Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Maxine felt slightly weird saying the word, because it felt like a word you only head in reruns of old series like The High Chaparral or Bonanza that she’d used to watch on TV when growing up a million years ago, but she said it all the same. “You mean they’ve been rustled?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Who by?”

  That genuinely stumped Donald, but he was riding a fizzy bomb of anger and hurt. His knuckles were white against the blue-black steel and walnut stock of his gun, and his arms were shaking with the effort to grip it so tightly.

  “You said it happened in the night,” Maxine reasoned. “If anyone came here to steal overnight, they’re going to be long gone by now.”

  “I’ll find them.”

  Maxine put her hand gently on Donald’s arm. “Dad, come on. You go after them angry and you’re not going to find them. You’ll just blunder around out there, and I pity the first person you come across.”

  He didn’t look like he cared who’d done it, and Maxine believed in that moment that, if he’d seen anyone outside the ranch right then, he would have given them both barrels of his guns and then reloaded to make sure.

  Donald fixed her with what Maxine recognized as the hardest stare in his armory. The one he’d reserved for her when she’d disappointed him with her behavior, or when she’d gotten old enough to talk back and point out the background hypocrisy of parents who told you to do what they say, not what they do. That look sent Maxine hurtling back down the years to crash into her younger self, and she immediately felt the danger billowing in her father. The danger of a spanking or a grounding. Maxine was ten all over again, and Donald was suddenly the tallest man in the world.

  “I’m going and I’ll thank you not to try to stop me. You can’t move ten heads of cattle without leaving some trail for me to follow, and I’ll follow them all the way to Perdition if I have to. No one steals from me. No one!”

  Maxine knew this wasn’t just about the cattle. This was everything he’d experienced since the supernova bubbling from the pot of his temper and burning on the stove of his patience. This was something he could take charge of in a world where everything had been taken from him. Maxine had felt it, too, and she reckoned it was an emotion familiar to a million people who were still able to think coherently, rather than engage in utter destruction.

  But that simple truth wasn’t going to work on Donald. He was too fired up. Too riled, and he wasn’t the kind of man to consider the psychological processes going on within him; Donald’s world was black and white. Stress, depression, and anger management were things that only happened to other people. The way he saw it, he’d been wronged, and a man did what needed to be done in order to right a wrong. He couldn’t do anything about the supernova, he couldn’t do anything about Maria, but he could do something about this.

  He struck off towards the fencing that bisected the road from the bottom pasture where the cattle had been feeding, and Maxine could do nothing but follow.

  In the end, it wasn’t Maxine’s words that stopped him—it was the break in the fencing that had been created to take the cattle and feed them through, made by whoever had taken them. They’d clipped the barbed wire in the fence through and pushed three posts to the ground. Once they’d gotten the cattle through, they’d pushed the posts back up and high-tailed it away along the road.

  Donald put the gun down against the fence and surveyed the damage.

  “We need to get this fixed up now or we could lose the whole herd,” he said.

  The cattle on the other side of the fence were looking at Donald and Maxine with their big brown eyes. An accidental nudge from any of them against the broken fence, and they’d all be able to file out of the pasture onto the road.

  “Go back and get Storm. There’s some timber, barbed wire, and tools in the work shed. Load up your buggy and get it up here. I’ll keep watch on the herd.”

  Maxine hesitated. She looked at the gun, and it seemed that Donald read her mind. “I’m not trying to get rid of you, I’m trying to save the herd. We need to fix the fence and then work out a roster for who’s going to watch over the road overnight. As if we haven’t got enough to do, without some scum suckers coming over here and stealing from us.”

  “If you’re sure,” Maxine said, knowing the quaver in her voice told the story that she herself was not sure at all. The whole idea of leaving Donald there with the gun really didn’t appeal, but he was right about the fence. They were lucky the cows in this pasture hadn’t made a break for it already.

  “Yes. Now, go. For once in your life, do as you’re told.”

