Before the Dawn (8 page)

These and other sibs seemed to constantly occupy her thoughts; yet she kept going. Getting bigger, stronger, smarter, Max knew these things would help her to find her sibs in this postapocalyptic America, no matter where they were.

Those were the goals that needed to be met, not spending her time worrying about what
might
be. If she could make herself good enough, finding the sibs would take care of itself.

They weren't the only ones she missed, though. Lucy, and the situation Max had left her in, still bothered Max—her other sister, back in Jack Barrett's house, his world. Then, in the spring of her twelfth year, when she finally returned to the Barrett home to rescue Lucy, she found the house abandoned.

All the way back to her home in the park, tears streamed down her cheeks, as she realized that Lucy was probably out of her life forever. Finding her siblings would be difficult enough—locating a normal child like Lucy? Next to impossible.

Three weeks later, early May, the Big Quake hit.

Measuring 8.5 on the Richter scale, the quake struck in the middle of the night, killing thousands in their beds, taking far many more lives in California than the Pulse had. Fires raged for weeks, buildings collapsed, houses slid down the sides of mountains, overpasses fell, crushing late-night drivers.

Max's small sanctuary in the park survived, but with literally millions homeless now, the job of protecting her niche, and still trying to forage enough for her own survival, was becoming hopeless. She lasted a year that way, but with supplies getting harder and harder to find, she was forced to scavenge farther and farther from home.

And like so many young girls had in that time just before hers, Max made her way to Hollywood, although in her case it wasn't to star in the movies: her journey ended up being more of a simple migratory path . . .

. . . a path that led her straight to Moody and the Chinese Clan.

Chapter Four

BLAST FROM THE PAST

THE CHINESE THEATRE
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 2019

When Max strode across the cracked cement patio and into the former Mann's Chinese Theatre, a pacing Moody was waiting for her just inside the doors. She would have liked to think his anxiety was for her, but knew better: the Heart of the Ocean was the root of his worry.

The lobby still possessed the glass concession counters from the old days, but now, instead of food, they served up sleeping quarters for some of the younger kids. The carpeting had at one time been red but now was worn to a threadbare pink. Severely cracked by the Quake, the high ceiling had held for seven years now, and no reason to think it wouldn't last seven more, anyway. The walls were decorated not with posters but graffiti, some—like old cave drawings—representing Clan history, others just obscene.

“Are you all right, child?” Moody asked, his voice soft and smooth, but with a tinge of excitement in it.

His long silver hair was tied back in its customary ponytail and he wore a black sweatshirt, black slacks, black socks, and running shoes.

“You mean, did I get you your bauble?”

“Do you think so poorly of me, child? . . . Well—
did
you?”

“That's why you sent me, isn't it?”

A wide wolfish smile opened his face to reveal large white teeth (his grooming, by post-Pulse standards, was remarkable).

Before the conversation could progress, Fresca popped through the double doors that led to the old theater's main auditorium.

Thirteen or so, Fresca was tall and skinny for his age, with long, straight red hair and pale flesh swarming with freckles. He bounced over to them in his ancient
WEEZER
T-shirt (no kid in the Clan had any idea what the word represented, but it amused Fresca), and tattered jeans that were more white than blue.

“Whassup, Max?” Fresca asked, ever chipper.

The boy had enough energy zapping around in that gangly body to light a small city. Stillness took him only when he slept, and only then because he had the upper bunk, the top of the concession stand, a precarious perch: if he moved at all in his slumber, he'd end up on the floor.

“Gotta check in with the Moodman here,” she said easily, “then I'm gonna chill, Fresca—maybe get something to eat.”

“Great! Can I come? Can I?”

The kid wasn't even on drugs.

“Who said I was going anywhere?” Max said, trying not to smile, and failing.

Fresca grinned in response, and dug the toe of his tattered sneaker into the carpeting. She was well aware he was in love with her, and probably had been the moment he met her, when he joined the Clan a year ago.

Having been with Moody for most of the last six years, Max was an old-timer, the Moodman's chief lieutenant and the best thief in the Clan (“A master of the forgotten art of cat burglary,” Moody would say), which was no small feat, considering all twenty-eight members were street-savvy thieves themselves.

“Why, Fres,” Max asked, “you wanna go out?”

Fresca lighted up a ciggie and started to jitter. “Max, that would be great . . . that would be perfect. Been up all night waitin' for you to get back!”

She nodded. “Moody and me, we gotta go take care of a couple of things. . . . Then we can blaze, okay?”

“I'll wait right here,” the redhead promised.

