Maxine took one last look back at Storm, but he was already returning to Gabe’s side.
Josh felt as if he was in a cotton wool dream until he got outside the bonded warehouse and the stiff sea breeze that had struck up across the vast area of concrete and containers sliced into him with the effect of a bucket of iced water.
Donald and the others had provided covering fire as Maxine had dragged him away from Storm and the words that had turned his muscles to rusted iron and cold slag. There was also a throbbing hell of a pain corkscrewing out of his skull just above his ear, where he’d been hit by an indeterminate piece of debris from the explosion.
He had let himself be pulled away willingly, though, and it was Donald’s eyes which he met first as the two groups met up and began to fight their way back towards the toppled container ship where they had tied up the kayaks.
Gabe’s forces had chased Henry and his crew back around the warehouse into a trap where they had been met with Molotov cocktails thrown by Filly and Martha. Martha had busied herself with lighting the rags, then passing the bottles to Filly so that he could arc them high in the air so they’d smash down on the Harbormen, driving them back into the hard darkness at the side of the warehouse. When a Harborman chanced to look around the edge of the building, a volley of shots from Donald and the others would soon get them ducking out of sight again.
Concerned now that they had a moment to breathe, Donald asked, “Where’s Storm?”
Josh didn’t have the words, and so Maxine gave up a couple of garbled sentences that made Donald’s eyes go as wide as dinner plates.
“We have to get out of here,” Henry said before anyone else could interject. “We’re running low on ammo and down to the last couple of MCs. If we’re going to make it back to the river, then we have to go now.”
Josh felt Henry put a pistol in his hand, and he nodded. “Let’s do this.”
The cover of darkness wasn’t completely lost to them, but the residue of the burning cocktails was throwing enough light across the concrete quayside to give Gabe’s forces the ability to at least fire in the correct general direction when there was a lull in the covering fire from Donald and the others. Josh managed to fire a couple of shots back towards the warehouse, and he saw them spark off the aluminum walls, but he didn’t have the wherewithal to aim at anything specific. The corkscrew of pain was turning into a tolling church bell ringing around his head with a brassy ache. The others provided enough shots directed back to the warehouse to prevent anyone from following with any kind of enthusiasm.
They crabbed sideways behind the first of the spilled containers from the ship that had shed its load on the quayside. The rusting orange container, darker against the night sky over Jacksonville, had split open so that a hundred washing machines had spilled out across the concrete like a jackpot from the world’s biggest slot machine. Crouching down behind the heaps of spilled machines, rotting cardboard, and disintegrating polystyrene packing, Josh started to come to his senses on the wave of cold air that ruffled his hair and flapped at his clothes.
“How’s your head?” Maxine was searching through his hair, squinting in the near darkness. Josh’s eyes were adjusting and he could see the gray concern in her face as her fingers palpated a bruise she had found above his ear.
“I’ll live. Let’s hope Storm does, too.”
Maxine nodded. “The fat lady isn’t singing, Josh. We’ll have another crack at him one day.”
Josh shrugged. “I hope so.”
Tally, who was next to the pair of them, poked her head above the spilled machines and fired off two bursts from her MP5.
“Storm is crazy,” she said, getting back down on her haunches. “Hasn’t been the same since this whole thing kicked off.”
“Who has?” Josh asked, kissing her cheek as she put her head on his shoulder for a moment’s affection.
“Everyone ready?” It was Donald. He’d been right down in the dark shadow of the container ship where it had canted over the edge of the quay, crushing the concrete and hooking a huge, bald steel propeller sixty feet in the air.
Josh looked down the line of fighters. From Maxine and Tally down to Halley and Poppet.
“Hold on… where’s Ten-Foot? Did we lose him?”
The boy was nowhere to be seen, and he hadn’t gone down to the kayaks with Donald.
Henry ducked and crawled sideways as three bullets ricocheted off the propeller above their heads with dull tannnngs which echoed across the wide expanse of windswept concrete. “He split from us as we came out of the warehouse,” he said.
