Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Try to remember.

  The meal at the restaurant. It had been fish. No beers or wine. Strictly coffee. They’d had a seat by a huge window that looked over the shore at the rolling gray waves of the Atlantic. It had been a windy day, and there’d been streamers of spray heading into the air as water crashed into the rocks.

  “So, talk. I’m listening.” Maxine kept looking at her watch to give Gabe the signal that she wouldn’t be stringing this out. He’d been perfectly polite and chatty in the car as they’d driven into downtown Morehead, the sky filling with clouds and the wind flapping at their clothes as they’d made their way into the restaurant.

  Once seated, he’d kept up the small talk until Maxine had looked at her watch for the third time and pushed him towards the meat of the meeting.

  “I have no real agenda but to apologize, Maxine, that’s all. No biggie. Just say how sorry I am for what happened.”

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  Gabe smiled, his eyes dancing with amusement. He drank his Pepsi and steepled his fingers.

  “Maxine, I’m really, truly sorry. I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. Since that night, I’ve felt we have unfinished business. I’ve felt… oh, I don’t know… I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but I’ve felt incomplete. Like there’s been a piece missing. My therapist…”

  Maxine raised an eyebrow, and Gabe smiled again.

  “Oh, I know it’s all the fashion to have one. The… what do they call us...? The worried well? Well, I’m not giving Prozac to the dog, I’m not that kind of worried well, Maxine. I just thought I had some issues that it would be a good idea to deal with. Impulse control. Anger. Those kinda things. Yup, this is the new me. With my therapy, I’ve discovered so much about myself that I didn’t have a clue about before.”

  Maxine raised her glass instead of looking at her watch. “Such as?”

  “That back then, however much I might have been the jock, the popular boy who could have whoever he wanted, it was all built on insecurity and anxiety that made me quick to anger and unable to say what I was really thinking. I was frustrated… now, I can see those eyebrows flying again, Maxine. Not that kind of frustration.” He laughed gently and pushed the food around on his plate with his fork. Maxine could almost feel the vulnerability leeching away from him. It was true. This was not the boy she had fallen for before her marriage. There was a different edge to him now, but an edge all the same. The rush of his words and the earnestness of his temperament—so different from how he’d been before—seemed at odds with what was going on in his eyes.

  Maxine couldn’t put a finger on it, but there was something hanging below the surface there. And she would have said something about it. She was sure that she would have, but…

  But…

  That was the last thing she remembered before waking up in this motel room.

  Soon, she’d gathered her coat, put it on against the chill wind, and walked out into a parking lot that was slick with rain which was falling in a soft and cold near-mist.

  It was then that she realized that she had no idea where she was, or what the time was.

  She found a phone booth down by the road—which she didn’t immediately recognize—and made two calls. One calling the number on the motel’s signage to ask directions from Morehead to it, telling the clerk she was thinking of staying there, and the second to call a taxi to take her home. Maxine had to wait half an hour for the car. She was ten miles outside Morehead, on the highway, and thankfully there was enough cash in her purse to get her home.

  Maxine got back before Josh and spent a good hour in a hot bath washing and scrubbing herself, getting the blood off her skin—from hands she’d stuffed into her pockets to stop the taxi driver from seeing them and asking awkward questions—and then she prepared the evening meal for when Josh got back from his shift.

  The next few days were tension-filled as she tried to fill the gap in her memory and piece together what had happened that afternoon. Josh was pulling double shifts and was too tired, too grumpy in the evening, to notice that anything was awry with her—and that was a blessing in disguise for Maxine. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, she knew, but he was working so hard right now that he didn’t have the bandwidth to cope with anything else.

  And Maxine herself didn’t know if she wanted Josh to realize anything was wrong. There was a hole in her memory, sure, but she was basically okay and didn’t want to have to go into why she might have gone with Gabe into town in the first place. It was bad enough not knowing exactly what had happened, but she sure didn’t want the fallout of Josh thinking she’d seen Gabe behind his back.

