Josh rolled onto his back and saw the bullets spitting from the muzzle of Gerry’s MP5.
The high paint racks went over completely, and Ralph disappeared under a crash of metal and gushing paint.
Gerry was still firing over Josh, into the area beyond the fallen racks.
“Look!” Gerry was screaming as he fired. “Look!”
Josh swiveled and rolled onto his knees, gun up, ready to empty the magazine into whatever threat was there. But when he raised his head up to look through the racks, he could see nothing in the aisle beyond them.
Gerry had stopped firing. Ralph was calling for help from below the wreckage, and the smoke above had begun dropping ever lower.
In the after-echo of Gerry’s gunfire, Josh thought he could hear running footsteps, but that sound was covered almost immediately by the detonation of a muffled explosion way off in the distance of the store.
This was crazy. It had been crazy to even come in here, and it was crazy to stay. He completely understood the reasons Barney and the others had wanted to take the risk, so they could make sure their kids were safe, but this mission into the burning store was tantamount to suicide.
“Keep watch. I’ll get Ralph,” Josh said, and with that he began kicking away the rolling cans on the paint-slick floor, trying to get to where Ralph was lying with just his feet showing from the wreckage, and his voice, filled with pain, calling for help.
He’d just about reached Ralph’s left foot when a German Shepherd, snarling and howling, leapt across the aisle, aiming its glistening canines at Josh’s throat.
And behind the dog came people. A screaming glut of half-starved wraiths. Pickaxes and shovels in their hands, and murder in their eyes.
9
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Tally couldn’t distinguish between the thumping in her chest and the thumping of the footsteps behind her.
Tally had no idea who was following and no intention of looking back to see; if she didn’t keep her eyes on the ground ahead, there could well be pits or natural furrows in the grassy earth that would trip her—even if her concentration only lapsed for a second.
She ran hard toward the next transmission tower in the line that stretched off into the distance. There was a rise in the ground to the left of it, which was the start of more solid ground than could be found here on edge of these wetlands. And there was a row of scrubby bushes and trees beyond that. If she could get to the tree line, she might be able to give the pursuer the slip.
Maybe.
Breath hot in her throat, Tally ground on, pumping her arms. The air was warm and humid in her mouth. Thick, almost. She’d been on a boat for more than six weeks and then shipwrecked. She hadn’t done any purposeful exercise in all that time. Too wrapped up at the beginning in her anger at her dad for making her go on the trip to help him babysit the four female probationers among a complement of ten and an all-male crew. Then, once her anger had been dispersed by the Barnard’s Star supernova effects, she’d spent the rest of the time trying to keep herself alive against the savage attacks and the machinations of Dolan “Ten-Foot” Snare, the probationer whose level of aggression and cunning had been multiplied exponentially by whatever the supernova had done to everyone. Even she’d felt quicker to anger and more willing to get physical since the new smudge of the nebula had appeared in the night sky.
Tally didn’t think the aggression that was driving her forward now had in any way been augmented, however. Right now, she was convinced she was running for her life.
Tally could feel the lactic acid building up in her muscles as they started to ache with the constant movement and exertion, and knew she would soon enough hit the wall between her desire to escape and her ability to carry out that desire. She would hit it and she would start to slow, and whoever was behind her would catch her.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The thudding footsteps were nearer. She was sure of it.
If she was going to go down, she figured she should go down fighting and with a weapon in her hand.
She knew she wasn’t going to make the next transmission tower. She knew she wasn’t going to make the tree line.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Closer.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A hand on her shoulder.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Tally dove and rolled into the springy grass, reaching behind her head to the rucksack and gripping the haft of the fire ax. She pulled it clear as she came up, flipping the blade to face her pursuer and screaming the most fearsome battle cry she could as it came upon her.
The cry died in her throat as the all-black, man-sized, alien ant monster brushed her ax aside with an armored fist and crashed into her.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” the ant said.
Tally had been struggling for thirty seconds as the creature bore down on her, straddling her shins and holding her down with black-armored hands.
“Stop struggling and I’ll let you go. I had to stop you before you reached the trees!” The ant’s voice was muffled and distant.
“I was calling to you the whole way, but the mask… it stopped you hearing me!”
Ant mask.
Gas mask.
The voice was that of a man, a young man. There were red hairs sticking out of the hood of his black coverall. He was covered in tactical belts and webbing, and his chest, arms, elbows, wrists, and knees were strapped with armor shards. His gloves had heavy protection on the back, and tactile rubber fingertips which were biting into Tally’s upper arms.
“Let go of me!”
“I want to! I do! But if you keep running, running in the direction you were, you’re going to die. Not at my hands, but because of the people you’d be running into! Trust me!”
The rush of fear and anger were running hot through Tally now, and she could feel her muscles tensing involuntarily as if her body wasn’t going to hold back getting this guy off her, whatever her mind told it to do. It was like she was trapped in the same body with an angry tiger.
She yelled and tried to free an arm, to reach for the ax, pick it up, and bury it in his face. Right in the middle of his face!
