Free False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

there and make our way back to the ridge. We’ll go quietly, and they won’t be able to find us.”
    “You do think they have more ammunition, don’t you?” she asked as they started the grueling crawl up the slope.
    For an answer, buckshot sprayed into the brush behind them. “I guess so,” Evan said dryly. “We’ll have to zigzag to keep them confused.”
    It was slow going, and the advancing light made it worse. The tight branches and flat leaves offered good protection; their jeans and neutral-colored shirts provided some concealment as well, but once in full sunlight they would not match the shadows and it would be an easy matter for the cyclists to pick them off as they emerged from the brush.
    Another round of buckshot crashed through the brush, but not as close as the first had been. Thea glanced over her shoulder. “I think they’ve found the guts,” she whispered.
    “They’re welcome to them,” Evan laughed softly. Tugging at her sleeve he pulled her farther away from the path of the buckshot.
    “There are more of them,” Thea said, pausing long enough to peer down at the track. “They’ve got help. There’s five or six of them now.”
    “Shit!” Evan’s fingers sank into her arm. “Look there.”
    Ahead of them, where the dirt road crossed the old highway, dust was rising. The sound of wagons coming, drawn possibly by oxen or other heavy, slow animals, grew steadily louder, increasing with the sun.
    Dismayed, Thea looked at Evan. “Now what?” she asked, looking from the coiling dust over the road to the armed cyclists on the gravel track.
    But Evan motioned her to be silent, squinting impatiently at the road ahead. “I wonder who’s coming?” he murmured aloud, rubbing at his unkempt beard.
    The noise on the road grew loud enough for the cyclists to hear it, and there were shouts as the men changed direction, their engines whining as the thick wheels tore into the gravel. With shouts of malicious joy the cyclists rode forward to meet the strangers on the road.
    But their delight was short-lived, for as they rounded the bend, Thea and Evan heard a cry of horror go up from the marauders and the words, “Untouchables! Monsters! Monsters! ”
    Gingerly Evan crawled through the brush, motioning Thea to stay where she was so she could keep an eye on the cyclists. She nodded her quick understanding and positioned herself between Evan and the burning buildings, lying flat on the ground with her sharpened file clutched firmly in her hand.
    The cyclists careened back to the burning farm, shouting to one another. In their moment of panic, they had dropped one of their shotguns at the crossroad, hut none came to retrieve it.
    Slowly the caravan that had frightened the cyclists drew into view; a pathetic band of men and women traveling in rough carts drawn by emaciated cattle. That they could use such livestock and go unmolested by the starving and desperate people who roamed the mountains attested more eloquently than any other thing about them to the horror they carried in their wagons.
    Evan beckoned Thea to come nearer, and she made her way in cautious silence through the underbrush to his side.
    “Poor bastards,” Evan muttered as he moved closer to the road. His eyes dwelled for a moment on the cart with the children, then he turned away. Even in the years when he had led the Pirates, he had not got used to the terrible deformities that were appearing more and more in the diminishing number of live births of the few surviving men and women. These children in the carts were no exception: only one looked close to normal, all the other seven had defects ranging from a few extra fingers on each hand to hideously stunted bodies, to limbless trunks, to hornlike growths on lead-colored skin. Evan saw that two of the women were pregnant, and wondered, as he had often done before, what could drive them to bear children, with the hopeless testimony of the children riding in the cart.
    Thea seemed