Josh wriggled. Whoever was lying dead across his back was heavy and bony. There were the raucous sounds of continual gunfire all around him, though, and the air was thick with the acrid stench of it. Someone pulled at Josh’s ankle, and for a moment, he felt himself being dragged backwards with the dead body wobbling on top of him. Then there came a nearby male scream, his ankle was released, and he heard the thud of the body of a Harborman crashing to the floor in his line of sight, a series of bullet holes across his neck and skull.
More gunfire discharged close by, and Josh heard shouting from a voice he recognized. “Get Josh! Get Josh now!”
Donald.
His voice was gruff and full of power, the words punctuated by shots clattering all around them. Josh hefted himself onto his knees, the bleeding body on top of him rolling off and star-fishing onto its back with a rubbery flop.
Josh kept his head low where he crouched, but was desperate to see where Maxine and Storm were. He scanned the dais where the throne had been knocked over and where white stuffing was erupting from bullet holes in the red velvet. Of Maxine, Storm, and Gabe, there was no sign.
A hand fell on his shoulder. He spun, fists bunching.
It was Poppet. She was pulling him backward while firing over his head towards the bleachers.
Many of the crowd members had gone off in a blind stampede, but there were still one or two Harbormen being pinned down by Donald and the others’ fire.
“This way. Now!” Poppet said, ejecting the mag from her pistol, sliding in another, and racking the barrel.
She pushed him towards the bleachers on the other side of the throne room. They too were empty, but the number of red-garbed Harbormen’s forces who were dead and dying in front of the wooden wall fronting them told Josh the full story of the battle. Donald and other others had taken refuge there, firing across the throne room at the other side.
Whether it had been through luck or the vagaries of desperation, they had succeeded in defending their position and were now receiving almost zero resistance from the other side of the hall.
At Poppet’s prodding, Josh dove over the wall to land next to Halley and Donald. He sneaked a look over the rail and saw that Poppet was still walking backwards and firing across the hall. Her bullets were keeping anyone there well pinned down.
She stepped through a gap in the wall and crouched down.
“We gotta get out of here, Donald. They’re going to regroup soon, and if we’re not history, they’re going to make us history.”
Donald nodded.
Josh looked down the line. He saw Halley kneeling with his hands over his head. He also saw Jingo, Karel, Henry, and Tally, as well as Martha and Filly. But Maxine and Storm were nowhere to be seen.
Bullets spat over their heads and everyone ducked. Henry put the MP5 over the rail and fired three bursts without looking at where he was firing.
“Where’s Maxine? Where’s Storm?” Josh looked at Donald and implored him for answers with his eyes. “Where are they?”
Donald shook his head. “One second they were there, and the next they were gone. Gabe, too. I guess they were taken out behind the throne by Gabe’s bodyguards when the firing started.”
The words clutched at Josh’s guts, but he shook his head and felt his body stiffen with resolve. “We can’t leave them here. It’s not happening.”
“What do you want to do?” Poppet asked as she reloaded her pistol with another magazine. “Get out of here while we have a chance, and then work on a way to get back and rescue them, or die here—when fifty of those Harbormen realize we’re just sitting ducks and come back mob-handed? Maybe with grenades.”
Josh shook his head. “You go. I’ll stay here and try to find them. Get Tally and the others to safety. If I’m on my own here, I can stay low and I can…”
But that was the last thing Josh said. There was an explosion in his skull, a hot searing pain in the back of his head, and then a sudden blackness which took all the hurt away.
2
Josh sat with a wet rag held to the back of his skull, trying to remember his name and what the hell he was caught up in.
He’d woken in darkness which, as his eyes had adjusted, had resolved itself into a weak gray light as the bubbling clouds peeking through the window had also glutted the sky and brought on fat drops of Florida rain for the city of Jacksonville.
Tally had handed him the wet rag and been forced to remind him of her name, if not that she was his daughter. He’d at least remembered that.
