But on her way back to the center building after one such outing, the yellow glow from a cigarette lighter momentarily blinded her eyes, flaring them out of being accustomed to the starry darkness. Maxine held up her hand to shield her eyes from the flame.
“Hey,” Maxine said. “You gave me a fright.”
“That’s nothing,” a voice which she hadn’t heard for three days now said. “Wait until I show you my face.”
The Harbormen didn’t return to Evergreen or make their way up to Bluehills that morning. Josh had sent Ten-Foot and Lemming down the track to keep watch over the stretch of river to give them advance warning if Gabe’s men came paddling through again.
Henry and Tally spent much of the morning collecting the driest of wood and twigs from the surrounding jungled areas behind the center. Josh had still been skeptical about building fires to cook with, but Henry said that now that the sun was up and they’d uncovered some equipment from the activity’s stores, namely a couple of small entrenching shovels, he would build them a “Dakota Fire Hole,” which, he promised Josh, was the best “stealth fire they could build, produced little smoke, and would not show any flames that might lead anyone to the center during the night.”
Josh had watched as Henry had dug two holes close to each other in the mulchy soil. One hole was three feet deep and two feet across while its sister hole was about half as deep and just as wide while being just a foot and a half away. Henry dug down through the side of the smaller hole, making a tunnel through to the larger hole so they were joined.
“You put the fuel in the big hole,” Henry explained, shoving dry sticks into the space he’d dug. “Tightly pack it in, and you make sure it’s as dry as you can get it. Drier the fuel, the less smoke it will create.” He put some tinder dry made up of dead leaves and grass down among the twigs and lit it with a lighter. “The smaller hole and the tunnel draw down oxygen into the base of the fire, making it burn hotter than hell. The hotter your fire, the less smoke it creates, too. Burns any dampness off really quickly. You can’t see the flames at any time from a distance because it’s at the bottom of a hole, and if you get the fuel right, there’s very little smoke at all. We can keep the fire burning all day to boil water, and cook as much as we want at night.”
Josh was impressed. “Organize the others to get all of the fuel you need. Then we can talk about hunting.”
“Trapping,” Henry said with a smile, looking up from his fire pit. “Easier to set snares and traps around here. We go hunting, they’ll hear the shots for miles around.”
Josh couldn’t help but smile back at the boy. He was an asset who was really finding his place in this crazy, mixed-up world, and the way that Tally was mooning over him now gave Josh a warm and joyous feeling he hadn’t felt for a long time. In the midst of all this carnage, love had found a way. That gave him more hope for the future than he could have imagined just a week before.
It felt good.
That Halley had returned to the fold the night before, Josh knew should have filled him with a similar sense of optimism, but as of yet, it hadn’t. Just having the professor back in the camp had turned Storm into a sullen, uncommunicative cypher again. Halley had been, in his words, “Swept around the headland in the storm, half drowned, and thought I was dead a dozen times. I was in a pretty bad way until I realized where I was.”
He’d continued on to say, as he had sat down with Josh and Maxine the night before, “I made for my house in Evergreen and saw what had happened to it, and all the bodies—fresh bodies—so realized it wasn’t a place to stay and made my way up the track to Bluehills, as it was the nearest place that I thought I could stay without having to build a shelter without any damn tools. I have nothing, not even a knife. Damn, was I glad to see Maxine as I came into the compound!”
Halley said he knew nothing about the helicopter and had had nothing to do with it or whoever might have been piloting the contraption. They may have found a way of getting it to work that mirrored his own attempts to get machinery working again. Improvised copper shielding, perhaps. Or something else he hadn’t considered. Talbot, the port town on the other side of the island, had sometimes had a military presence of ships stopping off, but he didn’t know if there had been any stopping there at the time of the event. “It’s possible,” he’d said, “but the only way to tell would be to take a walk over there.”
“With no guarantee as to what or who you’d be walking into,” Josh had replied.
“True,” Halley had said sadly.
