False Dawn (17 page)

“Where?”

Then, on the far bank, under the tall sugar pines, they saw a cluster of darkened houses, forlorn, hollow, burned-out. The snow had almost buried them, and the skeletal remains of the homes were surrendering to the weight of the snow, breaking, falling, crumbling away to unrecognizable charred pieces.

“Oh, Evan,” Thea cried out from the desolation that filled her as she realized what lay ahead. “There’s nothing there, nothing. Evan, nothing!”

6

Evan stopped walking, suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue. His arms dropped to his sides. This was not the fatigue of long journeying, although that was part of it. This was more; the fatigue of continuous struggle which had brought him so far and lost him so much. “Fuck it,” he said dully.

Thea had sunk into a drift, her eyes vacant, looking unseeing at the remnants of the settlement on the other side of the lake. She had no words now, and she did not know what to do.

Evan took one of the cooking pots he had lugged from Jonnsville and threw it away from him, suddenly disgusted with his own disappointment.

“I always wanted to be here, from the first time Dr. Ho told me about it. He had group of people farming on the east side of Marysville,” she said to the wind. “He promised there would be a place for me here …”

“Oh, Christ.” Evan jammed his fists together, and took a certain satisfaction in the ache it created in his hands.

“I…I wanted it to be here. I had to be here. This was going to be my chance.” She studied the end of the lake. “I’ve been coming here for four years. And all the time, it was gone.” Only her nervous fingers toyed with her crossbow, as if denying the rest of her body, showing that the calm she displayed was not composure, but stunned incredulity. The wind whipped her hair, blowing some of the feathery dark strands over her face, hiding her eyes. She did not brush the hair back, but took refuge behind it.

Abruptly Evan pulled her to her feet. “Come on.”

“But why?” She shrank back, seeking the snowdrift again, and its cool, comforting quiet.

“Because it’s coming onto night and we have to sleep somewhere.” He jerked savagely at her arm, hoping to see understanding, acceptance, anxiety fear, any emotion at all come into her pale, serene face.

“I can’t,” she said, pulling away.

“Yes, you can; you’re going to.” The harshness in his voice startled her, and for a moment she saw him as the man who had led the Pirates for those destructive years. His face was set and under the tangle of his beard his jaws were clamped tight. “We are going over there, we are going to find ourselves a place to sleep, and when the morning comes, we’re going to search the place from top to bottom. We’ll take anything we can use. And then we’ll leave.”

“Leave?” she asked helplessly. “For where? Where is there to go?”

“Somewhere.”

“To another place like this?” Something flickered in her eyes.

“No, not like this. Someplace we can make our own.” He didn’t believe it, or not all of it, but he wanted to banish her lassitude. “Come on, Thea. We’ve got to look for—”

“But how? How, Evan?”

“The same way we’ve been doing,” he said, rather more gently. “Day by day, until we find a place. We’ll go south for the time being. To Tahoe, or maybe Yosemite. Or a little valley in the gold country; Angel’s Camp is too big, but maybe Redhawk Pond, or Wilseyville. But we have to get out of here. If the Pirates can find Graeagle, they can find this, and when they do, we’d better not be here. They’ll find Johnsville, too,” he added regretfully. It would have been pleasant to go back to that snug kitchen and large wine cellar, at least for the winter.

“Why not stay here for a while?” she said, more animation in her face. “We could make the community happen again. We could set it up again, do some farming, maybe…Or hunting, this high up. We could find others to help us…”

“Farming? The two of us? In this?”

She started to shake her head, hut he took her by the shoulders, ignoring her protests. “Evan!”

“Listen to me, Thea. If we stay here, we’re going to die—maybe from cold, maybe from starvation, maybe the Pirates will kill us. It doesn’t matter how. We’ll be dead. We can’t farm here in the snow. If we had greenhouses, we might stand a chance, but we don’t have the materials to build them, and couldn’t do it until spring even if we did. You know yourself that there’s too little game in the mountains for us to live on for very long. And the Pirates are half a day away after the thaw. I haven’t come over a hundred miles through these mountains for the privilege of dying. You can stay here if you really want to”—his tone told her that he would not leave her behind—”but I’m going on. Anything else is surrender. And I’ve gone through too much to give up now. You’ve never abdicated before, Thea. Don’t do it now. If we die, we let each other down, Thea.”

