Josh had told Donald to defend the area as best they could, but not to turn it into a raging inferno too soon. They’d been meant to just keep Gabe’s men occupied, not wipe them out. So, it seemed strange that there were so many dead bodies around.
But then, as he looked further along the corridor, the explanation came into sharp relief.
“Can you see Storm?” Maxine’s voice was impatient.
“I don’t know yet.”
“There’s too much smoke,” she said. “What if he’s in all that!?”
Josh couldn’t see his son, but what he could see drove his chin to the floor with disbelief. “No… but… oh my God…”
From the intersection ahead, a Harborman was backing down the corridor with his hands in the air—he was backing towards them. Josh and Maxine were hemmed in on both sides by blank wooden walls. If this Harborman wasn’t going to bump into them, they would have to retreat, but then Josh saw something that made him freeze in his tracks. The Harborman’s arms were shaking, and his feet didn’t know where they were going because there was no way he could risk taking his eyes off the man who was pointing a gun at his head. The person who had caused Josh to freeze.
“Gabe…” breathed Josh.
The self-styled King of America was pursuing the Harborman on stiff legs and with a face like grim masonry. A livid, scabbing wound was visible along his cheek, and there was blood caked over his ear. His own arm was outstretched, and at the end of it, a Webley revolver—thick, black, and weighty—was held in his grasp. The Harborman was saying something that Josh couldn’t hear over the noise from the flames or the gunfire way back behind Gabe. But whatever he was saying looked from behind, for all the world, like he might be pleading for his life. Shadows from tallow flames framed in the background flickered along the corridor like a crazy carnival ride.
But when Gabe began to shout, Josh could hear him clearly. “Deserter! Coward!” the king roared, and then he pulled the trigger on the Webley. The kick lifted his arm and the back of the Harborman’s head fell away in splinters of bone and hair. As the Harborman’s body toppled backwards, however, Gabe suddenly had an uninterrupted view along the corridor.
He looked straight into Josh’s eyes.
Gabe pulled the trigger again, but the Webley remained silent. The barrel was empty.
Josh raised his own gun, pointed it at Gabe, and began squeezing the trigger. But then Storm stepped in from behind Gabe into the corridor and placed himself in front of his new father.
Maxine came out from behind Josh, her pistol raised.
Storm put up his hands.
Ten yards of stand-off in a burning corridor that wasn’t going to last as long as this confrontation might.
“Put down your gun, Josh,” Storm called out. “I’m gonna stand here until you either get the hell out of here, or our men back there realize what’s going on and come and kill you themselves.”
“Well said, young man,” Gabe said. “You’re a chip off the old block after all.”
Josh felt Maxine put her hand on his wrist and push the gun down. Gabe and Storm were safe.
For now.
“Storm, we’ve come to find you,” she called. “To take you back with us.” There was no mistaking the emotion in Maxine’s faltering voice.
Josh could see that Gabe was reaching into his pocket behind Storm—maybe he was going for more rounds for the Webley, or maybe he was reaching for another gun.
The Harbormen who stood another thirty yards down the corridor were still firing out through the flames while the firefighters beat at what tongues of fire that they could with blankets and jackets, waiting for more water to arrive. They were all occupied at the moment, but all it would take would be an order from Gabe or a stray glance, and they would be on this standoff in seconds.
“Come with you?” Storm replied coldly. “Mom, you’ve lived a lie your whole married life, and, Josh, you did everything you could to break us up by not being there for us. Why would I want to come back to that? I have everything I want here with the king. Now, you’ve had your chance. Either run now, or you will die. Right, Dad?”
Gabe had brought his hand out of his pocket. There glinting in the smoky light was a six-bullet fast loader for the Webley. All it would take for him to be ready to shoot at Josh and Maxine would be for him to unhinge the barrel, upend the spent cases, and slip in the fast loader, and the Webley would spit death at them.
Josh stood his ground, and Maxine didn’t move.
