Before the Dawn Page 2

  Mistrustful but with no better option, Max huddled on the floor as the Tahoe labored up and down the snow-covered hills. The woman seemed frightened as she drove through the night—that was good; if this were one of Lydecker's people, the driver would not as likely be scared . . . not unless the woman knew just how deadly a package she was transporting.

  The driver did look down at Max occasionally and offered reassuring smiles. Max couldn't figure out whether the gesture was meant for her or to help the woman reassure herself. Not that it mattered, right now.

  Fifteen minutes later, the woman pulled the SUV to a stop, killed the lights, and turned off the engine.

  “We're here,” she said, her voice still a little too high, the words a little too fast, her tension bleeding through her forced cheeriness.

  They both got out and Max followed the woman to the door of a cabin, a small, wooden structure. The rustic homeyness of the building meant nothing to a child raised in a concrete barracks, and it resembled nothing she had seen in their training films, which did occasionally depict civilian housing. This tiny building seemed more like a shed to the child—the shack would have fit inside one of the huge shower rooms back at Manticore.

  The woman opened the door, but Max hesitated.

  Another reassuring smile. “Come on . . . it's all right. Really. You'll be safe here.”

  Max wanted to believe her apparent benefactor; but then she had always believed Lydecker, they all had . . . and now one of them was dead. At least one of them. . . .

  Still, Max followed the woman's generous gesture and stepped inside the cabin. Though she immediately understood its purpose, Max marveled at the fireplace set into the left wall. The heat it supplied gave the room a warm, cozy feeling she had only previously felt in her own bed, between the sheets, on exceptionally cold nights.

  To the right, a door led to a tiny bathroom—imagine that, a room with one toilet!—and farther down, a sink protruded from the wall next to a small stove. A refrigerator squatted on the opposite wall, with a small dining table and two chairs in front of it. In the living room area, a daybed doubled as a sofa, and a leather chair with wooden arms warmed itself in front of the fire, an Indian-print blanket folded neatly on top. The furniture, what there was of it, was all made of warm, hard, dark woods.

  To a child raised in a concrete bunker, so much warmth, so much wood, was dizzingly unfamiliar . . . and yet wonderful.

  The woman picked up the phone receiver and punched in numbers. A few seconds later, she said into the mouthpiece, “It's Hannah. . . . I need to see you.”

  Wondering if she was being betrayed, Max walked gingerly through the room, examining the homey touches (which to her were odd yet not off-putting) as she went.

  To her surprise, and with an air of confusion, Max found herself feeling more at home within the walls of the teeny cabin than she ever had at Manticore. It was an emotion she was having trouble understanding, surging through her like a sweet sickness, as she looked at the candlesticks, books, paintings, and other objects that were so foreign to her.

  “Naw,” Hannah was saying. “She's just a kid . . . but she's got problems at home and needs to find somewhere safe.”

  Max wondered if she would ever have a place as beautiful as this, a place of her own; thinking of the cabin that way, that a person could live by herself, made its smallness seem suddenly roomy. . . .

  “Look,” Hannah was saying, vaguely irritated. “I'll explain everything when I see you . . . Thanks. 'Bye.”

  Hannah hung up the phone as Max reached out and touched the soft hem of the Indian-print blanket, relishing the texture. None of the wool blankets at Manticore had ever been so soothingly soft. . . .

  Hannah stepped forward, picked up the huge blanket and wrapped it around Max's shoulders. The child immediately felt warm all over, down to her bare feet, and she sniffed deeply, taking in the woman's sweet scent, which still clung to the blanket.

  “I'll be back as soon as I can,” Hannah said, shrugging back into her heavy coat. “Make yourself at home.”

  Max said nothing, the phrase as foreign to her as if in a language she hadn't got 'round to learning yet. She and the woman locked eyes, then Hannah stepped outside into the cold night and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Standing in the window, the blanket still draped around her, Max waited. She stood there, staring out the window, for what might have been hours. This was, after all, still enemy territory. She was not certain what distance they had traveled in the civilian car, but Max knew nonetheless that Manticore wasn't that far away.

  She knew also that Lydecker and that vague yet specific entity called Manticore would never give up looking for her . . . for all of them.

  Finally, reluctantly, Max decided Hannah either wasn't coming back or had been captured. Either way, the cabin must now be considered unsafe. She liked this place . . . had she known the concept, she might even have loved it. Human feelings deep within her had stirred—the warmth, the wood; the woman's kindness.

  But she had already stayed here too long.

  Opening the door, she took one last long look down the deserted lane; then she turned and took one more, even longer look into the warm cabin. Max yearned to stay, to be wrapped in warmth, to not be a soldier for a while; but she knew that wasn't possible.

  Survival, adaptability, overcame these new emotions.

  She dropped the blanket in a puddle in the doorway, and bounded off across the snow.

  The sun rose to find Max moving at a slow trot, fatigue catching up with her; even the flapping nightshirt seemed weary.

  She needed to find a place to hide during the daylight hours, another warm place. The cold had drained her strength even more than the constant running had. Sweat froze into tiny beads of white in her eyebrows, on her close-cropped hair, and stiffened the already starchy material of the smock.

