Supernova EMP- The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Poppet felt for a pulse in his neck. “He’s alive. Fainted from the pain or blood loss, I guess.”

  “But what are we going to do?” Maxine asked as the firing intensified outside again.

  Poppet pushed Maxine backward and her hands plopped from the wound in Storm’s tummy.

  “Improvise,” Poppet said. She passed the shotgun to Maxine’s bloody hands and started pulling on a pair of sterile gloves.

  “You take the window, and I’ll do what I can here.”

  “You know how to stitch up wounds?”

  “Some. Ask Josh if you ever get the chance. He’s living proof.”

  Maxine nodded and went to the window.

  Tally Standing took a step back as Greene Davidson moved around Laurent’s exsanguinated corpse and came towards her; his knife was held out in front of him like a magic wand, and his greatest trick had been disappearing Laurent’s life.

  His eyes were wild, and all the blood had been sucked from his thin lips behind his beard. But that wildness in his face held something even more disturbing than straight-up murder. Greene looked like he was enjoying himself. His cheeks were flushed, his chin thrust out with anticipatory relish. Like a guy who was looking forward to the best meal in his life.

  Tally moved so that there was a low coffee table between them, cutting off direct access. But this was not a tenable position to be in.

  She would need a real escape route soon.

  Tally and Henry had met Greene on the road from Georgia. He’d come to them in the night with stories of his murdered companions. And when they’d investigated Greene’s camp, they’d discovered the bodies of his companions with their throats cut—in the same way that Laurent’s had been.

  Henry and Tally had taken pity on Greene, a twenty-four-year-old software designer with few survival smarts and a penchant for bragging. Really, he’d seemed like nothing but a young rich guy with a hipster beard and a clumsy gait, who’d caused them a couple of problems on their way to the M-Bar. And who, because of his recklessness in killing four of Creggan’s men with an RPG—men who had already been vanquished and who had been walking away without their weapons—had triggered the assault on the farm, which was being led by the man running the nearest town, Dale Creggan.

  And now, here was proof that Greene wasn’t just a liability, but a psychopath. Tally didn’t know if he’d been this way all along, or if the propensity for that kind of aggression and violence had been awakened by some factor of the Barnard’s Star supernova, but right now it didn’t matter. The outcomes were the same.

  “Stay back.”

  “How am I going to open you up like a pretty little purse if I stay back? No, why don’t you come here and I’ll make it quick. Deal?”

  Greene took another step, and Tally went back two. She hesitated between a battered armchair and the stone surround of the fireplace in her grandparents’ living room. The TV had already been killed by a shot that had come through the window overlooking the back of the property. Not that that was an important observation, as nothing electrical on Earth had worked since the supernova, but in one important respect, it did show Tally that there were attackers outside the boarded-up window.

  Tally dropped and lunged as Greene attacked.

  Tally, using all her free-running skills and rock-climbing reflexes, rolled past the shattered TV and up to the window. Greene was a good ten paces away now, and she had time.

  She ripped the board away from the glass so that the dim room was filled with light. Yanking on the drapes to pull the rod they were on away from the wall, she flourished the material like a counterpoint magic trick of her own and dove for cover.

  Greene was exposed, and suddenly he was diving, too, as the window exploded under shattering impacts.

  Tally scrambled for the back stairs on her hands and knees. Used to moving fast and low across rooftops and concreted public spaces, she was almost as fast on four limbs as she was on two, arching her back and pushing hard with her feet and scrabbling with her hands over the floorboards.

  Greene screamed with rage, and she heard him slithering across the floor, coming after her.

  Tally was on the stairs now. The space they were built in was thin, and the stairs went on one turn through ninety degrees, leading up to the corridor at the back of the house.

  Tally was up them like a leopard, her back bowing and her legs pounding. She was up on two legs as she made the turn, and then it only took three huge steps for her to make it up the second flight of stairs.

  There were two doors leading to seldom used rooms, which her grandparents used as storage or occasional workrooms. Both were locked.

  Dammit.

  She thudded against one door with her shoulder, but the wood was thick and the lock strong. There was no way out through the doors. The small windows that ran across the top of the outside wall were sealed units and would have been near impossible for even someone as lithe and slender as Tally to get through.

  Tally scanned the ceiling. There was an attic access panel; other than going back down the stairs, which she could hear Greene ascending, it was her only hope of escape.

  “I’m gonna get you, lil’ piggy…”

  If Tally needed anything extra to spur her on, that did the trick in spades.

  She positioned herself beneath the hatch, sank to her haunches, and leaped up, driving the palms of her hands into the flat surface.

  Mercifully, the hatch wasn’t locked and so it flew up on itself with the impact, crashing onto the attic floor beyond and sending up a cloud of old dust.

  Greene was turning the corner in the stairwell. She could see the top of his tousled head.

  “This lil’ piggy went to market…”

  Tally dropped again, preparing the muscles in her legs to propel her upwards one more time.

  “This lil’ piggy stayed at home…”

  Tally exploded upwards on the gunpowder of fear. Her hands went through the hatch and she hooked her elbows over the lip. She was suspended now, half in and half out, feet kicking in space.

