Before the Dawn Read Free Page A

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.
    Max knew that when the sun got high, Manticore would have very little trouble catching up with a barefoot nine-year-old girl wearing only a blue-gray hospital nightshirt. From her training, she knew enough about the outside world to realize that she and her siblings likely would be described to the authorities as escapees of some kind, perhaps from a mental institution.
    Her special genetic gifts would provide some protection, yes; but she was beginning to lose the battle with exhaustion.
    Since leaving the cabin, she had clung to the woods, only occasionally hearing the whine of snowmobiles or the roar of helicopters, as she moved south. She still had no idea where she was, much less where she was going, survival itself her only engine.
    She did know she was still too close to her former “home” to achieve any reasonable sense of safety; and she needed to put as much distance as possible between her and Lydecker and the minions of Manticore.
    Ahead of her, the woods trailed off and, across a scrubby clearing, there lay the expanse of a large parking lot filled with trucks, the same type of vehicles she had noticed bringing supplies to Manticore.
    These she had seen at the facility, one or at most two at a time. Now perhaps as many as fifty of them sat not a hundred yards in front of her, a virtual forest of massive vehicles. Some moved out, while others moved in, taking their places in a constant parade.
    Max watched for a long time as trucks parked, their drivers climbing down and disappearing into the distance toward a building of which she had only an obstructed view. After a while, drivers would come back out, check the rear doors on their trailers, climb back into the cab, then sometimes drive away, and other times just remain parked with the engines running, studying maps, reading, resting.
    The child knew that even if the trailers weren't heated, any one of them would provide better protection from the elements than she had now, as well as give her a place to hide during the coming day.
    They also presented a variety of potential hazards.
    She might choose to hide in a truck that ended up back at Manticore; since she had no real sense of the size of the world beyond Manticore, this seemed a genuine possibility.
    Or, if unable to relock the trailer from the inside, she might be discovered by one of the drivers, who would certainly call the authorities. And for all she knew, that could easily include Colonel Lydecker.
    With the icy air biting into her, she was unsure what to do; but, as a soldier, she knew doing nothing was not an option.
    Max watched patiently as two more trailers came and went, one at either end. Then she rose to her haunches and prepared to move. The tree line would provide cover for the first twenty yards or so . . . but after that, Max would be running over open ground, in the bright sunshine, with absolutely nowhere to hide. . . .
    When the next trailer backed in and parked—a long orange affair with black trim—Max made her move. She shot forward like a runner coming out of the blocks, streaking through the last