Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End

by Hamilton, Grace

  The inside of the raft was messed up like it had gone through a spin cycle in a washing machine. First aid kits, weapons, ammunition, clothing, and emergency rations were in a swirl around the bodies. It looked like the raft had been through an awful lot of tossing about on the sea. The storm, though, which might even have been a hurricane—Josh didn’t know, and he’d not been in one before—had borne them through the height of its power and left them here like so many rags and garbage. But at least they were alive. And if they were alive, the occupants of the other rafts might be, too. Donald, Storm, Tally, and, of course, the man who might be able to extricate them from this mess, Halley.

  Over the next few minutes, Josh untangled the bodies in the raft and brought them out to rest on the beach. Maxine woke first, and she gripped his arm after seeing Henry and Ten-Foot.

  “Where are our children?”

  Josh held her hands, meeting her eyes to try to calm her. “If we made it, there’s a good chance they’ve made it, too.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I have no idea. Also, I have no idea how I got into the raft. Last thing I remember is being hit by that huge wave.”

  Maxine pointed at the raft. “Donald and Halley got you in, I think. Someone threw me in. I don’t remember who. You were unconscious. Henry and Ten-Foot got in and just got the flap closed before another wave hit the ship and carried us off the deck. Then it was crazy. I think I hit my head on you first, and bam. Woke up here.”

  Josh shook his head. Whoever smiled on situations like this had certainly smiled on them that day. But where could they themselves be? It was anyone’s guess.

  He looked along the rocky shore, up over to a thick jungle dotted with palm trees. Beyond it, in the distance, blue, tree-covered mountains rose into a warm afternoon sky. He couldn’t see any buildings, and as he looked out to sea at the blue water, just rolling along like a PR video for a vacation company, he couldn’t see any sign of the Sea-Hawk, the Grimoire, or, more pertinently, any other life rafts. “But the storm’s blown itself out, thank God, and we’re alive.”

  Maxine wasn’t happy about the absence of her father and her children, but she helped to bring Henry and Ten-Foot around all the same. Checking them for injuries and wiping the dried blood from under Henry’s nose, she indicated to Henry that his nose was broken but that there wasn’t really much she could do about it now beyond giving him some painkillers from the medikit.

  Henry refused the tablets. “It’s okay, I can cope for now. Let’s save those pills for when somebody really needs them.”

  “It’s paradise, man,” Ten-Foot said when he could stand up and check the surroundings, his hands on his hips and his smile wide. Whatever Halley had done to him in the hold of the ship had certainly mellowed him out. Josh wondered how long it would last. When Halley’s sister had been away from the immersion therapy Halley had pioneered on her behalf, it had taken a few days, but she’d eventually reverted to complete insanity. Would Ten-Foot? Josh didn’t know, and he didn’t much look forward to finding out.

  “Let’s hold judgment on how much of a paradise this place might be until we’ve found the others,” Josh replied.

  Ten-Foot nodded, but it didn’t stop him grinning all the while he stood there shielding his eyes against the sun.

  Henry checked his watch. “We have about three hours of daylight left. We should start a fire and dry ourselves out as soon as we can.”

  Ten-Foot helped Henry drag the life raft well away from the rocks and up beyond where the seaweed indicated the tide would reach when it came in, then went into the trees to collect some dry wood. Plenty of the palm trees and other trees showed signs of damage from the storm, so there was plenty of fallen timber to be found.

  Maxine and Josh busied themselves sorting out the mess of equipment and weapons inside the raft while the boys dealt with the fire. Maxine was quiet, and it was the kind of quiet Josh knew came forth when something was gnawing at her.

  “We’ll go and look for the others soon, I promise. Henry is right—we need to make sure we’re secure here first before we travel into the jungle.”

  “The jungle? Why…?”

  “We were lucky with the beach here. But it’s small, and everything else on this side of the island seems to be rocks. We’re going to have to travel across jungle to get anywhere else and check to see who else has washed up. Does that sound reasonable?”

