Before the Dawn (10 page)

Max's eyebrows went up. “How much is fair?”

That white smile of his could have lighted up a much larger room than this. “Don't concern yourself with details, Maxine. Suffice to say the Clan can move somewhere where we don't have to worry about the ceiling falling in on us . . . though it
will
be hard to leave here. However shabby, it has come to be home, after all.”

That she understood.

“My dear . . . you're not smiling. Is something wrong? Is the notion of leaving this palace a sad one to you?”

Suddenly, Max seemed unable to speak. All the way back from the restaurant she had rehearsed the speech, and now came time to let it out, and she couldn't find a damn word.

“Do you believe you've earned a bigger share? Perhaps you're contemplating heading up your own subclan?”

Max took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, just as she had in Manticore training. This felt a lot like defusing a bomb, though she would much rather be doing that. Centering herself, she started again. “Moody, I have to take off.”

He rocked back in his chair, tented his fingers, smiled gently. “For where, my dear, and for how long?”

Looking at the frayed carpeting on the floor, Max said, “I think for good.”

Moody's smile disappeared. “Please don't tease me, Maxine. Things are just about to turn around for us. You can be a queen here.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “I'm sorry. I'm grateful to you—you've taught me so much, but . . . I just never wanted to be a queen. I only wanted to be . . .”

“What?” he asked, his voice edged with irritation and something else . . . disappointment? “You just wanted to be what?”

This was getting hard again, emotions surging through her, stress gnawing at her guts.

“Free,” she finally managed.

His displeasure accelerated with the volume of his voice. “You're not . . .
free,
here?”

She shook her head. “Of course I'm free here. That's not it . . . this isn't about you or the Clan. It's about me. Moody . . .” She touched the back of her neck, indicating her barcode. “. . . you know I'm not the only one like me.”

“Yes,” he admitted, quieter now.

Max sat forward. “I came upon information this morning, about where one of my brothers may be. I'm not positive. But I need to find out for myself.”

Moody's sigh was endless. “I always feared this day would come. I always . . . dreaded it.”

“You do understand, then?”

His dark eyes were sad as he gave her a little shrug. “You don't have enough . . . family here?”

“I have a large family here. The Clan will always be my family, but . . .”

“But?”

Max looked at the floor, then up at Moody again, their eyes locking. “
They
were my family first. Yours was the family I adopted.”

“And that adopted you.”

“That's right. And you've been good to me. And I've done well by you.”

He nodded slowly.

She shook her head, dark hair bouncing. “We've talked about this, Moody. You know all I've ever wanted is to find my sibs.”

He looked at her for a long time. Then, wearily, he said, “I know I'm being unfair, Maxine . . . but I don't want to lose you.”

“I'll be back someday. If not to stay, to visit. Visit my family.”

That made him smile, but it was a melancholy thing, nonetheless. “The Clan has been strengthened by having you in it, Max.”

“Thank you,” she said, standing. “But with the payday you'll get for the Heart of the Ocean, everything should be fine.”

Rising, he said, “That's probably true . . . nonetheless, your absence will be felt.” He came around the desk and stood facing her. “Can you wait until after the exchange? I could use the backup.”

She shook her head regretfully. “I think he's in trouble, my brother, and I need to find him as soon as possible.”

“Where is it you're going?”

“I'm just going, Moody. Where I'm going means nothing, except to me.”

Moody accepted that with a nod. “You have enough money?”

“I have a stash. It won't last forever, but it'll get me where I'm going. . . . Moody, I'm sorry.”

“Maxine, don't apologize for following your heart . . . not ever. Such instincts are the only pure thing left in this polluted world.”

Her smile was warm, her gaze fond. “You have been a hell of a teacher.”

“Have I?” He reached for something on his desk: a photo. “Know this?”

She took it in with a glance, answered matter-of-factly, “
Trafalgar Square
by Mondrian. Piet Mondrian.”

His smile was admiring—and she could tell the admiration was not just for her good looks.

