Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End

by Hamilton, Grace

  It had been while on the search for fresh water that Karel’s group had heard Maxine’s scream. As they’d approached the river, they’d seen her plop into the pool right in front of the basking reptile that had wanted Maxine for lunch.

  As they talked, Karel led Maxine and the probationers back around the edge of the pool and over to the white-crested rapids. There was no sign of Ten-Foot in the water, but he could have gone much further downstream by now, swept away on the current. The rapids wouldn’t go on forever as they made their way down the mountain, though; they would get to calmer waters eventually. “We should follow the water back downstream; he may have got snagged somewhere,” Maxine said, and Karel agreed.

  As they struck off in the direction Maxine had suggested, the group felt good-humored and relieved to have picked up another of the survivors from the wrecked ship. If truth be told, Maxine got the impression that the probationers at least were happy to have another trustworthy adult around, even if they wouldn’t admit it to her out loud.

  “Look!”

  Maxine and Karel turned to see Scally pointing across the river, thirty or more yards to a beach on the other side of the water. Josh and Henry were pulling Ten-Foot from the water where he’d snagged on an overhanging branch. The rapids were no longer rushing and frothing at this point. The river ran briskly, but far from a raging torrent of white water.

  They called to Josh and the others, Maxine waving across the water to her husband and Henry. Ten-Foot was now sitting up, coughing and spitting into the mud.

  They could just make out the voices of the others calling back to them across the river, but it seemed clear that each group felt serious relief about the fact that both Maxine and Ten-Foot had survived their ordeal, and that now they had as much fresh water as they needed. Not to mention the fact that Karel’s group had been found and joined up with them.

  Through judicious use of sign language, it was decided that Josh and his party would go downstream a little further to where they could see a narrowing in the course of the river and come across.

  Josh and the others, once they reached the narrowed bend in the river, waded waist-deep through the briskly flowing but not too savagely moving water.

  “You made it,” Josh said, coming to Maxine once he’d climbed the bank on the other side of the river.

  “Just about,” she said, accepting his saturated hug. “If it wasn’t for Karel here, though, I wouldn’t be anything but an ugly reptile’s lunch. A caiman, I think. But who knows? I certainly don’t.”

  Henry was studying the dead reptile that was looped over Marshal’s shoulder. Ten-Foot, mostly recovered from his ordeal in the water, observed it, as well. “Damn ugly before you shot its face off.”

  “Yup,” Henry said. “A spectacled caiman, but it’s a long way from home. Unless the storm blew us all the way to Cuba. Probably escaped from a home or school lab. Definitely not native. And look.”

  Henry held up one of the creature’s back legs. There was a small hooped piece of plastic on it with a barcode and a serial number. “Definitely escaped from somewhere.” Henry looked around the riverbank and into the trees. “Let’s hope it wasn’t from a zoo with tigers, mmm?”

  Maxine shivered. She really hadn’t needed that thought in her head right now.

  Then something else insistently invaded the space where the imaginary tiger might have remained in her thoughts.

  Thwop- Thwop- Thwop- Thwop- Thwop- Thwop…

  The hiss of the river was replaced by the distant strop of helicopter rotor blades on the air above the island.

  “Josh! Is that a…” Maxine began as they all scanned the skies.

  “Yes!” Josh replied. “Yes, it is.”

  It was Ten-Foot who saw it first—heading over the jungle towards the mountain, low enough for them to see that it was black, traveling fast, and not coming in their direction. Not even close, but skimming the tree tops with deliberate speed and height.

  Maxine felt Josh’s hand on her arm, squeezing. “My God,” he said as the helicopter became a black dot and then disappeared into the haze of distance. “We might be saved.”

  “Unless it’s Gabriel,” said Ten-Foot.

  They were mostly old-timers in comfortable stretch pants and Hawaiian shirts. Grey-faced rich men in panama hats with fat wives who had pearls around their turkey wattle throats and swinging arm fat that jounced above their elbows.

