“Come up, Boss Man, and you’ll see I’m on the level. I just wanted a chance to speak to you before you got all hotheaded and shot me in the face for what happened back with the king.”
Josh looked at Poppet again. She shook her head. Donald shrugged. “Let me shoot him in the face for you.”
Josh handed his gun to Poppet, and then he began to climb the stairs.
“I’m coming up and I’ve left my gun downstairs. Don’t make me look like a fool for trusting you. Tally, is he on the level?”
“I think so… I can’t be one hundred percent… but everything he said he’d do, he’s done. And? There’s one thing I haven’t seen in him before.”
Josh reached the landing, and in the dim light coming through one open bedroom door, he saw Halley on his knees, Tally with her hands up, and Dolan “Ten-Foot” Snare behind them, pointing a gun at the back of Halley’s head.
Tally didn’t need to tell Josh what that one thing was. Ten-Foot was scared. There was a line of sweat across his top lip, and the gun wavered a little with a tremble that was being transmitted down his arm.
“Okay, Boss Man. You trusted me. That’s good.”
“I hope I don’t die to regret it,” Josh said.
Halley shot Josh a razor of a look, its translation clear: Don’t antagonize him, you idiot. But Ten-Foot didn’t seem at all perturbed by Josh’s retort. They’d known each other long enough before the Barnard’s event to have built up a rapport, enabling them to work together to keep Ten-Foot just on the right side of the law. The rapport had extended far enough for the boy to tell Josh how he’d gotten his nickname. He’d been a snot of a kid who’d tried to rob a convenience store and, when chased by the owner, managed to scramble miraculously over a ten-foot high wall in order to escape. He’d even told Josh the one part of the story he hadn’t related to anyone else. As he’d made it over the wall, he’d landed on the hood of a local police car and been apprehended anyway.
“So, here we are,” Josh said. “And where are we going?”
Ten-Foot licked at his lips, but didn’t lower the gun. “Can I trust you, Boss Man? Really trust you?”
“You have my word, Ten-Foot. I’m not going to shoot you. I’m just happy my daughter is safe. I don’t understand why you brought her here rather than taking her to Gabe, but we can come to that later. Why don’t you put down the gun and we can talk?”
Ten-Foot considered his next move for several seconds that seemed to expand to geological timescales in the stuffy atmosphere across the landing.
Josh’s work as a cop, before he’d changed careers to become a probation officer, had offered him many similar situations. With really scared people who were on the cusp of fight or flight, there was a good chance that they would shoot out of reflex if they were threatened or startled by something unexpected.
The best armed person to talk down was someone who wasn’t scared and who had stuff to lose. The mere fact that Ten-Foot was here, and that Tally hadn’t been taken to Gabe, told Josh that Ten-Foot had already calculated his losses, and it was just the fear that Josh had to contend with now.
Josh raised his hand, palm up and fingers wide.
Halley’s eyes sliced into him.
“Come on, Ten-Foot, give me the gun. We can talk about this. And I promise you, you won’t be harmed.”
Ten-Foot raised the gun.
5
Gabriel Angel, self-styled King of America and man who didn’t think he was going to get stabbed, screamed and put his hand up to the side of his face. Blood already seeped through his fingers as Maxine propelled herself away from him, overturning the chair she’d occupied and rolling away. She kept the knife Gabe had offered to her tight in her grip.
She knew already that the blow she’d struck hadn’t been even remotely fatal, but it had felt good to slice along the side of his face and dig the blade into his ear before he’d knocked the utensil away with one hand and tried to punch her at the same time with his other. It wasn’t Maxine’s speed which had saved her from the punch, but the sudden flush of pain from the wound that had scrunched up his face and drawn the scream from his lips.
Maxine rolled up onto her feet and ran for the door of the dining room that would take her through the stateroom and out into the wide thoroughfare that ran through the center of Castle Jaxport. A Harborman who must’ve been drawn to the dining room by Gabe’s screaming clattered into her as he ran in. The Harborman staggered sideways, Maxine’s knife embedded between the ribs to the left of his sternum. He had only a second to register what had happened before he fell to his knees with a whimper, and Maxine reached down and pulled the Colt Government from the holster at his side.
