“Okay, Ten-Foot and the others, get below. Let’s let the crew do their jobs.” Josh clapped his hands together like a shepherd with his sheep. “C’mon, let’s do this.”
The probationers began to move awkwardly towards the hatch that led down into the innards of the Sea-Hawk, their faces still unsure, but showing they knew their freedom might depend on what Josh reported when they got back to shore.
All of them, of course, except Ten-Foot.
Ten-Foot stood his ground, even folding his arms across his chest to make his point. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or what happened to our heads, but I ain’t going nowhere until we find out.”
Josh shook his head and pulled Tally’s head close to his mouth so that he could whisper into her ear. “Get the others down below and break out the chocolate or cookies. I’ll deal with this tough guy and be down with you in a minute.”
“I don’t want to leave you…”
“Tally, please. Do as I say. I’ll be a minute. I promise.”
Tally bit her lip, but nodded her head just the same and joined the snake of probationers at the edge of the hatch.
Ten-Foot had not said anything else; he remained stock still, ready for whatever might be thrown at him.
Rollins was a big man, and tough as tempered metal, but there was no way that he could go up against Ten-Foot on his own and triumph in a physical fight. His face seemed to be transmitting that understanding, too. Until, that was, Petersen gauged the tension in the air and stepped up beside Rollins. Then Spackman, who was still eyeing the befuddled Rollins with confusion, turned and stood beside his captain, too. All three men stared down Ten-Foot as the wind slapped at the sails above their heads and the bow of the ship hissed, cutting its way through the waves. The waters were getting heavier, there was no doubt, and the crew needed to be dealing with the concerns of the Sea-Hawk, not getting into complications with a Morehead City baby gangster with a bad attitude.
“Ten-Foot…” Josh began, using the boy’s nickname rather than his given name, this being a small acquiescence that he hoped would soften his attitude enough to get him below. “Look at the weather, you can feel it’s getting worse. The wind’s up, and we need to let the crew get on with this. We can go down, you and me, and we can talk about this. Iron out our differences… yeah?”
Ten-Foot didn’t move, but he did speak. “You gonna send a bad report on me when we get back, Mr. Standing?”
The deal. Always a deal with Ten-Foot. The only way to get anywhere with him was to make him think you were giving him something he wanted. The currency of the street and the imperative of saving face.
“We can go talk about it. We’ve all had a shock. I got hit as hard as you. I don’t know why it happened, so maybe there are extenuating circumstances to your behavior. So, let’s get out of Captain Rollins’ way, and see what we can come up with, yeah?”
It took a moment, but Ten-Foot nodded. He walked towards the hatch.
Rollins visibly relaxed, too, as Petersen retook the wheel and Spackman went to speak to the five other members of the crew who had been standing yards away, unsure of what to do or how to react.
“Keep that boy off my deck,” Rollins growled as Josh started to back away. “If you don’t, you’ll follow him over the side.”
Josh knew that arguing right now wasn’t going to make things any better, but along with the headaches, there was something else going on here. He’d felt it himself… the rising anger, the willingness to fight. He’d seen it in Rollins—and had the bruise on his chin to prove it—and seen it in Tally and Ten-Foot, even though he’d been putting his freedom in real jeopardy.
This wasn’t just a case of gas or mass hysteria. Something was happening to all of them, and it sent a shiver of fear up and down his spine like iced water. All he did was give a nod to Rollins to keep him sweet, and then he went to the hatch and followed Ten-Foot below.
Tally and the probationers were in the male passenger cabin situated below the main deck in the middle of the ship. There were enough bunks for eight people, plus a draped-off area at the back with two more bunks, where Josh and Tally had stowed their gear. Beyond that area was another cabin for the female probationers. Josh had been glad that his bunk was between the two groups. That meant any midnight liaisons between the sexes would be more difficult. Already, Josh had noted how close Dotty-B was getting to Lemming Field. He’d had to break up their canoodling several times. Dorothy Blaine was the seventeen-year-old who went by the moniker Dotty-B and had a rap sheet consisting of many TADAs, possession with intent to supply, and around a dozen charges of petty larceny. Carl ‘Lemming’ Field was eighteen, looked thirty, and had a criminal career a forty-five-year-old con man would have been proud of.
