The desperate, unholy screaming of her mother from the upstairs room where her father had her chained spoke all the words that were necessary.
25
Josh awoke with a headache that thudded in his skull so hard that it could have split open the world like an egg.
His mouth was full of sand and his knees and elbows felt skinned to the bone, not to mention that he was cold enough to stop matter vibrating and was either deaf or blind, but too confused to work out which.
He moved a hand up to his face and used his index finger to pull up one of the eyelids that was refusing to budge. Light bladed in, causing him to drop the sliver of flesh right back down again. He didn’t know where he was, or how he’d gotten here, but something fundamental had changed about his condition and situation. The Sea-Hawk had stopped moving. There was no sound of the wind flapping in the sails. There was no Tally calling out commands, and there was no up and down movement of the Sea-Hawk on the waves.
When Josh tried raising his eyelid again, he held it open until the harsh light had subsided and looked along the beach to the pile of black rocks over which the ocean was breaking.
He lifted his head. It felt like it weighed a thousand tons and there was a booted foot kicking it for a field goal.
“Tally?”
Cody.
Someone else’s voice was using his mouth to speak. That was a damn liberty.
“Tally?”
Cody.
The only reply was the breakers washing up and splashing their white spume into the morning air against a forever blue sky.
“What is it?”
Josh put his cell phone back into the top pocket of his Jacksonville PD uniform. His legs were wobbling, made of Jell-O. It was as much as he could do to stagger from the donut concession stand down by the harbor to the police car and thump his backside down into the passenger seat.
Micki Lancing came around the other side of the cop car with her two bags of donuts and slid into the patrol car next to Josh. His head was thumping. The light was too bright all of a sudden, and he couldn’t breathe.
“Josh, come on, man, what’s happened? Is it Maxine? The kids?”
Josh shook his head, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on his knees, which were still half outside the car with his feet on the too hot asphalt.
The sky showed endless blue, and he could hear the waves lapping up against the jetty, the wires on the yacht masts thrumming in the breeze like the tinkle of wind chimes.
Tally.
Cody.
“I saw him this morning. Just this morning. Took him to the school. Made sure he was inside. Made sure he’d registered.”
“Who? Stop speaking in code, Josh. I don’t have my CIA ears on today.”
Micki Lancing was twenty-eight, sarcastic, more cynical than a cop twice her age, and unflappable even when there was a ton of flapping going on. She’d been Josh’s partner for a year. She was infuriating but dependable, professionally irreverent, and if she hadn’t been a cop, she would have made a great stand-up. Josh didn’t feel like laughing right now.
“Cody. Cody Zem.”
“That kid you’re mentoring? The carjacker?”
“Ex-carjacker,” Josh said automatically, even though it didn’t matter anymore what he said about Cody Zem. Cody Zem was no more. The boy had been part of the Jacksonville PD outreach program, where cops had been matched with young offenders to help them think about a career and education path that might steer them clear of the penitentiary in later years.
Cody had been seventeen, with nine years of trouble building up a head of steam behind him, when he’d been steered by juvie court into the mentor program. The fact that it wasn’t a voluntary program, and that the mentors were all cops, made for a certain level of consumer resistance from the get-go, but Josh had been hopeful he could make a difference and give added value to some of the kids’ lives.
Cody Zem had been a piece of work right from the start. He’d never called Josh by his name or any other honorific. To him, Josh was the Uniform. Nothing more. Nothing less. The Jacksonville PD badge and uniform were as deep as Cody Zem wanted to go, and Josh hadn’t pushed it. At least for the first three months.
Slowly, softly and patiently, he’d made the relationship with the boy kind of, sort of, maybe, nearly work. It had been the hardest thing he’d ever tried to do. He made sure he was on time for their meetings, made sure he was never late. Made sure any promises he made were kept, and whether it was a trip to the softball field, the gym, or the movie theater, Josh was always there. Even when Cody didn’t show, which happened frequently. At the start, he would WhatsApp the boy a picture of him waiting at the agreed-upon venue, and he would always, without fail, every single time, give him another chance. Oh yes, he might tear Cody a new one, but he never gave up on the boy. Not like his mother had, and not like the father who had given up on him before he’d even been born.
Everyone had given up on Cody along the way.
Everyone except Josh.
It was Josh who would go to pick Cody up in the middle of the night if he got stranded somewhere without money. It was Josh who made sure Cody kept his finances on the straight. His mother had kicked him out when he’d been fourteen. He’d lived in a series of crack-houses and above massage parlors, he’d shoplifted for drug money, he’d graduated to robbery with violence, and then when he’d come onto Josh’s radar, his crime of choice had been carjacking high-end Beemers and Mercs, hoping to score a rich dude and his bi-atch for a Rolex or two.
Cody had been clean of drugs, and had his nose out of trouble for the last two months, and today had been his first day back in school for months. That morning, Josh had gone to the one-bedroom apartment Cody crashed in. Gotten him up, made him shower and put on clean clothes, and driven him to school. Cody had made Josh park two blocks away and walk with him to the school gate. The boy hadn’t wanted to be seen arriving in a Fed-Mobile.
