The spectacle, and it surely was unusual, had turned almost everyone on the planet into an amateur astronomer overnight. The UFOlogists had called it alien intervention, and fundamentalists had called it a sign from their own particular deities of choice. Many people had been flocking to churches, and a similar number had flocked to bars. Humanity had done what it always did when something strange and wonderful happened–everyone reached for their crutch of choice and leaned on it as heavily as they could.
“What was Halley saying?” Josh asked, wanting to keep his son talking.
“Crazy stuff, Dad. He said the government was keeping the truth secret, and they knew a lot more than they were letting on. He said he had sources within NASA and the NSA who were trying to get the news of the dangers out to the world, and they were being stopped at every turn.”
“Sure sounds crazy.”
“He looked terrible, Dad. Never seen him look so scared. Conan asked if Halley’s psychiatrist was as concerned, for a cheap laugh, and then on CNN they cut away from him, and he tried to get back in front of the cameras and you could see security hauling him off screen! It’ll be on YouTube. I can send you the link.”
“Thanks, I’ll get the popcorn.”
Storm laughed. It was a good sound, and made Josh feel so much better. Despite everything, the fact that his son could still laugh, that Josh could still laugh, meant that things weren’t over yet. But they still had a long way to go and the distance didn’t help.
“Halley was saying we’ve never had a supernova happen so close to our solar system before, so we don’t know what’s going to be riding the wave behind the light. Conan reached behind his desk and held up a surfboard, and said he was ready to hang ten in the stars like the Silver Surfer.”
Josh could almost hear the audience’s laughter in his head as Storm relayed the story. He imagined Halley’s eyes, darting confusedly behind his bug-eyed glasses, his lips thin and his hands trembling on his knees. Public humiliation was the surefire way to prick someone’s bubble, and when you could add gas-lit layers of suggested crazy onto that, all the better.
“What stuff riding the wave?” Josh asked after a moment. “What did he mean?”
“Dunno, Dad. They never really let him get it out, but he looked… well, he looked terrified.”
Josh thought of the others now, outside currently looking at the smudge. The sky over this wilderness was wide and cloudless tonight. The young people in his charge weren’t what you’d call readers of Nature or National Geographic, but even they had been moved to kick back, forget their attitude for a few hours, and look up at the beautiful spectacle high above them, moving slowly across the sky. Josh had been tempted to stay outside with them longer, but his call to Maxine and Storm had been scheduled already, the satellite time booked. Even a tense moment with Maxine was worth it to rub away the guilt he felt about being out here instead of in Boston with his son.
This was what Storm wanted, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time.
Josh knew that he could have bugged out of the trip, too. His boss would have understood. He knew that, if he’d not stuck his heels in and made sure his eighteen-year-old daughter Tally had also come along with him—instead of giving in to her insistence on staying home while both parental units were separated by space, time, and emotional breakdown—he’d have had more than enough reason to back out.
But Josh wasn’t the backing out kind.
This trip had been planned for more than a year. It was important not just to Josh and his bosses in the Morehead City Probation Service, but could and should be important to the young men he’d brought out here.
These were kids who’d been let down their whole lives by their peers, their parents, and, yes, the system Josh was a part of. And as no one else in the department had had the time or the inclination to replace him on the trip… well, if Josh hadn’t gone, then the trip wouldn’t have happened. And under those circumstances, he’d have just become another letdown for those kids, one in the long line of letdowns. Just another blur in their headlong trajectory toward lawless oblivion.
Granted, when Storm had heard all this, he’d been insistent that his dad make the trip. “Those kids need you more than I do, Dad,” he’d told Josh. And that he’d already been with him through all the others, he’d prefer it if it was just mom this last trip. No fuss. No celebration. Just business as usual was what Storm wanted.
Josh couldn’t stop the cancer himself—and he’d researched and read every medical article out there, called every doctor, tried everything—but what he could do is give his son what he asked for. Some control over his life. Even if it broke his heart.
Still, he’d weighed it up.
But this was Storm’s last course of chemo, and Maxine, a Wound Care Specialist Nurse at Morehead Mercy, was more professionally equipped to deal with the side effects from the constant poison infiltrating their son’s body whereas he was more apt to rail against the unfairness of it all. So he had come out here—Tally almost kicking and screaming, but in the end accepting that she wasn’t going to be left alone to her own devices—and he’d ridden a wave of guilt every damn mile of the journey.
Fzzzt!
The satellite radio buzzed and crackled. The indicator lights flashed, and somewhere inside the box, something electrical made a sick, crunching sound.
The light over his head flickered and the wood-paneled room was plunged momentarily into darkness before, after two or three seconds, the light regained its luminosity and the satellite radio box stopped flashing and burping.
“Storm? Storm? You still there?”
Silence.
Josh twisted the dials and turned the machine off and on again in the universal answer for all errant tech, but the machine only lit up; it didn’t connect. There wasn’t even the usual carrier signal for him to lock onto. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
A thudding headache kicked in behind Josh’s forehead. A proper ten-tonner. The iron of it kicked against his skull and almost rattled his teeth out of his jaw. He’d suffered migraines as a kid, but thought he’d outgrown them since he hadn’t had one like this since before college. There were painkillers back in his pack, stored beneath his bunk, but such was the eye-squinting ferocity of the pain that Josh didn’t know in the moment if he’d be able to get upright and reach them.
