I’m getting ahead of myself, he thought. Once we drop off the communication grid, there’ll be Coast Guard out looking for us. We have a flare gun, we’re bound to see a passing ship at some point, and we can send up a distress call. And maybe the satellite base station will come back online.
There was no need to panic.
Not yet, anyways.
“It’s okay, Dotty. We’ve got food and water, and we’ve got the means to communicate, and with Mr. Spackman’s help here, I know we’re going to be fine.”
“That’s if we don’t all kill each other first like the crew,” said Ten-Foot darkly. Since being persuaded out of the toilet, he’d recovered a little of his swagger, and it showed now. His eyes burned into the others, daring them to say something about why and where he’d hid himself during Petersen’s assault. No one bit, and Josh had long since decided against saying anything, opting instead to not turn up the heat and give Ten-Foot the responsibility of keeping an eye on Petersen while he fixed Spackman’s ear. When Petersen had awoken and begun moaning incoherently through the blood caked around his mouth, Ten-Foot had rummaged in one of the girl’s bags without asking, pulled out a dirty sneaker sock, and stuffed it into Petersen’s mouth. When the first mate had then struggled to breathe because the of his blood- filled nostrils, Ten-Foot had taken great pleasure in squeezing the blood out of the cavities and clearing them. Not before everyone in the cabin had heard the grind of bones beneath the flesh, though, and Petersen had squealed like a problem child being sent to bed without any supper.
Now the Swede lay still, mouth stuffed and eyes wide. Josh had no idea if he was listening and assimilating what they were saying, or if he was still too far gone, but more than a couple of times in the hour of silence from above decks, he’d found himself dropping down on one knee to check the knots and bonds of his impromptu hogtie.
“Ready?” Josh asked Spackman.
“No,” Spackman replied quickly, “but I don’t have no choice, I guess.”
Josh nodded, and turned to Tally and the others. “Just stay here until I call down to tell you that it’s safe to come up, okay? No heroics, no attitude from the rest of you. Mr. Spackman and I are going topside to see what’s what. I don’t know what we’ll find, but we’re going armed, and you’ll all find out what the situation is when we do.”
The nods of assent from Tally and the others were heartening. Josh still had the room. He guessed taking on and beating Petersen had gone a long way to promote the idea that, at least for now, no one should give him any trouble, and even Ten-Foot had dialed it down. How long that would last, Josh had no idea, but he’d take what there was of it now, for sure.
Josh retrieved the fire ax from the dead crewman’s skull, needing to put his foot on the dead man’s back as he did so in order to lever it free.
This was turning into a day he’d not forget in a hurry.
Spackman held Petersen’s ax in a white-knuckled grip and made a couple of dry-throated swallows, smacking his lips as he followed Josh up the stairs and onto the deck.
Wind and spray swirled around the rigging. The sky was still dark, apart from the gaseous glow of Barnard’s destruction. Swells moved the ship a little more firmly now, too. This wasn’t a full-blown storm, but Josh felt the chill of the wind in his bones—well, he assumed it was the wind… it could have just been the freezing terror of the situation.
The sails were billowing stiffly with the heavier gusts, pulling hard at their ropes and spars. Pregnant with strain.
The deck in front of them was empty apart from a few splashes of blood which Josh assumed had come from the crewman who’d fallen through the hatch with an ax in the back of his head. Josh could see all the way to the wheel, which spun and turned as if it were in the hands of an invisible pilot.
“Where are they, do you think?”
Spackman shook his head and bent down. He picked something up and held it out to Josh.
It was a severed hand, and he was holding it by the finger. “Well, bits of them are here.”
Josh shook his head and moved forward. He didn’t know what was worse, finding a severed hand or Spackman’s attempt at dark humor to assuage his internal anxiety.
Spackman threw the hand over the side rail and into the sea, and they moved on.
They found what was left of the crew in the bow section of the Sea-Hawk. Bodies were strewn about like autumn leaves. All had died violently, and the deck was awash with blood that rippled still in the stiff breeze off the water.
Everyone was accounted for except Captain Rollins. Some of the crew had been killed by axes; others looked like they’d been strangled. One had a split in his cheek from lips to ear and looked as if someone had tried to tear off his face with their bare hands.
No wonder the screaming had been loud and anguished, and it was only the mercy of death that had ended it.
Josh rubbed at the stubble on his chin as he surveyed the scene. What had brought this on, visiting murder upon them all in such a grotesque fashion?
He looked up at the hazy glow of the Barnard’s supernova. Could an exploding star, light years away, have something to do with this? It seemed too crazy to contemplate, but he couldn’t help thinking back to the conversation he’d had with Storm on the satellite phone, about the mad professor on CNN and Conan. Could he really have been talking about something like this?
No.
Because if he had, that would mean that this wouldn’t be a local problem for just them on the ship, but could mean that the star had affected… well, everywhere.
Even Boston.
Josh shook his head. These were questions for another time. First things first. “We have to find Rollins.”
Spackman lifted his ax. There were tears in his eyes from looking at the bodies of his crewmates. “Let’s do it then.”