Gabe unhinged the Webley.
8
“Please, Dad. Please let them go. They only came back to get me.”
Maxine knew she would never get used to Storm calling Gabe that. Dad. But right now, it was the least of their worries. Gabe sniffed at Storm as he gripped the Webley and clicked the barrel home.
“Son, that woman tried to stab out my eyes. That man tried to burn down my home. With, I might add, me in it. That’s a capital offence around these parts.”
Maxine looked at the wound in the side of Gabe’s face. If only she’d been quick enough to actually stab out his eyes, they wouldn’t be in this particular position, and then maybe Storm wouldn’t have been fixing to stay in Jaxport.
Gabe waved the barrel at the bleeding body in front of them. “Look at the Harborman I just retired. All he did was tell me fighting the fire was a waste of time and that he wanted to get out and let it burn. What do you think I’m going to do to the people who started the damn fire?”
Gabe shook with rage, and Maxine saw there was the purest instinct of murder pinballing around in his eyes—but she also noted that he wasn’t yet ready to push her son aside and open up on them.
“I could take you from here, Gabe,” Josh said, trying to lift his gun arm again. Maxine put the pressure back onto it. Forcing it back down. It would be the work of a moment for him to shrug her off, but like Gabe, he was walking the cliff’s edge of his restraint.
“No, Josh, please,” she said.
“Going to risk it, are you, Josh? Risk putting a bullet in your boy just to take me out? I doubt that. I doubt that very much.” Gabe was a sneer made flesh. A catcall with its own gun. Maxine could see he was trying to press Josh’s buttons and to get him to fire first, which would then give Gabe all the reason he needed to kill them both.
Gabe leaned forward, putting his lips closer to Storm’s ear. “See, son? This is how much they think of you. Action Hero here is so annoyed you’re not his son anymore that he’s willing to risk blowing your head off, just to see if he can take me out. So, tell me again why I should let either of them go?”
Maxine, hoping that Gabe’s twisted feelings for her would stay his hand, if only momentarily, moved in front of Josh to shield him in the same way Storm was shielding the king.
Storm turned his head slightly so that one eye could earnestly target his newfound father. “I just want them to live. Please, Dad. Whatever. You’ve won.”
Josh tensed again behind Maxine. She reached back and gently took his wrist—keeping the gun pointing down.
“You’ve won me,” Storm continued, turning back to Maxine and Josh while still addressing Gabe. “I’m happy you’re my dad. I don’t care about being a Standing anymore. I’m an Angel, and that’s all that matters. These are just people I know now.”
That knotted in Maxine’s gut and festered there.
“Killing them would put them out of their misery. You let them go, and this is going to burn them for the rest of their lives.”
Maxine swallowed the hot bile that was rising in her throat. She searched his face for the true feelings behind his words. Hoping she would find something to hold onto. Or did Storm really believe that? Did he really want them to suffer so? Or was it just a ruse to get them out of there alive?
But was there any point to living on if they had to leave Storm behind?
“Run,” Storm repeated, locking eyes with Maxine. He indicated Josh with his Colt. “Mom, get out of here and take that sorry
carcass of a man with you. He’s nothing to do with me anymore. Get out of here while you can, because Dad isn’t going to hold off shooting you much longer.”
“Damn straight,” said Gabe. “But by all that’s holy, I am digging your thought processes, Storm.”
Storm smiled, but he kept looking at Maxine the whole time. The moment hung over the precipice on a burning thread. Maxine could feel it fraying and curling them all away from safety.
Gabe lifted the Webley and put it over Storm’s shoulder, still using the boy as a willing shield. Maxine could feel the heat coming off the flames now, but there was a different heat coming at her from Josh. His muscles were bunched and trembling. It was clear he wanted to lift his gun arm, but Maxine pushed it back down again. Soon, if Gabe or Storm kept goading him, it would be a battle she might lose, and then where would they all be?