  “This lil’ piggy had roast beef…”

  The attic was full of dust, cobwebs, and the accumulated odds and ends of two lives lived long and well. She kicked up with her legs, trying to give herself the momentum to get up from one elbow onto a hand, thus allowing leverage to do the rest.

  But Greene’s hands closed around her ankle with a maniacal, breathy giggle. “And this lil’ piggy had… none!”

  2

  Maxine fired through the window with Poppet’s shotgun as Poppet continued her stitching up of Storm’s abdomen. Storm himself was looking at the wall, his fingers working at the bedclothes. Maxine could hear his breathing between shots at the running figures outside. She had to duck occasionally as fire was being concentrated on the second story of the ranch, but other than small splinters of wood in the back of her hand and scratches from chips of concrete scratching her cheek, she remained uninjured.

  Larry was laid out on the floor. His chest was rising and falling, and occasionally his eyes flickered, almost wincing as shots pummeled the outside of the building. He was swimming up through the layers of unconsciousness, though, and Maxine was mightily relieved at that, at least.

  Maxine kept side-eyeing Poppet when she could. The other woman worked quickly and with skilled fingers. “Not much different from stitching up a gunshot or a knife wound on one of Joey’s boys. When you’re in the kinda business we were, visits to the hospital emergency rooms were kinda a no-no. So, I learned how to do this in lieu of running the rackets or providing protection,” she said as she stitched.

  “You have lived a very different life than mine,” Maxine replied, firing out through the window again and then taking the Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun inside to reload the five-shell magazine.

  Poppet shook her head. “Not so very different, lady. You’re a nurse, right? I was just nursing in a different kinda hospital. Joey got stabbed in the back once. Not often you can say y
ou waved hello to your husband’s kidneys.”

  Maxine snorted, but smiled. What a remarkable woman Poppet Langolini was. A criminal and menace to society… but remarkable all the same.

  Poppet began rooting about in Larry’s Gladstone bag and pulled out a plastic-covered, gun-shaped device.

  “Score!” she said as she ripped the plastic from the device, then set about changing into a fresh pair of sterile gloves.

  “You know how to use one of those?” Maxine asked.

  “No different from stapling invoices and duty rosters together, lady. And quick. When you’re expecting the feds to rock up on your doorstep, a medical stapler is a godsend if you want to get your beloved bag into a vertical position to receive the good officers of the law.”

  Poppet began stapling the last layer of skin over the wound she had expertly closed. “Won’t be pretty, Storm, but you will have a great scar to scare your grandkids with.”

  Outside, Maxine could see men moving towards her side of the house. They were dodging behind the dead tractor and the corners of the barn where she and Storm had stayed their first night after arriving at the M-Bar.

  The men she could see ducking and weaving were now within twenty yards of the house, in fact. She had managed to wing a couple with her shots, but that didn’t seem to have arrested the wave of attackers who were closing.

  The battle was moving towards the endgame now.

  One box of cartridges out of the three Poppet had brought in with her was exhausted, and Maxine was halfway through the second. Just using shots to keep the raiders at bay was no longer an option, though. She’d have to wait to fire until she could be sure of a definite hit on a target. And that meant letting the attackers get closer and closer to the house.

  The ammunition, even used sparingly, wasn’t going to last more than half an hour at this rate.

  Poppet finished with Storm’s wound and admired her handiwork. Staples snaked up his skin like a crazy railroad. “It won’t win any awards, but it’ll do.”

  Poppet wiped away excess blood and iodine, then covered the wound with a pad and taped it into place. Storm’s eyes unscrewed as he turned his face from the wall.

  “Thanks,” he breathed, evidently still in a ton of pain.

  “S’gonna hurt like a bitch for an age, kid,” Poppet offered in return. “But looks like your mom got the infected stuff out of you, and if we fill you up with antibiotics and keep the wound clean as we can, nature should do the rest.”

  Storm managed to pull together a smile that hit Maxine right in the center of her heart.

  Poppet, flinging off her gloves and wiping the sweat from her forehead, knelt down to check on Larry.

  The old surgeon’s eyelids were flickering and his dry mouth clacked as it opened and closed on incomprehensible words.

  Poppet bent to his ear. “Hey, Doc, I’m going to have a look at your hand. Might need some more of my handiwork. You okay with that?”

  Larry gave the slightest of nods, so Poppet began undoing the blood-sodden tape around his shot hand.

  Maxine returned her gaze to the gap beneath the window board and sighted along the barrel of the shotgun. She could still hear firing from the front of the house, and the rattle of the machine gun fire out back.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she breathed out, as much to herself, as to Poppet or Storm.

  “That would be my assessment, too,” Poppet replied as she revealed the mangled carnage of Larry’s left hand. He groaned and bit on the knuckle of his good hand. “But right now, I don’t see any way we can achieve that. Even if we shot our way out like Butch and Sundance, Larry and Storm wouldn’t be able to come with us in the state they’re in. If Josh uses the last of the RPGs, he might turn some of Creggan’s guys into jigsaw puzzles, but he won’t get all of them.”