This cabin smelled of old socks, young men, and the residue of cigarette smoke. Smoking below decks was strictly prohibited, but allowed in one area topside, so it was a smell that had been carried down on the probationers’ clothes.
Tally was doling out candy and cookies and cokes from the lockbox in their section of the cabin. Ten-Foot had already jumped up onto his bunk as Josh came in behind them and shut the door on the short corridor behind them.
“What the hell was all that?” Goober Nash was a wiry twenty-year-old with a string of credit card frauds behind him, as well as a murdered father. “I ain’t never felt anything like it. I thought my head wuz gonna ‘splode.”
Heads were nodding in agreement. Puck Gathers, a chubby ex-drug mule (well, he’d better have that behind him) and corner-boy was biting into a cookie, and crumbs spat from his mouth as he continued speaking. “The captain said it might be gas…”
“It’s not gas,” Josh said.
“Then what?” Tally asked.
“We’d smell it if it was gas,” Josh pointed out.
Ten-Foot shook his head. “No, man, we wouldn’t. Methane coming up from the seabed doesn’t smell; if we got caught in a cloud of it, we wouldn’t know…”
“Yes, we would,” Josh countered. Ten-Foot kissed his teeth, and Josh sighed. “Raise your hand if you were up on deck looking up at the supernova.”
Everyone raised their hand.
“Now, keep your hand up if you were smoking before the first headache hit you.”
Only three hands, including Tally’s, went down.
“If you were smoking and we got hit by a cloud of methane, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? We’d have been blown to kingdom come.”
Josh stared hard at the probationers, and Ten-Foot clamped his mouth shut. Now, Josh had the room. Good.
First things first. “Is everyone okay? Physically, I mean. No ill effects after the headaches? Some of us, me included, went down pretty hard—anyone got any injuries I need to know about?”
Josh looked around the room, but thankfully, everyone was shaking their heads.
“Good. Now, this might seem like an odd question… but how do you all feel?”
“Angry,” said Puck, spitting more crumbs, “but I ain’t gonna do anything about it, cuz I ain’t stupid, but I sure felt like it up there.”
Others were nodding their heads. Ten-Foot was impassive, seemingly not wanting to give anything away.
“Anything else?” Josh asked the room.
Everyone started as Goober punched the wall behind his bunk, then said “Oww!” and sucked at his knuckles. When the fist fell from his mouth, he fixed Josh with watering eyes. “That’s how I feel.”
More nods around the cabin.
Josh didn’t get any further as, from outside the cabin, they heard a scream that cut through the night and almost rattled the door in its frame.
Before anyone could react, the door crashed open and Spackman tumbled in. His face was streaked with blood from a wound that had sliced into the side of his head and bisected his ear.
“What the…” Josh managed, before Spackman shoved the door closed and yelled, “Barricade the door, barricade it now! They’ve gone crazy! And when they�
�ve finished killing each other, they’re gonna kill you all!”
As if to make his point, the door splintered down the middle as a fire ax tore through it, and the lights in the cabin went out forever.
4
Maxine dropped Ben’s arm and screamed, “Storm!”
Her son spun from the girl to see the red-headed man with the iron bar storming towards him, and he raised his arms as the metal began its arc of hatred towards him.
Red-Head froze, the bar held at the top of his swing as the back of his jacket creased inward in two places as if punched by an invisible man. He rocked, and dropped back and then fell forwards like a felled tree. It was only then, as Storm scrambled out of the way of the falling man, with his face now dotted with a spray of blood from the exit wounds in his attacker’s chest, that Maxine’s mind caught up with the sounds of the gunfire. Two bullets had been fired from behind her.
