Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Maxine and Storm nodded like the motion would shake their heads loose from their bodies.

  The next few hours consisted of McCready swinging between being a ranting maniac and a whispering psychopath. The police department had a lot to answer for, he would say, but didn’t go into specifics, and Maxine didn’t want to interrupt to ask him any questions, figuring it was better to let the guy have his head and carry on like he was in charge. Being in charge seemed to matter to him an awful lot right now.

  The ‘high-ups’ in the Boston Police Department were all corrupt, McCready told them, and he had a plan to expose them. It was a cast-iron plan and it would work completely, and when McCready finished his work in exposing them, he would be the hero of the hour. There would be no civic accolade that would not be conferred upon him. He would be taken to Washington to be decorated by the President. It would all happen exactly as he knew it should. His plan would vindicate his actions. And if the world didn’t go back to normal, then he, Maxine, and Storm would stay here, and they would be fine, and seeing as Maxine was still at child- bearing age, perhaps they could start their own family. Here in Boston. A new family! Phoenixes rising from the ashes!

  “Rising high!”

  McCready’s face was flushed as he finished, his throat working, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He held the gun up to the ceiling as he collapsed into a chair, breathing hard. He fired one shot as if in celebration, which was deafening in the small space. A ragged hole appeared in the ceiling. Plaster and splinters came down like snow.

  McCready lowered the gun to his lap, his eyes furtive as if he knew by firing the gun, he had himself gone too far, and maybe now it was time to rein things back in. He didn’t holster the pistol, but he did flick the safety with his thumb to make the weapon safe on his thigh.

  As the last of the plaster pattered down onto the kitchen and the hair of the people in it, all anyone could hear was McCready’s ragged breathing.

  His rant had gone on for what seemed like forever. Maxine didn’t know what the time was, but she guessed that it must be approaching noon. Rain pattered gently at the one smeary window in the kitchen, and through the droplet-covered glass, and with a chill sense of apprehension, she could make out the ghost of Boston, gray and misty beyond.

  As McCready breathed hard, the sweat standing out on his forehead, his hair slick with it, Maxine looked at Storm. Although she knew he was trying to show it, a deterioration in him was clear to see. His eyes were downcast, his fingers digging into his thighs, a tremor in his bottom lip. The side effects of the chemotherapy. She could see Storm’s tongue working inside his cheek, too. Since the chemotherapy regime had started, one of the worst side effects had been painful and enduring mouth ulcers on his gums and in his cheeks. Anti-inflammatory and topical gels had been given to Storm to help the symptoms, if not cure the ulcers themselves. Storm’s cheek bulging told Maxine that he was worrying at one of the more painful ulcers with his tongue. He needed his medications and gels now. He’d need his anti-emetics, too. Storm was used to vomiting two or three times a day, and having gastrointestinal difficulties. Pills to combat nausea and diarrhea were essential to making sure he wasn’t debilitated too much and could at least go far enough out of the house that he didn’t have to worry about being away from a bathroom. Without his medications, he would soon be in real pain and distress. She would have to talk to McCready and persuade him to allow her son to access the pills and gels he needed.

  She waited another thirty seconds and then chanced an interaction. “Officer McCready?”

  McCready didn’t respond. His face was set, his breathing the only sign of movement. He wasn’t even blinking. It was as if the name Maxine had used didn’t apply to him and he’d forgotten to keep up the presence.

  Maxine tried again. “Officer McCready?”

  McCready’s eyes flickered, and his head jerked up. His hand half-lifted the pistol from his lap, and then, as if realizing there was no threat, put the weapon back down.

  “What?”

  “Storm is suffering. He needs his medication…”

  “Mom, don’t…” Storm croaked. His voice sounded old and unused. It broke Maxine’s heart to hear it like that. She saw more hairs had fallen from his balding head, to rest on the navy blue of the robe around his shoulders. These hairs were thin—new growth, by the looks of them—but even they were being pushed out by the chemo. Her boy looked awful.

  “It’s okay, Storm. Officer McCready will understand… if I could just have the bag back please, Officer…”

  McCready thumped his hand on the table. “No! You can’t. If you want the medications, you can go to the store and get some of the things we need.”

  “I’ll need my clothes for that.” Maxine knew there was no point in arguing with McCready when he was in this state.

  He blinked. His eyes jittery, his tongue coming out to lick his dry lips. Then he nodded.

  “I’ll make a list.”

  Outside, the rain had relented, but the sky was still packed from horizon to horizon with fat-bellied clouds. Maxine felt good to be back in her clothes, even though McCready had insisted that she get dressed in front of him, his eyes full of salacious lust. Storm had turned away and faced the kitchen wall. For some reason, that had made McCready laugh hollowly and without warmth.

  She had an hour, McCready had told her, for this first trip. If she took longer, then she’d be sorry. He’d waved the gun in Storm’s direction again to bring his point home all the harder.