She turned and brought the gun to bear on the table where Gabe had been sitting and fired off three rounds, the bullets breaking crockery and spitting food up into the air. She couldn’t see Gabe at all, not until he rose up from behind the table like a periscope, a pistol gripped in his hand and spitting fire from the muzzle. Maxine was already out the door before the bullets slammed into the wall just behind where she’d been shooting from.
Maxine sprinted across the stateroom; the gun held out ahead of her. She needed to get out of here now, and fast, before Gabe came after her. She blessed Josh for forcing her to learn how to shoot way before the Barnard’s event. He had gotten her a pistol that she’d kept in a lockbox in their bedroom so that she’d be able to defend herself if Josh wasn’t home to resist burglars trying their luck on their property. She’d had regular sessions on the firing range and knew more than the basics, but still, the adrenaline was backing up in her body, making her tremble as she ran and shortening her breath.
Should she have stayed to try to kill Gabe?
Would that have been the right thing to do, the right thing for the people of Jacksonville and the wider surviving population of America?
No.
She had to find Storm.
Storm had to be her priority. If she could get to him and keep the gun, then she might, just might, be able to get out of this hellhole alive.
She sprinted through another door, right into the path of two guards who had been brought on by the sound of the gunfire. They hadn’t been expecting Maxine to be speeding towards them, and even if they did register the gun in her hand, they didn’t think she was a threat.
Maxine put on the brakes and turned on the tears. “Quick! Back there. The Harborman! He’s tried to kill Gabriel! He shot at him while we were eating! I don’t know if Gabe is alive or dead! You’d better go and help!”
The Harbormen brushed past her and moved toward the dining room door.
She shot them both in the back as they ran, then delivered two more shots to assure herself they were dead. Approaching only after that, she reached down, took the magazines from their belts, and ran back towards the door into the main thoroughfare. A bullet chewed into the frame of the door as she pelted through it.
Gabe had followed her from the dining room as she ran. She heard him curse as he saw the bodies of the guards she’d felled. Gabe might have hoped that would have been the net to snare her, but she’d outwitted him there, too. But she could only ride her luck for so long. As soon as Gabe got word to his men, the castle would be alive with danger—even more than it was now.
She fired off two shots behind her and then ran blindly forward.
At this time of night, there were few people walking about in the corridors of the castle. Most of Gabe’s so-called subjects only spent their days in the castle to carry out the building work that was going on, or to provide meals for Gabe and his courtiers. She’d seen staff filing out of the castle earlier as the Harborman she’d accidentally stabbed in the dining room had brought her to Gabe’s table.
She jogged on, throwing looks back along the corridor to see if Gabe was following her, but at first glance, he was not. Perhaps he was worried she was waiting for him to stick his head around a corner so she could blow it off. With all three of his bodyguards down, and no
one Gabe could easily call on for help, she might have a few minutes’ grace to find Storm and the others.
How she’d get out of the castle after that was another matter, so right now, she would concentrate on finding Storm. One thing at a time.
The corridor that ran alongside the room where she’d been kept for the last four days was only a hundred or so yards from Gabe’s quarters. There was evidence of carpentry that had been abandoned for the day all along the hall. Trestles and tools as well as saws and boxes of nails abounded as she jogged on.
She came across two Harbormen walking in the opposite direction as she turned a corner into the corridor she’d been aiming for. Breathing hard, she crouched down and waited for them to turn away at the end of the corridor and disappear from sight. She was far enough away from Gabe now, she figured, that opening fire would be a mistake that could draw him or whichever of his Harbormen he’d ordered to her vicinity. When the coast was clear, she saw that the door behind which she’d been kept was open, but the three other doors down the line were closed. Throwing the bolts free, she found Larry behind the first door. He was asleep on his bed. His face was haggard, and he had a thickening growth of beard on his face.
