Supernova EMP- The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The four were locked together, and unable to take more than a half-stride at a time because of the way they had been secured, but they began to inch their way through the camp in a caterpillar of tension. There was no moon to speak of overhead, but there was just enough light reflected from the still spreading Barnard’s Nebula in the sky for them to pick out the edges of the tents, and to avoid being tripped up.

  The tent they were heading for was fifteen yards away, and it took them nearly three minutes of cooperative travel to get there. Maxine could hear the snores and the breathing counterpointed by the odd hoot of an owl away in the forest by the side of the road.

  Maxine hunkered down at the entrance to the tent they had been aiming for, her breathing almost as fast as her beating heart. Blood thumped in her ears, anxiety levels hitting trip-hammer proportions.

  The Harborman who usually kept the keys to the padlocks securing the chains was named Dawidziak. He was a monstrous-sized, pink-faced, head-shaved fellow whose improvised red uniform jacket rode up over his belly. The horse he rode was the largest of those in the group, and even a horse of that size seemed exhausted at the end of a day’s travel. The huge horse was tethered to a tree close to the tent. Head down, breathing gently. But it stirred as they approached, as if the beating of Maxine’s heart was loud enough to disturb it.

  Maxine knelt down while the others kept watch. Poppet had lifted a Colt Cobra from the dead guard’s belt, as well as a thick hunting knife which she’d handed to Storm. Larry was breathing hard, and there was sweat standing out on his forehead in the chill air.

  Maxine played out what slack there was in the chain connecting her to Storm and then pulled the flaps of the tent apart. Dawidziak, still fully dressed, lay just inside the tent, on his back like a humpbacked whale beached inside the canvas. He was breathing through trembling lips, his cheeks puffing and blowing. Beyond him in the tent were two other Harbormen. With a distinct horror that flushed her spine with glacial fear, Maxine saw that one of them was Ten-Foot.

  And not only was Ten-Foot turned on his side, facing Maxine in the entrance of the tent, but both of his eyes were open. He was staring directly at her.

  She almost stumbled back into Storm, but reached down to the ground to steady herself. Ten-Foot’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t conscious. Maxine’s medical training kicked in, and she sighed with a sense of utter relief. Nocturnal lagophthalmos—sleeping with one’s eyes open—wasn’t as rare as some people might think, and she’d encountered it before in the hospitals where she’d worked. The first time she’d come across it, on a night shift where she’d been the only nurse on duty, it had freaked her out—she had almost run from the ward to find a priest to perform an exorcism. But she’d eventually gotten used to seeing the open but vacant eyes on subsequent night shifts, and she could be sure that was what she could see now in Ten-Foot.

  He was as much out for the count as Dawidziak and the other Harborman in the tent, though that didn’t make Maxine any more inclined to make eye-contact.

  She leaned forward, getting herself in close to Dawidziak—more than close enough to smell him. The reek of sweat and gas and halitosis coming off him was just as unpleasant as Ten-Foot’s open eyes, but not surprisingly, no more inviting than the other man’s wide-open peepers.

  The bunch of keys which Dawidziak kept on his belt hadn’t been taken off to lie in the vicinity of his body on this side of his figure. So, Maxine, taking her nostrils on an unpleasant ride, had to place a steadying hand down on the groundsheet between his legs and lean over his body to look at the other side of it.

  The keys were as expected, still attached to his belt, held there by a silver trigger clip.

  The prize was in sight, and Maxine leaned ever forward.

  And it would have been an easy prize to take if Storm hadn’t started screaming a warning, and if Poppet hadn’t opened up with the Cobra.

  19

  “Josh, I don’t know. If Maria knew anything, she would have told me, and she didn’t.”

  Donald looked at Josh over the rim of his coffee cup. There was a campfire between them, and the tumble of water from the James River splashing over rocks, fast-moving along the banks, seemed to underline the earnestness of what Donald was saying.