  They were also murderous and armed with axes, kitchen knives, boat hooks, and garden shears. There were nearly twenty of them bounding out of the trees like banshees, screaming and yelling. Their eyes blazed with the madness Tally had seen many times before on her trek across the U.S., and their clothes, although obviously expensive and appropriate for the climate in normal times, were now stained, torn, and ragged. Some only had one shoe on while others were bleeding from wounds they took no notice of. All they appeared to be intent on was flooding out from between the trees and attacking Tally and the others.

  Even with handguns and Poppet’s AK-47 in clear view, many of the attacking elderly rich of the island made their way through the hail of bullets and past their fallen compatriots. Panama hats splashed with blood rolled on the beach. Multi-colored beach shirts flapped open to show chunks of bullet-torn and wrinkled but well-tanned flesh. Fake breasts exploded in situ as they were hit by the gunfire, but the relentless march of the attackers soon became hand-to-hand fighting.

  Tally ducked an axe swung by an octogenarian with foam-flecked lips and liver-spotted forearms. She fell onto her backside and fired two rounds from her SIG into his chest. The magazine clicked empty as the body sagged and fell, only to be replaced by a corpulent woman with horn-rimmed spectacles, the lenses showing spiderwebs of cracks, coming at her with a long, mahogany boathook. Tally dropped the gun and prepared herself for impact. The shaft of the hook stabbed past Tally’s side as she twisted, and it dug into the earth. Tally grabbed the wood as firmly as she could, pressing the shaft back at the old woman. It took her in her fleshy gut and sent her flopping backwards, her legs kicking up and showing pink fluffy slippers on the ends of her feet.

  Tally used the boathook as a staff to get herself back to her feet and swung it at the next moneyed islander, a thin man who had already lost half his jaw in the gunfire from the AK-47. His chest was a mass of blood and slippery teeth, but he kept on coming, his eyes black pools of murder.

  Poppet, who had just clicked in a new magazine for the machine gun, peppered his skull and shoulders with bullets before Tally had a chance to swing the business end of the boathook around to hit him, so it scythed through empty air. Luckily, it hit a grey-haired septuagenarian wearing a dinner jacket over his naked, emaciated and bloody frame, sending him cartwheeling sideways like badly sliced gold shot to T-bone a woman in a turquoise sarong who’d been about to throw her carbon steel chef knife at Tally.

  Poppet’s hand fell on Tally’s shoulder and she was pushed away as an old guy—who was dressed thirty years too young for his age and had a black mustache on his top lip, which didn’t match the white hair on his head and looked dyed—ran forward with a screaming yowl, his hands held out like claws. As he went down under a hail of Poppet’s bullets sent into his back, Tally saw the toupee flapping off the back of his skull like bunting in the wind.

  “Fall back!” Donald was shouting. At the same time, he kept stabbing a man in long bathing shorts and beach shoes, running his knife into his chest and pushing him away from him.

  There were more emerging from the trees. Intent on reaching them. Intent, from the looks in their eyes, on killing them.

  Storm had already taken a dozen steps back and was picking off attackers as he could with accurate head shots, and Tally and Poppet got back to his shoulder, Poppet reloading again and passing Tally a replacement SIG from the rucksack so that the three of them could form a line, firing into the bodies as they came.

  Donald came around behind them, his face and upper torso covered in blood—thankfully, not h
is own—and he threw down his knife, pulled another pistol, a Beretta, from the rucksack, and began to pick off attackers in the same calm way as Storm.

  In thirty seconds, there were only two of the psychotically murderous residents left, still coming and still holding out their axes and knives, and they were cut down effectively by the four in Tally’s party.

  In the silence that followed, Tally fell to her knees, realizing she hadn’t drawn a breath for nearly a minute and a half. Her heart had been in her throat, seemingly blocking her windpipe with adrenaline-fueled breathing.

  Poppet kneeled down beside her. “You okay? Are you hurt?”

