Supernova EMP
Dark End
Deep End
Bitter End
Final End
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MARCH 11 2020
Copyright © 2020 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Grace Hamilton is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Post-Apocalyptic projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.
www.relaypub.com
Blurb
Only the strong will survive when civilization collapses.
Barnard's Star, light years away from Earth, went supernova, and now, six years later the influence of that catastrophe is just reaching our planet. When the resultant EMP strikes Earth, the world is sent back to the Stone Age. Yet it soon grows evident there are worse things hidden in the dark matter hurricane. Unbearable headaches strike without warning. Human aggression goes off the charts. Small disagreements become bloodbaths.
Josh Standing took an oath to serve and protect those of their North Carolina community. That didn’t change when he left the police force to become a probation officer. If only his wife understood his drive to rescue tomorrow’s troubled youth. But Maxine’s greatest concern is to ensure their son survives the cancer that has ravaged his body. As their marriage circles the drain, she takes the once promising athlete to face the final pronouncement of the Boston specialists—alone.
But the fractured family has never needed each other more.
In the immediate aftermath of the EMP chaos, the separated Standings decide to make their way toward the family farm in West Virginia. However, getting to Maxine’s prepper parents is no small task in a world that’s swiftly turning into kill or be killed.
And when events threaten to separate them further, Josh is faced with an unthinkable choice in this thrilling post-apocalyptic series.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
End of Dark End
Thank you!
About Grace Hamilton
Sneak Peek: Deep End
Also By Grace Hamilton
1
Two days before the Earth went insane, Josh Standing was trying hard not to bring an end to his own personal world.
Josh made a fist and tried to shift the anger that wanted to come out of his mouth and stuff it down into the bones of his hand. All he succeeded in doing was thumping the desk in front of him, barking his knuckles on the satellite radio apparatus. He cursed under his breath at the stinging pain.
“What?”
Maxine’s voice was coming through from Boston tinny and thin. Even in that state it had not been shorn of the bitter anger transported by the degraded signal.
“Nothing,” Josh muttered. “I hit my hand. Just get over telling me what a useless father I’ve been to our son so that I can speak to him.”
Maxine’s sigh came through loud and clear, and Josh sucked on his grazed knuckles as much to soothe them as to stifle the stream of harsh words that threatened to rise to her bait.
Twenty-two years of marriage and two kids—Tally now being eighteen and Storm twenty-one—had educated both parties enough for them to know exactly which buttons to press to drive the stiletto of an argument through the ribs of past passion. Josh and Maxine argued now in very much the same way as they’d used to make love; hot and fevered, neither taking any prisoners in the pursuit of liberation from internal tensions. Now the goals seemed to be to hurt each other just as deeply as they’d once wanted to give each other pleasure. Same drives employed, different destinations.
Josh had promised himself before this call that he would not give Maxine the satisfaction of rising to her provocation. It was a promise he was already coming perilously close to breaking. It wasn’t that he was blameless in all this, as he knew he wasn’t. It took two to tango, after all. And it only took one to be the bigger man, to apologize, to be the first one to apologize—but Maxine and Josh had pretty much reached the point where no one was willing to go first in pouring the much- needed oil on the troubled waters of their marriage.
“Toe-tac.”
A sliver of guilt cut into Josh’s heart as the voice on the transmitter changed to that of his son. That Storm was obviously trying to take the heat out of the situation by using the silly ritual greeting they’d developed when he was very much younger gave Josh pause, and he didn’t offer the expected response right away. When Josh had still been a cop, he’d tried to teach four-year-old Storm tic-tac-toe, and although the boy had grasped the game, he could never get words in the name of it in the right order. Storm would say “Let’s play toe-tac-tic” and Josh would immediately reply “tic-tac-toe.” Over time, this attempted corrective had become their standard conversational opener, and Toe-tac and Tic-tac had morphed into nicknames of sorts. And here, still fizzing with his irritation at Maxine, Josh hesitated. He wet his dry lips, and tried to get back in the game.
“Toe-tac. You there, dad? Has this stupid thing gone down again?”
“I’m here, son.”
“Then…” Storm’s voice caught a crack, “say the words.”
It wasn’t like you could hear cancer as a tone in someone’s voice, but the effects of it could be easily identified if you knew what to listen for. The breathiness of fatigue, the shudder of pain, the trembling of uncertainty over one’s personal future. Maxine and Josh had not necessarily become the cliché of a couple who’d stayed together because of the kids, they were damn close. Had Storm Standing’s Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma not been diagnosed less than a year before, then Josh and Maxine might never even have reached the stage of almost becoming that cliché.