  Josh had picked his moment. They were alone in the camp. Filly had taken Martha and Karel out to stalk a deer and teach them the best way to do it with crossbows. Jingo had gone with Tally to lead the horses down to the water’s edge to drink, and Henry had gone into Eagle Rock to see what could be appropriated there.

  They’d found evidence of Ten-Foot’s camp on the outskirts of town. There was scuffed grass, the remains of fires, and discarded corned beef cans of the same variety they’d seen left at Ten-Foot’s first campsite fifty miles from Cumberland. Ten-Foot was taking a pretty direct and logical route south, which was easy to follow. They weren’t hiding signs of the camps when they broke in the mornings and just left their trash lying around. If campsites had had fingerprints, then the ones left by Ten-Foot and his Harbormen would have been the easiest to read.

  “Not one word? Not anything?”

  “I don’t want to keep repeating myself, Josh. I don’t know what Maria said to you at the end, but she never said anything to me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re Storm’s father and that’s an end to it. Of course, I remember Gabe Angel. He came to the M-Bar with Maxine when Maria was in the hospital. Brought me a Stetson. A good one, if I recall. But I never took to him.”

  “To be fair, Donald, you never took to me. No one was good enough for Maxine.”

  Donald upended the dregs of his coffee cup into the glowing embers of the fire, where they hissed like baby snakes. “And I guess I was proved right when you pushed her into the barbeque.”

  “That’s harsh. I didn’t push her.”

  “But she still got burned, Josh. And you were the one holding her.”

  Josh couldn’t argue with that.

  His trip into Pickford to find the answers that Maxine had refused to give him had proved fruitless in that respect. But, more importantly, it had saved Donald and brought them Filly and Martha. Filly was proving to be a real asset in the hunting stakes, and Martha was starting to come out of her shell. Josh may not have gotten everything he’d wanted in terms of information from Donald, but the fact that they were all alive was of paramount importance.

  But Josh still felt the gnawing ache deep inside. He couldn’t get over it or around it. He’d been constantly biting back the question until he’d felt sure that Donald had recovered enough from his ordeal in Pickford to give him the answer he craved, but then he’d had to ask. There were still marks on the old cattle farmer’s face, and he winced on occasion due to his healing rips, but he was also clear and unequivocal—he had no idea what Josh was talking about, and Josh believed him.

  “So, this… Gabe Angel situation. This is why you were putting your hands on my daughter?” Donald’s eyes were narrowed like he was looking through the smoke of a cigarette, the Stetson on his head and his weather-beaten face giving him the look of an elderly gunslinger who was sizing up an opponent. The tension hung in the air like a cloying taint.

  “Donald… you know that’s not how it was. I admit I shouldn’t have pulled on her arm like that, but I didn’t mean for her to pull away. How would you feel if it was you… wanting to know about Maxine and Maria…?”

  Josh immediately knew he’d gone too far.

  “You hurt my daughter and now you take my wife’s name in vain. You’re not much convincing me that I wasn’t right not to take to you, Josh. And if what Storm says is true…”

  That hit Josh like a rock. “What has Storm been saying?”

  “I could tell from the moment he got to the M-Bar that things weren’t right between you and Storm. Ain’t natural for a kid not to be worried about his father under these circumstances. If he mentioned you three times the whole time, then I’d be exaggerating. He was angry with you, Josh. Angry at you, way be
fore what happened with the barbeque. He thinks you let him, his sister, and my daughter down by going on that damned boat. And from where I’m sitting, I don’t blame him.”

  Josh’s eyes fell. He knew Donald was speaking the truth. He’d come to the same realization himself between Savannah and the M-Bar… how he’d neglected his family because of his sense of duty. He’d argued with himself that he had to put it right on the way there. And his whole mindset had been about fixing things with Maxine and their trying to become the solid unit their kids needed in the post-supernova madness. But the war with Creggan and Maria’s deathbed revelation had turned everything back on its head. And now, for Josh to have it confirmed by Donald that Storm had been down on him for so long really cut into his thinking.

