Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Josh guessed that, yet again, the effects of the Barnard’s Star explosion had in some way deepened the upset he was feeling. He tried to hang onto that idea as much as he could. He knew that, in normal circumstances, he might not have been quick to judge or anger—sure, he would have been sad and perhaps angry, but he liked to think that he would have given Maxine the time and the space to explain. Now, he had very little idea how he would react in any given situation—there was something else inside his head calling the shots. Maybe one day he’d be able to get a handle on it and not be subject to its troubling ministrations, but right now that wasn’t possible. So, when he could screw that particular lid back down over the crater punched in his life, he put the shotgun down in the middle of the road, raised his hands, and said to the two men standing behind the white Pickford PD SUVs: “Hey, I’m Josh Rennie. Any chance of a place to stay for the night? Maybe longer?”

  Two shotguns were pointed at Josh’s midriff from across the SUVs. The first was held by a pinch-faced, hollow-eyed fella with shaggy gray hair and an unkempt beard that was streaked with tobacco stains. The other shotgun was being pointed by a ruddy-faced twenty-something with premature baldness and a crooked nose that had been broken too many times.

  “What’s your business here?” called Tobacco, not dropping his bead any.

  “Just passing through. I’ll work for board and lodging. I’m good with my hands. Not so good with a gun, but I can hold my own. I tried Lewisburg, but I didn’t like the setup.”

  “There any disease there?” Tobacco again.

  “Well, there’s no cholera or typhoid if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s not what we mean. We mean the sickness. The madness.”

  Josh nodded as if he understood. “Man, there’s plenty of that. But I steered clear.” He pointed a thumb at the shotgun lying on the blacktop. “I had to put a few crazies down with Lucille there, but I haven’t been in touching distance of anyone for a few weeks now. Kept to the trees where I could, the road when I couldn’t.”

  “Why don’t you have a tent or a bedroll?” Nose piped up.

  Josh and Karel had thought of a contingency for this eventuality already. Josh pointed to the Bowie on his hip. “I don’t like to carry too much, man. With the knife, I can make myself a shelter when I want, and I’ve stayed in a few deserted houses. There are plenty of those, for sure. Dunno where everyone has gone from ‘round these parts. Do you?”

  Tobacco dropped the barrel and stood up and away from the hood of the SUV. “Well, they haven’t come to Pickford. And neither are you. So, just turn yourself around, Mr. Rennie, and we’ll bid you good evening.”

  Gerry had told Josh and Karel that this would be the reaction. Things had gotten a little more intense, he had said, since a “dust-up” at a local farm. Josh kinda thought it amusing that the battle at the M-Bar where Creggan’s men had been comprehensively beaten was being described as a dust-up. Propaganda in the post-Barnard world was going to be as important as the power behind it. Gerry had told them—and at times, with Karel’s knife held whisper-close to his neck, they’d had trouble keeping up with his babbling—that Creggan had made it a new rule that no one unknown was to be let in without express permission from him.

  “Can I open my pack?” Josh asked, slipping it off his shoulder and putting it gently onto the road.

  Tobacco shrugged. “Do what you like, friend. You ain’t coming in. This door is locked.”

  “Depends on the key, doesn’t it?” Josh asked, unzipping the top of the pack and gingerly opening the flaps.

  Nose whispered to Tobacco and they both trained their guns on Josh again. “Nice and easy,” Tobacco said. It seemed that Nose was the brains of the operation, and Tobacco the mouth.

  Josh nodded and slipped one hand inside the pack. The things he was searching for were right there where he needed them, as he had placed them right at the top of piles of food, clothes, and ammunition. He pulled them out—two green, spherical grenades.

  Tobacco and Nose, even shielded behind the two SUVs, actually took a step back, raising their guns to shoulder height with their eyes wide, Nose licking at his lips.

  Josh held the grenades in the palm of one hand and kept his other hand away in the air like a magician flourishing his effect after an impressive trick. “M67 fragmentation grenades. Standard U.S. Army issue. Injury radius 20-25 yards, fatal at five yards.”

