McCready drew his gun as they climbed wearily to the door.
The building itself had seen better days, and might have been anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old itself. The stone fascia was stained and chipped. The entrance doors were painted dark blue with paint that had already been peeling before the city had been ravaged.
McCready led them into a hallway that smelled of old cabbage and dirty laundry. There were concrete steps ascending up to dim landings, and drying puddles of liquid that smelled like they could have been urine. Human or animal was more difficult to ascertain.
It wasn’t the Ritz, that was for certain.
They climbed to the third-floor landing. There were three doors, and McCready made straight for the one furthest from the stairs. His key was in the door quickly, and he ushered Maxine and Storm inside while waiting against the doorframe, gun still drawn. McCready took a couple more glances along the landing and then followed Maxine and Storm inside.
The apartment, quite frankly, stank.
McCready wasn’t just a bachelor, but someone whose solitary existence wouldn’t allow another human being to share his space, let alone a wife or a girlfriend. Piles of newspapers were stacked five feet high in the hallway, the walls looked like they’d been rescued from the nineteenth century, and the ceiling held the brown stains of nicotine and fatty cooking.
McCready avoided eye contact and brushed past Maxine to head down the hall and lead the way into the kitchen.
“It’s not much, but it’s home,” he said as Maxine exchanged glances with Storm, and Storm retuned the glance behind McCready’s back with a finger pointed down his throat.
Maxine nodded and followed McCready into a room that was not so much a kitchen as a bacterial zoo. Pots and pans were stacked dry in the sink, an open loaf of bread was growing a cure for bronchitis on its outward slice, and the milk in a glass on the counter had decided, now that it had evolved sentience, it was going to climb out of its receptacle and start life anew on the kitchen floor.
“Had a tough few weeks,” McCready said, clearing more newspaper and magazines from kitchen chairs, and indicating that Maxine and Storm could sit down. Not before Maxine picked up one newspaper from the pile McCready had removed and put it back on the chair where she was about to sit, due to the suspicious staining of the material.
“Hey, it’s warm, out of the rain, and there’s somewhere to sit,” Storm said. “It’s a whole lot better than the street.”
McCready smiled, and began excavating the sink so that he could get at the faucet and run some water to clean some glasses.
McCready ran his fingers under a tap for nearly a minute before going to the wall and flicking the switch on and off on the boiler. He tried the wall light switch, too.
“No power anywhere. All out.”
He picked up the receiver of a wall phone that reminded Maxine of a prop from a 70’s sitcom, all yellow/orange plastic and wildly curly flex, and brought it to his ear.
“Even the phone power is out. And they’re on a separate grid.”
Maxine shook her head. This was getting better and better. But at least, as Storm had said, they were out of the rain, which was throwing itself against the window like gravel. McCready disappeared for a few minutes into the bowels of the apartment and they heard him rummaging in cupboards or boxes. When he reappeared, he had towels that at least looked like they’d been not used since the last time they’d been washed, and robes for Storm and Maxine to replace their clothes as they dried out.
“You can get changed through there.” McCready pointed to a bathroom.
Maxine sent Storm first, as he was the most vulnerable right now to infection, and when he returned in the thick blue robe she went into the bathroom, happy to see that at least here McCready kept the place hygienic and clean.
It only occurred to her once her hair was dry and she was in the robe that maybe the bathroom was so clean because McCready didn’t use it. She snorted at her own sarcasm, and it felt good to know that, even in all this, she still could find a sliver of humor to slide between the horrors.
That sent a shiver through her sensibilities, but nothing like the hit those sensibilities had taken in the last twenty-four hours.
When she went back to the kitchen, Storm was drinking orange juice McCready had poured from a carton into glasses he’d cleaned in cold water.
“If the power’s out, we don’t know how long the fresh water is gonna last, or how well the sanitation in the city is going to hold up. We should set up some way to boil water if we’re going to stay here, or at least go and get some water purification kits.”
McCready and Maxine looked at Storm as if he’d just made a pronouncement in Arabic about space flight.
“I read,” he said. “Ain’t been able to do much else for the last sixteen weeks. Tally got me a ton of survival books for my kindle. She loves that stuff, too. All that wilderness trekking and climbing she wants to do; you have to know what to do when the bottom drops out.”
Storm looked through the window, out over the smoky buildings sizzling in the rain. “And the bottom is well and truly gone now.”
Maxine slept a fitful night on an uncomfortable armchair, in a room stacked with thousands of paperback books, next to a single bed in which Storm curled himself beneath three thick blankets and a sheet. Before bed, Storm had expanded on the knowledge he’d used to surprise and nonplus Maxine. “The city is a big baby. It needs to be fed, watered, cleaned, and protected. It needs its shots, it needs energy, and it needs to be dressed and kept warm. And that takes a lot of people. People who aren’t going to be able to do their jobs anymore if Sudhindra was right and this is the mother of all EMP events. Maybe it’s a foreign power, maybe it’s solar flares… god, maybe it’s the Barnard’s Star supernova… but whatever it is, the baby has been left outside on the hillside, naked in the rain. Trojan babies only had to survive one night before their parents took them back in. If this is a worst- case scenario, then this baby, all the babies—all the cities—are out on the hillside in the rain, and one by one they’re going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
They slept in the robes McCready had given them. The rain continued to beat against the windows, and the power stayed off, but helpfully, the books against the walls of the small room reduced the space inside it so that, soon, with their two bodies in there, the warmth in the room increased to a tolerable level. It wouldn’t be a very viable position when the winter came, but Maxine wasn’t planning on staying for that long.