“Josh, I think we should go.” She couldn’t believe what had just come out of her mouth, but she knew it was true, despite the fact that she couldn’t believe what she was about to abandon there in the corridor. Josh’s arm went limp, as if she’d sucked all the strength out of it with her words. She looked back at him over her shoulder.
Josh’s head tilted slowly, like the head of a giant in rusty armor. She imagined the squeak and protesting of the metal as that skull came forward to fix her with incredulous eyes—like the sound disbelief would make if it could transmit its anguish to the world.
“You want to go?” Josh whispered. She could feel he was still on the cusp of action, but she hoped it was the action that would get them out of there to fight another day.
“If we’re alive,” she whispered back, “then that still gives us a chance to find Storm and persuade him to come back to us in the future. If we’d dead, we can’t do that.”
“Come on, Josh!” Gabe called, a black vein of laughter running through his words. “It’s time to crap or get off the pot.”
And the burning thread chose that precise moment to snap, but not in the way Maxine was expecting.
The explosion tore through the corridor with a hot gust like that which would come from the mouth of Hades. The wooden walls around them simply disintegrated into whirling splinters and they were all knocked off their feet, sent sprawling. The heat was intense, but rolled over Maxine without burning her, although Maxine felt cooked in her skin for the seconds she was in its grip.
Maxine found herself on her back with the smell of singed hair in her nostrils. She blinked and opened her eyes into a rain of dust and the sound of moaning. She wiped at her eyes and tried to sit up, but there was something across her legs pinning her to the ground. She lifted her head. It was Josh.
He was sprawled across her, the entire weight of his torso across her knees. He held his head and groaned in semi-consciousness, but he looked otherwise intact, and there were no visible signs of open wounds or leaking blood.
Maxine looked down what was left of the corridor.
Storm was kneeling over the body of Gabe, who was still and silent beneath him. Far beyond her son and Gabe, the firefighters and Harbormen had taken a severe kicking in the blast, which had torn an even greater hole in the side of the castle, but had perversely seemed to blow out the fire with its ferocity. The Harbormen who weren’t dead were getting to their feet and tending to the bodies of those who looked like they were.
Josh rolled off of Maxine’s legs and tried to sit up, but he was too groggy and confused to manage it. He flopped onto his back as Maxine regained her feet and reached for him.
“Josh? What happened? Was that Dad and the others?”
Josh shook his head. “Maybe, but more likely another of the propane tanks got blown. Maybe two. Something hit my head. Hurts like hell. Are you okay?”
Maxine rubbed the dust from her eyes. “Yes, I think so.”
She fixed her gaze on Storm, who was still tending to Gabe. “Storm… Storm, are you alright?”
Storm ignored her; he was still checking Gabe for injuries, and the man seemed to be unconscious.
Maxine held out a hand to Josh and helped him up. Clouds of dust puffed from his hair, and his skin was deathly pale.
“Storm!” Maxine called again.
With a frustrated roar, Storm spun on his heel. Leaving Gabe behind, he walked towards them with his gun arm raised and his Colt glinting in the gloom.
Seeing his approach, Maxine realized that she didn’t have her gun in her hand, and neither did Josh. They were both unarmed, and Storm was almost upon them.
Storm snarled, “You are so lucky he’s still alive. So damn lucky.”
The gun was pointed in Josh’s face. His arm was trembling, but at this range, there was no way that Storm could miss if he pulled the trigger.
“You two will not say a word. You will get out of here now, and you will forget you ever knew me. I don’t want to see you again, not ever.”
Maxine opened her mouth, but the bolts from Storm’s eyes transfixed her heart with the cruelest archery. She could see that he meant it.
“In ten seconds, I’m going to call the Harbormen over here to assist the king, and I’m going to get them to set up a firing squad, and you’re both going to be the stars.”
“What has he done to you?” Josh breathed out.
