Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  “I can make a still. To purify water. You and Spackman can get on with finding a way to turn the boat around and sail us into the wind, or whatever you need to do with sheets and Jolly Rogers or whatever they’re called.”

  “Since when are you survival-girl?”

  “Dad, it’s a wonder you can remember my name, you know so little about me.”

  That stung.

  “You have to have a lot of back-up knowledge if you’re going trekking,” she pointed out.

  “You haven’t been trekking.”

  “No, but I planned to. When you and Mom stopped clucking around me. I had some books on wilderness survival. I shared them with Storm, too.”

  “Storm? Tally, Tic-tac’s idea of being in the wilderness is not being able to get a cellphone signal.” Josh couldn’t help the note of incredulity creeping into his voice. Before the cancer, Storm had been an athlete, had concentrated on his running and his training, and occasionally seemed to be focused on girls, and his work as an admin assistant at Morehead Mercy, but… survival? No, come on…

  Tally’s eyes narrowed and her jaw set. “Maybe if you weren’t so concentrated on your job and your own issues, you might have noticed, Dad, and maybe Mom might not feel about things the way she does.”

  Josh felt the words of recrimination and hurt bubbling in his throat, but he clamped them back down inside. This was the first time since he’d been talking to Storm on the satellite phone that the real- world concerns of the dire straits of his relationship with his family had hove into view over the horizon, and he couldn’t let them get in the way now. There were ten probationers and Tally to keep alive; until they found a way to get back to a port, there wasn’t time to argue this out.

  He took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s stuff for another time, Tally. We’ve gotta stick together on this now, okay? We’ll deal with whatever we need to when I know we’re all going to make it. I promise.”

  Tally shrugged. “I notice you didn’t apologize, but yeah. Okay. So. I can make a still. You want me to do that?”

  Josh nodded with clamped lips and bunched fists.

  How is it that you can take any hit but this, Josh? Anything that life throws at you except one thing… the disappointment of your children?

  He stalked off to find Spackman.

  Josh found the crewman in the cabin, trying to get some sense out of Petersen.

  The Swede’s gag had been removed, and he was now tied sitting up. Ankles bound and arms behind him. The blood had been cleaned from his face, possibly by Spackman, and the remains of a can of cold beans sat next to him with a spoon sticking out of it. Spackman had been feeding the first mate, and had given him some water, too.

  Petersen’s eyes were wide and rolling. Hair awry, mouth working and stretching over words which Josh couldn’t understand that were coming out of his mouth in a language that might have been Swedish or could have been gibberish.

  “I thought if I gave him some food, showed we weren’t going to hurt him, he might help us with the rigging and navigation.”

  Spackman wiped at some stains on the front of his shirt.

  “He just spat at me.”

  Petersen fixed Josh with a static, unblinking stare that Josh felt drilled right through him on a spike of madness. Another stream of unintelligible and guttural words gushed from out of Petersen’s cracked lips. The first mate seemed to not to have to pause for breath.

  Josh bunched his fists inside his jeans pockets and hunched his shoulders in frustration. Suddenly, he was shocked by the desire to reach down, take Petersen by the collar, and punch the first mate’s face to a bloody pulp until he died, and he imagined kicking him over the side of the Sea-Hawk into the drink, to sink below the dark waves, to rot in the water as fish bait and shark food…

  Stop!

  God, man. Stop.

  The roil of anger that had washed up from nowhere was a gut-punch. It showed Josh again that there had been a change in him, too. Too a much lesser extent than Petersen and Ten-Foot, sure, but certainly there had been one. Josh prided himself on the fact that he was not a man quick to anger, and he considered himself to be thoughtful and level headed. He hadn’t felt like punching someone’s lights out since high school, and that had been over Maxine and his ex-best friend Gabe, who’d treated her so badly. But he was channeling that murderous rage now, and then some.

  It scared him, and chilled him to the core.

  What had happened to them all? What had caused it, and what if anything could be done to prevent it getting worse?