Sighing, she leaned against him, resting her head on the tough, cold-stiffened canvas of his jacket. “It’s just that I wanted it so much,” she said at last, looking across the frozen lake to the wreckage. “I really did believe in it. I thought it would be here. Turning, she studied his face. “You never did, did you, Evan? Not really.”

“Let’s say that I hoped,” he answered kindly. “Come on, we’ve got to get around the lake before all the light’s gone.

We can find shelter in what’s left of the buildings tonight, anyway.”

She nodded and stood up, snow clinging to her clothes. “We’ll need something secure. I saw wolverine tracks earlier today.”

“Wolverine? Here?”

“The predators are on the move,” she said, and fell into step beside him.

Morning showed the full extent of the damage, the gutted houses revealing ominous bits of charred bones scattered through the rubble like pieces of some terrible puzzle.

“It happened a long time ago,” Evan said as he held up a rusted hinge. “Perhaps as much as five or six years.”

“I can’t get used to it,” Thea said; they were in the seventh ruin. and she was scooping away snow to see what lay below the thick, icy coat that covered the charred floor. “I didn’t think this would happen. I thought somewhere would be safe.”

Evan tossed the hinge aside and paused to blow on his cold, gloved hands. “There never was a Shangri-La, or an Oleana.”

“Oleana?”

“There was a song once, about Oleana. It was supposed to be a wonderful place, fantastic and pleasant, where there was no work and no trouble. It turned out to be a land swindle. But the song was sung, long after the fraud was exposed.” The simple, enthusiastic melody jigged in his mind. “There never was a Big Rock-candy Mountain, either—that was another one of those songs, about a place where everything was perfect. Shangri-La was a book, and a film about a perfect, peaceful, long-lived place.”

“But this wasn’t perfect, Evan. It was a chance, just a chance.”

He was about to say that a chance was as close to perfect as they would ever get, but held back. Even if it were the truth, he did not want to face it. “I know,” he said very softly.

“But there isn’t even a chance any more, is there?” Thea waited for a reply, and when none came, she went back to work, sorting necessary things from the unnecessary. She moved through the building emotionlessly, betraying little of the deep loss she felt. She went as if she were exploring another world, an alien place that had no meaning for her but the satisfaction of her curiosity. Evan knew that she was using the work to shield herself from shock, as she had shielded herself from so many other shocks before. She even had the guts to whistle once when she found several long-tined cocktail forks with barbs at the points.

“Look, Evan,” she said as she brought them to him. “What quarrels they’ll make. I’ve salvaged all the whole ones.” She studied the forks as she turned them over in her hands. “Whatever possessed them to keep these things? I’m glad they did, but why?”

“Maybe they couldn’t give them up. Maybe they were special. Maybe having them made it easier for them to live up here. How do I know? But we can use them, so maybe it’s good that they were here.”

“There are some other forks too, but they’re heavier. They won’t carry as far, even if we can file them down enough to use as quarrels.”

“Never mind them. These will do fine. And those fondue prongs you found. They’re good, too, and the little seafood knives. They’re all long and fairly light, especially if we remove most of the handles on the fondue forks.” He shook his head, unable to understand why anyone would have brought such needless luxuries into the mountains. He stared at the rumpled snow and the few metal bits that had escaped burning.

“I guess it is hard to give up nice things. I remember that Mom had some good china that she insisted we take to Camminsky Creek. It was expensive and pretty. She almost never used it, but she kept it.”

“Yeah,” he said, recalling some of the senseless trophies the Pirates had taken when they were looting.

These had included women’s jewelry, a crystal candelabra, fine china, and luxury fabrics like velvet and brocade.

Thea saw the new strain in Evan’s face, and her disappointment at the loss of Gold Lake lessened. She touched his arm fleetingly. “It’s not important,” she said, and even she was not sure what she meant.

