Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Seeing Tally filling in here, in exactly the way her mom would have if she’d been there, tugged hard at Josh’s guilt. Being resolute and reliable were creditable qualities, but Josh had let those qualities of his, for whatever reason, slip towards stubbornness and an unwillingness to see things in the round.

  These were things he was going to have to fix if he ever got the chance. That was if his kids and his wife wanted them fixed. Perhaps it was all too late, in which case this crisis wasn’t serving as a wakeup call for him to turn things around, but throwing what he was about to lose into sharp relief.

  Josh slammed the inspection cover down on the generator, overcome in the moment with a rushing sense of hopelessness. As he closed his eyes, he saw Rollins’ black and bloated face swinging again from the rope in his cabin. The gentle oscillation of his legs, the white piece of paper with the one word written on it beside him on the table…

  Sorry.

  Cody

  What?

  No. Not Cody. Not now.

  Cody.

  NO. He wrote SORRY.

  Josh reeled as the black, bloated face in his mind’s eye changed abruptly from Rollins’ features to his own. His own legs gave way beneath him, and his backside slammed onto the deck plate so that he cracked his head against the engine block behind him.

  The shock of the pain stabbing into his head made him think there was another agonizing headache in the offing, followed by another bout of senseless unconsciousness.

  However, the headache never came, and neither did the unconsciousness.

  But the tears flowed.

  Oh yes, the tears came, and even though his eyes stung with the salt, he was too scared to bring his eyelids together in case the looming contortions of his own strangled face swung back into view.

  Josh waited an hour before he felt calm enough to come back onto the deck. This feeling of desperation bordering on the terminally suicidal was more affecting and shocking than the feelings he’d experienced when he’d wanted to beat Petersen to a pulp.

  Such extremes of emotion, he’d never felt before. Certainly not to this depth of black depression, or the fantasy of seeing his own death. He’d known people, everybody had, who’d suffered and succumb, taking their own lives in the process. Two colleagues from his police department years had decided to kill themselves when their lives had become too difficult for them to cope with. One, when he’d been diagnosed with cancer too late for the doctors to offer treatment other than pain relief, had taken himself to a cabin in the woods and swallowed his gun barrel. Another, who was being swallowed by debt and whose relationship had broken up, had found a drug dealer he’d busted in the past and bought enough pure heroin from him to end his life in a squalid hotel room, surrounded by pictures of his children.

  But as for Josh… whatever the strains of the job, whatever the worries of his personal life, he’d never been close to even considering suicide as an option. Not even on the far periphery of his thinking. And for the idea to arrive in his head fully formed, in technicolor, with the means and the motivation to carry it out, had stunned him to tearful stillness.

  Now, there was a small cut on the back of his head. It was crusted over in a tiny scab. He sat in the engine room sobbing, running his fingers through his hair, over the rough bump between the strands. It was that vicious thump on the head, and the pain of the cut in his scalp, that Josh felt had shocked him out of that darkest of all places.

  But the awful sense that murderous rage or suicidal intent could bubble up from within him at a moment’s notice was destabilizing in the extreme. It made him a danger to himself and others. As a cop, he’d taken plenty of people to medical facilities against their will, with social workers and doctors in tow. And now here he was, having the internal geography of his mind twisted and changed in terrible directions.

  By what? How? And for what reason?

  He needed to find a way to, if not stop it, at least recognize the onset, like once could recognize the aura experienced before an epileptic fit, and give himself enough time to administer the notional smack on the back of his head which would shake him out of it.

  Josh wiped his oily hands on a rag and, concentrating on putting one shaky foot in front of the other, made his way up two levels topside to the Sea-Hawk’s deck.

  A scream as he reached it told him all was not well.

  Spackman almost crashed into Josh as he stepped up from the hatch.

  “It’s Petersen,” he said, his voice full of alarm. “He’s loose.”