Josh had walked on the other side of the street, and watched as Cody had gone through the gates, up to the steps and into the school.
Josh had felt about a million feet tall.
Sure, it was only the first day, and he was sure there would be more hurdles to jump in the months to come, but a journey had to start somewhere.
Josh had then swung by Micki’s place to pick her up and head down to the station house. The morning had been spent tying up the loose ends with a series of aggravated robberies on a series of Korean grocery stores, and then down to the harbor for donuts and a well-earned break.
It had been while Micki was taking up the bags of donuts, and handing over the cash, that Josh had taken the call from the hospital.
Josh was effectively Cody’s next of kin. They’d found his card in Cody’s jacket pocket, and when they’d wiped the blood from the surface, they’d called his cell. At some point during the morning, Cody had had a run-in with one of the school security guards—another Uniform—and had pelted out of the school after only two hours and one-and-a-half classes.
He’d gone back to his old haunts to hustle for crack, had been mistaken for a gang member who he superficially resembled, and been taken down an alley out of the sight of prying eyes and stabbed six times in the torso. Five blows to his stomach, intestines, lung, and liver, and a final one under the ribs and up into the heart.
This hadn’t been a warning, or even a one-on-one battle. Two boys had held his arms while a third had carried out the deed.
Cody had managed to crawl as far as the sidewalk on a slick of blood before he’d collapsed.
Josh handed his notice in three days later.
He didn’t want to be a Uniform anymore.
Cody.
“Tally?”
Josh rolled over onto his back and tried to sit up on one painful elbow. There were slimy strands of kelp tangled through his fingers. He had no shoes, and his feet were white and spongy from where they’d been in the water too long.
Cody.
No! Where was
Tally?
Josh looked around.
He was on a beach, surrounded by boxes and rucksacks. Their contents strewn over the sand like they’d just been upended and dumped there. Among the debris, Josh could also see lengths and slats of wood. They were painted white and some were curved. They rested between the rocks as if something had been smashed there.
The lifeboat…
Josh shook his head to clear the fog in it.
They’d been in a lifeboat. They’d been put there by Goober Nash.
Josh, Tally, and Poppet. Poppet… who had after all crashed and burned as she’d said she would. She’d found Rollins’ stash of rum, and was near wasted even in the face of the danger of being cast adrift from the Sea-Hawk.
The wooden lifeboat had been thrown into the water first, and they had been pushed in afterwards with their gear and their rucksacks. Ten-Foot had been persuaded by Nash to let them make their own way to shore. It had been Nash who’d released Ten-Foot, as he had also released Petersen. Nash who had kept his duplicity hidden as long as he could, but eventually cut Ten-Foot loose after Josh and the others had been put out in the boat, two miles from shore.
“We go back now, we’re going to jail, whatever way you cut it. Ten-Foot, for the rest of his life. I can’t let that happen. So, I’m giving you your life now before I cut him loose,” Nash had said to Josh before he’d pushed him into the water after Tally and Poppet. “Don’t try anything. Just get to shore, and get out of our lives. Okay?”
There’d been no arguing with Nash. He’d pushed Josh against the gunwale with a fire ax as Josh had pleaded with him. “We don’t know what’s happening over there. God, we don’t even know where we are. Goober, c’mon, man! You’re not going to jail! There won’t be any jails!”
But Nash hadn’t been listening. Whether it was because of the psychological effects of the supernova, or because he genuinely believed his cousin Ten-Foot would go to jail because of the events on the Sea-Hawk, Josh didn’t know. But right now, all that was moot. Since Poppet’s refinement of their navigation capabilities and a change in the wind had pushed them on so rapidly, they’d sighted land just five days after they’d left the Empress behind. The sight of land, and the consequences of getting back to shore, had brought things to a head among the probationers.
Goober Nash had poured enough poison into their already psychologically vulnerable ears to make them believe that if they got back to the U.S., Josh’s story would land them all back up in front of a judge. Goober had argued that Josh couldn’t be trusted, and that he’d probably try to pin the deaths of the crew on the kids to save his own neck after his failure of leadership, or some other BS. The best thing to do was to get Josh, his kid, and the woman off the ship, and then sail on south—maybe to Florida, to lose themselves in Miami or Tampa.
The probationers, even Dotty-B, had gone along with this. They’d thought, not unreasonably, it was a wholly credible outcome for a bunch of kids who’d been let down a million times by a system they thought was rigged against them. So, Poppet, foul-mouthed, drunk and arguing, along with Tally, just happy to be in sight of land, had swum to the lifeboat as Josh had made his last desperate attempt to persuade Nash to change his mind.
Nash had shaken his head. “I can release Ten-Foot now if you want, like I cut Petersen free. I can give him a knife, and you can explain to him yourself why you want to stay here, bossman. How about that?”
“You released Petersen?”
“Sure.”
“For God’s sake, why? He drowned Spackman and nearly killed my daughter!”
