When she looked at Josh now, she no longer felt the slice of what might have been cutting through her. Yes, there were still a ton of things to talk through, and even more healing to be done––but at least that was something they could resolve.
Storm was their child. There could be no doubt of that.
That was a good basis to build from.
The warm wind coming off the water ruffled the hair around her face, and for the first time in a very long while, Maxine felt there were at least some certainties she could hold on to and appreciate.
Down along the beach in the moon and nebula light, she caught sight of two figures walking arm in arm. The figures stopped and kissed. Tally pulling Henry close with an unselfconscious move that reminded Maxine immediately of the first kiss she had given Josh all those years ago. Her pulling him in, not caring who was looking, not caring what anyone thought, because the most important thing was the kiss.
And so, Maxine reached up to Josh, who had been sitting alongside her and watching the moon and nebula rise with her, cupped the back of his neck, and pulled his head down to crush their lips together.
Josh hadn’t been expecting the kiss, but he didn’t reject it. Why would he reject something that he wanted almost as much as he’d wanted to know, finally, that Storm was his son?
He knew that, even before the Barnard’s event, he hadn’t been the best father he could have been. Everything had changed for him that day when Cody Zem, the young ex-carjacker who he’d taken under his wing to try to turn his life around, had been stabbed to death in a garbage-strewn alley. That one event had gone off in Josh’s life like a supernova and changed him forever, just like the Earth had been changed by Barnard’s Star.
He’d left the police force almost immediately and tried to become something different––someone different. A force for good, by joining the Probation Department and working with probationers like Ten-Foot and the others.
Such had been his single-minded focus on that job, he’d not left enough of himself for his own kids and his wife.
As he and Maxine had drifted apart, Josh had not felt able to be there when his family really needed him. Choosing to go out on the Sea-Hawk while Maxine had gone to Boston to support Storm in his treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had been a mistake that had turned into a catastrophe. When the supernova had hit, he’d been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, nearly nine hundred miles from his wife and son when they were at their most vulnerable and in desperate danger.
Josh knew there would still be reparations to be made for that foolish decision. Maxine’s duty had always been to her family. Josh had let his duty slip to include the needs of the probationers––who’d admittedly had terrible lives, too, and been on everyone else’s scrap heap––and he would need to make up for that decision, whatever Storm’s status was and however Maxine felt now.
But the kiss was a start. A good start.
She tasted good.
The closeness felt good, and as his lips parted from Maxine’s lips, the Barnard’s Nebula was sparkling in her eyes.
There would be so much more to do in the coming years. Working with Morris and the crew of his ship to try to get it running again. To begin to treat whoever they could on the island, and then get back to the mainland to spread the cures for technology and the mental health of the world, all across the country.
It would be an immense task, and it would require them to work harder and in more dangerous situations than they ever had before. They’d discussed this with Halley and Morris before they’d left in the helicopter.
Josh had wondered if Maxine would want them to put themselves at risk again by going back to the mainland to begin to rebuild.
“We could stay here,” Josh had said after the helicopter had flown away into the hazy distance over Cook’s Hump. “We have everything we could ever want here. We have a paradise of food and resources. We have Tally and Storm. We have Donald. We have each other. We could just let the world get on with fixing itself without us.”
Maxine had looked up at him, then reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand. “Thank you. Thank you for at least offering that, Josh. But even I know it wouldn’t be right for us to do that. Thank you for offering to put me and the children first. That’s the most important thing you could have done. But we have to go out there and help. Staying here is not an option.”
And so, they were on the beach now that the sun had gone down, and the moon and the nebula were up. The kiss had ended, but so much more had begun.
Josh felt Storm sit down on the other side of him from Maxine. He felt the boy’s head rest on his shoulder and the warmth of his body, his muscles relaxed and his breathing steady.
Storm didn’t say anything, because Josh knew he didn’t need to.
