“Mom!” Storm protested, wavering on the spot like a tuning fork. “I can make it…”
“No, you can’t. Just wait here. I’ll be quicker without you.”
“Take his gun,” Storm said, pointing at McCready’s belt. McCready’s eyes flashed.
Maxine sighed. “No. You and McCready and McCready’s gun stay here. But I’ll take your baton and mace if you have any, officer.”
McCready reached to his utility belt and took a can of pepper spray from a pouch, as well as the brutal, thick tube of an extendable baton from a clip. He had to flick his wrist twice to get the baton to click out, and almost took his own nose off in the process.
Poor guy, Maxine thought, he’s more scared than I am. If only Josh were…
She killed the thought where it stood, before it had a chance to get its boots on. If this thing with Josh was over, then she really needed to start thinking like they were individuals, and not joined at the hip. And, right now, Josh was a thousand miles away in the middle of an ocean. As a notional model of what a messy divorce might look like in terms of physical and emotional distance, you couldn’t have a better one.
Maxine took the equipment and slipped the can into the pocket of her jacket, holding the baton out in front of her like a divining rod.
“Okay. Stay here, don’t get into trouble, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
McCready motioned to a door behind the reception desk. “We’ll wait in there. Stay out of the open.”
Maxine nodded grimly and walked off into the gloom.
On the many occasions she’d been in the institute over the last sixteen weeks, to accompany Storm for his chemo, she now realized that she hadn’t taken much notice of her surroundings, so absorbed as she’d been in the matter at hand—namely, Storm’s illness. It had been a matter of going into the building, heading for the clanky old elevator that seemed as old as the building itself, and going up to Sudhindra’s office, which was located at the head of the chemotherapy unit. If what had happened to the wider city had been replicated in the institute, as that breaking window had suggested, then it was almost certain that the elevator would not be working. And it was then she realized that she had no idea where the stairs to the upper level would be, and how she would gain access to them.
At the end of the corridor leading from the reception area, along two walls of modernist graphic art posters in silver frames, there was a door that had an electronic lock which Maxine and Storm would normally have been buzzed through from reception. It wasn’t like the institute was Fort Knox or anything, but all hospitals had a baseline level of security in these troubled times, and the double doors of gray/green frosted glass would be Maxine’s first obstacle.
The further she went down the corridor towards the door, and the further she went from the foyer, the more light was leeched from her surroundings. It wasn’t full dark, but the grim lack of light was oppressive.
This might be a really short trip, she thought as she reached out to push at the doors. With no one to buzz her through, the usual hummm-click of the mechanism being remotely released didn’t reach her ears.
But the door opened with a suck of air, and swung back.
Whatever had befallen the city’s power grid had also rendered the door lock inoperative. She guessed she must be benefitting from a safety feature included here, where anything like a fire knocking out the electrics would lead to an automatic system blowing all the doors in the place so that people could escape. Stepping through, she blessed the foresight of the engineers who’d converted the old brownstone.
Beyond the doors, there was more illumination than found in the corridor she’d just left. There was a short square lobby with a large window at the far side which overlooked an internal courtyard. She could see beyond the roof of the institute, where, perhaps a block away, a tall apartment block was ablaze like a Roman candle against the night sky. It was throwing crazy carnival light across the whole area. The dazzling yellow and orange light from the conflagration almost crackled and popped like a raging campfire around her. A fist of smoke punched into the black air, but even here it wasn’t thick enough to obscure the light from the supernova that hung high in the heavens like a ragged blister on the sky.
Maxine tried not to think about what was going on inside the apartment block, and just got on with finding the stairs. The door to the elevator was half open, and a body, the face a bloody mess, lay dead there, half in and half out. It was a man in a janitor’s uniform, and a broken mop handle stuck out of his back from between his shoulder blades. Maxine had to step around a wide puddle of blood as she moved past.
