Gabe poured some wine into an ornate goblet which looked like a prop from a pirate movie.
“We’ve been watching you since you made it to Bluehills, Josh. I’ve had men around you from the moment you left Evergreen. Do you think I’d be so stupid as to leave you to make your plans? We mined the beach, then waited for you to come. Watched you prepare and lay in wait.”
Josh blinked.
Gabe smiled.
“I’ll give you massive congratulations for getting yourself onto the Grimoire. We didn’t see that coming, but your silly little catapults and your stones and your attempts to trick us into believing you were low on ammunition––they were all mind-numbingly stupid.”
Josh blinked and licked his lips. The room was hotter and smaller than it had been before. His knees were hurting against the hot wood, and the revelation that Gabe had been on top of everything they’d been doing for the last two days was smacking into his punch-drunk heart like a haymaker.
“So, perhaps now would be a good time,” Gabe said, sipping at his wine, “to tell you about the traitor in your midst.”
And that gave Gabe the reaction he wanted from Josh.
23
The palm trees on the shore were alight, throwing long orange reflections across the water towards Gabe’s ship. Maxine was pressed against the trunk of another tree with a knife at her throat, while the Harbormen who had come upon them as they lay dazed and in pain after the explosion continued rounding up the stragglers and bringing them back to where Maxine was being held.
Tally had a small gash in her forehead which was leaking blood down her cheek, but her eyes, flicking towards Maxine as she was forced to her knees, told her that her daughter was ostensibly okay. Storm was brought in a few moments later. His clothes and hair were a little singed, but he was going to be okay, too.
Everything had been going to plan. Josh and his crew had been in the water and on the other side of the Grimoire. Donald had signaled with one wave of his arm at the pre-arranged moment, just as he’d passed under the ship’s bow, and the signal had been seen in the bright moonlight through the binoculars Maxine had been holding.
She’d then given the signal for Ten-Foot, Goober, and Marshal on the catapults––each catapult was made up of two wooden piles driven deep into the sand with bungee rope stretched between them––to prepare the first shots from their respective piles of stones. The practice they had had back at Bluehills, across the river, had told them that the one hundred and fifty yards across the water to the Grimoire would not be an issue once they got into range. It had taken just three or four practice shots each before the fist-sized stones had begun to clatter into the side of the ship, and the Harbormen had begun to fire back. The catapults had been quickly abandoned then, and they’d all taken up their positions along the beach behind the large rocks ready there to provide them cover.
Maxine had felt that everything was working fine until the beach had blown up behind them.
If they’d still been at the tree line with the catapults, they would all be dead or dreadfully burned by now. As it was, the roil of fire had been blown out by the detonation, and the force of compressed air which had sent them flying or crashing into the rocks had been enough to cause a welter of damage. The Harbormen who’d set off the detonation had come crashing down the beach then, swarming over the rocks and landing upon them like hellions.
Maxine had been dragged backward by the hair, a knife edge digging into her throat, as the Harborman who’d taken her hissed flatly in her ear, “Don’t make me gut you. At the moment, Gabriel wants you alive, but don’t make me hav’ta tell him you died trying to escape. No one wants to see that happen, right?”
The Harborman had twisted around her, pushed her against the trunk of the tree, and pointed the tip of his knife to the middle of her throat. He was tall and broad, a beard bushing on his chin, and his pale blue eyes stood out in the sickly orange light from the nearby flames, where dry vegetation was reigniting the fire from the near-extinguished embers that lay scattered everywhere.
He stank of sweat, and his breath was like stale air from a tomb. There was sand in his hair, and his face looked like it had been smeared with soot deliberately to disguise his face while he and his men had watched what Maxine and the others had been doing.
“We should have detonated while you were still in the trees,” Pale Blue said, “but orders is orders, I guess.”