  Maxine nodded, the anxiety in her gut unfurling like a black flower. “We need a miracle.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles, lady,” Poppet said, pulling on fresh gloves and preparing to clean the wound in Larry’s hand with a sachet of sterile water. “I live by the maxim that something will turn up…”

  Poppet left that hanging in the air for long moments, until she finished, “Or it won’t.”

  “That’s a terrible maxim,” Larry whispered, his rheumy eyes flicking open and focusing on Poppet.

  “Maybe,” Poppet said with a shrug, “but it’s the best we got.”

  A huge crash came from the ceiling above them, a rattle of metal hitting something hard being followed by a yell of frustration.

  Maxine fixed her eyes on Poppet’s with a questioning glance.

  Poppet shrugged. “I have another maxim if you want. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, it suddenly does.”

  Tally’s chin smacked against the lip of the hatch as she was pulled down by Greene, her elbows slipping and hands grasping for anything that would give her purchase and the ability to maintain her position above him.

  The only positive that flashed across her mind in that second was that, as Greene was holding onto her leg with both of his hands, he didn’t have one free to stab her. Perhaps stabbing wasn’t his idea at all, though. He’d have to get her out of the hatch if he wanted her throat.

  With her free leg, she kicked out, and she heard Greene grunt as the blow took him somewhere on the upper body. It didn’t loosen his grip on her, however; she was getting dragged further out of the hole in the ceiling. One of her hands, feeling about on the inside of the lip of the hatch, came on a cold piece of aluminum tubing. Her first thought was that it was a bar of some kind or the handle of a tool, so she gripped it hard and pulled at it.

  It wasn’t a free object, though. It was attached to a larger, bulkier contraption, which followed her downward with a crashing rattle as Tally was pulled out of the hatch.

  It was a rackety attic ladder that slid down on rockers and extended out all the way to the floor.

  The bottom rung of the ladder, the one holding Tally, had slid out on well-lubricated runners as she’d crashed down to the floor, winded but unscathed.

  But the ladder had barreled into Greene’s chest like a lance in a medieval joust, and he’d clattered backward with a frustrated yell to the top of the stairs, where he just stopped himself from falling by grabbing onto the bannister. After rocking back on his heels to steady himself, he rushed at her again.

  Tally only had time to see that he was holding the knife between his teeth like a damn pirate as his hands scrabbled for anything to grasp on to before she was up off her back and swinging around the ladder to begin to climb it.

  Nearby window glass shattered as more bullets poured into the house’s structure, spraying the side of her face and hair with fragments.

  That was the least of her concerns just now. Tally didn’t have a plan other than getting up into the attic. After that, she didn’t know what she was going to do.

  No time to plan now.

  Greene thumped four strides back towards the ladder as she scampered upward and leaped through the hatch into the attic. Tally felt Green’s desperate fingers bouncing off her boot heels as she crashed into the gloom and came down with a thud. The floor had been boarded out and seemed sturdy enough—it appeared she wasn’t going to crash back down through the ceiling.

  Tally turned onto her front, got up onto her knees, and shot out a hand for the ladder, wanting to pull it back up and catch her breath.

  The ladder wouldn’t budge, of course. She dared a peek over the lip of the hatch, seeing that Greene the pirate was already halfway up it.

  Tally got to the edge of the hole and, spinning on the ball of one foot, kicked down towards Greene’s face. He easily dodged away. He also let go of the ladder with one hand and took the knife from between his teeth. If she kicked or punched down again, she’d more than likely skewer herself on the blade without Greene having to do much other than hold the knife out in front of him.

  Tally needed a weapon. Her gun was downstairs in the k
itchen. She had no knife, and Greene was advancing up the ladder. Slower than he might have wanted due to caution, but inexorable all the same.

  The attic space, which ran the length of the ranch house, was some six feet high at the apex of the roof, with wooden pillars dotted along at regular intervals. There were two windows on each side of the roof to let in natural light, and although they were silty with the grime of the years, there was enough illumination to see by. Her grandparents were tidy and ordered, and there were boxes and trunks everywhere. Some of which must have been constructed in the attic itself, as there was no way they would fit through the hatch in one piece. There were no guns she could see, nor handy knife blocks. Just boxes that offered her no idea of what they might contain.

  She had to make a decision. Stay by the hatch and try to keep Greene at bay with whatever was at hand, which basically amounted to the hatch cover—not exactly the best weapon, as even though it was heavy, it was too big to go through the hatchway in one piece—or get up and see what she could rummage from the boxes.

  Tally got up.

  The nearest box was cardboard, and she ripped the flaps open. Greene’s head appeared in the hatchway. He was being wary as he ducked up, but he need not have bothered since the box was full of old clothes.

  Great. Just great.

  She hefted the box as best she could and threw it hard towards Greene as he was slithering up through the hatchway. The box exploded with its contents over his head and shoulders, snapping his body back. No more than an annoying hindrance as the clothes spilled out around him, but it gave her a few more vital seconds.

  Tally moved to the next box. It was a rough wooden crate which had a flat lid. The inside was full of papers. Years of farm accounts and bills of sale. Not even a heavy ledger that she could throw at Greene’s head.