Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End

by Hamilton, Grace

  He was seventy yards from the shore. He looked back. The boats were still around the Grimoire, but they seemed to have completely lost him now.

  He dove below the surface again and kicked out. His shoulder ached, but he pushed the thoughts of pain from his mind. All he wanted to do was get back to the shore and find his wife and kids. Once he knew they were safe, he could work out what he was going to do about rescuing them and then seeing to Gabe while releasing the captives on the boat. He hated the idea of escaping and leaving Donald and the others there, but a free Josh gave them more of a chance of staying alive than a captured one.

  He was sure they wouldn’t come to harm while Gabe thought he could use them for leverage, too, but that wouldn’t make their time there any more appealing and safer. He would need to get them off the Grimoire as fast as possible.

  The dull thudding thwop-thwop-thwop of the helicopter shattered the gentle calm of the nighttime waves as Josh broke the surface again.

  As he watched in abject horror, the small flying machine, night black and seen as an erasure of stars rather than as an impossible machine, swooped low over the waves and headed for the Grimoire.

  And then there was a hiss, a bright light that illuminated the whole sea, and the rocket the helicopter had fired at the ship hit it amidships, sending up a fountain of fire.

  Josh’s hand slammed into the face of a dead Harborman who had been blown off the stricken Grimoire in the explosion. He’d been swimming blindly back towards the ship since the helicopter’s attack, and was now coming into contact with debris from the missile’s detonation and the smashed bodies thrown out by it.

  The Grimoire was making a good attempt at staying afloat, but from the hole ripped in the side to the tilting aspect of the hull—the bow nearly lifting clear of the sea’s surface—it seemed clear that this was a battle it was going to lose in the next few minutes. Stark in the moon and nebula light, the Grimoire was breathing its last oxygen.

  Josh pushed the body away from him as he pulled himself closer to the ship with more carefully judged strokes. The body rolled lazily away and sank below the surface.

  Josh was now navigating through torn planks, pieces of ripped sail, snaking ropes, and the detritus of life aboard a ship. He made for the prow. It was dipping closest to the waves––making it the easiest place to haul himself aboard.

  He couldn’t have just waited to watch the ship go down, not while knowing that Donald, Karel, and Henry were bound up in Gabe’s cabin. They would more than likely have been left to drown while the so-called king got himself to safety.

  He couldn’t just leave them to die.

  Putting himself on a sinking sailboat was not the best move to stop himself from joining them in their demise, he knew, but that intelligence was secondary to his intentions right now.

  A line flailing above Josh from the ship’s forward mast’s cross spars was grabbed in both hands, and Josh pulled himself up, flinging his leg over the splintered rail. The seawater beneath him now was rushing white with turbulence, huge bubbles of air bursting to the surface from the gutted ship.

  The helicopter no longer flew overhead; after its sweep over the soon-to-be- wrecked ship, it had moved on, although Josh thought he could still hear it as he crashed onto the deck.

  A screaming Harborman sped past him along the raked vessel, having let loose or been shaken from wherever he’d been clinging to. There was a crunching thud as he slammed into a bulwark. Josh looked up the deck towards the rear of the ship. Some Harbormen were heading to the rails, preparing to jump into the sea. Others were clinging to ropes or stays, petrified. One was shouting, “I can’t swim! What should I do? I can’t swim!”

  Josh got to his feet like a novice surfer climbing onto his board and began to walk up the steepening deck. Where he could, he held onto whatever sturdy piece of woodwork came to hand. The ship was shuddering, and the bow still rising, but he could make steady progress. The Harbormen on the deck were ignoring him completely, more concerned with their own safety than getting at him.

  At the abandoned wheelhouse was the hatch through which Gabriel and his men had taken Josh and the others when they’d been captured. The doors to the short staircase were swinging outwards and the dark interior didn’t look at all inviting. But as there was no water rushing about below decks in this section of the Grimoire, at least, it was a better prospect than going down any other hatches forward of this point.

  Recognizing with a chill that he was unarmed, Josh knew that going down into the dark on a sinking boat should give him pause, what with his not knowing what else he would find down there. A quick look around the deck and through the windows of the wheelhouse proffered no immediate weapons, though, so there was no choice to be made. He took a breath and began to climb down.

  The Grimoire was screeching and reverberating in its death throes. Through the superstructure of the vessel, it sounded like vast lengths of wood were being twisted and snapped by sea-giants from the depths, their stomachs rumbling like echoing caves as they ate the ship mouthful by mouthful.

  The stairs bucked and Josh smashed into the side wall, tumbling the last few steps into the raked corridor. His arm hurt like hell, but out of the water now, the blood in the cuts of his face—made when he’d propelled himself through the window—was starting to congeal.

  Regaining his footing, Josh made his way along the lantern-lit wooden tomb to where the door to Gabe’s cabin stood closed.

  He pushed his hand against the trembling wood, not sure if it was him or the door that was shaking the most.

  No give.

  He tried the handle.

  Locked.

  Damn.

  He heaved his body against the door, but it stood firm in the frame. Josh thumped on the slick surface of the door. “Donald! Karel! Are you in there?”

  “Yes! Is that you, Josh?!”

  Karel. Her voice cracked and croaky. “It’s me. Is Gabe in there with you?”

  “No!” she yelled. “He locked us in to drown! Hurry! Donald’s in a bad way!”

  Josh nodded to himself, took four steps back, and then, harder and faster than he’d moved for the effort it had taken him to get through the cabin window, he hit the door with his uninjured shoulder.

