The changes were coming thick and fast. Maxine knew she was going to struggle to accept all of them. But she also knew, after what had happened on the journey to Jaxport, that Josh wouldn’t have allowed Ten-Foot anywhere near them if he wasn’t convinced the boy was on the level.
They took a minute to share out the weapons and ammunition they’d salvaged from the dead and dying Harbormen in the throne room. Maxine, feeling like she was floating in a dream that had stuffed her mind full of cotton candy and numbing narcotics, took the gun offered to her, but couldn’t get her mind away from Ten-Foot—cruel, implacable Ten-Foot. She stared at the back of his head as they moved off, wondering what the real thoughts going on inside his mind were, and whether they could ever be trusted.
And then there was her husband to contemplate as they moved onwards.
Josh kept close, his hand holding her arm gently above the elbow. It was the only real contact they’d had in this whole sorry mess of a new world, other than their brief time together in West Virginia, when he’d found out about Gabe and Storm.
Back when they’d fought. He’d grabbed her arm and she’d pulled away and stumble-crashed into a barbeque, burning her face a little. That was the last time he’d touched her, and now here he was, almost leading her by the arm, and in the intervening weeks, it suddenly felt like so much had changed. She had begged Gabe for his life, and now Josh had come back to Castle Jaxport to save her. The grip on her arm didn’t feel repellant; it didn’t make her want to pull away like last time. Last time, when she’d been shocked that Josh had asked her for the truth about Storm. Now, she looked up at him as they walked quickly through the deserted thoroughfares and corridors of the castle, seeing he was focused, with his face forward, but still making sure she was close by his side.
As if her eyes were having a physical effect on him, he turned his head and looked down on her. “I’m not letting go of you or Storm again. Ever.”
Maxine put her left hand over his. “And I’m not letting go of you.”
And suddenly that was all that needed to be said in order to mend the divide that had existed between them. Whether it would last, she did not know, but it felt right for now.
They came to a crossroads in the wooden tunnel system deep in the castle. The smell of smoke was strong in the air, but it wasn’t yet clogging the walkways. Through their whole time walking from the throne room, they hadn’t heard any more shooting, and no more Harbormen or civilians had passed them going to and from the fire.
It was as if the building had been evacuated already, and Maxine and the others were the only ones left.
“Where is everyone?” Josh asked Ten-Foot.
The boy shook his head. “I guess they’re gone, Boss Man. We should get out, too.”
“Not without Storm,” Maxine said, and Josh nodded.
“We need to find him, Ten-Foot. We’re relying on you here.”
“This place is gonna burn,” he argued as he pointed at the wooden walls, at the wisps of smoke that were moving across the ceiling. “It’s made of wood, man, and you set it on fire pretty good. If Gabe is smart, he’ll have gotten out already, and he’ll have taken your boy with him. He could be anywhere by now.”
It was time for Maxine to lead Josh. “This way.”
She pulled her husband to the right and brushed past Ten-Foot, still unable to look him in the eye without wanting to spit in it. “We’ll go to the staterooms. If they’re not there, it’ll be clear they’ve gone.”
“Okay,” Josh agreed. “Staterooms it is.”
A minute and a half later, they were back at the scene of Maxine’s escape from Gabriel. The bodies hadn’t been moved and the bullet holes that had been chewed in the walls were bright scars on the décor, showing splintered wood against the blue paint.
As they came through the dining room door, Maxine saw the room was just as she’d left it. Food scattered across the table. Overturned chairs and blood from the cut on Gabe’s cheek spattered on the carpet.
But there was no sign of Gabe—or, more importantly, Storm.
Smoke was running four inches deep across the ceiling in gray waves now. There were no flames as of yet, but the building was definitely alight.
“We need to get out of here before we all go up,” Ten-Foot said, pointing to the smoke and moving back towards the door. The others edged backward with him, looking to Josh for guidance; he remained where he’d been taking stock of the scene and had stood his ground.
Josh ran his fingers through his hair, squinting up at the smoke and taking a deep breath. “The place is burning, Maxine. Storm would have gotten out. He’s not a fool.”
Maxine felt a tear at the corner of her soul. “You go. Save the others. I’ll search.”
Pushing past Josh, she ran back to the door.
7
Storm Standing had lost one father, and he wasn’t going to lose another.
He’d run, armed, away from the staterooms when he’d discovered the dead bodies of the Harbormen and seen that there was no sign of Gabe or his mom. Gabe had instructed Storm to come to the dining room at eight o’clock in the evening, telling him that he should come at that time because the meal would be over and his mom would be ready to hear how happy Storm was to have found out the truth of his birth father. Gabe had wanted him to help persuade his mom that this discovery was for the best, and that now that Josh was out of the way, perhaps they could become the family Gabe had always wanted.
Storm had been sure that his mom would continue to resist the idea, but Gabe had been very clear. All this was for the best, and if they presented a united front to Maxine, then everything would work out fine. Maxine would come around; Gabe had been sure of it.