They’d slept in the plush, comfy seats in the lecture theater, taking turns keeping watch outside. It had been a quiet, easy, if hungry night. Henry and Tally had then gotten on with finding tools and digging the fire pit first thing that morning.
Josh didn’t know where Storm had spent the night and was glad to see him still there in the morning, coming up from a pile of small, inflatable buoyancy aids he’d turned into a mattress for himself behind the counter in the entrance hall. It had been away from Halley and everyone else, and Josh hadn’t felt it a good idea to speak to Storm about how he was feeling yet. They didn’t exactly exchange pleasantries as they passed each other going in and out of the building for morning ablutions, either. Josh would wait for his son to speak to him. Going all-in with Maxine when he’d found out from her mother what had happened between her and Gabe had caused enough damage. Maxine still bore a small scar on her cheek from where she’d crashed into a barbeque as she’d pulled away from Josh at the M-Bar Ranch. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again.
So, he’d gone out to watch Henry and Tally, but now that that was done, they needed to make a council of war. Things had to be brought to a head once and for all.
“There’s no point waiting for them to find us,” Josh said to the probationers, his family, Poppet, Henry, and Halley. “We have to take the fight to them or all we’re doing is waiting for them to overrun us. We have a fair number of guns, ammo, and grenades buried where we landed. That alone will not guarantee that we can beat them, but you saw the way we fought them off at Evergreen. The Harbormen—and Gabe—are not natural soldiers or tacticians. If we give ourselves the element of surprise, we might, just might, be able to get this over with and set about building a place here on the island for us to live—until this thing is sorted out once and for all, we can’t do that. But you’re all going to have to put your lives on the line. I can’t force you to take this action or make you fight with me. If we’re going to build this new life for ourselves here, we’re going to have to fight for it.”
Josh took a deep breath, and he studied every face in the room before he spoke again. “And if you’re willing, this is how we’re going to do it.”
21
The Grimoire was anchored a hundred and fifty yards offshore at the mouth of the inlet where Tally, Donald, Poppet, and Storm had been washed up.
The ship was still stable and afloat, but the rigging was a mess. There was one mast missing completely and fire had damaged the prow. Rails had been blown out by the explosion from the fire. It looked wounded, but with a bit of work, it could be seaworthy again, Donald told Maxine. He passed her the binoculars so that she could see the boat for herself.
There was a little movement on the deck. Some red-uniformed figures were using tools to fix what they could of the damage the battle and the storm had wrought upon the ship. Maxine half-expected to see Gabriel moving across the decks and giving orders, but he was nowhere to be seen. The boat the Harbormen had used to attack Evergreen was tied to the side of the Grimoire by a line, and there was one man in it who was being thrown stores from another on deck.
“They’re getting ready for another expedition,” Maxine said.
“Or to hunt us down,” Donald offered uninvitingly.
“How long do you think before Josh gets here?”
Donald shook his head. “Hour or so, maybe more. They’ve got a lot of gear to dig up and bring back here.”
Josh had taken Henry, T
en-Foot, and Marshal down to the beach where his party’s raft had washed up. There were considerable amounts of ammo and weaponry there. Donald had put as much as he’d dared in with Josh and the others just before he’d launched them in the raft from the deck of the Sea-Hawk.
Maxine, Poppet, Donald, and the others were looking down from the jungle and across the inlet to the Grimoire, staying well back in the trees and keeping out of sight. Only Maxine and Donald had gone forward enough through the trees to get a good view of the ship, and now the enormity of what Josh was asking them to do came home to Maxine.
She had to admit to herself that Josh had been impressive giving his speech back at Bluehills. There was to be no respite, and she understood what he was saying. Unless they finished things with Gabe and his men, they would always be targets. And now she could see that it wouldn’t be long before the Grimoire was able to set sail, and then it could easily leave the island, get back to Jaxport, and bring back reinforcements at Gabe’s whim. There had to be a final reckoning, and she’d agreed with Josh as he’d roused them all and explained his plan.
