Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Checkshirt leveled the Cobra, but nodded. “Steve!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Got a live one!”

  From over a grassy dune ahead, a figure came into view and then stomped down through the sand. Steve was African American, mid-thirties, and wearing a Dodgers T-Shirt that did nothing to conceal his physical size. A black Heckler & Koch swung barrel-down from his shoulder, and there was a thick-bladed Bowie in a sheath on his belt.

  Checkshirt, Josh could take down in a fair fight. Steve was a whole other ballgame entirely.

  “Graves and Stillson have taken the Vancouver 28 out. Should catch up with the ship in an hour or so. Whoever’s piloting, it looks like they don’t really know what they’re doing,” Steve finished, looking Josh up and down, seemingly appraising his threat level in much the same way Josh had done with him.

  “You’re going after the Sea-Hawk? You saw it?”

  “We see everything along this coastline,” Checkshirt offered uncharacteristically, and then addressed Steve. “He’s looking for his daughter and another woman. Anyone found them?”

  Steve shrugged. “No one’s reported back that they have. Maybe they’ll wash up dead later.”

  The words cut through Josh like razors. There was a nanosecond where he thought about making a break for it, but he was shoeless on a wide-open beach up against two armed men. He wouldn’t get ten feet.

  “Please. Help me.”

  Checkshirt laughed. “Help you? Dude, you’re the one who’s going to be helping us. Move out!”

  Josh was handcuffed by Steve, and Checkshirt, who Steve called Harve, marched him away from the surf, the rocks, and any clue as to where Tally might be.

  Harve as a name suggested a middle-aged character from a garbage sitcom Josh might have watched on cable when he was growing up. A paunchy racist guy with questionable hygiene and no girlfriend. No threat at all.

  But this Harve was anything but. If you cut him in half, he’d have danger written all the way through—not a physical danger, but the danger that comes when morality is subtracted from intelligence. Josh got the impression Harve was as sharp as the knife he’d happily stab him with.

  They trudged up the dunes, through the rough scrub, and came to a flat, windswept area of land that stretched to the horizon. There was a stony track, and four horses being watched over by a young man with raven-black hair tied back in a ponytail. Two of the horses were hitched to a rackety-looking market wagon, and the other two were saddled.

  Harve pushed Josh on towards the wagon.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “That depends on your level of cooperation, buddy,” Harve said, and without any tone in his voice that suggested he felt Josh was his buddy. “You do as you’re told and we take you back to the camp to meet Trace. If not, we put you in a grave.”

  Steve climbed up onto the wagon seat, and Ponytail sat himself in the saddle of the nearest horse. When Harve had secured Josh in leg irons in the back of the wagon and then padlocked the chains to a riveted rail, he patted Josh’s cheek. “Now, you be a good boy and I promise not to kill you slowly.” Harve grinned at something he obviously thought was a hilarious line and then got up onto the saddle of the last horse.

  “Do it!” he called to the others, and the horses headed off down the track.

  “Anything from the others, Jackdaw?”

  Ponytail shook his head. “Last I saw was them heading towards Maiden’s Point. Carly was bitchin’ about having to go down through the rocks. You know Carly. Always bitchin’ ‘bout something.”

  Josh heard Harve sigh like he knew all too well what Carly was like.

  “Can I ask a question?” Josh ventured when the party had settled down to a silence that was as stony as the track they were heading across.

  “If you must,” Harve said, not looking back.

  “I’ve been out at sea for a number of weeks. This is the first time I’ve seen land since the supernova. Catch me up?”

  Barnard’s star, light years distant, had exploded—the effects of which had taken just a little over six years to hit the solar system, and the consequences of that extrasolar event had hit the Earth harder than a baseball bat in the teeth. All the electronics on the Sea-Hawk had gone down and a number of the crew had turned into insane murderers.

  As a probation officer and ex-cop who’d been taking a group of ten probationers on a team-building adventure, Josh had gotten a lot more adventure than expected.

