Halley, who was at their side of the deck, said, “Oops.”
It was the understatement of the century.
Maxine lifted the binoculars and began to scour the deck of the Grimoire for any sign of her son, husband, or father. The explosion had had one unimagined side effect. The blast had blown out the majority of the flames that had been burning. Although there were still gouts of dark smoke lifting from the ship in the near darkness, there were only a few smoldering embers of wood or sail left to provide any kind of light on the ship.
At the stern, where the lifeboat was still grappled to the side of the larger craft, Maxine could pick out figures moving around in it. The boys were firing their weapons into the back-cabin windows, the muzzle flashes dizzying and the gunfire a staccato Morse code on the air. She flicked the binoculars up to the deck of the Grimoire. Two black silhouettes were running to the rail, dragging a body along with them. The light from the near extinguished fires wasn’t bright enough to give her full hope, but the shapes spoke of her father and Josh. Whoever they were dragging—and there was only one person they would be dragging off the ship, and that was Storm—was floppy and still between them as they hefted him over the rail and dumped the body the twenty feet into the heaving water.
The men jumped next, straight down to approximately where the limp body had crashed into the waves. For a second, Maxine’s heart was a grenade in her chest as all three of the figures disappeared below the waves.
She let out a lengthy sigh as first one and then another head appeared intermittently between the waves, and then they began cleaving through the water until they were reaching up into the lifeboat to be pulled inside, the limp form of Storm—she hoped—being slithered into the small boat first, and the other two men behind him.
When that phase of the operation was completed, Maxine watched as one of the boys cut the grapple lines and the others began digging their oars into the water to bring the lifeboat back to the Sea-Hawk.
No more gunfire came from the Grimoire, and Maxine could see little or no movement on its decks. Karel readied the others to providing covering fire if need be, but the order was never given. Dotty-B ordered the crew to make ready to set the sails to get the Sea-Hawk away from the Grimoire at the very second Josh and the others were back on board.
Donald appeared over the rail first, and he organized a line to go down to the others. The boys and then Josh, once he’d attached the line to Storm’s still limp form, came up after that, and as Dotty-B turned the wheel to make the most of the unfurled sails, Storm’s lifeless, floppily loose body was hauled aboard.
They carried him to the captain’s cabin and, as Maxine swept the charts and mugs aside with a savage sweep of her arm, they laid him on the table.
Storm was as wet as a drowned spider; hair plastered over his forehead and face drained white. She felt for a carotid pulse, closing her eyes and thanking God that it was strong beneath her fingertips.
Josh and Donald had been wrapped in towels by Poppet, and Halley arrived with rum-laced black coffee for them to drink while Maxine checked Storm over. He had taken a savage blow to the side of his head, and there was a gash there which was shipping out blood. Once Poppet had finished with Donald and Josh, Maxine got her to apply pressure to Storm’s wound while she checked the rest of him over.
“If the ammunition they were storing on the deck hadn’t exploded… he had me zeroed,” Josh said flatly. “It blew him off the spar and down onto the deck. Donald and I were shielded from the worst of it by the boats, but it was a close thing. Gabe’s still there, and he’s still alive.”
“More’s the pity,” said Donald, taking warming gulps of the fortified coffee. “We should stick around and finish them off.”
Maxine shook her head, feeling down Storm’s limbs for obvious fractures or dislocations. Thankfully, there were none. The gash on his head was bad enough for a boy not at the top of his physical fitness after his recovery from cancer; he didn’t need broken limbs to go with it. “No. Let’s just get away from here as quick as we can.”
“We need to try to outrun the storm,” Poppet agreed. “It’s coming in fast. The barometer is lower than a rattlesnake’s belly and the sea conditions are worsening. A few hours from now, you wouldn’t have made it back from the Grimoire in the lifeboat. We’re back on course for Dark Point, though, and with any luck, the Grimoire is too damaged to follow us.”
“What’s our luck been like recently?” Josh asked through gritted teeth.
“Hey,” said Poppet with a smile, “gotta travel hopefully, right?”
