Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Ten-Foot looked like he was going to swear and shoot her in the face where she knelt. But before he could speak, a machete cut through the canvas and buried itself in Dawidziak’s guts.

  The tear in the material was followed by the screaming face of a woman in her forties with wild blond hair and a mouth forming a wide O of rage.

  Ten-Foot shot her in the face instead.

  Maxine felt her point had been made, and started to unlock the chains around her ankle. Ten-Foot, eyes muzzy with sleep, blinked away tears from eyes that had dried out from being open too long while sleeping. He made his way across Dawidziak’s body and placed the SIG in Maxine’s hands.

  “You help me fight them off and we’ll see what’s what. Okay?”

  Maxine didn’t have time to seal the deal with a nod; she was crashing out of the tent with Ten-Foot right behind her.

  Storm was stabbing at a teen who was trying to tear out his eyes with her bare hands. Larry, weaponless, had fallen to his knees trying to retrieve the ax that had spun towards him from the first man Poppet had shot.

  There were five more of the attackers going through the camp—swinging axes, machetes, and baseball bats. It was a blessing that they hadn’t managed to get hold of any guns before they’d carried out their assault.

  Ten-Foot’s Harbormen were groggily coming from the tents, shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. Two of them were killed in the entrances to their tents, cut down before they’d even realized what was going on.

  But now that Ten-Foot and Maxine joined the fray, the five remaining attackers were cut down in a matter of seconds. Storm pushed the girl off him with the point of the knife he held, and Poppet finished her off with the last round in her magazine.

  Maxine knew it had been the last round, too, because when Poppet had fired that last shot, she turned the gun to point at the back of Ten-Foot’s head. Maxine at first anticipated the blast, but then heard Poppet say “Damn” bitterly as the trigger clicked dry under the pressure of her finger.

  Maxine would have taken the opportunity to shoot him, too, if she hadn’t suddenly been punched unconscious from behind and crashed to the ground in complete blackness.

  Maxine woke with a bruise the size of a knucklebone on the back of her head. She quickly ascertained that she was back in chains, the day was climbing towards midday, and Ten-Foot was a very angry man, indeed.

  “What the hell happened to you all? Where were you? How did they get past the guards we set? How did this happen?”

  The surviving Harbormen were standing in a line and all getting themselves ripped a new one. Ten-Foot stalked up and down the line, pointing at Maxine and the others, as well. “How was it that you were all so fast asleep that these four got out of their tent and made it to my tent with no one stopping them?”

  The Harbormen shook their heads. One of them said, “I don’t know,” and got a slap across the chops for opening his mouth at the wrong time.

  Ten-Foot made them bury the five dead Harbormen from his contingent, seemingly enjoying making them dig a grave that would accommodate Dawidziak’s bulk in the stony earth. The Harbormen had worked like dogs, and they looked it. Ten-Foot kept yelling at them that they were only three days from home, and that each and every one of them would pay for this disaster. He hadn’t seemed to make the connection that his men may have been drugged. But the amount of morphine doled out between all of them had been enough to give them a very deep night’s sleep, but not enough to make them unarousable. It was likely he thought that their apparent exhaustion was based in the killing pace he had set the company at, which was finally coming home to roost. There were no awkward questions posed to Larry, and no one, least of all Ten-Foot, went through his bag to see what was missing.

  “What hit me?” Maxine asked Storm as Ten-Foot paced up and down in front of the men digging the graves.

  “Another crazy,” Poppet answered. “Hit you with the flat blade of the machete rather than the edge. You were lucky. And you can thank Ten-Foot for saving your life. He shot her before she could bring the blade down. Almost a good thing that I didn’t have a round left for him.”

  Maxine felt the bruise tenderly. “Almost?”

  Poppet smiled. “Well, maybe a little more than that.”

  When the bodies were buried, Ten-Foot took pity on what remained of the crew and told them they’d stay another night where they were, but ride hard for Jacksonville the next day.