  His nineteen-year-old daughter Tally had reluctantly come along when she’d rather have been at home partying or up in the mountains climbing. To further complicate matters, his son Storm and near-estranged wife Maxine had been in Boston. Storm had just finished his last round of chemotherapy and had been on the satellite phone when the first wave of madness had hit. In the last few weeks, Josh had lost emotional contact with his wife, and then physical contact with his son and now his daughter.

  It felt like his whole life had slipped through his grasp.

  “World’s gone crazy,” Steve said, reining the horses forwards into the teeth of a stiffening breeze. The wind was bringing dark smudges of clouds which promised a needling rain if they didn’t make it to shelter soon.

  Harve didn’t look pleased that Steve had talked to Josh, but he didn’t say anything, just shook his head slightly. Steve faced forward and seemed to not be bothered that what he’d done had rankled Harve.

  Josh could see these men were an uneasy band—if they’d been thrown together since the Barnard’s Star event in tumultuous circumstances that in any way mirrored what he’d lived through on the Sea-Hawk, then the tension between them was perfectly understandable. Being chained up in the back of the wagon meant there was very little Josh could do to take advantage of their non-cohesiveness, but his grasp of situational awareness told him to bank the information for now. He might be able to use it to better his lot sometime in the future.

  “So, what’s the situation here?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Jackdaw commented.

  “I do. But please, the more I know, the more chance I have of finding my daughter.”

  Harve laughed then. “Where you’re going, your life expectancy will be what you’ll be concerned with more than where your daughter is. If she’s dead already, she’s in a better position than you.”

  Josh had no idea what Harve could mean, but the laugh, all hollow and bereft of humor, chilled him sufficiently to still his tongue. There was no way out of the leg irons, and he was a passenger to wherever these men were taking him, so there was no point wasting energy on Harve and the others. Energies he would need, should opportunities to escape presented themselves.

  Well, at least I hope they do…

  The spit of sandy scrub where Josh and the others had washed up turned, after an hour or so, into open grassland. This landscape was bisected by a single strip of blacktop looking like it came from and was going to nowhere.

  No signage appeared along the route to give Josh any clue where he was. The rain stayed off, but the air had little warmth. The clouds scudded busily overhead, and the tussocked grass to either side of the road sighed and rustled in the wind.

  Josh’s three captors said hardly a word to each other. Their faces remained set and stony. Perhaps they were concerned about what might happen when they got to wherever they were going, and the reaction of this character called ‘Trace’ who Harve had said he was taking Josh to see. There was certainly something more in the atmosphere surrounding the two men that suggested their silence wasn’t just about the personal tensions between them, not even in the apocalyptic situation they’d found themselves in.

  This didn’t bode well, and as the horses clip-clopped on and rain began to fall, Josh felt ever more disconnected from the beach, Tally, and Poppet. Since the supernova and its effects on those around him, Josh had found in his more reflective moments—which had been few and far between—that a sense of dread and anxiety had crept up on him. He would never have described h
imself as an anxious guy or susceptible to depressive thoughts before the supernova, but where some of the crew and probationers on the Sea-Hawk had become murderous and overly aggressive, Josh knew he’d been changed, as well. As if there wasn’t enough going on for him to deal with on the outside; he didn’t look forward to having to battle any internal demons focused and enhanced by whatever had hit the earth.

  Josh shook his head and held his face up to the rain, trying to use its cleansing sting to wash away those black thoughts bubbling up from his mind. He needed to be at his best if he was going to get out of this, and letting that dreadful tide rise within him wouldn’t assist that endeavor.

  As the rain eased, Steve and Harve looked back sharply when drumming hoofbeats on the road were heard. Josh opened his eyes from where he’d been concentrating on squashing the negativity back down to see a horse and rider almost upon them.

  The rider was burly, with wild black curls of hair framing a bearded face. As he approached, Josh saw the face was ruddy and the lips thin, with a chin that jutted with self-importance.