There were at least eight other Harbormen bringing in the probationers. Goober and Scally were disorientated, and the boy kept thumping his ears with the palms of his hands as if he was trying to get them to start working again. Lemming and Marshal were kicked into the circle and covered with guns and knives. Maxine heard a scream, a rattle of gunfire, another scream, and then Ten-Foot was dragged into the circle, too. The Harbormen punched and kicked at the boy on the ground. Pale Blue, who appeared to be the leader, barked at them to stop, but they carried on for another good twenty seconds of vicious beating. When they did finally quit, their faces were streaked with sweat and exhausted strings of spit dripped from their lips. One of them wiped his hand across his mouth, dug his boot into Ten-Foot’s side, and said, “He killed Zack and Beedle. We should crucify him on a damn tree.”
Ten-Foot groaned and rolled in the sand, bringing up his knees to cover his stomach.
“Maybe we will,” Pale Blue spat, “but not until we get our orders. Frayne?”
A younger Harborman with a straggly blond beard and a closely shaved skull peeled from the team, stepping over Ten-Foot as he did so. “Go signal the Grimoire. Tell them who we have and that we’re awaiting orders.”
“Roger that, Lander,” Frayne said before Pale Blue, who’d now been identified as Lander, grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and murmured cruelly in his ear. “Captain Lander. Captain.”
Frayne nodded, made an apology, and jogged back along the beach away from the trees. New flames were licking their trunks, and it wouldn’t be long before the effects of the explosion were fully reversed and the jungle was a conflagration all over again. The two Harbormen who had brought in Ten-Foot were beckoned to close to Lander. “Holden and Ahern, if you two do not follow my orders immediately again, I’ll shoot you both myself. Is that understood?”
Holden and Ahern understood. Without question. They were dismissed to take care of the bodies of the men Ten-Foot had killed while they’d been capturing him.
The heat from the increasingly more intensely burning wood was wafting with a sting of smoke across all their faces. Maxine, now that the knife had been taken from her throat, was allowed to sit down with Tally and Storm. Goober’s ears seemed to have started to work, and Ten-Foot lay in a trembling ball, but at least he’d stopped groaning.
That meant, Maxine realized with a thrill of fear and optimism combined, that everyone on the beach had been accounted for.
Except Poppet.
Maxine couldn’t remember seeing her just before the explosion. She hoped against hope that the woman hadn’t gone back into the jungle to get something she’d forgotten, or to take one more shot from a catapult. If she had, there was a good chance she’d been roasted in the flames, or worse still, lay unconscious even now with the blaze moving inexorably towards her.
Both Tally and Storm shook their heads when Maxine whispered to them to ask if they’d seen Poppet.
Damn. Maxine hoped the older woman was free. Maybe running up the trail to Bluehills to raise the alarm to Halley and the girls.
Everyone ducked as there was a sharp crack off in the trees. A shower of sparks seemed to mark where a tree trunk had exploded in the heat, spitting chunks of wood in all directions, but Maxine was confused. The sharp crack and the shower of sparks from the nearby fires didn’t seem to match up.
And when Ahern crumpled to his knees and then onto his back with blood pumping from a bullet wound in the center of his forehead, Maxine knew the sound hadn’t come from the fallen tree at all.
Tally threw her a
rms around Storm and her mom as it became apparent they were being fired upon. She thought she’d caught a muzzle flash, somewhere out in the dark, from over along the beach in an area of the jungle that wasn’t alight, but it could have just been a reflection of the fire.
“What the hell?” Storm exclaimed, struggling under her arms.
“Stay down! Both of you,” she whispered. “There’s someone out there firing at us!”
Captain Lander had already hit the sand and was screaming orders to his men. “There’s a sniper! Return fire! Return fire!”
A barrage of muzzle flashes backed by the chatter of machine gun fire was loosed off into the darkness. They couldn’t in any way tell where the first shot had come from, so they covered all their bases and aimed everywhere.
As the first round of magazines emptied and fell silent, there was a general fluster of activity to eject them and clips and replace them with fresh ones. Lander looked up over the rock he’d hidden behind. A metallic zing and cherry red sparks exploded from the rock right in front of his face. He went down on his knees again, clutching at his cheek with his hand. When it came away, Tally saw there was blood smeared on the skin of his face and on the palm of his hand, glistening in the firelight. He’d been hit by rock chips from the ricocheting round.