  Maxine nodded, but her jaw remained tight. Josh knew it was best not to press matters right now, however. They were both tired and frayed.

  He reached out to touch her. It was the first time he’d tried a moment of tenderness in a good long while with his wife, and as she looked up past his hand into his eyes, he could see there were tears forming along her eyelids.

  He opened his arms to offer a hug, but before she could move, Ten-Foot stuck his head through the flap. “Boss Man. Henry says he can see a raft.”

  15

  They pulled the broken bodies of Dotty-B, Filly, Martha, Banger, and Puck from their raft and lay them on a small patch of sand between some jagged black rocks.

  Maxine’s heart lay in tatters in her chest. Not only for the dead, but because their being beaten into this state by the process of the raft continuously smashing against the rocks had reduced Maxine’s expectation that her own children and father might still be alive… reduced it to fifty-fifty at best.

  Two rafts. One dead crew. One live crew.

  The narrowing odds made her sick to the middle of her soul.

  Henry and Ten-Foot recovered what supplies they could from the raft. Maxine and Josh did what they could to make the bodies respectable.

  While Henry and Ten-Foot had been in the jungle collecting wood for the fire, Henry had climbed a palm tree to collect some coconut and attempt to get a better look along the rocky shoreline to the headland. That’s when he’d seen the raft, like a punctured orange party balloon, where it had been thrown on the rocks like garbage.

  They hadn’t been able to move the deflated raft around to get to the flap, so Henry had used his knife to saw open the material. In response, Dotty-B’s lifeless body had thumped into the sand in a welter of blood and fractured bone. Her neck had been twisted almost comically into a cartoon of the young girl, but that hadn’t made it any easier for Maxine to see it—except in that she’d known immediately that there was no need to feel for a pulse.

  There would be no more pulses from Dotty-B after that storm.

  The others were the same. Their injuries terrible, their faces showing that their last moments must have been beyond terrifying.

  That hit Maxine hard. Had the same thing happened to her family? Were they lying just a few miles from here, around the headland in a burst raft, waiting for the jungle’s scavengers to come out of the humid dark interior and get a free lunch?

  Maxine shuddered and held herself. Josh came up behind her and put his arms around her shoulders, resting his head in her hair. He was trying to reassure her, but the anger and frustration welled up in her again in a way that she could not control.

  She turned and pushed him away from her. His face fell, but she shook her head. “Not until we’ve found them. Not until I know they’re okay. Our family would not have been split in the first place if, when I was with Storm in Boston, you hadn’t been out on the Atlantic—” she pointed at Dotty’s dashed body, “with these… children. We would have been together. All of us.”

  Josh didn’t say anything. He just nodded. “Yeah, I know. We’ll find Tally and Storm. I promise. They can’t be far, and we will find them.”

  Maxine didn’t have any words to respond, so she turned and went to help Henry and Ten-Foot with the graves.

  When the bodies were buried, the sun was bobbing toward the horizon under clouds that just showed remnants of the storm, straggling across the sky like abandoned rags. They’d taken what hadn’t been smashed from the raft and gotten it back to their camp where the fire was burning, and Henry was feeding it with fr
esh fuel.

  “We’ve got bottled water for a day or two, but we’re going to have to find fresh,” Josh said. “That’s another reason to go into the jungle and find a stream. There will be plenty of water coming off that mountain.”

  Henry agreed, nodding. “We’ll head off in the morning. We’ve got some survival flashlights, yes, but we should conserve batteries as best we can and travel by day. Food and water shouldn’t be an issue. We don’t know what animals might be around here, so it’s best if we stay by the fire when we can.”

  This all sounded perfectly sensible to Maxine, but the pull of wanting to get out there and start the search now, even though there was only maybe half an hour’s daylight left in the sky, was a strong one. Of that, there was no doubt. She couldn’t concentrate on their conversations about water and food, or how one of them would take first watch—Henry—as she just felt they were wasting their time and the time her children had left in a spectacularly dangerous way.