  “You keep mighty still, Mr. Rennie, or we will cut you and your grenades in half.” The confidence had leeched away from Tobacco’s voice. These weren’t ex-cops like Josh with his training, or dedicated militia like Karel. They were ordinary guys who had won the lottery of survival and who had seen which way the wind was blowing. That wind had blown them all the way to Creggan.

  “I’m not threatening you,” Josh said, “but I have two more in the bag. I’m offering to trade.”

  “For what?” Nose was suddenly bypassing Tobacco, and there was a definite edge of interest in his tone.

  “For what I was asking for. If you have someplace for me to rest up, and maybe a chance to come to some arrangement about me staying on a more permanent basis. There’s a sign back there for Pickford. I’m assuming you guys are security for the town? Yes?”

  “Maybe,” said Tobacco.

  “Well, if you are, then I’m looking for a place to settle. Been on the road too long.”

  Nose laughed. “What’s to stop us just killing you now and taking the grenades anyway?”

  Josh grinned. “Nothing. Except I know where there are thousands more, just ready to be lifted, along with several lifetimes’ worth of weapons and ammunition. And under the right conditions, people of Pickford might be able to share in my good fortune.”

  Nose whispered in Tobacco’s ear. Tobacco nodded, and the two men lowered their guns.

  Josh was in.

  8

  They stopped on the first night, just over sixty-five miles from Cumberland.

  Progress had been slow, as the buggy could only be driven at just around walking pace or it would jounce Storm around too much. The Defenders had created a flexible perimeter around the convoy and its occupants so that the seemingly random attack by an ax-wielding woodsman wouldn’t be repeated—well, at least not so easily.

  “It’s almost like he jumped down out of the trees from nowhere. Screaming like a Berserker and swinging that ax like he meant it,” Tally said as she scooped stew from the pot onto her plate.

  Keysell had moved them off the road an hour after sundown, the sky lit by a bright moon in between scudding clouds and the glowing Barnard’s Nebula—the smear of bright white which sat in opposition to the moon like its melted twin. His men had checked that the area was free of tree-swinging crazies, and then they’d cleared some brush, lit fires, and gotten on with feeding the crew.

  Storm had been lifted out of the buggy and laid on a blanket on the springy earth. He hadn’t said much of anything to Maxine in the intervening hours, moving between dull wakefulness and silent, eye-closed resting.

  Tally-Two seemed happy to be out of the trappings of hauling the buggy and had been led by Poppet down to a nearby creek to drink and eat. Henry was working with some of Keysell’s men to make shelters for the night from branches and ferns. Tally-One was still riding an adrenaline rush from the attack, though. Maxine could see a slight tremble in her daughter’s hand as she ate. Her eyes were bright with the remembering. Maxine had seen Tally like this many times before when she’d come back after a successful climbing trip or completed a free-running session. Tally had once called the tremble “residual groundrush”—it was the leftovers from the endorphins and chemicals that had gone coursing through her body during a welcome brush with danger. And here she was, exhibiting all the same physical expressions as she did in her sporting life, but after nearly having had her head separated from her body. Maxine was glad to be back with her daughter after all the weeks apart; however, the old concerns and worries for the way the girl would thro
w herself into dangerous situations, just for the rush of it, were still nibbling at her sensibilities.

  In their unique ways, both of Maxine’s children threw up challenges that she could have done without right now. Back before the Barnard event, this had been normal family dynamic stuff. Stuff that could be dealt with through wise words, sage advice, or the occasional grounding. But now it added a whole new layer of complication to everything. Storm’s recovery and Tally’s appetite for danger would, under normal circumstances, have been things that could be managed and handled—but now? One more illness, one more broken bone, and all bets were off.

  “Henry was so quick. All I saw was a flash from the ax and then he was firing at the guy. He went down and it was over in just a second. Blink and you would have missed it.” Tally punctuated her sentences with mouthfuls of food.