“I knew we couldn’t trust him,” Maxine spat.
Henry shook his head. “No, he said he had an idea and that he would send us a signal.”
“A signal?” Josh was confused. “What did he mean?”
“Beats me,” said Halley, joining them, “but he took a thermite charge, and he ran like the wind towards the water.”
“Let’s go,” Donald said, the authority in his voice clear. Staying here wasn’t going to do their health any long-term good.
Maxine still stuck close to Josh, and although his ears were ringing and there was still a throbbing pain in his head, his muscles felt freer as they scurried, heads down, to the waterline. Donald had pushed the kayaks back into the water from where they had left them, but they were still daisy-chained on a line. As their group climbed into the boats, bullets whistled overhead, but Josh knew it would only be a matter of time before the Harbormen grew confident enough to follow them to the skewed bow of the container ship and fire upon them directly. Once they got out into the water, they would be sitting targets. They had discussed this possibility, however, and Halley had come up with an answer—one that Josh, as he steadied a kayak at the lapping edge of the quay for Maxine to climb down into—waited with bated breath to be actioned.
Maxine settled, Josh jumped down into the kayak and reached for an oar. Maxine was already putting hers in the water and beginning to push away from the concrete apron.
The first head of a Harborman appeared over the pile of trashed washing machines. Donald took aim with his pistol and fired, but not at the Harborman’s head. He fired directly at the base of the pile of rusting white goods.
The burst of light hurt Josh’s eyes, causing him to look away and blink until the tears rolled down his cheeks. Two paint cans of thermite which Halley had placed there on the way into the castle, and then just now while Donald had been pushing the kayaks back into the water, had been primed and ready for shots to be fired into them—and just like Halley had said, they’d erupted in gouts of hissing flames. The two packed cans had sent up waterfalls of sparks which had ignited the gas Halley and Poppet had drenched the machines in. The flames whumped up high and bright. The Harbormen, who’d been climbing up over the mound of washers, were being driven back screaming. Donald and Henry both emptied their magazines into the flaming morass and then jumped into the last kayak and pushed it away out into the estuary behind Josh and the others.
Maxine and Josh turned their boat in the water and struck down with their paddles. “Get as much distance between us and the shore as we can. Drive hard!” Josh called to the others. “The quicker we get away from here, the less chance they have of hitting us.”
Josh risked a look back over his shoulder. The flames were still high, the thermite still sending up sprays of molten aluminum. It would take time for the Harbormen to get around to the prow of the toppled ship, and if they came out from behind the cover of the washers, then even on the other side of the water, they would be easy targets for Donald, Henry, or Poppet to pick off with their machine guns.
Josh and Maxine propelled the fiberglass kayak at speed, cutting through black waves. The starlight and the dim illumination from the smudge of the Barnard’s supernova bruised the sky, shimmering on the wave crests. The water splashed up occasionally from the oar, so hard was he paddling, that Josh could taste saltwater on his lips.
When they were well
clear of the container ship, some two hundred yards from the shore and resting on the gentle bobbing of the water, Josh eased back a little with the paddling and got his breath under control. His lungs were burning from exertion, and the pain in his head was doing his stamina no favors.
Back on the quay, the flames from the burning gas had been subdued a little and the sparking cans of thermite were almost expended. Josh could see silhouettes of Harbormen milling about. Arms waving. The flashes from muzzles and the hisses of bullets flying overhead or smacking into the water. The Harbormen were having some difficulty ranging their shots.
“Keep going!” Josh shouted to the others in his group. “They might get lucky.”
As if to underline this assumption, a bullet from the shore hit the side of his own kayak and tore a small but ragged hole in the fiberglass.
Josh and the others struck hard with the paddles again and kept their heads down as they dug holes in the surface water, which was filled with white froth and disturbed waves from their paddling and the bullets alike.
Two bullets hit Donald’s kayak, one shuddering his paddle and taking a corner off of it. Donald cursed and redoubled his efforts to get the kayak further from the shore.