  He supposed there was a small amount of hope to be found in the fact that Ten-Foot had bounced back from one extreme to the other. He was now more docile, ready to help and falling over himself to be useful—but who knew what tomorrow would bring?

  Josh certainly didn’t.

  There was no consistency in all of this. No predictability. That’s what made everything so unsettling. That’s why Josh had found himself trying to gain control over some of the unknowable. Make inventories of the food; find a way to sustain fresh water. Find some practicable solutions for navigating the ship back to shore.

  “We’re not going to get anything out of him yet,” Josh said.

  And so Spackman put the sock back in Petersen’s mouth. They left the cabin to the strains of Petersen’s growling, incomprehensible mumbles.

  Next, they went to Rollins’ cabin. The hank of rope from which the captain had hung himself was still tied around the ceiling beam from when Josh had cut the body down. It was a grim reminder of what had gone on in the room. The rope end moved with the shifting of the Sea-Hawk on the waves, and Josh couldn’t help himself imagining the creaking of Rollins’ bodyweight on it. He figured, when he had the time, he would cut the rest of the rope down. He didn’t need a permanent reminder of Rollins’ fate. The memory of sheeting up the bodies of the people who had died at his hands was bad enough, and more than raw enough in his mind.

  Spackman and Josh started going through the captain’s books and papers. There were a number of Mack Bolan: Executioner men’s adventure novels, a collection of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower naval romances, a collection of perhaps twenty vintage Playboy magazines, charts, logs, and leaflets about how the Sea-Hawk had been made and what she was capable of. Josh had himself one of these leaflets back in his luggage. It had been handed to him on the first day of the trip by Kip, the first crewman to have died in falling from the rigging. The one who had taken a shine to Tally.

  Josh hadn’t read the leaflet, and in that moment felt unutterably sad that he hadn’t.

  He shook his head and came up from examining Rollins’ bookcase. “No ‘Tall Ship Navigation for Dummies’ here,” he said, making an approximate stab at humor that was he knew was uncalled for under the still swinging stump of rope.

  “Nope,” Spackman replied, closing the door of the closet.

  “But you must have, I dunno, learned what you had to do with the sails in conditions like this? No?”

  Spackman looked apologetic and rubbed at the dressing on his ear. “I’ve been on this ship three weeks. The last time we had to go into a headwind, Rollins pulled in the sails and used the engine to get us back to port. I don’t know how many times I can say I’m not an expert, but trust me, man, I’m running out of ways to express it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as I am.”

  “What I wouldn’t give for five minutes on the internet right now.”

  “Amen, Josh. Amen. Although, I don’t think Amazon’s going to deliver out here.”

  They laughed.

  They had to. The only other option was crying.

  When they came back up on deck, Tally had probationers bring the freezer Josh had fired the flare into up and lay it on the deck, on its back with the door wide open. All the flare-ruined food had been put to one side, but not discarded completely. “We might be able to use it for bait if we need to start fishing,” Tally said as she worked.
<
br />   With Dotty-B and Marshal, she was working to lever out as much of the plastic innards of the freezer as she could so that it left the metal bare. “We can set a fire in here,” Tally said. “The freezer will keep it contained.”

  From the galley, she’d taken two pots with tight-fitting lids that had small steam holes in them to stop them from boiling over if left unwatched. From a storeroom for equipment used in shallow water anchorages, she’d acquired some snorkel tubes which were being gaffer-taped to the lids of the pots and then covered in Vaseline to make the best airtight seal she could.

  The snorkel tubes had then been wrapped in tinfoil to stop them being burned by the heat of the fire, and then taken out over the side of the freezer to cool and condense into empty demijohns they’d found under sacking in the back of the galley.

  “All we need now is some fuel.”

