Max Collins: Before the Dawn

The latch groaned as it slipped loose, the door made its familiar squeal as it yawned open and daylight cascaded in.

Heedlessly, Max launched herself before she realized the driver and another tall man — both wore jeans and heavy barn coats — were blocking her path, a fork truck sitting behind them, its motor purring.

“What the hell?” the driver blurted, as he took a reflexive step backward, his hands coming up to defend himself, unintentionally clearing the way for her.

Max landed gracefully on the loading dock, the concrete frigid beneath her feet after the trailer’s relative warmth. She took one step toward the wide-eyed men, pivoted and leapt off the dock onto the snow-covered parking lot below. Bolting across the lot, the two men yelling at her, she made for a line of trailers against the far fence.

As she pulled away, she could hear the huffing of the two men behind her; again a small smile formed: they were not going to catch her.

The seven-foot chain-link fence beyond the line of trailers proved to be even less of an obstacle than the one back at Manticore; she scampered up and over, the way a spider navigates a wall. And the pair of overweight old men pursuing her hardly compared to helicopters and snowmobiles.

She was gone before the two men were halfway across the yard. Beyond the fence lay a two-lane blacktop road, and across that what looked to Max like a factory of some sort.

Still making its morning ascent, the sun told her it was approaching noon, the sky’s compass indicating that west lay to her left. For no particular reason she could discern, she chose that direction, hopped onto the road and ran for all she was worth.

Max passed business after business, trying not to allow the newness of it all to distract her, however much seeing such things in reality, as opposed to some training video, excited and aroused her. She kept arms and legs pumping and, eventually, she left the industrial park behind and moved into an area of houses.

Homes.

Once in the residential neighborhood ( Civilians live here, the young soldier thought), she slowed down, finally allowing herself to take it all in. These structures were not much like Hannah’s cabin at all. Much bigger and close together, they vaguely reminded Max of castles in Manticore texts.

Though most of the structures were white, occasionally there would be a blue one or a yellow one — a rainbow to a child raised in a blue-gray environment — and all of them seemed to be two-story and have a garage underneath one side. A few cars were parked on the street, all with license plates stenciled WYOMING, like Hannah’s last night; but she saw no people and wondered where everyone was.

At the sound of a car motor, up the street behind her, a startled Max took off at a sprint between two houses. She circled the house to her left, coming back onto the place where she’d started, just after the car had passed, rolling down the street, oblivious to her presence.

The vehicle looked different than anything she’d seen at Manticore, and when she focused in on the nameplate, she could make out a word: AVALON. She had no idea what that meant. She did know the Manticore men traveled in black vehicles labeled TAHOE and HUMVEE; this white Avalon looked nothing like those.

Max wondered how far she was from Manticore, and how far away she needed to get, to be safe. Though her sense of time was aided by the sun, distance remained vague to her. She returned to the sidewalk, but she knew her smock would draw attention to her, and that she needed to find cover again until dark... and the sooner, the better.

Rounding a corner, she wandered down a new street. Max had trouble telling this one from the previous one, the houses looking interchangeable, as if manufactured from identical plans; the cars looked about the same, too, and there still didn’t seem to be any people around except her and the driver of the car that had passed by.

Max had gone another block or two when she spotted movement in the next block, on the other side of the street.

A child...

... about her age, playing in a yard three doors up. The sight of another kid made Max think again of her sibs, and an emotion rose in her, a caring emotion, and sad: she wondered if any of them had escaped.

She might never know what had become of Jondy and the others — Zack she feared had been killed — but she wasn’t sure how she would find any of them, if they had gotten away.

But standing here on this corner, watching that other child play in the snow, Max made a vow that would form her in years to come: she would never stop looking for her brothers and sisters...

Never.

Hanging suspended by a slender nylon rope, eight stories over nighttime Los Angeles, Max thought, Piece of cake...

The line tethering her to the building felt snug against her wasplike waist. Though a chilly wind swept over the city, colder than one would expect for early March, it barely registered on Max, upon whom weather had little or no effect. Her lithe, athletic body was sheathed in black formfitting fatigues, providing warmth enough for her genetically amplified body; besides which, her Manticore training in the frigid winters of Gillette, Wyoming, had toughened her far beyond any mere meteorological phenomenon she might encounter in LA. Her silky black hair, worn long since her escape from the compound, was tucked neatly under a black watchcap, and she made an anonymous, asexual figure as she played human spider.

Like the music that had once been made here, the record company that had originally erected the pseudo-stacked-disc structure (where she would soon be breaking and entering) was ancient history. After the Pulse, gangster groups had taken the building in lieu of royalties owed, following negotiations that were rumored to have been a literal bloodbath.

The ragtag street army that moved in to the old Capitol Records Building turned the structure into a fortress that had withstood all attacks... until the Big Quake of 2012, anyway. After that, a building that had once resembled a stack of records came to look more like a layer cake with the top four stories smushed by the thumb of a frosting-licking God.

A second generation of gangsters dwelled in the building — known now as the Cap — and this particular batch of criminals-since-birth were the ones Max planned to rip off this evening. The Brood, as they were called, would buy, sell, or trade anything — as long as it was illegal.

For instance, right now the Brood had in their possession the security plans for the Hollywood Heritage Museum, not far outside Brood turf on Highland, a reconverted office building (once belonging to a powerful “agency,” Max had been told — spies, she supposed) that held much of the remaining nostalgic artifacts of a city whose main business had once been (before the Pulse, before the Big Quake) entertainment.

Max knew the Brood planned to rip the museum off, and she and her own clan intended to prevent them from doing so... not out of civic-spiritedness, but to take down the score themselves.

After years of struggle, the sector police had finally fought to a stalemate with the Brood, penning them into an area bordered by the old 101 on the north and east, Cahuenga on the west, and Sunset Boulevard on the south. The Hollywood Freeway, the old 101, curved around the Cap and still occasionally bore spotty, sporadic traffic, vehicles driven by those brave (or foolhardy) enough to pass through Roadhog territory.

Hanging along the north side of the building, as casual and unafraid as a child on a backyard swing, Max looked down on the twinkling abstraction that was the 101 and watched idly as the Roadhogs chased after some unfortunate soul who’d had the bad judgment to try to run the freeway. She smiled a little, shook her head; how reckless, the young woman thought, as she dangled off the side of the tower.