It was just now, in the humid heat of the afternoon, that she could see the battle ahead was going to be a difficult one. Josh and Donald had made it onto the ship once before to rescue Storm, but the Harbormen would be wise to that kind of attack now, and they’d be prepared for it, without question.
That’s why Josh’s plan had to be so audacious. Maxine was not at all sure about it, but Donald thought it was worth trying, and Henry had given it his full-throated support. The rest of the survivors from the Sea-Hawk had been swept along with that support in going forward.
All of them except Halley.
Halley hadn’t said a thing about Josh’s plan of action, and his lack of comment on it was as worrying as if he’d completely trashed it. In Maxine’s experience, Halley had never been neutral about anything. He always had an idea, or input to offer on someone else’s. But on this, he’d been silent.
“So, Professor, what’s your take on this?” Josh had asked Halley, and the response had been minimal.
Halley had shrugged, left the lecture theater, and gone outside to sit by Henry’s Dakota hole, cooking some strips of caiman left over from the carcass.
Maxine had gone to him as the meeting had broken up and sat down with him. “You okay?”
Halley had shrugged again. “I’m tired of fighting. I just want to get on with fixing people and fixing the machines. It can all be done, but if I get caught up in this and I get hurt… or worse, killed… what will we do then?”
Maxine hadn’t felt it right to point out that someone had obviously had a way of making the helicopter work, so maybe Halley wasn’t as important as he thought he was. In fact, she wondered if the problem was that, for the first time, he’d seen that he wasn’t indispensable. He’d been telling them this morning that, as well as Henry setting traps, one of the things they needed to do as soon as possible was get as many dopamine-producing foods into their diet as possible in order to counter the effects of the supernova. They needed omega-3-rich fish, nuts such as walnuts and almonds, and as much unprocessed protein like beef and chicken as they could source. Bananas, too, as many as they could find and cultivate. “We need to be prioritizing all of this now,” Halley had said. “You won’t be able to fight a war if Ten-Foot or one of the others regress back to madness. We need to set up water tanks for immersion therapies. We need to be doing all that, not fighting.”
Maxine had seen the passion in Halley’s face and heard it in his voice, and that morning she had pressed him, “So, why don’t you go and tell Josh that?”
Halley had only snorted. “Do you think he’ll listen to me? He’s set on getting his own revenge on Gabriel for trying to take his son. I fixed that, as well! Where’s the gratitude for showing you all the truth? And anyway, how would they find us here if they don’t know about us being here? If we stay hidden, they’ll eventually get bored and go away.”
Maxine herself had been able to see that none of this was realistic. Like all of them, Halley had been through hell since the supernova—he’d seen his sister die and been caught in many battles and desperate situations. “You’ve been close to death too many times, Robert,” Maxine had said. “We all have. And Josh is right. We have to stop it. We have to take the fight to them.”
Halley had shaken his head and clamped his mouth shut, his face pale as he avoided looking at her. Maxine had stayed with him for ten minutes, and Halley hadn’t spoken anything more to her, so she’d gotten up and turned to go.
“See?” Halley asked, as she’d taken her first step. She turned and saw he was poking himself in the chest, hard, three times, and fixing her with his wildest gaze. “You couldn’t find me in here, so you got up and went away.”
So, after Maxine had spoken to Josh, they’d decided that Halley would be tasked with staying at the Bluehills center with Lash and KK to get on with searching the surrounding area for the foods he thought they needed to protect their minds from the effects of the Barnard’s Star. If the truth be told, KK and Lash had been nearly as relieved as Halley to not be involved in the forthcoming battle, and they’d said as much to Maxine.
She couldn’t blame them, thinking about how their lives had changed, too.
“How is it looking?” Karel was crawling up on her knees and elbows to rest beside Maxine where she crouched looking out over the inlet.
“Quiet, thankfully,” Maxine said. “How are the catapults?”