Maxine continued her exam of Storm by checking over his torso. There was a ripening bruise on his side that might indicate damage to his ribs from the fall, but she wouldn’t be able to confirm that until he woke up. He was deep in sleep right now.
Maxine looked up as Halley moved in, and, reaching down to Storm’s face, the professor lifted his eyelids with his thumbs and stared down into the boy’s eyes. It wasn’t that, as a nurse, Maxine felt her professional competence was being impinged upon by the eccentric doctor, but she just wondered what the hell he was doing. “I didn’t realize you were a medical doctor as well as an astrophysicist,” she offered tightly.
Halley let Storm’s eyelids drop back. He smiled at Maxine. “I’m not. I’m just an interested amateur, you might say.”
Halley didn’t touch Storm again, but he watched intently as Maxine finished the exam. She noticed Halley looking from the boy to Josh several times. For his part, though, Josh didn’t notice Halley’s interest. He was too busy with Poppet and Donald, discussing what they needed to do to make sure the Sea-Hawk was as protected as possible in case they couldn’t outrun the oncoming bad weather.
Maxine watched over Storm, and eventually, as the sea outside the ship began to move the Sea-Hawk ever more strongly, her boy began to stir. Maxine held onto his hand. Donald and Poppet had already left to go back on deck to organize the others in their preparations. Halley had brought more coffee for Josh and Maxine. Josh had changed into a dry set of waterproofs and was standing over Storm just next to Maxine, his face etched with concern. Maxine was equally concerned as Josh pulled the SIG from his belt and racked it. Josh shrugged. “Honey, the last time he looked at me, he tried to kill me. I have no idea what he’s going to be like when he opens his eyes.”
“I know,” she replied. “Just don’t give him any more reasons to hate you.”
“I won’t,” Josh said, and he put the gun out of sight behind his back. “Just better to be safe than sorry.”
Waiting for Storm to wake up, Maxine experienced a yawning moment of vertigo that came when she considered how far their lives had fallen in the months since the Barnard’s event. It was a gap between then and now which was almost impossible to measure in any meaningful way.
Storm’s eyes flickered open and he lifted his head. His face swept through several expressions at once. Mainly confusion, then discomfort at his injuries, and finally anger as his eyes settled on Josh and Maxine.
“How did… I get… here?”
“You were rescued.”
Storm narrowed his eyes and shook his head, fixing his gaze on Josh. “Captured, more like. I want to go back… I want to go back… to my father… let me go now!”
Storm sat up, pushing Maxine’s hands away. But curling into a sitting position on the table sent a wave of agony across his face, and he pressed his own hand against his side, right where Maxine had found the bruise. The ribs beneath it were fractured. That much was clear from the way he moved and breathed.
When the pained expression on his face subsided, Storm looked from Maxine and Josh, and then back to Maxine. “Keep that man away from me. I want nothing to do with him. If you’re not going to send me back to my father, I don’t even want to look at this loser.”
“I don’t really think you have any choice in that.”
All eyes in the room fixed on Halley, who’d peeled away from the wall where he’d been leanin
g and was scratching at both sides of his head with a grin.
“Shut up, you freak!” Storm spat. “I want this man gone. He’s got nothing to do with me anymore.”
Halley shook his head. “Well, son, that’s where you’re wrong. I don’t care what you’ve been told, and I don’t care what you want. As the saying goes, you can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts. Josh Standing is your father, and you know what, Mr. Snippy? I can prove it. Right here, right now.”
14
Their luck did not hold.
Two storms hit the Sea-Hawk in quick succession as dawn rose the next morning—one the howling teeth of a gale that threatened to tear the ship apart before it sank it between the waves, and the other, a boy finding out a truth that he didn’t want to know. Both situations were potentially insurmountable and would take all of Josh’s strength to survive.
He knew he was needed up on deck to help the others, but seeing as the ship shuddered violently, waves breaking higher than the gunwales while Storm held Halley from behind with his arm across his windpipe, there were things to sort out here in this very cabin first, before he could think about the other storm.