They stayed at Gold Lake one more night, then followed the road down to a place that had once been called Bassetts. It had been burned out long before Gold Lake was. Another, wider road merged with the Gold Lake road there, leading south and east out of the little valley lying at the beginnings of the north fork of the Yuba River. It was now early February, or so Evan figured, and the winter storms were at their worst, pounding the mountains with freezing breakers of snow. It was difficult to keep warm and folly to try to press on in the faces of these storms. Three days of heavy snow stranded Thea and Evan at Bassetts, and it was more than a week before they left the old hut in which they had taken shelter.

“We could go back to Johnsville, at least for a while,” Thea suggested as the storm ripped the shredding sky. The three layers of canvas which was their door boomed and bellied like sails on a clipper ship.

“We could. And the Pirates might come up the mountain. Or we might run out of food, even there. We can’t go back, Thea. We wouldn’t be safe.”

“Do you think we’re safe now?” Thea challenged.

“Safer than we’d be near the Pirates.” He gave her a moment to think about what he had said, then added, “Do you want to have to battle for a cluster of burned buildings?”

“No,” she said dubiously.

“Look, Thea, one more good storm and the winter will be almost over. That’s been the pattern for the last six years. Once the weather calms down, traveling will be easier. We’ll find a good place, some place that’s protected, where we can stay without Pirates coming.” There was a forced enthusiasm in these words, and he wished that she would not remind him of how vulnerable they were.

“But we won’t get a thaw for a while, Evan.”

“And maybe we will. You can’t tell.” It was a vain hope, he thought, as the darkness deepened.

“All right. I can’t tell anything about the weather.” She turned away.

At Yuba Pass they found a survival station, and in it several cases of food and other vital supplies.

“How long can we stay here?” Thea asked as she looked at the bright room with its shiny cabinets and wonderfully stacked cardboard boxes. Only three of the boxes had been damaged, their contents long since scattered. But the rest waited in army-made lockers, just as they were when they had been put there. The stamps affixed to the boxes dated them as 1982; over thirty years before.

“A week, maybe two,” Evan said, wondering how to find out if the contents were still good.

“It will be better in a week. There’s another storm coming up, I think. But it should clear up after it passes.” The uncanny sense that warned her of changes in the weather was touching her bones. “But it’s going to be a wet spring.”

“A wet spring it is, then,” Evan said, prepared to delve into the treasures they had found. “Ten days from now, you see how you feel. We’ll be rested then, and fat and sassy. I sure wish we had a bathtub. But sponge baths are a lot better than no baths.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you like to be clean?”

“Sure. I don’t itch when I’m clean. I just wondered what made bathtubs better than any other kind of washing?” She sat wearily on the edge of the drab metal table. “Hot water’s fine, but—”

“I’ve always like to soak—”He broke off. “God, it’s funny what you miss. I miss hot baths and good food and music. But there were other things we lost that were far more important.”

“And now we can be tired and hungry and scared. You might is well miss nice things than any others.” She moved away from him, “Make us a meal, Evan, and then you can tell me how good it used to taste.”

“Quincy north; Truckee, south,” Evan said as they looked at the rusted sign by the old highway. There, in the Sierra Valley, the snow had turned slushy as warmth came back into the mountains and the trees armed themselves against the spring with long, leaking icicles. The creeks and rivers were growing noisier under their layers of snow; in a little while they would be free-running and only in the shade of the trees would there be any snow left.

“Quincy,” Thea said, feeling a draw to that pleasant place she had tried to forget, but could not. “Do you think…I hoped we could go back there…”

“Thea, the Pirates are at Graeagle.” His words were harsh but his face was shadowed with sorrow. He tightened his hands on his pack straps and attempted what might have been a smile. “Come on. We’ll do better going south.”

“I know. But it would have been nice.” She cast one swift glance over shoulder, then turned her back to the north.

Keeping to the old ranchers’ road that skirted the base of the mountains which rose around the marshy expanse of the Sierra Valley, they avoided the open places where unfriendly sharp eyes might be watching. They could see buildings in the distance, white buildings that looked well kept, almost prosperous in their austerity. That might mean safety and a welcome, being that there were just the two of them. More likely it would mean hostility and danger. They decided not to put the matter to the test.