Poppet reached the cage first, and Josh watched as she clasped her hand to her mouth. For a second, Josh wondered how many of the children had survived the gunfire and the explosion. He hesitated before joining Poppet at the side of the hole. He knew that there was a small chance some of the children had been shielded from the explosion and the onslaught by the bodies of others hit first by gunfire. He would have to check. He would have to not just look over the lip of the hole, but in all likelihood jump down and check the pulses of the kids who were lying there, apart and beneath others.
Josh looked over the edge.
The cage was empty.
The children were gone.
It’s difficult to think logically when there’s an all-out battle going on around you, Josh thought as he hunkered down and the bullets flew around him, and the seemingly endless blasts from the RPG exploded in the sides of the burning mansion; they kept coming, too, fired at the groups of Trace’s men who obviously didn’t know their boss and benefactor was now so much slime, and thus tried to fight off the attack by Jayce, Elvis, and her men.
Josh had already pulled Poppet away from the empty cage, and they crouched down in a ditch about three hundred yards from the burning mansion.
Combatants ran in all directions, their black silhouettes etched starkly against the flames. Knots of men were engaged in a vicious fire-fight with Jayce’s men, who hadn’t come from the direction of Thunderbolt, but had circled the whole of Parkopolis and come from the seawards side, as planned. If they had encountered any resistance to their movements, then no word of it had reached Parkopolis, so far as Josh could tell. The chaotic battle that was being played out around them was evidence enough that Trace’s men hadn’t been in the least prepared for what was coming at them.
An RPG exploded amongst a group of six men still loyal to Parkopolis and its leader. Limbs flew up on jagged splashes of blood as the grenade reduced the men to their constituent parts.
Two men who’d been sheltered from the blast tried to run, but were cut down by withering fire from behind them, jagged dots running up their backs like stitches from a sewing machine, and then they were sent spinning to the ground to twitch and die.
“What’s happened to the kids?” Like Josh, Poppet was concerned with the core part of the plan.
“If they’re not there, then there’s a good chance they’re alive. But where? I dunno. And, more to the point, who moved them?”
Poppet ducked as an RPG exploded not thirty yards away, throwing up a spray of dirt with a concussion that rattled Josh’s teeth.
“It had to be Harve,” Josh said. He’d told Poppet how Harve had been willing to get the jump on Trace by allowing Josh to take the explosives into Savannah. Harve had been beaten and humiliated by Trace enough times, Josh thought, to perhaps have taken matters into his own hands. Perhaps Josh coming back empty-handed had put a plan to move the children into action—maybe it was something he’d been contemplating for a while. If he took away Trace’s power over the people he forced to work for him, maybe they would rise up and overthrow him. What Harve hadn’t counted on was Josh burning down the mansion and organizing this attack.
The difficulty now wasn’t just in finding the children, but making sure Jayce’s attack didn’t kill them by accident. “We need to find the kids now,” Josh said, getting onto his knees and racking the Colt. “If they’re being hidden somewhere in the line of fire, then they’re almost in worse danger than they were in the cage. At least there they had some protection from stray fire.”
Then it hit him, what he should have noticed before.
“There were no guards on the cage. There should have been four, at least. There always have been. But Trace had run there with his guy. The kids had to have been taken recently, or Trace would have found out sooner. Maybe in the last hour. And who else haven’t we seen apart from Harve?”
“Steve and Jackdaw…”
“Yeah. And you know what else we didn’t see when we came out of the mansion?”
“I was a little busy, I’m afraid. You know. Trying not to get killed.”
“What’s usually parked up outside the mansion?”
“The cart?”
“Yes, and it wasn’t there. Look!” Josh pointed back to the burning building as a grenade burst against its wall and collapsed a whole section of roof.
The space where the cart would usually be was empty. “That means Jackdaw, Steve, and Harve must have the cart and kids, and there are only two directions by road that they can use to get out of here. Back towards the sea, or the road to Thunderbolt. They can’t be going back to the sea because Jayce’s people skirted that way and would have found them. So, my guess is they’re on the road to Thunderbolt. Come on. We need horses.”
They galloped away from Parkopolis as the mansion and tents burned, even as the explosions boomed and the battle raged.
The horses had been skittering and whinnying in the mansion’s stable block some hundred yards from the main house. Whoever had owned the house in the past had kept horses––perhaps even trained them to show, based on the look of the grounds. So, Trace’s men had maintained the brick-built stables and kept fifty or so animals there in the boxes and in the corral. The stables had been deserted, as whoever had been working there had gone first to see the mansion burning and then to fight.
Two palominos had already been saddled, maybe to go out on patrol before the battle had started. They were nervous and unhappy about the explosions, but their training had been strong enough for them to calm as Poppet soothed them with her voice, and then more than willing to ride the road away from the mansion towards Thunderbolt.
Josh knew they had to reach the cart and its precious cargo before Harve and the others reached the streets of Thunderbolt. Out in the open, Josh knew they had a chance, but once the children had been stored in an easily defensible building, extracting them wasn’t going to be at all easy.
