Max Collins - Before the Dawn

Still, Max had managed to build a loner’s life for herself there in Los Angeles. As the people around her broke up into smaller groups in order to protect themselves, she continued to live the outlaw life, finding herself a remote spot within the confines of Griffith Park, from which she ventured only when she needed supplies. To Max, the three years she lived in the park were like an extended Manticore field exercise.

With one important difference — she was free.

Whenever she started to get down about the state of her life, that one thought could bring her back up. But she wondered if the others — if there were any still outside the wire — missed her as much as she missed them...

... defiant Eva, shot by Lydecker, the catalyst for their escape, dead for sure; Brin, the acrobatic one; Zack, their leader and her older brother; Seth, the boy who’d been caught that night and dragged back by the guards; and her best friend and sister Jondy...

These and other sibs seemed to constantly occupy her thoughts; yet she kept going. Getting bigger, stronger, smarter, Max knew these things would help her to find her sibs in this postapocalyptic America, no matter where they were.

Those were the goals that needed to be met, not spending her time worrying about what might be. If she could make herself good enough, finding the sibs would take care of itself.

They weren’t the only ones she missed, though. Lucy, and the situation Max had left her in, still bothered Max — her other sister, back in Jack Barrett’s house, his world. Then, in the spring of her twelfth year, when she finally returned to the Barrett home to rescue Lucy, she found the house abandoned.

All the way back to her home in the park, tears streamed down her cheeks, as she realized that Lucy was probably out of her life forever. Finding her siblings would be difficult enough — locating a normal child like Lucy? Next to impossible.

Three weeks later, early May, the Big Quake hit.

Measuring 8.5 on the Richter scale, the quake struck in the middle of the night, killing thousands in their beds, taking far many more lives in California than the Pulse had. Fires raged for weeks, buildings collapsed, houses slid down the sides of mountains, overpasses fell, crushing late-night drivers.

Max’s small sanctuary in the park survived, but with literally millions homeless now, the job of protecting her niche, and still trying to forage enough for her own survival, was becoming hopeless. She lasted a year that way, but with supplies getting harder and harder to find, she was forced to scavenge farther and farther from home.

And like so many young girls had in that time just before hers, Max made her way to Hollywood, although in her case it wasn’t to star in the movies: her journey ended up being more of a simple migratory path...

... a path that led her straight to Moody and the Chinese Clan.

When Max strode across the cracked cement patio and into the former Mann’s Chinese Theatre, a pacing Moody was waiting for her just inside the doors. She would have liked to think his anxiety was for her, but knew better: the Heart of the Ocean was the root of his worry.

The lobby still possessed the glass concession counters from the old days, but now, instead of food, they served up sleeping quarters for some of the younger kids. The carpeting had at one time been red but now was worn to a threadbare pink. Severely cracked by the Quake, the high ceiling had held for seven years now, and no reason to think it wouldn’t last seven more, anyway. The walls were decorated not with posters but graffiti, some — like old cave drawings — representing Clan history, others just obscene.

“Are you all right, child?” Moody asked, his voice soft and smooth, but with a tinge of excitement in it.

His long silver hair was tied back in its customary ponytail and he wore a black sweatshirt, black slacks, black socks, and running shoes.

“You mean, did I get you your bauble?”

“Do you think so poorly of me, child?... Well — did you?”

“That’s why you sent me, isn’t it?”

A wide wolfish smile opened his face to reveal large white teeth (his grooming, by post-Pulse standards, was remarkable).

Before the conversation could progress, Fresca popped through the double doors that led to the old theater’s main auditorium.

Thirteen or so, Fresca was tall and skinny for his age, with long, straight red hair and pale flesh swarming with freckles. He bounced over to them in his ancient WEEZER T-shirt (no kid in the Clan had any idea what the word represented, but it amused Fresca), and tattered jeans that were more white than blue.

“Whassup, Max?” Fresca asked, ever chipper.

The boy had enough energy zapping around in that gangly body to light a small city. Stillness took him only when he slept, and only then because he had the upper bunk, the top of the concession stand, a precarious perch: if he moved at all in his slumber, he’d end up on the floor.

“Gotta check in with the Moodman here,” she said easily, “then I’m gonna chill, Fresca — maybe get something to eat.”

“Great! Can I come? Can I?”

The kid wasn’t even on drugs.

“Who said I was going anywhere?” Max said, trying not to smile, and failing.

Fresca grinned in response, and dug the toe of his tattered sneaker into the carpeting. She was well aware he was in love with her, and probably had been the moment he met her, when he joined the Clan a year ago.

Having been with Moody for most of the last six years, Max was an old-timer, the Moodman’s chief lieutenant and the best thief in the Clan (“A master of the forgotten art of cat burglary,” Moody would say), which was no small feat, considering all twenty-eight members were street-savvy thieves themselves.

“Why, Fres,” Max asked, “you wanna go out?”

Fresca lighted up a ciggie and started to jitter. “Max, that would be great... that would be perfect. Been up all night waitin’ for you to get back!”

She nodded. “Moody and me, we gotta go take care of a couple of things... Then we can blaze, okay?”

“I’ll wait right here,” the redhead promised.

Moody — standing patiently through all of this (Fresca was one of his favorites, too) — led the way. Just before he got to the double entryway of the auditorium, he opened a side door at left and ducked up the stairs, obviously heading to Max’s crib, in what had once been the grand old theater’s projection booth.

Max wondered why they were going there. Moody usually conducted business in his own quarters, the former manager’s office; not that he hadn’t dropped by Max’s crib before... but this just seemed unusual.

Then again, the Heart of the Ocean was an unusual prize.

The tall man in black turned the knob and entered as if this were his room, not hers. Max’s door was always unlocked — living with a building full of thieves made locks unnecessary if not outright absurd — and, anyway, Max knew of no one who might enter that she couldn’t handle.

The young woman followed her mentor into the modest chamber and he closed the door behind them. Other than Moody’s office/living quarters, this cracked-plaster-walled room was the biggest private room in the place. The dead projector had been shoved into a corner, a decaying museum piece unworthy of the institution Max had just looted. This provided Max a window into the auditorium where most of the Chinese Clan slept.

Down there, the rows of seats — except for the first half a dozen rows — had long since been removed and replaced with items better suited to the needs of the Clan: cots, jury-rigged walls, small camp cookstoves, and other paraphernalia, scattered around the huge room in little living-quarter pockets. The movie screen — with CHINESE CLAN! emblazoned in huge orange spray-paint graffiti — still dominated the wall behind the stage, and Moody used this platform when he addressed his shabby but proficient troops.