  “Well, I’m glad he missed you, that’s for sure. Henry is a good kid. You two are getting along fine, I see,” Maxine said, the subtext in her voice clear. From the blanket, Storm snorted with amusement as the red patches appeared on Tally’s cheeks.

  “Mom! It’s not like that. It’s not…”

  Maxine held up her hand. “I’m just messing with you, Tally.”

  Tally turned to her brother, changing the subject and averting her eyes from Maxine. “How are you feeling, Storm?”

  Maxine smiled inwardly. Although her daughter was growing up—and had had to do a lot of that recently, very quickly—there was still the child just under the surface of the emerging woman. In some respects, that allayed her fears over the future, if only a little. Tally wasn’t going to cause too many problems yet. Maxine had genuinely warmed to Henry, and not just because he’d saved Tally from the attack that day. He was calm, modest, had a good head on his shoulders, and was someone she felt she could rely on. If he and Tally did end up being an item, then that was something she wouldn’t think was too bad of an outcome. The embarrassment in Tally’s cheeks told Maxine her daughter had probably had the same thought, too.

  Storm put a hand down on his stomach. “I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut, but the wound feels okay.”

  Maxine, as a wound care specialist nurse, had already told him what to look out for and bring to her and Larry’s attention. If the heat increased, if the wound wept, or there were pains that didn’t feel like bruising, any of those symptoms might signal a start of infection. “I don’t think I’ll be throwing any baseballs for a while, but the pain isn’t getting any worse.”

  “Good,” Maxine said, handing her son a plate of food which he began to eat while propped up on one elbow. His face was still a little pale in the firelight, but he’d started moving a little better than he had during the day, and at least he wasn’t cutting himself off from everything again.

  Tally finished her food and went over to help Henry and the others with the shelters. Poppet had brought the horse back around and was deep in conversation with Larry at the second campfire.

  “Do you want Dad back with us?”

  The question from Storm had come out of nowhere. Maxine suddenly became aware again of the blisters on her hands and the dressing on her cheek. Larry had told her they could probably come off before they reached Cumberland, and she had agreed, but Storm mentioning Josh brought the whole of the picture back to her mind in living color.

  “Are you angry with him?” she asked.

  Storm stopped the spoon halfway to his mouth and stared into her like lasers. “You’re not?”

  Maxine didn’t want to get into what she was feeling right now about Josh. The salad of emotions in her head wasn’t yet ready to form itself into a coherent meal. “Let’s talk about how you feel.”

  Storm put down his plate. “You can’t trust him now. Not anymore. You know how he was before the supernova. It was like he wasn’t present at all, and within days of seeing you again, he lost it and you got burned on the barbeque! He’s not the dad I remember. Before all this… I tried. I tried being okay with him—being okay with both of you, the way things were going—but I could see how much it was hurting you, Mom. That night in the hotel, when I was talking to him on the satellite phone, don’t think I didn’t see how upset you were…”

  The night of the supernova, Maxine had been in a Boston hotel room with Storm, just after he’d finished the last course of chemotherapy for his cancer. The conversation with Josh, who’d been out there in the Atlantic on that damn boat with those damn delinquents, had been tough enough. They’d taken a dozen bites out of each other before Storm had lifted the receiver from Maxine’s hand—metaphorically getting between the two combatants like a referee in the wrestling ring which their marriage had become.

  Maxine had noticed a hardening in Storm’s attitude to Josh on the tortuous journey from Boston to the M-Bar, but he had never been as overt in his criticism as this. The fight in the yard and the subsequent burns had pushed Storm beyond mere criticism into mistrust and rejection, it seemed.

  What would happen if Storm found out what Josh had had a glimpse of? Would it affect his recovery? Would it harden him even further against his… what? Father? Stepfather? The truth was, she didn’t know herself. Any of those outcomes could erupt, or all this could be nonsense brought about by a false memory. She didn’t know. What she’d shared in the kitchen of the M-Bar with her mother had not been based on any kind of certainty, after all. How could it have been?

