False Dawn

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  False Dawn

  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Contents

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Afterword

  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.

  In the next instant she was reeling back. “Stupid, stupid!” she said aloud. “Stupid!” For there was a man in the silo, waving something at her. She started to run, angry and frustrated.

  “No! No!” The voice followed her. “Don’t run away! Wait!” it got louder. “That’s my arm!”

  Thea stopped. His arm. “What?” she yelled back, ready to bolt.

  “It’s my arm. They cut it off.” The words made a weird echo in the corrugated walls of the silo. “Last week. I think.”

  She started back toward the voice. “Who did?”

  “The Pirates. In Orland, across the river from Chico. With a power saw.” He was getting weaker and his words came irregularly. “I got this far.”

  She stood in the doorway looking down at him. “Why’d you keep it?”

  He drew in a breath. “They were looking for a man with only one arm, So I pinned this into my jacket. It’s going bad—I can’t use it much longer.” He paused a moment, then finished, “I can’t get any farther without help.”

  She ignored this and cast a glance at the arm that lay on the floor of the silo. “Well, you better bury that.”

  His eyes met hers. “I can’t.”

  Thea looked him over carefully. He was at least fifteen years older than she was, with a stocky body made gaunt with hunger and pain. His wide, square face was deeply lined and the lines were grimy. He wore filthy clothes, but in spite of the dirt and rents, Thea saw that they had been well made.

  He moaned and tried to look away from her.

  “How long you been here?”

  “I think two, or maybe three days.”

  “Oh.” From the state of the arm she reckoned three days was right. She pointed to the stump just below his shoulder. “How does it feel? Infected? Can you feel anything?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think it’s infected. Or not much. It itches.”

  She accepted this for the moment. “Where were you going? You got a place to go?”

  “I was trying to get into the mountains.”

  Thea considered this, and her first impulse was to run, to leave this man to rot or live as it happened. But she hesitated, and saw disbelief and hope in his blue eyes. She thought about Gold Lake, so far away, and knew that getting there would be hard.

  “I’ve got medicine,” she said, making up her mind. “You can have some of it. Not all, ‘cause I might need it. But you can have a little.”

  He looked at her, his rumpled face puzzled. “Thank you,” he said, unused to the words.

  “I got parapenicillin and a little sporomicin. They’re both still good. Which one do you

  want?”

  “The penicillin.”

  “I got some ascorbic tablets for later,” she added, looking thought fully at the stump of his arm as she came completely into the silo and tugged the door behind her, leaving just enough space to escape. She gave her attention to his injury. There had been an infection but it was clearing and she saw that the skin was the tawny orange color of regenerating tissue. “You left-handed?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  After releasing the crossbow’s straps and storing her quarrels in a side pocket of her pack, she put it down, not too close to the man. He still had one good arm and had admitted that he was left-handed. “What’s your name?” she asked as she dug into the pack.

  “Seth Pearson,” he answered with slight hesitation.

  She looked at him sharply. “It says David Rossi on your neck tags. Which is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Whichever you like.” He sounded tired now, and the color had gone from his face and his voice.

  Thea looked away. “Okay. That’s the way we’ll do it, Rossi.” She handed him a packet, worn but still intact. “That’s the parapenicillin. You’ll
have to eat it; I don’t have any needles.” Then she added, “It tastes terrible. Here.” She handed him a short, flat piece of jerky. “It’s venison; tough, but it’ll take the taste away.” She put her pack between them and sank to the floor. When the man had managed to choke down the white slime, she spoke again. “Tomorrow I’m going east. You can come with me if you can keep up. There’s one more bad river ahead, and you might have to swim it. It’s fast though, and rocky. So you better make up your mind tonight.”

  She did not look for an answer. She took two more sticks of jerky out of her pack and ate them in guarded silence.

  The north wind bit through them as they walked; the sun was bright but cold. Gradually the gentle slope grew steeper and they climbed more slowly, saying nothing and keeping wary eyes on the bushes that littered the hillside. By mid-afternoon, they were walking over the crumbling trunks of large pine trees that had fallen, victims of invisible smog. The dust from the dead trees blew in plumes around them; stinging their eyes and making them sneeze. Yet they climbed on.

  Their going got rougher and slower until they were forced to call a halt in the lee of a huge stamp. Rossi braced his good shoulder and held out his tattered jacket to protect them both from the wind.

  “Are you all right?” Thea asked him when she had caught her breath. “You’re the wrong color; kind of purple and green at once.”

  “Just a little winded.” He nodded. “I’m…still weak.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking covertly at his stump. The tawny shade was deepening. “You’re getting better.”

  He started to make a flippant reply and his feet slid suddenly on the rolling dust. He grabbed out to her to keep from falling.

  She stepped back. “Don’t do that.”

  As he regained his footing, he looked at her in some surprise. “Why?” he asked gently.

  “Don’t you touch me.” She grabbed at her crossbow defensively. Superimposed over his features she could see the hate that had been in Mackley’s face at the river.

  He frowned, his eyes troubled, then his brow cleared. “I won’t.” In those two words there was great understanding. He knew the world that Thea lived in, and the price it exacted from her.