Maxine had hugged Josh then. There hadn’t been any subtext to the hug as they’d returned to the bar. It hadn’t been a promise of things to come—just the sense of needing the close comfort of another human being who knew right from wrong, knew what justice meant, and who wanted nothing more from her than to know she was okay and safe.
It had been six months before she’d realized that Josh might be more than a friend.
He’d not tried to inveigle his way into her affections, or play both ends towards the middle with her. The look of shock on his face when she’d asked him to take her to a movie had made her smile, and her heart had tingled with equal measure.
She’d hugged him again then, reaching up to his shoulders under his confused face, which was contorting with wonder, and pulled him into her arms.
“How about there?”
Maxine’s reverie snapped closed as Storm, who had been gently dozing when she’d drifted into her own thoughts, pointed to a sign giving directions to a nearby picnic area and viewpoint.
Maxine blinked a couple of times, shaking the memories out of her head and bringing her focus back to the matter at hand. There was a short ramp off the highway, up the side of a wooded hill, and she steered the buggy towards it.
The road was steep, but well-maintained, the pines overhanging it giving cool shade in the warmth of the sun. When they crested the rise at the top of the hill, they found a viewing area over a rocky, shallow valley with a fast-moving river. It held a picnic area of benches, garbage cans, and a notice board with suggested routes for hikers on simple maps.
There were two abandoned cars in the parking lot. Both looked like they’d been attacked with iron bars. The windows were all smashed, the doors opened, and the bodywork dented all to hell. One of the cars, a Toyota Corolla, was blackened and scorched inside where someone had tried, as with so many other pieces of property, to set it alight.
There were a couple of places in the grassy area beyond the picnic tables where crude hearths had been constructed from stones, and ash in the center of both. Storm put his hand over the ash. “Cold,” he said. “No one’s been here for a few days at least.”
Maxine nodded and told him to sit down and rest while she unpacked the gear and rummaged for Storm’s bag of medication. They were getting dangerously low on antibiotics, and the antiemetic pills were dwindling. Sudhindra had given them what he could, but it was clear these supplies wouldn’t last forever. They would probably need to replenish their stocks soon if they were going to keep Storm anywhere close to functional.
The comedown off the adrenaline rush of the last couple of days hit Storm almost as soon as he finished taking the meds Maxine had proffered him.
He lay down in the grass and appeared to be asleep within thirty seconds. He’d rested one hand under his head and drawn his legs up almost to his chest. Other than the sound of the wind gently moving through the pines, the only sound Maxine could hear was Storm’s gentle breathing as she put up the North Face Summit Series Assault two-person tent Sally had given them. “You can’t always be sure of a roof over your head on the road,” she’d said. “Take this and carry your roof with you.”
She’d also given them back their guns, and more than enough ammo, situation notwithstanding, to get them through the days between there and her parents’ farm.
Tally-Two seemed happy to be out of harness for the first time that day, too. Maxine used a long line to tie her to one of the picnic tables so that she had room to walk around and shake off the road while also having space to feed.
When she’d finished erecting the tent, she began to collect dry brush for a fire. There was little point in driving on if Storm needed more time to recover. Pushing him too hard would only make matters worse, she concluded, and it was better to travel carefully when they could.
The fire built, Maxine went down the half mile to the river, taking Tally-Two along for a drink, and filled their spare canteens after filtering the water. They’d seen no one all morning—not on the roads, and not in the woods on the way to the picnic area. Still, it didn’t diminish the sense that things were on a knife’s edge, and that at any moment they might run into someone hostile to their presence; if the situation between the Childs and the Klane families had taught Maxine anything, it was that as people realized that help was not coming anytime soon, from whatever authorities remained, then people would jealously guard everything they had, and wouldn’t bat so much as an eyelid to protect it.
Maxine wished she’d taken more notice of those people who’d appeared on news and magazine programs, warning the citizens that it was their duty to prepare and be ready for a world knocked off-course. She’d heard talk of surviving a nuclear winter, how to live after an EMP attack, and make sure families could go on after society broke down.
The Barnard’s Star event had been the perfect storm, too, bringing all those elements of disaster to the Earth in one fell swoop. No technology worked, some people had apparently been sent murderously insane, with others paranoid and fearful, and there seemed to be no ability in the government to respond in any meaningful way.
Maxine thought back to how resistant she’d been to even Josh’s insistence on buying the pistol to put in the floor safe by her bed. All he’d been doing was trying to prepare, to make sure they’d put some thought into whatever might happen in the future. If Maxine hadn’t been puffing so hard, climbing up from the riverbank to the picnic area, she would have kicked her own backside at the thought of it.
More than anything, she regretted her initial response and intransigence to Josh’s intervention. If they’d been better prepared, and had a store of hidden food, weapons, and gear back at the house in Morehead city, she might have been heading back there now from Boston, not trying to get across a quarter of the country with limited supplies and no idea what they would find at the end of their journey. What if, like so many other properties she’d seen along the way, her family’s farm had been attacked, burned out—or, and this was a more uncomfortable thought—what if her father had turned and done such a thing himself?
Maxine felt a hollow fear over the fate of her parents. Was this a wild goose chase across the country, made just to find a couple of fresh graves?