As the explosions diminished and the road to the bridge began to rise a little, Josh saw what he’d hoped he would. The cart—hitched to two horses, with Steve driving and Jackdaw in the back with the children—and Harve on his horse.
Harve turned in the saddle even as Josh drew his gun and trotted the horse up to the cart and its attendants.
In the back, the fifteen children huddled, their faces white with fear as they clung to each other, eyes shiny with tears.
Harve pulled his Colt, and Jackdaw reached down and pulled up a Mossberg 590 pump-action shotgun.
Neither Jackdaw nor Harve pointed their guns at Josh and Poppet. They pointed them at the children.
“Well, look at the big brain on you, Josh. Not even Trace had figured out what we were pulling here.”
“Trace is dead.”
Harve cursed hard. “Don’t lie to me. Because I can get this done with fourteen kids instead of fifteen.”
“I saw him killed. Blown to smithereens, Harve. Why would I lie to you?”
“Because you wanna take my bargaining chips away from me.”
The distant crump of the explosions from Parkopolis were still on the warm night air.
“Hear that, Harve? That’s Parkopolis going up in flames. You don’t have a kingdom to take over. By the time the battle is over, my guys will have wiped out yours through superior firepower. Now, you let these kids go, and I’ll let all three of you ride off into the sunset. I don’t care what you do or where you go, but these kids are not going any further.”
Harve smiled and moved his gun over the heads of the children. “Wanna pick which one I end first, Josh? Boy or girl. Blonde or dark. There’s a redhead there. Shall we take him out first?”
Josh’s pistol was pointed directly at Harve’s head, but even if he fired, there was still a chance Harve would get his shot off, and Jackdaw certainly would. These guys knew what a risk they were taking and had known there was a good chance that crossing Trace would put them in mortal danger anyway. It didn’t matter whether he was dead or if they believed
it. Right now, they had less to lose than Josh and Poppet.
“Go ahead, Josh. Pull the trigger. I dare you.”
Josh lowered the gun and Harve’s face lit up in the moonlight, his eyes all aglitter. “That’s better.”
Jackdaw raised his shotgun so that it was off the children and pointing directly at Josh. Harve kept the kids covered, and Steve turned around in the cart; he was resting the reins on his lap and had a .44 Magnum in his huge fist that didn’t appear to be pointed in any direction, but Josh knew the big African American was fast enough and skilled enough to bring his weapon to bear the moment he needed to.
“I’m telling you, Harve, you don’t need to take the kids to Thunderbolt. Trace is dead. If you don’t believe me, go back and look. You’re already free.”
“Thunderbolt? What makes you think we’re going to Thunderbolt?”
“Because it’s the obvious choice.”
Harve threw back his head and guffawed. “You’re such a fool, Josh. You think you have everything worked out. Did you really believe you could manipulate me to get me to go against Trace just for a piece of his action? No, Josh, that’s not where we’re going at all. We’re going to the Harbormaster…”
“And, where is he?”
Harve laughed again. “You think I’m going to tell you that? You really are a fool. Trace was just small fry compared to where we’re going. And this payment will be just the beginning. America as you knew it so gone, Josh. You and your kind, you bleeding-heart heroes, you’re nothing. You’re bugs on the Harbormaster’s windshield. You’re crushed and you don’t even realize it yet.”
“Why does the Harbormaster want these kids?” The horror was rising in Josh again now. He hadn’t thought any of this could be what Harve would be doing. But he’d been thinking too small, too parochial, too contained. There was a bigger game being played above his head, and he didn’t have an inkling what the pieces were, where the board was, or what the strategy might be to counteract it. If Harve would risk everything he had to take these children to God knew where, just to lay tribute at the feet of this Harbormaster, what else were the people following him capable of? Look at what Trace had done to the people of Savannah and the parents of the kids––Josh felt that he’d just picked back the scab on a wound he hadn’t known he had. A wound that ran all the way from his heart to his guts.
And here was the evidence before his own eyes.
“So, are you both ready to say goodbye?” Harve moved his gun between Josh and Poppet. “Who wants to go first? I’m an equal opportunities murderer, ya know, so I’m happy not to show any discrimination.”
“You don’t have to kill anyone, Harve. You don’t have to give these kids away.” Josh left his gun by his side; if he raised it, they would either shoot him or shoot the kids. He couldn’t let that happen.
And so here he was again, caught between what he would have called his duty to act for the greater good––that idea of service he’d always cherished: to protect and serve––and the very real need to be selfish, to look after his own. To find his children and his wife and make sure they were safe.
Duty to his family or duty to others. Two sides of the same coin, and to be on the cusp of both was the most painful place to stand.
He couldn’t let the children die.
Jackdaw’s chest burst open, and then Harve’s head was smacked sideways by the impact of a bullet that ripped his cheek open and busted a flap of skull out on the opposite side of his head.
Both men had gone down fast, Jackdaw falling out of the cart to crunch down as the children screamed, and Harve falling back in his saddle and rolling off his horse. Crunching down face-first onto the road.
Steve put down the .38 and shrugged. “I guess you made some sense, Josh. I guess you made some sense.”