  Tally shook her head and spat iron-tasting saliva from her mouth. “No, I’m fine. I’m good. Just… need a breath.”

  Donald and Storm were still standing side by side, their guns dropped to their sides in limp hands, breathing hard. Not looking at each other, as if they were each waiting for the other one to speak first.

  Tally looked at them both, at their blank faces and their hard eyes and their deep-rising chests, wishing for the moment to flip over into something new. Wishing as hard as she dared. It took another twenty seconds, but it happened. Donald sighed, put the pistol in his belt, and without looking at his grandson, said quietly, “You did well, son.”

  Storm didn’t look at the old man in turn, but he put his pistol back behind his belt and said, “Thanks, Gramps,” and that was that.

  It wasn’t a complete thawing of the ice between them, but there was a sign of spring, at least.

  The retirement settlement for rich folk was deserted. Probably because they’d killed all of the residents back on the beach. It was eerily quiet beyond their feet crunching on glass from many broken windows. The place stank of decay. In the houses, freezers had been ransacked, and fridges were dead and filled with mold. Milk cartons sat furry and rank.

  Whatever the residents had been eating to survive in the months since the Barnard’s event, it didn’t look like it had been any of the food they’d had in their houses. Tally found the rotting corpse of a dead dog that looked like its legs had been chewed off by another animal—some animal that didn’t bear thinking about. In the back room of one of the houses, they found three smashed aquariums which had contained large reptiles that had long since been released or escaped. There was also an enclosed run from the room going out the back of the property to a large pool in which the half-eaten carcass of an iguana floated upside down in the scum-covered water.

  “How did they survive this long without food?” Tally wondered as they made their way into the next property. It had been a sumptuous residence with expensive furniture, top of the range vinyl players, huge wall-mounted TVs—now smashed—and wardrobes full of sarongs and Hawaiian shirts.

  “No idea,” said Poppet. “I guess there’s enough fruit and stuff in the jungle. Perhaps they just ate what they could find.”

  Donald walked out onto a wide veranda that overlooked the small scalloped bay the houses had been built to face. Storm was rifling through drawers in a cabinet, while Poppet looked through the labels of wine bottles in a rack.

  Tally joined Donald on the veranda. “Well, we’ve got fresh water in the bay and a base of operations now. When can we start looking for Mom and Dad?”

  Donald was looking through binoculars, peering downriver from the way they had come. He’d stiffened as she’d spoken, and there was ice in his voice as he passed her the glasses and replied, “I don’t think we’re going to be staying here any longer than it takes to get the hell away again.”

  Tally put the binoculars to her eyes and scanned the direction Donald had indicated.

  A small wooden boat with three oars on both sides was sculling slowly towards the bay. There were perhaps eight crew in the vessel as it moved towards them.

  Eight of Gabriel Angel’s Harbormen.

  19

  It was the gunfire that led them further down the river, away from where they had crossed it and where they had seen the helicopter. Josh had immediately wanted to strike out back across the expanse of water he’d just waded through and try to follow a route through the jungle, heading in the direction the helicopter had gone. Maxine, who had been warming to him in the last day, and who was also backed up by Henry and Karel now, had said they shouldn’t do that—that they needed to stay in the river and could traverse ground along its length in either direction looking for the others. They’d also be looking for fresh water, after all, and the river might attract everyone who’d been wrecked on the island.

  “But the helicopter,” Josh had said, “that’s evidence of civilization.”

  “Unless it’s Gabe,” Ten-Foot had repeated.

  “Gabe is dead,” Josh had said emphatically. “We left him on the Grimoire without sail or a mainmast in the middle of a storm. He’s at the bottom of the ocean now.”

  Josh had convinced himself of this over the past few hours. The Sea-Hawk had had a sail and a crew who’d mostly known what they were doing under the command of poor Dotty-B. Gabe would have been up the creek without a paddle, so to speak.

  “We should try to get to where the helicopter was heading to. There may be a base. Government, soldiers… they may be out searching for us because they already have Donald, Storm, and Tally safely found.”