  Josh was beyond impressed at the lash-up Tally had achieved in a so short a time with the help of the probationers. Ten-Foot and Goober were swinging fire axes twenty feet away, breaking up crates and boxes, and Lemming was piling newspapers and books from the crew cabin, along with tablecloths and spare bedding. They’d opened up deck stores and found spare sail which was being cut into strips with knives. A can full of diesel had been brought up from the engine room, and Josh pointed at it.

  “Diesel is hella difficult to light cold,” Josh said, trying not to pour too much cold water on her invention.

  “Thought of that.” Tally smiled and reached down behind her side of the freezer to pull up a small plastic bottle with a hand pump above the nozzle. “One of the crew liked growing bonsai. She used this to spray the leaves. We clean it out, fill it with diesel, pump it up, and that atomizes the fuel. Spray it on the wood and naked flame, and we’re cooking with gas. Well, obviously not gas, but you get the idea.”

  When did my little girl do all this growing up? Where was I looking when all that was going on? Josh felt elated and sad all rolled up into one. Maybe she had a point about where his focus had and hadn’t been for the last couple of years.

  Josh hugged her tight, and Tally squealed with surprise.

  10

  McCready’s face was flushed with anger as he protested, “I think it’s a bad idea!”

  Maxine hugged the robe around her and looked about the kitchen for her clothes. They’d been hung from the cupboard doors when she and Storm had gone to the spare room the night before, but now they were conspicuous in their absence.

  Maxine had just finished telling McCready that she agreed with Storm’s assessment of how dangerous it was going to be to stay in Boston, and how they needed to get out of the city and either find a way to travel back to Morehead City or, better still, make their way to her parents’ cattle ranch in Iowa. Both journeys were daunting and full of risk, but staying here while the water became contaminated, the food ran out, and the rats multiplied in the sewers was just as dangerous, if not more so. It had only been when she’d noticed that her clothes were no longer hanging up that her voice had trailed off and McCready’s anger had bubbled to the surface.

  “No. We need to stay here. We’re safe her. I have food. We can go to stores. Get more. Get bottled water.”

  “Umm, just a minute…” Maxine pointed at the cupboards where her clothes had been hung up. “What’s happened…”

  But McCready, still in his dirty uniform and with two days of stubble on his chin, was on another track entirely, spittle flecking the corners of his mouth as he spoke. “Didn’t I look after you? Didn’t I save you… twice?”

  “Yes… but…”

  “I can keep you safe. That’s what policemen do. Protect and serve. That’s what I’m going to do and we’re going to stay here and it’s going to be alright!”

  Maxine was surprised in the change in McCready since he’d woken that morning. He was wound up tighter than a watch spring as his fingers drummed on the stained cloth of the table. He’d made some attempt to clean the dirty pots and pans in the sink, but it looked like he’d given up halfway through. There was an open garbage sack into which he’d thrown empty packets, cans and cartons that had been left out on the side, but it was only half full, and there was still plenty of stuff that could be chucked into it.

  It occurred to Maxine that she might look in the bottom of the sack for their clothes, but McCready was so wired; plus, the gun was still on his hip, and his manner had become so freaky that she didn’t think it would be a good idea to do so right now.

  “You’re to stay here. Both of you. That’s an order.”

  “Hey, come on. You don’t have that authority...”

  “Yes, I do! I have all the authority I need!” McCready was shouting hard now, and his finger pointed at his gun.

  This situation had gone south pretty quickly. Yesterday, McCready had been a little odd at times, but now he was verging on the frightening. Maxine got the feeling this wasn’t just because he’d gotten out the wrong side of his pig-sty that morning, either.

  The door opened just then and Storm came in, eyes red and bleary. “Mom… is there a problem?”

  McCready stood up and pointed at Storm. “There’s no problem! There’s no damn problem!” Then he stormed out of the kitchen towards his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

  Storm looked at the kitchen cupboards. “Where are our clothes?”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Maxine said, diving down the garbage sack. Of course, that would have been too easy a solution. It was just McCready’s garbage all the way down. She began opening cupboards. From the bedroom, it sounded like McCready was kicking at the walls or breaking wood. Maxine looked at Storm. “How do you feel?”