Moody—standing patiently through all of this (Fresca was one of his favorites, too)—led the way. Just before he got to the double entryway of the auditorium, he opened a side door at left and ducked up the stairs, obviously heading to Max's crib, in what had once been the grand old theater's projection booth.

Max wondered why they were going there. Moody usually conducted business in his own quarters, the former manager's office; not that he hadn't dropped by Max's crib before . . . but this just seemed unusual.

Then again, the Heart of the Ocean was an unusual prize.

The tall man in black turned the knob and entered as if this were his room, not hers. Max's door was always unlocked—living with a building full of thieves made locks unnecessary if not outright absurd—and, anyway, Max knew of no one who might enter that she couldn't handle.

The young woman followed her mentor into the modest chamber and he closed the door behind them. Other than Moody's office/living quarters, this cracked-plaster-walled room was the biggest private room in the place. The dead projector had been shoved into a corner, a decaying museum piece unworthy of the institution Max had just looted. This provided Max a window into the auditorium where most of the Chinese Clan slept.

Down there, the rows of seats—except for the first half a dozen rows—had long since been removed and replaced with items better suited to the needs of the Clan: cots, jury-rigged walls, small camp cookstoves, and other paraphernalia, scattered around the huge room in little living-quarter pockets. The movie screen—with
CHINESE CLAN!
emblazoned in huge orange spray-paint graffiti—still dominated the wall behind the stage, and Moody used this platform when he addressed his shabby but proficient troops.

The projection booth itself was the biggest room Max had had to herself in her entire life. Her earliest memories were of the Manticore barracks; then she'd shared a room with Lucy, after which she lived in a hole in the ground barely big enough for one, back in Griffith Park.

Ten by sixteen, with its own bathroom, the booth seemed huge to Max, a suite all to herself. Of course, the bathroom would have been a greater luxury if the plumbing worked on a more regular basis. The theater had been abandoned because of the quake cracks in the ceiling, and had even been scheduled for demolition by the city, except someone had stolen the work order and—with all the other troubles in the city—Mann's seemed to have been lost in the shuffle.

The plumbing, which only worked some of the time in Hollywood anyway, worked even more infrequently within the theater—usually only after Moody had laid some green on local power and water reps.

Max's bed—rescued from the rubble of the old Roosevelt Hotel across the street—was a luxurious queen-sized box spring on the floor, mattress on top. A Coleman camp lantern, a prize from her days of living in Griffith Park, sat at the head of the bed near a short pile of books, mostly nonfiction (subjects Moody wanted her to study), and a dog-eared paperback copy of
Gulliver's Travels,
the one novel she owned, also provided by Moody. Her new motorcycle, a Kawasaki Ninja 250, leaned against one wall, and a padded armchair, also lifted from the Roosevelt ruins, squatted near the projection window. Her only other possession, a small black-and-white TV, sat on a tiny table to the left of the chair.

Moody gazed down at the books. “Traveling to Lilliput again, Maxine?”

Moody knew full well that Maxine wasn't her name: it was just an affectionate nickname.

She smiled. “Can't help it—I like the guy.”

Her mentor chuckled. “You and Gulliver—your lives are not that dissimilar, you know.”

“Yeah, I'd noticed that.”

Moody eased his lanky frame into the chair; Max remained standing.

“So, Maxine . . . the score—was it difficult?”

Max recounted the evening, draining it of any excess melodrama; still, Moody seemed impressed.

Shaking his head, he said, “Mr. Kafelnikov will be . . . displeased with you.”

“I hope he doesn't know who borrowed his security plan. That poor traitor would die slow, I bet.”

“Very slow . . . but our Russian adversary may well have made you, you know.”

“How could he I.D. me? I never met the guy before.”

“You underestimate your renown within certain circles.”

Max frowned. “What circles? I don't know any ‘circles.' ”

Arms draped on either side of the chair, as if it were a throne and he a king (the latter was true, in a way), Moody arched an eyebrow. “You think the other clans don't talk to each other? You think these . . . superhuman feats of yours have gone unnoticed?”

“I don't care,” she said with a shrug.

“Perhaps you should. You've given them all one sort of trouble or another over the years, haven't you?”

A slow smile crossed Max's full lips. “Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.”

Moody's eyes seemed to look inward. “That security plan meant a great deal to the Brood. They meant to obtain the bauble in your pocket—and they won't take this defeat lightly. Kafelnikov will search long and hard to find out who wronged him.”

Finally, casually, she withdrew the necklace from her pocket. “This old thing?”

Moody's eyes went as wide as the stone. “My God, Maxine. . . . It's even more breathtaking up close.”

Max held the stone to the dim light and studied it for a long moment. “It's pretty cool, I guess.” With another shrug, she handed it over.