The silhouettes on the shore were running along the quay and away from the container ship with her raked hull and stranded propeller. They were heading for where the estuary narrowed to maybe one hundred and fifty yards across.
Josh realized they weren’t going to be able to paddle that way or they really would be range compromised.
“Head east!” Josh called to the others, and he turned the nose of the kayak away from the direction they had first paddled into the container dock.
They were moving further from Jaxport itself, but heading inexorably out to sea. They would have to find a landing spot on the other side of the estuary and hope that Gabe didn’t have a set of Harbormen stationed there already.
But that concern suddenly became moot as the stretch of water ahead of Josh’s leading kayak burst into flames.
9
The paddle almost slipped from Maxine’s hands as the blast of light to the right of them caused her to throw up her hands to cover her eyes.
“What the hell…?” was all she managed to say before the burning ball of thermite sent up a shower of light, and, in the crazy cavalcade of illumination it threw across the water, one object they hadn’t figured on was lit up as it moved across the water on an intercept course with the kayaks.
It was maybe seventy yards away. The masts were high, the sails unfurled, and on the deck of the low-slung sailboat, Maxine could see five or more small figures waving across the waves at them.
“The Sea-Hawk,” Josh said, trailing his paddle one-handed in the water. “And there’s Ten-Foot!”
Josh pointed to the prow of the Sea-Hawk, where, in the lines and stays, sheets and sails, Ten-Foot was up on the rail, holding one-handed to a belay while with the other beckoned them to paddle in the ship’s direction.
A small dinghy had been sent out from the ship. Thermite was blossoming in it, providing enough light to illuminate the whole area, giving them a direction and a rendezvous point to make for. Soon, the dinghy would completely burn up and sink, but while the light it provided was there, they needed to use it.
“Make for the Sea-Hawk!” Josh ordered the others in the boats, and almost as one, they struck out for the tall-masted ship ahead of them. Bullets spat up spray as they slammed into the waves around them, but they were no more accurate than the earlier shots had been. Shooting three hundred yards in the dark across windswept water had not enhanced the Harbormen’s aim any.
When Ten-Foot had left the others, he’d made straight for the reconstructed Tea-Clipper where he, Josh, and ten other probationers had been taken to team-build, increase their self-esteem, and see that there was more to life than crime and criminality. Josh and Tally had been on the boat when the Barnard’s event had spread its cruel influence over the Earth and its inhabitants. Maxine had seen many pictures of the ship but had never seen the thing close up before. As she was pulled up onto the deck by willing hands, she marveled at the varnished wood and the complicated ropes. The crew itself, she half-recognized from pictures Tally had sent back to them from the Sea-Hawk whilst Maxine and Storm had waited in Boston for his next round of chemotherapy to begin. They were young, full of attitude, and they knew what they were doing. A young African American woman who introduced herself as Dotty-B took the wheel of the Sea-Hawk and began calling out orders to her crew to get the ship trimmed, as they were heading out to sea “Right now!”
Shots were still being fired from the quayside, but now in the flickering light from the floating thermite—which Ten-Foot had set adrift on a small skiff—they saw that a larger oared boat was being sculled from Jaxport by eight Harbormen digging into the water with ferocious strokes. At the head of the boat, two of their comrades were taking aim with what looked to be Donald as he lowered his binoculars to his chest, like hunting rifles.
“Keep down!” Donald called to the others as the first high-velocity rounds thudded into the side of the hull, one going higher and splitting a rope before burying itself in the mast.
Poppet, Maxine, and Josh went to the stern of the Sea-Hawk and did what they could to fire their pistols and MP5s back at the Harbormen’s launch. Now, the roles were reversed. The Harbormen had the range, and their rifles covered the distance with greater accuracy. They still had to contend with the added distraction of the rocking boat and the shifting waves, but round after round was smacking into the bow of the Sea-Hawk, singing through the sails and fraying rigging where a fortunate shot sizzled through ropes.