She stopped a hundred yards from the lip of the picnic area. She set down the canteens and began to breathe in through her mouth to a count of five, and then out through her nose to another count of five. A well-practiced calming strategy she’d taught to countless patients who’d feared dying or permanent invalid status associated with their wounds. To focus on one’s breathing, to take control over it, would ward off panic in most situations. And it was that panic Maxine was pushing back down inside herself now.
Yet again, Maxine had clear evidence that her thinking and responses had been warped in the days since the event. She knew she was stronger than this, she knew she could cope, and yet the intrusive thoughts about her parents were knocking her off kilter in ways they wouldn’t have before.
Maxine went through the cycles of breathing until she was back in full control and her heart had calmed down in her chest.
Then she carried on up the grassy slope.
Maxine needed all of her breathing control once again when she saw that their makeshift camp had been disturbed while she had been collecting water.
Storm was there. So were the buggy and the tent.
But all of their gear, including the rucksack with Storm’s medication, was gone.
21
Barney’s mouth frothed with blood as Lazzy picked a Heckler & Koch up off the table where Joey had put it and stepped over the stricken bodyguard. Joey took the other gun while Josh knelt by the dying man’s convulsing frame.
Poppet’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t move from the stateroom’s sofa, and as Josh felt for a pulse in Barney’s neck, she took a draught of champagne from the bottle.
Barney was dead.
Josh could hear footsteps in the corridor outside the stateroom as Lazzy stalk
ed down it. Joey stood in the doorway looking right and left, wiping his hand across his mouth and through his hair.
“Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot! It wasn’t us! I swear.”
Josh got up from Barney’s side and looked around the doorway into the corridor. Banger and Lemming were both on their knees with their hands up and Lazzy had the machine gun raised to his shoulder, looking like he was going to finish them here and now.
“Look at the blood!” Lemming yelled, keeping one hand raised and his other pointing back along the corridor. “Your guy came that way. He was shot by the others. We don’t even have guns. I promise! Search us! All we’ve got is a couple of kitchen knives!”
Josh saw that the corridor from the other direction was splashed with Barney’s dying blood. Banger and Lemming were thirty yards away, at least.
“They’re the kids who came aboard with me, Joey. They’re not killers.”
“What he said!” Lemming insisted, moving his index finger to settle on Josh.
Lazzy slapped Lemming’s face and kicked Banger over with a boot flat to his chest and a roar of rage, but he didn’t shoot them.
Joey knelt back beside Barney, put a hand on the back of his skull, and lowered his head as if in prayer. When he got up, his eyes were damp. Banger and Lemming were shoved into the room by Lazzy, who then returned to cover the corridor with the Heckler & Koch.
Joey rounded on the probationers. “Okay, you two a-holes, tell us what you know and where the shooters are.”
Banger’s lips were trembling and he kept his hands held high. “We lost Jo… Mr. Standing when he went into the cabin lower down the ship. We carried on up. Saw your guys chasing someone in uniform and decided to head back to the Sea-Hawk. We didn’t want no trouble, but when we got back to the side, it was damn well sailing away. Ten-Foot’s a total slime—he got the ship and he was happy to leave us behind! We heard the shooting from inside the Empress, so we hid again on the deck below this one. We heard you coming up the stairs with Mr. Standing, and so we thought we’d head up here to let him know we were still alive. That guy—” he pointed to Barney’s body, “came crawling from the other end of the corridor. I swear we didn’t do anything to him. We didn’t do anything to anyone. We just hid. We were scared, mister! Really scared!”
Josh turned to Joey. “I know these boys, Joey. They’re telling the truth. They were forced to come over here with me by another probationer back on the Sea-Hawk. The one who left me behind.”
“You know how to pick your accomplices, that’s for sure,” Joey breathed. “Okay, I guess if they shot Barney, and Barney made his way up here… all they’re going to have to do is follow the trail of his blood and…”
As if to finish his sentence for him, Lazzy leapt back into the stateroom as a torrent of bullets bit into the floor and walls outside in the corridor.
“Holy…” Joey began, and Josh pushed the boys down to the floor.
“Stay there. Don’t move.”
As Lazzy and Joey returned fire, Josh pulled Poppet by the wrist off the sofa and threw her to the floor next to the boys. And it was that movement which save her life. The wall behind where she had been sitting was buzz-sawed open. Not from the doorway, but from behind them, across the veranda.
A shadow of movement showed in the corner of Josh’s eye as bullets poured through the space where he’d been ducking just a moment before. Two figures had climbed down from above and were at the sliding doors, picking their next target.
As Josh had moved, he’d already grabbed the other Heckler & Koch off of the table and was bringing it to bear on the two people on the veranda. One was in his twenties, wearing a white uniform, and the other was a fit forty-year-old with thick, hairy forearms, wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt. Both had the look of red madness about their faces, their lips barred with spit and their eyes sharp as lasers.
Josh was already firing. Uniform crashed backwards and somersaulted over the railing to fall over the side of the ship. Shirt looked down at his open belly and destroyed sternum, then went down like a falling tree. Josh stuck his head out onto the veranda. The killers had come from above, where the stateroom section of the Empress was raked back in deep steps of opulence.