She never could have imagined, in all her years as a nurse, that she would ever find herself just walking around dead bodies as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To offer a body some dignity in death—and she’d carried out last offices for hundreds of sadly departed patients in her time—was something that Maxine had once prided herself on, knowing her own stoic and compassionate ability to achieve such closure for them. And yet, here she was walking past a corpse, leaving it where it lay.
That thought hung an icy block of guilt right in the center of her heart.
Maxine shook her head to clear it, reckoning suddenly that she should be more concerned with avoiding the person who had stuck the mop handle in the back of the janitor than his corpse.
How the tenets and underpinnings of civilized society could be flicked off so easily. Maxine held the palm grip of the baton all the harder, her fingers becoming buttery with sweat and feeling the thump of blood in her temples. There was going to be a doozy of a headache to follow this, once she could allow herself the luxury of the time for it to develop.
Next to the elevator was a door to a storeroom, and beyond that was a frosted glass door on which she could read STAIRS in the flickering light.
She opened it and went through.
There was a small amount of light coming through the glass, but the stairwell was windowless and, as she craned her neck up, the space ascended up into total blackness.
Maxine swallowed. No point going back now.
And that’s when she heard the breathing.
Oh god oh god oh god oh god.
There was a shuffling from behind the stairs, as if someone had been hiding behind them like a spider waiting on the edge of her web for the vibration of prey caught in the sticky strands of her trap.
Maxine had no more than a second to make up her mind. Go back, stand and fight whatever was shuffling out of the dark, or…
Maxine ran for the stairs, pounding upward blindly as she moved the baton to her left hand and used her right to haul her weight up the bannister all the faster. Feet working on muscle memory alone.
Stairs were stairs were stairs.
You could ascend them with your eyes closed, Maxine had figured, and that’s exactly what she did. She counted the steps on each flight until she reached the small landing in between, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to go on up. Thirteen steps.
Unlucky for some.
Maxine kept her eyes closed, thinking her consciousness into her feet and keeping all her attention there. The smacking of her feet on the stairs blocked out all of the breathing from whatever was hiding in the dark below, and she careened up the first level in near total darkness without falling.
Maxine didn’t pause; she swung herself around again and clattered up the next thirteen steps to the mid-level, then the same again and again until she lost count… was this the fourth floor, or the fifth? She couldn’t decide and could see nothing that would confirm it. Maxine’s breath came in ragged bursts, head buzzing, her heart earth-quaking in her chest.
She made it onto the small landing between staircases and dug her hands into the rail, forward momentum propelling her forward, ready to reach the level she was ultimately aiming for, only to find her feet taken out from under her, sending her arms flailing and her body catapulting through the air to crash into a wall. The impact kno
cked the breath from her lungs and skittered the baton out of her grasp.
It clattered away to her left with a stinging ring of metal on concrete, and then the person whose legs she’d tripped over rolled on top of Maxine and clawed into both her biceps with an iron grip.
5
The door exploded again, sending splinters and chunks of wood bursting into the cabin. Spackman sprang back, spraying blood from his head wound like he was a Jackson Pollock painting. He crashed into Josh’s chest and Josh stumbled into Tally.
Ten-Foot jumped down from his bunk and tried to push his way through Lemming, Scally, and Marshal, away from the disintegrating door. Josh heaved Spackman back to his feet, and called out a warning. “Everyone! Get back! Get back!”
The probationers and Tally didn’t need to be told twice. Tally pushed Dotty-B and KK before her and they scrambled back in the near dark, the only illumination now coming through the holes in the door being cut apart by the ax.
The boys weren’t making any provisions for the female probationers, either—it was a free-for-all. Scally Lish, all curls and earrings that you could jump a dolphin through, went down with a crash, and Ten-Foot placed his boot in her back to step over her. Once Spackman had passed by, Josh grabbed Scally’s wrists and pulled her up behind him like a sack of coal.
