Supernova EMP- The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Josh had seen enough people die to know the end wasn’t minutes away, but more likely seconds. Maria’s eyes were milky and dull. Her hand in his had lost all its reciprocal grip. If Josh let it go, it would fall to the floor without any will from Maria to stop it.

  Josh leaned down to Maria’s mouth. “I’m here, Mom. What do you want me to know? I’m here… if you need to tell me, I’m listening… it’s me, Josh.”

  Maria’s eyes fluttered and the pulse in her neck became a tiny vibration beneath the skin. Her mouth breathed a long sigh, and on the sigh came Maria’s last words.

  “You have to tell him, Maxine… about Gabe… You have to tell him… who Storm’s father really is…”

  Tally stumbled out of the kitchen and back into the living-room. Donald, Poppet, and Henry were firing out of the windows on Creggan’s men as they advanced and dodged. But they were running low on ammo, even though they’d brought much of their store into the kitchen.

  Tally had told them she would go and get what they needed from the store in the utility room at the back of the ranch, but as the bullets thudded into the ranch house, smashing glass, cracking into the walls, and tearing through the roof, Tally, keeping her head down as the wall spat plaster and splinters of wood, came to a stop in a moment of utter shock.

  There was blood all over the floor of the living room as if a pig had been stuck and hung to bleed in a slaughterhouse. Where she would have expected to see Laurent on the couch was now a drained, dead thing. Skin white and empty. A red, bloody bib of scarlet painting his shirt the color of death.

  Behind him, bowie knife still in his hand, was Greene. He was smiling at another triumph, his eyes twisting darkly and his mouth open with excited expectation.

  “Ooops,” Greene said, like a kid who’d accidentally trod on a snail after a rainstorm.

  Tally was struck dumb. All she could think of were the bodies she and Henry had found after Greene had run into them in the forest.

  Their throats had all been cut in exactly the same way.

  Larry had given Storm a local anesthetic from a syringe, sinking it into the area where he was going to perform the operation on the boy’s abdomen. He and Maxine had washed up as best they could, then spread the contents of sterile packs and linen over where the operation was to take place. Maxine had laid out the roll of scalpels, forceps, retractors, stitch kit, and cotton wool, all ready for the first incision.

  Storm was sweating from fever as much as from fear. Maxine wanted to hold his hand, but now she was gloved up and observing all the rituals of aseptic technique that she could.

  “I’ll hold your hand when we’re done, Storm, and then I reckon I’m never going to let go of it.”

  There hadn’t been time for any real meaningful words of reunion when Maxine had come to Storm’s room with Larry. The doctor had wanted to get down to business as soon as he could. The sooner he got the appendix out and cut away the infection, the sooner Storm would be on the road to recovery, he’d argued.

  Storm looked away as Larry picked up the scalpel and brought it down to the boy’s exposed belly.

  Maxine had assisted at countless surgical procedures in her many years as a nurse, and she had been calm, professional, and centered throughout all of them. But as the edge of the blade pressed down and opened a white-lipped wound, which soon began to well with blood, she promised that she would trade anything she possessed to make sure her son came out okay on the other side.

  The firing from outside started as the surgeon lifted the scalpel from the wound. Maxine reached in with a swab to wipe the blood from the iodine-smeared wound.

  Maxine’s eyes met Larry’s, which were dancing above his mask as the bullets slammed into the building and plaster sifted down from the ceiling.

  “What are we gonna do?” she asked, unable to keep the rising panic from her voice.

  “Nothing we can do,” Larry said, picking up a retractor. “He’s open. We’re going to have to finish what we started.”

  Two bullets thumped through the board over the window and zinged across the room. Maxine ducked as the wall behind her cracked open, spitting dust.

  She looked at Storm. His face was smattered with a spray of misted blood.

  “Oh God! Storm! Are you hit? Storm…!”

  Storm’s eyes were wide, his face dotted with crimson, but he gently shook his head. “No,” he said gently. “I’m not hit.”