What Storm had said made sense. A city without its services soon became a dangerous place for anyone still there. There may be stockpiles of food and equipment, but without clean water and effective sanitation, it would soon become a death trap.
Maxine had been impressed with Storm’s recall of the wisdom in the books he’d been reading. There was a whole world of preppers out there, and they planned for situations just like this, he’d told Maxine. They’d stockpiled food, created bug-out retreats, attained equipment to sanitize water, accrued knowledge to gather and scavenge things from the cities, and identified food in the lands beyond the city, all to ultimately be able to set themselves up as self-sufficient. It was a world Maxine had had no idea about, and when she’d come in on Storm while he’d been recuperating between bouts of chemo, she’d thought he’d been flicking through comics on his tablet, or deciding what to watch on Netflix. She’d had no idea that the debilitation of his illness and its treatment had given him a taste for survival. However, if she thought about it, the inclination seemed natural. The boy was under threat—he was battling with his own internal apocalypse—so how fitting that he’d want to learn about how to survive a real one.
Storm had lost his kindle in the hotel fire, and the way machines and electricity seemed to be affected since the… whatever the event was that had hit them… it seemed like the whole of Boston, and perhaps the world beyond, had been kicked right back to dealing with the pre-electro
nic and even medieval technology of the past.
It was then that the enormity of what that meant hit Maxine. What if this was it? What if nothing was going to get better unless people learned how to make it better themselves? What if they had to learn to make even the simplest machines and technologies again? Damn… she didn’t even know how to knit or do something as fundamental as lighting a fire without matches. As a wound care specialist in a busy trauma unit, she knew how to use all the technology at her disposal to help wounds heal, but how would she help someone now… without antibiotics, wound care products, pain relief medication, or debriding and draining equipment? Dammit, how would she even make a sterile area? Do bloodwork? If she couldn’t light a fire to keep even herself warm, how could she help someone else?
“We’ve become slaves to technology,” Storm had said before they’d retired to McCready’s spare room for the night. “We’ve become soft and complacent,” he’d then added, completely earnestly, as he’d pointed to the pistol McCready was cleaning and then reloading in his lap. “What happens when the last bullet has been fired from the last gun? What do you do then?”
McCready had offered no answer, and neither had Maxine.
Storm had fallen asleep easily, he was so exhausted, completely drained. Maxine had kissed him on the forehead and curled her legs under her in the lumpy leather armchair, and dozed into the night, waking often and checking on Storm’s breathing. He snored gently, wrapped snugly in the bed, and when asleep his face lost the troubled pallor of his illness; in repose, he reminded Maxine of a much younger and happier boy. Before the ravages of the cancer, before his life had taken a turn down a much darker path.
Her heart vibrated with love for him then in the dark room, with its blue square of window looking out over the still smoldering city. The Barnard’s smudge crept across the window in a sky free of cloud. There were stars visible, dusting the night. Now, there was much less light pollution from the normally brightly lit city—just the dull glow of weakening fires, the bowl of heaven circled. The scatter of the Milky Way’s backbone, the wound of Barnard’s Star, and the sliver of moon in opposition to it.
It was good that something beautiful could emerge above them after such an awful couple of days, filled with uncertainly and terror.
Maxine tried to get her head back down to sleep on that thought, gauging the time to be somewhere beyond three a.m., but sleep was utterly elusive. So, she contented herself with listening to Storm breathing, the deadened acoustics of the room making it easy to focus on the soothing rise and fall. The lack of city noise, the inability to turn on the TV or the radio to find out what was going on, and the lack of any ability to communicate with Josh or her parents in Iowa, was both a curse that raised her anxieties and also a blessing that she felt put her back in touch with the imperatives of what she needed to do to survive without the distractions provided by modern life.
It was in those hours, as the second night of the disaster fell towards morning, that Maxine made her plan and decided what she would do, and she promised herself she would not be deterred from that course of action—whatever happened.
9
There was nothing else for it. They wrapped the bodies of the dead crew in spare sails and bunk linen, and let them slip over the side of the Sea-Hawk into the Atlantic’s swells. It had been the grimmest of grim tasks for Josh and the last remaining crew member. He’d charged Tally with getting the probationers to scour the ship and the hold’s containers for food which they would need to eat soon, as well as food that they could leave until later, while he and Spackman had worked to cover the bodies with as much dignity as they could muster and let them loose into the waves. And then Josh had cleaned the pooled blood from the decks—the blood that hadn’t yet been washed away by the spray.