  The dam holding back the memories of the night that had driven her from her home to travel back to her mom was beginning to crack in Maxine’s mind. Storm must have picked up on it, too, because he reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up…. I just don’t know what to think right now. I’m so angry with him. I’m so over excusing him.”

  Maxine turned her palm over, feeling Storm’s palm through the dressing on her left hand, looking into her son’s earnest eyes. Should she tell him now? Tell him what might be the reality of his existence?

  But that was the point, wasn’t it? She didn’t know, and the cracks that uncertainly was sending up through the concrete she’d thought she’d set over those memories were widening. Images were coming through. Some bright, some dark, and some which she never wanted to have to think about again.

  Memories of the day she’d opened the door of their Morehead City home, their first home—a run-down, clapboard starter in a neighborhood that had as many problems as it had residents. There, they’d had neighbors who hadn’t taken well to having a cop—albeit a trainee cop—living amongst them, and who’d made that distaste perfectly clear over the month they’d been there. The day she was thinking of had been the day when she’d opened the door thinking it was the mailman, and seen Gabe Angel on her doorstep.

  The marriage ceremony itself had been smoother than Maxine could have hoped for. A small affair at a community church in Raleigh. She and Josh had chosen neutral ground, away from West Virginia so that her parents would be there because they wanted to be there, not because it was their duty. Josh and Maxine had scraped the money together for the wedding themselves and had taken out a modest bank loan to supplement it. She hadn’t asked Donald for any contribution to the ceremony other than to be there. He was still angry that she had left the M-Bar anyway—whenever she came back to the farm during her nurse training, of course, Maria would welcome her with wide smiles and good cooking. Donald would find things to do on the ranch; otherwise, he’d just turn up for meals, say little, and turn in early. When she’d brought Josh to the farm to introduce him as the man she was going to marry, Donald hadn’t even turned up for the meal.

  Maria had apologized to Josh for Donald’s behavior, and Josh had taken it in stride. “I guess I’ll feel the same about any guy who comes to marry any daughters we have, Mrs. Jefferson. I’m sure he’ll come around in the end,” he’d said.

  The trip up to the M-Bar with Josh had been very different from the one she’d made with Gabe when her mother had been crushed by the bull. Josh had engaged with the notion tha
t Donald and Maria might find it difficult to meet with him and hadn’t shied away from acknowledging that difficulty. Gabe had brought a brand-new Stetson for her father—trying even then to use baubles and trinkets to endear himself to the family. It was a trait that had come to define the experience of Maxine’s next encounter with Gabe, several years later in Morehead City.

  And so, Donald had traveled to the wedding and had nodded to Josh’s parents—both dead within ten years of the wedding, from a car wreck on the interstate in a storm—and had been polite where he had to be to the pastor and other guests. But he and Maria had left the reception early and driven back to West Virginia that night.

  But the ceremony had gone ahead—Josh and Maxine were married. They both worked double shifts in second jobs while they trained in their respective careers. Josh worked in a friend’s father’s auto shop, and Maxine bussed tables in various restaurants. It was tough—studying and working in the evenings and on weekends—but it was a mainly happy time.

  When Josh finished his six months of basic training at the police academy and Maxine was in a position to transfer her nursing studies, they got a modest mortgage on a starter home in Morehead City. The house was small, with one bedroom, a den, a kitchen you had trouble holding two plates in at once, and a yard where you might have been able to count every blade of grass in it in an hour. It allowed them to move out of rented accommodation in Raleigh, traveling the 150 miles to the coast in Morehead City, where they thought their quality of life would improve with their environment. Josh acquired a position in the Jacksonville PD, an hour’s commute by car along NC-24, and Maxine transferred her studies to Morehead Mercy.

  The neighbors around them on the street were fine until Josh admitted he was a cop. Then people stopped being so neighborly. Whether it was because they had had bad experiences with the police department or had a natural paranoia about a law enforcement officer living in their midst that kept them at arm’s reach, she didn’t know, but there it was.