Boston had, in just a few short minutes, become a nightmare.
They moved in grim silence, sticking close to each other, with Maxine holding Storm’s hand in a way she hadn’t since he’d been ten. McCready, gun drawn, walked ahead with hesitant steps. Maxine couldn’t blame him for being reluctant—this was so outside, so beyond anyone’s comfort zone, that she was grateful that he’d not just run off and left them. At least, with an armed officer by their side, Maxine felt a little safer. But not by much.
A snake of maybe ten young men walked along the opposite sidewalk. There was no logic to their grouping. Some were wearing suits and ties, others being in streetwear with hoodies and low-slung pants worn over expensive sneakers. Moving, they looked like a line of Neolithic hunters, eyes alert and heads scanning from side to side. Missing nothing. As they moved, they tried the handles of parked cars. Some doors opened, and the men would reach inside to take what bags or clothes that they could. For other cars which were locked, they would use a swift elbow to smash a window and get a door open that way if something inside appealed to them.
Two of them looked directly across the street at McCready in his police uniform. As if daring him to intervene. McCready looked away.
“Ain’t worth getting involved,” he commented.
Maxine nodded.
“Keep going,” Storm said breathlessly. “Just pray they don’t think we might have something they want.”
McCready nodded and they moved on. The Travis Institute of Oncological Medicine was a modern re-furbishing of an early twentieth century brownstone. The windows were dark but thankfully, Maxine thought, no one had started a fire inside.
Yet.
Storm stumbled and went down on one knee, breathing hard. Maxine and McCready placed their arms gently under his, and when he nodded his assent they helped him back to his feet.
The wide parking lot in front of the institute was perhaps half full of cars, but there were only a few people around them. They got out of McCready’s way when they saw the gun, too, one woman in a nurse’s uniform cowering down behind a silver SUV.
“This is insane,” Storm said as they made their way past the nurse and up to the steps of the institute. And as if to underline the insanity of the moment, on the fifth floor of the building, a window exploded outwards. In the rain of glass and debris that came down, a computer monitor first burst open on the concrete, to be swiftly followed by an office chair and then, finally, with a sickening crash of broken bones, a man in a white doctor’s uniform who crashed headfirst into the spread of glass and metal.
The was no point checking to see if he had survived the fall. Maxine just encouraged Storm into the building and McCready followed, his face pale and his jaw set.
The foyer inside the institute was eerily quiet. No emergency lighting had kicked in, but there were enough windows to bring in weak light from the fires outside and Maxine’s eyes had become used to the lack of illumination on the walk from the hotel. Her mind still reeled at the things that had happened, and the things she had seen, but for now it was all too much to process. All she could do right now was deal with the moment, and the moment right now dictated that they make it to Sudhindra Gokhale’s office on the fifth floor of the building to see if the doctor was there and if he could authorize the medication Storm needed to treat the symptoms of the chemo…
What am I thinking? Maxine corrected herself. Authority? Dammit, I’m getting the medication whatever happens. Sudhindra or no Sudhindra.
“Where now?” McCready asked.
“I’m going upstairs to get what we need. Storm’s too exhausted to climb the stairs. You look after him here, and I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”
“Mom!” Storm protested, wavering on the spot like a tuning fork. “I can make it…”
“No, you can’t. Just wait here. I’ll be quicker without you.”
“Take his gun,” Storm said, pointing at McCready’s belt. McCready’s eyes flashed.
Maxine sighed. “No. You and McCready and McCready’s gun stay here. But I’ll take your baton and mace if you have any, officer.”
McCready reached to his utility belt and took a can of pepper spray from a pouch, as well as the brutal, thick tube of an extendable baton from a clip. He had to flick his wrist twice to get the baton to click out, and almost took his own nose off in the process.
Poor guy, Maxine thought, he’s more scared than I am. If only Josh were…
She killed the thought where it stood, before it had a chance to get its boots on. If this thing with Josh was over, then she really needed to start thinking like they were individuals, and not joined at the hip. And, right now, Josh was a thousand miles away in the middle of an ocean. As a notional model of what a messy divorce might look like in terms of physical and emotional distance, you couldn’t have a better one.
Maxine took the equipment and slipped the can into the pocket of her jacket, holding the baton out in front of her like a divining rod.
“Okay. Stay here, don’t get into trouble, and I’ll be back before you know it.”
McCready motioned to a door behind the reception desk. “We’ll wait in there. Stay out of the open.”
Maxine nodded grimly and walked off into the gloom.
On the many occasions she’d been in the institute over the last sixteen weeks, to accompany Storm for his chemo, she now realized that she hadn’t taken much notice of her surroundings, so absorbed as she’d been in the matter at hand—namely, Storm’s illness. It had been a matter of going into the building, heading for the clanky old elevator that seemed as old as the building itself, and going up to Sudhindra’s office, which was located at the head of the chemotherapy unit. If what had happened to the wider city had been replicated in the institute, as that breaking window had suggested, then it was almost certain that the elevator would not be working. And it was then she realized that she had no idea where the stairs to the upper level would be, and how she would gain access to them.