“Hey Tic-tac, how’s things?”
“Pretty rough.”
Storm was in Boston, eight hundred miles and change from the Standing family home in Morehead City, North Carolina. He was having his final R-CHOP chemotherapy sessions in the Travis Institute. A long way to go for chemo, but the oncologist there, Sudhindra, had been a friend to both Josh and Maxine since their college days, and had all but fallen over himself to help in the only way he could when he’d heard about Storm’s initial diagnosis over the social media telegraph. “It’s the least I can do, Josh,” he’d said in his high, earnest voice, which had seemed fired out of the past like a flaming arrow of hope on the telephone.
The least he could do.
The least Maxine and Josh could have done, the ex-cop thought, was to stop pecking pieces out of each other at every opportunity, and concentrate on their son’s recovery.
The least.
Storm’s treatment had been fraught with side effects and debilitating post-chemo complications. Basically, to poison and kill the cancer, you had to poison and very nearly kill the body. Storm had said to his dad on many occasions that the treatment was worse than the cancer itself. “It isn’t worse than dying,” he’d say, “but sometimes I’d choose that over this.”
Once the poisons with the long and complicated Latin names (which Josh was convinced, if translated into English, would come out at as ‘Kill-O-Matic’, ‘Vom-a-Cause’, or ‘Die-O-Sure’) had been pumped by Sudhindra and his team into Storm’s body, there would be a sudden and alarming deterioration in Storm’s condition. The first course of drugs some sixteen weeks before, which Josh had made the trip to Boston with his son for, had caused him to think his son had relapsed and been pushed close to death, such was the change in him. The sickness, the pain, the hair coming out in clumps, the pallor and the listless… nothing… in his eyes. He’d raged at Sudhindra, talking of lawsuits and lawyers, and the tiny Indian in the too-large white coat had smiled, taken Josh by the hand, and explained for perhaps the thirtieth time that, “This is all to be expected.” And that, “The body doesn’t enjoy being poisoned, but the cancer in Storm’s lymph and skeletal system will enjoy it even less.”
“I’m sorry, son,” Josh said now, snapping back to the matter at hand. “It’s your last course, though—after this, it’ll be only up. You’ll be back on the track training before you know it.”
“I hope so.” Storm didn’t sound so sure. “How’s the vacation?”
Josh’s stomach knotted at the word. A Maxine word if ever there’d been one.
Because he knew Maxine was listening in on speaker, Josh had two choices. He could correct his twenty-one-year-old son and say he wasn’t on vacation, and this wasn’t a fun trip; it was strictly business and it was part of his job. Or he could not rise to the bait she’d placed on Storm’s hook and just roll with it.
He chose the latter. “Oh, it’s all okay here. Everyone is basically outside looking up at the sky. Are you going out to look? It’s damn beautiful. Never seen anything like it.”
In his mind’s eye, Maxine’s lips pursed and her fingers drummed on her knees. He could imagine that she’d have much preferred Josh to correct Storm, which would in effect have given her another stick to beat him with—the stick of taking out his anger at her on his gravely ill son.
“We could see it all from the window of the hotel once we pulled back the drapes. It’s amazing. Like a bag of jewels spilled in a corner of the sky.”
Josh smiled at the comment; if Storm hadn’t been such a strong runner before his diagnosis, he could just as easily have been a strong and descriptive poet. Now that he was getting a second bite at the cherry of life, perhaps he could be both. His job as an administrative assistant in the accounts department of Morehead Mercy, in thanks part to Maxine being a nurse specialist at the same hospital, was being held open for him. It would give him something to help get his life back on track. The running… that might take a little longer.
“Did you see the news last night?”
“Nope. What did I miss?” Josh asked. Normally, he was a more than a little hardcore news-junkie, but out here, there were too many other distractions to keep him busy—distractions that also helped him concentrate on something other than the collapse of his marriage and the illness of his son, if only for a few weeks. And that brought another cold chill of guilt to his mind, which he was determined not to show in his voice.
How did it all come to this? he thought. How?
Storm continued, “Professor Halley, the TV science guy, he was going so crazy on Conan last night that they had to cut to commercials, and then he went psycho on CNN and they just shut him down. He was saying some pretty crazy stuff. I thought you might…”
“Not had time, Storm, sorry.” It’s not a vacation. But he kept that last part to himself.
Storm’s voice had an enthusiasm in it which belied his physical frailty and fatigue right now, and it suddenly felt good for Josh to hear that tone in the boy’s voice; it had certainly been a while.