“Woken me up to what a drag you’ve been on my life, Josh. Now, go. Ten… nine…”
Maxine took Josh’s hand and led him through the debris, over to the hole in the wall which the second explosion had created. Through the smoldering ruin of this section of the warehouse, she could see the nighttime quayside, the braziers burning, the toppled container ships, and her father and her daughter standing there in the middle of it all.
Maxine took one last look back at Storm, but he was already returning to Gabe’s side.
Josh felt as if he was in a cotton wool dream until he got outside the bonded warehouse and the stiff sea breeze that had struck up across the vast area of concrete and containers sliced into him with the effect of a bucket of iced water.
Donald and the others had provided covering fire as Maxine had dragged him away from Storm and the words that had turned his muscles to rusted iron and cold slag. There was also a throbbing hell of a pain corkscrewing out of his skull just above his ear, where he’d been hit by an indeterminate piece of debris from the explosion.
He had let himself be pulled away willingly, though, and it was Donald’s eyes which he met first as the two groups met up and began to fight their way back towards the toppled container ship where they had tied up the kayaks.
Gabe’s forces had chased Henry and his crew back around the warehouse into a trap where they had been met with Molotov cocktails thrown by Filly and Martha. Martha had busied herself with lighting the rags, then passing the bottles to Filly so that he could arc them high in the air so they’d smash down on the Harbormen, driving them back into the hard darkness at the side of the warehouse. When a Harborman chanced to look around the edge of the building, a volley of shots from Donald and the others would soon get them ducking out of sight again.
Concerned now that they had a moment to breathe, Donald asked, “Where’s Storm?”
Josh didn’t have the words, and so Maxine gave up a couple of garbled sentences that made Donald’s eyes go as wide as dinner plates.
“We have to get out of here,” Henry said before anyone else could interject. “We’re running low on ammo and down to the last couple of MCs. If we’re going to make it back to the river, then we have to go now.”
Josh felt Henry put a pistol in his hand, and he nodded. “Let’s do this.”
The cover of darkness wasn’t completely lost to them, but the residue of the burning cocktails was throwing enough light across the concrete quayside to give Gabe’s forces the ability to at least fire in the correct general direction when there was a lull in the covering fire from Donald and the others. Josh managed to fire a couple of shots back towards the warehouse, and he saw them spark off the aluminum walls, but he didn’t have the wh
erewithal to aim at anything specific. The corkscrew of pain was turning into a tolling church bell ringing around his head with a brassy ache. The others provided enough shots directed back to the warehouse to prevent anyone from following with any kind of enthusiasm.
They crabbed sideways behind the first of the spilled containers from the ship that had shed its load on the quayside. The rusting orange container, darker against the night sky over Jacksonville, had split open so that a hundred washing machines had spilled out across the concrete like a jackpot from the world’s biggest slot machine. Crouching down behind the heaps of spilled machines, rotting cardboard, and disintegrating polystyrene packing, Josh started to come to his senses on the wave of cold air that ruffled his hair and flapped at his clothes.
“How’s your head?” Maxine was searching through his hair, squinting in the near darkness. Josh’s eyes were adjusting and he could see the gray concern in her face as her fingers palpated a bruise she had found above his ear.
“I’ll live. Let’s hope Storm does, too.”
Maxine nodded. “The fat lady isn’t singing, Josh. We’ll have another crack at him one day.”
Josh shrugged. “I hope so.”
Tally, who was next to the pair of them, poked her head above the spilled machines and fired off two bursts from her MP5.
“Storm is crazy,” she said, getting back down on her haunches. “Hasn’t been the same since this whole thing kicked off.”
“Who has?” Josh asked, kissing her cheek as she put her head on his shoulder for a moment’s affection.
“Everyone ready?” It was Donald. He’d been right down in the dark shadow of the container ship where it had canted over the edge of the quay, crushing the concrete and hooking a huge, bald steel propeller sixty feet in the air.
Josh looked down the line of fighters. From Maxine and Tally down to Halley and Poppet.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 8