They each took one side of the deck, moving away from the bodies. Walking in tandem, axes at the ready, eyes keenly swinging around the masts and lockboxes, past the curls of rope and hatches leading down into the bowels of the ship. Spackman looked up into the rigging as they went, making occasional adjustments to the sails where he could. “We should take in the sail, but that’s not a one- or two-man job. The Hawk is flyin’ now, and we don’t have control. That’s not good.”
“I’m not letting Tally and the others up here until we’ve dealt with Rollins.”
Spackman nodded grimly. “If we had more people searching for him…”
“We’ll search. Those kids are in my care. Whatever they’ve been found guilty of doesn’t make them expendable. We’ll find Rollins, and then we’ll deal with the sail. There’s only so many places he can be.”
They reached the prow of the Sea-Hawk, having searched everywhere topside that they could. They’d found so sign of Rollins. The deck was as empty as that of the Marie Celeste.
That only left one other option.
“We’re gonna have to go below.”
Spackman returned Josh’s anguished expression.
There were two levels of decks below. The cabin sections where there were cabins for the passengers and two cabins for the crew; on top of those, on the same deck, the Sea-Hawk boasted a cabin for the captain, the galley, and a small stateroom that doubled as a mess where everyone could eat.
Below this deck was the hold, the storage areas, the freezers, the water tanks, the ballast, the bilges, and the engine room. The engine was there only as a back-up, and Josh had only heard it used when the Sea-Hawk had chugged out of port on the first day of the trip, before Rollins had let the sails power the Sea-Hawk out into open water.
It occurred to him that, if they could get the engine going, perhaps they wouldn’t need the sails at all. He didn’t know if there was enough fuel oil to get them back to civilization, but it might give them a fighting chance.
“Right, we’ll start on the lowest level first. With the engine room, and work our way up,” Josh said as they approached the nearest hatch that would lead them down
into the ship’s lower decks.
Spackman lifted the hatch and rocked it back on its hinges. He took one step onto the ladder and froze.
“Dad!” Tally screamed. “Dad! He’s got me! Help! Please! Help!”
And then her voice was immediately cut off.
6
Maxine tried to shake her arms free of the vice-like grip holding her down, but the fingers were far too strong. The ghost of a grey shape against the blackness of the stairwell might have been either a face or the chest of a body.
She kicked up with her knee and felt the bone of her kneecap sink into something fleshy and soft.
The fingers on her arms let go immediately, and the body above her groaned out an expression of deep and abiding pain. “No. Please. I… I thought you were her!”
Almost before the words registered in her head, Maxine recognized the voice. “Sudhindra? Sudhindra, is that you?”
There was a second or two of shocked silence, and the drawing in of breath. Then, “Maxine?”
Maxine scrambled to her knees, feeling out in front of her for the steps going upward. “We have to get out of here; there’s someone down there following me up. I don’t know who they are, but they don’t sound friendly.”
She felt one of the strong hands running along her forearm to take her hand. “No, she’s not. Come on. I know it’s dark, but there’s only one more flight of stairs to the fifth floor.”
Sudhindra took Maxine’s hand and, together, once they’d found the first step, they made their way up to the fifth level of the institute and through the door into a corridor that was lit, if anything, even more brightly than the level below by the burning building. Through the fifth- floor windows, Maxine could see what looked like hundreds of fires burning across the city. A huge sports arena—she couldn’t make out which one—was alight in a ring of fire. Smoke snaked up into the sky like Medusa’s hair written large into the size of the city, writhing and pulsing, and all the while, the stain of the supernova hung there in the heavens, too bright now to even be extinguished by the smoke.
“Help me,” Sudhindra said, pulling a small leather sofa from the reception area of his oncology department to barricade it against the door they had just come through.
Maxine brought up two more chairs as Sudhindra, face sweating in the firelight, his black hair awry and his glasses askew, with his white coat stained with blood and his eyes full of anxiety, manhandled a filing cabinet from behind that level’s reception desk and thudded it against the door.
“Who is that out there?”
“Gabby,” he answered quickly, as if he didn’t want the word to spend any more time in his mouth than it had to.
“Doctor Hallows? Gabby Hallows?”
“Yes.” He nodded, his eyes welling with fresh tears.
Maxine remembered Sudhindra’s second- in- command with affection. She’d made a whole extra effort with Storm, staying on long after she’d needed to just to speak to him and explain everything that was going on with the chemotherapy, right down to every fractal detail Storm had needed to put his mind at rest. Bright, bouncy, beautiful Gabby Hallows, reduced to breathing like a caged monster and climbing up the stairs behind Maxine like dread made incarnate.
“She pushed Raymond through the window, and then she killed Bobby. Broke his mop in half and stabbed him in the elevator. I went down to see if I could help him, but there was nothing I could do. I was waiting at the top of the stairs for her. To see if I could… I don’t know… neutralize her in some way. But you… you got to me first.”
A thumping thud rattled the door behind the barricade, and a low, keening growl vibrated through the frosted glass.
“Come on, Sudhindra. I know you’re in there. Come out to play.”