“Pretty cool,” Moody said, taking the stone. “If they connect you to us . . . and they will . . . we'll have a real enemy.”

“They try to storm this place, we'll hand their asses back, with change.”

Turning the stone over and over in his hands, Moody seemed not to have heard her. “The necklace alone would feed the Clan for a year.”

“That was a good plan you had—'cept for those dogs. For rumors, they had
some
teeth on 'em.”

He shook his head, ponytail swinging. “My apologies. . . . Anyway, a plan is worthless without proper execution. That was key . . . and the only one in this city who could have executed it was you. . . . Which, my dear, you did.”

“No biggie,” she said, with yet another shrug.

Rising, he tucked the stone into a pocket as he moved to her. Putting an arm around Max, Moody kissed the girl's cheek, as he had many times before . . . only now, his lips perhaps lingered a moment too long. “You did well, my dear . . . you did very well.”

“Thanks,” Max said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. Oddly, the image of Mr. Barrett entering the bedroom after midnight, to fetch Lucy, flashed through her mind. “I . . . I better get Fresca—he's probably wet his pants by now. I promised to get something to eat with him, y'know.”

Moody didn't move, his arm still around Max's shoulders. “If they come . . . if the Brood dares breach our stronghold . . . God help them when you reveal your powers of battle.”

“Thanks.” Sliding away, not wanting to anger him, but still feeling that something wasn't quite right, she made another mumbled excuse and slipped out of the room and down the stairs. She could hear Moody on the steps behind her, but didn't turn to see where he was.

Fresca was sitting like a gargoyle on the edge of the concession counter, already wearing his rumpled Dodgers jacket. His prize possession, the jacket was Fresca's only tie with his old life . . . whatever that had been. The clothes he'd been wearing when he joined the Clan had been burned, his old name forgotten, his new name adopted from the menu behind the concession stand. Only that faded blue Dodgers jacket remained.

The Clan rule—instituted by Moody and embraced by them all—was that the past didn't matter, didn't exist; time began the day you joined the Clan.

“Let's bounce,” Max said as she walked past him.

Fresca jumped down and, following her suggestion, bounced along next to her, a puppy excited to be in his master's . . . mistress's? . . . presence.

They swept out of the theater across the remnants of old-time movie star handprints and cement signatures and onto Hollywood Boulevard, to be greeted by the rising sun. Max had never been near Hollywood Boulevard before the Quake, but some of the area's denizens she'd spoken to over the years told her that the Boulevard was the one part of the city that the Quake hadn't changed all that much.

“Where we goin'?” Fresca asked.

“Where do you want to go?”

“How about that waffle place over on La Brea?”

“Sure. Waffles are good. I got nothing against waffles.”

Fresca giggled at that, as if Max were the soul of wit; she smiled to herself and they walked along.

The Belgian Waffle House was on the corner of La Brea and Hawthorn, a healthy but doable walk from Mann's. The place had once been all windows, but the Quake had destroyed them, and the plywood hung to replace them temporarily had become permanent. Littered with graffiti, the plywood was now the waffle house's trademark, and customers were provided with markers to add to the decoration while they waited for their food. The booths were still vinyl-covered, but wear and tear had taken them beyond funky into junky. Sparse early-morning traffic meant that only nine or ten other patrons were in the place when Fresca and Max strolled in.

They took two seats at the counter so Fresca could watch the wall-mounted TV adjacent to the food service window from the dingy kitchen.

The Satellite News Network, with headline stories in half-hour cycles, was at this hour about the only choice in a TV market that had gone from a pre-Pulse high of over two hundred cable channels to the current half dozen, all of which were under the federal government's thumb. The SNN and two local channels were all that was left out east, and in the Midwest, they got SNN and scattered local channels; so the West Coast remained, by default, the center of the television
world. . . . it was just a much smaller world.

“I'm gonna make a leap here,” Max said, “and have a waffle.”

Fresca grinned. “You buyin'?”

Max favored him with a wide smile. “What have you done lately, to deserve me buying you breakfast?”

“Uh . . . I just figured . . . you were on some big score, and wanted to, I don't know, celebrate. Maybe share the wealth.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

Fresca seemed hurt by her kidding. “I don't know . . . I just . . . kinda hoped . . . you know . . .”

She reached over and patted his hand. “Relax, mongrel. You know I won't let you starve.”

He brightened and, as if keeping up Fresca's end of the conversation, his stomach growled.

A waitress came up to them with all the urgency of a stroke victim using a walker. She was in her late forties, early fifties, skinny as a straw, with a tight, narrow face. She was not thrilled to see them. “Save me a trip—tell me you don't need a menu.”