  “Well enough to get the hell out of here. What’s eating him?”

  “All I did was tell him I agreed with you about getting out of the city and he went to pieces. I don’t think this is all him. Look at the people we saw on the way to the institute, how Gabby killed Sudhindra… I think people are being changed somehow. I don’t understand it… a power outage might cause mass panic, but it’s not going to cause mass murder. We need to find our clothes and … god… no!”

  “What…?” Storm demanded.

  Maxine was looking about the kitchen floor, behind the table, and in the cupboards with increasing panic. “Your bag of medication. It’s gone, too!” she whispered, not wanting to be overheard, but unable to conceal the worry in her voice. “McCready’s moved that, too!”

  If McCready controlled the medication, then he controlled Storm, and by extension Maxine, too.

  Maxine pulled open a drawer. It was full of rusted cutlery and old receipts. She pulled open another, this one filled with balls of string and tape, dead lottery cards, a broken Rubik’s cube, and an ID badge on a lanyard.

  Maxine picked up the ID badge and flipped it over. It was a Boston Police Department identification badge, laminated and crusted with some substance that could be either ketchup or blood.

  Maxine scraped at it with her thumbnail. The substance flaked away, and with increasing horror, Maxine uncovered first the name, James McCready, and then a unit number 458236, a District 4 designation, an authorizing signature, and finally a photograph. A photograph of a man who wasn’t the McCready who lived in this apartment. This badge belonged to a different man completely.

  “We need to get out of here and we need to get out now,” Maxine whispered to Storm.

  “What about our clothes? What about the medication?”

  “We’ll get more from a store. We’ll go to another hospital or a pharmacy. I think I can remember what we need. But we’re going. Now.”

  Maxine took Storm by the arm and propelled him out of the kitchen and along the corridor towards the door of the apartment.

  They both stopped dead in the hallway. An internal metal security gate had been closed over the front door, and it had been secured with hefty, fat, new-looking padlocks. The padlocks were the shiniest, best looking pieces of equipment in an apartment that generally looked and sme
lled like the inside of a roadkill raccoon’s skull three days after it had been hit by a truck.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” McCready said from behind them.

  Storm and Maxine turned. McCready had followed them into the hallway, his gun hanging limply at his side.

  “I’m gonna keep you safe. That’s what I do. Protect and serve.”

  McCready—given that Maxine didn’t yet have a correct name for him, and thought it good sense not to let on that she knew he wasn’t a police officer, or at least not the one he claimed to be—was pacing the kitchen, scratching at his temple with the sight on the pistol, the fingers on his other hand clicking furiously as ideas that seemed to be occurring to him at random tumbled out of his mouth.

  “I’ll go to the supermarket… no, Storm… no, Max, you can go to the supermarket while I keep Storm here. I’ll make a list. You can get cans and sodas. You can get a camping stove… gas canisters. Bottled water. Everything we need. You can get a chemical toilet. Something like that. We’ve got more than enough books to read… candles! Yes. Get some candles. Candles are essential if we’re going to stay in here for the duration until the government fixes things. Yes… maybe an oil heater… yeah, an oil heater. It gets cold here in the winter. Sometimes I’ve had ice on the inside of the windows. And… yes. You can get some games. I like games. Monopoly. Scrabble! Chess and Checkers! We can play them in the evenings so we don’t get bored, and I know you’ll do that, Maxine, I know you will because if you don’t…”

  McCready stopped scratching at his temple with the gun barrel and pointed it directly in Storm’s face. Storm’s eyes widened and his lips squashed together in a bloodless line. Maxine’s heart hammered.

  McCready cocked the pistol. The click was the loudest sound Maxine had ever heard.

  “…if you don’t, I think you know what’s going to happen to junior here. Yes?”

  Nobody moved.

  “YES???” McCready screamed.