She guessed he had a lot to be anxious about right now. She thought about going out to talk to him, but concluded that the best thing might be to wait for him to talk to her—to give him the space to find his own way back into the family, assuming that’s what he wanted. Tally hadn’t really understood what the lure of Gabriel had been for Storm—Josh had been the man who had brought him up, and been there for him most every step of the way—admittedly, only until the last few years, as things had deteriorated between their parents had Storm’s relationship seemed to change with Josh. But that was not the point. Dad had been there for both of them when they had been young. Not this crazy Gabriel Angel.
But Storm had been so easily taken in and over. Perhaps the effects of the Barnard’s event hadn’t coalesced in her brother as madness, but as a yearning for something else. Something bigger than their little, normal lives in North Carolina. Or maybe he’d been searching for a way out from the fights and the battles they’d been dealing with, and Gabe had presented him with a route away from all that.
Whatever the reasons for what he’d done, Storm looked like someone trapped in limbo. Tally resolved that she would supply the rope out this time, but she reckoned that Storm would have to choose whether or not to grasp on and pull himself in.
16
Once they were away from the huge black rocks of the beach, the jungle closed in around them quickly. Wherever they were, and on what island, Henry said that this part of it had not been deforested in the way many of the larger Caribbean islands had been. That suggested it might be the island they had been making for—the mainly unspoiled Dark Point of which Halley had spoken and where he’d had his vacation residence. Not having Halley with them now made finding him a priority just slightly below that of finding Tally, Storm, and Donald.
The sun had set directly behind them on the beach, and so going into the jungle in an easterly direction to begin with, towards the mountain to find fresh water, was the best route to take right now.
Once they’d found a stream and boiled the water, they would have to decide whether to traverse the island in a northerly or southern direction, keeping the beach in sight.
“With just four of us, we can’t split up and go in two directions at once,” Josh had said, and they shouldered their way between the high, rough-barked trees of the interior. “Too dangerous.”
Henry added. “We should go north as a unit when we can. Dotty’s raft washed up north of us… maybe the gale blew the others along the north coast. If we go north for a ways and don’t find anything else washed up, we can turn around and concentrate our efforts south, along the other shore.”
“But for how long? At least if we split up, we can cover two directions at once,” Maxine pleaded as they made their way through thorny bushes, beneath the shade of high, unnamable trees with lush foliage and wide leaves.
Josh felt glad that Maxine was less wired than she’d been the night before now that she’d had some food and sleep. He, too, felt the pull of wanting to find their kids, but also knew that if they went off half-cocked and didn’t take account of the survival situation they were in, they wouldn’t help themselves or their kids by making the wrong decisions. And in making those decisions, Josh couldn’t help thinking they should rely heavily on Henry.
Henry, who had met up with Tally on the outskirts of Savannah, had been the son of a keen survivalist and prepper who had passed on much of his knowledge to his young son before he’d been killed by the forces working, ultimately, for Gabriel Angel. Henry had already proved himself invaluable in keeping Tally alive on the road north to the ranch, and again when they’d been separated from Maxine and Storm in Cumberland, before the trek back south to Castle Jaxport. He was an excellent shot, brave, and had a ton of survival smarts to impart as they walked.
“We can survive here for a good while once we run out of food, however long that might be,” he offered.
“You know what’s good and not good to eat, plant-wise, smart boy?” Ten-Foot asked. “In… this… jungle?”
Henry shook his head. “Nope. But I know how to find out. We can hunt and trap animals and birds; there will be plenty of those. We can collect fresh seaweed from the sea—not the stuff on the beach—and boil it or roast it. Full of iron and vitamin C. That’ll keep us going. And if we fail to find success in our hunts, we can test what plants are good to eat and which are not.”
Josh shook his head, dipping under a branch and holding another out of the way so Maxine and Ten-Foot could get through. “How do you do that without killing yourself in the process?”