And really, Storm had found out very quickly that Gabe had the keys to unlock any resistance in others. He was intense, persuasive, and charismatically passionate. That attitude could bypass the strongest opposition. Also concerning him, there had been no mention at all of Storm’s failure to kill Josh before he had escaped with the others. Storm had spent some time in a confused muddle about the whole thing. He had wanted to please Gabe so badly, but the very idea of shooting someone—anyone—let alone Josh, the man who had brought him up, had made him hesitate. Storm had assumed that Gabe would be angry with him, incandescent even, but he’d spoken nothing of it upon coming to his room the next day.
But tonight, Storm had entered the stateroom just as pandemonium had broken out. With the explosions and gunfire, he’d had the presence of mind to grab a Colt 1911 from the gun cupboard in the stateroom. After sliding three magazines into his pockets, then slamming a fourth into the Colt, he’d jogged from the stateroom to find his parents.
Storm assumed that the explosions were connected with the deaths of the Harbormen in Gabe’s quarters. Perhaps there was an invasion force already in the castle—could it be Josh and the others? It seemed likely they would come back and try to take him away from Gabe, and get his mom back, too. He knew how determined Josh could be.
Or maybe it was someone else—there were plenty of groups who were wary of the king and his Harbormen. Perhaps a rival settlement far from Jacksonville had come here to take over and assassinate Gabe.
There were any number of options. But, to Storm, the cause of the explosion and fires wasn’t relevant to finding Gabe and his mom. Whoever was attacking the complex, the outcome would be the same.
He ran against streams of Harbormen and civilians who were running to answer the fire alarms. He stopped one of the Harbormen captains to ask him if he had seen the king, but the look on the captain’s face told him that it was not common knowledge what had happened in the staterooms. Sweat stood out on the captain’s young face as if he had turned into a colander. “Stand to the king!” he yelled to the men nearest to him after Storm had explained what he’d found. The captain directed three of his men to search for Gabe, and the rest to continue on to see what had caused the fire.
The captain himself, a blond-haired near-youth
called Garrison, bounded back towards the stateroom as well, his weapon drawn—as if there was any point in locking a stable door after a horse had bolted.
Storm watched him go through the crowd. If the castle was burning inside the bonded warehouse, then it was only a matter of time before they’d need to evacuate the building. Surely, Gabe would have taken Maxine towards the exit if they had been able to go that way—but what if they’d been captured? The dead Harbormen in Gabe’s quarters suggested it as a possibility. If the castle had been breached, then there was a good chance that was where the kidnappers’ forces would be heading. Storm began to run away from the throne room and the exit, and towards where those being instructed to fight the fire were heading.
He shouldered his way forward with Harbormen and civilians alive, occasionally getting splashed with water from jiggling buckets.
The rear of the castle was where the kitchens and the food storage areas were located. There were areas still under construction, too, with internal walls still waiting to be fully erected or painted. The roof was on, but the internals were still waiting to be decided. All of that added up to a lot of confusion and a fair amount of clutter as he rushed forward. The corridors were narrowing and getting darker, the oil lamps seemingly getting further apart in a manner that left wide areas of gloom to be traversed.
Smoke was building up. Not enough to affect breathing yet, but enough to catch in the back of Storm’s throat. He pulled the front of his T-shirt up over his nose and mouth, and walked forward with the would-be firefighters.
He heard the flames before he saw them. There was a great crackling coming from the other side of the wall, and he could feel heat wafting down the corridor with the smoke. As he turned the final corner, he saw flickering light and a ragged five-yard tear in the back wall of Castle Jaxport.
As civilians tried to put out the flames with their meager buckets of seawater from the harbor, Harbormen shot their weapons into the flames. Like some surreal scene from the cover of a devil worshipping, heavy metal band’s album, flames roared, smoke twisted up in thick curls, and bodies moved to perform the grim but desperate tasks involved in the fight.
For a second, Storm couldn’t understand what they were doing, and then through the smoldering wood, bright flames, and billowing smoke, he saw beyond the flames—to shadows moving among the blown propane tanks. They were taking aim and firing back towards the Harbormen. There was a gun battle being fought here even as they were trying to fight a fire.
Storm kept his head down and stumbled forward over the broken sheets of wood and water-slick floors, trying to see through the smoke to the outside of the castle. As the flames were doused anew and died down for a moment, he could see beyond the castle to the outside wall of the warehouse, where the jagged hole smoldered and allowed fresh air to be sucked into the castle to feed the flames.
New sprays of bullets spat through the flames and, more conscious of their closeness, firefighters dove for cover, their buckets scattering. Those who had deposited their water already ran back the way they had come—perhaps to get more water at the behest of the Harbormen, or maybe to try to affect an escape because they knew their task was pointless. The castle was going to be destroyed; there was no possible reprieve for it. Even though it had been built so close to the water’s edge, it might as well have been a million miles away with the firefighters being shot at from beyond its walls.
There was no sign of Gabe or his mom here. Storm had chosen the wrong location to search. Here there were only sweating civilians trying to make some headway with the conflagration, and hollow-eyed Harbormen knowing they were fighting two losing battles for the price of one, shooting blindly through the flames. Pretty soon, they would all reach the same conclusion he’d just come to. It was time to retreat and get outside the castle. If Gabe and Maxine had been taken out through this route by the attackers, they were already long gone, and all Storm would achieve here was being burned or shot. There was no middle ground.