  Which, of course, she had. She felt guilty, too. Of course, she did, but she didn’t want Josh to hurt because of her foolishness.

  The blood and the flesh she’d scraped from under her fingers had told her that whatever had happened in that motel room hadn’t gone to plan for Gabe one little bit. Whatever it was that Gabe had slipped into her drink when she hadn’t been looking, it hadn’t stopped her ability to fight him off. That she’d woken up pretty much fully clothed led her to believe that, if the intention of Gabe had been to rape her in her drugged state, then he’d been unsuccessful. In any case, the hot bath she’d had would have washed away any evidence—and going to the police would, again, have led to Josh finding out about the meeting.

  There was enough substantiation to suggest that whatever had happened in that room hadn’t gotten past a fight where Gabe had tried to finish the process he’d begun years before, when she’d been slapped and Gabe had had his flesh raked by Maxine’s fingernails.

  And as the days stretched away and turned into weeks, Maxine convinced herself that nothing more had occurred, and she began to settle with not knowing. Josh continued to work his heart out, and she continued to work and feel guilty all the same. But it was okay. It was all going to be okay.

  No harm, no foul.

  That was until she missed two periods in a row, and then had the pregnancy which would lead to Storm confirmed by her doctor.

  17

  Three days of hard traveling in the wagon, heading northeast up the state from Pickford, took them out of West Virginia and, when they crossed into Maryland, almost into Cumberland. They’d let Gerry go twenty miles outside of Pickford. He’d been convinced they were going to just kill him where he stood and had skipped away like a spring lamb when Karel had cut his bonds and pushed him down the road on his way back to town.

  He’d kept looking back like he couldn’t believe his luck, or couldn’t believe they weren’t going to shoot him as he walked. “I hope he makes it back,” she’d said as he’d disappeared around a bend in the road. Karel had told Josh she’d caught Gerry coming into town while she’d been laying the plastic explosives in a building behind the police department. She’d dashed up to meet him and taken him down before he’d gotten a chance to raise the alarm.

  As to the explosives, Karel hadn’t been able to use detonators because nothing electronic worked since the supernova—so she had lit a trail of gunpowder and run like the wind back to the wagon and horses she’d acquired, where Gerry had been trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Then she’d taken the whole thing along the main street, throwing out grenades as she went.

  Filly, Josh had found, really did believe there was a disease. It had taken Karel and Josh many hours to disabuse him of the notion that there was anything communicable about what was causing any number of effects in the people of the world.

  “But Doctor Hauser,” he’d argued. “She took my blood. She looked at in a microscope.”

  “She did the same to me,” said Josh. “It was all theater. Cruel theater, but theater all the same.”

  He’d also apologized to Filly for using him to get away from the bar. Filly was pragmatic, but Josh could see that he’d been hurt by the tack Josh had taken. “I understand, mister, I do. But I was so scared. They coulda killed me at any time. I thought they were going to shoot me
in the jail—because that’s what they usually do—but Hauser said to Creggan’s boys I should be hung with the old man and the woman. Make it a party.”

  That had sent a shiver down Josh’s spine. He didn’t know what was going on in Pickford now. Had the regime been fully changed now that Creggan and Randy were no more? Nature abhorred a vacuum, and so did politics. Maybe if they’d stayed…

  No.

  No.

  Maxine, Tally, and Storm had to be his focus. He didn’t have the time to fix Pickford and give them the knowledge they needed to make the right decisions about the effects of the supernova. The mission had been to save Donald, and that’s what he had done.

  He and Karel had given Filly the opportunity to go back to Pickford if he wanted, but the bartender had shaken his awry-haired head. “I ain’t going back there. Not after the way they treated me. No guarantee they wouldn’t do it again. I’ll take my chances with you folks, if that’s okay. I can hunt, and I’m good with a gun. Way things are out here, looks like you could use all the help you can get.”