Gesturing with the photo, her mentor said, “Most of the cretins who inhabit this city believe the Mondrian to be a hotel from the pre-Pulse days and nothing more. But you know his paintings, all of them . . .”

“. . . Most of them . . .”

“. . .
all
of them, and what they're worth, and what they can be fenced for, and where to find them.”

“You taught me how to be a good thief.”

“I refined you, my dear. You were a good thief when you joined the Clan. . . . Now, you are the best.”

He went back around the desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a wad of bills with a rubber band around it. He tossed it to her, she caught it, looked at it—
damn, at least five grand!
—and tossed the packet back.

“Moody, I told you—I got a stash.”

An embarrassed smile crossed Moody's face. “You have some money, I'm sure; but I've always kept back part of your share . . . just in case this day ever came. To tell you the truth, I do it for all of you.”

“You don't,” she said simply.

“Ah . . . no. But it sounded good.” He lobbed the bundle back to her. “In your case, however, I did . . . because I was grooming you to sit beside me.”

More than just sit,
she thought; but said, “I don't want this, Moody. Use it for the kids.”

He shook his head. “You'll need it more than we will: you said it yourself, we're about to have the biggest payday ever. We'll be more than fine.”

Hefting the bills, she said, “No hard feelings, then?”

His eyes and nostrils flared. “Of
course
there are hard feelings, my dear, that's what life largely is, hard feelings . . . but there's no anger, and not a little love. You go, Maxine, you find your brother, and if you want, bring him back here with you. Then you will both have a family.”

This time Max was aware of the tears trickling down her cheeks. She rounded the desk and hugged Moody. They embraced for a long time.

When she finally pulled back, Max asked, “You'll tell the . . . rest of the gang?” She gestured toward the theater. “I hate fucking good-byes.”

“Are you sure you don't want to?”

She shook her head. “God no! I'm crying just telling
you
. . . how do you think I'd do with them?”

He laughed gently. “Ah, Maxine, my Maxine . . . for a genetically enhanced killing machine, you don't seem very tough.”

“Well then help me preserve my image. You tell the kids good-bye for me.”

A smirk dug a hole in one of Moody's cheeks. “I guess this is one negotiation I'm destined to lose.”

They hugged one last time.

Before she left, Max called Fresca up into the projection booth and asked him to watch it for her until she got back from “a little trip” she had to take.

“Can't I come with you?” he moaned; even his freckles seemed to droop.

“No, I need you here. You're my
guy,
aren't you?”

“I am? I mean . . . I am!”

She shrugged with her shoulders and her mouth. “Well, then, kid—watch my shit for me. All I'm takin' is my bike.”

“No prob!”

She put an arm around him conspiratorially. “And I want you to do one more thing for me.”

“Anything.”

“Keep an eye on Niner. She seems like a good kid, but she's green . . . she needs a
man
to look out for her.”

Fresca seemed to pump up a little at the thought Max considered him a man. “Count on it!”

“And here, Fres—take this.” She handed him a wad of bills, about half what Moody had given her.

His eyes were like fried eggs. “Max, you're
kidding,
right?”

“Put that in your pocket, and don't tell anybody that you have it, or where you got it.”

“Why?”

“Because everybody needs a secret stash o' cash . . . and that's yours.”

“Rad,” he said breathlessly, thumb riffling the thickness of bills.

“And always remember, Fres—you're my brother, too.”

He frowned in confusion. “‘Too'? You got another brother?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I'll let you know.”

They hugged, then she said, “Gotta blaze.”

“Better blaze then,” he said.

And she walked her bike out, and was gone.

Chapter Five

WELCOME TO THE
MONKEY HOUSE

THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY
EUREKA, CALIFORNIA, 2019

Like poison mushrooms, they sprang up all around the country after the Pulse, these villages of ramshackle shacks where people—little more than refugees really—came to live and, frequently, die. Named Jamestowns—after Michael James, the president of the United States when the Pulse hit—the ragtag hamlets were a twenty-first-century variation on the Hoovervilles of the previous century's Great Depression, those packing-crate communities named after another less-than-stellar president.