End of Final End
Supernova EMP Series Book Four
PS: Do you love prepper fiction? Then keep reading for an exclusive extract from Dark Retreat.
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About Grace Hamilton
Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.
Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"
You will find Grace on:
BLURB
In the dawn of a new Ice Age, families everywhere are taking to the road to escape the frigid landscape—but you can’t outrun the cold.
No one could have predicted the terrifying impact of human interference in the Arctic. Shifts in the Earth's crust have led to catastrophe and now the North Pole is located in the mid-Atlantic, making much of the eastern United States an unlivable polar hellscape.
Nathan Tolley is a talented mechanic who has watched his business dry up due to gas shortages following the drastic tectonic shifts. His wife Cyndi has diligently prepped food and supplies, but it’s not enough to get them through a never-ending winter. With an asthmatic young son and a new baby on the way, they’ll have to find a safe place they can call home or risk freezing to death in this harsh new world.
When an old friend of Nathan’s tells him that Detroit has become a paradise, with greenhouses full of food and plenty of solar energy for everyone, it sounds like the perfect place to escape. But with dangerous conditions and roving gangs, getting there seems like an impossible dream. It also seems like their only choice.
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EXCERPT
Chapter One
“What’s that?” Freeson asked, pointing beyond the wrecker’s windshield.
Nathan squinted through the swirling snowflakes peppering the glass, but the wipers were struggling to give meaningful vision beyond the red expanse of his Dodge’s hood. He thought they were on the spruce-lined Ridge Road running between Lake George and Glens Falls but he couldn’t be sure. The cone of light thrown out by its headlights only illuminated the blizzard itself, making it look like a messed up TV channel.
Without any real visibility, the 1981 Dodge Power Wagon W300 4x4—with driver’s cab, a four-person custom-sized crew cab behind that, a wrecker boom, and a spec
tacle lift—grumbled deep in its engine as Nathan slowed the truck. To stop the tires fully, Nathan had to go down through the gears rather than by the application of the discs. There was a slight lateral slide before the tires bit into the fresh snow. The ice beneath was treacherous enough already without the added application of fresh flakes.
Who knows how thick the ice is over the blacktop, Nathan thought.
With the truck stopped, he tried to follow Freeson’s finger out into the whirlpooling night.
For a few seconds, all he could see was the blizzard, the air filled with fat white flakes, which danced across his vision like God’s dandruff. Nathan was about to ask Freeson what the hell he was playing at when he caught it. He saw taillights flicker on and the shadow of a figure move towards the truck’s headlights.
Sundown for late April in Glens Falls, New York State, should have been around 7:50 p.m. The Dodge’s dashboard clock said the time was 5:30 p.m. and it was already full dark out on Algonquin Ridge.
The world had changed so much in the last eight years since the stars had changed position in the sky and the North Atlantic had started to freeze over. The pole star was no longer the pole star. It was thirty degrees out of whack. Couple that with the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis wrecking countries around the Pacific Rim, and the world had certainly been transformed from the one Nathan had been born into twenty-eight years before. And this year, spring hadn’t come at all. Winter had spread her white skirts out in early December and had left them there. It was nearly May now, and there was still no sign of her fixing to pick them up again.
A face loomed up in the headlights, red with the cold, hair salted with snow, the flakes building up on the shoulders of the figure’s parka. It was Art Simmons.
Nathan zipped his own puffy North Face Nuptse winter jacket up to his chin, opened his door, and jumped down into the powder. The snow came up to his knees and he could feel the hard ice below the chunky soles of his black Columbia Bugaboots.
Even through the thermal vest, t-shirt, and two layers of New York Jets sweatshirts, the cold bit hard into Nathan. Without the meager, volcanic-ash-diluted sun in the sky, the early evening was already steel-cold and the blizzard wind made it near murderous. He rolled his hips and galumphed through the snow towards Art.
“Nathan! Is that you?”