  Max knew that when the sun got high, Manticore would have very little trouble catching up with a barefoot nine-year-old girl wearing only a blue-gray hospital nightshirt. From her training, she knew enough about the outside world to realize that she and her siblings likely would be described to the authorities as escapees of some kind, perhaps from a mental institution.

  Her special genetic gifts would provide some protection, yes; but she was beginning to lose the battle with exhaustion.

  Since leaving the cabin, she had clung to the woods, only occasionally hearing the whine of snowmobiles or the roar of helicopters, as she moved south. She still had no idea where she was, much less where she was going, survival itself her only engine.

  She did know she was still too close to her former “home” to achieve any reasonable sense of safety; and she needed to put as much distance as possible between her and Lydecker and the minions of Manticore.

  Ahead of her, the woods trailed off and, across a scrubby clearing, there lay the expanse of a large parking lot filled with trucks, the same type of vehicles she had noticed bringing supplies to Manticore.

  These she had seen at the facility, one or at most two at a time. Now perhaps as many as fifty of them sat not a hundred yards in front of her, a virtual forest of massive vehicles. Some moved out, while others moved in, taking their places in a constant parade.

  Max watched for a long time as trucks parked, their drivers climbing down and disappearing into the distance toward a building of which she had only an obstructed view. After a while, drivers would come back out, check the rear doors on their trailers, climb back into the cab, then sometimes drive away, and other times just remain parked with the engines running, studying maps, reading, resting.

  The child knew that even if the trailers weren't heated, any one of them would provide better protection from the elements than she had now, as well as give her a place to hide during the coming day.

  They also presented a variety of potential hazards.

  She might choose to hide in a truck that ended up back at Manticore; since she had no real sense of the size of th
e world beyond Manticore, this seemed a genuine possibility.

  Or, if unable to relock the trailer from the inside, she might be discovered by one of the drivers, who would certainly call the authorities. And for all she knew, that could easily include Colonel Lydecker.

  With the icy air biting into her, she was unsure what to do; but, as a soldier, she knew doing nothing was not an option.

  Max watched patiently as two more trailers came and went, one at either end. Then she rose to her haunches and prepared to move. The tree line would provide cover for the first twenty yards or so . . . but after that, Max would be running over open ground, in the bright sunshine, with absolutely nowhere to hide. . . .

  When the next trailer backed in and parked—a long orange affair with black trim—Max made her move. She shot forward like a runner coming out of the blocks, streaking through the last of the trees, then hit the open field, churning along at full speed.

  Her eyes swept the parking lot for witnesses to her approach, but she saw none; the rear ends of the vehicles were lined up before her, making it unlikely a trucker sitting in a cab might spot her. As she neared the designated trailer, and zeroed in on its two doors, her heart sank . . .

  . . . A tiny thread of metal ran through the two pieces of the lock. There was no way to open the door without breaking the metal, thus alerting the driver that someone had tampered with his rig. If she broke the seal, she'd be caught—that much she could figure out, without ever having seen the device before.

  She kept moving, ducking in and crouching under the trailer, which would provide at least some cover; huddling like the spooked animal she was, Max tried to figure her next move.

  Did the trailers all have these devices? After eyeballing the doors, she realized there would be no way to lock the door from the inside, anyway, and the driver would still know his load had been tampered with. Damn it, she thought, using the forbidden words she'd heard Colonel Lydecker use, when he was frustrated or angry.

  Maybe, she decided, one of the other trailers would have a different type of door. . . .

  Moving out from under the trailer, still careful to check for unwanted witnesses, she slid to the next trailer, and the next, and the one after that, until finally, at the fifth trailer, she found a single door that slid up, instead of a pair of doors that opened on hinges.

  Even luckier, there was no little metal seal this time; but the driver would still know the truck had been opened when Max wouldn't be able to latch the door from the inside. . . .

  She would have to risk it.

  After unlatching the door, not rushing, she tried to raise it silently, but it squeaked, like a wounded beast, and she ducked under the vehicle, desperately, quickly scanning the parking lot for anyone who might have heard.

  Nothing.

  She eased back out, raised the door another six inches—just high enough for her to crawl under—and then took a step back. From a flat-footed position, Max leapt the three and a half feet to the lip of the trailer, landing nimbly, all but silently, and—in one fluid motion—slipped under the edge, pitching herself forward, rolling onto her side, under the door.

  With the door still up, and the dull gray light from outdoors providing at least slight illumination inside, she checked out her latest home.

  The back half of the trailer was empty, while, at the front end, five wooden pallets stacked with cardboard boxes nearly as tall as she, were jammed into the space. Behind them crouched a wooden crate that came almost to Max's neck. Inside, two black tractor seats faced each other.

  It wasn't the cabin, but it would do.

  Max pulled the door back down, careful to toss out the canvas strap attached to the bottom of the door. The unlatched door might draw attention, but leaving the canvas strap on the inside would have been a dead giveaway that the door had been closed by someone still inside.

