Max Collins: Before the Dawn

The Tahoe dropped into a valley, then crested beside Max, the tires sliding a little as the driver stomped on the brakes and locked them up. Max glimpsed the Wyoming plate, AGT 249, then the driver finally got control of the vehicle and pulled it to a stop, the passenger’s side door right in front of her.

It swung open, like a slapping hand, and a woman in her thirties with dishwater blond hair to her shoulders and wide-set blue eyes stared down at Max.

“Get in,” the woman said. The eyes were a peaceful color, the blue of a mountain stream; but they glistened with fear. “Hurry up!.. Come on.”

In 1.3 seconds, Max completed a threat assessment, reckoned the woman harmless, at least for the time being, and the child soldier climbed into the vehicle and shut the door.

“Get on the floor,” the woman said.

Max responded to the command and the woman wrapped her in a gray woolen blanket — Manticore issue!

“It’s all right,” the woman said, responding to the flared-eyed expression of the girl. “I work for them... but I’m not one of them.”

Keeping her eyes on the woman, Max said nothing. Better to let the woman keep talking and for Max to use the time to gather her strength. In the meantime, the girl calculated that snapping the woman’s neck would be the quickest way to kill her; and Max knew she’d had enough vehicle training to operate this civilian machine. Killing her while the car was moving, however, would add unpredictable factors...

The truck’s heater hummed sporadically, but the air it blew into the compartment was warm, soothing the child as she considered murder methods. Even the itchy blanket felt good wrapped around her shoulders...

The woman had a straight, thin nose, full red lips, and those aquatic blue eyes, all set inside a triangular face. She wore a white medical uniform that peeked out beneath a long dark overcoat. Security-cleared civilian medical personnel came and went at Manticore, Max knew.

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.