At the end of the corridor leading from the reception area, along two walls of modernist graphic art posters in silver frames, there was a door that had an electronic lock that Maxine and Storm would normally have been buzzed through from reception. It wasn’t like the institute was Fort Knox or anything, but all hospitals had a baseline level of security in these troubled times, and the double doors of gray/green frosted glass would be Maxine’s first obstacle.
The further she went down the corridor towards the door, and the further she went from the foyer, the more light was leeched from her surroundings. It wasn’t full dark, but the grim lack of light was oppressive.
This might be a really short trip, she thought as she reached out to push at the doors. With no one to buzz her through, the usual hummm-click of the mechanism being remotely released didn’t reach her ears.
But the door opened with a suck of air, and swung back.
Whatever had befallen the city’s power grid had also rendered the door lock inoperative. She guessed she must be benefitting from a safety feature included here, where anything like a fire knocking out the electrics would lead to an automatic system blowing all the doors in the place so that people could escape. Stepping through, she blessed the foresight of the engineers who’d converted the old brownstone.
Beyond the doors, there was more illumination than found in the corridor she’d just left. There was a short square lobby with a large window at the far side which overlooked an internal courtyard. She could see beyond the roof of the institute, where, perhaps a block away, a tall apartment block was ablaze like a Roman candle against the night sky. It was throwing crazy carnival light across the whole area. The dazzling yellow and orange light from the fires almost crackled and popped like a raging campfire around her. A fist of smoke punched into the black air, but even here it wasn’t thick enough to obscure the light from the supernova that hung high in the heavens like a ragged blister on the sky.
Maxine tried not to think about what was going on i
nside the apartment block, and just got on with finding the stairs. The door to the elevator was half open, and a body, the face a bloody mess, lay dead there, half in and half out. It was a man in a janitor’s uniform, and a broken mop handle stuck out of his back from between his shoulder blades. Maxine had to step around a wide puddle of blood as she moved past.
She never could have imagined, in all her years as a nurse, that she would ever find herself just walking around dead bodies as if it were the most natural thing in the world. To offer a body some dignity in death—and she’d carried out last offerings for hundreds of sadly departed patients in her time—was something that Maxine had once prided herself on, knowing her own stoic and compassionate ability to achieve such closure for them. And yet, here she was walking past a corpse, leaving it where it lay.
That thought hung an icy block of guilt right in the center of her heart.
Maxine shook her head to clear it, reckoning suddenly that she should be more concerned with avoiding the person who had stuck the mop handle in the back of the janitor than his corpse.
How the tenets and underpinnings of civilized society could be flicked off so easily. Maxine held the palm grip of the baton all the harder, her fingers becoming buttery with sweat and feeling the thump of blood in her temples. There was going to be a doozy of a headache to follow this, once she could allow herself the luxury of the time for it to develop.
Next to the elevator was a door to a storeroom, and beyond that was a frosted glass door on which she could read STAIRS in the flickering apartment light.
She opened it and went through.
There was a small amount of light coming through the glass, but the stairwell was windowless and, as she craned her neck up, the space ascended up into total blackness.
Maxine swallowed. No point going back now.
And that’s when she heard the breathing.
Oh god oh god oh god oh god.
There was a shuffling from behind the stairs, as if someone had been hiding behind them like a spider waiting on the edge of her web for the vibration of prey caught in the sticky strands of her trap.
Maxine had no more than a second to make up her mind. Go back, stand and fight whatever was shuffling out of the dark, or…
Maxine ran for the stairs, pounding upward blindly as she moved the baton to her left hand and used her right to haul her weight up the bannister all the faster. Feet working on muscle memory alone.
Stairs were stairs were stairs.
You could ascend them with your eyes closed, Maxine had figured, and that’s exactly what she did. She counted the steps on each flight until she reached the small landing in between, and turned one hundred and eighty degrees to go on up. Thirteen steps.
Unlucky for some.
Maxine kept her eyes closed, thinking her consciousness into her feet and keeping all her attention there. The smacking of her feet on the stairs blocked out all of the breathing from whatever was hiding in the dark below, and she careened up the first level in near total darkness without falling.
Maxine didn’t pause; she swung herself around again and clattered up the next thirteen steps to the mid-level, then the same again and again until she lost count… was this the fourth floor, or the fifth? She couldn’t decide and could see nothing that would confirm it. Maxine’s breath came in ragged bursts, head buzzing, her heart earth-quaking in her chest.
She made it onto the small landing between staircases and dug her hands into the rail, forward momentum propelling her forward, ready to reach the level she was ultimately aiming for, only to find her feet taken out from under her, sending her arms flailing and her body catapulting through the air to crash into a wall. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs and skittered the baton out of her grasp.
It clattered away to her left with a stinging ring of metal on concrete, and then the person whose legs she’d tripped over rolled on top of Maxine and clawed into both her biceps with an iron grip.
5
The door exploded again, sending splinters and chunks of wood bursting into the cabin. Spackman sprang back, spraying blood from his head wound like he was a Jackson Pollock painting. He crashed into Josh’s chest and Josh stumbled into Tally.