Art had, until recently, been a Glens Falls sheriff. He’d been a warm-hearted gregarious man whose company Nathan enjoyed a lot. But since being laid off when the local police department had shut down, he’d become sullen and distant. Seeing Art so animated now offered the most emotion Nathan had seen coming from the chubby ex-cop since before Christmas.
“What’s the trouble, Art?”
Art’s words tumbled in a breathless rush. Sharp and short, it was clear that the cutting air had begun constricting his throat. “Skidded. Run off the road. I couldn’t even see the road… I’m in the ditch… Been here an hour...”
“Run off the road?”
Art nodded. “Glens Falls has been overrun, Nate. Scavengers tracked me. If I wasn’t trying so hard to outrun ’em, I wouldn’t be here now. Hadn’t driven so fast, when I lost them through Selling’s Bridge…”
Nathan had heard the rumors of small packs of raiders using snowmobiles to hold up residents in their cars, stealing supplies and invading homes. But he hadn’t seen evidence of them himself. He’d only been told by neighbors and friends they were operating in other parts of New York State, fifty miles further south than Albany, but not until now had he gotten any notion they might be as far up in the state as Glens Falls. But now that they were here, the lack of an operational police department in town might just make them bolder and more likely to try their luck with what they could get away with.
“Where did they go?” he asked.
Art shook his head. “Guess they lost me in the blizzard when I came off the road. Maybe gone off to track some other poor bastard. They won’t be far.”
Freeson joined them in front of the truck, banging his arms around his own parka to put feeling into his fingers. His limp didn’t help him wade through the snow and his grizzled face was grim, but Nathan knew the determination in Freeson’s bones wouldn’t allow his physical deficiencies to stop him doing the job Nathan paid him for. The cold might freeze and ache him, but the fire in Freeson’s belly would counter the subzero conditions for sure.
Freeson hadn’t been right since the accident, maybe. Quiet at times, and quick to anger at others, but he was always one hundred percent reliable.
Together, they walked the ten yards down through the snow to the roadside ditch beneath the snow-heavy trees.
An hour in the blizzard had made Art’s truck almost impossible to recognize. Nathan only knew it was a white 2005 Silverado 1500 because he’d worked on it a dozen times in the past ten years. The last time had been to replace a failed water pump that had fritzed the cooling system. Nathan smiled wryly. No one needed their cooling system fixed now—not since the Earth’s poles had shifted. Since that unexplained catastrophe, the Big Winter’s new Arctic Circle had been smothering Florida and the eastern seaboard, all the way up to Pennsylvania and beyond. It had frozen the Atlantic clear from the U.S. to North Africa.
Art told them he’d been turning the taillights on and off every ten minutes to signal to anyone who might be passing, trying to preserve battery life at the same time. He said Nathan’s wrecker had been the first vehicle to show up since his slow-motion slide into the ditch.
Nathan scratched his head through his hood and looked up the incline of Algonquin Ridge. The Silverado was trapped between two spruces on the edge of the ditch. The tail had kicked up as the front end had dropped, leaving the back wheels floating in space—or, would have done that if the snow hadn’t already drifted beneath them and begun to pack in.
There was no leeway in the tree growth to get the wrecker onto the downslope of the road, either, though the easiest way out of this would have been to pull the Silverado down the thirty-degree incline. Instead, they were going to have to pull Art’s truck up the slope and fight gravity all the way.
Nathan opened his mouth to tell Freeson to get back in the wrecker and start her up, but Art placed a hand on his shoulder and pointed into the trees. “Look.”
Through the forest, three sets of Ski-Doo headlights were moving along two hundred yards up beyond the treeline. The blatter of two-stroke engines was dampened by the snow, but still unmistakable. This part of the ridge was well out of town and had once been a popular tourist trail. There were wide avenues between the spruce where summer people rode chunky-tired trail bikes, and winter people, Ski-Doos. They had room to maneuver.
“They’re back,” said Art.
Better get this show on the road.
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Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 100