  Harve turned his mount around to face the newcomer as he pulled his horse to a stop. “Where’s Leif, Carly? What’s the deal?”

  Josh noted again that Carly—the one Jackdaw had described as always bitchin’—was indeed someone who exuded attitude.

  Carly reported back with barely disguised contempt for Harve’s apparent position of authority. “Back at Maiden’s Point. I’m heading back to camp to get some ropes. We found someone trapped in the rocks. Got themselves wedged in and can’t get out on their own. Need some ropes and tackle.”

  Harve rolled his eyes. “Why are you bothering? We don’t have time for this.”

  “Harve, you might enjoy casual sadism, but I ain’t leaving a woman to die in the rocks. That might be your way, but it ain’t mine.”

  And with that, Carly kicked his horse forward and was off. Harve shouted after him to come back, but Carly was gone, clattering across the tarmac like someone’s life depended on it.

  Josh’s heart was clattering like Carly’s horse.

  A woman? Trapped in the rocks?

  All he could think of was Tally, washed up, regaining consciousness, and trying to use her climbing skills to get herself out of the water over the savage black rocks. Tally was an excellent climber and free-runner, but if the fatigue and exhaustion Josh felt were in anyway replicated in his daughter, then perhaps she’d slipped… made a mistake and gotten herself stuck.

  Josh thanked whoever was looking over them right now that it had been Carly and not Harve who had found her, because it seemed Harve wouldn’t have bothered to rescue her. He’d have left her to die.

  The party moved forward in silence, the tension still evident, with Josh feeling that Steve and Jackdaw were trying not to exacerbate Harve’s anger by discussing Carly’s behavior with him.

  But Josh couldn’t help clinging onto the first new leaf of hope glimpsed in the forest of his dread. He looked back with unalloyed hunger at the route they had travelled across the windswept landscape, back towards the sea through the pitter of rain, willing Tally to be okay—to be saved.

  When Carly came back past them again at a near gallop, he didn’t even bother to stop to speak to Harve and the others. There were two other riders with him, both with their faces down in the rain, hats jammed onto their heads, ropes and gear slung over their shoulders. The Stetsons blackened with rain, their coats slick with it, and the sudden clatter of hooves all spoke of another time, and another place. As if Josh was looking back down through a tunnel of time to a past where America had been a lawless and dangerous place. The black silhouettes of the riders haring off into the distance like a posse in pursuit of a fugitive, or a gang fleeing from justice, brought home to Josh in one hard hit the uncompromising truth that, while he had been at sea, the country he had known had been upended and its treasure scattered like garbage.

  And his first encounter with this new world had seen him lose everything dear to him, and end up in irons in the grip of a fresh tyranny he could only guess the extent of.

  He had no idea what he would find at the camp to which he was being transported, or who this ‘Trace’ would turn out to be, or what awaited him after the cryptic ‘You’ll be the one helping us’ line from Harve, but the doom-laden hollow in his gut was nothing to what he felt when the party turned off the track, beginning a descent along a bumpy, unpaved track down into a deepening trough between grassy banks, and what he saw above him.

  If the chill of the afternoon rain and the strained atmosphere of the men around him hadn’t been enough to extinguish the one spark of hope he had of Tally being rescued, then the ten, black and bloated bodies, hung from gibbets by the side of the road and swinging in the wind, snuffed it out of him forever.

  Get your copy of Deep End

  Available April 8, 2020

  www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com

  BLURB

  When the lights go out, anarchy reigns supreme.

  After journalist Austin Merryman’s wife died, he and his fourteen-year-old daughter left home to travel the country in an old RV. But the comfort and renewal they sought soon descends into chaos.

  After a message from an old college buddy leads Austin to a bridge in the middle of nowhere, he finds his friend—now an NSA agent—waiting to give him a USB drive. Before the contents can be explained, machine gun fire strafes the bridge, killing Austin’s friend and forcing Austin into the raging river.