Before they’d settled down in their bunks the night before, Spackman had tied off the wheel with ropes, and had the boys help him use the ropes to roll up as much sail as they dared. This slowed the Sea-Hawk down. The wind was blowing fiercely from the west, and that would take them further from the Atlantic coast of the U.S. The compass was still useless, spinning and gyrating wildly as if the magnetic force of the Earth had been shaken into continual flux. All they could rely on, Spackman had told Josh, was the position of the sun during the day, and if the clouds cleared at night, the stars. But the sky, day and night, had been completely covered by thick sheets of gray.
They could just make out the position of the sun when it rose in the morning, but once it rose above the clouds, they had only the briefest of glimpses as to where it might be in the heavens, so thick was the cloud cover.
The radio, GPS system, and the satellite phone were fritzed beyond use, and nothing Spackman did in the engine room could get the engine to fire up.
Josh had to face up to the fact that they had only rudimentary abilities to sail the ship and navigate it.
Still, he protested again, “But you’re a sailor, Spackman, you know how all this stuff works.”
Spackman shook his head. “Mr. Standing, I’m a history major, and this is my occasional job between semesters teaching middle school. I’m not a career sailor like Rollins or Petersen. I can get by. That’s it. If we had the GPS system working or the engine, or even a functioning compass, I might be able to get us back to approximately where we started out. But without any of that stuff, we’re out here and blind.” Spackman looked up at the sky and pinpointed the morning sun. He pointed vaguely behind the Sea-Hawk. “I think the U.S. is that way…. Maybe.”
Josh’s heart sank.
“I know a little about how to operate the sails. I know that if we’d kept the mast fully rigged, the Sea-Hawk would have carried on its merry way until we hit Spain or crashed into the west coast of Africa. I’m interested in where my DNA came from before you guys dragged my ancestors kicking and screaming to the New World, but I ain’t ready to go back to my roots right now. We need to experiment with tacking this ship against the wind. And for that, we need to get those kids working like the crew. That’s gonna take some time. I know the principles, but without navigation equipment…”
Spackman’s voice trailed off, but Josh had picked up the underlying despair in the crewman’s voice.
“And the only guy on the boat with all the knowledge we need is Petersen, and he’s as mad as a bag of elbows,” Josh offered.
Spackman nodded. “And at any moment, any one of us might be, too.”
Josh sighed. This was going from a wholly bad situation to an impossible one.
“Dad?”
Tally appeared beside Spackman, her face grave. If Josh’s heart could have climbed out of his skin and jumped over the side of the ship, it would have.
“Is there any good news?” he asked.
Tally shook her head. “Not really. We have food, but…”
“There’s always a but...”
“It looks like, before Rollins died, he sabotaged the water tanks. They’ve been vented into the sea. We have next to no fresh water on the Sea-Hawk.”
Great.
“Who knows what was going through Rollins’ head?” Josh looked down into the square, black plastic-lined water tank, having levered up the lid. “Perhaps he thought making us die of thirst was easier than chopping us up with his ax. I don’t know. And there’s no point in speculating. We have to deal with the situation as it is. If we’re going to get through this.”
There were maybe six inches of water below the vent plug. Scant little of the precious liquid. The irony of being a ship on one of the largest bodies of water on the planet, and yet none of that water being in a drinkable condition, was not lost on him.
“Quickest way to get drinkable fresh water from seawater is to distil it. But for that we’ll need a fire, and on a boat made out of wood…” Josh rested his head against the cool plastic. Now was not a time to show desperation. Tally, Spackman, and the probationers needed to know there was someone taking this stuff in their stride. Otherwise, chaos may reign once more
.
The galley was well equipped, but the cooking range was powered by electricity—there were no gas-fired burners. On a ship made of wood, you wanted to cut down on the combustible material, Josh reasoned, and so gas would increase the risk of a fire even though it would have made the task of feeding the crew a little easier. There was a useless microwave, as well, but there were lots of pots and pans.
A small stock of bottled water sat on a couple of cardboard pallets in the galley, and there were perhaps fifty cans of soda in the pantry with some other dry and tinned goods. So, the good news was—and Josh realized you had to take what little good news you could when it came in a situation like this—was that they weren’t in immediate danger. Well-rationed, they had maybe a week’s worth of drinkable liquids to be split between the ten probationers, Tally, Spackman, and Petersen.
With that in mind, Josh charged Puck and Goober to find whatever sealable water containers they could in the cabins and then get as much of the water out of the tank as they could. The water pump on the plumbing system was electrically powered, as well, so if they wanted what little water there was in the tank, then they were going to have to take it out manually.
There was enough food in cans for them to eat meats, hotdogs, beans, and the like, and to last fourteen people on the Sea-Hawk for at least as long as the water would hold out.
“I reckon I can build a still,” Tally announced over Josh’s shoulder as he looked out over the waves. The water was gunmetal gray, but the wind had dropped a little. It wasn’t as stinging, and only occasionally would spray be picked up from the white-crested waves to hit those on deck.
“I’m sorry? Repeat that.” Josh turned to Tally, and found her hugging herself in an oversized navy blue, cable-knit seaman’s jumper that she’d found among the crew’s things.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 9
