John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“I don’t even know where I am,” she said.

“You’re in Indiana, northeast of Pale Bluff, not far north of Terre Haute, on the Wabash. Go home now. They’re worried about you, they want to see you.”

He felt desperate—she wasn’t understanding; she was unbound, unhurt, all she had to do was slip out and run.

“They told us it’s all tribes all the way to the Mississippi.”

“No, no… the Wabash is the line, sorta, and that’s the river we’re on now. There’s a bridge… about a mile north… it’s US 36. Get across it. It’s all trees and hills on the other side, lots of woods to hide in, keep running, they might chase you for a day or more, but keep moving. Do you know your way to Pale Bluff from 36?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Go now.”

“Can’t I do something for you first?”

“What’s the name of the boy that tricked you into coming over here?” he asked. “What’s his name?”

“Eric, but I haven’t—”

“Okay, I’m gonna say you got a message from him and ran off to meet him. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll look in the wrong direction. Now go , Pauline, go .”

He was so afraid she’d delay further, and he might break down and ask her to kill him, but he felt her lips brush his forehead and then she was gone. He rolled, found the watering can, bit down on the spout, and drank the last of it.

When Robert came in to slap Ecco awake, he had slept only fitfully; he tried to sleep on his back with his head tilted back, so that maybe he could choke on blood or a loose tooth, but no luck.

They didn’t ask him about Eric, or Pauline, or anything about Pueblo; he wasn’t sure what they did ask him about. He just tried to say “no” five thousand times, telling himself he’d surely be dead before he got to five thousand, but he kept losing count and having to start over.

Eventually they gave up and just finished things.

“Paint him with hot pitch,” Karl ordered. “So he’ll last. Put him on a post in the middle of the road, on our side of the US 36 bridge, facing the other side. Have a light hand with the tar on his face and do what you can to keep that expression; it fucking makes me jump, you know.”

“They gonna be able to tell who it was?” Robert asked. “With that tar, he won’t look white.”

“They don’t need to know who it was, as long as they know it was a man and we didn’t like him.” Karl was in an expansive, jolly mood. “Any word on the steno slave?”

“I’ve put trackers after her; bet your ass that Mister Asshole In Pine Tar here told her where she was and that she wasn’t far from home.”

“I figured as much,” Karl said, pulling at his beard the way he did whenever he wanted to make sure that everyone understood that any good ideas Robert had, and carried out, were still to Karl’s credit for having chosen Robert.

Robert nodded. “Hey, I had an idea for going home. Let’s let the crew work our boat upstream each day, and you and me hunt and then meet the boat upstream; that way we don’t have to hang around for all that hard work, and we can make a real vacation out of it, hunting and fishing the whole way, but we have the cooks, the bitches, and fresh game every night.”

Karl laughed in pure delight. “Damn, Robert, that’s why I keep you around, you’re my idea man.”

Pauline woke to the sounds of dogs and men. She rolled off the cot and crept across the floor of the cabin; in the daylight she could see it was an ordinary fishing and hunting shack like her grandfather’s, with outdoor junk lying in heaps where the plastic holding it had rotted. In the dark, last night, she’d just followed a trail, looking for somewhere to rest.

She crawled to the window, staying low, and peered out cautiously. The sun was well up.

She heard the men shouting to the dogs. She knew them; two of Castle Earthstone’s scouts—she’d taken dictation for their reports. They were not close yet, but they would be.

Pauline felt like punching herself in the head; the night before she had gone just a few miles before holing up to rest and savor the feeling of safety and freedom.

Well, nothing for it now, but try, as Aunt Carol May used to annoy her by saying. She looked around; nothing useful right out in the open and no time to pick through the cabinets. She went out the back door, running downhill away from the trackers.

Fishing shacks are located near water, and water runs downhill, she told herself. Sure enough, at the bottom the owners had piled logs and rocks into a creek to make a pond. She waded across and upstream; it sounded like they were getting closer, and wading was slow, so she only went up the creek far enough to be out of sight of the pond, and then a few more yards to a pipe-and-board bridge, where she climbed out and followed the one-car track that ran through it, heading south because that was the way back to 36, and from 36 she could get home.

Bambi Castro had always thought the area around the mouth of the Russian River pegged the meter for gorgeous: the deepest green on the California coast, the wide rushing river, the beaches and hills, like a movie image of Eden unspoiled. Flying at the Stearman’s low cruising ceiling, she could just see a few columns of smoke still rising from the ruins around the Golden Gate, far to the south. Someday soon, some poor bastards will have to go in there to take a look, and I don’t envy them.

She swept wide over the ocean and came back in across the beach, touching down about as well as anyone could on underfilled greased-linen tires.

She tried to pretend that she was irritated about being called off her regular route, but the chance to fly into one of her favorite parts of the country and stay with one of her best friends rendered her irredeemably cheerful.

In his office, though, one glance showed that Quattro had been worried sick about something. Little bits of torn paper littered the desk; four half-filled water glasses sat among the paper snowstorm; and he lurched more than stood when she came in.

“Is there something wrong?” Bambi asked.

“I’ve never been this scared before in my life,” he admitted. “Bambi, will you marry me?”

Pauline Kloster felt like she was jogging through icy fog, and the cool damp as the road passed through shadowy woods threatened that as the sun sank, the night would turn cold. I’d prolly suck at this anyway, even if I’d had food and sleep.

She had been running or walking constantly since leaving the fishing cabin, afraid to take time to forage. Besides, the abandoned stores and homes in this country had been thoroughly picked over. At least she’d had plenty of water from creeks and ponds on the way; a few months as a Daybreaker slave had given her trot-proof guts.

She’d wasted the lead time Ecco gave her; she hated herself for that. As soon as she crossed that bridge she should have run all night, as far and fast as she could, right down the middle of the paved roads, so that the afternoon thunderstorm would have erased most of her scent, and maybe waded up and down some streams, anything to put the dogs off.

Three times this afternoon she’d waded from one bridge to another she could see along the stream; each time put the dogs off, but only long enough to let her walk instead of run for an hour or so, because the slow process of working along a streambed cost precious distance and time.