  Josh’s heart pounded and his throat burned. The search for Petersen was desperate and intense. Spackman had led him down into the girl’s cabin, where Petersen had been tied up during the day, and two things had immediately put him into panic mode. First, Scally was being tended to by three of the other probationers. She’d been punched savagely in the face by Petersen. Her left eye was almost closed by a swelling bruise and her lip was split. Between sobs, she managed to tell Josh that she’d been bringing food and water to Petersen when he’d jumped up and hit her. When she’d awoken to raise the alarm, he had already gone.

  The second thing that sent Josh’s mind into overdrive was Spackman showing Josh the bonds which had been used to secure the first mate. The ropes hadn’t been undone, picked apart, or even torn by brute strength.

  They had been cut through. Cleanly and efficiently.

  Either Petersen had been given a knife, since there had certainly been none in reach, or he’d been released by someone on the boat.

  Josh had gone with Spackman up onto the deck and called Tally and the probationers together for a head count, as much as to ascertain who might have released Petersen as for anything else.

  Josh’s radar hadn’t been pinging, though, and no one came forward to fess up.

  So, a search had begun, with Tally keeping an eye on the probationers who weren’t searching with Josh and Spackman.

  Ten-Foot went with Josh, and Lemming went with Spackman. In very much the way they had searched for Rollins, Josh and Ten-Foot took the lower deck, and Spackman the mid-deck.

  The engine room where Josh had spent the majority of the day already, fruitlessly trying to get things working again and wrestling with his own demons, was empty. Ten-Foot hefted his ax and searched diligently. If anyone had been the one to release Petersen, then going by Ten-Foot’s chaotic mental state, Josh would have thought the blame was likely to rest with him. But Ten-Foot gave no sign that he’d sunk back into his violent or paranoid state as they searched. In fact, if anything, he looked more stable than Josh felt. The hangover from his dark musings around the idea of checking out were still bubbling below his consciousness, uncomfortable to contemplate.

  They moved from the engine room into the first hold. The rocks and sacks of ballast were still in place, offering lots of nooks and crannies for someone determined to hide. One of the freezers had been taken up for Tally’s fresh water still and the other stood open, so at least they were free of the fugitive Swede.

  “Nothin’ here,” Ten-Foot said, coming back from one of the dark corners to join Josh in the center of the hold. Josh’s palm felt sweaty against the stock of the flare gun.

  “We go on.”

  The second hold had its regulation sacks of ballast, as well as crates of spare parts for the engine. Things that might possibly wear out and could be replaced at sea. Filters, timing chains, spark plugs, and the like.

  The gloom of the second hold was almost complete—unlike the first hold, it had no portholes and had been lit by electric light. If the Sea-Hawk had had a stock of oil, lamps, or candles, they might have been able to illuminate it better, but that wasn’t the case. There were hatches to allow cargo to be lowered into the hold, but they were locked, and Josh and the others hadn’t yet found the keys to open the padlocks on them, so the hatches remained closed. Wan light seeped in from the doorway to the first hold, but that hardly helped.

  Ten-Foot and Josh had to go into the darkest of dark corner
s, feeling ahead with their hands or the ax. Josh felt vulnerable and on edge. His breathing hot and raspy in his throat and his heart thumping in his ears, blocking out the sound of the waves slapping against the side of the boat.

  When it came, the kick caught Josh in the side of the knee, and it was the buckling of his body as his leg collapsed in red agony that kept the swishing blade in Petersen’s fist from scything into his throat.

  Josh went down with a scream, dropping the flare gun and clutching at his knee. It was only Ten-Foot pushing into the dark with the head of the ax, catching Petersen in the midriff, that saved Josh from a killing blow.

  In the near dark, Petersen stumbled backwards, crashed into a crate, and then got up and ran.

  Ten-Foot took off in pursuit as Josh got to his feet and, with a grasping ache in his knee, limped as fast as he could after the two of them. He’d left the flare gun where it lay, so he was unarmed, but he wasn’t going to let Ten-Foot deal with this himself.

  Ahead, Petersen and Ten-Foot clattered for a ladder. Petersen, not encumbered by an ax, leapt for the ladder and was three quarters up its fifteen feet before Ten-Foot reached it.