  That cut into Maxine. There was still no way she could go there, not now that she knew what she knew—but the chances of escape, since they had burned their stock of morphine, were more remote than ever.

  All she had left right now was what Ten-Foot had said to her when he’d put Dawidziak’s gun in her hand so that they could go fight for their lives. Had he meant it? She had to find out.

  When the evening meal was cooked and eaten, she went as far as the chain would allow her to sit by Ten-Foot. He had put down his plate of food half-eaten. He hadn’t lost all of his confidence, but the attack and near wipe-out of the Harbormen looked like it had taken its toll. So had all of the shouting and anger. Ten-Foot seemed to be more like the boy he really was, as if he had only been wearing the mask of a man. Or maybe, as Maxine had experienced at times, there was an element of supernova effect to his mood. She knew from bitter experience that bad news seemed to hit her twice as hard now, and her recovery from it was not as assured as it had once been. There was no reason to believe that anything would be different for Ten-Foot. What was he? Eighteen, maybe? And not eighteen for very long, if he was even that. Maxine didn’t exactly feel sorry for him in the moment, but she wondered if he was experiencing a vulnerability that she could use to her own advantage.

  “You help me fight them off and we’ll see what’s what. Okay?”

  Ten-Foot’s words rattled around her head as she made eye contact with him, and for a moment his eyes seemed clouded—as if he was having trouble putting a name to her face. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “What do you want?” sounded like less of a question than a placeholder to give him time to get his scrambled thoughts in order. There were white smears of dried spittle at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes looked a thousand years old, but he was getting it all back on track—it was almost like watching a Rubik’s Cube solving itself in front of her.

  “What did you mean last night? When you gave me the gun? You said ‘help us, and we’ll see what’s what.’ I need to know what you meant by that.”

  Ten-Foot grinned. “You think I’m just gonna let you and the boy go, Mrs. Josh?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  Ten-Foot picked up his plate of food and shoveled two spoonfuls into his mouth, then answered her while chewing. “I meant I’d put in a good word for your friends. They might not end up nailed to the wall of the castle if you play nice. But you and the boy, you’re my ticket to the top, Mrs. Josh. Ain’t no way I’m letting go of that. Not never; no way, no how.”

  The city around the port, a metropolis which had once been the home of nearly a million people, was now a ghost town of burned-out buildings, overturned cars, and rotting bodies left lying in the street.

  They moved along the highway on the horses in near silence. An eerie quiet that didn’t belong around the skeletons of so much civilization was all-pervading. In the distance, downtown Jacksonville showed itself as a ruin of broken, half-collapsed, and burned-through buildings. When the skyscrapers here had burned out of control, they’d gone down in sickening echoes of New York’s twin towers. It was a catastrophe that had been mirrored across so many other cities in the U.S., and perhaps the world.

  The container cranes looming up like the bones of dinosaurs sent shivers through Maxine. She knew the shape of cranes of that kind well enough to know they were getting close to the port. A sense of dread coursed through her in floes of solid terror.

  Storm reached across from his horse and squeezed her hand. “It’s
going to be okay, Mom. This guy is keeping us alive for a reason. I don’t know why that is, and I can’t guess at it, but I’m sure we’d be dead if he didn’t want us alive now.”

  He could be your father! she wanted to scream at him. We’re going to meet the man who drugged me with a view to raping me. I have no idea if that was the case. I just don’t know. But if it happened, you could have been the product of that!

  But she said nothing to him. She couldn’t form any words in her mouth that would make any kind of sense.

  What if Gabe knew that Storm might be his? What if he’d followed her from afar? He’d had no trouble tracking her down in the early years of her marriage, to Morehead City, and persuading her to go with him to the restaurant. He’d certainly had the money—or his father had—to pay a private investigator to keep tabs on her. He’d correctly surmised that she would, if she was still alive, have made for West Virginia and the M-Bar Ranch, and that was probably where Ten-Foot had been heading when they’d met on the road into Cumberland. What if that private investigator had managed, while Storm had been in college, to get some of his hair for DNA testing? What if Gabe Angel was driven by the desire to see his son and to tell him the truth?