There were two rope lines hanging down which the killers had used to come in behind them. Josh covered the stateroom above, but no one dared put their head over the upper balcony.
That’s when Poppet screamed.
Josh whirled to look back into the room—Lazzy was tottering backwards, the top of his head gone. He smashed into Joey, who just managed to sidestep him before the bulk of the bodyguard took him down. Lazzy crashed across Barney’s body and twitched as he finished dying.
Joey screamed his rage to the ceiling and then stepped into the corridor, firing as he went. He walked out of sight, the crash of his machine pistol reverberating mercilessly.
Josh turned his back to the stateroom and looked down over the side. Uniform hadn’t fallen in the water. He lay dead on the veranda of the cabin below. It was a seven-foot drop, and right now it was the only way out.
Josh stepped back into the room as the firing continued outside. He hauled the boys and Poppet to their feet and pushed them out through the glass doors. “Take the guns from the boy there, and the one on the balcony below. Get over the side and wait there. I’ll be down in less than a minute. Lemming nodded. Poppet was frozen in fear, eyes wide as hubcaps, her throat working up to its next scream. And so, Lemming pulled her out through the windows, lifted her up, and dropped her feet first onto the veranda below. He followed her down, and when Banger had picked up the Heckler & Koch from Shirt’s body, he followed, too.
Josh strode to the doorway and risked a quick look down the corridor.
A pile of three bodies lay on the blue carpet. Joey was firing a shot into one of the heads as its arm moved, and then it went still. Joey spat on the body and, after picking up any spare magazines he could find, stalked back up the corridor towards Josh.
“Sometimes you just gotta roll the dice against the wall and see what turns up,” he said as he went past. Joey waved at the bodies of Lazzy and Barney, his eyes still damp with tears. Then, after Josh had told him where the others were, he climbed over the rail and dropped down onto the veranda below.
The cabin below was large and ornate, but nothing like the stateroom above. Like life, the further down you went on the scale, the less you had to play with. The boys eyed their guns like they didn’t really know what to do with them, and Josh gave them a couple of sentences of instruction. “Don’t hold it too tightly. Point and squeeze. Aim low, because the barrel will move up of its own accord and you’ll rake more of your target. Start at the head and you’ll be chewing up the ceiling. Got that?”
The boys nodded their understanding, but they still looked terrified.
Poppet was clinging to Joey, sobbing into his shoulder. “What’s the plan?” Josh asked Joey.
Joey shook his head. “I’m deferring to you, Mr. Interloper. You got us all out of that situation up there. So, you got a plan, I wanna hear it.”
Josh thought fast. “We need to find somewhere to hole up. Somewhere where they can’t drop onto us from above, like here and the next level up. How many of them do you think there are? I can’t know how long it will take them to regroup unless we have an idea of numbers.”
Joey shook his head. “We never saw them all together. We would just come across them when they went for us. We had the upper hand when we were the only ones with the guns, like I said. This is a whole different ballgame. Lazzy thought there might be as many as fifty, and I think after today, if we’re including the ones we’d already offed in that, there may be twenty left. Twenty-five. They got into the armory, which is why they’re coming for us mob-handed,” he finished.
“Okay, there’s one level of cabins with verandas we can drop down onto. I suggest we go over the rail again, get inside, and then make our way down through the ship before they pick up our trail again.�
��
“Why go down?” Poppet asked. “Surely, it’s better to go up?”
Josh shook his head. “The guys with the guns are up here, and we’re too exposed. There may be places easier to defend below. Well, at least I hope so. These cabin doors aren’t going to keep back a determined raccoon, let alone a guy with a gun.”
Joey nodded. “Let’s do it.”
On the next level down, the sliding door to the cabin was locked. Before Josh could tell him not to because it might give away their position, Joey shot the lock out and slid the door back with a crash. He was not a sneaky-sneaky-catchy-monkey kind of guy.
The corridor outside the cabin was lit in sections by open doors to trashed cabins. They turned left, Josh going first, followed by the boys, with Poppet and Joey bringing up the rear.
Every twenty yards or so, Josh made the others stop and listen for any sounds of movement. There was nothing to be heard. Well, not anything human, that was for sure.
“It’s too much of a risk to take the main stairs.” Josh said as they reached the door into the stairwell. “If I was trying to catch us, I’d post guards on the main staircases and just wait for us to rock up.”
Joey nodded his agreement. “So, how we gonna get down to the lower levels?”
Josh rubbed the side of his head, trying to genie a thought from the lamp in his head. A sign on the wall told him that they were travelling in the right direction to get to one of the Empress’ galleys. “Okay. It’s a long shot, but I think I have an idea.”
“No way. Not for all the sham-pag-nay in France,” Poppet said, looking down the shaft now that Josh had levered out the guts of the dumbwaiter and exposed the thirty-foot-deep hole running down three levels to the second-class dining room.
“Look, there are plenty of hand-holds on the wall. It’ll be like climbing a ladder.”
“Well, you go first,” Poppet said. “So, you can break my fall when I drop, Mr. Interloper.”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 21