  Petersen climbed, and Ten-Foot paused. Then, he aimed and threw the ax.

  The blade thumped into a rung by Petersen’s ear, but missed him. As Josh came along the corridor, he saw that Petersen had the blade of his knife gripped in his teeth, pirate style. He grinned wildly as the ax clattered back down, and then he was gone.

  Ten-Foot grabbed the ax and began to climb.

  Josh got to the base of the ladder as Ten-Foot made it over the top and onto the next level. Below, Josh pushed the pain in his knee to one side and began to climb.

  The he came out onto the second level, and took the two steps to the deck ladder as Ten-Foot’s legs disappeared onto the above deck.

  Josh hauled himself up. Sweat in his eyes, daggers in his knee.

  On deck, there was screaming as the probationers ran to get out of the way of Petersen, who was laughing and yelling incoherently, swiping at them with his knife.

  Ten-Foot swung at Petersen with the ax, but Petersen avoided it with a feint and then stabbed back with his blade.

  “Keep away from him!” Josh yelled to the others as he hobbled the thirty feet over the deck to reach the whirling dervish of the first mate. Probationers fell back.

  Tally was in the throng, pushing probationers ahead of her as Petersen closed in on the group.

  Josh screamed as he saw the knife begin to arc down towards his daughter’s back.

  Ten-Foot made a despairing lunge with the ax, but missed completely, his own momentum throwing him off balance and sending him down to one knee with the fire ax buried in the wood of the deck.

  As the knife reached Tally, a white-shirted, brown-skinned bullet T-boned Petersen, seemingly from nowhere.

  Spackman had been pelting across the deck at full speed, and he’d hit Petersen in the side, low down with his shoulder, head down and feet pumping.

  The last thing Josh saw was the shock on Petersen’s face as he and the crewman were catapulted over the side of the Sea-Hawk in a tangle of screams and yells and limbs, to splash out of sight into the ocean.

  12

  Maxine held her breath and pointed the SIG-Sauer 9mm ahead of her as she began to walk up the stairs inside McCready’s apartment building.

  She’d fired a gun before, several times, but never in self-defense or, like now, in offense.

  More than once, Josh had taken her to the firing range to get her familiar with the pistol he kept in a lockbox in their bedroom. That gun was a Colt Cobra and he’d bought it when there’d been a spate of burglaries in the neighborhood. Back when Josh had been a cop working night shifts forty miles away in Jacksonville, he’d said he’d feel safer if Maxine at least had an option of defending herself and the kids. So, he’d bought the weapon, built the fire-resistant lockbox into the floorboards on Maxine’s side of the bed, and provided her with a key to open it should the need arise.

  Of course, just having a gun wasn’t enough. Growing up on an Iowan cattle ranch, Maxine had been around guns. Her father was a keen hunter, but for whatever reason, she’d not taken to the hobby herself.

  Her relationship with her big, bluff father Donald was a complex one. He wasn’t a demonstrable man. He was quiet, keeping to himself, and she’d never gotten over the feeling that perhaps, in the final analysis, he would rather have had a son to take over the ranch when he was too old to carry on. And so that had contributed to making a wedge of sorts between them, which Maxine felt keenly, and because so few emotions leaked out of her father’s stoic countenance, she could only guess that he felt it, too. So, although there were guns in her parents’ house, they’d never become an interest she shared with him. And so. guns had not been part of her life at all, until Josh.

  As a cop-turned-probation officer, Josh was armed almost constantly, and he was comfortable around guns—he had to be since they were an important part of his working life, and he brought his gun home at the end of a shift and would often still have it in his side holster around the house until he got in the shower.

  But still guns hadn’t figured in her personal life at all until the burglaries on nearby streets had begun; they’d taken place at night and while the occupants were still in their beds. Thankfully, no one had been hurt, but Josh had been concerned to the point that he’d turned up one day with the Colt, a box of ammo, cleaning materials, and a lockbox to go into the floorboards of the bedroom.