This Jamestown, located on the east side of Eureka, California, had been around since just after the LA Quake of 2012. What had started with only a few cardboard hovels had become—following a frontier pattern hardly new to the state—an actual town over the last seven years, complete with bars, trading posts, a church, and even a roughshod school. Covering acres that used to be the Sequoia Park Zoo, the Jamestown had incorporated the zoo's animal housing for its own varied purposes.

Though most of the zoo had been converted to human shelter, the monkey house had long since become a bar of the same name, also serving humans, at least technically. Bordering the Monkey House (which had a neon sign wired to its bars) were towering ravines of stately redwoods, which most people—even the rough sort who came and went to such Jamestowns—had the good sense to avoid at night. Though the village was more or less peaceful, the woods was where the majority of the bad things around here happened: the usual . . . murders, rapes, robberies. The foliage of the forest would never lack for fertilizer, thanks to the flow of decomposing bodies.

Across the main walkway from the Monkey House, army-navy surplus tents had been pitched around the former zoo's structures, providing temporary shelter for the hundreds of travelers who stayed anywhere from a day to three or four months, depending on their ability—financial and/or physical—to move on.

For the last few weeks, the tent city had been home to a band of barbaric SoCal bikers, descendants of a notorious pre-Pulse biker gang called the Hell's Angels. The New Hellions took their name seriously, were suffused with pride in their mongrel pedigree, and tried to live up to that image every day, in every way.

Strolling at twilight through this nasty-ass post-Pulse slum as if it were a benign street fair was a slim, beautiful, busty black woman with high cheekbones, a wide nose, and huge brown eyes shaded with blue eye shadow; her dark eyebrows curved with an ironic confidence that was no pose and her large, rather puffy Afro had been dressed up with a few pink stripes for good measure.

For a woman alone in a tough town, “Original Cindy” McEachin showed no fear . . . neither did she feel any.

Her pants were a second skin of leather, jet black, with an orange, midriff-baring top so tight it hardly needed the spaghetti straps, showing off not only her flat tummy but the tops of her breasts and bare shoulders, like a dare. Not surprisingly, many males took that dare, this striking female drawing goo-goo-eyed, drop-jawed stares from the few bikers who weren't already in the Monkey House.

You damn well
better
be starin',
she thought; her heels were spikes, but she couldn't have moved easier in tennies.
You ain't never seen nothin' like Original Cindy—lookee but no touchee, you barbaric bozos. . . .

Crossing the walkway, shaking what God had given her, Original Cindy all but bumped into a biker couple exiting the Monkey House.

The burly man's automatic frown flipped into a yellow-green grin when he saw the shapely form he'd almost collided with; he had long, tangled brown hair, which may have been washed at some time or other, and wore only a ragged denim vest with his obligatory jeans and boots. Despite a hairy beer belly, the biker had arms rivaling the trunks of the surrounding sequoias, each bicep tattooed with snakes that curled around and undulated whenever he flexed.

“My bad,” Original Cindy drawled.

The guy had slithered one snake arm around his date, a thin little former prom queen in jeans and a black-leather-and-chains halter, with long blond hair, puffy lips, tired blue eyes, and a sultry air about her; drugs and booze had not yet robbed her of all her appeal.

Original Cindy smiled at the woman, who smiled knowingly back.

The big drunk biker, thinking the smile was for him, said, “I jus' might accept that apology, Brown Sugar,” and took a step toward Original Cindy . . .

. . . which was a mistake.

The first thing he lost was the blonde. Slipping out from under his snake-embossed bicep, the prom queen said to him, “Screw you and the Harley you rode in on,” and stormed off toward the tent city, leaving the biker to stare at Original Cindy.

“Hey, baby,” he said flashing that multicolored grin, his speech only a little slurred. “Three's a crowd, anyway.”

Original Cindy put her hands on her hips and reared back her Afroed head. “You can't be serious, Haystack—you think I was smilin' at
your
punk ass?”

His forehead clenched as he attempted thought.