  And that sealed it.

  When she brought the buggy drawn by Tally-Two—the plucky and resolute horse they’d found on the road, who Storm had renamed after his sister in an echo of ‘Tic-tac,’ his own family nickname—with timber and equipment, she was relieved to see Donald had been as good as his word. The shotgun was still leaning against the fence where it had been when she’d left.

  Along with the tools, Maxine had brought some cans and canteens of water. They worked long into the afternoon, mostly in silence, fixing the fence and pausing only occasionally to rest.

  When they’d finished the job to Donald’s satisfaction, he picked up the shotgun and put it on his shoulder, looking down the road and then shading his eye in the still bright but waning sunlight.

  “Shall we go back now, Dad?”

  Donald took a long while to answer, but in the end, he lifted his Stetson, wiped the sweat from his brow, and replaced the hat first.

  “Yes, but don’t for a moment fool yourself thinking this is over, Maxine. I’m going to find those SOBs, and they’re going to face a reckoning.”

  And as Donald turned and began to walk back to the M-Bar, Maxine believed him, and she knew that it was going to take everything she had to stop him.

  10

  Josh forced his leather-jacketed forearm into the snapping dog’s mouth and fired the MP5 one-handed at the advancing crowd. There were perhaps a dozen of them. Pasty-faced men and women. Clothes covered in filth, swinging picks and shovels.

  The gun bucked in his hand, and the savagery of the attacking dog made the spray of bullets go over the heads of the nearest attackers, but at least it made them duck and pause. That gave Josh the half-second he needed to turn the gun on the dog and dispatch it with two bullets. It fell away fast, leaving a ragged tear in the fabric of his jacket and a mess of bloody slather, but the material of his undershirt was intact, and that meant his skin was, too. It was going to hurt and bruise like crazy, but he hadn’t had chunks taken out of him like the guy on the forklift.

  Some of the crowd, realizing they no longer had the element of surprise, were falling back behind a tall rack. Others, their faces as desperate as their lack of tactical ability, came at Josh.

  He could still hear Ralph below the cans of paint, calling out, but there was nothing he could do for him until he’d dealt with this.

  “Stay where you are!” Josh called. “Don’t make me…”

  But a stream of bullets spat past him. Gerry was already firing.

  Two of the attackers went down with their torsos ripped open. The others dove for cover. Josh fired over their heads again. He couldn’t bring himself to fire at a retreating enemy, but Gerry had no such qualms. Two more went down, squealing and writhing.

  “They were running away, Gerry, they were running!”

  Gerry fired two more shots into each body, stopping their thrashing once and for all.

  “Don’t care,” he said, like a toddler being told off for behavior he thought was entirely reasonable.

  Josh shook his head. The look of utter despondency on the faces of those who had attacked them remained fresh in his mind’s eye. How crazy or without hope did you have to be to attack men who were armed with submachine guns? Why would they take such a risk?

  What was going on in Savannah that would have caused such action to look reasonable?

&n
bsp; Josh couldn’t get his head around that kind of thinking, and so he parked it while he pulled at Ralph’s exposed foot. “Cover me,” he said to Gerry, mindful that, of the dozen or so attackers, only four had gone down.

  Ralph, covered in paint of a myriad colors for almost the whole length of his body, came out from beneath the cans. However, not all of the red on him was paint. There was a sizeable gash on the crown of his head where a can had smacked into it, and the unnatural angle of his wrist suggested it was fractured. Josh, from his first responder training, knew people often sustained this injury when throwing their arm out to break their fall. The wrist bone would snap and the arm, at the point where it joined the hand, would take on a vaguely S shape.

  It was going to hurt like hell to fix it.

  “Keep your wrist hard against your chest. Stop it moving around. We’ll isolate it properly when we get out of here.” Josh held onto Ralph’s other hand and helped him fully to his feet. Ralph nodded and tucked his arm into his body, his face sweating with the pain.