  “But unfortunately,” Larry said, a gasp of pain preceding his words, “I can’t say the same about me.”

  Larry was holding up his hand. The blue nitrile glove on his right hand was destroyed, the fingers uncovered beneath it suddenly a Chinese puzzle of flesh and bone.

  As the blood from Larry’s wounded hand dripped down onto the bed in thick, slow droplets, Maxine’s world closed down around her to a cold tunnel of pitch-black fear.

  End of Deep End

  Supernova EMP Series Book Two

  Blurb

  The truth will be revealed, whether they’re ready or not.

  The firefight for the M-Bar’s valuable resources rages on in the post-apocalyptic madness, but the Standings are finally standing together… until secrets that Maxine has tried to keep buried come to light. And when they do, they threaten to severe the last tenuous strands holding the family together.

  Reeling from betrayals that cut deeper than flying bullets, Josh Standing follows after his revenge-seeking father-in-law. He doesn’t seem to have much choice, as it seems the Standings are collapsing from within and there isn’t anything that can keep them together.

  And then they hear of a new horror: People are being rounded up and systematically slaughtered or enslaved by a single man leading a train of carnage. He’s ruthless, he’s cunning—and now he has Storm Standing, too.

  To save her family, Maxine will have to come face-to-face with her past and stand down her worst fears if she has any hope of stopping the man threatening her family.

  Before her final secrets become the death of them all.

  1

  Josh Standing, who had lost his family and then found them again, no longer felt sure of who they were or how he fit in to their lives. But, for now, he had a more pressing concern to attend to.

  He had a dead woman in his arms, and there were bullets smashing through the windows of the bedroom where he knelt.

  The M-Bar Ranch was under attack. If Josh didn’t defend the property right now, the notion that had been placed in his head by the dying woman—that he was not the father of his son—would be moot. Moot because they’d all be dead anyway.

  Maria, who was Josh’s mother-in-law, had been attacking him when she’d been hit by one of the bullets slamming into the ranch. They were being fired on by Dale Creggan’s men. As she’d died, a moment of seeming lucidity behind her blood-smeared lips had led her to implore her daughter to tell Josh the truth about who Storm’s father really was.

  Now, that rabidly screeching, murderous woman, smothered in the slobber of a rabid madness and the blood from her injuries, looked like the broken fossil of a small bird.

  Josh laid the limp and now pathetic form of Maria Jefferson down onto the floorboards. Moments before, she had been attacking him with all the fury of psychotic insanity—an insanity that seemed to have been visited upon ninety percent of the world’s population. The effects of a supernova that was something like six light years from Earth had rushed over the planet in a welter of madness and technological destruction, causing savage insanity to well up in billions of minds since that moment.

  Josh closed his eyes, ducking as another bullet spat through the second-floor window beside him, punched a hole through the ceiling and sent out puffs of white plaster and splinters from ceiling beams.

  Josh got up and, keeping low, went to the wall at the side of the window and looked out through the bullet holes in the boards which covered it.

  Creggan’s men hadn’t yet made it as far as the yard, but the pasture beyond the yard, where t
he cattle had been corralled, was a bloodbath of dead beef. Creggan’s men, advancing, had shot thirty of the animals to use as cover. The rest of the herd had stampeded away from the gun battle. Josh could see the retreating forms of the animals as they ran along the road away from the ranch. From there, some of the terrified animals had broken for the plain that eventually led up to the foothills of Alleghany Mountain.

  Puffs of smoke below told Josh the tale of those left downstairs—his father-in-law Donald Jefferson, his daughter Tally, and Poppet Langolini, Henry Grange, and Greene Davidson—who were defending the ranch with vigor at the moment. Keeping Creggan’s men pinned down for now, too. But it wasn’t a situation that could last forever. Ammunition was finite, and if the quick forms of the attackers dodging behind the dead carcasses and moving about on the hillside were anything to go by, Josh and the others were outnumbered ten to one.

