing laughter was cut off with a bubble and a sigh as the quarrel bit into the woman’s neck. There was no sound then but the snarling of dogs, and tearing,
In the deep shadows of the alley Thea moved away from the pack. I’d forgot about that, she said to herself accusingly. There will be more dogs. And rats, she thought, after a moment.
As she walked she tightened her crossbow again and fitted another quarrel to it. She probably wasn’t a mutant, she let herself decide as she walked. The woman still filled her mind. Probably she was just healthy. Health was as suspicious now as obvious deformity. She did not want to consider what the Pirates would do to Thea herself, genetically altered as she was.
The sound of the dogs died behind her in the empty, littered streets. Here and there she saw piles of bodies, some dead from fighting, others from more sinister things. The “M” brand was on many of them. Twice she saw the unmistakable signs of New Leprosy on the blind faces, skin scaled over and turning the silver that allied it with the old disease. But unlike the first leprosy, the new variety was very contagious. And the Pirates had carried it away with them.
She chafed her dark, hard skin, long since burned red-brown. So far she had been lucky and had resisted most of the new diseases; but she knew that the luck would eventually run out, even for her, even if she found the Gold Lake Settlement and they accepted her. Nothing could hold out against the contamination that flowed with the water and sailed in the air.
After more than an hour of walking she left Chico behind, striking eastward through ruined fields and swampland where the levees had failed.. The last crops had been forced from the much half a dozen years before and now dead stalks crisscrossed underfoot like great soggy snakes. A heavy phosphorescence hung over the marshland, a light that did not illuminate or warm. Thea did not know the source of it, but she avoided the spot. Since the Sacramento Disaster four years ago the Valley had ceased to be safe land. Before the levees had crumbled the basin had been a haven from the pollution around it, a last stronghold of fertility in a sterile land. Now, with the Delta a reeking chemical quagmire, the upper river was slowly surrendering to the spreading desolation.
She stumbled and saw a dead cat at her feet. Animals had been at it: the chest gaped and the eye sockets were empty, but the fur was thick and healthy. She shook her head at the waste of it. Bending closer she noticed with surprise that the front paws were the tawny orange of regenerating tissue. Maybe the cat had been virally mutated, as she had been. Or maybe the virus that caused the mutation was catching. A lot of other things sure were catching. Shaking her head again she dragged some rotting stalks over the little carcass, knowing this for the empty gesture it was even as she did it.
The ground grew soggier as she went, the old stalks becoming a vile goo, and sticky, clinging. She looked ahead for firmer ground and saw an oily stretch of water moving sluggishly under the wan moon. Beyond was the stunted fuzz of what had been cattails. Sliding the nictitating membranes over her eyes, she dropped to her knees and moved forward, her crossbow at the ready. The river was not a friendly place.
Once she heard a pig rooting along the bank and she stopped. Those pigs that were still alive were dangerous and hungry; the big ones outmatched her in weight and ferocity. Eventually the pig crashed away up the bank and Thea began paddling again. One thing to say for the Disaster, she thought, as the stinking water surged around her. It killed a lot of insects.
Then she reached the cattails and slipped in among them for cover. There was a kind of protection that would last until first light, when she would have to find higher ground. She pulled herself onto a hummock and curled up on it for a few hours’ sleep.
Sunrise brought more animals to the river, and a few foraging Pirates, who swept by in the modified open vans that ran on methane. They had rifles and took three shots for two carcasses the pig from the night before and an ancient horse with broken knees.
“Bring ‘em in! Bring ‘em in!” hollered the one in the lead van.
“Give me a hand, you snot-fucking Mute!”
The first gave a shout. “Montague gave you hauling this week. Cox didn’t change that. I didn’t have maggots in my pack.” He snorted mockingly as he revved the engine.
“You know what you have to do if you waste fuel, Mackley,” the one doing the hauling said gleefully.