Original Cindy continued with his schooling: “I was
smilin'
at the sweet squeeze that went thatta way,” one long thin finger pointing in the direction the biker's chick had gone.

His eyes widened and the grin turned upside down. “Jesus! A fuckin'
dyke!
”

He took another step toward her, a menacing one this time; but stopped when Original Cindy dropped into a combat stance.

She asked, “You denigratin' my sexual preference aside . . . you
sure
you wanna go there?”

Cindy had been making her way back to Seattle since she'd gotten out of the army, not so long ago. And a woman, veteran or not, didn't hitch her way from Fort Hood, Texas, unless she knew how to handle her ass.

The drunk biker considered backing down for a moment, but his ego got the better of him and he pulled out his switchblade. The knife opened with a
snick,
long narrow blade finding light to wink off.

But he might have taken out a kazoo and started playing “Yankee Doodle,” for all the reaction it got out of Original Cindy, who merely smirked a little.

“Know what they say,” she said. “Longer the blade . . .”

The biker wiped several greasy locks of hair out of his eyes. “Y'gonna
really
apologize now, bitch.”

She tilted her head and appraised him, as if the biker were fine print she was trying to make out.

“You know,” she said, “you done nothin' but call Original Cindy names since we met . . . the ‘d' word, the ‘b' word . . . and you're just about a consonant away from getting my boot in the crack of your wide honky ass.”

His eyes were white all the way around now, and he blurted another epithet—finally getting around to the “c” word—and charged her.

“That's the one . . .” she said, and as he neared, she sidestepped, cracking him along the ear with the back of a fist as he stumbled past her, and kicking him in the ass.

That was the second thing the biker lost: his dignity . . . such as it was.

“God
damn it,
” he roared, one hand going to the reddening ear. “I'm gonna cut you to fuckin' ribbons, you black bitch!”

Her response to this name-calling was nonverbal: with a martial-arts jump, she delivered a perfectly placed, spike-heeled kick to his foul mouth.

The biker dropped like a bag of grain, his knife tumbling from his popped-open fingers and rolling under some bushes, as if trying to get the hell out of this. The big man tried to speak again, but the words came out a mushy mumble mixed with the teeth he was spitting up like undigested corn. Blood streaked down his chin onto his bare, hairy chest in colorful ribbons.

“Ooooh,” Original Cindy said, hands on hips again, wincing in feigned disgust. “You do know how to gross a girl out. . . . You wanna call me some more names? You ain't worked your way to ‘n' yet. . . . 'Course then I'd have to kill your ass.”

Wobbling to his feet, his eyes narrowing with hate, the biker glanced toward the bush where his knife peeked out from under some leaves.

“Now, you don't even wanna think about going for that, do you now? Your mama didn't raise a fool, did she—surely you know when you got your ass kicked?”

The response to this diplomacy was, “Fuck you!”

She waggled her head and waggled a finger, too. “No sir, nada chance, not on your
best
day . . . not even if I got some of that sweet thing you chased off afterward.”

Hysterical with fury and embarrassment, the biker lunged for the bushes where his knife awaited. Original Cindy cut off his path and met him with a side kick to the head. Again the biker dropped . . . and this time he stayed down. Breathing—a bubbly saliva-and-blood broth boiling at his broken mouth.

Turning casually toward the tents, Original Cindy thought,
Now where did that fine slice of heaven get herself to?

But the blonde was nowhere to be seen.

“Damn,” Original Cindy said to nobody. “And just when I thought we had us a moment.”

Turning back, she went through the open cage doors into the bar. Two things assaulted her immediately: the raucous roar of a bad rock band in the far end of the room—almost twenty years into the twenty-first century and ZZ Top covers still ruled—and the aroma of sandalwood incense laced with monkey shit. Original Cindy decided the smart money was on breathing through her mouth—which meant she would fit right in with this group.

