Her husband, Joey Langolini, had reeked of authentic power and real menace. They’d come under sustained attack while on the ocean liner named Empress, the aggression sourcing from the remnants of the passengers and crew. Joey had died giving Josh the time to save Poppet and get off the ship—and that had further tempered the bond that had grown between them.
Josh pushed Karel’s chin up to close her mouth with a soft click. “Don’t worryaboutit,” he said in his best Joe Pesci accent. “You’ll get used to it.”
Karel didn’t say anything. She just shook her head and went back to the window to keep lookout.
Halley was keeping his head down, too, making his thermite mixture from the iron oxide and aluminum powders. Mixed in the correct ratios and set alight, thermite would produce an aggressively hot exothermic reaction that they planned to use to get into the back of the warehouse by burning quickly through the thin metal of the wall, thus saving themselves the difficult task of fighting their way through the guards at the front entrance. Donald had been impressed by Halley’s suggestion to make and use thermite in this way, and that’s why he’d encouraged him and Josh to go and get the materials that were needed.
Halley had been working and mixing for some hours now, and had moved on to packing lines of the rust-colored powder into plastic cable-trunking which Donald planned to use to frame charges that would burn their way quickly into the side of the bonded warehouse. In this time, Halley had been the quietest Josh could remember since he’d met him. The conversation in the chemistry department’s storage area had stretched a distance between them that Josh thought it was now time to close. If they were going to survive and make any of this work, they needed to be together, and he figured Halley was someone who could be temperamental and a bit of a sulker, but enough was enough. He had been more than a little annoyed at Halley’s attitude, but then, if he felt as he did about his own situation—with his wife and son still in the lion’s den—and how that was mirrored for Halley by Grace, it wasn’t beyond the realm of logic to see how such stress could present itself as angry grief. Since the supernova, Josh had felt moments of instability in his mood that had also seemed out of the ordinary, more than just reactions to the situation. So, now, Josh felt the best thing to do was be the peacemaker.
“Looking good, Robert,” Josh said, sitting down on the floor next to Halley and picking up one of the thermite-packed yard lengths of two-inch cable-trunking. Karel and the others had been tasked with finding some, and as had happened for them in the university’s chemistry department’s storage area, they’d found more than enough for their needs—who needed electrical cable-trunking in a world where there was no electricity anymore?
Well, no electricity for a while. If Halley was right, he might be able to bring some power back with his copper filigrees and batteries.
“It’ll do the trick,” Halley replied. “The tough thing is going to be getting it to ignite when we want it to. But I have an idea about that.”
Josh smiled. “It’s your ideas we need you for, Robert.”
Halley sighed. “I’m sorry. Sorry about what happened up at the university. I didn’t think. My mouth… it runs away with me sometimes.”
“Yeah. I get that. As far as I’m concerned, we’re good. Water under the bridge.”
Halley smiled and spooned more thermite into a piece of trunking before he began tamping it down with his thumbs.
“I meant to ask you,” Halley said as he worked, “about Storm.”
Josh tensed. No one had spoken to him yet about what had happened in the throne room. Not even Donald. Perhaps they guessed it was all too raw and were waiting for Josh to say when he was ready to speak about nearly being shot by his own son—a son who, inexplicably, was now calling another man “Dad.”
Josh didn’t feel like he was ready to talk about it, either, and was in the process of raising his hand like a crossing guard’s stop sign, but he didn’t even get that far.
There came a sudden commotion by the front door, and a soft exclamation from Poppet, and as Josh looked around, he saw Donald staggering through the door with fresh blood streaking his face in thick lines.
3
They found Henry where Donald said they’d been attacked, not one hundred yards from the house. The boy was alive but unconscious. Josh helped him to sit up and looked at the gash on his head where, like Donald, he’d been half-brained with a house brick.
Henry’s eyes were blurry with a possible concussion, and he found it difficult to talk, but he managed to say they’d been attacked from behind as they’d been making it back from a boatyard where they’d found the craft they needed for the assault on Jaxport. Donald had gone down first, and then something had clattered into his own head, and he’d immediately gone unconscious.
Donald told them he had come staggering back to the house to get help upon realizing that Tally had disappeared and Henry was unarousable. Whoever had attacked them had been savage and uncompromising, but at least they hadn’t killed them. With Tally gone, however, the mercies to be counted were small.
Josh and the others searched for Tally in the surrounding area as best they could in the darkness. There was no trail to follow and no obvious sign of her or those who’d attacked them. The houses were dark and unwelcoming, and as Josh stood with Poppet at the head of the street looking down the rows of cold, dead-eyed buildings, Josh was suddenly overwhelmed by the task. The entire deserted city was laid out before them in the gloom. They were searching for a needle in a haystack of needles.
“We’ll try again at first light,” Poppet said. “We might be able to find something that leads us to her.”
Josh shook his head. “The trail will be cold by then. Whoever has taken her could have her back to Jaxport within the hour, or well on the way to anywhere else.”