A rotting mixture of anger and fear covered his face as he pushed Holden away from the rock where he was cowering to crawl across the small stretch of sand to where Tally, Maxine, and Storm were lying, “Keep them covered!” he yelled. “Don’t let them get away in the confusion!”
The rest of the Harbormen couldn’t readily be seen. They were down between the rocks or had made it behind various trees at the edge of the jungle. But when Lander gave the order to “Continue firing!” Tally could see pretty much where the other men were situated, which meant that whoever the supposed sniper was, they would be able to see them, too.
This observation was borne out as a heavy caliber shot whistled over Tally’s family, coming from the opposite direction from the one the Harbormen were firing in, and a second Harborman fell forward from his position behind a tall palm, screaming from a torn, blood-geysering throat that he was “Hit! I’m hit!”
Another shot buried itself in his temple, sending a spray of blood and bone into the air, and the man was silent.
“Parnell?” Lander called towards the dead man. “Parnell? Are you okay?”
Tally realized that Lander couldn’t see that Parnell was silent and still. She caught Holden’s eye, who was biting at his lip while covering them with a distinctly quavering handgun. Holden saw that Tally was looking at him and did what he could to harden his face and stop the gun from trembling in his hand.
“Burns! Michaels!” Captain Lander called from his position on his knees in the damp sand, his eyes wide and his hair awry. “Head out! Over the rocks! Whoever it is can’t be far. Hunt them down! Hunt them down!”
Nobody moved. Tally risked a look around her to see if Holden was back to being scared, and if she could identify whose deaf ears Lander’s orders were falling on.
“Who is firing?” Maxine whispered up from the ground, blowing sand off her lips.
“I don’t know,” Tally replied. “Poppet? Halley? Someone who knows how to handle a gun.”
Two bullets pinged, sparking off rocks just ahead of them. Holden dug his head further down towards the sand, but kept the gun on them. “Don’t even think about moving,” he said.
“Burns! Michaels! I said get going, NOW!!!!” Captain Landers couldn’t keep the strangled squawk out of his voice. It came home to Tally then, that the Harbormen were not at all professional soldiers in the accepted sense of the word. Maybe they liked pushing people around, and maybe they liked the uniform—whatever—but here and now, when the chips were down and they were being attacked out of the darkness by an unknown assailant, that was when they were found wanting. And it might prove to be something Tally could use to their advantage. The more Holden lost vertebrae from his backbone and screwed himself deeper into the sand to keep himself out of the line of fire, the sooner Tally might be able to use his fear against him.
“Burns! Answer me, dammit!”
“If you want someone to go out there under fire, you go!” came a reply from behind a rock.
Lander made a fist and punched at the rock in front of him, skinning his knuckles. “I’ll see you hang for this!”
There was no reply.
These Harbormen may have been safe to charge with laying some explosives and keeping up surveillance of what her people were doing, but Tally could see their discipline was evaporating quicker than thin ice on a warm spring morning. Another of the sniper’s bullets dinged off a rock, and this time she did see the muzzle flash away in the dark. It was about seventy yards away, in the jungle, low down in the base of a clump of brush ringing the base of several palm trees.
Holden’s eyes were wide, peering around as if his nerve had long since disappeared and he was looking for a way out. He kept looking from Lander to the fires and back to Tally and her family, the whites of his eyes showing through the soot on his face.
A shot from the sniper fizzed past his head and buried itself into the thigh of Burns. The scream was long and high-pitched. His leg buckled and he went down holding his smashed thigh, blood pumping out from the wound and all over the sand.
He was no more than four feet away from Tally, and Burns had dropped his Uzi and was ignoring it. Holden was on lookout, his petrified eye sweep from the back of Lander’s head to the jungle and back to Tally. If Holden continued in this cycle, Tally would have two seconds to roll, grab, and then turn and shoot. She had Lander in range, and Holden, and could see where two other Harbormen were crouched and firing into the jungle.