  Donald said no more and stalked away from the fire to go down to the water’s edge to talk with Tally and Jingo. Josh stared into the fire, trying to work out what he would do and say to Maxine and Storm if and when they managed to wrest them from Ten-Foot’s clutches. Before they reached the Harbormaster’s lair.

  Josh sat there for the next hour while Filly and the others came back to the camp. Karel’s Defenders had furnished them with horses, weapons, ammunition, and two crossbows for the journey. Filly—the small, balding, creepy little guy Josh had humiliated back in Pickford—was rising in stature within the group and enjoying the newfound kudos he was receiving. They came back this time with a deer which Filly gutted and dressed. Venison to be eaten now, and good stock to be salted and potted for them to eat on the days ahead.

  Jingo, who had been relieved of his command back in Cumberland, had been pressed into coming on this journey with Karel. Karel had softened a little to the young Maryland Defender officer in the last couple of days, but still kept a tight leash on him, giving him his orders for each day and making sure he carried them out. He’d lost some of his tenseness and reticence around Karel, but Josh still felt the shame Jingo was experiencing because of what he’d done to Billy. Josh thought that Karel was all the more remarkable for the fact that she wanted to play by some sort of honorable code or military ethics. Even against the backdrop of the complete breakdown of everything in her life over the last few months. He was incredibly glad that she’d agreed to come with him without being asked.

  Karel had moved the command of the guerilla unit onto another capable officer and told them to keep up the good work until she returned. Which she would. She would aim to be away two months at most, she had told them.

  She’d joined Josh and the others as they had saddled up and lit out of Cumberland. They rode horses the Defenders had collected from farmsteads around the city and from a riding school where the animals seemed to have been all but abandoned.

  The animals were strong and had been well looked after by the Defenders, and they would serve them well on the journey south.

  The flames flickered in Josh’s eyes, and he stared into the flickering shapes trying to discern a compass point at which to send his worries and fears.

  There was none.

  And when Henry didn’t return to the camp before midnight, it seemed that compass point was ever further from being found.

  Karel, Josh, and Jingo went into Eagle Rock just before dawn. It was a small, unincorporated community at the foot of rocky limestone heights on the banks of the James River, where it wore its thousands-years’ course across the state of Virginia. The houses had been quaint or near derelict even before the current crisis, where so many buildings had been destroyed in orgies of unimaginable destruction across the country. There didn’t seem to be much to the place other than a fire station, a post office, a burned-out diner, and a funeral home. The majority of the residences were either burned out or showed signs that the residents themselves had left in a hurry. Where the population of Eagle Rock was, was anyone’s guess, but one thing Josh did know was that it would have taken Henry less than an hour to scan the whole of it and decide whether or not there was anything worth taking back to the camp. Josh wished he’d gone with the lad, but he seemed capable and skilled—he’d managed to keep himself alive for a while even before he’d made contact with Tally. He was good with weapons, and he was good in a crisis.

  So, the longer Henry was away from them, the more Josh knew something terrible might have happened. Tally had wanted to come with them into town, but both Josh and Donald had forbidden it. She was to stay back where it was relatively safe, to look after her granddaddy and the horses with Filly. There’d be no argument, he’d told her, and Josh had to admit to himself, at least in this respect, that it had felt good to have Donald back on his side on something.

  The wind was coming down off the limestone cliffs which the river had carved in them over the millennia. The first fingers of dawn light were edging the horizon and birds were beginning to call their morning chorus. The speed of the river was constant.

  They checked the first few houses they came across, Jingo and Karel going in military-style while Josh covered their six, weapons hot.

  Nada in the first five houses.

  In an ironic twist, the fire department building had been burned down with the engine still inside. A rustle in a hedgerow which startled all three of them turned out to be a wild pig snuffling for roots, brought down out of the woods by the lack of human habitation. Karel shooed the pig on its way. Any other time, they might have shot it, but if Henry was held captive somewhere in the town, then they didn’t want to draw attention to themselves just yet.