  Josh had a sidearm, a Glock in a holster on his hip, but it wasn’t a gun that would be a useful defensive weapon from up here. Downstairs, he had a bolt action Remington Model 700 that fired hefty .300 Winchester magnum cartridges, which he’d liberated from an exclusive gun store in Savannah, Georgia. He’d placed it with his pack at the bottom of the house’s front stairs. With that weapon, with its scope and range, he’d be better placed to pick off attackers as they made themselves available to him.

  Josh ducked away from the window as the board before him rattled and warped—bullets tearing through it to smash into the far wall of the room.

  He ran for the door, got out into the corridor, and made for the stairs.

  The front range of the ranch house was mostly made up of the large and generous kitchen, a storage area, and a utility room. Donald and Henry had boarded the windows there, too, but left enough of a gap below the plywood to observe and shoot through. Josh came into the kitchen with the Remington already in hand, clicking the bolt and chambering a round.

  Donald, in his early seventies, was as tall as John Wayne and wide as the West Virginia sky. He and his shotgun remained focused outside as Josh came in. Henry, nineteen, red-haired, and keen as mustard, kneeled below the windows with his MP5, taking the occasional shot through the gaps beneath the board in front of him.

  Poppet Langolini, a self-described ex-gangster’s moll in her early fifties, blonde and brassier than a vintage Italian espresso machine, was loading shells into weapons and changing magazines in others on the kitchen table. She was getting them ready to pass to Donald and Henry as they were needed. She was an excellent sports shot herself—a long-time skeet shooter and hunter—and Josh knew this would only be a temporary respite from her getting back into the fray.

  When Josh came in, bullets were rattling the frame of the house, glass was falling with shattering crashes, and the air was full of dust. Josh couldn’t help being glad the old man was concentrating on the attackers. He didn’t want to meet Donald’s eyes and have to tell him right now that his wife had been killed. This wasn’t the best environment in which to receive the worst of news. Instead, Josh took the Remington to a window and began sighting through it.

  “They’re not going to stop until we’ve killed ‘em all,” Donald said as Josh fired his first shot. The head he’d been aiming at had already ducked out of sight behind a carcass in the paddock.

  “They’re tying us up here,” Henry said, sending a burst from his MP5 out beneath the window board. “Best we can do is keep them down. But the ammo ain’t gonna last forever. And I bet you they’re circling the house already.”

  “I’ll go and take a look out the back,” Poppet said, hefting a shotgun and two boxes of shells under her arm. “I’ll look in on Maxine and Storm, too. Hopefully, the operation’s nearly done.”

  Storm was in a back room being operated on by Lawrence Banks, a surgeon Maxine had risked everything over in order to bring him back to the M-Bar to deal with her son’s appendicitis. Maxine, a nurse and wound care specialist, was assisting Banks, and as the house came under fire, Josh couldn’t imagine how difficult the operation had become with this new addition of stress.

  “Thanks,” Josh said as Poppet left the room; however desperately he wanted to know that Maxine and Storm were doing okay, he was needed here in the kitchen more.

  Henry sent out another burst of bullets just as Josh saw a figure making an opportunistic break from behind cover to run towards the barn. The figure was caught by Henry’s fire across the legs and pelvis. His arms flew wide, his Stetson spinning away and his body flailing. He wasn’t dead, but he was out of the game.

  “Where’s Tally and Greene?” Josh asked, sending another shot into the paddock, though it didn’t find his target.

  “Covering the windows at the side of the house in the den,” Donald said, sending a blast of shot towards the paddock.

  Josh chambered another round with the bolt and took aim through the scope. He had no idea how this was going to end and who would be left at the end of it to pick up the pieces.

  Maxine felt like she was going to fall into the open wound in Storm’s abdomen. Doctor Banks—Mr. Call-me-Larry—was wrapping tape around the gauze he’d circled around his shot-up fingers, and he’d sat back on his backside to direct Maxine in continuing the operation.

  “I can’t,” she’d said at first.

  “You can,” Larry had answered. “The wound is open. You can do this under my direction. Back in the mists of time when I learned how to do this, the maxim was ‘See one, do one, teach one.’ I’ve done this a thousand times. You can do it.”