The grip of the SIG felt buttery and slick in his grasp. There was no way he was going to use it on his son, especially not now that he knew the truth, but since Storm had his back to the wall and Halley was rapidly losing consciousness, Josh knew he was going to have to do something quickly… before the only hope that Josh knew of for a cure to the madness and their world’s loss of power died there in front of him. There were no easy solutions, however.
Maxine had already tried to get close to Storm and Halley, but the boy had just tightened his grip and Halley’s eyes had bulged out like they were on springs.
“Stay back! Or I’ll snap his neck. I know how! Dad showed me how to do it!”
“He’s not your dad!” Halley managed to hiss out with a creditable amount of diverted effort under the circumstances. “Your eyes are brown, your Mom’s are blue, and your Dad’s are brown. Gabe’s eyes are blue. For him to be your father, there would have to be a whole upending of the current theories of genetics. Blue eyes and blue eyes never make brown eyes. Ever. So, unless your mom screwed the brown-eyed postman, Josh is your father. End of…”
Storm tightened his forearm again. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Josh held up the gun and put it down on the table as the Sea-Hawk got hit by another wave and the deck beneath his feet heeled and jerked. The SIG slid off the table and clattered into a corner on the opposite end of the cabin, well out of Storm’s reach. “What’s killing him going to achieve, Storm?”
Storm’s eyes were wide. There were white flecks of spittle at the corner of his mouth, and his lips moved without making any sound.
“It will still be true. What he said about our eyes will still be true. Killing him doesn’t undo it.”
“Shut up! All of you, just shut up!”
In the midst of Storm’s screaming, the door to the cabin opened and Ten-Foot came in on a gust of chilling wind followed by a huge, drenching burst of spray. His waterproofs were running with thick streams of seawater. The rivulets pooled darkly at his feet.
“Donny sent me. We need you up on…” The words dried in his throat as he took in the scene. Storm’s eyes widened with concern at Ten-Foot’s presence, and he pulled Halley closer to him, wrenching his head back with the professor’s pony tail twined in his fist. Halley’s fingers grasped ineffectually at Storm’s forearm, the man gasping and groaning.
There was one chance. One moment.
Josh took one step and belted his distracted boy on the chin with one sharp stab of his fist. Storm’s head snapped back, crunching into the wall, his eyes rolling like a jackpot in a Vegas slot machine. Maxine yelled, and Halley wheezed and pushed himself away from Storm with a savagely aimed elbow deep into the boy’s already broken rib. And Josh’s son—Yes, my son, no question—slumped to the floor with a sigh.
Josh paused only to secure the unconscious Storm at the ankles and hands with rope, then left Maxine to make sure that Halley and their boy were okay before following Ten-Foot out of the door and back onto the Sea-Hawk’s deck.
The wind scythed across the bucking ship. Lines were hanging free from where they had been torn from their moorings. Sails had been ripped apart, flapping uselessly in the black gale. Waves as tall as houses—taller, even—were rushing towards the prow of the ship while others tilted the hull up towards the sky, and then let the whole seemingly matchstick-light construction thump down into the troughs between them.
The probationers were fighting a losing battle. Some were sliding across the decks on their backs, crashing into masts, and others were hanging onto rope nets or stanchions with all their strength as gouts of water dumped in white deluges over the sides of the vessel as it was tossed and thrown.
“Where’s Donald?” Josh screamed at Ten-Foot, who had been blown almost off his feet and crashed into a capstan.
Ten-Foot wiped the streaming water from his face and pointed amidships. Through the drenching rains and whirling gale, Josh saw the yellow blur of Donald’s waterproof hauling an inflatable life raft pack out of the storage cabinet in the deck. Poppet was reaching behind him to pull out another.
Looking the other way, back towards the wheel, Josh saw it was spinning crazily on its spindle. He could see Dotty-B’s feet turned up in a rushing welter of water. Her legs and arms were star-splayed and lifeless. She was either dead or unconscious. “Go check on Dotty!” Josh yelled through the gale to Ten-Foot. The boy nodded and pulled himself up, where he grabbed onto the rail and began to haul himself aft.