The only other logical course of action to take—if Gabe and Maxine were still at liberty—was to make for the main entrance to the castle.
So, pulling his T-Shirt up over his nose, Storm turned to head that way—and he walked straight into Gabe.
The king put both his hands on the tops of Storm’s arms, his fingers digging painfully into the flesh. Around them, the business of fighting the fire and the attackers went on, but they were suddenly caught in the clockwork of frozen time.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Gabe rumbled. His face was ruddy from pumped adrenaline and streaked with sweat. His eyes were razors. There was a cut on his cheek that looked ragged and bloody. Gabe was wiping blood from it and cleaning his hand on his shirt. “My castle is not burning down, boy! You understand? It. Is. Not. Now, you will defend it to your last breath with that gun, or put out the flames with your hands! Those SOBs are not taking away everything I’ve worked for!”
Josh caught up to Maxine in the maze of wooden corridors as the ceiling writhed with smoke and the rattle of small arms fire began again in the distance.
“Where are the rest of them?” Maxine asked as she walked with stiff resolve away from the stateroom.
“I told them to get out through the main hall and throne room. Fight their way out if necessary, but I figure they won’t meet much resistance. Sounds like it’s all concentrated where we made our hole in the wall.”
“Is that where Dad is?”
“Yeah, their job is to keep Gabe’s forces busy until we either turn up to come out the way we came in or get out the other way and come around to retrieve them. They’ve got enough thermite bombs and Molotov cocktails to hold their end up. We’ve been in here too long now, though. The fires have taken hold. Getting out the back way might no longer be an option.” Josh wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. “I wasn’t planning to spend this long in here. Ten-Foot said he knew where you’d all be, and we thought we’d be out of here in minutes. Best laid plans of mice and men be damned.”
He couldn’t tell if Maxine was taking any of this in. She was going to do this whether Josh was with her or not, unwilling to be deflected by any of his words, and that was clear enough.
And when she responded, “Look, you can go back with the others, but I’m not leaving him here,” Josh knew there was only one way to try to keep them both alive and get them both out of Castle Jaxport. And that was to go with her now, and try to find Storm.
They hurried on through the deserted corridors, their only guiding principle being the clatter of gunfire. Maxine spoke up as they moved at pace, “If Storm hasn’t escaped already, then he might have gone with the others to fight the fire. You know what he’s like. He doesn’t run away from danger.”
Maxine was right, and Josh knew it. Storm, even though he had been through the most awful experiences imaginable between cancer and the enforced changes in the world, was not someone who shied away from danger. If there was trouble, Josh knew he would run straight towards it.
But…
“If he’s still here,” Josh said, knowing he was thinking it, so he might as well say it. “That’s the point.”
“I can’t leave this place without knowing, Josh. You know that. I can’t.”
“And I can’t leave you behind. I’m not letting you go, and that’s that.”
Maxine stopped, put a hand behind his head, and pulled his lips down onto hers. It was the briefest of touches before she was off again, but the starburst of fireworks exploding in his chest told him that he was going to make up for those last five wasted years of existing in their marriage rather than living it.
He followed on after Maxine. The shooting was getting louder, and the smoke getting thicker. Three civilian occupants of Castle Jaxport ran past them going in the opposite direction, carrying buckets and water containers. They didn’t give Josh or Maxine a second glance, so focused were they on their mission to bring water back to the fire.
As the couple came down
a thinner service corridor, five more apparent firefighters came jogging by, their faces weary and their shoulders drooping with depression. Josh could see they all thought they were fighting a lost cause, but it looked like they had been given no choice but to do as they were told. Their faces carried the oppressive ‘on the pain of death’ look that Josh had seen in so many of Gabe Angel’s people.
“We’re getting close.” Josh moved himself slightly ahead of Maxine so that he would get to the corner first, his pistol raised. The gunfire had become more sporadic in the last minute or so, as if both sides in the battle were taking stock to see what the other side would do.
Josh put his shoulder to the wall and inched forward. He could feel Maxine behind him, her body pressing into his back. He felt like he was holding back an eruption of anticipation and fear as her body trembled against him.
“Just hold off until I’ve seen what’s what. Okay?”
An affirmative grunt sounded from Maxine, but he wasn’t going to be able to keep a lid on that pressure cooker for much longer. Josh looked around the angle in the wall to the place where he and the others had entered the castle some forty minutes before.
They moved forward another ten yards into a long corridor that ran along the back of the castle. There was smoke and a confusion of people at one end––Harbormen firing, while other people were fighting the fire. A small intersection fifteen yards ahead spilled out people with buckets heading for the flames.
Josh could see the large hole in the wooden wall where they’d made it into the castle, blown through by the force of the propane tanks exploding. As they moved cautiously towards the intersection, he could see more flames, and bodies dotted about the floor—dead Harbormen. As well as the bodies, he noticed several other people in civilian clothes who’d hunkered down behind the makeshift barricade of wooden wall sections in front of trestles. Beyond them, more Harbormen were taking occasional potshots through the flames and ducking as, just as occasionally, fire was returned.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 7