And then, almost as if a switch in his head had been flicked, the dagger of pain sheathed itself softly back into a dull ache and he could open his eyes without wanting to throw up.
“What the hell was that?” he breathed aloud to the empty room. He blinked a couple of times and rubbed his temple. Perhaps it had been his body reminding him that the last year had been pretty intense, what with Storm, the growing emotional distancing with Maxine, and the trip.
He shook his head as much to clear the pain as to get the truth of how hard he’d been pushing himself out of his mind.
Josh sighed, rubbed his eyes, and got up, vowing to try again later with the satellite radio, figuring Storm would be up a few hours more to observe the smudge hanging with its starry glitter like a party in the sky.
He walked to the door, more unsteady on his feet than he’d expected, and having to lean heavily on the door jamb as he pulled the beautifully tooled and brass-handled door open.
The gust of a stiff but not unpleasantly chill breeze washed over his face as he climbed the ladder. The dark sky above was a dusting of stars, and the Barnard’s Star Supernova cloud, still constantly expanding and brightening, now totally owned its corner of the sky.
Halfway up the ladder, before his head crested fully into the open air, the pain kicked back into his temples, taking his breath out of his lungs in one agonizing thump. A moan of pain leaked from his mouth, and it was matched by one from above. He recognized the voice that had made it, but for one moment, because of the hammering between his own ears, he couldn’t put a name to it. But it was a sound that hacked at his heart as much as the headache hacked at h
is head.
Gritting his teeth and the handrail as hard as he could, Josh hauled himself up the last few rungs, and then, finding that the effort seemed to have shorn the muscles in his legs of all their power, he pitched forward and slithered like a freshly landed fish out into the open.
For a moment, the smell of the varnished wood close to his nostrils reminded him of college basketball courts or musty museums. Memories burst into bright light in his mind intermingled with the loosened iron ore rolling around his brain like it was a ball made from nails and blades.
“Dad… Dad…”
Josh felt a hand take his and squeeze its own panic into his bones. He managed to open eyelids that had been stapled shut with pain and look along the planks where he lay. Tally Standing, his daughter, her blonde hair flapping and fluttering in the breeze, was prone on the varnished planking, her face twisted into a mask of agony. Behind her, he could see other bodies slumped over or collapsed, hands on temples, knees drawn up into fetal agonies, some of the boys rolling and crashing into each other as if they were trying to escape their own bodies.
Above him, as Josh twisted his eyes up, he could see the sails and the rigging lit by the deck lights, and he could feel the roll of the Sea-Hawk as it rode the swells of the Atlantic. Up, between the spars and the ropes, between the ladders and the sheets of the clipper’s rigging, the smudge of the Barnard Star explosion now festered in the sky.
It was no longer beautiful.
The glitter and majesty of its spilled jewels had changed completely. It showed a tinge of red, a trace of black, and the sickness of unwholesome green.
Now the exploding stellar object that had awed every eye on the planet was a festering sore between the stars, dripping its infection onto the Earth.
2
Maxine Standing paced the hotel room as Storm spoke to Josh, her arms folded across her body as if she were freezing cold even though the room was a comfortably warm temperature. She was dying for a cigarette—despite the fact that she hadn’t smoked for fifteen years, and not earnestly for another five before that.
Storm, his wispy hair and mostly bald head covered by a beanie, was on the edge of the bed, a smile on his face as he spoke to Josh. His father was somewhere out in the Atlantic, on a vacation with a bunch of kids who didn’t have the discipline or the self-control to stay out of trouble. Storm had discipline and the self-control of a saint. So, what was Josh doing out there with those worthless….
Stop-it!
Maxine paused her pacing and hugged herself tighter.
She knew she didn’t really believe the thoughts running away with her focus. She wasn’t some ‘hang ‘em high’ or ‘flog ‘em ‘til they scream’ numbskull. She was a nurse, for crying out loud. Her job revolved around healing wounds, not inflicting new ones, but that’s what it had come down to with Josh. Big, beautiful, impossible Josh, the love of her life, and yet now he was the man who on some days she couldn’t bear to even breathe the same oxygen as. Josh, who had been her constant companion for over half her time on Earth, and the man who’d lifted her up from the lowest point of her life and helped her to find the key to unlock love again after it had almost been jailed inside of her forever.
The man who had been her partner in raising two wonderful children who were just now finding their own way in the world.
The man who seemed to have given all that up, and grown cold and indifferent. In whose arms she’d once found the greatest peace and safety, but who now made her flinch if she found him rolling over and putting an arm across her in the night. She would lay there stiff. Waiting for him to move, or, if he settled, she’d slip out from under his heavily muscled arm and go to the guest room without a look back into the bedroom that had become a freezer where their love was now on ice, unable to thaw.