Ten-Foot agreed, looking around the trees. “There’s gonna be a lot of stuff here just waiting to kill us.”
“True,” Henry said. Josh could see the boy was enjoying imparting his specialist knowledge to them, especially to Ten-Foot. Perhaps he was auditioning for him in the same way Josh himself had never been able to do for Donald in respect to Maxine. “But there are a pretty simple set of rules to follow when you’re choosing which plants to eat. Wanna hear the list? I learned it.”
Maxine and Josh exchanged glances—the boy certainly sounded like fine son-in-law material even if no one knew when another marriage ceremony might ever be carried out. “Sure,” Josh said. “Knock yourself out.”
Henry grinned, cutting through some brush with his knife. “Never eat plants with thorns—basic 101 survival. Avoid plants with shiny leaves. Easy to remember. Forget fungi. Many are okay to eat, but many are also toxic or deadly, so it’s just not worth the risk.”
Henry pushed through the next area of light brush in the dappled shadows and the ground began to rise. The comfortable heat of the morning was becoming sticky and humid at midday, and the discomfort of it all was compounded by the vegetation, even in the shade. Henry was out into a small clearing now, and he continued as they took a breather and a lesson. Ten-Foot looked at his nails and rolled his eyes a couple of times, but Josh knew that even though the probationer might be showing his aloofness, under it all, he’d be taking it in.
“Umbrella-shaped flowers are a bad sign. Steer well clear. Same with white or yellow berries. More likely than not, they’re gonna make you hurl. And if a plant’s sap is milky or discolored, leave it alone. Ready?”
Josh nodded as Ten-Foot side-eyed Henry. “You got any room left in that big brain of yours for anything normal, boy? You’re a walking internet.”
Henry looked askance at the ex-delinquent. Their lives couldn’t have been more different before the Barnard’s event. Street smarts and criminal mentality versus books and a sense of preparedness for whatever might come. Swap them in their respective environments, and would they have turned out differently? Probably not, thought Josh. You could only do what you could for your kids, he thought, and after that… well, after that, they had to become their own persons. Henry had found a way to survive that was just as cast iron and knowledgeable as Ten-Foot’s experience with the underbelly of the world. They’d both gotten this far, though, and that must say something.
“An internet is what we need right now. Carry on—north, and with your list please, Henry,” Maxine said to the boys. And Josh had to concur.
“Okay. Avoid beans or plants with seeds inside a pod. If it tastes soapy or bitter, get it out of your mouth stat. If it smells of almonds, pass. Same as with poison ivy, dodge plants with leaves in groups of three. And here endeth the lesson on what to avoid entirely; once we find some plants worth trying, I’ll teach you how to test each part of each type of plant that you might use for food.”
“Impressive,” Josh said. “You can be our chef.”
Henry smiled. “You got it.”
Ten-Foot carried on ahead of the group with Maxine almost but not quite at his side. Her determination to get water found as quickly as possible so that they could get on with the search ran almost as strong as Ten-Foot’s apparent desire to appear as useful to the group as Henry, and he showed it by taking the lead now, forging ahead through the brush and trees.
<
br /> Josh looked at the muscles in the boy’s shoulders, searching for signs of tenseness. He had been out of Halley’s improvised treatment program for two days now. There hadn’t been any signs of reversion to the Jekyll side of his character yet, but Josh knew he would have to keep the notion in his head that there might yet be such a change for the worse. Of course, the boy had changed of his own accord—without any treatment—a few times already. Perhaps the tides of exotic particles thrown out by the supernova had waned for the time being, and Ten-Foot would stay calm and amenable.
But Josh resolved not to let his guard down, and not to stop thinking that Ten-Foot might still be a time bomb with not that many ticks left on the clock.
Thinking that, Josh started as Ten-Foot, who had been taking up all his internal concentration for the last few minutes, yelled with triumph and threw his hand in the air before screaming and disappearing completely—dropped as if through a trapdoor—and Maxine, who had been close behind Ten-Foot, reached out to grab at him, got her fingers snagged in his shirt, and pitched over with a yell and was gone.