Henry and Filly were positioned with guns by the windows and looking out over a wide, open area leading to a line of Florida Elms lining the street. They appeared to be on a residential street. Josh could see more houses through the window, and the room they occupied had once been a comfortable living room with sofas, shelves full of books on Naval history, and a stone-clad fireplace dominating the room. If it had been alight, it would have served the whole room with warmth and light. Unfortunately, broken windows, bullet holes, and the rain water had made some of the books pulpy and bloated, the carpets were dewy, and at some point an animal or two of indeterminate species had used the place as a den, as well as a place in which to carry out more personal activities.
Josh had wrinkled his nose at the smell a couple of times while he’d sat taking stock of things.
“Who hit me?” he finally asked.
Halley raised his hand.
Josh looked at the lank-haired scientist with as much disdain as he could muster. “You’ve left my wife and boy in there.”
“And my sister,” Halley countered almost immediately. “But Poppet and Donald’s logic was correct. You can’t fight logic, Josh. So, I intervened and made logic klonk you on the back of the head. Mea culpa.”
Josh sighed. He couldn’t refute what Halley was saying, and it was true that the man’s sister—poor, crazy, tortured Grace—was still back in Jaxport with Gabe and the others. It had been through Grace, back in her house in Eagle Rock, that Josh had learned from Halley that immersion in water reduced the effects of whatever was causing millions of people to go insane. The scientist had shown that Grace became lucid and almost well with the treatment he’d devised—long hours in a bath of water, water being what he’d called a good insulator against whatever was in the air. That and Halley’s jury-rigged buzzer had shown Josh the first true pieces of hope that the nightmare the world had descended into might someday be lifted.
At least Grace, locked inside a room in Gabe’s Castle Jaxport, itself being constructed in a huge harborside warehouse like a doll within a larger Russian doll, had not been brought out by Gabe’s men to witness the terror and horror Josh and the others had experienced in the throne room. Grace Halley had more than enough terror and horror inside her, all of which had been brought on by the Barnard’s Star supernova—and in her untreated state, was more than a handful to deal with.
“Did you have to hit me quite so hard?” Josh asked Halley.
Halley shrugged. “If I hadn’t, would you have still wanted to stay?”
Josh conceded the point with a nod. “So, where are we, and how did we get here?”
Tally peeled herself away from another window and pointed towards Donald. “Gramps was amazing. We got out through the front door of the warehouse. All the guards had been inside and had already run away from the fighting. It gave us a clear run. We pulled the doors across, and Gramps secured them with a chain.”
“Won’t have kept them there long, but it gave us enough time to get out of the compound,” Donald said. “Halley and Henry carried you while the rest of us were on crowd control—the people living in the containers outside the warehouse were unarmed and not looking for a fight. We got the horses, slung you over the back of one, and high-tailed it out of there. We’re about five miles away from the port, I reckon. Quiet, deserted street. No activity at all that we can see.”
Henry turned from the window and gave an affirmative nod to agree with Donald’s assessment of
the situation. “We’ve got the guns and ammo we took from the Harbormen we killed, and we’ve got enough distance and time to plan what we’re going to do to get back into Jaxport and get Grace, Maxine, and Storm out of there.”
“And now that you’re awake, sleepyboy,” Karel added, her blond hair tied back in a savage ponytail and her trim figure silhouetted against a window full of gray light and rain, “you can join in the fun.”
“So, what are you saying?” Josh knew exactly who he was now, and although his head throbbed like a silent square dance was tracking across it, his thinking had gotten a lot clearer. It was what Donald had said to him that was causing the newest confusion in his mind. “Because what you did say sounds crazier than a sack of rattlesnakes.”
Other than Henry and Filly, who were still stationed at the windows, the rest of them sat in a rough circle on the floor of the room—where the carpet was still dry, and the rain from the broken windows couldn’t reach them.
Donald was adamant. “Jacksonville is a big port city with all the attendant facilities that implies. We will, I’m sure, be able to find exactly what we want somewhere along the shoreline and boatyards.”
“Canoes?”