“More speed!” Ten-Foot ordered the probationers.
The crew, still keeping their heads down as best they could, set about bringing out more sail to catch the stiffening breeze. The sails billowed overhead and the Sea-Hawk keeled to one side, digging into the water and carving through it with increased speed.
“They’re falling back!” Donald announced as he emptied his magazine over the side of the Sea-Hawk, spitting up a line of white spray towards the launch.
Within minutes, they had almost doubled the gap, and through the binoculars, Maxine could see that the Harbormen rowing the launch were exhausted.
They had made it. They had escaped Castle Jaxport and the self-crowned King of America.
Soon, Jaxport slid out of sight around the headland, and as they came out into the open sea, Maxine felt the dog tiredness of her body begin to usurp the adrenaline rush created by the escape. Tally showed her to the dormitory cabins that had been designed to berth male and female passengers who had, before the supernova, come to learn on the Sea-Hawk, a true piece of living history.
“Would Storm really not come?”
Tally, sighing, plonked herself down on the bunk next to Maxine and held onto her hand. They had had hardly any time together in the last month or so since leaving Donald’s M-Bar ranch in West Virginia. Once they’d been attacked by Ten-Foot’s Harbormen forces in Cumberland, Tally and Henry had escaped into the ruins of the city. Maxine and Storm, with Larry and Poppet, had been rushed to Florida on the orders of Gabe.
Maxine shook her head. “No, I tried. Your father tried. But Gabe… Gabe is a persuasive man. He’s gotten inside Storm’s head, and that’s where he sits.”
“And Gabe really is his father?”
The words required to answer clotted in Maxine’s throat. That was a story she didn’t want to tell to anyone, least of all her daughter—but it was secrets like this one that had gotten her into this situation in the first place, and so she knew she would have to break that blockage. A shrug started a trickle of words. “I honestly don’t know.”
Tally’s eyes were showing shock, but her face made a creditable attempt at staying neutral. “You slept… with Gabe… after you were married?”
Can’t stop now.
“No. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it li
ke?”
“I think I was drugged. I went for lunch with Gabe, and the next thing I remember is waking up half-dressed in a motel room with blood under my fingernails.”
The shock bled from Tally’s eyes to the rest of her face. “He… raped you?”
“Yes. We’d been together before my relationship with your dad, and then we’d fought and broken up. He turned up at the house one day… said he wanted to apologize and make up for being an idiot,” Maxine said, her voice quieting to a near whisper—not because she didn’t want to be overheard, but because she didn’t want to have to hear the words come out of her own mouth. “I was a fool to trust him. I should have known better and realized that he could pull something like that to get back at Josh and me.”
“But why Dad, too?” Tally’s face was a confused whirl of hot colors and cold angst.
“Because when I split with Gabe, your father made sure he couldn’t hurt me. Made Gabe look a fool. I think your father saved me from a beating. Gabe was a very angry young man.
“And then, when he tricked you… you got pregnant?”
Maxine nodded slightly, just once. To do more would have given more credence to the thought than she wanted it to have. She’d rather skim the surface of the horrible truth rather than dive right into it.
“But Storm could be Dad’s—you just don’t know?”
Maxine felt shriveled and old. The tiredness and the grilling were using her up, scuffing up her resolve and crumpling her defenses. “He could be.”
“And you didn’t tell him, because…”
“Because I thought… wrongly, as it turns out… that it would never come out. It would never be an issue. Josh is the man I married; he’s Storm’s father by right even if not by blood. Why break something that was nearly perfect?”
Tally dropped her head to her chest and placed her hands on her lap. She looked like crystal in the light from the oil lamp, as if one word from Maxine would shatter her stillness. Maxine didn’t know what she was contemplating, but could guess at it. Would it be the same recrimination and betrayal she had suffered from Storm? The shame she’d earned by stupidly trusting Gabriel Angel, or the guilt she felt over lying to Josh by terrible omission. Which way would Tally go in accusing her?
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 83