  Rescued downstream by a beautiful veterinarian, Austin learns that EMP attacks have thrust the world into eternal darkness—and separated him from the only person he has left. Now, he’ll move heaven and earth to locate his daughter and make it to his brother’s prepper hideaway in Utah.

  But the post-apocalyptic world is no longer a friendly place. Resources are growing scarce. Factions break out along ethnic and religious lines. Everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. And Austin’s daughter is caught right in the middle of this splintering society.

  But an even deadlier foe stalks them as they struggle across the landscape. Someone who hasn’t forgotten about the USB drive Austin possesses.

  And they’ll do anything to get it back.

  Grab your copy of Surviving the Chaos.

  www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com

  EXCERPT

  Chapter One

  Austin Merryman stored the last of the dinner dishes in the small cupboard of his thirty-two-foot fifth wheel. The RV wasn’t an ideal living space for a man and his fourteen-year-old daughter, but they’d been managing to make it work. As he and Savannah constantly reminded each other, it was both easy and difficult to keep the small living space clean. It only took a stray pair of shoes or a few dishes on the tiny kitchen counter to make things look untidy, and both of them were guilty of forgetting the fact on a too-regular basis.

  Waiting for Savannah to emerge from the little upper bedroom, he folded a blanket, tossed it on the couch, and put the TV remote back in the little caddy mounted on the wall. Austin liked things neat, though he knew Savannah had to clean up after him just as he was cleaning up after her now.

  “Savannah!” he called out, checking his watch again.

  She popped her head out from around the upstairs corner of the fifth-wheel, a hair dryer still in her hand. “What?”

  “I have to get going.”

  She shrugged as she wrapped the cord around her dryer. “I told you, I don’t need a ride. Leave already.”

  “I’ll be back within an hour or so. Where are you going exactly?” he asked. She’d told him she was going to the creamery for ice cream with the girl who lived on a nearby farm; somehow, he couldn’t believe it was that simple. He wanted to, but he’d seen the way she’d ogled that boy they’d run into in town—and the way they’d leaned in to each other to talk. He remembered being young and carefree. Yeah, it had been a long time ago, before life and the world had given him a much more jaded v
iew of things, but he remembered. And Savannah was too pretty for him to forget what he’d been like as a teenage boy.

  “Dad, I already told you. We’re going to get ice cream,” she groaned, adjusting her hair in a hand mirror. “Me and Cassie.”

  Out with it, Austin. “Are you going to see that boy?” he asked.

  She glanced over to meet his eyes and then gave him that maddening teenage shrug again. “He might be there,” she replied.

  Right. He might be there. Austin kept eyeing her, trying to decide whether or not to trust her—not that he had much choice, but still. She looked so much like his late wife that it hurt sometimes. Her long, light brown hair had been brushed to a high shine and left loose around her shoulders. She’d only asked him to buy her lip gloss and mascara thus far. He dreaded the day she wanted to go full face-paint. He preferred the clean, youthful look that befitted her fourteen years over the girls her age who he’d seen with more makeup than a supermodel wore.

  And he had to admit, she didn’t give him as much stress as he knew many fourteen-year-olds dealt their parents. Even with tonight being a warm early summer night, she wore something he couldn’t quite object to. For tonight’s ice cream trip, she’d donned the black flowy shirt with the shoulder cut-outs that she’d begged him to buy her on their last mall visit. And it wasn’t truly revealing, so he couldn’t complain. It just made her look far more mature than he liked, reminding him that he had to accept that she was growing up.

  “I want you home by ten,” he reminded her. “Not at the farmer’s house with your friend down the street, either. Home.”

  Finally starting to move down toward the door where he stood, she quirked her lips in a frown. “Dad, it doesn’t even get dark until like nine-thirty,” she argued.

  “Ten, or don’t go at all. You don’t need to be walking around after dark. There are wild animals out here,” he lectured her.