“Or kayaks. I’m not fussy. It’s the quietest and easiest way to get close to the castle without being seen at night. You saw what it was like when we came in. There are guards at the gates to the harbor facility. There are fences and defenses. But from what I could see, very little thought’s been put into defending an attack from the water.”
Josh’s memory was a little fuzzy, but what the old warhorse was saying seemed to be borne out by what he could remember. The container port had been turned into a shantytown so that Gabe’s ‘subjects’ could live on the periphery of the castle, while inside of the warehouse, teams worked on building a vast wooden castle of staterooms, corridors, and throne rooms for Gabe to live out his current fantasy of being King of America. Where his wife and the boy, who he’d thought for more than twenty years had been his son, were being held by Gabe. Maxine, unwillingly, of course, but when it came to Storm? Josh didn’t know, but that wasn’t going to stop him getting back into Castle Jaxport and attempting to rescue them.
It was just Donald’s scheme that sounded crazy.
“But we’ll be stuck in the compound,” Josh said. “The gates will be defended, and the Harbormen will not let us get out again that way since, if they see us heading back out in the kayaks on the waterway, all they’ll have to do is shoot us as we paddle. It’ll be like a shooting gallery at the fair.”
Donald shook his head and moved his hands over the tops of his thighs, remaining seated crossed-legged on the floor with the others. Yet, Josh hadn’t seen him this animated and full of anticipation before. The old Navy man, who’d been a combat medic for the Marines in Vietnam, was riding a wave of self-confidence. Josh could see that the plan had crystalized in the old man’s head and thus wasn’t something he was willing to be turned away from. Now, he shook his head in refusal of the counters for it. “If we do this right,” Donald told him, “they’ll be having too much to deal with inside the warehouse to worry about us getting away.”
“And what’s that?”
Donald reached down beside him and picked up a match from a small, open box. He thumbed the edge of the sulfur tip and the match ignited with a splutter, leaving a clean blue and yellow flame which gave his excited eyes a beguiling glitter.
“This.”
The next three days would be spent gathering the many supplies they needed for the raid. Donald split the group into three teams to be led by Josh, Karel, and himself. Two groups were tasked with going into Jacksonville proper to find what accelerants and chemicals they could for the improvised firebombs they would carry with them, as well as bottles and containers with which to carry them. The third group, led by Donald and containing Henry and Tally, went in search of kayaks, as well as places from which to launch them safely.
As with many of the cities Josh had visited since he’d returned to the U.S., there had been incredible amounts of destruction and looting across Jacksonville. The roads were blocked with dead cars and fires burned all over—sometimes spontaneously, but others had been lit during the orgy of violence that had happened as the first effects of the supernova had hit the Earth.
Josh and Halley went with Jingo in search of iron oxide and aluminum powder. The campus of the nearest university was deserted, and a number of buildings had been razed across the facility, but they managed to find what they needed there. Halley walked around the chemistry department’s storage area with the eyes of a child in a toy shop and quickly located what they needed. “All you want here to fight a war,” he said to Josh as they loaded up their packs with containers of chemicals. “I could make you gunpowder; I could build you a dozen kinds of bombs. Chemistry is boss, and pretty much no one bothers to learn about it. I mean, come on, Josh, what do you know about chemistry?”
Josh shook his head. “I know sugar dissolves in my coffee to make a suspension. But that’s about it.”
Halley looked at Josh like he was concerned for the welfare of a slow child. “Everything is chemistry, Josh. That or physics. Your body is alive with chemistry. There is reaction and syntheses going on inside you twenty-four seven. Every time you breathe in and out, there’s chemistry. And look around us! This collection of supplies is the evidence that, for ninety-nine percent of the population, nobody is aware of that chemistry or even cares.”
Josh looked down the rows and the racks of stored chemicals. Everything had been left pretty much as it had been on the day the world had gone mad.
Halley pulled more containers of iron oxide off the shelf and stuffed them into his pack. “Just look at this place, Josh. Every Target, every Home Depot, every damn 7-Eleven on the planet has been looted, strip-mined, and even burned to the ground almost. And yet this place is almost untouched. It didn’t even cross people’s minds to come here because they wouldn’t know what to do with any of this stuff. Sometimes I think the whole destruction of the world was a positive thing, Josh. A culling of the shortsighted and the ignorant.”