The door continued to disintegrate as the assailant on the other side renewed the voracity of his assault. The ax bit into the wood again and again. By the time a white-shirted arm that could have belonged to any of the crew members of the Sea-Hawk reached through to lift the latch keeping the door closed, Josh and the others were already backed into the probation officer’s bunk area, with only a flimsy curtain between them and the ax wielder. It was dark, but at least there was no debate to be had about where to go.
Josh crashed into Marshal, the eighteen-year-old ‘steal anything on wheels’ car thief, and they almost went down. Josh grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck and propelled him forward.
“Keep going!” Josh yelled; his arms spread wide like he was corralling livestock. “Go through the female bunk area. There’s a door there we can get behind.”
The other youngsters kept going. Spackman put a hand to his bleeding ear, his eyes wide with shock and fear that Josh could only see sketches of in the gloom. When everyone was through the curtain at the other end of the mid-section cabin, Josh pushed Spackman ahead of him and looked around for anything he could use as a weapon. He knew he only had a second or so before the ax-carrier came through the door. Whoever it was holding the weapon was obviously having trouble with the door latch, though, because the sounds from behind the curtain had returned to being those of the ax smashing into the wood of the door. Perhaps the man was too frenzied to muster the necessary calmness to operate the latch blind, and for a second Josh thanked whoever had kitted the doors of the Sea-Hawk out in sturdy oak. Anything less and they’d already be toast.
In the dim light, Josh’s eyes alighted on Tally’s camera bag. He dived for it and pulled it out of the way, knowing what he’d find. Beneath the bag was Tally’s tripod. It had a hefty aluminum construction, with a heavy camera mount at one end and enough weight to feel solidly defensive in his hands. It probably wouldn’t be a huge help in defending against an ax, but that wasn’t what Josh had in mind.
As Josh hefted it, the noise of Spackman’s harsh breathing close by told Josh that the injured crewmember hadn’t followed the others through the curtain and the door at the other end of the girl’s cabin. Nothing to be done about that now.
He held the tripod out in front of him as the door continued to be battered.
“What the hell is going on? Who is that?”
“Man… I dunno. It’s Petersen, I think. One second, he was ordering the crew to take in sail, and then he had the fire ax and was trying to kill me. If I hadn’t seen the shock in the eyes of the captain when Petersen came up behind me, I wouldn’t be here now. I just about managed to get out of his way. He’s gone insane, man. It’s…”
Behind the curtain, the destroyed door was being kicked aside, scraping against the wooden floor. Whatever was left of the base was protesting and squeaking as the kicks continued and then, with a roar, Petersen was through.
“Spackman! I’m gonna kill you, you lousy creep! I’m gonna chop you up and then I’m gonna burn you. Burn you to ash!”
Josh stood ready with the tripod, to one side of the curtain. If Petersen hadn’t had the presence of mind to operate the door latch, then Josh took the leap of faith that Petersen wouldn’t be expecting Josh to be waiting for him on the other side of the partition.
And so, it proved.
Petersen blundered forward against the drape, slashing it with his ax. It was the equivalent of an inexperienced boxer leading with his chin. Josh just pressed himself back, waited for Petersen’s face to appear, and then stabbed at it with the mount end of the tripod. The short but explosive blow smashed into Petersen’s nose, but more than that, the shock in his eyes now gave Josh the advantage. The ax came down, but without power in it as Petersen reeled. Another blow from the tripod cracked into Petersen’s temple, and he went down on one knee. Josh gave him an uppercut beneath the chin next, with the full arc of the tripod rounding out like the best golf shot getting his hole in one. Petersen’s hand opened, the ax clattered to the floor, and the tall Swede keeled over unconscious, his nose and chin bleeding freely.
Josh picked up the ax and handed it to Spackman, and then, dropping the tripod, he began ripping the curtain into strips to make something with which to bind their attacker.
“Tally!” Josh yelled as he rolled Petersen over and yanked his wrists behind his back.