Tally was building a fire with Poppet when they heard the shots. Three of them—their rapports dampened by the surrounding vegetation, but loud enough to send a flock of multicolored birds, dotted with several bright red macaws, into the white-flecked blue of the sky.
Storm stood up from the rock where he’d been sitting, still lost in his own thoughts. He hadn’t helped collect the wood with Tally and Poppet, preferring to stay back at the makeshift camp while they did so. Since his cancer diagnosis, Tally had become used to him needing to sit out physical activity while undergoing chemotherapy for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but as the treatment had been a success, and he’d traveled from Boston and down the east coast of the continental United States to Florida pretty much under his own steam, she felt that it was just him being ornery and self-indulgent now.
Especially when there was work to be done.
However Storm was feeling about the situation with Josh and Gabe and the resolution Halley had provided, there was still work to be done, and she had told him as much. “Storm, we’re gonna need you to help out—you can’t leave everything to us. It’s not fair.”
Storm had not answered at all, and had only moved when they’d heard the gunshots.
Poppet got up from the fire and passed out weapons to the three of them from inside the raft. “Just in case we need them,” she said, looking into the trees and biting her lip. “We don’t know who else is on the island. Might just be Donald taking a potshot at dinner, but it’s best to be prepared.”
Twenty minutes later, Donald emerged from the tree line some fifty yards away from the camp. His shirt was drenched with sweat and stained with blood, but it wasn’t his. It belonged to a dark-bristled, pointy-eared, wild-looking pig that was dead and lain across his shoulders with a lolling head. There were two bullet wounds in its side and one in its head.
“Quenk,” Donald said as he threw the already gutted animal down near to the fire. “Collared peccary to you and me. Fast little critter, but I got him in the end. Good eating. Better than the rations in the raft, that’s for sure.”
Tally’s grandfather began butchering the animal there in the sand and handing pieces to Poppet to hold above the flames on sticks.
“We’re gonna be okay here, whatever happens,” Donald said. “However long we have to stay here, we’re not going to want for anything. All we have to do is make camp near some fresh water—and if tomorrow we head up this inlet, we’ll see where anything fresh is draining into it, and then we can start looking for the others.”
“Do we have to?”
Everyone looked at Storm. It was the first time he’d spoken in hours, and Tally felt the knots tying themselves tighter inside her as he finished the sentence. There was no anger in his voice or sarcasm—just flat seriousness. As if he was asking if it was okay for someone else to go to the store to get milk today instead of him. Matter of fact. Normal.
Mirror world normal.
“What are you saying?” The words were hot out of Donald’s mouth, like they were fizzing and spitting fat. “Yes, we do have to. I want to find my daughter and your dad, and I want Henry and anyone else back with us! If we’re going to get off the island, we need to find everyone. And damn it, Storm, you’re going to help us find them!”
Tally had been aware, secondhand, that her grandfather had a temper—not really having seen it herself—but it was now as if something incendiary had been ignited in him. If eyes had been gun barrels, Storm would have been shot to hell right now.
“Am I?” Still no rise or heat in Storm’s reply. He sounded like he was talking about a sandwich and soda. “I don’t want to find either of them. Henry, I don’t mind, but Mom lied to me all my life and Dad almost broke this family apart.”
Donald looked at Tally’s brother over the sizzling quenk meat, wafting smoke out of his eyes with maximum irritation. “While you’re with me, boy, you talk about your parents with the respect they deserve.”
“Respect?” Storm asked coolly, with an arched eyebrow. “When did you ever treat Mom with respect? You avoided her when we came to your place as kids, and you hated Dad. You were famous for it. Why can’t I be as pissed with them as you were, Grandfather?” Now there was something in Storm’s voice… something nearer to what Tally was feeling.