The rat-a-tat-tat of the pistols and machine guns stopped almost in unison, as the magazines needed to be swapped. Holden was looking at Lander.
Tally pushed herself off her mom and brother, and rolled for the Uzi.
It felt big and blocky in her hand as she got up on one knee and fired a single shot into Holden’s shocked face as it came around to focus on her from the jungle. He went down without a sound, and in the confusion of sniper and return fire, it didn’t seem that the next nearest Harborman, Captain Lander, even noticed that one of his men had been taken out of the game.
Tally peppered Lander’s back with bullets as Maxine crawled forward to snatch Holden’s gun and fire from where she was, laying into two other men—who were covered from the sniper, but not from her.
Storm wasn’t resting on the moment, either. He rolled through the sand to where Captain Lander was slumped against the rock, pumping blood from the wounds in his back, and picked up the Captain’s gun. He shot two others as Tally took out another.
Frayne stood up with his hands held high; he’d seen the writing writ large on the wall. He threw away his gun and said, “I surrender! I surrender!”
But he hardly got the second line out before the sniper’s bullet lifted the top off his skull and sent him cartwheeling over a waist-high rock to leave him slithering to the sand in the now silent night.
“They’re dead!” Tally called into the night. “All of them! We’re all okay!”
Silence greeted them in reply.
“Who was it?” Storm asked as he checked the bodies for signs of life. Only Burns remained alive, just. He was lying in a wide puddle of blood. The shot to his thigh looked like it had severed something substantial, and his life was bleeding away by the second.
Tally left her mom and Storm to make Burns as comfortable as they could as he died and checked on the probationers—especially Ten-Foot, who had taken the hardest of the beatings. Meanwhile, Tally jogged along the beach clutching Burns’ Uzi.
The sound of the burning jungle receded, and she could hear the waves around the rocks. This being a small island in the Caribbean, there were no tides to speak of—just the constancy of the ocean around it, and when you were on the beach among the rocks, you’d never be
far from the sound of the sea coming up against the rocks. Depending on the weather and the wind, that sound might be deafening or whisper soft. The Grimoire was in near darkness, and all the firing on it had stopped around the same time as the charges laid by Lander and his men had gone off. The near silence after so much frenetic activity was more than a little disconcerting.
Tally reached the point in the jungle closest to where she’d seen the muzzle flashes from what she assumed to have been a sniper’s rifle. It was impenetrably dark in between the trees and palms, as well as around the brush. Tally couldn’t see any movement, so she took a step forward.
“You haven’t shot at us, so I guess you don’t want us dead. Who are you? Is it you, Halley? Poppet?”
A harsh rustle in the undergrowth five yards to her right snapped her head around. She almost brought the gun up and fired as a figure stumbled from the jungle, blood all down its front like a bib, its jaw slack, arms out and imploring, but Tally was able to stop herself.
She didn’t want to add to Poppet’s wounds.
24
Tally’s shouts had brought her running from Storm and the probationers. She could see that her daughter kneeled down holding a body against her thighs, but it was only as Maxine got within a few yards that the terrible truth came home to her hard. Maxine was looking down on Poppet.
Poppet had been shot in her chest, through her lung and out the other side, so that she sported a large exit wound in her back. She was barely conscious by the time Maxine had reached her daughter’s position.
“Sorry…” Poppet was saying, “didn’t mean to get… blood on your jeans.”
Tally stroked the older woman’s forehead, on which Maxine could see sweat standing out like studs in leatherwork. If didn’t take her more than a few seconds to realize that the woman was not going to make it. Even if they’d had a fully equipped emergency room with many units of blood and the finest surgeons, Poppet Langolini’s future would still have been touch and go. Here on a dark Caribbean beach, with the susurrating waves and a sky filled with the moon and the nebula, her chances were zero.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 22