And then Tally caught herself.
No. Stop.
Don’t give into the rage.
He’s telling you stuff. If he wanted you dead or hurt, he could have done that by now.
A cool wave of rational thought splashed over her. She told her arms to stop resisting, and they did. She made her legs relax. She pushed the murderous thoughts from her mind.
“Okay. Let me up and I won’t run. I promise.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll trust you. But if you are going to run, don’t run that way,” he said, pointing to the trees. “Trace Parker’s men have an observation camp there, and anyone trying to get in or out of the city, they kill. Or worse.”
“Worse?”
“You’re a pretty young woman. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
“No.”
The ant released her hands and got up off Tally’s legs. Then he reached down, picked up the ax, and handed it to her. It felt heavy in her hand. She could have used it there to hack him down, and there was still a bright nugget of that thinking at the back of her mind, but she suppressed it like she had before.
The ant trusted her enough to give her the ax. That had to count for something.
“We should get away from here. It’s too exposed. If they send out a patrol, they’ll see us. Follow me.”
And with that, the ant turned and headed inland, but away from the wetlands and the transmission towers.
His name was Henry Grange, he was nineteen years old, and he wouldn’t take off his gas mask.
They’d found a hollow in the grass where they couldn’t be seen from the tree line. He told her, “Whenever I move into a new area, I leave the mask on for twenty-four hours. Precautions.”
“Precautions against what?” Tally had b
een given a foil survival blanket Henry had taken from his pack. She’d offered him one of her candy bars, but he’d pointed at his mask with the shoulder-shrug equivalent of rolled eyes. She’d taken the bar back and eaten it herself. The survival blanket warmed her, though, and that warmth soothed her aching muscles. “Precautions against what?” she repeated.
Henry did the shoulder thing again and pointed at the mask. “Gas, obviously, alongside some sort of EMP attack of unknown origin. I don’t know if the weather has fully dispersed the gas. There are still plenty of crazy people on the loose, burning and killing, so I guess they’re either pumping new toxins into the atmosphere, or the initial bursts are lingering.”
“There’s no gas.”
“How do you know?”
Tally had to admit that she didn’t know for sure, but when she told Henry about her trip on the Sea-Hawk, what had happened out there and how she and her dad had reckoned it had only started when whatever had hit the earth from Barnard’s Star had arrived, Henry refrained from again insisting the world’s problems had been caused by gas attacks—but he still didn’t take off his gas mask.
Henry stood up and, surveying the bleak landscape around him, said with finality, “We need to get out of here. We’re still too close to Trace’s men.”
“I need to find my dad.”
“Was he washed up the same time as you?”
“Yes. We were in a lifeboat. It smashed on the rocks. Me, my dad, and Poppet.”
Henry rubbed the top of his head with a gloved hand. “I’m sorry…”
“About what…?”
“I saw Trace’s men dragging some dead bodies out of the water.” He pointed back in the direction from which Tally had approached the transmission towers across the wetlands.
The news hit Tally like a blast furnace toppling over. Her legs throbbed and became rubbery. Even though she was sitting down, she had to put out a hand to steady herself. “Bodies?”
The gas mask nodded. “Two of them. Dead, for sure.”
“Dad! Stop! Dad!”
Maxine ran from the kitchen out onto the porch after her father. She hadn’t seen Donald with a shotgun in his hand since the incident in the bedroom upstairs, where her mother was still chained. The shame of that knowledge thudded into her as she thought of it. Shame that she’d still not been able to find a way to bring peace to her mother or her family. However much training as a nurse she’d had, and regardless of her experience of dealing with difficult patients, she still couldn’t fix this. And that hurt almost as much as feeling the desperation of the state of affairs she found herself dealing with now.
To Maxine, the family was the basic unit of life. You found a way to deal with things together, all facing the same way at the others’ shoulders. But Donald was a taut bow string, Maria was in the grip of unescapable madness, and Storm wasn’t out of the woods with his cancer treatment, while Josh and Tally were lost somewhere out in the wide Atlantic. Maxine didn’t know what shoulder would be the one to stand next to now, or with whom she was going to face down the challenges to come.
“Stop!”
Donald was stalking across the yard, past the dead truck and the barn, heading for the road outside the M-Bar. The sky was big with a brisk trail of scudding clouds. It was going to turn into another warm one, but the trail Donald was leaving on the air was deathly cold.
The morning had started with the usual tensions in response to Maria’s howling and screeching. Donald had thrown down his spoon from the porridge Storm had made them all and clattered out of the house, only stopping long enough to snatch his Stetson from its hook and plant it on his head.
“Shall I go after him?” Storm had asked. Since he’d helped Donald deliver the breeched calf, Donald had softened considerably to the boy and his daughter in the face of his family’s dysfunctional condition. Maxine had advised against either of them following, though, until she’d later noticed Donald through the kitchen window… coming back towards the house with a face that looked like a time bomb with three ticks left.
Donald had crashed into the house without a word, pulled the shotgun out of his cabinet, and, still saying nothing, had walked briskly through the door like a man who wasn’t going to brook any disagreement over the action he was about to take.
