Max Collins - Before the Dawn

“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.

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.