  And so, Josh had let him stay. And it was true. He was good with a gun, and a competent hunter—bringing in a couple of wild turkeys he’d shot after they’d made camp the first time and dragging a small, white-tailed deer from a foray into the woods on the next. Karel had been impressed, and Josh felt even more of a heel for the way he had treated the man back in Pickford.

  Books. Covers. Judging and the like.

  Donald and Martha hadn’t said much of anything as they had traveled away from Pickford over the last three days. Both had gone through the wringer, and however much Josh wanted to take Donald aside and ask him the truth about Storm’s birth, it was only right that he allowed him to rest and gather himself. The beating he’d taken from Creggan’s men when he’d come into Pickford had been severe. He moved like he had a cracked rib or two, and his face was a crazy map of scabs and scars. But as the time passed, his left eye began to open, and the cracks in his punch-thickened lips began to heal.

  The longest conversation he’d had with Josh so far had been to tell him he wanted to thank him… twice.

  “Twice? What for?”

  “First for getting me out of Pickford.”

  “And the other?”

  “For not stopping me killing Creggan.”

  And that had been that. The rest of the time, he’d sat quietly in the back of the wagon with Martha. She kept her knees up and her chin resting on them most of the time, and only occasionally made eye contact.

  Martha refused food most of the time, too. “Not hungry.”

  She would take occasional sips of water, and often when Josh looked back from the skeleton boot, he would see tears streaking down her face. Karel would take turns in the back of the wagon with her. Not trying to get her to talk, but just offering some closeness and support. Josh would look around sometimes and see her head resting on Karel’s shoulder, their hands gripped together.

  They were a motley crew, Josh knew, but they traveled with hope. They hadn’t been followed by anyone from Pickford so far as they could tell, and hadn’t been attacked on route by bandits or crazies.

  On the third morning, the ever-approaching colder weather dawned bright and clear. The forests around them were dewy and misty, the aroma of damp earth and vegetation sharp in their nostrils. The sun slanting through the treetops lit the road ahead, which was damp from the night dewfall, and it took some moments for Josh, up on the buckboard, to pick out four figures walking along the road. They were shimmery and black in the dawn light, walking in a line, and heading their way.

  Karel, beside him on the cart, racked her Glock and sat up alert. She’d seen them, too. “Looks like they’re coming up from Cumberland,” Josh said. “Could be some of your boys.”

  Karel shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not, but let’s keep our wits about us.”

  She reached back and shook Donald and the others awake from where they’d been sleeping. “We’ve got company.”

  The details of the four figures became clearer the nearer they came to the wagon along the road. They were dressed in black, their faces covered in bandanas that showed only their eyes above the material. They were armed and had small packs on their backs. They weren’t geared up for a long expedition into the mountains and didn’t look like they were far from needing more supplies. They kept their weapons slung over their shoulders and didn’t take anything like a threatening formation.

  Josh brought the wagon to a halt in front of them.

  The figure in the middle held up his hand in welcome. “Karel, you made it!” The bandana over his face was pulled down to reveal a young, fresh-faced man with a poor attempt at a beard clinging to his face like scrub in a dry desert. His eyes held more than a suggestion of intelligence, however. In a moment, he had walked forward and clasped Karel’s hand to shake it vigorously, and, Josh noted, with some relief.

  “Jingo!” Karel said, her smile broad and filled with a similar amount of relief. “Jingo Gold, what are you doing out here? Clitheroe let you off your leash at last?”

  The grin on Jingo’s face was short-lived, to be replaced by a grim line as his hand fell away. “We were looking for you and Josh here. We knew this was the route you would take into town from standing orders…”

  Karel leaned forward. “What’s wrong, Jingo? I know you well enough to know when you’re sidestepping me. If there’s one thing I hate, baby, it’s being managed. Don’t manage me, boy, just lay it out for me flat.”

  Jingo took a deep breath and blinked against the harshness of the sun. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I have to report that General Clitheroe is dead, the Third Maryland Defenders scattered or killed, and that Cumberland has fallen.”