  Maxine took herself off to the tree line on the pretense of a comfort break, but in reality, she wanted to climb up one of the palm trees to scour the headland in both directions and look for the bright orange material of another raft. Or, if not the raft, at least some sign that someone else had lit a fire—not just to dry their clothes, but to signal to Maxine. She wanted a signal to tell her that Storm and Tally were alive, if not well.

  But Maxine failed at the first hurdle. Her muscles were so weak from the battering she’d taken in the storm, her coordination all shot to hell from stress and dehydration, that she couldn’t haul herself more than five feet up the trunk of a palm tree before her toes slipped, her knees scraped against the bark, and she fell with a yell of frustration down to the earth again.

  The yell brought Josh crashing up from the camp, flashlight on and SIG drawn. “Are you okay? Maxine? What happened?”

  “This happened,” Maxine said, swinging her arm from the jungle and over the beach, across the sea and up, up into the sky, where the smudge of the new Barnard’s Nebula was starting to crawl above the horizon. Gesturing to the world. “This. This. This!”

  All she wanted were her kids. That’s all. Was that too much to ask?

  She stomped out beyond the tree line, down to the beach, and went into the raft, where she pulled the zipper down and, in what passed for privacy, began to sob.

  Everything was hitting her. If Halley was right, and she had no reason to believe he wasn’t—in fact, she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before—then there was no question about who Storm’s father was. It was Josh. She felt a relief rush through her that she hadn’t been able to appreciate at all since Halley had told them his news in the captain’s cabin on the Sea-Hawk. Everything had been a blur since then. The attack on Halley, Josh’s punch, the storm, and the Sea-Hawk going down; then, washing up here, and seeing the bodies of Dotty and the others. It was only now that she could allow herself to feel the relief of knowing that whatever Gabe had done to her after he’d drugged her in that motel room all those years ago had not led to the birth of her son. That could only be Josh. And this savagely hot moment of closure shook the tears out of her. Finally, she could completely let go of the image of Gabriel sitting like a spider in the web of her life. It was done. It was over—although Storm was out of her reach right now, and how she felt about Josh in this moment was no barrier to stem the tears. But there was still a gem inside, a bright gem lighting the way forward, which had not been there before Halley’s revelation.

  She wasn’t really crying about her anger towards Josh, and she wasn’t really crying about Storm and Tally being an unknown distance away—Maxine was crying in this moment for herself. She knew that as she hugged herself in the warm darkness of the life raft, and that she needed it to be about her stepping over the threshold from one life to the next.

  When Maxine emerged from the life raft, it was full dark.

  The only light on the beach was that from the fire—her own group’s fire. Her eyes were dry, and her cheeks were, too. She’d cried out everything she’d needed to, and now she was ready to go back to the others.

  Maxine sat down by the fire lighting up the faces of Henry, Ten-Foot, and Josh. Her husband’s expression was set. She sensed that he wasn’t making eye contact with her not because he was angry, but because he didn’t want to antagonize her. He’d learned that move very early on in their relationship, and it brought a curl to the corner of her mouth that turned into the first stirrings of a smile.

  Maxine reached out then and squeezed Josh’s hand. He looked up in response, and she knew he would have seen the curl of the smile in the firelight.

  When Maxine spoke, it was a dry croak coming after so many tears, as if the crying had dredged a drought from the moisture in her throat. “It’s just gonna take some time, you know. Halley, Gabe, you, Storm… all this. And in the middle of it all, we’ve got to find our kids. But please know two things. I’m sorry I kept what Gabe did to me from you, but I’m happy to have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that you’re Storm’s father. I think that’s a basis to go forward on, right?”

  Josh smiled right back at her. “Yes. Yes, it is,” he said.