  A nearby rack still contained a few packs of paper towels. Josh took a roll from the cellophane and used it to wipe the paint from Ralph’s face, and then he pressed a wad into the injured man’s good hand so that he could hold it against the wound in his head to stop the flow of blood.

  “It was a damn trap. A damn trap!” Gerry was swinging the MP5 barrel around, covering the whole aisle they were on as well as the aisles to the left and right that he could see through the racks. “They were waiting for us! Pushed the racks over to stop and confuse us, then come in with the picks!”

  Josh was less interested in Gerry’s assessment than what was developing over their heads. Up above them, the smoke that had once been gray was now black, and much thicker.

  “Can you walk?” Josh asked Ralph.

  “I’ll run if I have to. Just get us out of here.”

  “Okay, we’re near the front of the store now. Let’s go that way,” Gerry said, taking his newly minted tactical awareness role rather more seriously than he had when Barney had been giving all the orders.

  “But that’s towards the fire,” Josh argued, pointing out what he thought was not an unreasonable reality.

  Gerry shook his head. “Won’t you just stop arguing?” It came out in a plaintive whine, the sort of thing people having a fight over the dinner table at home might say—but not here in a burning store surrounded by murderous near-savages.

  Gerry began heading down the aisle towards the front of the store. Ralph, favoring his weirdly bent wrist with a wince and pressing the bloody towel to his head, looked questioningly at Josh. “It’s better if we stick together, right? I can’t fire my gun, and if those guys come back again, can you hold them off on your own…?”

  Josh was almost at the point where he’d happily leave them both to their own devices. But then Gerry turned the corner at the end of the aisle, and a paint can slammed into Josh’s back.

  He stumbled forward, almost crashing into Ralph.

  Ralph was already running as another can of pain smashed open at Josh’s feet. The attackers were lobbing cans and other objects from behind the racks.

  Josh scrambled up and hurried after Ralph.

  They turned the corner to find Gerry on the floor, his head a mess of blood and torn flesh. Two attackers, thin and starved like those they’d seen off in the first attack, were beating at Gerry with a short length of mahogany.

  Josh shot them both down and then spun away, crashing into a display of light fixtures.

  “We’re dead,” Ralph said simply. “We’re not getting out of here.”

  Josh could see there was nothing he could do for Gerry and there was no point trying, but he bent to the body all the same. He had to look beneath it.

  Josh hadn’t been able to see Gerry’s MP5, and the cold fear of that knowledge gripped him as he rolled Gerry’s lifeless body over in the vain hope that the dead man had fallen onto his submachine gun.

  He hadn’t. And that was immediately confirmed when Ralph’s chest exploded outwards as he was shot several times in the back. Ralph went down with a sigh and rolled across Josh, taking three more bullets as he did so, all of which had been meant for the ex-cop.

  Josh got up and ran.

  Bullets zinged and spat as he turned down an aisle and began running towards the back of the store, towards the warehouse. The smoke was so much thicker now, and it felt as though it was curling around his head in thick swirls as he ran. There were footsteps behind him, and more firing, but whoever had the gun wasn’t adept at running and firing at the same time.

  Josh turned down a cross-aisle and skidded to a crouching halt, going down on his knees and turning. The person with the gun turned the corner, and Josh fired a ragged burst up their body to explode their chin and rock their head back.

  It had been a woman.

  The MP5 clattered to the ground and Josh retrieved it. He took one glance at the dead woman’s body. Filthy and ragged like the others. There was a definite sense that this woman, and the others, were living some kind of terrible existence. A city like Savannah would have been stuffed with tinned food and other consumables. There was no real explanation as to why the woman looked so poorly nourished, or why she’d joined a band of others intent on killing anyone they came across.

  None of this made any sense at all to Josh, but he didn’t have any time to consider it. He had to get out of the store.