“Just you shove it up your ass!” shouted Mackley, panic in his voice. “I don’t want to hear no threats from you. I could drop you right now.”
“Then you’d have to do the hauling,” reminded the second laconically, then added, “Cox says Montague’s dead, anyway.”
“Him and his guard!” Mackley said, as if it were a curse. “They tried to stop Wilson and me when we got that Mute kid out of the cellar. Said to leave him alone. Said that we had to save the kid. A rotten Mute! Montague; he was crazy.”
They were silent but for the whir of the engines and the sound of the dead animals being dragged through the mud.
Thea huddled in the cattails, hardly daring to breathe. She had seen Cloverdale after the Pirates had sacked it, the first of many cities that had fallen to them, in the days before Montague had organized them under that ironic rallying cry, “Survive!”
“That’s one,” said Mackley.
“Lick your cunt.” The sound of his voice was threatening.
Again there was silence until the one doing the hauling lot out a scream.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Mackley from the van.
“Water spiders!” the other shrieked in terror. “Dozens of ‘em!” And he made a horrible sound in his throat.
From her protection in the cattails, Thea watched, crouching, fright in her eyes. Water spiders were nothing to mess with, even for her. She clung to the reeds around her and watched for the hard, shiny bodies with the long hooked mandibles filled with paralyzing venom. Three of them could kill you in less than ten minutes. Dozens, and you didn’t have a chance at all.
The voice-rending shouts had stopped, and soon a body drifted aimlessly by, with the spiders climbing over the face toward the eyes. Thea looked away.
Up on the bank there was a cough and the motor whizzed as Mackley drove away too fast, the tires spewing mud and pebbles.
Thea waited until the body had slid out of sight around a bend in the river before she moved free from the cattails. Then she ran off through the brushy undergrowth, not pausing to look for Pirates or spiders. Every step left her struggling for balance, but she knew beyond all doubt that if she fell, she would end up floating downriver, her body a raft for water spiders. Her knees were uncertain as jelly and her fright made her light-headed. She ran frantically until she was on higher ground; there she stopped and breathed.
She had come about half a mile from the river in those few, interminable, minutes, and had left a wake like a timber-run through the brush. There was nothing to concern her about that: it could easily have been made by an animal and would not be investigated, not with water spiders about. But the hunting party meant that the Pirates were still around, maybe camped for a time. If Montague really was dead, as the men she had overheard had said, she knew that there would be many changes with the Pirates. Montague had been a stern, uncompromising man, but there had been those who said he was just, and kept the havoc of his men to as low an incident as he could. If what she had seen in Chico was any indication of what Cox would be like…She had to get away from them, or she would end up hanging from a billboard. She shuddered as she remembered.
She guessed that the Pirates would camp near the river, within walking distance of Chico, so she started away from that, off to the southeast, keeping to the cover of the trees. The Scrub oak were gone, having succumbed early to the poisonous molds in the water, but the hardier fruit trees, long adapted to chemical growth, had run riot, spreading over the hills like weeds, their fruit made inedible by the stuff that had fed them.
Thea realized that if she had to she could climb up into the branches of the trees around her, and from there, pick off the Pirates one by one with her crossbow until they killed her. That would take time. Arid she needed time.
By midday she had put several miles between herself and the Pirates. The river lay below her, a greasy brown smudge. The east fork of the Sacramento was dying.
That was when she found the makeshift silo. Some farmer in the hills, perhaps one of the old communes, had built a silo to store grain, and there it stood: lopsided, rusty, but safe and dry. A haven for the night and a possible base for a couple of days, a place to come back to after scouting the hills for the best way into the Sierra arid to Gold Lake.
She walked carefully around the silo, looking for the door and for the farmhouse it belonged to once. The farmhouse turned out to be a charred shell half-hidden in blackberry vines. The silo was the only habitable thing left standing where once there had been a house, chicken coops, and a barn. She shook her head at the loss and touched the handle of the silo door. Bracing herself, she tugged it open.