Maxine looked out of the hotel window, over the sparkling lights of west Boston. They were five stories up in a hotel just two blocks from the Travis Institute where Storm had had his last session of chemo that day. Maxine knew it would take a few hours for the poison to take full effect on her boy, and that his ability to joke on his phone with Josh about Halley and popcorn wouldn’t be something he’d be able or willing to do tomorrow. Admittedly, the treatment wasn’t as harsh on the twenty-one-year-old’s body now as it had been back at the start of the treatment, when he’d been laid low for two weeks at a time—unable to leave his bed, hair coming out by the fistful, and surrounded by aromas Maxine would usually associate with a hospital ward at Morehead Mercy when there was a bout of Norovirus sweeping through.
Maxine had been happy to care for him at these times, and felt it was her area of expertise. Josh had been scared, and that fear had come out in anger at Sudhindra’s team, or anyone else who’d gotten in the way. But that was the kind of outburst Maxine could understand in Josh. It was partly why they’d made such a good team. She had easily settled into the role of nurturing caregiver while Josh had been the slayer of all things that went bump in the night.
In the seven years since he’d give up being a cop, and taken his social science degree with him into the Morehead Probation Service after what had happened with Cody Zem, Josh had slowly changed from the fun-loving, intimate, and caring man she’d thought she knew into someone who, on some days, she didn’t think she knew at all. Yes, he was still a stand-up guy who did his chores around the house to help out—two people working full-time these days, if they wanted to keep on top of things, had to be sharers of burdens rather than the kind of people who put burdens on their partners. And Maxine worked just as hard, if not harder than Josh. Her hours were certainly longer, and the stresses of her work dealt with post-surgical infections, and healing around compound fractures and, of course, gunshot wounds, while Josh spent his working days helping the kinds of people who made gunshot wounds…
Stop-it. C’mon, Maxine, stop-it.
And at a fundamental level, Maxine could understand the change in Josh, but God… there was only so much understanding to go around when your son might die from cancer and your family needed to be at its strongest, and one of the cornerstones of that family was trying to balance three balls on his nose at the same time. It just wasn’t viable.
Storm’s cancer diagnosis hadn’t, of course, been the cause of that distancing between Maxine and Josh, but it had thrown into sharp relief that which had changed between them.
When Tally was away at college, and when Storm was over this huge bump in his road, Maxine didn’t know how much more of Josh’s distance and ambivalence she could accept.
This could be the Standings’ last stand.
“Huh?”
Maxine’s eyes flicked up. Storm was looking at the satellite phone Josh had made sure they had so that they could contact him at any time on the Sea-Hawk. The rubberized line to the handset was still draped through the window to the small base station on the balcony, pointed up to the TelSat. Storm had taken the handset away from his ear and was staring at it as if it had just turned into a snake.
“What’s the matter?”
“Line just went dead.” Storm shook the handset, thumbed a few buttons, and put it back against his ear. “Nothing.”
Maxine shrugged. “He’s in the middle of the Atlantic, maybe something went down at his end?”
Storm gave the phone another shake as if to force a re-connection with his father. “I know, Mom. I’m the one who told him to go, remember?”
Maxine nodded. “I know. I just…”
But before Maxine could finish, Storm’s face contorted. His eyes bulged out and he fell face-first onto the carpet with a groan.
Maxine would have dropped to the floor to check his vitals and see what had happened, but suddenly a bolt of pain shot through her head at pin-ball speed and racked up a zillion crazy points in the sparking lights before she could even stagger a step forward.
Maxine was dumped unceremoniously onto her backside by the debilitating pain in her head. Her eyes were fuzzy, as if someone was pinching her optic nerv
es from the inside of her skull and stopping ninety percent of the nerve signals that converted light from her eyes to her brain. Her heart trip-hammered in her chest.
“Mom…” Storm groaned from the floor; his voice thin but full of breath.
At least he’s breathing, Maxine thought, trying to recover enough to check on her son.
Some other noises were coming in through the open hotel window. The screeching of brakes. The metallic crunching of vehicles hitting each other on the road.
Women screaming.
Men screaming.
An explosion.
Glass breaking. A siren coming on and then cutting off almost immediately. The lights in the room flicked off and the sudden darkness gripped at Maxine’s innards. Leaning forward and rolling onto her knees, trying to force herself to move while her head felt like it was collapsing under its own weight, she inched her fingers across the carpet and found Storm’s shoulder. His hand reached up, gripping her wrist and telling her that, alongside the steady breathing, he was conscious and aware.
Whatever was happening to them wasn’t anything to do with his course of chemotherapy. No… whatever was happening to them now was being replicated at least in the street outside, and if the echoing crunches of car wrecks at ever-increasing distances, floating up through the hotel window, told her anything, it was that this was happening across a whole chunk of the city. Maybe even further out than that.
Maxine shook her head in an attempt to clear it, and suddenly, like a cloud moving in front of the sun and cutting off its heat and pain, the agony in her head subsided enough that her vision snapped back to normal as the ceiling lights came back on.
Storm looked up. One side of his face had been grazed along the cheek from rubbing against the carpet. There were a couple of small dots of blood, but his eyes were clear and his skin was holding its color.
“What the hell happened?”
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 2