Josh could see on Poppet’s face that she agreed he was speaking logically. The longer they left it, the harder it would be to find Tally, and yet, with just the nine remaining members of their party, two of them still reeling from major thumps on the head, searching a city—even the immediate vicinity—was a near impossible task.
“Back before this, we would have had dogs, manpower, helicopters, thermal imaging, house-to-house calls, roadblocks… you name it.”
The crushing change in the world since the Barnard’s event had never felt more acute than it did now.
“Taken from under my nose a hundred yards away,” Josh spat as they searched through another deserted north Florida house, its rooms dank and chill even in the still warm humidity of the even.
“If we still had the dog, maybe we might have a chance…”
But he knew he was clutching at straws.
Josh returned to the others with Poppet just as dawn began to pink the sky. Exhausted and hollow, he crashed down on the sofa next to Donald, who looked an extra seventy years older in the weak light.
“I’m sorry,” the old man croaked. “They came out of nowhere. I reckon whoever it was, was waiting for us.”
“Maybe Gabe’s men have been watching us the whole time,” Karel said. “Waiting to see what we were doing. There’s been no patrols that we’ve run into for days. The Harbormen have been keeping to themselves—maybe they had us under surveillance. Jingo and I will go out now, see what we can find. Make sure no one’s watching the house at least.”
As Karel and Jingo geared up, Henry tried to stand, but he was still wobbly on his feet. Poppet helped him back to a chair. Martha had put a pad on the wound on the side of his head to stanch the bleeding, but his eyes were still revolving like cherries on a slot machine.
“We’ve got to find her. I can’t… we can’t…”
Poppet sat with Henry and put an arm across his shoulder. She kissed the uninjured side of his head and gave him a squeeze. “Easy, soldier. You and Grandpa over there just need to chill for a few hours. We’ll do the searching. You go out there, and you won’t know which way is up.” That said, Poppet slipped Henry some painkillers
from their dwindling supply. “If only we had Larry here.”
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Banks, the retired West Virginian surgeon who had been with them since he’d performed an appendectomy on Storm, had not been brought out into the throne room with the others on the night of their escape. Like Maxine and Storm, he was—they surmised—still in Castle Jaxport with Grace and the others. His condition was unknown, but after having had his hand shot up, the aging surgeon had been having trouble keeping things together and had dropped into a depressive funk. He did, however, come alive when he had some good old-fashioned doctorin’ to do, and had worked well with Poppet as she’d become his chief theater nurse on several occasions on the trail.
If they’d had him there now, he’d have been able to monitor Donald and Henry for possible signs of concussion and give them the care they needed. “Me,” Poppet said ruefully, “I’m just making it up as I go along. As usual.”
Josh drank some water to slake the dry anxieties collecting in his mouth. He wanted to get back out there and search for Tally, but the enormity of the task felt like a crushing weight on his shoulders. They had looked in maybe two hundred houses in the last few hours before the exhaustion had crippled him, and they hadn’t found her. And yet he knew that she could still be in any of those houses. In the roof spaces, in the basements they’d missed… anywhere.
“Tally could still be within a hundred yards of us and we’d never know it. We just don’t have the resources to find her.” He sighed and thumped the arm of the sofa. “Our best hope is that she escapes and finds her way back.”
“Escapes from what, though?” Henry asked.
No one could answer that question, and the room was silent for some time. The black mood of the people there sat at odds with the lightening sky that was turning Florida blue outside as the day picked up speed.
Halley had finished making his frame charges and was now constructing his detonators from thin, twelve-inch lengths of doweling, 9-volt batteries, and lightbulbs, all wrapped in small copper wire cages to ensure the electricity wasn’t suppressed by the Barnard’s field. “It’s a little more complex than I would have wanted, but them’s the breaks,” he said to no one in particular when the silence in the room had become almost unbearable even for Josh. “Usual way for igniting thermite is to use magnesium strips—you light them and get your backside as far away as you can as fast as you can. But guess what? No magnesium to be found at the university. Guess they’d run out and were waiting for supplies when the supernova hit. You can always try a match, but that’s dangerous, and I really don’t want to risk burning my hand off. So, a lightbulb broken open to expose the tungsten filament, a 9-volt battery placed against it so both terminals are active, and the doweling rod to work through the copper cage and push the two together. Bulb lights up, ignites the thermite. Neat, huh?”
“Why not just throw a Molotov cocktail against it?” Donald asked.
Halley gold-fished. Then he put down his detonator and rubbed his hands through his hair. “Well, yes, I… well… I hadn’t… quite…”
“Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best,” said Donald, getting up and putting his Stetson carefully back onto his injured head. “Son, you are a big-brained and brilliant man, but let’s just say sometimes you lack the ability to see the wood for the trees.”
Josh felt immediately that the moment of levity had at least partially lifted the mood in the room. Tally’s abduction was still fresh and bitter, but he felt the exhaustion recede a little. Maybe it had partly been created by the Barnard’s event, or at least promoted by it.
Josh stood, took a breath, and, picking up a SIG from the table next to the sofa, racked it and slid the weapon into the holster on his belt.
“Let’s get out there and find my daughter,” he said.