  He jogged on, Gerry’s MP5 slung across his back and his own gun at the ready. It was getting difficult to see more than ten or twenty yards ahead. He looked back to see if there was anyone else following him and rammed into a body coming the other way. In a desperate tangle of limbs, they went down. A gun fired, and three shots burst past Josh’s left ear before he realized he’d crashed into Barney.

  “It’s me! Stop firing!” Josh shouted at Barney’s blood-smeared face. There was a deep laceration to his chin and part of his ear was missing, but the biggest change in Barney was in his eyes. There was real fear in them—deep-rooted and unrelenting. He pushed Josh off him and stumbled to his feet. Looking around, swinging the barrel of his MP5, Barney took no notice of Josh and wobbled off again in the direction of the warehouse. There was a star of blood growing between his shoulder blades, too, and with horror, Josh saw the short haft of a knife sticking out through the material of Barney’s shirt.

  Josh got up and ran after the other man. “Barney, let me help you. Wait!”

  But Barney wasn’t listening. He stumbled on, his feet loose at his ankles, making his gait all the more difficult to maintain. He slammed into a rack and almost went down on one knee, but with supreme effort, he brought himself back to standing and carried on towards the entrance to the warehouse, or what Josh thought was the entrance to the warehouse. The thickness of the smoke was such now that it was difficult to tell if the doors were twenty or fifty yards away.

  The rack in front of them, full of faucets and other plumbing supplies, toppled, causing a sparkling rain of chromium plated metal to crash around them. Two cracks on his shoulder told Josh he’d been hit, but the worst of it had at least missed his head.

  Revealed behind the rack was a row of attackers. They came swinging through the smoke with their picks and shovels. Josh brought the gun to bear, but a movement from the side of him told him he’d been caught in a pincer movement. A thick wooden haft smashed down on the barrel of Josh’s gun so that the weapon got jarred from his hands. Another pick arced down above him, and it was all he could do to catch the wooden handle and begin wrestling against its owner.

  Barney got off three shots before he went down in another flurry of blows. Three attackers around him, smashing again and again at his head.

  Josh had just enough time to turn the guy he was fighting with around and use him as a shield against another pinch-faced attacker, planting the business end of a pickax in his compatriot’s skull. Josh pushed the jerking body at the man who was trying to twist his pickax out of his friend’s h
ead, looking around for his weapon. It had skittered away in the melee, far out of his reach.

  “Gah!” Josh shouted, remembering that he still had Gerry’s MP5 slung behind him. Ducking another blow from the side and pulling on the gun strap, Josh pulled the MP5 around and began to fire.

  Two attackers went down with screams, but the gun coughed and died. There had only been six shots left in the mag.

  Josh ejected the magazine and had just enough time to slam another into place before the last of the attackers were on him. He shot two of the five quickly and they spun away. But the submachine gun was useless for close-up fighting when the assailants were within arm’s reach. One blow stunned his chest as a pick handle crashed into him, filling his head with pain.

  He turned the MP5 around and began to swing it like a club.

  The stock connected with the side of one of their heads, and the man went down with a yell. Josh continued the arc downwards, and the second of the three had his knee zig-zagged sideways as the bone and sinew within snapped and tore.

  The third attacker looked wary for a moment, holding his pickax out in front of him. Josh could see the thinking going on behind his eyes. Was it worth the risk to his life to try to deliver the blow?

  “Don’t do it. Don’t…” Josh said, his voice croaking and full of smoke.

  “I… have… to,” the thin-faced attacker answered. “I… have to… I can’t…” His voice trailed away as if the software in his brain had rebooted and the program was set to kill.

  With a scream of bloody rage, the attacker raised his pick.

  Josh had already turned the MP5 around and unloaded half the magazine in the thin-faced man’s chest.

  “Thank you,” he whispered as he went down.

  The long slow walk back to Thunderbolt was punctuated by explosions from the Home Depot as the fire spread to the whole store.