Authors: Dawn's Uncertain Light
Neal Barrett Jr.
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
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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
T
he 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.
H
owie 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.
L
ate 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.