Ten-Foot jumped down from his bunk and tried to push his way through Lemming, Scally, and Marshal, away from the disintegrating door. Josh heaved Spackman back to his feet, and called out a warning. “Everyone! Get back! Get back!”
The probationers and Tally didn’t need to be told twice. Tally pushed Dotty-B and KK before her and they scrambled back in the near dark, the only illumination now coming through the holes in the door being cut apart by the ax.
The boys weren’t making any provisions for the female probationers, either—it was a free-for-all. Scally Lish, all curls and earrings that you could jump a dolphin through, went down with a crash, and Ten-Foot placed his boot in her back to step over her. Once Spackman had passed by, Josh grabbed Scally’s wrists and pulled her up behind him like a sack of coal.
The door continued to disintegrate as the assailant on the other side renewed the voracity of his assault. The ax bit into the wood again and again. By the time a white-shirted arm that could have belonged to any of the crew members of the Sea-Hawk reached through to lift the latch keeping the door closed, Josh and the others were already backed into the probation officer’s bunk area, with only a flimsy curtain between them and the ax wielder. It was dark, but at least there was no debate to be had about where to go.
Josh crashed into Marshal, the eighteen-year-old ‘steal anything on wheels’ car thief, and they almost went down. Josh grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck and propelled him forward.
“Keep going!” Josh yelled; his arms spread wide like he was corralling livestock. “Go through the female bunk area. There’s a door there we can get behind.”
The other youngsters kept going. Spackman put a hand to his bleeding ear, his eyes wide with shock and fear that Josh could only see sketches of in the gloom. When everyone was through the curtain at the other end of the mid-section cabin, Josh pushed Spackman ahead of him and looked around for anything he could use as a weapon. He knew he only had a second or so before the ax-carrier came through the door. Whoever it was holding the weapon was obviously having trouble with the door latch, though, because the sounds from behind the curtain had returned to being those of the ax smashing into the wood of the door. Perhaps the man was too frenzied to muster the necessary calmness to operate the latch blind, and for a second Josh thanked whoever had kitted the doors of the Sea-Hawk out in sturdy oak. Anything less and they’d already be toast.
In the dim light, Josh’s eyes alighted on Tally’s camera bag. He dived for it and pulled it out of the way, knowing what he’d find. Beneath the bag was Tally’s tripod. It had a hefty aluminum construction, with a heavy camera mount at one end and enough weight to feel solidly defensive in his hands. It probably wouldn’t be a huge help in defending against an ax, but that wasn’t what Josh had in mind.
As Josh hefted it, the noise of Spackman’s harsh breathing close by told Josh that the injured crewmember hadn’t followed the others through the curtain and the door at the other end of the girl’s cabin. Nothing to be done about that now.
He held the tripod out in front of him as the door continued to be battered.
“What the hell is going on? Who is that?”
“Man… I dunno. It’s Petersen, I think. One second, he was ordering the crew to take in sail, and then he had the fire ax and was trying to kill me. If I hadn’t seen the shock in the eyes of the captain when Petersen came up behind me, I wouldn’t be here now. I just about managed to get out of his way. He’s gone insane, man. It’s…”
Behind the curtain, the destroyed door was being kicked aside, scraping against the wooden floor. Whatever was left of the base was protesting and squeaking as the kicks continued and then, with a roar, Petersen was through.
“Spackman! I’m gonna kill you, you lousy creep! I’m
gonna chop you up and then I’m gonna burn you. Burn you to ash!”
Josh stood ready with the tripod, to one side of the curtain. If Petersen hadn’t had the presence of mind to operate the door latch, then Josh took the leap of faith that Petersen wouldn’t be expecting Josh to be waiting for him on the other side of the partition.
And so, it proved.
Petersen blundered forward against the drape, slashing it with his ax. It was the equivalent of an inexperienced boxer leading with his chin. Josh just pressed himself back, waited for Petersen’s face to appear, and then stabbed at it with the mount end of the tripod. The short but explosive blow smashed into Petersen’s nose, but more than that, the shock in his eyes now gave Josh the advantage. The ax came down, but without power in it as Petersen reeled. Another blow from the tripod cracked into Petersen’s temple, and he went down on one knee. Josh gave him an uppercut beneath the chin next, with the full arc of the tripod rounding out like the best golf shot getting his hole in one. Petersen’s hand opened, the ax clattered to the floor, and the tall Swede keeled over unconscious, his nose and chin bleeding freely.
Josh picked up the ax and handed it to Spackman, and then, dropping the tripod, he began ripping the curtain into strips to make something with which to bind their attacker.
“Tally!” Josh yelled as he rolled Petersen over and yanked his wrists behind his back.
God, what I wouldn’t give for a utility belt and a pair of handcuffs right now, he thought bitterly.
Tally stuck her head through the drape and Josh just caught the look of relief on her face as she saw him tying Petersen’s hands together.
“Are the others okay?”
“Apart from Ten-Foot pushing past everyone to hide in the head, yeah, there’s two doors between them and the stairs to the deck. But, Dad…”
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 5