  The buzzer, when it sounded, made the three of them look at each other with amazement.

  Josh hadn’t heard a sound that even approximated something electronic since the effects of the supernova had hit the Sea-Hawk and fritzed the satellite radio.

  And there… there it was again. An electronic buzzer. The sound of something you might hear in a game show when a contestant was able to answer a question.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Josh breathed quietly to the others.

  Karel and Jingo nodded incredulously. “Yes,” said Karel. “Definitely electronic.”

  There was a white clapboard residence ahead, resting on a slope, with lime and beech trees backing onto it. The yard outside was strewn with garbage, but the house itself looked, apart from a couple of broken windows on the second story, mostly intact.

  The buzzer sounded again. Almost insistent now.

  It was coming from the house.

  “I don’t like this,” Jingo commented.

  “Well, it makes a change from being shot at,” Karel replied.

  Josh had to agree. “So, we going in, or…”

  “I’ll go around the back,” Jingo whispered. Karel gave her assent, and Jingo took off in a wide arc.

  The front door to the house was wide open, the dawn light behind it making it something of a black rectangle of uncertainty.

  Their Glocks racked and drawn, Josh went first up the steps and Karel followed. They slammed against the wall on both sides of the door and listened.

  The house, for all intents and purposes, seemed deserted. There was no light from within, not even a candle. No smell of fire or cooking—not even the residue of it. The only sound from within, which was even louder now and averaging about thirty seconds between each emission, was the buzzer. Bright, mechanical, and not a sound caused by any natural means.

  Josh counted them down from three and they went in.

  Beyond the door, in the near darkness, was a room that looked so ordinary it could defy description. Some sofas, a dead-eyed TV, doors leading back to a kitchen. A stripped pine staircase that led to the upstairs of the house… and nothing else.

  The buzzer. Loud and insistent. The longest duration it had sounded. A full fifteen seconds. A noise that could have covered anything, any movement above and any movement in the rooms beyond the living room.

  Josh, Glock high, took another step.

  The floor collapsed below him and the rug he’d been standing on flapped around him like bat wings. He hit the ground in a we
lter of arms and legs, and Karel thudded into him at speed, dropping in the same way he had.

  The room they were in now was lit by oil lamps. It was a basement of some sort. Wooden steps leading back up to ground level stood nearby. They’d fallen about ten feet, and they were in a cage with chicken wire covering the space between the metal bars, with a door padlocked with three hefty locks.

  In the corner of the room was Henry. He was trussed and gagged. Arms behind him, legs tied together at knees and ankles. He was lying on his side and his eyes were sending an apology their way. He’d obviously been caught in the same fashion.

  There was a crash behind Josh, and he ducked instinctively as a section of the ceiling fell open like a trapdoor; Jingo smashed into the metal floor of the basement room and the counterweighted trapdoor closed above him with a wooden thud.

  Jingo was now also in a cage on the far side of the basement.

  “You’ve heard the buzzer, and so you know I have access to power. All three of you are in a metal cage with metal floors and walls. You have thirty seconds to disarm, or I will put a thirty-thousand-volt charge through the cage and fricassee you where you sit. Please do not think I will not. Survival is the name of the game, and you’re playing by my rules.”

  The voice was male, had a near Bostonian accent, and was firm and commanding.

  “The clock is running.”

  Josh took his Glock, cleared the barrel, and took out the magazine. Jingo and Karel did the same with their weapons.

  “Thank you. You’ll find a slot in the door for you to drop the weapons and ammunition through, and I’ll thank you to do that in the next thirty seconds. Trust me, you don’t want to hear the buzzer again.”

  They did as they were told.

  Josh turned his attention to Henry. “You okay?”

  Henry nodded.

  “I’m not a barbarian,” said the voice coming from above. “All I’m trying to do here is carry on my work. The traps weren’t meant for you, but I can’t take any risks. I’m sure you’ll understand.”