  All these questions spun through her mind in a sickening kaleidoscope that had only gotten worse since the raid on the camp, coming with the realization that her best chance to escape had been lost. And now here she was, riding into the belly of the beast with absolutely no chance to avert the inevitable.

  The port of Jacksonville, Florida, was reached via a route that wound through the city to a nub of headland in a curl of the St. John’s River. A vast flat area of tarmac and bonded warehouses fronted a deep-water anchorage where, before the supernova, container ships from across the world had come to offload their cargo. A row of huge cranes lay idle against the gray of the sky, with a dark line of swampy forest beyond them. The containers—of which there were many, thousands, even—were stacked sometimes four or five high in huge blocks which could have been cargo neighborhoods. Giant-sized warehouses were dotted around the space, and nestled on the landward edge were a complex of buildings that had once belonged to the Port Authority along with the head of a lifeless railroad where full containers not destined for trucks had been taken away by rail.

  In the anchorage, there were two massively different ships from very different ages. One was a substantial container ship, leaning over on its side as if it had tried to climb up onto the dockside to escape the water. Its superstructure had been burned black by fires at some point. The deck was so raked now that what containers it had been carrying had crashed over the side of the ship and currently lay scattered across the dockside like broken toys. The other ship, this one moored against the dock, was in much better shape. Maxine didn’t need to read the name on the side of it to know that it was the Sea-Hawk. A replica Boston clipper that Josh had taken his ragged band of delinquents on out into the Atlantic, in order for them to learn how to operate as a team. She’d seen enough pictures of the Sea-Hawk in the past to recognize it without difficulty, and in any case, it tied in exactly with Ten-Foot being part of the Harbormaster’s entourage.

  Guards in Harbormen uniforms were waiting at a wide chain-link gate which, at a signal from Ten-Foot, was swung back so that the company could go trotting through.

  Night had almost fallen, and down the rows of container blocks, smoky braziers were being lit. There were tents and lean-tos constructed amongst the containers, too, if the blocks were being used as some shelter for the Harbormen. Other containers had been opened and either gutted of their contents or empty already, and in them Harbormen and civilians could be seen sitting at tables. Some playing cards, others dicing, and some just staring at Maxine and the others as they rode past.

  They approached an inner, fenced area beyond the first block of containers. There was a wide concourse of tarmac which had been cordoned off with chain-link between the container block and the side of a huge, bonded warehouse. There were many more Harbormen guarding this fence in comparison to those who’d been on the main gates to the port. They were more alert, too, their uniforms more… uniform, not looking like they had been thrown together in a fit of improvisation.

  Maxine found herself scanning faces, looking for Gabe. Wondering what he might look like now in his newfound position of power. Each face she ticked off in her mind felt like she was counting down for a time bomb to a future explosion. Each face was a tick around the clock of destruction.

  She caught sight of Storm. He kept looking about in something she might have described as awe, focused on the enormous undertaking that the occupation of the port had become. There were hundreds of people there, and maybe thousands more that were camped around the other blocks. They certainly had enough people to raise an army and send it north to Cumberland, so who knew where else the tentacles of this particular octopus reached across the land?

  “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Poppet said from her horse, and she pointed into the cordoned-off area behind the hard-looking guards. The wide, double set of doors on the side of the bonded warehouse were opening. And, from them, a troop of red-uniformed Harbormen, even more formally dressed than the ones on the inner gate, were coming out in double file. They had machine pistols slung across their chests, and Maxine, in the failing light, saw in the middle of that troop a man dressed all in black. He was tall, and walked with precise steps. In the crook of his arm was a golden rod, and on his head was a golden crown studded with jewels.

  She guessed it was Gabe before she could see the features of his face.