  Josh’s heart skipped and bucked in his chest. Cumberland fell? What about Maxine? Tally and Storm?

  “Fallen?” Karel jumped down from the buckboard, “Fallen? Who to?”

  Jingo’s reply turned Josh’s flippering heart to ice, solid in his chest.

  “The Harbormaster.”

  Tally was lying on her side on a camp bed fast asleep when Josh came into Jingo’s HQ in a basement in west Cumberland.

  They’d had to wait until nightfall to enter the city, as that was the safest time to move around. The Harbormen were more reticent about patrolling at night now, Jingo had told them as they’d waited the day out for darkness to fall.

  Jingo and the others had been waiting on the route into Cumberland for Josh and Karel for the last day and a half. Figuring that if they were going to be coming from Pickford, now would be the time to set sentries.

  Josh placed a hand on her shoulder and Tally’s eyes came open with a start. “Dad!”

  She moved stiffly as she got up, and hugged him with a wince, favoring her shoulder. She pointed at her shoulder with her free hand as she parted. “It’s okay. I took a slice to the shoulder from a Harborman’s saber. Henry fixed me up, and Jingo and the others have been looking after me until they could make contact with you.”

  Donald sat on the bed next to Tally and kissed the top of her head. Putting his arm around her, he said, “Getting you back is one more coin in the piggy bank.”

  Karel was still in shock from hearing that the Defenders had been overrun and that Clitheroe was dead. “I guess that makes me commanding officer,” she’d said quietly to no one in particular.

  Jingo had outlined what he and his team of twelve Defenders had been doing since the overthrow. They’d gone to ground here in west Cumberland, taking over a series of basements below stores in a medium-sized mall, which on top was burned out and derelict, and from which all the salvageable food, clothing, and weapons had long been taken. Jingo and the others had been going out hunting at night for Harbormen patrols and had had several successes with minimal losses. Although the Harbormen were decent fighters when they were superior in number, or when they had their own element of surprise, they were vulnerable at night and when in small groups. Jingo had said they lacked the tactical acumen to
go about their business unmolested.

  Jingo and the others had exploited that to the max.

  They had over thirty-five confirmed kills, and they’d noticed an attendant drop in the number of patrols they came across at night, which gave them near free range of movement on the periphery of the city.

  Of course, that meant they had to lay low during the day and stay below ground—they had a number of safe houses between the old mall and the Lincoln Elementary School where the Harbormen had taken over Clitheroe’s headquarters.

  The space around Tally and the camp bed was stocked with boxes of canned food, dried goods, and much weaponry. There was plenty of ammunition, and Jingo said he figured they could hold out with what they had for many months if they remained undiscovered.

  It was quite a setup, Josh thought, as between spoonfuls of beans Jingo continued with gusto.

  “But there’s not enough of us to launch a full, head-on assault on them—yet,” he said. “We picked up a couple of stragglers from Keysell’s group after they were attacked, but that still makes less than fifteen of us. Even though a small group of Harbormen has gone south with Tally’s mom and brother, we reckon there are still over two hundred Harbormen holding the city. They’re putting the population to work, those who are left, and killing those who won’t cooperate.”

  “The Harbormaster’s modus operandi for sure,” Josh said bitterly. “They did the same in Parkopolis. Work or die.”

  Karel swore under her breath. “Then what to do?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Josh said, scratching at his near four-day beard. “I’m going south. I can’t let my wife and son be taken to the Harbormaster. Do we know where he might be?”

  Jingo motioned Josh to a gap in the cinderblock wall. Beyond it was a dusty room lit by one candle. On a blood-stained mattress on the floor was a bound and injured Harborman. His eyes were wide with fear and there was a dirty rag shoved into his mouth. He’d been beaten with vicious precision. Blood was caked around his ear and the hair surrounding it. With a wrench in his guts, Josh saw that the man’s fingers were twisted and crooked. At least two of his fingernails were missing.