“The world as we know it is dead!” Storm hissed. “We’ve had the good fortune to wash up here with a clean slate. You said it yourself, that we can survive here with no problems. There’s food, we’ll find water, and we will be okay. I want that second chance, Grandfather.”
“My God, Storm!” Tally shouted, getting up and taking three steps towards her brother. “Listen to yourself. What has Gabriel turned you into? He’s not your father, and yet you’re as crazy and broken as he was! How did he brainwash you so completely in so short a time? You’re not him! You don’t have to treat people like this. They’re our parents! He hated them. You don’t have to!”
Donald stepped around the fire towards Storm, until they were close enough to strike. The old man’s hands were by his side, but his fists had begun bunching. “Listen to your sister, you damn stupid fool!”
Donald’s voice echoed along the beach, the waves on the surface of the inlet hissing and underlining his ragged breathing as he stopped and stared.
Tally followed Donald’s eyes, past Poppet’s shocked expression and down to Storm’s hand. He was holding a knife in his trembling fist, the blade pointing like death’s compass needle right in the direction of the old man’s heart. He wasn’t making a move with the knife yet, but the possibilities were clear.
All Tally’s determination to let Storm find his own way out of the hole he was in had disappeared. Tally couldn’t believe the garbage that had come out of her brother’s mouth. Yes, she could understand that he didn’t like being lied to by their mother, and that Josh drifting apart from Maxine had affected them all, but this was a step too far. If she didn’t do something to intercede between the two men now, their survival chances were going to drop to less than zero, however much food and water could be found on the island.
Especially now that Donald had a SIG, pulled from his belt and in his hand, and was sending that compass needle of anger right back at his grandson.
Tally stood up and put herself between her grandfather and brother, holding out her hands. Poppet, who had been watching the cooking meat, stood, as well, her eyes locking with Tally’s.
Poppet edged towards Donald, and Tally towards Storm.
“This is out of hand now, Storm. You don’t need to do this. If you want more time to get your head around what happened on the ship, then that’s fine. But I don’t want you pointing a knife at our granddaddy!”
Storm’s eyes flicked from where they were burrowing into Donald, back over to Tally. She could see a whole bunch of emotions dancing through them. Anger, desperation, and… yes… even fear.
Out of the corner of he
r eye, she could see that Poppet was putting a hand out to gently get the old man to lower the gun.
Tally reached out to Storm in a similar way, but her fingers never made contact because everybody’s attention was snapped immediately away by the clattering mechanical echoes of helicopter rotor blades as they scythed through the sky a mile or more away.
17
Maxine’s stomach jumped up through her body and slammed into her chest as she fell. Out of the gloom of the jungle and out into the bright light of the open air, she dropped past a rocky outcropping that was crested with greenery—the sky rotating, her arms flailing, and her feet coming up over her head.
She could only have been falling through the air for less than two seconds before she hit the boiling surface of the water, but she’d had time to see that one of her boot laces was undone, that the socks sticking out of them were different colors, and that there was a new tear in the knees of her jeans which meant she would have to get to the store as soon as possible to change them because…
Store…?
Maxine had enough space in the moment to see and think all this as time seemed to stretch out like a piece of chewing gum pulled between fingers and teeth.
The gum snapped as she hit the water headfirst.
The bright splash of impact that was followed by black silence was gone in a millisecond as the currents below the surface of the water clutched at her and began to spin her hard and fast. Something hard thudded into her shoulder. It could have been Ten-Foot’s boot or it could have been a rock. Even with her eyes open, Maxine couldn’t tell which way was up. She was end-over-ending, the water biting at her with shock as it ran all around her body and flung her in any direction it chose.
The lack of breath in her lungs was starting to burn and grind. The gritty water in her mouth felt like a plug, or a smothering pillow over her face. She was whipped by her own hair and then, with a rushing of bubbles and a solid whooooooooomph, her head broke the surface and all was light again.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 16