Maxine ran after him, the warm Virginian morning sun casting sharp shadows over the earth. “Dad, wait! What’s the matter?”
They reached the road. Donald broke the gun and slipped two cartridges into it, taken from his pocket just then.
“What’s the matter?” Maxine was breathing hard, and she had to stand right in front of her father to make him even look at her. He was scanning the road and the surrounding land that sloped up to the mountain with a face that could take the tops off bottles.
“Damn them. Damn them all!”
“Who? What’s happened?”
“In the night. We’ve lost ten head of cattle.”
“Lost…?”
“I don’t mean they’ve decided to go on vacation, Maxine, I mean someone came to the ranch in the night and took them. There’s a bull gone, too. Plus, sacks of feed from the barn.”
Maxine felt slightly weird saying the word, because it felt like a word you only head in reruns of old series like The High Chaparral or Bonanza that she’d used to watch on TV when growing up a million years ago, but she said it all the same. “You mean they’ve been rustled?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Who by?”
That genuinely stumped Donald, but he was riding a fizzy bomb of anger and hurt. His knuckles were white against the blue-black steel and walnut stock of his gun, and his arms were shaking with the effort to grip it so tightly.
“You said it happened in the night,” Maxine reasoned. “If anyone came here to steal overnight, they’re going to be long gone by now.”
“I’ll find them.”
Maxine put her hand gently on Donald’s arm. “Dad, come on. You go after them angry and you’re not going to find them. You’ll just blunder around out there, and I pity the first person you come across.”
He didn’t look like he cared who’d done it, and Maxine believed in that moment that, if he’d seen anyone outside the ranch right then, he would have given them both barrels of his guns and then reloaded to make sure.
Donald fixed her with what Maxine recognized as the hardest stare in his armory. The one he’d reserved for her when she’d disappointed him with her behavior, or when she’d gotten old enough to talk back and point out the background hypocrisy of parents who told you to do what they say, not what they do. That look sent Maxine hurtling back down the years to crash into her younger self, and she immediately felt the danger billowing in her father. The danger of a spanking or a grounding. Maxine was ten all over again, and Donald was suddenly the tallest man in the world.
“I’m going and I’ll thank you not to try to stop me. You can’t move ten heads of cattle without leaving some trail for me to follow, and I’ll follow them all the way to Perdition if I have to. No one steals from me. No one!”
Maxine knew this wasn’t just about the cattle. This was everything he’d experienced since the supernova bubbling from the pot of his temper and burning on the stove of his patience. This was something he could take charge of in a world where everything had been taken from him. Maxine had felt it, too, and she reckoned it was an emotion familiar to a million people who were still able to think coherently, rather than engage in utter destruction.
But that simple truth wasn’t going to work on Donald. He was too fired up. Too riled, and he wasn’t the kind of man to consider the psychological processes going on within him; Donald’s world was black and white. Stress, depression, and anger management were things that only happened to other people. The way he saw it, he’d been wronged, and a man did what needed to be done in order to right a wrong. He couldn’t do anything about the supernova, he couldn’t do anything about Maria, but he could do something about this.
>
He struck off towards the fencing that bisected the road from the bottom pasture where the cattle had been feeding, and Maxine could do nothing but follow.
In the end, it wasn’t Maxine’s words that stopped him—it was the break in the fencing that had been created to take the cattle and feed them through, made by whoever had taken them. They’d clipped the barbed wire in the fence through and pushed three posts to the ground. Once they’d gotten the cattle through, they’d pushed the posts back up and high-tailed it away along the road.
Donald put the gun down against the fence and surveyed the damage.
“We need to get this fixed up now or we could lose the whole herd,” he said.
The cattle on the other side of the fence were looking at Donald and Maxine with their big brown eyes. An accidental nudge from any of them against the broken fence, and they’d all be able to file out of the pasture onto the road.
“Go back and get Storm. There’s some timber, barbed wire, and tools in the work shed. Load up your buggy and get it up here. I’ll keep watch on the herd.”
Maxine hesitated. She looked at the gun, and it seemed that Donald read her mind. “I’m not trying to get rid of you, I’m trying to save the herd. We need to fix the fence and then work out a roster for who’s going to watch over the road overnight. As if we haven’t got enough to do, without some scum suckers coming over here and stealing from us.”
“If you’re sure,” Maxine said, knowing the quaver in her voice told the story that she herself was not sure at all. The whole idea of leaving Donald there with the gun really didn’t appeal, but he was right about the fence. They were lucky the cows in this pasture hadn’t made a break for it already.
“Yes. Now, go. For once in your life, do as you’re told.”
And that sealed it.
When she brought the buggy drawn by Tally-Two—the plucky and resolute horse they’d found on the road, who Storm had renamed after his sister in an echo of ‘Tic-tac,’ his own family nickname—with timber and equipment, she was relieved to see Donald had been as good as his word. The shotgun was still leaning against the fence where it had been when she’d left.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 33
