Max Collins - Before the Dawn

She blinked. She didn’t know she had been, but those were tears, all right, running down her cheeks; the streaks of moisture felt warm. “It’s nothing, Fres,” she said. “How you doing with your chow?”

“I’m gonna blow up soon.”

“Then why don’t you stop eating?”

“After you treated me to this feast? I would never insult you that way, Max!”

She couldn’t help but smile through the tears. As she sat watching the boy shovel in the food, she knew her course was clear: a girl had to do what a girl had to do.

But she knew when she left, she’d miss Fresca most of all. “You ready to go then, waffle boy?”

He slurped down the last of his second chocolate milk. “Yeah, yeah, I’m ready to blaze... And thanks, Max. I haven’t eaten like this in days... You sure you’re okay?”

“Just somethin’ in my eye,” she said. “I’m great, now.”

“You’re always great, Max.”

The waitress came over as they rose and Max paid their bill, including tip.

“Be sure to come back,” the waitress said; it seemed vaguely a threat.

As they walked back to the theater, with considerably less urgency, Max’s mind was nonetheless racing.

She’d always wondered how she’d go about finding her siblings, and now, at breakfast, one of them had practically dropped into her lap. How long would it take her to get to Seattle, and how would she get past all the checkpoints? What would Moody think about her leaving? He had all but suggested it before, hadn’t he?

Or had Moody wanted her to stay with him?

The bike’s gas tank was full, more or less; but would she be able to get fuel on the road? Even if she could, the price of the stuff would eat through her bankroll. The questions engulfed her like swarming insects.

As they neared the theater, Fresca again asked, “You sure you’re okay, Max?”

She wrapped an arm around his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek, taking her good sweet time, the smack of her lips like a sweet slap. When she let him go, Fresca flushed red, his thousands of freckles merging into one big glowing blotch. She knew instantly that he was thinking the same thoughts about her that she’d been thinking after Moody’s lingering kiss on the cheek... only Fres didn’t seem weirded out like she had been: he seemed pleased, even... excited.

Uh oh...

Her motivations had been purely innocent, which made her wonder if maybe Moody’s had been, too...

Mann’s was slowly coming awake, Clan members stirring and lining up to use the bathrooms, the smell of breakfasts cooking on hot plates wafting pleasantly. Max deposited the still-beet-faced Fresca next to his concession-stand berth and headed into the auditorium in search of Moody.

The sloping floor was scattered with sleeping bags and beds appropriated from the Roosevelt wreckage, while blanket “walls” were draped from clotheslines. Despite the breakfast odors, the smell of stale sweat and unwashed souls hung in the air; and yet very faintly lingered the olfactory memory of buttered popcorn.

It was a motley crew Moody lorded over, but they were a family — Max already was viewing them with a sort of nostalgia — and they loved the old man.

Moody’s second-in-command, Gabriel — an African American in his late twenties — was rousing the kids when she came in.

“Moodman in his office?” she asked.

Gabriel had a shadow’s worth of black hair, brown eyes, and an ostrich neck. He cocked his head toward the movie screen. “Yeah, and he’s happy as a clam. What the hell you pull off last night, Maxie?”

“Little score. Same-o same-so... save-the-day kinda thing.”

He harrumphed, but grinned. “Ain’t it the truth. Don’t know what we’d do without you ’round here, girl.”

Max felt a twinge of guilt.

Gabriel was looking down at Niner, a sixteen-year-old newbie girl who’d been with the Clan for about a month.

“Get your scrawny ass outa the sack,” Gabriel growled. “There’s work to be done in the real world.”

Continuing on toward the looming screen, Max thought about Niner. Nice kid; reminded her a little of Lucy. Max hoped that once she was gone, maybe Fresca and Niner could hook up. Might be good for both of them.

Max took a doorway to the left of the screen, into an area where a single guard, Tippett, blocked the hallway that led to Moody’s quarters. Six-four, maybe 240 pounds of tattoos and piercings, Tippett had been a linebacker back in the pre-Pulse days. Now, nearly fifty, he still had a black belt in karate and was the only person in the Clan who could hold his own with Max. When they’d sparred once, he’d lasted eight seconds, easily the record for a match with her. Only now that Max knew the man’s moves, he’d go down in five.

“Hey,” Max said.

Tippett smiled, showing a thin line of tobacco-browned teeth. Big and pale with an incongruous Afro, he scared the shit out of everybody... except Max and Moody. Even Gabriel gave Tippett more than the average amount of space.

“Cutie pie,” he said. “Wanna go a few rounds?”

“No. You?”

“Hell no. You must wanna see the man.”

“I need to see the man.”

“Girl whips my ass don’t have to ask me twice.” The guard stepped aside.

The hallway had an incense odor, always pleasant to Max after the fetid sweat smell of the auditorium. Moody’s office was the second door on the left of the pale-blue cracked plaster walls, an unmarked one just after another labeled MOODY — OFFICE. The latter led into a tiny empty room; but the important part of that “OFFICE” door was the four ounces of C4 wired to it.

She knocked on the second door, said firmly, “Max!”

The door replied with a muffled, “Come!”

She found Moody seated behind his desk, on his cell phone; he waved for her to enter and take a chair across from him, which she did.

The wall to her left, the one that abutted the booby trap room, was loaded floor to ceiling with sandbags to protect Moody’s office should the trap be sprung. The desk was an old metal one accompanied by three unmatching metal-frame chairs, one for Moody and two on the other side. The wall to the right had a doorway carved into it, and a curtain of purple beads separated Moody’s private quarters from the office. A few of the ancient movie posters — Sean Connery in Goldfinger, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (both meaningless to Max) — salvaged from somewhere in the theater, were tacked here and there.

“Don’t insult me,” he snapped into the phone, but his face revealed calm at odds with his tone. He glanced at Max, rolled his eyes, made a mouth with his fingers and thumb, and opened it and closed it rapidly: blah, blah, blah.

Perhaps fifteen seconds later, Moody told the phone, “I know it’s a bloody depression, but this is a diamond bigger than that one good eyeball of yours, you ignorant, cycloptic son of a bitch.” He hit the END button. “That’s what I’ve always hated about these damn cells,” he said, his voice as blasé as if he were ordering tea, “you can’t slam a receiver into a hook, and put a nice period on a sentence.”

Max’s head was cocked. “Was that?...”

“That was someone who, if I’ve done my job correctly, will be calling right back.” Five seconds later the cell phone rang and Moody smiled. “Got him.”

Max had watched Moody negotiate before and knew he usually got what he wanted. The man had charm and cajones and a tactical sense second to none.

“Yes,” Moody said into the phone.

He listened for a few seconds.

“Well, that may indeed be true about my mother,” Moody said, “but then we’ll never know, will we, since she passed away some years ago... but one thing is certain: my price is a fair price.”