  He’d released the padlocks on the security door with keys from a bunch he’d taken from his pants. It had not been easy for him, trying to keep an eye on Maxine, keep Storm covered with the gun, and unlock the gate. Evidence of his chaotic thinking, and his inability to put together a coherent plan that would allow him to achieve all his goals. Evidence that McCready was a mess. He’d been a mess before the event, but now, for whatever reason, his deficiencies had been amplified and exacerbated. This alone told Maxine that it would only be a matter of time before she was in a position to out-think and blindside him. She just had to make sure that she did it in a way that kept Storm—her poor and ailing, desperately ill Storm—safe.

  Maxine couldn’t do anything that put him in danger.

  McCready’s directions had proved accurate, and within ten minutes, she was in the forecourt of a large superstore. The rain-slick tarmac held a few abandoned cars, but she’d seen no one. In the distance, snakes of smoke, desultory and thin rather than signs of raging fires, still rose towards the clouds, caught by the wind and taken off course. The city was silent, and that silence made Maxine quicken her feet and keep looking behind her as if she were being followed. It was as if the silence had become a predator, and it was hunting her down.

  She had to shake her head to rid it of those thoughts which had bubbled up from nowhere, and which she couldn’t explain. Silence had never had this effect on her before—yes, the quiet city was strange and unsettling, but Maxine felt these ideas were being driven into her mind by a different engine… one that she didn’t have a handle on, and which she couldn’t explain.

  The superstore had been looted pretty effectively at some time in the last two days. There were some stocks left, but most of what had been left was perishable and already on the turn.

  McCready’s list was a fantasy, she knew. There was a good chance that everyone had already had the same idea as him. In the outdoors section, there were no camping stoves left, and certainly no canisters of butane to run them. All that was left were the boxes in which they’d been transported to the store. There was no rice, and only one half-open bag of pasta that had split when it had been dropped. No bottles of water, and the section where the signs suggested the bottles of soda would be for sale were white expanses of plastic shelving in aluminum frames. She did score two boxes of candles and a disposable lighter, but that was it.

  That was another problem with staying in the city. Those who were the fastest and the strongest, and more
willing to act first, would be the ones who got all the prizes.

  But time was moving on, and she knew that if she went back empty-handed, there would be trouble.

  A plan to change the balance of power in the apartment had formulated in her mind as she’d made her way to the superstore, but it was a plan that had depended on the superstore being partially stocked with all its wares, and with one type of product in particular. Instead, all sections of the store had already been ransacked, and the last section she went to, the one that her plan ultimately relied upon, was, like the rest of the place, already empty. She searched the racks and the shelves for anything that would fulfill her scheme, but again, all she found were empty boxes and cartons. There was plenty of money in the cash registers, but there was nothing left to buy here or anywhere else.

  If anything, the warehouse section behind the main store, where stock would be kept after delivery and before being brought out onto the shelves, had been even more ransacked and looted. Apart from the lack of anything useful, it was dark and cold, and smelled acridly of fire that had burnt itself out. Skitters and scrabbles deep in the darkness, outside of the light thrown in from the store, told her that the empire of the rats was ascending, and so, with a shiver, she went back out into the empty aisles.

  Maxine sighed. She was going to have to go back to the apartment near enough empty-handed, apart from the candles. Perhaps McCready would let her out of the apartment again to go further afield. Perhaps there were other warehouses nearby that might prove fruitful.

  She gathered up the candles, put them in a bag with the lighters, and began to make her way from the store.

  If she had gone out the way she’d come in, she wouldn’t have seen it, and would have had to return to the apartment and await another opportunity to change the power dynamic, but as she walked, eyes fixed on the door ahead, her foot caught something that was half-submerged beneath some plastic packing and sent it twirling out across the shiny floor and into a display case for engine oil.

  Maxine stopped.

  She looked down at the SIG-Sauer laying there on the tiles, its barrel pointing at the exit, right next to a half-empty box of 9mm shells which she’d kicked out with it. The way they seemed to have been abandoned suggested they’d been left behind by someone with too many weapons to carry and a vested interest in getting out of the store as quickly as possible; essentially, they’d clearly been dropped in the rush, and considered too small potatoes to bother putting the looter in danger by coming back for them. But they were more than enough for her to bother with them.

  The power dynamic had shifted with grim finality.

  Suddenly, the silence didn’t make her feel so frightened after all.

  Suddenly, the silence made her feel powerful.

  11

  The still proved to be brilliantly effective, and it wouldn't be long before Tally and Goober would have more pure water than they had receptacles to fill.

  Spackman had also begun drilling some of the other probationers in the basics of sailing as he understood them, and although his knowledge was indeed scanter than what they needed, it was also far more in depth than that of Josh or the others.

  Spackman could tell them how to move the sails, furling them or unfurling them with the ropes, blocks, and the winders. He could tell them how to set the sails in the direction they needed, either along the ship or across it, and to give them their due, the probationers took to it well. There was some bitching and moaning, and a few rope burns across palms, but generally they got it.

  Spackman was a better teacher than he was a sailor.

  “Right now, we’re just running with the wind, which is taking us further into the Atlantic and away from the U.S.”

  Groans.

  “But now you’ve got the rudiments of working the sails under orders, and you’re more confident working as a team, I think we can have a shot at turning the Sea-Hawk around and tacking into the wind.”

