False Dawn (12 page)

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.

“We’re awfully low on wood.” Thea frowned at the last remaining stack in the corner by the door. “If this keeps on much longer we’ll be like everything else out there—waiting to thaw.”

“We can break up the chairs,” Evan said shortly as he worked with his file on new quarrels. His regenerated hand ached abominably and his muscles were taut against the hurt.

“And then?” she demanded, waiting for an answer. “We break up the chairs and…” When the silence grew heavy she slammed down the whetstone she was using on their hunting knife. “
And then!
”

His eyes were clouded as he looked at her. “Then we freeze.”

She was about to make a sharp retort, but kept it to herself, returning her attention to honing the knife. They both worked in silence; only the muffled howl of the wind whispered to the fire that crackled in the larger of the two stoves. Only the occasional whick of their tools ventured against the sound of the storm.

As the early darkness closed in, Thea moved closer to Evan, who had the only candle—and that was sputtering now, nearly used up, guttered—and jealously guarded the little light.

“Maybe we could save the wax; use it to make more,” she said, seeing the puddle at the bottom of the dying candle.

“Do you want me to get another candle?” he asked as the one they had winked out, leaving only the ruddy glow from the stove for light.

“How many do we have left?”

“Eight or nine,” he said after touching the box. In the muted lambency from the stove, he counted out the remaining candles and reluctantly set up another for burning. “It will take us through tonight, and part of tomorrow night. If we’re careful, maybe we can get a whole week out of what we have left.” He sounded almost confident, but it went no further than the force he gave his voice.

“Maybe we can make up torches. There’s enough of the old kind of pines around. We’d have to tap them for sap,” Thea said, her eyes fixed on the piles of cut wood which had shrunk quickly during the blizzard. “We have to get more wood, anyway. We might as well get enough to make torches.”

“Sure,” he agreed, believing none of it. The very thought of torches in a wooden building brought back memories of towns in flames, always the aftermath of a Pirate battle. Burning towns had a special smell, a smell he had come to hate. “It isn’t a good idea to use torches in here, though. Too easy to catch fire, and then where would we be?” Very deliberately he kept his tone flat, emotionless.

Reluctantly she accepted that, her hands going white at the knuckles to show the strain she felt. They worked silently once more, each shutting out the other as they battled private worry. The night deepened, spreading cold like a deadly frosting over the mountains, sending a numbing chill into the little office of the stamp mill, a subtle, damp cold that defied the fire Evan kept burning in the big-bellied stove.

Thea put her scissors down, the last of the items she had set out for sharpening. Her hands moved stiffly now, and when she tried to speak she found that her face ached. “Does your arm hurt?” she asked Evan in order to ask him something.

“Some.”

“I’m sorry.” She moved slowly to her mattress on the far side of the stove and there she sank tentatively to her knees, shivering. She fingered the blankets, lost in thought. Then, quite suddenly, she said, “Oh, Evan, let’s get out of here. We’ll die if we don’t; I know we will.”

“In the dead of winter?” It was an automatic response, one he didn’t bother to think about.

“It’s better than sitting here waiting.”

Startled by the urgency in her words, Evan looked up, his irritation forgotten.

“We can start for Gold Lake as soon as the blizzard is over. It’s southeast of here, and we’ve got a compass. Hobart told us the trails we should take. We can find them, if we look. Evan, please,
please
, I don’t want to die here—I can’t.”

“Thea,” he began as calmly as he could. “If we start before the thaw comes, it will be worse out there than it is in here. Believe me. You think it over.”

“It’s not worse, dying outside!” she shouted with venom as she tore at the old blankets. “Anything is better than this. My hands are swollen. My teeth hurt. I bruise all the time. And when the thaw comes then it will be worse. We’ve just about fished the lake out now. We’ve scavenged everything we can reach that’s halfway edible. What do you think it will be like when the bear come out of hibernation? There aren’t going to be enough rabbits to go around. There aren’t going to be enough
mice
. Are you up to fighting a bear, Evan? Right now? It’ll be worse then. We’ll have run out of strength. Could you fight a hungry puma? Or coyote?”

“They don’t usually attack people,” Evan said reasonably.

“Would you like to make a bet? They’ve had a lot of lean years, these animals. I don’t imagine they’re too particular about the meat they get, so long as it doesn’t have too many maggots.” She had hugged the blanket to her and now was rocking back and forth. “Puma, hears, foxes, there’re a lot of them with teeth that are hungry. When the thaw comes, there’ll be more of them. They’ll be hungry, hungry.”

“Stop it. Thea,” he said, putting his work aside.

“Bones and bones and bones,” she murmured, ignoring him. “Blood first, for fertilizer, and then the bones. They’ll grow a bumper crop: bones, all over bones. Bones grow in poison where nothing else grows. And there’s enough poison to go around, everywhere—” Her crooning was cut short. Evan dragged her to her feet, shaking her with a fear that made him rough.

“Stop it!” His shout brought no response to her glazed, unseeing eyes. “Thea!
STOP IT!
”

Recognition came back into her face. “Evan? Evan…I didn’t…I never meant…” She began to tremble, the strength gone out of her. Shamed, she knelt on the mattress, her face white. At last the trembling passed, and she said in a still voice, “I’ve never had to wait like this. There was always something I could do before. It’s killing me, this waiting. When I sleep, all I dream about is getting away. I wake up, and there’s no way out. I can’t escape. But I’ve got to do something, Evan. I can’t just
wait
any longer: I’m going crazy waiting.”

Standing beside her, Evan longed to comfort her, but knew that he didn’t have the words for it. Gently he touched her shoulder, and for once she did not draw back from him.

“You don’t have to leave with me,” she said reasonably. “There’s no reason you should. But I’ve got to get out of here as soon as the blizzard stops. Really. I must.” She plucked aimlessly at the blanket, unable to look at him. “I used to think that it was only those people who couldn’t deal with the world the way it is who went crazy. But that’s not so, is it?”

“We’re all vulnerable, Thea.” For a moment memories of the Pirates were vivid in his mind. How had he ever consented to such barbarity? What had made him think that he could salvage civilization through rapine? Why did he think the Pirates would agree with his goals, and give up raids for a defended community. “And there more ways than one way to he crazy. I know. I
know
.”

The next day the blizzard began to abate, but the snow still fell and the winds pawed at the stamp mill, like some wild creature hunting food. Where the winds had sculpted crests and hollows the snow now came there, smoothing away the roughness, wrapping safety and danger alike in white swaddling.

In the stamp mill, Thea and Evan at first made feeble jokes about their last candle, hut when it had burned down and winked out, they did not speak to each other. Shortly after that they ran out of cut wood for their stove, and ended by breaking up the heavy desk in the inner office, feeding it bit by carefully rationed bit into the dying fire. Eventually that, too, was gone and they were left to the dark and the cold.

Then, through the stillness there came light. It touched the snow and made rainbows there. The brightness seeped into the stamp mill, making it glow softly as if the rooms were under water. And although the cold was no less intense than it had been through the night, the morning made it more bearable.

“There’s a shovel in the infirmary.” Thea made this announcement through stiff, chapped lips. “I think we can dig out if we try.”

Evan pulled himself uncertainly to his feet. “The door will he snowed in,” he said, thinking of the lower level door, which by now was under six feet of snow.

“There’s that porch off the infirmary. We can go out that way.” To say those words, words that meant her release from this frozen prison, lightened Thea’s mood, giving her a burst of new strength. She started gathering up her few belongings to arrange them in her pack. “I’ll be ready to go in a bit,” she said as she worked.