  Ten-Foot stopped the company fifteen yards from Gabe and dismounted. Waiting by his horse, he stood to attention. The rest of his men did the same. Only Maxine and the others remained on their horses.

  Maxine watched as Gabriel Angel, in his crown and holding his golden scepter, whispered into the ear of the Harborman nearest him.

  The Harborman nodded, and then he shouldered his weapon and shot the horse beneath Poppet dead with one shot.

  Poppet crashed to the ground with a howl, and only narrowly managed to escape the dead weight of the horse trapping her legs. Maxine and the others didn’t need a second shot; they dismounted, and Maxine reached down to help Poppet to her feet.

  Gabe Angel stepped towards the gate which had still not been opened, and a smile played across his lips as he locked his eyes on Maxine’s.

  “Hello, Max,” he said. “Welcome to Castle Jaxport. Court to the King of America.”

  21

  It was two hours later, and Josh still hadn’t gotten over the shock of discovering who’d trapped them in a basement through the fiendish trapdoors that had sent them crashing down into electrified cages. He also hadn’t gotten over the shock of finding out there was somebody in the world who could make electricity work—even if it was just for a buzzer and electrocuting intruders.

  Josh had been made, at gunpoint, to secure Karel in the way Henry had been secured, and then he’d been let out of the cage to do the same to Jingo.

  Then he’d been asked to handcuff himself to the cage, by both wrists, at which point Professor Robert Halley, TV’s science guy and all-round popular science geek, had trussed him hand and foot before releasing the handcuffs from the cage and letting him sit on the floor with the other three from his group.

  The last time Josh had thought about Professor Robert Halley had been when he’d talked to Storm over the satellite phone on the Sea-Hawk. Storm had told him that the long-haired hippy throwback, who looked more like a member of the Grateful Dead than a well-respected popularizer of science for the masses, had been ridiculed on a talk show and on CNN on the same night that the blast from the supernova had hit. He’d been trying to get the message out that people in the government and/or NASA had warned that particles from the supernova—traveling six years from the cataclysmic explosion—were going to race through the solar system and cause havoc.

  He’d been laughed off the talk show an
d ejected by security from CNN. Josh hadn’t thought any more of him, until now, when the matter had become rather pressing.

  “I know you,” Josh said.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not giving autographs at this time. But I might send you a signed photograph if you’re extra nice,” came the reply of a man who sounded for all the world like he wasn’t tying up his captives, but shooting the breeze with a fan who’d stopped him on the sidewalk outside of a TV studio.

  “You’ve got the power back on, too.”

  “Hardly,” said Halley. “I’ve managed to build a small shield that will allow a battery to power a buzzer, but that’s it. I’m afraid the thirty-thousand-volt thing was a ruse to get you to cooperate. I’m very clever, and most of the people who follow the buzzer are quite stupid. I didn’t mean to entrap people who weren’t badly affected by the Barnard’s Star explosion. If you hadn’t come into the house fully armed and instead just walked on by, you wouldn’t be in the cage. I guess you weren’t as clever as you thought you were.”

  “Why are you trying to capture those affected? To kill them?”

  Halley looked at Josh as if he were a puppy who’d missed the paper. “To cure them. Why else? What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  Halley pulled out an elastic band and tied his gray hair into a ponytail. Now the picture was complete. Professor Robert Halley was in the costume Josh remembered from his show on the tube.

  “You lived here?”

  Halley tutted. “No, of course not. It was my sister’s place. I made for it because it was the best place for me to hide away. If the government are out and about, then they’ll want me, I reckon. See much of the government, Mr. Standing?”

  Josh didn’t understand how Halley knew his name, and that confusion played out on his face. Halley flicked a thumb at the still trussed-up Henry. “Very talkative when he believed the thirty-thousand-volt thing. You’re Josh Standing, she’s Karel something unpronounceable, and he’s Jingo Henry-don’t-know. So, the government. Are they out and about?”