Tally Standing was as scared as she had been at any time in her life. And that included all the times since the effects of the supernova had rushed over the rigging of the Sea-Hawk and turned everyone in the crew into murderous maniacs.
She was gagged and bound at hand and foot. Under the circumstances, she wished that she was blindfolded, too, and then she wouldn’t have been forced to look at the wreck of the man in front of her who was pacing and muttering and getting ready to choose whether to let her live or die.
Greene Davidson, since Tally had literally bumped into him in a forest in northern Georgia, had always been on the cusp of a great madness. The computer entrepreneur in his early twenties had been a royal pain to Henry and Tally as they’d moved north, getting them into serious trouble with his lackadaisical attitude and bull-headedness, but they had both, at least at the start, felt genuinely sorry for him and let him travel with them.
It had taken a while for the guy’s madness to truly show itself, but when her grandfather’s ranch had been under attack from forces in the nearby town of Pickford, Greene had slaughtered one of the captured attackers by slicing open his throat. That murder had convinced Tally that Greene had also murdered the party he’d been traveling with in Georgia—but had lied to her about it from the beginning, telling her instead that he was the only survivor of the attack. The madness in his eyes, and the way he’d handled a knife back then, not to mention the way he had chased her through the ranch house and up onto the roof, had sealed the deal.
It was only the intervention of Josh that had saved Tally on that roof and caused Greene to be catapulted off it. There’d been no sign of him on the ground when Tally had looked for him, though, and she hadn’t seen him again until their time in Castle Jaxport—when he had smiled at her from the bleachers, large as life and twice as ugly.
When Henry had given Tally the prearranged signal for them to try to disarm the guards in the throne room and she had gotten her hands on a MP5, the first burst of gunfire she’d sent towards the crowd had been to where Greene had been sitting the moment before. But just as it had been when she’d looked over the edge of the ranch house’s roof, Greene had once again performed his disappearing act.
In the heat of battle and subsequent headlong rush to escape the castle, she’d not had time to think about Greene still being alive. A case of point, when it had popped up in her thinking over the last few days, she’d wondered if he had really been there in the bleachers at all.
When Henry and her grandfather had been felled by vicious blows from behind, and she’d been poleaxed by a crashing right hook to the chin and carried off to God knew where, she’d had to admit that Greene really had been in the bleachers, that he’d really survived his fall from that roof, and now he totally was making up his mind about if he should end her life.
They were in a brick-walled basement for the debate.
The walls were dry, and the place was obviously being used as a storage area for Gabe’s forces. There were stacks of canned goods, bottled water, and other cased sundries against one wall. There was a clipboard with an inventory pinned to it hung from a nail in the wall. That inventory looked like a stock list for the goods stored in the room, suggesting to her that they’d come back toward Jaxport. Tally couldn’t hear any sounds of activity from beyond the basement, so she doubted she was in the castle itself, but she guessed there was a good chance she was somewhere in the Jaxport harbor area.
Greene was hollow-eyed and his skin was almost translucent in the thin light that came through a dusty skylight—which again gave no indication about the location of the basement. His hair was a mess and his hipster beard had begun growing out in unkempt curls and dreads.
The madness, whether supernova enhanced or all his own, was twisting his lips and exposing his teeth as he spat words to himself under his breath.
Tally had seen this kind of thing on plenty of faces of people since the supernova had hit. Their mental processes seemed to be working in two directions at once—minds being pulled back towards sanity in one second, and away to madness in the next. And in the middle, a festering ball of confusion that could go one way or the other. She’d seen the effects it had ha
d on her grandmother, Maria. She had been so crazy that Tally’s grandfather had had to chain her to a bed on the upper floor of the ranch. She would use her fingers like claws if you got too close, and would try to bite out your throat if you chanced into her orbit. And yet, just before the battle for the ranch, she’d become calmer—not exactly lucid, but the murderous rage had dissipated. Tally had seen a similar thing with Ten-Foot on the Sea-Hawk. Always a boy who was quick to anger, and one with criminal intent, he’d also wavered between the two extremes. Greene was going through the same thing now, and it was impossible to tell which way he was going to go when it came to his actions.
He’d had the wherewithal to attack Donald and Henry, then spirit her away, but since he’d brought her here unconscious and tied her up, her waking had seemed to aggravate his condition, and he’d descended into what she could only describe as ‘textbook crazy.’
“I can’t decide if I’m going to marry you or kill you, too, true, blue…” were the first words she’d heard from him as she’d awoken to this nightmare.
There were flecks of white spit at the corner of his mouth and in the curls of his beard.
Tally tried to move her chin against the gag and loosen it so that she could speak to him, but there was little give in the material. She was going to be a silent partner in whatever transaction would be taking place here.
Greene crouched down in front of Tally, and he was close enough for his breath to fall warm on her cheeks. A wall stood behind her, so she wasn’t able to move away any further. His eyes looked like they were puddles of rusty water in the bottom of an abandoned well. He’d been rubbing them, or they were being irritated by an infection making them look ruddy and painful. There were broken teeth—just snapped off stumps, some of them in his mouth—and behind them a tongue curled and wound like a dry snake.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 3