Professor Robert Halley was tangentially known to Josh. A pop-culture scientist who’d used to have his own show back in the late 90s, where he would debunk science myths and promote rational inquiry. He’d been a massive proponent of space exploration when firing tax dollars beyond the Earth’s atmosphere had not been a hugely popular stance to take. That’s when he’d fallen out of favor with the networks, and instead retired to write books and trawl the lecture circuit. These days, he often turned up on talk and news segments as a Rent-A-Science-Dude—a man in his late fifties with bug-eyed glasses and hair in a dirty-blond ponytail that made him look like a refugee from the Grateful Dead rather than MIT.
Josh remembered Storm watching him on YouTube when he’d gone through his question everything phase, and considered Halley a great communicator, if a little wired.
“He thinks there’s going to be some kinda problem with the supernova.”
Two nights ago, a sparkling smudge to the side of Orion’s belt had lit up the night sky like a smeared moon. First, it had been a white dot which the people who’d first seen it had thought to be an approaching aircraft, but it had grown visibly as the watchers had observed it with increasing concern. When it had become a blurry, pearlescent splotch on the night sky, like the negative image of a Rorschach test, the world’s media had gone into overdrive. Mainly because of the new light in the sky, but also, it seemed, because NASA and all the major observatories of the world had been taken completely by surprise.
Once the telescopes and instruments of the world had been trained on the still growing object, now brighter than the stars around it, jaw-dropping information had begun spreading. Barnard’s Star—at six light years distance, the closest star which could been seen in the Earth’s northern hemisphere—had exploded. The supernova, catastrophically destroying itself in a stellar detonation, had thus sent out a wave of light which was now, six years later, just becoming visible on Earth.
The spectacle, and it surely was unusual, had turned almost everyone on the planet into an amateur astronomer overnight. The UFOlogists had called it alien intervention, and fundamentalists had called it a sign from their own particular deities of choice. Many people had been flocking to churches, and a similar number had flocked to bars. Humanity had done what it always did when something strange and wonderful happened–everyone reached for their crutch of choice and leaned on it as heavily as they could.
“What was Halley saying?” Josh asked, wanting to keep his son talking.
“Crazy stuff, Dad. He said the government was keeping the truth secret, and they knew a lot more than they were letting on. He said he had sources within NASA and the NSA who were trying to get the news of the dangers out to the world, and they were being stopped at every turn.”
“Sure sounds crazy.”
“He looked terrible, Dad. Never seen him look so scared. Conan asked if Halley’s psychiatrist was as concerned, for a cheap laugh, and then on CNN they cut away from him, and he tried to get back in front of the cameras and you could see security hauling him off screen! It’ll be on YouTube. I can send you the link.”
“Thanks, I’ll get the popcorn.”
Storm laughed. It was a good sound, and made Josh feel so much better. It also made him feel better that Maxine, sitting next to Storm, would have hated it coming as a response to Josh’s comment just as much as Josh had loved it. And then he felt like a heel for thinking that.
How, again, did it come to this?
“Halley was saying we’ve never had a supernova happen so close to our solar system before, so we don’t know what’s going to be riding the wave behind the light. Conan reached behind his desk and held up a surfboard, and said he was ready to hang ten in the stars like the Silver Surfer.”
Josh could almost hear the audience’s laughter in his head as Storm relayed the story. He imagined Halley’s
eyes, darting confusedly behind his bug-eyed glasses, his lips thin and his hands trembling on his knees. Public humiliation was the surefire way to prick someone’s bubble, and when you could add gas-lit layers of suggested crazy onto that, all the better.
“What stuff riding the wave?” Josh asked after a moment. “What did he mean?”
“Dunno, Dad. They never really let him get it out, but he looked… well, he looked terrified.”
Josh thought of the others now, outside looking at the smudge. The sky over this wilderness was wide and cloudless tonight. The young people in his charge weren’t what you’d call readers of Nature or National Geographic, but even they had been moved to kick back, forget their attitude for a few hours, and look up at the beautiful spectacle high above them, moving slowly across the sky. Josh had been tempted to stay outside with them longer, but his call to Maxine and Storm had been scheduled already, the satellite time booked. Even a tense exchange with Maxine was worth it to rub away the guilt he felt about being out here instead of in Boston with his son.
Josh knew that he could have bugged out of the trip, too. His boss would have understood. He knew that, if he’d not stuck his heels in and made sure his nineteen-year-old daughter Tally had also come along with him—instead of giving in to her insistence on staying home while both parental units were separated by space, time, and emotional breakdown—he’d have had more than enough reason to cry-off.
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