Neal Barrett Jr. Read online

  DAWN’S UNCERTAIN LIGHT

  Sequel to Across Darkest America

  By Neal Barrett, Jr.

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2016 Ruth Barrett

  LICENSE NOTES

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  Meet the Author

  NEAL BARRETT, JR was an American treasure, a prolific author with a keen eye to character and the ability to make the improbable obvious. He has written over fifty novels and numerous short stories that span the field from mystery/suspense, fantasy, science fiction and historical novels, to “off-the-wall” mainstream fiction. Reviewers have defined his work as “stories that defy any category or convention…”

  His “author’s best” collection, “Perpetuity Blues,” was a finalist for the 2001 World Fantasy Award.

  His two fantasy novels featuring “Finn, the Lizard Master” have been published by Bantam—”The Prophecy Machine,” in 2000, and “The Treachery of Kings” in 2001. These novels were based on “The Lizard Shoppe,” which appeared in Dragon Magazine, and won the “best fiction of the year” award from The West Coast Publishers.

  In addition to his appearance in numerous magazines, his work may be seen in collections such as The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nebula Awards, OMNI: Best Science Fiction, Asimov’s Robots, Dark at Heart, The Year’s Best Science Fiction (Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, Tenth and Eleventh Annual Collections), etc.

  His novelette, “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus” was a finalist for both the SFWA NEBULA Award, and the Hugo Award, for best novelette of the year, and his story “Cush” was a Hugo nominee.

  His short story, “Stairs,” received a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

  Barrett had a habit of crossing genre lines with his fiction. “Sallie C.,” from The Best of the West, and “Winter on the Belle Fourche,” from The New Frontier, were both chosen for Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction.

  His novel, “Through Darkest America,” received acclaim from readers and critics alike. Reviewer Edward Bryant called it “A book of astonishing power…simply one of the best…”

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  Introduction

  I can’t explain the way Neal Barrett’s mind works, but I can give you an example. Neal once wrote a story in which two brothers, Orville and Will, were trying to build an automobile and were having a hell of a hard time perfecting it because…well…it kept leaving the ground. That is a Neal Barrett, Jr. joke. No laugh track but it’s hilarious.

  Neal Barrett’s imagination is accompanied by sentences that do his will and make it look easy. Sentences that lope along, sentences that run ahead, sentences as supple as a thirteen-year-old gymnast or as revelatory as a night sky full of lightning.

  In Dawn’s Uncertain Light (which is, by the way, the perfect title for a sequel to Through Darkest America) young Howie Ryder has been shaped by the darkness around him. He has learned that the world he lives in is based on a vast and terrible lie. He is no match for this horror, and he knows this, and his reason for hanging onto his grim existence has narrowed to a single motivating force: the white hot focus of revenge. He has seen into the black heart of the human monster, and pity has fled from his soul. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of Howie’s wrath; he’s resourceful and single-minded and fearless.

  This world that Neal Barrett has created… Here’s the frightening part of this big-themed book: it is a plausible future. This landscape of forests and towns that Mr. Barrett has built with such care, such attention to the natural world—for, like Mark Twain’s Huck, Howie knows the physical world better than his fellows—is a place too substantial for allegory. Yes, this could happen. It could happen here. It’s unthinkable. And plausible. And seriously scary. Forget vampires. Forget zombies. Forget The Road. Forget Paranormal 12. This is where the light doesn’t go, for good reason.

  The critic John Clute (think of him as sf’s Harold Bloom) once described Neal Barrett as “the prophet of loss,” and certainly Neal Barrett has written lots of fiction in which things are winding down in grim, inevitable ways. Nobody’s going to fix the world. Small victories must suffice.

  But Neal Barrett has not written a gloomy tone poem of a novel. His books are always eventful, and always rewarding. This is, among other things, a western, a coming-of-age novel, a picaresque, an adventure, and a page-turner. There’s even sex. Howie is smitten by the lovely Lorene—and who wouldn’t be? But this is a world in which any respite from the corrosive light of its truth is brief; it’s the nightmare that triumphs.

  There have been plenty of novels with dystopian futures—there’s a new rash of them in the young adult market—but you’ve never read anything like Through Darkest America and Dawn’s Uncertain Light.

  I don’t think anyone can read these books without experiencing a visceral sense of their power. How long a book lingers in one’s mind is one of the best ways I know to assess its worth. You won’t forget Dawn’s Uncertain Light.

  William Browning Spencer

  Austin, Texas

  DAWN’S UNCERTAIN LIGHT

  PART ONE

  South by Southeast

  CHAPTER ONE

  The creek was no deeper than spit, a sluggish course that scarcely seemed to move under an August sun that drank the land dry. Along the red clay banks the earth had crumbled and given way, loosing chunks of dirt into the bed.