  A volley of shots had interrupted Maxine’s answer, and Storm, sweating, covered in his own blood and in Larry’s from his injured hand, had reached for his mom. “There’s no one else, Mom. You gotta do this. Please.”

  So, as the shots had pummeled the side of the building, coming through the window boards with anxiety-spiking regularity, Maxine had followed Larry’s instructions.

  It wasn’t a case of being squeamish. She’d seen plenty of open wounds in her time as a wound care specialist at Morehead Mercy, where she’d worked in their North Carolina hometown. It was just that this was her son. Opened up to the world, and in a room that was coming under sustained gunfire from attackers outside.

  “Right, Maxine. We’re nearly there. Hook your finger through the peritoneum and you should be able to feel the appendix there. It’s thin like a green bean, and squashy but tough. Get your finger under it and bring it out.”

  Three bullets sang across the room from the window to bury themselves in the wall opposite. Maxine and Larry ducked instinctively. Plaster spat into Larry’s silver-gray hair, and he used his free hand to dab at Storm’s iodine- and blood-smeared abdomen to remove the flakes.

  “The longer this goes on, the more garbage that’s going to get into the wound. We can flush it out, but it’s still a huge risk. Get the appendix now, Maxine. Now.”

  Maxine nodded and hooked her nitrile-gloved finger through the last layer of muscle in her son’s abdomen. Larry had managed to open everything he’d needed to before he’d been shot. That was something to be thankful for, at least. Now, the sweat was standing out on his wrinkled forehead like rivets on a battleship. Maxine knew he must be in terrible pain, but he was keeping a lid on it. He couldn’t help her other than to direct her movements.

  She closed her eyes to think herself into her finger. Feeling through the small hole to try to locate what Larry had described. Larry was swabbing around the retractors and forceps that were already in the wound in order to staunch as much of the blood as he could. Storm groaned as Maxine worked her finger in and she almost pulled back. But then the thin, hard ribbon of gut she was searching for moved against the pad of her index finger, and suddenly she was hooked beneath it.

  She pulled up with her hand and the appendix—blue-red, swollen, and hot beneath her finger—came into view.

  “That’s it, girl. Well done. Infected for sure, and the thing that’s been causing all his pain. Homestretch now, son,” Larry said, a strained smile sk
etched across his face as the sounds of the battle intensified outside.

  “Okay, hold it there, and I can use the forceps to clip the artery feeding its blood supply; then you can ligate… tie off… the vessels before we crush and cut out the appendix.”

  Larry clipped the arteries and told Maxine how to prepare the surgical thread to tie them off.

  The door opened breaking her concentration as Maxine spun her head. For a moment, she expected to see one of Creggan’s men in the doorway about to shoot them down. But it was Poppet. She came in with her face determined and her shotgun in hand, kicking the door closed with her heel behind her. “They’re moving up behind us and to the side. I’m gonna see if I can pin some of them down from here. Okay?”

  Maxine nodded. She hadn’t had time to get to know Poppet yet, but she hoped she would on the other side of this if any of them got out alive.

  Poppet knelt at the window and fired both barrels of the shotgun through it. “Nailed one. They’ll think twice about just walking up here now.”

  She ducked as a line of machine gun bullets studded the board.

  “Or maybe not.”

  The operation continued as best it could under the circumstances. Larry explained how to tie off the arteries and Maxine followed his instructions with shaking fingers. Then she was directed to crush the base of the appendix with another set of forceps and tie off below the crushed area. Larry reached in with forceps-scissors at that point, and the appendix was free. Maxine pulled it away and dropped it on a plate by the side of the bed.

  “Now to close up. First, we need a purse stitch around the stump of the appendix, and…”

  Larry’s head dropped forward, his face pale and his mouth lolling.

  Poppet fired two more shots from the window and tracked back to look at Maxine, who felt like her heart was about to burst out of her chest. Her hands were still in the wound, and as Larry’s voice had trailed off, he’d slid back. His chest was rising and falling softly.