Maxine turned.
A policeman in a Boston PD uniform and a cap askew on his head was still covering the man he’d shot with his pistol. Legs spread, arms locked together, eyes unblinking. The policeman nodded to himself, as if satisfied that the man he had shot was not getting up again, and then he holstered his weapon.
He approached and held out a hand to Maxine. “Get up.”
Maxine pointed to Ben. “I can’t. I need to help him. I can’t just…”
The policeman was perhaps in his late forties, thick-set and with what Josh had always described in his fellow offers as a donut belly—a paunch attained from too many donuts snatched on duty between calls. The policeman’s eyes were gray, and flecks of gray hair curled with unruly persistence from beneath his cap. When he spoke again, there was a soft Boston Irish burr to his voice. “Lady, we need to get out of here; the hotel is on fire and I ain’t got no equipment to move the car or the debris. And anyways, I don’t think this young man is going anywhere at all.”
Maxine followed the officer’s finger. Ben’s head had flopped backward and a widening pool of blood was seeping from beneath him.
Maxine checked his pulse, and then felt down below his waist and along his thigh. A sliver of metal was embedded there, and her fingers came away slick and sticky. The blood was dark and arterial. Even if he had stood a chance of getting free, the blood loss would have killed him in moments. Maxine wiped her hands on her own thighs and got up.
“Thank you. You saved my son.”
They began walking over to Storm, who knelt between the two bodies.
“I’m McCready. I don’t know what the hell is happening, but we need to get out of here, and we need to get out now.”
“If you don’t know what’s happening and you’re with the police, then we’re in real trouble.”
“Tell me about it, lady,” McCready said, casting his eyes around the lobby. Many of the able people had left already, spooked by the situation, the fire, and the shooting. But there were still screams floating in from the dark streets outside—screams than ran through an eerie quiet in an absence of normal city sounds—which seemed even louder than those notes of distress.
Storm was wiping Red-Head’s blood from his face as Maxine knelt to check the girl. No pulse. Pupils fixed and dilated. As Maxine felt around the back of the girl’s skull, the pulpy crunch of loosened bones told her that the girl had suffered an appalling injury that may have killed her outright.
“I’m sorry,” Storm said lamely, as if it had been his fault. Maxine squeezed his arm.
“There was nothing you could do.”
McCready had pushed his cap back from his forehead and had another hand on his paunch as he looked around. Smoke was billowing from a stairwell, and also escaping from the crack in the elevator doors. Maxine got up and pulled Storm to his feet. His cheeks had the best color she had seen in them since before the chemo had started, but she could tell from his breathing that the lack of energy was catching up to him, and that flush in his face wasn’t an expression of health, but of fear and worry.
“Okay, let’s go,” McCready hissed as the dull thump of an explosion reverberated through the hotel and a rain of glass fell down onto the plaza outside the back entrance to the building.
“We can’t,” Storm said. “I don’t have any of my meds.”
Maxine looked at the stairs and the gusts of smoke coming down from above.
“We can’t go back to the room.”
“But…”
Maxine turned to McCready. “Will you come with us back to the hospital? It’s only two blocks. We need to get more meds for my son from the Travis Institute.”
McCready sighed. “Lady, I…”
“He’s had cancer. He needs these drugs or he’s going to get ill. You saved him once, Officer McCready. Are you going to make that good work a waste of your time?”
McCready’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, his mouth barred by white strands of spittle. He smacked his lips and swallowed. “Okay, lady, but I really should get you people somewhere safe.”
“You can do that after we have the medications. And please, Officer McCready…”
“Yeah, lady?
“For God’s sake, stop calling me ‘lady’!”
The streets had gone insane.