Josh slid, pulled, and stumbled forward as the ship protested and creaked. Water seemed to cover the whole deck now, inches deep. There was no way it couldn’t be running below decks. Two hatches had been smashed open by falling spars already, and they were open to the elements. Hungry mouths ready to swallow as much of the water as they could.
The fourth raft pack was out of storage now, and as Josh approached Poppy and Donald, he could see the grim set of their faces. They were getting ready to abandon ship. Tally was crawling back from the prow of the ship with Henry, and they were calling to what probationers they could find in order to bring them to the rendezvous point. Martha and Karel were dragging Filly along unconscious, the whole group swaying in the blasts or wind and water.
“This ship is going down!” Donald called. “We’ve lost her, Josh. We’ve lost her!”
“We can’t abandon the ship in the middle of the sea!” Josh howled in Donald’s ear. “There’s no one coming to rescue us!”
“There’s land ahead!” Poppy shouted. “We saw it before the waves got too bad. An island! Maybe more than one. The storm’s blowing us straight at it! But the ship’s going down way before we get smashed on the rocks! The inflatables are our only chance!”
Josh bit his knuckles and looked back along the ship to the captain’s cabin, where the precious cargo of Maxine, Storm, and Halley were still recovering from the ordeal.
Such a risk it would be to cut their losses and go into the water, but the Sea-Hawk was taking on water by the ton. Soon, it would start to drift below the waves. When that happened, it would be seconds before the ship went completely under. Josh looked over the rail. The ship was dead low on the crest of the wave it was riding. A mere three feet of clearance, maybe less. The Sea-Hawk was in a terminal state. Sprays were blowing from every angle, and there was salt in his nostrils as well as the taste of cold sea water on his lips.
“I’m going get Maxine and the others!” he said, and with that he began to make his way back across the deck.
Josh didn’t see the wave that hit the ship then, taking him off his feet and into the stone-deaf black water, but suddenly his feet were yards away from the deck of the ship, his arms floating free and his guts going as cold as old death.
Josh had woken washed up on a beach once before. When he’d been sent into the wate
r from the Sea-Hawk just off the east coast. The wooden life raft he’d been in with Tally and Poppet had been smashed to pieces on rocks, and he’d wound up, once he’d come to his senses, in the clutches of one of Gabriel Angel’s satellite operations near Savannah, Georgia.
Like the last time it had happened, he ached abominably. Plus, he was wet and his mouth was full of sand. At the moment, he was cold from the dampness of his clothes, but he could feel warming sunlight on his face. There was a hard bar of something across his midriff. He felt half in, half out of something. There was, along with the smell of salt, sand, and seaweed, the smell of rubber. A gentle wind was ruffling his hair, and just when he’d begun getting used to how nice that felt, he was suddenly struck by the feel of someone trying to cut off his pinkie finger with a bread knife.
“Hey!”
Josh’s eyes snapped open against harsh brightness. He had no time to take in his surrounding before pulling up his left hand… to find a small yellow crab dangling from the first knuckle of his little finger.
He shook his hand and the crab sailed away from him, landing with a disgruntled plop in a tidepool. Josh spat the rest of the sand from his mouth and slithered from whatever he was half in and half out of, digging his elbows into the damp sand. He was still in his waterproofs, and the memory of his last thought on the Sea-Hawk before he’d blacked out rushed through him like the killing wave that had lifted him off the deck.
Josh turned onto his back and then sat up. He’d just gotten himself out of the orange and black inflatable life raft through the waterproof flap in the side, which had to be closed to form a waterproof seal when on the sea.
The enclosed interior of the raft was dark, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see there were bodies in there. He rocked forward onto his knees and put his head through the flap.
Ten-Foot, Henry, and Maxine lay in a tumble of limbs like a game of Twister gone rogue. They were unconscious or sleeping, but Josh was pleased to see they were breathing and intact. There was some blood smeared on Henry’s face that looked like it had come from his nose, but that looked to be it in the way of injury.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 14