God, what I wouldn’t give for a utility belt and a pair of handcuffs right now, he thought bitterly.
Tally stuck her head through the drape and Josh just caught the look of relief on her face as she saw him tying Petersen’s hands together.
“Are the others okay?”
“Apart from Ten-Foot pushing past everyone to hide in the head, yeah, there’s two doors between them and the stairs to the deck. But, Dad…”
Josh began on Petersen’s ankles with the torn strip of drapery. He fixed her gaze with his, hearing the note of anxiety in her voice.
“There’s screaming coming from topside. Sounds like there’s one hell of a fight going on up there.”
Josh tied a double-knot on Petersen’s ankles and then hog-tied them with a loop of material running through the makeshift restraints on Petersen’s wrists. When the man woke up, if he was still disorientated and crazy, he might not have the wherewithal to release himself anytime soon.
Petersen stirred as if in response to the thought, and Josh rabbit-punched him twice behind the ear to send him swiftly back to unconsciousness.
“Spackman,” Josh said. “They got guns topside? Weapons of any kind?”
Spackman pointed at the tripod. “Anything can be a weapon if you put your mind to it. But no guns. Knives from the galley, I guess. A flare gun for signaling for help. Stuff like that.”
A piercing scream cut through the cabin, coming from the deck hatch where Petersen had attacked. As Josh watched, a body fell headfirst through the hatch and crunched down onto its face. There was a fire ax buried in the back of its skull.
“More fire axes, of course,” Spackman said drily.
The screams and yelling from above decks continued for half an hour and then went silent, but Josh waited another hour before he ventured up to investigate.
They’d pulled Petersen through into the girl’s cabin as the probationers had sat around in silence, the bravado and braggadocio sucked dry by the events of the last hour. Even Ten-Foot, who’d had to be persuaded to leave the relative safety of the toilet cubicle, had lost a large chunk of his attitude. No one came down from above in all that time, and all that could be heard were the bursts of spray coming off the prow of the Sea-Hawk, the flapping of wind in the sails, and the thrum of the ropes as they vibrated.
<
br /> The ship itself was rolling a little, but not enough to give Josh any concern that they were yet in real danger. Tally gave out more chocolate and cookies, but no one felt much like eating.
Josh fixed up Spackman’s ear the best he could with the first aid kit in the cabin, and the crew member sat trembling as the adrenaline of his flight from Petersen’s murderous attentions dissipated.
Josh wanted answers, but he made himself wait. He’d never, even on his most dangerous days as a cop, experienced anything like this. It was totally unbelievable in almost every respect. Once the yells and screams from above ceased, it became a little easier for him to think without distraction.
“How far are we from port?” Josh asked Spackman eventually.
“A good thousand miles. If no one is at the wheel, and we’re just going where the wind takes us, we might be going anywhere. The last I looked at the compass, just before the first of the headaches hit, it was going haywire in the mount. Just spinning and turning. I turned to the captain to report to him, and that’s when we all went down and Kip fell from the rigging. After that… well, you know what happened after that.”
“How are we going to get back to land?” Dotty-B pleaded. Her brown eyes were huge in the gloom, her be-ringed hands working in her lap like rats fighting in a sack. As with many of these kids, once you scratched the surface of the attitude, there were just frightened children below. “I don’t know how to sail this ship thing, and if the crew are all killing themselves up there, what are we gonna do?”
Josh had to admit that she had a point. Even though it was quiet up there now and they had no idea who was alive or dead, could they really, even with Spackman’s help, sail the Sea-Hawk back to the U.S. with no functioning compass, not to mention a murderous rage that might break out in any of them without warning?
He looked at Tally. Of course, she was Josh’s first priority, but there was little chance of keeping her safe in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean when the food and the water ran out. Not her more than the others, anyway. The cook, Jonty Bride, had told Josh they had more than enough food and water for the journey, but the journey was only supposed to have lasted another week. What about after that?
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 5