A confused look had come over Nash’s face at that point, the equivalent of calculus and algebra going on behind his eyes. His mouth had stumbled over something, but no words had come out. Josh had seen then the clearest evidence yet of the effect of the supernova on the minds of those who had succumbed fully to its influence. Goober Nash’s mind was stuck in the groove, his thoughts skipping, and his motivations scrambled.
He hadn’t been able to answer, but Josh had gotten a sense of the chaos that had been dictating what had happened on the Sea-Hawk, the Empress, and probably all around the world. There was a madness in people’s heads, an externally created psychosis that had led Josh to deep depression and near suicide, and influenced Ten-Foot, Nash, and the attackers on the Empress to bloody murder.
Stay or go, Josh would be caught up in the same insanity whatever way he went.
Josh had jumped into the water.
The lifeboat had been caught by a fast-running tidal surge within a hundred yards of the beach. However hard he and Tally paddled; they’d then been catapulted towards the rocks too fast to avoid them.
Poppet, after vomiting neat rum over the side of the boat, had climbed over them both to get into the stern. She’d seen that the prow of the small wooden lifeboat was about to crash into the black rocks. Amid whooshing welters of spray and rending splinters of wood, the boat had seesawed wildly and went over, sliding down a slab of wet limestone. Its underside shook and crunched, quickly followed by the shock of fat-bellied waves depositing cold cargos of seawater over their limbs. Josh had grabbed desperately for his daughter’s hand, just catching the material of her shirt before she’d been wrenched away by the current and the sucking pull of the waves.
Poppet had screamed as she’d been upended. All he’d seen of her as she’d disappeared beneath the foaming water were her legs scissoring above the surface before she sank completely.
Josh had held up his arms to try to protect his face, but everything had gone black as something had cracked into the back of his head and sent him beneath the waves, unconscious.
Getting to his feet wasn’t an easy operation.
Everything hurt. He hurt in places he hadn’t previously been aware were parts of his body. The headache, although not as crippling as the ones he’d experienced on the Sea-Hawk when everything had changed, was also having a fair stab at crippling him, but at least it wasn’t taking away his consciousness… what little of it there was.
“Tally…”
That frog that had taken up residence in his mouth was croaking again. The tango dancers in his brain were kicking and stamping.
“Tally!”
Now, that was his voice. He was sure of that, at least.
His shout was negated by the bursting waves and the wind coming off the sea. He hauled one stiff leg after the other, up the beach towards the dunes, over seaweed and kelp streaming along the sand in ragged lines. Sharp-edged pebbles dug into the water-softened skin of his feet, but he crunched on.
He wanted to know where Tally was.
He wanted his daughter.
“Tally! Can you hear me? Tally!”
He was high enough to see along the shore in both directions, his view no longer obscured by the heaps of black rock against which the lifeboat had been dashed.
He couldn’t see Tally or Poppet on either side of the headland, but he could see the Sea-Hawk under sail, moving out to sea—a near dot made harsh black with distance against the blue of the sky in the burning sun.
It was all Josh could do not to fall back to his knees. All energy leeched from him into the pool of desperation into which his body had been dipped.
“Tally! Tally! Where are you?”
This time, it wasn’t just the surf that answered his shout. A voice, male and gruff with threat, came from directly behind Josh.
“Don’t move. Don’t turn around. Put up your hands. Try anything and I’ll blow your head off your shoulders.”
End of Dark End
Supernova EMP Series Book One
Blurb
They’ll either find salvation or face damnation.
Screams of agony. Cries of terror. The sounds of a dying civilization echo all around Josh Standing as he navigates the aftermath of this new post-apocalyptic world. All traces of modern advancements have been wiped away by the supernova EMP when he washes ashore on the Georgia coast.
Alone.
An
d when a psychotic gang takes Josh prisoner, he’s torn between grief and gratitude that his daughter isn’t discovered nearby. Josh swore long ago to serve and protect—and he desperately wants to help the other prisoners—but his daughter needs him, too. If she’s still alive.
Circumstances are only slightly better for Josh’s wife Maxine and their cancer-stricken son as they settle at the family farm in West Virginia. There, they discover Maxine’s beloved mother has been heavily effected with the aftereffects of the supernova, and her battle-hardened father struggling to keep the family together. Even worse, a local militia is targeting the farm for its resources, which causes further dissention in the family over how to handle the attacks.
When the dust from the firefights settle, the choice between duty and family will be the difference in who is left standing.
1
Josh put up his hands.
Whatever the man behind him said next was whipped away by the surf crashing against the black rocks where the lifeboat had been wrecked.
Shoved squarely in the middle of his back, Josh pitched forward to sprawl in the sand.
“I said, who are you?”
The voice’s accent suggested the owner of it was American, at least. It still didn’t tell Josh where the Sea-Hawk’s lifeboat had been smashed to pieces, but it was a fair assumption they hadn’t made landfall thousands of miles from their launch point in North Carolina.
“I didn’t hear you ask. The waves.”
Josh was cuffed around the back of the head hard. “You heard it the second time. Who are you?”
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 25