  Darkness consumed the trailer. This may not have been as comforting as a blanket and a fire, but Max certainly felt better being out of the wind. The wood-and-steel floor was cold beneath her bare feet; still, it was less wet and less frigid than standing in the snow outside. Max was not a child afraid of the dark—the tiny amount of cat DNA mixed into her genetic recipe gave her the ability to see even in pitch black.

  Climbing into the crate, Max huddled low, disappearing into herself, peeking out from behind the seat back, trying to see between the slats of the crate. She stayed that way, on guard, for half an hour.

  Then, from outside the trailer, she heard a man's muffled, “Son of a bitch!”

  Max had heard Lydecker say those words, too.

  The door pig-squealed in protest as it rose a foot or so, the driver still hanging on to the canvas strap. He was a short balding man with a sphere for a skull, little more than a disembodied head and shoulders floating above the lip of the trailer.

  Wide-eyed, a peeled onion of a nose dominating his face, the guy bobbed his ball-shaped head as he looked around the trailer, saw nothing, swore some more, muttered something about “damn kids anyway,” then banged the door down.

  Max heard the latch scratch back into place; she allowed herself a minute smile.

  A moment later she heard the driver's door slam, the transmission get shoved into gear, the engine roar, before the truck lurched forward.

  Some time later (Max didn't know how long, as she'd finally gotten some sleep), she felt the truck come to a stop, back up for a long moment, and then the trailer rocked a little, as if it had bumped into something. She heard the burp of the air brake being engaged, followed by the slamming of the driver's door again. Hopping out of the crate, Max prepared herself. . . .

  The latch groaned as it slipped loose, the door made its familiar squeal as it yawned open and daylight cascaded in.

  Heedlessly, Max launched herself before she realized the driver and another tall man—both wore jeans and heavy barn coats—were blocking her path, a fork truck sitting behind them, its motor purring.

  “What the hell?” the driver blurted, as he took a reflexive step backward, his hands coming up to defend himself, unintentionally clearing the way for her.

  Max landed gracefully on the loading dock, the concrete frigid beneath her feet after the trailer's relative warmth. She took one step toward the wide-eyed men, pivoted and leapt off the dock onto the snow-covered parking lot below. Bolting across the lot, the two men yelling at her, she made for a line of trailers against the far fence.

  As she pulled away, she could hear the huffing of the two men behind her; again a small smile formed: they were not going to catch her.

  The seven-foot chain-link fence beyond the line of trailers proved to be even less of an obstacle than the one back at Manticore; she scampered up and over, the way a spider navigates a wall. And the pair of overweight old men pursuing her hardly compared to helicopters and snowmobiles.

  She was gone before the two men were halfway across the yard. Beyond the fence lay a two-lane blacktop road, and across that what looked to Max like a factory of some sort.

  Still making its morning ascent, the sun told her it was approaching noon, the sky's compass indicating that west lay to her left. For no particular reason she could discern, she chose that direction, hopped onto the road and ran for all she was worth.

  Max passed business after business, trying not to allow the newness of it all to distract her, however much seeing such things in reality, as opposed to some training video, excited and aroused her. She kept arms and legs pumping and, eventually, she left the industrial park behind and moved into an area of houses.

  Homes.

  Once in the residential neighborhood (Civilians live here, the young soldier thought), she slowed down, finally allowing herself to take it all in. These structures were not much like Hannah's cabin at all. Much bigger and close together, they vaguely reminded Max of castles in Manticore texts.

  Though most of the structures were white, occasionally there would be a blue one or a yellow one—a rainbow to a child raised in a blu
e-gray environment—and all of them seemed to be two-story and have a garage underneath one side. A few cars were parked on the street, all with license plates stenciled WYOMING, like Hannah's last night; but she saw no people and wondered where everyone was.

  At the sound of a car motor, up the street behind her, a startled Max took off at a sprint between two houses. She circled the house to her left, coming back onto the place where she'd started, just after the car had passed, rolling down the street, oblivious to her presence.

  The vehicle looked different than anything she'd seen at Manticore, and when she focused in on the nameplate, she could make out a word: AVALON. She had no idea what that meant. She did know the Manticore men traveled in black vehicles labeled TAHOE and HUMVEE; this white Avalon looked nothing like those.

  Max wondered how far she was from Manticore, and how far away she needed to get, to be safe. Though her sense of time was aided by the sun, distance remained vague to her. She returned to the sidewalk, but she knew her smock would draw attention to her, and that she needed to find cover again until dark . . . and the sooner, the better.

  Rounding a corner, she wandered down a new street. Max had trouble telling this one from the previous one, the houses looking interchangeable, as if manufactured from identical plans; the cars looked about the same, too, and there still didn't seem to be any people around except her and the driver of the car that had passed by.

  Max had gone another block or two when she spotted movement in the next block, on the other side of the street.

  A child . . .

  . . . about her age, playing in a yard three doors up. The sight of another kid made Max think again of her sibs, and an emotion rose in her, a caring emotion, and sad: she wondered if any of them had escaped.

  She might never know what had become of Jondy and the others—Zack she feared had been killed—but she wasn't sure how she would find any of them, if they had gotten away.

  But standing here on this corner, watching that other child play in the snow, Max made a vow that would form her in years to come: she would never stop looking for her brothers and sisters. . . .