  But he hadn’t gotten anywhere with the others, pursuing that argument.

  “If they were searching,” Henry had pointed out, “they’d have been quartering the jungle, and they would have come back on another heading to cover what they missed. That was a point-to-point journey. Maybe they’ve only just gotten it working. Halley can’t be the only person who’d know how to get around the effects of Barnard’s supernova. He’s not the only smart person on the planet. His shielding idea will have occurred to others.”

  “But what if it was Halley?” Josh persisted. “We don’t know if he’s alive or dead. If he’s alive, he’s going to be one of the most valuable people right now.”

  “More than our kids?” Maxine had asked tartly.

  “No, of course not. But they all might be together. We should go that way!” Josh had said, pointing to the mountain along the route that the low-flying helicopter had taken.

  And then the distant clatter of gunfire had turned all of their eyes downstream. The battle sounded like it was raging fiercely and continuously.

  “That might be Storm and Tally being attacked!” Maxine had said, and that had been the last of the discussion. With one last yearning look across the tops of the trees towards the mountain, Josh had been swept along with the party, downstream and towards the gunfire.

  Their speed was reasonable under the circumstances. The muddy, rocky banks of the river were easily traversable for the time being, and when great limestone slabs couldn’t be easily climbed over, the route around them through the jungle trees was easily followed. Within five minutes of their mission downstream beginning, the gunfire stopped. If anything, however, that quickened their pace, and Maxine became even more keen to get down to where the sounds of the battle had come from in order to find out what had happened.

  Within half an hour, they came to a bend in the river, where they couldn’t see more than a hundred yards ahead.

  And that’s when the firing started up again.

  “Get ready,” Josh said, unhooking his pistol from his belt and racking the barrel. “We don’t know what’s going on around there, or even if it’s anything to do with our people. We might have just stumbled on someone else’s war. So, we take no unnecessary risks, clear?”

  Everyone with a weapon nodded and made them ready. There were a couple of submachine guns of the AK-47 variety, but most everyone had pistols, and Josh knew that, in terms of what they had carried up from the beach, ammunition was at a premium. They had hidden what ammo they couldn’t carry before they’d lit out that morning, so it was comforting to know there was a small cache of back-up firepower if they needed it, but that didn’t make the idea of going into battle now any more appealin
g.

  “Keep down and move slowly,” Josh said to the others as he began to move forward.

  The sounds of battle now seemed much more urgent and fiercer than it had before. Compared to this, he felt that the first battle had sounded a little one-sided. Now, what they could hear sounded like there were shots being fired from all directions as gunfire rattled and reverberated around them.

  Moving forward with his head down as best he could, Josh covered the uneven ground with the SIG sitting heavy and cold in his hand. He had three spare mags in the back pockets of his jeans. If they got involved in a firefight, though, he wouldn’t be able to continue firing indefinitely, and this thought was sharpening his thinking. He wished he’d been able to persuade his group to follow the helicopter. They had no idea right now what they were walking into. He understood Maxine’s desire to find their kids—and hell, he felt it acutely, too—but if they all got themselves dead or injured, they wouldn’t be finding anyone today. Or on any day after this one, for that matter.

  The trees on the corner of the bend were thin enough now for him to make some sense of the battle that was raging beyond them. He saw a small freshwater bay where a group of white-walled, high-end residences had been built in a secluded but idyllic jungle location. Smoke and muzzle flashes were coming from the houses out across the water, and as Josh looked on, following the line of the fire, he noticed a small oared craft bobbing in the water. Men dressed in the red of the Harbormen were firing into the houses, returning the fire that was being sprayed upon them. They had metal SWAT shields with view holes, and were taking shots from behind them. Josh could see one red-clothed body lying face down in the water.

  “Gabe’s men,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Well, there’s a thing, Boss Man,” Ten-Foot said, close to his ear between the crackling reports. Josh could hear the grim humor in the boy’s voice with its near sing-song, I told you so tone.