  Howie Ryder studied the land with a farmer’s practiced eye. Nothing stirred in the thick oppressive air. Rain hadn’t touched this place in a year, maybe more than that. The fields were parched, the soil cracked and sere. The land was more than dry. It was plain used up. Rain wouldn’t likely bring it back. Too many generations had squeezed a living from the ground and there was nothing left to give.

  The house stood beneath a dead oak, a one-room shack with the paint sucked off by the sun. Howie stood well out of sight in a stand of trees. The dirt yard was empty, but he knew someone was there. A cane chair stood on the porch, the bottom freshly patched. A cornshuck doll lay on the steps. There was sun-bleached wash on the line—a woman’s dress, and smaller garments cut from the
same faded cloth. A man’s shirt and coveralls. A sheet and rag towels. There was still wear left in the coveralls and shirt, and they’d be nice to have. Howie left them where they were. If the man here had kept his family safe in such times he had a gun. And if he did he was in there now, waiting for the stranger to leave or come close enough to fire. It wasn’t smart to waste lead. The way to get it back was to hit a man square and dig it out.

  Howie knew there might not be a man at all. A woman with her man off to war or maybe dead would have the sense to leave his clothes on the line. That would be the smart thing to do.

  Howie left the dry fields and started walking east again. Stopping for a look was just a caution; he hadn’t figured on going any closer than the trees. Even if the folks in the house had come out and asked him in, he wouldn’t have come nearer than the creek. There wasn’t food to spare these days; if you had any sense you knew that. A friendly invitation wasn’t always for supper and a bed. At Dan’s Crossing three days back, Howie had seen a man and his wife and two grown-up girls all hanging from a tree. The woman and the girls were stripped bare, and they had plainly been used. A man who’d lost both arms in the war told Howie the family had been buying a lot of goods, and they hadn’t had a crop in three years. Some men got together and went out to the house; a little persuasion and an afternoon’s digging tinned up ten bodies buried shallow in the yard. The two girls were real pretty. That’s how they’d gotten strangers in.

  And that was how things were, everywhere he had been. The fighting hadn’t come to the South; there weren’t any Loyalists or Rebels about, there wasn’t any shooting going on. But the war reached out and found you, no matter where you were. There was hurt everywhere, and the misery that went with empty bellies and the fear that went with that.

  Late in the afternoon, Howie found a burned-out house and a barn that had collapsed on itself, one wall standing and halfway holding up the rest. Anyone could see it was a good place to hole up for the night, and a man would be a fool if he did. Before he left the barn, Howie kicked around and found two ears of dried red corn and took them off in the woods a good quarter mile south. Dried corn was hell to chew, but once you got it down it swelled up and seemed close to a meal.

  When night came he worked on the corn and drank from the glass jar of water he had dipped out of the creek. The water tasted better if you let the silt settle, but he never had the patience for that, When the water was gone he leaned back against the tree and thought about where he might be, and how much more he had to go. Howie didn’t like the night. The night was real bad. In the day you had to look what you were doing, and there wasn’t time to think. The night put pictures in your head, and showed you things you didn’t want to see. The thing to do then was just think about dark. Dark and nothing else at all. Sometimes it worked and you went right to sleep. Sometimes it didn’t and the bad stuff came and took over in your head. Howie could see that’s the way it might be this time, and there was nothing you could do about that. If it came it just did.

  The men came at him just before first light, making little noise, working up to him on the ground. He could smell their sweat and knew they weren’t afraid. Howie figured they’d done this once or twice before. They came in together, the second man holding a knife, just behind the first. They stopped still to listen for a while, then the first man crawled up slow and grabbed out at Howie’s arms to hold him down. Howie rolled to one side and came up in crouch; the man with the knife looked surprised because Howie wasn’t there and then he was. Howie thrust his own blade in belly-deep, sliced up quickly to the breast, and jerked free, all in a move too fast to see.

  The other man cried out in fright, crabbed away and tried for the weapon at his belt. His eyes told Howie this wasn’t the way it ought to be. It was his job to hold; he hadn’t ever had to do this. He could see that a man who wasn’t ready was a man already dead. and he wouldn’t have to think of that again.

  The men had been doing something right up to now. Howie found a bag of copper coins, a pistol, and some shells. He kept the best of the knives and a good straw hat, and a better pair of boots than his own. A slit on one side and they fit just fine. The men were likely deserters, unless they’d stolen the pistol too. Howie followed their tracks out of the woods in case they’d left packs somewhere, but there was nothing else to find. Neither of the two had any food.

  Howie started walking east,-chewing corn along the way. He left the men where they were. He didn’t look back, and didn’t think about them after that.