“Maxine…?” he asked, sitting up on the bed as the meager blanket he’d been given fell off his frame.
“Get up. We’re getting out of here.”
Larry’s eyes cleared. “How? What’s happening?”
“No time—come on!”
Larry had difficulty pulling on his boots with his injured fingers as Maxine watched the corridor outside for Harbormen. When he’d finished, Larry joined her outside and they moved to the next door along the line.
Halley’s sister Grace erupted from the door in a wildcat whirl of arms and snarls. She was bedraggled and stank of sweat and waste. It seemed that Gabe’s men had just left her to her own devices, and as the door had opened, she’d leaped towards the light with her fingers clawed and her eyes on fire. She barreled into Maxine, throwing her back into the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. Then she swiped at Larry, who was just trying to get out of her way.
Her murderous fingers thrashed through empty air in much the same way as Maxine’s mother’s had when she’d been at her worst back on the ranch. Larry betrayed his years by propelling himself backwards as she slashed at him again.
With a roar, Grace turned, saw an escape route down the corridor, and made for it. The only sounds in the corridor then were Larry’s ragged breathing and Grace’s bare feet slapping the wooden floor until she skidded around the corner—headed in the direction where the two Harbormen had gone.
“There are two Harbormen down there,” Maxine said, striding to the next door and throwing the bolts. “She’s going to bring them back, and we need to find Storm now!”
The door opened onto a room furnished like all the others, with a camp bed, a chair, and a small table. One of Storm’s T-shirts was draped over the back of the chair, but he wasn’t there and the bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in.
“Dammit!” Maxine hissed, slamming the heel of her hand into the doorjamb. “Have you seen Storm, Larry? Heard from him? Anything?”
Larry shook his head as he looked nervously down the corridor to where Grace had disappeared.
It was time for Maxine to weigh her options. Should she stay and suffer the wrath of Gabe for the knife attack, made via the bluff he’d never thought she would have the courage to call? Or should she get out with Larry? Leave Storm behind and live to fight another day? Knowing that Storm would at least be safe with Gabe.
Well, alive rather than safe was incontrovertible. There was no way Gabe was going to harm his only son.
Then there were the practicalities––the castle, the wider facility, and the port itself were too vast an area to search right now. Especially when Gabe and now Grace would raise the alarms. If Storm wasn’t in his room, then he really could be anywhere. The grinding dilemma in her heart and head was reducing both to bitter shards of thoughts and feelings. And even if she found Storm, Maxine realized, chancing upon him in some explosion of luck as he came the other way on the main thoroughfare, after what he had nearly come to do for Gabe… Nearly killing Josh? God, would he even come with her?
Maxine didn’t know. So, she just had to hang on to the notion that Storm was going to remain alive at Castle Jaxport. She had to believe that. Had to. Or what she was about to do would be something she’d regret for the rest of her life.
And then she heard the dull detonations which shook the whole castle.
Halley’s improvised thermite frame charges worked perfectly. They ignited with the first of the Molotov cocktails thrown at them by Donald. They sizzled, spat, and gave off tremendous heat and blinding light where they’d been placed against the outside wall of the warehouse. Smoke billowed up as the integrity of the warehouse wall was compromised by the 4,000 degrees of heat directed onto the surface. Molten aluminum dripped and pooled with the hissing of a thousand snakes reaching across the concrete, and Josh’s heart hammered inside his chest as he got ready to lead the group on a mission that could end badly for any one of them.
But really, the mission was getting off to a confidence-boosting start as the side of the warehouse where the thermite charges had been placed began to visibly buckle and split along the lines formed by the cable-trunking frame. Of course, as Josh ruefully observed to himself much later, no battle plan survived first engagement with the enemy. And in this case, the enemy wasn’t Gabe or his Harbormen; it was far more unremarkable than that.
If it hadn’t been for what had been stored behind the warehouse wall they were burning through, then everything would have worked out pretty much okay. But in the end, that nearly ended the attack before it had begun.