  “What’s that for?” Maxine had asked.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Me? Why?” Maxine always got antsy when Josh went off half-cocked and made decisions himself that both of them should have been involved in.

  “You know what’s been going on, Maxine. I want you and the kids to be safe. Especially when I’m not here at night.”

  “Get bigger locks on the door. Buy cameras.”

  He’d looked at her like she’d just kicked his puppy.

  “Come on, Maxine, it’s better to be prepared. Hopefully, you’ll never have to get it out of the box. Except to clean it.”

  “I don’t know the first thing about guns.”

  Josh had smiled, and put the gun into her palm. It had felt like it weighed a thousand tons. “Well, the first thing to know about guns is how they feel in your hand. How’s that?”

  “Heavy.”

  “Ha! Okay. Well, that’s the first thing. The next thing is Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “You’re going to learn how to fire it.”

  They’d fought then, and it had been a firecracker, but in the end she’d relented. Josh had been adamant she needed to learn how to use the Colt in case of an emergency situation, even if she felt that she’d probably have shot her toes off by accident before she deterred a burglar.

  Josh was a good teacher, though. At the firing range, he’d been patient and supportive. He’d explained about being safe, how to check the gun over, how to load the gun, how to aim it, and how to fire it.

  The first time she’d fired the Colt, she’d thought she’d broken her wrist, but he’d taken the ear protectors off the side of her head upon seeing the pained expression on her face, taken the gun from her hands, placed it on the counter in front of them, and kissed her wrists better.

  “Not too tight. Don’t strangle it. Be firm; hold it like you would a pen, or a glass of wine. You have to be firm enough not to break the stem, nor loose enough to drop it. As you squeeze the trigger and the round discharges, let the gun take your hands up. Don’t fight it. Then bring it back. Squeeze and discharge.”

  And so that’s what she’d done.

  Twenty-four rounds later, the gun had started to feel like an extension of her hand. She wouldn’t be a target shooter by any stretch of the imagination, but she would be able to point it, and fire it without putting holes in the ceiling or, and she had initially thought, shooting off her own toes one by one.

&nbs
p; Josh had put the lockbox next to Maxine’s side of the bed in the floorboards, and placed a small ornamental mat over the box and given her two keys. One to put in the drawer of her bedside cabinet, and one to put on her keychain.

  They’d gone to the range once a week for the first few months, and when Josh had been satisfied, she would know what to do in the event of a home invasion or a Martian attack, they’d only gone to the range every six months.

  In between those occasions, Maxine hardly thought of the presence next to the bed, and now as she climbed the stairs up toward McCready’s apartment, she wondered what had happened to their house and possessions back in Morehead City. Had her neighbors gone crazy, too? Had their city burned like Boston? Was this sickness of the mind spreading all over the country… or even the world?

  Maxine reached the landing. The gun still stretched out in front of her.

  She wished in that moment that she’d been the boy she thought her daddy had wanted. Perhaps if she had been, he would have taken her hunting. Perhaps then she would have squeezed a trigger before now, with a weapon pointing at something that was alive.

  As a nurse, her whole career had been about preserving life. Life was sacrosanct in that sense to her. And here she was contemplating shooting someone down in cold blood.

  Strange phrase that, cold blood. She felt hotter than hell right now. There was sweat running down her sides from her armpits. It was running from under her scalp and collecting in a warm, sticky pool in the small of her back.

  She had the feeling that McCready wasn’t going to surrender easily. The way he had shot the guy in the hotel, and Gabby, as well, told her that even if he wasn’t the police officer he professed to be, he was proficient with a gun. If he was still in crazy rant mode, he might not be expecting for her to come back with a weapon—but he’d been more than lax to send her out on her own, to a store that had sold guns as well as food. If he felt more logical and focused now, there was a good chance that he was waiting for her, and perhaps he’d seen her from the window, coming back mostly empty-handed, having put the gun under her coat in the back of her jeans. Perhaps he was apoplectically angry now... Was threatening Storm. Was waiting behind the door to shoot her as she walked in…