The only light came from the smudge of the supernova in the sky and the brightness of burning buildings. There were three kinds of people outside the hotel. Those too frightened to move who sat on the sidewalk curb hugging themselves, staring up at the sky. Those who were running in a panic that seemed to have welled up from nowhere at the moment the headache had subsided. And those who were looking for someone to fight. Someone to blame for the way they were feeling and the horror that had been visited upon their city.
Maxine, Storm, and McCready threaded their way through the devastation. There was no logical reason for the fires. They seemed to be springing up randomly all over, from roofs and windows. Cars burned in the street, some with bodies still inside, cooking in the conflagration.
It wasn’t until Maxine saw a light in the upper windows of an apartment, as a woman used a cigarette lighter to catch the curtains of the room she was in alight, that the sickening realization came to her—that, along with the darkness and the panic, some people had been gripped with a destructive urge to destroy and burn.
Boston had, in just a few short minutes, become a nightmare.
They moved in grim silence, sticking close to each other, with Maxine holding Storm’s hand in a way she hadn’t since he’d been ten. McCready, gun drawn, walked ahead with hesitant steps. Maxine couldn’t blame him for being reluctant—this was so outside, so beyond anyone’s comfort zone, that she was grateful that he’d not just run off and left them. At least, with an armed officer by their side, Maxine felt a little safer. But not by much.
A snake of maybe ten young men walked along the opposite sidewalk. There was no logic to their grouping. Some were wearing suits and ties, others being in streetwear with hoodies and low-slung pants worn over expensive sneakers. Moving, they looked like a line of Neolithic hunters, eyes alert and heads scanning from side to side. Missing nothing. As they moved, they tried the handles of parked cars. Some doors opened, and the men would reach inside to take what bags or clothes that they could. For other cars which were locked, they would use a swift elbow to smash a window and get a door open that way if something inside appealed to them.
Two of them looked directly across the street at McCready in his police uniform. As if daring him to intervene. McCready looked away.
“Ain’t worth getting involved,” he commented.
Maxine nodded.
“Keep going,” Storm said breathlessly. “Just pray they don’t think we might have something they want.”
McCready nodded and they moved on. The Travis Institute of Oncological Medicine was a modern re-furbishing of an early 20th century brownstone. The windows were dark but thankfully, Maxine thought, no one had started a fire inside.
Yet.
Storm stumbled and went down on one knee, breat
hing hard. Maxine and McCready placed their arms gently under his, and when he nodded his assent they helped him back to his feet.
The wide parking lot in front of the institute was perhaps half full of cars, but there were only a few people around them. They got out of McCready’s way when they saw the gun, too, one woman in a nurse’s uniform cowering down behind a silver SUV.
“This is insane,” Storm said as they made their way past the nurse and up to the steps of the institute. And as if to underline the insanity of the moment, on the fifth floor of the building, a window exploded outwards. In the rain of glass and debris that came down, a computer monitor first burst open on the concrete, to be swiftly followed by an office chair and then, finally, with a sickening crash of broken bones, a man in a white doctor’s uniform who crashed headfirst into the spread of glass and metal.
The was no point checking to see if he had survived the fall. Maxine just encouraged Storm into the building and McCready followed, his face pale and his jaw set.
The foyer inside the institute was eerily quiet. No emergency lighting had kicked in, but there were enough windows to bring in weak light from the fires outside and Maxine’s eyes had become used to the lack of illumination on the walk from the hotel. Her mind still reeled at the things that had happened, and the things she had seen, but for now it was all too much to process. All she could do right now was deal with the moment, and the moment right now dictated that they make it to Sudhindra Gokhale’s office on the fifth floor of the building to see if the doctor was there and if he could authorize the medication Storm needed to treat the symptoms of the chemo…
What am I thinking? Maxine corrected herself. Authority? Dammit, I’m getting the medication whatever happens. Sudhindra or no Sudhindra.
“Where now?” McCready asked.
“I’m going upstairs to get what we need. Storm’s too exhausted to climb the stairs. You look after him here, and I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 4