Josh and the others had easily disembarked from their kayaks at the quayside and made it across the fifty yards of concrete in the pitch-black night, going very much unseen. Ten-Foot had given them what Josh considered to be vital intelligence about patrols around the port-facing edge of the bonded warehouse—there basically weren’t any, the implication being that Gabe’s forces were so vicious and cruel that all resistance would be neutralized.
Everyone had been majorly suspicious of Ten-Foot, obviously—how could those who had experience with him not be? But in Josh’s opinion, the boy had lost much of his swagger and self-confidence. He was now much more like the boy who’d been on his caseload back when he’d been the kid’s probation officer. Yes, he had criminal tendencies, and yes, he operated on the periphery of society, but he wasn’t the murderer he had become, and neither was he still the lieutenant that Gabe had demanded he be for the Harbormen.
Ten-Foot had told them how he’d heard from one of the Harbormen that Greene Davidson had been seen carrying an unconscious girl into the food store on the north side of the Jaxport facility. The description of the girl had matched that of Tally, and Ten-Foot had thus explained, “That changed something in me, I can’t explain to you. I didn’t get it. But I knew I had to get down there and get her away from Greene.”
“And I’m glad you did,” Tally had said. “Another five minutes and I would have been toast. You saved my life, Ten-Foot.”
Ten-Foot had looked sheepishly at the floor. “I can’t explain it. Yesterday, I would have let you die. Today… I just couldn’t.”
He’d come back with Tally without his uniform, with only his gun and this story to tell. The story that had piqued Halley’s interest even more than Josh’s.
“I just kept asking myself what I was doing?” Ten-Foot had said as they’d sat downstairs listening to his explanation. “All the anger and the hate just zipped away. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror when I thought about what I’d done—not just in Gabe’s name, but for the sake of it. For the fun. It was like I’d been filled up with anger—I was burning with it, Boss Man. Burning. And I couldn’t let anything happen to Tally. Greene was a dog… and I put him down like one.”
Josh had r
emembered back to the change in the boy on the Sea-Hawk, and how a similar thing had happened to his mother-in-law, Maria. How she had changed from a raving lunatic to being meek and submissive, and then back to a screaming harridan with murderous intent. On the boat, Ten-Foot had made similar changes—if not as pronounced ones—but his cooperation had at one time been subsumed into antagonistic fury at other times.
Halley had pushed up his glasses on his nose. “Was it gradual, this change of heart, or was it like the flick of a switch?”
Ten-Foot had clicked his finger and pointed in the affirmative at the scientist. “That’s it, man. Like a switch was turned in my head. Boom! Gone. Just like that.”
Halley had turned to the others then. “It’s in line with what I’ve been thinking for some weeks now. The rage and the insanity are not permanent changes. It’s very much dependent on the body affected and the exotic particles hitting the Earth in streams from the Barnard’s event.”
“Is that even possible?” Poppet had asked, her face incredulous.
Halley had nodded. “Well, you’ve seen the change in millions of people. Some have been driven to pure insanity, and with Ten-Foot here, it’s made him susceptible to higher levels of violence than even he would have considered acceptable in the past.”
“And for me,” Josh had said, “it’s been a falling blanket of depression. Waves of it. There was a time on the Sea-Hawk where I even contemplated taking my own life.”
Tally’s eyes had widened in shock at the admission, but Josh continued. “That’s just not me. I don’t think like that—but since the Barnard’s event, I have. It comes and it goes. Looks like everyone has a different experience. And some people are not affected at all.”
Halley had warmed to his subject. “It must be due to a change in the serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain. These exotic particles—whatever they are—are acting as suppressants in the brain, very much like others are stopping the movement of electricity through metal. This is all way outside all known knowledge of physics and biology, so it’s just a hypothesis, and I’ll need to carry out some more experiments and tests—as best I can—but there very well might be a way to counter the effects of these exotic particles in the human brain, in the same way I’ve managed it in small pieces of electronics. Maybe.”
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 5