  For some time after Mexico, Howie had walked north and east, finally running flat out of land and coming up against the sea. He marveled at the great blue expanse that seemed to stretch out forever to the sky. Ma had shown him a picture in a book one time, an ocean and a boy in a boat. The water in the picture looked flat and painted on; it didn’t look a thing like this.

  Howie liked the sand and the shells and the curious things that washed upon the shore. The beach was thick with tiny creatures that scuttled along the sand; they were easy to catch and good to eat. Storms came in off the water now and then, and he had enough to drink.

  He followed the coast for some time. It was the easiest thing to do. Twice he saw the ruins of old cities and quickly passed them by. He tried to draw a map of the country in his head, and decided the big stretch of water was the Gulf.

  The coast seemed to go on forever. Finally he began to find settlements on the beach and headed north. The land changed to pine trees and farms. Small towns, and people with hollow eyes. At the Big Muddy River, a man kept a large raft. It cost a small coin or real goods to get across. Howie didn’t have either at the time. He waited till dark and then stole a small boat and rowed to the other side.

  He knew he was getting close. Crossing the river told him that. The map in his head said the country made a narrow little tail to the east. Silver Island lay somewhere south of the tail. His thoughts didn’t go beyond that. He didn’t see another Howie going somewhere else, doing something he wasn’t doing now. Silver Island was enough.

  Half a day after he left the men in the woods, he found one of the old stone roads and followed it east. A hundred summers and winters had done their work. The road was buckled and overgrown; tall trees split the man-made surface and thrust slabs of rubble aside. Howie could smell salt air and knew the Gulf was not far to the south. The trees were full of white birds. He even saw a little game, snicks and two rabuts, and some creatures he couldn’t name, the only animals he’d seen since Mexico.

  By late afternoon he smelled stock. The odor sent a sharp wave of nausea through his belly. Pictures appeared in his head, things he didn’t want to see. Howie stopped and drank from a clearwater stream, cooled his face and thought about what he ought to do. Stock meant a town up ahead, and a fairly good-sized one at that, if they had enough men to guard meat. He didn’t want to see the town, but he knew it was something he had to do. There were things he didn’t know, things he had to find out.

  It wasn’t a real big operation; meat was scarce as it could be, and nearly every head went to feed the troopers fighting in the war. Howie wondered if there would ever be another great herd like the one he had helped drive west. Most likely not; the army was simply eating up stock too fast.

  Two men with rifles watched Howie as he passed. Their eyes said keep walking by. That was fine with Howie. He picked up his pace and walked as quickly as he could. The stink was overpowering. The pens were set up in a clearing, on the bank of a sandy river that likely ran down to the sea. With a river close by you could dump all the waste from the stock and the organs nobody liked to eat. If the river was deep enough, shippers could barge the herd down to market and save money on feed. A herd on foot liked to eat, and that cut profit to the bone.

  The cutting plant was silent, and that told Howie a lot. The lack of noisy clatter said meat was being shipped out live; the price was too good to sell to folks who couldn’t match the army buyers.

  As ever, there was slow,
constant motion in the pens, stock shuffling aimlessly about. Howie passed the breeding sheds, keeping his attention straight ahead, trying to ignore the growing knot that cramped his gut. He walked by a high board fence, past gateways and ramps, and came right on the mares. Howie stopped, too shaken to turn away. Sweat cold as ice stung his face. They were young, no more than fourteen, each one gravid and heavy-breasted, nearly ready to foal. One looked up, a mare with matted yellow hair, looked right at him with dull, incurious eyes, grunted in her throat and clutched her breasts. Bile rose up in Howie’s throat and he turned away and retched.

  “Hey, you,” one of the guards called out, “what the hell you think you’re doin’?”

  “You can’t hold it, don’t drink it,” the other man said, and both the guards laughed.

  Howie swept a hand across his mouth, staggered through the brush and ran blindly through the trees. Thorny branches ripped at his flesh. Terrible pictures filled his head, visions bright and sharp as colored glass. Howie ran until his lungs caught fire and then dropped to the ground. An awful cry escaped his throat, a cry of sorrow and anger, a pain that cut and slashed at his soul. All the pictures in his head turned red. Howie let them come. He didn’t try to fight them anymore.

  It was close to night when he walked into the town. The storefronts were closed up tight, and there were very few people in the streets. Howie heard a woman laugh. Two men squatted beneath a tree. One shook a handful of stones and then tossed them on the ground. The other man groaned.

  Lamps in the tavern cast pale yellow squares on the street. Howie walked through the open door and found a table in the back. The air was thick with the overpowering smell of cooked meat. Howie’s stomach threatened to revolt, and he fought the sickness back. He had to eat, get something down. He tried to remember when he’d had real food. Counting back didn’t work. The weeks and the months swam together, one long day and night. Grubs and dried corn. Wild onions and nuts. Stale creek water, and those animals he had sucked from their shells on the beach.