It was Gabby’s voice. It had lost all its compassion and musicality, though, its humanity and lightness. But it was still recognizable, in the same way a house might still be recognizable if it had been hit by a flood and half destroyed. It was the voice now of cold dirty water and ruin, a voice that spoke of horror and blight.
Maxine and Sudhindra exchanged glances, then went to pull more furniture to the barricade.
When the barricade was complete, they backed away from the door and went into Sudhindra’s office. The room was as dapper and clean as the man himself was, usually. And the room, like much of everything on this side of the building, was lit by a hundred fires.
Sudhindra sat in the armchair he normally used to talk to relatives, choosing this rather than pontificating from behind a desk in the now discredited power exchange of a godlike doctor handing down his pronouncements like Moses with his tablets of stone. Sudhindra—“Call me Sudhindra, not doctor”—was a man who didn’t use his experience and qualifications like a battering ram; he was a man who displayed genuine interest in what people had to say to him. His offer from so many miles away and months past, to help Storm in his hour of greatest need, had been a wonderful thing to accept, but Maxine knew, when she thought about the man himself, that it wasn’t something which should have surprised her. Sudhindra was, and always had been and forever would be, one of the good guys.
And to see him now, in his armchair with his knees pulled up to his chin, the blood of a murdered janitor on his white coat and his fingers trembling, was an awfully thin repayment for a man who had given so much.
“I couldn’t stop her. I tried. I tried… but…”
“The whole city has gone crazy, Sudhindra; it’s not just here in the institute.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“No. Our hotel was burning. I’ve lost everything, so I came here with Storm and a policeman…”
“A policeman?”
“He’s downstairs with Storm, keeping him safe. I came up here for more medication for Storm; we couldn’t get back to our room for his because of the fire. I didn’t think what happened at the hotel would be happening everywhere. But it is. People are being murdered, killed in front of us. Other people setting light to their homes while they’re still inside. It’s as if insanity’s become a communicable disease.”
Sudhindra pushed his glasses up the sweaty and tear-streaked bridge of his nose. “I can believe it. Gabby and I stayed on after all the outpatients and the candy stripers had gone home so we could see the supernova from the balcony. I went to get a couple of beers from the refrigerator, and when I came back, all hell had broken loose.”
Maxine related her similar experience with Storm. “Can you give me enough medication to make it through the emergency? Looking at the city burning now, and the way people are behaving, I can’t see things getting back to normal soon. I have no idea how I’m going to get home, or where we’re going to stay tonight—or any night, come to that.”
“Come home with me. I’ll drive…”
Maxine shook her head. “It’s a good idea, but everything has stopped working. There’s not power anywhere, and it looked from the road outside the hotel like all machinery stopped working at the same time. The satellite phone went off, the lights went out… the headache hit us and then everything went dead.”
Sudhindra uncurled himself from the chair and fished a set of keys from his pocket. “Come with me.”
As they walked the corridor outside his office, away from the barricade keeping Gabby from this level, Sudhindra continued, “EMP. An electromagnetic pulse attack. That’s what it sounds like, at least.”
“I know we had contingency planning for EMP attacks at the hospital where I work, but we all thought it was crazy-could-never-happen stuff! No one took it seriously.”
“We did here,” he said simply. “We have shielded generators, back-up batteries, and EMP-resistant wiring throughout the building. You never know when something like this might hit. We had to make sure that everything stayed in working order.”
“So, why are all the lights out here? And nothing’s working?”
Sudhindra stopped and looked at her. “That’s a very good question. Perhaps it’s not an EMP attac
k, or more likely it’s an EMP event the likes of which even our contingencies and shielding engineering could not cope with. And if we couldn’t cope with it, then that might mean…”
“That no one can? Not even the government?”
“Precisely.”
Maxine’s heart thumped in her chest as the enormity of what that might mean for the people of Boston rushed through her. And then, what if it hadn’t affected only Boston? What if it reached out east into the Atlantic? West to Iowa maybe. Iowa, where her mother and father’s ranch was. Who knew how Tally and Josh were? Or, her father and mother.
Could everything she held close and dear be ripped away from her in just one evening like this?
Maxine had liked to think in the past that she was definitely a glass half-full gal, but suddenly she felt very tiny, very vulnerable, as a tsunami of doubt rushed through her.
Sudhindra opened a door with a key from his bunch, and they went inside a small room that smelled of medications, ointment, and liquids. “Keep the door open for me please, Maxine. It’s on a self-closer, and the hall’s going to be the only way to get any light into the pharmacy.”
Maxine stood by the door and held it open as Sudhindra went from cupboard to cupboard bringing out boxes and bottles, and putting them into a blue zip-up shoulder bag with the words TRAVIS INSTITUTE stenciled on the side in yellow letters.
Storm had to take many medications a day. Some were prophylactic antibiotics, others were to boost his weakened immune system, and still others counteracted the side effects of the chemotherapy. Some drugs were to help with the gummed-up workings of his digestive system while still more helped to stop him expelling stuff out of the top end, such was the constant state of nausea he felt. On top of that, there were painkillers and others to counteract the side effects of drugs he was taking. It was a complex and mind-twisting cocktail of chemicals, and a real pain in the backside to keep a handle on.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 6