  “How do we sail into the wind?” Dotty-B asked, her face confused. “Then the boat just goes backwards, right?”

  Spackman smiled. “Do you know how an airplane wing works?”

  “There’s an engine. A propeller,” answered Banger, his face showing that he thought he was full of right answers today.

  “Nope,” Spackman said.

  Banger didn’t look convinced.

  “An airplane wing is curved on the top and flat underneath. As it moves through the air, that curve makes an area of low- pressure on the top surface, and high- pressure underneath. That’s what provides lift. All the jet engine or the propeller provides is forward momentum. The curve of the wing provides the flight—otherwise, the plane would just roll along the ground.”

  “So, you’re gonna fly the boat?” sniggered Ten-Foot.

  “Yes,” said Spackman.

  Ten-Foot shut up laughing.

  “But we need sideways movement. So, we set the sails across the beam of the ship rather than across it. As the wind comes at us, the boat will move forwards and sideways in the wind at the same time. The curve of the sails working in exactly the same way as the wings on an airplane, but on their side.”

  “But if we’re moving sideways, and we want to go in the direction of the wind, how do we get where we want to go?” Ten-Foot asked, trying to recover from the loss of face in front of the others.

  “That’s the clever part,” Spackman continued. “We set the sails at twenty-two degrees starboard to the wind, and we make progress forward and sideways for a while; then we change the sails to twenty-two degrees to port, and tack back the other way, sideways but still forwards.”

  Spackman drew a straight up-and-down line in the air with his index finger. “At the top is point A, and the bottom is point B. Right?”

  The probationers agreed.

  “And I travel there in a straight line with the wind.”

  More agreement.

  “So, now we want to move against the wind.”

  Spackman drew a jerky zig-zag line in the air, going forwards and sideways one way, and then going forward and sideways the other way, but he started at the same A point and ended at the same B point in the air.

  “Same start point, same end point. First journey with the wind is a straight line, second journey is a zig-zag or a tack against the wind. Make sense?”

  “Yes,” said Dotty-B. “I think.”

  “But,” Josh said later to Spackman, while the probationers were eating from cans of soup with bread that wasn’t far from going stale, “unless we know where we are now, we don’t know where we’re going to end up on the mainland?”

  “Precisely,” Spackman said. “Ever thought about going to Argentina?”

  Josh was appalled. “You think we might go that far off course?”

  “Who knows? The wind is coming from the west. Mainly. But without a compass and GPS, we’re blind. Worst case scenario, we miss the Americas completely and end up in the Southern Ocean bound for Tierra del Fuego, or get caught in the winds and currents off Antarctica. Trust me, for the purposes of getting us home, it would have been better for all concerned if I’d gone mad and killed the crew, so that Rollins was alive or Petersen was sane.”

  Josh rubbed his chin and looked out across the vastness of the ocean. Getting back before they ran out of food was a slim chance, but at least it was a chance. “Okay. Break over. Let’s get this boat turned around.”

  The probationers followed Spackman’s orders. It helped, it would seem, that he’d explained the principles of tacking into the wind to them and allowed them to concentrate on the sails, the ropes, and direction of travel rather than being distracted by the enormity of the task.

  Josh thought it best not to share with them the issues about not exactly knowing where they were going, or where they would end up. As far as they were concerned, they would get back eventually.

  Where exactly they made landfall was another matter.

  Josh would cross the bridge of telling the probationers tha
t when he needed to. Perhaps if they washed up on the Falkland Islands…

  The ship turned, and with the prow going crosswise to the wind, there was a lot more spray coming up and washing across the decks as they cut through the waves. Tally had issued everyone waterproof windbreakers and life preservers. The boys were less keen on the fashion change than the females, strangely enough, Josh noticed, but complied with Tally’s insistence that they wore the life preservers and safety lines when they were swinging the booms under Spackman’s orders—especially when Josh agreed with Tally that it would be virtually impossible to find one of the boys if they fell overboard.

  Josh spent some time down in the engine room, meanwhile. Trying to offer something positive. If he could get the engine working, it would take the pressure off the probationers’ grueling physical work, or perhaps he could even get the generator working, to the extent that power might help them raise assistance on the radio. He was no engineer, but he figured that it would do no harm to try to strip and clean as much of the engine and generator as he could, and thus work toward getting things moving again.

  But two days up to his elbows in grease and engine parts convinced him he wasn’t going to be performing miracles in the engine room any time soon.

  One of the great positives Josh could console himself with was the way he saw Tally blossoming into a capable, effective leader. She’d initially been so against helping out on the trip—not just because she’d wanted to stay home and party, but as Josh had discovered, she’d resented spending time with him when the focus for all of the family should have been on Storm and his illness. But now that she was here and her world had been turned on its head, she was doing more than coping. She was performing at the highest level, and Josh saw in her much of the capable and practical skill of her mother. Maxine was unflappable in a crisis, an excellent and reliable nurse, and now Josh knew that he’d made some serious mistakes in not picking up on or dealing with Tally’s concerns.