21
Tally clung to a root, her feet dangling over a drop that went down who knew how far into the side of the limestone hill. The walls around her were rough-hewn and looked naturally created. She’d dropped into some sort of sinkhole—one that had probably been there for hundreds of years, cut by a subterranean stream through the limestone, and that, over time, had become overgrown with brush and covered by fallen branches.
If she hadn’t been running so fast and wildly from the gas station attackers, she’d probably have seen it as she approached and avoided it. But now she was a good twenty feet below the surface of the hill, and hanging onto a wrist-thick root she had dislodged from the surface layers of the soil as she’d fallen.
Above her, the hole she’d created in the natural cover showed a bright patch of sky.
She tried to get purchase on the wall with the toes of her boots, but there was nothing to grip. Maybe if she’d been prepared for a day’s climbing and had been in her lightest gear, with a belt full of carabiners, quick-draws, chalk, and rope, and wearing her beloved Black Diamond climbing shoes, she might have been up and out of the sinkhole in a matter of seconds. But weighed down by all her gear, wearing the thick-soled walking boots and with a throbbing ankle’s aggravated injury, she was not in the best of situations.
The root in her hands shifted above her and a small clump of dirt falling right down onto her face told her all she needed to know. The root was strong, but it wasn’t going to keep her there forever. And there was no way she could risk using the root to pull herself out of the sinkhole. There was a good chance it would unravel from the soil above like a line from a fishing reel, giving her a moment of free fall before snapping and sending her to the bottom far below.
Realistically, she had only two choices. Try to climb up the wall, or go down and try to find a way up on another section of the rock.
One of the counter-intuitive lessons she’d discovered early on, while learning how to climb, was that sometimes in order to go up, you needed to go down first.
She’d first trained as a young girl on the rock-face simulator in her local community sports and athletics center. She’d been taken along on weekends by Maxine, ostensibly to support Storm in his athletics and track training. But watching the boys running around their circles had never been her thing. The rock-face simulator, however, had been a revelation. Within a few weeks of discovering it, she’d been begging her mom to take her to the center so she could climb, even when Storm was at track meets or feeling happy to train at the local gym. That had started a ten-year love affair with climbing which had quickly moved on to her experiencing the real thing, and then, when she hadn’t been able to get out to the mountains, it had morphed into her secondary love––free-running.
A horizontal rush created by a vertical one.
A sudden scream above snapped her head up, and suddenly a black shape was falling towards her. One of the fighters running down the hill had managed to find the same hole she had. The screaming woman crashed into the rock above Tally, rebounded in a spin, and then banged against the root Tally clung to, causing another foot of dirt to rip from the soil and all but jolt Tally’s arms out of her shoulder sockets.
The woman fell past her, brushing against Tally’s pack and then continuing to scream on her way down.
The noise from the woman cut off after two more seconds, and was followed by an almighty thump that stilled any further sounds she might have made in her dead throat.
Tally tried not to think of the woman’s fate, but to concentrate on how far the drop might be. In the less PC corners of the climbing world, the number of seconds it took to fall a certain distance was known as the Splat Calculation. A body accelerates at 9.8 meters per second. So, in one second, you’d fall 9.8 meters––around thirty feet; fall another second, and you’d have fallen another 19.6 meters––another sixty feet, loosely. This crude calculation told Tally that there was a very strong possibility she was dangling over a near one-hundred-foot drop. There was no chance of just letting go of the root, finding the bottom of the crevice, and then getting herself back up. She was going to have to free-climb down and then find a route back up, all the while in t
he wrong gear and carrying her pack on her back.
Much as she didn’t want to lose the gear in the rucksack, she wasn’t going to be able to climb effectively with it. So, holding on with one hand, she shucked off the pack and attached it to the root with a strap, tying the knot with a hand and her teeth. Once the pack was off her back, she felt immediately lighter. The root hadn’t moved again, either, and she now found it more than easy to hold onto it with one hand while her dominant hand, the right, reached down to meet her upraised foot and began to take off her boots.
Once the boots were in the pack and her toes were free to locate purchase on the wall that her boots hadn’t been sensitive enough to find, Tally leaned into the wall, discovering two toe-holds and a handhold which allowed her to let go of the root completely.
The limestone was generous to her touch in giving her several opportunities to go down, but not any to go up. So, she started to feel her way down. Free-climbing––without ropes and with minimal equipment—was an aspect of sports which had at once fascinated and appalled Tally, but the rush felt from completing a climb under such conditions gave a real sense of achievement that could rarely be matched in other ways. As she snaked down a further twenty feet from the dangling pack and the root, her confidence grew.
Crabbing around the ten-foot-diameter sinkhole, she soon found enough finger- and toe tip-sized micro-ledges to allow her to start moving up to the surface. Free of the boots and the pack, she was able to dance with the rock face. In a quick ballet of lithe arms and powerful legs, Tally soon got moving swiftly towards the light. Above the limestone, the loam and soil of the forest floor presented a near seven-foot stretch of friable, rooty heaven for any climber or spelunker.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 43