Halley finally paused upon catching sight of Josh’s astonished face.
“Well, obviously, I’m just riffing on a theme.” Halley coughed, pushed up his glasses with his index finger, and broke eye contact with the ex-policeman. “I didn’t mean to…”
“We’ve lost a lot of good people,” said Jingo. “I’ve lost a lot of good people.”
Halley pulled his pinched fingers along the line of his lips as if he was closing a zipper and nodded at the young Maryland Defender. Jingo was a good fighter, but he was also a man who had had to be pulled back a couple of times by Karel because his overenthusiasm had crossed the moral lines which needed to remain in place, but Josh could see how Halley’s words had affected him.
“I get it,” Jingo continued. “Yeah, there’s nine billion people out there who took everything for granted. They have no idea how anything works, how to make even a candle or a bar of soap, let alone treat a tooth abscess or, yes, see the potential of these chemicals and use them appropriately. But that’s freedom, Mr. Professor. They got to choose what they wanted to know. And because of that, we get to use all this to our advantage. If Gabe and his Harbormen knew about this place, it would be me and you they’d be using it against. So, I guess it’s an ill wind that brings no good. And that’s me riffing on a theme, Mr. Professor. You’re not the only one here with opinions.”
Halley closed his pack and heaved it onto his back, his eyes flicking up to Josh’s gaze. Josh felt like the scientist was looking to him for some sort of support, or at least hoping he’d mediate between the two of them. But Josh wasn’t in a position to do that. He knew he agreed with Jingo. “Don’t despise the people who don’t know what you know, Halley,” he said instead. “Takes all sorts to make a world. Our job—your job—is to help us to get our world back. If that means only you’ll know how to make soap, then I guess I can live with t
hat. I hope you can, too.”
The three of them didn’t speak a word to each other on the way back to the house.
Karel, Poppet, Filly, and Martha had been sent out looking for bottles and any gas they could syphon from abandoned vehicles to use for the Molotov cocktails Donald was planning to construct. They’d returned several times to the house with plastic bottles of gas, and many more glass bottles for the explosives, all recovered from bars and residences in the surrounding area. Their booty was piled in the corner of the den, along with tubs of nails and screws found in a hardware store. Poppet tore up rags while Filly and Martha filled bottles with gas and shrapnel to make the cocktails.
Josh surveyed the work, his nose wrinkling at the smell of the gas as it was funneled into the neck of wine bottles. “Takes me back,” Poppet said. “Joey’s preferred method of encouraging guys who wouldn’t pay up for protection was the judicious use of a Molly. I liked making them, but I wish I’d gotten really good at it.”
Poppet winked at Josh and Karel looked on with an expression caught between horror and admiration. Poppet took the torn rags and fed them into the necks of the bottles. “Of course…” Poppet continued, her New Yorker drawl becoming more pronounced when she talked about her mob boss husband and the nefarious exploits she’d been party to, as always, “…Joey very rarely had to use them. All it took was him sliding one along the counter and taking out his zippo. You’d be surprised how quickly someone will find the cash to pay up when you wave one of these beauties under their schnozzle.”
As ever, Poppet spoke about these things as if they were the most natural things to be recounting in the whole world. Josh, even when he’d been a police officer, had had zero dealings with the New York mob. In fact, his view of that world had largely been formulated by watching movies and TV shows, where the things Poppet talked about had seemed fanciful at best and downright laughable at worst. Like a cartoon version of Mafia activity. And over the months since he’d met Poppet, her skills at stitching gunshot wounds, using weaponry, and now constructing improvised explosives had proved to him that she was as authentic as the stories she told suggested she was. Poppet was a remarkable woman who Josh had come to like, trust, and admire in equal measure—even considering the fact that, if they’d met five years ago and he’d known what he knew now, he’d have had to lock her up and lose the key.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 2