  Tally’s attachment to Donald had been tenuous at the best of times. He’d never visited them at their home in North Carolina, and as for the few Thanksgivings and Christmases when Mom had taken them to the M-Bar ranch in West Virginia, her main memories were of Maria, her grandmother, who had been warm, generous, funny, and larger than life, displaying overflowing love for her grandchildren at every turn. Her grandfather was a hazy, distant image in her memories; he’d always either been going out to work with the cattle or returning from working with the cattle and wafting through the kitchen on his way to the bathroom. He was so tall that his head might as well have scraped the clouds and lived in them for all the impression that child-Tally had gotten of him. Now, since she’d been in his company so much since she and Henry had reached the farm after the crisis had struck, and since she’d begun to better understand that his distance in the past had been about his feelings about her mother leaving home, marrying Josh, and not staying close to her parents, things had begun to make more sense. What she’d learned in the last few months explained a lot more of the tensions she’d only been vaguely aware of as a young child.

  Seeing Donald up close and personal—the way that he had dealt stoically and bravely with the death of Maria, how he’d fought like a tiger when the ranch had been attacked, and how he’d been the first to want to go into Jaxport to rescue her mom and brother—had garnered more than just her respect for him.

  She could definitely file the feeling she had for him under love.

  He was a much more complex man than she would have given him credit for before the Barnard’s event had turned the world upside down. Seeing him at his best, even though he was at the point in his life when finding things to occupy his retirement should have been the only challenge of his life, had been a revelation.

  As the Sea-Hawk had gone down, it had been her grandfather who’d withstood the waves like a rock in rapids. It had been Donald who’d thrown her unconscious father into a raft and pushed others in after him, including her mother. It had been her grandfather who had taken Tally and Storm by the proverbial scruff of the neck, screaming into the wind, “I’m not letting you two out of my sight!” as he’d dragged them into the last raft with Poppet after all the other probationers had been zippered into theirs, then waiting with them for the next waves to lift them off the deck and into the raging sea.

  It had been her grandfather who had held Tally and Storm tight in his arms as the raft had been buffeted, thrown, and crashed around for what had seemed like hours and hours.

  And it had been Donald who had been first out through the flap when they’d heard the scrape of stones and sand beneath the raft, emerging even as the storm still raged overhead and stepping into the shallow waters of a rocky inlet. Trees bending in the onslaught, the sky a yell of weather, the waters a
witch’s cauldron of dark spells… and through it all, he had dragged all of them up over the rocks and then gone back to pull the raft out of the water, settle it on a raked but flat portion of muddy land, and put them all back inside of it to wait out the storm in safety and relative warmth.

  When the storm had passed, and they’d all gotten what sleep they could, dozing fitfully, her grandfather had left the raft and gone off to, as he said, “Reconnoiter the surrounding area, to see what’s what.”

  That had been an hour ago.

  “Should we go and look for him?” Tally asked Poppet, who was arranging the tumbled stores and weapons into a semblance of order.

  “He’ll be fine,” Poppet said in reply. “He’s like a cockroach. He’ll survive anything, that one.”

  Tally didn’t take kindly to the comparison, but she understood the feeling behind it. Donald was tough as old boots.

  Storm had left the raft, too, but Tally could see him through the flap in the newly bright, post-gale afternoon. He was sitting on a rock rubbing at his wrists and ankles, massaging the spots where he’d been hog-tied by their dad. He hadn’t said much in the raft when he’d woken and been released by Donald. As they’d been buffeted and tossed by the seas and wind, his face had been set, his eyes thousand-yard-staring into an unknowable distance. Tally had only caught part of the conversation between her mom and Halley as they’d brought Storm out onto the deck. Halley had been re-explaining the genetics of eye color that proved Storm was Josh’s son and not Gabe’s, but she could see Storm was now having some kind of crisis of confidence in his thinking. His eyes were lost to the horizon as he rubbed at his wrists. The circulation must have returned to them hours ago, so this was just an automatic movement—anxiety overspill, as her mom might have called it.