The joint was packed with the sort of lowlifes who made the road their home, and the combination of sweat, liquor, and bad breath was an invitation to be somewhere else.
But Original Cindy ain't no quitter,
she reminded herself, and besides . . . Cindy was parched. She'd been looking forward to a brew even before she worked up a thirst kicking biker ass. So she elbowed her way to the bar.

The band continued to whack away at their instruments the singer caterwauling into a frequently feeding-back mike; but Cindy knew it would take someone with a Ph.D. in classic rock to figure out which ZZ Top song they were currently butchering.

The bartender—a skinny pale pitiful-looking guy with more hair than his comb could handle and two puffy black eyes, courtesy of a dissatisfied customer no doubt—moved in front of her.

“Beer!” she yelled, over the din of the band and the crowd.

He nodded and walked away.

She wheeled to have a look at the predominantly biker crowd. Last time Original Cindy had seen this much denim and leather in one place had been at a rodeo near Fort Hood. This was nothing like that . . . thank God; even the bikers were an improvement over the shit-kicker cowboys in Texas. Original Cindy was not prejudiced, but she had little patience for rednecks.

Or for redneck bands like this one—two guitars, a bass, drums, and a druggie vocalist in search of the key; they sounded like marbles twirled in a garbage can with a couple of fornicating cats thrown in for good measure.

Original Cindy was still shaking her head in disbelief at the sorry state of her cultural and social life at this particular moment, when the shiner-adorned bartender came back with a cold bottle of beer. She got a three-dollar bill out of her wallet—President James on it, appropriately—and the bartender snatched the bill from her fingers.

“Damn!” she said. “Go on and help your damn self, why don't you?”

The bartender walked away.

“No wonder you a damn raccoon,” she mumbled, then: “Keep the change, Prince Charmin'!” . . . even though she knew he'd already assumed as much.

She sipped at the beer, hoping to make it last. At these prices being sober was looking like a reasonable option. Besides, this joint with that band and these patrons wasn't worth more than one beer and fifteen minutes of her life. No one who shared her particular worldview seemed to frequent this establishment, and if she didn't want more biker run-ins, the best bet would be to drink up and get the hell out of this zoo.

She swigged her suds and, considering this was Original Cindy anyway, kept a low profile. Nonetheless, the bikers stared at her, making her more uncomfortable than she would care to admit.

She wasn't afraid—hell, nothing scared her, except maybe life itself; but thirty bikers to one black ex-soldier seemed like shitty odds. Killing the beer, she turned toward the door just as the biker she'd pounded came staggering in, drunk (more from her beating than beer), his mouth twisted in an angry snarl, blood still trailing down his chin like a sloppy vampire.

“
Now
you get yours, you black bitch,” he bellowed, though the words came out slurred and mushy because he was drunk and no longer had all his teeth.

The band kept playing; but every eye in the bar had already turned to the door, and now swiveled to Original Cindy. After all, no one in here had missed her entrance. . . .

“Oh, maaaan . . . I thought I was done with your sorry ass,” she said, and looked around at the other patrons, to court their support. Once a fight was finished, the fight was finished, right? Get on with your damn lives!

But the bikers were closing into a loose semicircle around her, putting the bar at her back, leaving a path for the drunk to get to her.

Again the burly biker edged toward her, and he had that damn blade in his hand again. The circle began to close in, providing a compact stage for the coming action.

So she struck first, picking up the beer bottle and smashing it over the head of the nearest biker, who collapsed in a heap. The band finally noticed that no one was listening to them and stopped playing, providing an awful, deathly silence.

Original Cindy tore a hole in it:
“You want some more of Original Cindy?”
She gestured to herself with both hands, entering the center of the circle, oozing bravado, saying, “Then come on—plenty to go 'round!”

Unfortunately for her, they took her invitation.

There was little room to maneuver, this close to the bar, and although she got one biker across the bridge of the nose with a straight right, and another in the groin with a knee, it was only a matter of time before the bikers had swarmed her, pinning her on the floor like a dead butterfly in a collector's book. They held her down, tight, spread-eagled, and took turns copping obnoxious feels until the burly bastard she'd already defeated outside now fought his way through the crowd.