Which, Maxine had to admit to herself, was one of the more bizarre sentences she’d ever said in her life. Josh, with Tally and Henry, had found drums of bungee rope when they’d gone through the stores at the activity center, the supplies having been meant for when the visitors to the center got tired of rafting and kayaking, so they could bungee off a high scaffold that had been built next to a less frenetic stretch of the river. The bungee ropes had given Josh the basis of his plan. Making it feasible, they’d also found snorkels, masks, flippers, weighted belts, and a number of full tanks of air reserved for scuba diving.
Karel smiled. “All ready. We’ve been collecting rocks to send flying over—all we need to do is put them in position when all hell breaks loose.”
The idea behind the catapults would be to use them in the night to pepper the Grimoire and keep the Harbormen on it occupied, all while the other stuff Josh had planned played out. Hopefully, the Harbormen would assume there was very little ammo spread out among the attacking forces—which was true, to an extent—and lulling them into a false sense of superiority would hopefully make them lax and complacent.
Maybe.
There had been a good stock of equipment in a well-equipped gymnasium in one of the other buildings Lemming and Ten-Foot had broken into, and that helped. In the two days since Josh’s speech, they’d located the Grimoire anchored off the opening to the inlet, and there had been feverish activity undertaken to repurpose as much as they could from the center—turning otherwise innocuous supplies into weapons or adjuncts to battle.
And when Josh and others made it back to Maxine’s position, the battle would begin.
Donald had given Josh, Henry, and Karel as much instruction in the use of the aqualungs as he could, but it was still a moment of counterintuitive activity. One to be resisted. To put his head beneath the water and try to breathe as normally as he could without panicking was a tough ask.
Josh had always been a good swimmer, but going under water in near darkness, over coral and around the black rocks close to the beach, was proving as difficult as it was dangerous. Under normal circumstances, the one hundred and fifty yard swim from the shore to the boat wouldn’t have held much in the way of fear for Josh, but doing the whole journey underwater, with only the occasional moment with his head above water to check that their direction was sound, was a whole other kettle of fish.
Donald swam alongside Josh, with Henry and Karel just behind them. The waves were thankfully gentle, but they had to swim below the
troughs in them at a depth of just over a yard, the weighted belts giving them a neutral buoyancy to ensure they didn’t crest the surface of the water and provide an inviting target for the Harbormen on the Grimoire.
“Why don’t we just blow it out of the water with the grenades?” Ten-Foot had asked the night before, even as Josh had gone over his plan again in the lecture hall.
“We need to try to take the boat intact,” Josh had replied. “We might need it one day to get ourselves back to the mainland. We don’t know what other craft there are on the island. Sinking it would cut off our noses to spite our face.”
Ten-Foot had shrugged. “We’s well set up here, Boss Man. All we can eat forever. We’s fine.”
“And how do we and Halley get back to the mainland to show people the treatment for the Barnard’s madness?” Poppet had piped up. Her face had fallen as she’d realized what she had said, though, and she’d followed it up with an immediate apology to Ten-Foot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think before I spoke. I didn’t mean…”
Ten-Foot had glared at her. “I’m doing what I should––two hours in the river every day. If I eat any more of those bananas Halley and Lash are forcing on me, I’ll start to look like one. I’m okay. You can trust me.”
“It’s okay,” Josh had soothed. “We know you’re good to go, Ten-Foot. Poppet didn’t mean anything.”
Ten-Foot had kissed his teeth and shrugged. “Okay, but it’s not madness if it’s caused by that star, right? It’s just a condition, an illness. Right? I’m not mad.”
And Josh had agreed with the boy. Ten-Foot was turning into a proud man, Josh could see. He was more of an asset than a hindrance, and although it had been kind of sweet to see him competing with Henry for being the most useful, he was also finding his own niche amongst the group. That of a strong man and fighter. He’d finally found a place for himself, and Poppet’s talk of madness had shaken the foundations he was building for his identity in this new world. It had been quite a ride for the boy—from criminal, to probationer, to evil soldier in the thrall of Gabriel Angel, to this boy who was trying to become a man they could trust.
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 20