  The door deformed in the frame, but did not open.

  Once more.

  Crash.

  Again.

  Crash.

  This time, a kick was aimed directly on the lock and the door sprung open. Josh was inside. The two guards who had been covering them when he’d been inside the space before were dead. Shot through the head, their failure to stop Josh’s escape meaning they’d paid the ultimate sacrifice for Gabe’s anger. Their bodies had slid across the tilting deck and lay crumpled in the corner.

  Karel and Henry were on their backsides, hands still behind their backs, but now with added restraint. There was rope tied cruelly tight around their ankles––to stop them, Josh surmised, from following him out the window.

  Donald lay unconscious. He’d taken another beating, and his face was a pulp of swelling and cuts.

  Gabe hadn’t taken kindly to Josh escaping or the way Donald had spoken to him. Both Henry and Karel had been bleeding from the nose at some point, too.

  Josh bent to untie their ankles.

  “That explosion, what was it? We heard the helicopter. Did it fire on us?” Karel’s words were running fast on the panic.

  Josh freed her and nodded. “Yeah, came out of nowhere and blasted the ship.”

  “Who the hell is it?” Henry asked as his legs came free and he stood. “If they’re the good guys, I wish they wouldn’t try to blow me the hell up.”

  Karel’s hands had been untied by Josh, and she began to untie Henry’s wrists as Josh went to check on Donald. “There’s no way he’s walking out of here,” Josh said, freeing Donald’s hands. “Help me.”

  The ship gave another huge shudder and the rushing sound of water came ever closer. The back window of th
e cabin was now showing the nebula dead-center, its limpid light augmenting the illumination of the lantern.

  Josh hefted Donald under the arms, his purple face leaking both blood and saliva. Karel and Henry supported the old farmer’s back and knees. Donald was a solid lump of a man, and difficult to maneuver, but against the shaking wall, they pushed him up to the broken window and fed his body through.

  “Go!” Karel shouted at Henry as Donald’s body splashed down. “Make sure he doesn’t go under!”

  Henry nodded and threw himself through the broken window, his ankles disappearing into the night.

  Karel pushed Josh to the window. “You next.”

  Josh put his arms on the Maryland Defender’s shoulders and turned her around. “My party. My rules. Go.”

  Karel grinned and leaped for the window and was gone. Josh took two steps back, and the ship bucked more than it had before, the tilt shooting up ten more degrees, and Josh was suddenly sliding backwards. All forward momentum lost. Expecting to crash backwards through the doorway, he was relieved when something in the way arrested his near fall and steadied him.

  That relief was immediately dissipated by a constricting force across his windpipe.

  “You walked right past me on the deck, Josh. Didn’t even see me. Had to come and save your stupid little friends, didn’t you?”

  Gabe had Josh around the neck. Breath hot in his ear. He was braced in the doorframe and had begun bringing up a pistol with his other hand.

  Josh calculated that he had less than a second, and he buckled at the knees and pitched forward, dragging Gabe with him. The muzzle exploded next to his ear, but the bullet smashed into the back wall of the cabin that was rapidly becoming its ceiling.

  Gabe yelled his frustration, but was already being upended by Josh’s shoulders. Josh jammed his feet against the doorframe and used both their bodyweights to roll forward. The gun fired again as Gabe flew off Josh and crashed into the deck. The bullet, wherever it went, sizzled in the air and landed harmlessly against wood somewhere to his right.

  The impact Gabe had made with the cabin floor shook the gun loose from his fingers, and he made a desperate grab for it, but it slid away from him—down between Josh’s legs and into the corridor. Josh heard it smash into the base of the stairs.

  Gabe scrambled up and thudded into him at the top of his thighs like a two-hundred-forty-pound linebacker taking down a quarterback.

  They both careened out of the cabin and back down the corridor, punching and kicking as they slid.

  Josh’s fists were bouncing off the top of Gabe’s head. Gabe’s teeth were trying to bite through the material of Josh’s T-shirt, in turn, and he was trying to punch up into Josh’s groin at the same time. With a hard expulsion of breath and a groan of pain, both men clattered into the foot of the stairs and broke off punching to try to find the gun.

  Josh was rolled onto his back as Gabe tried to reach underneath him to find the pistol. “I should have killed you when I had the chance!”

  “That’s you all over, Gabe!”

  The fight boiled with desperate intensity as they strained to get any advantage they could over the other. Gabe scrabbled for Josh’s eyes, his nails raking the side of his face. The scar on his own cheek was opening like a cold dead mouth, welling with blood. Josh was kicking up into Gabe’s legs, trying to dislodge him. Gabe elbowed downward like a pneumatic drill, trying to punch holes in Josh’s chest.

  Josh twisted his body, trying to get it sideways on. Trying to present a smaller target. “You always go for the meanest and the baddest way. You don’t just want to kill me…”

  Gabe was tearing at Josh’s shirt now, ripping the material. Josh could see the other man was hoping the torn shirt would become a garrote around his throat to give him another advantage. Josh reached up with his hand, digging his fingers into the wound Maxine had cut into Gabe’s face—getting some purchase on the flesh and ripping down, causing Gabe to scream and howl. But it didn’t get him off of him. If anything, the pain seemed to spur him on. Josh clawed on and punched Gabe’s ribs with his other hand as the man pulled harder at the material of the shirt.

  “You have to break someone,” Josh accused. “You have to crush them!”

  Gabe pulled his face away from Josh as the excavation the ex-cop was plowing up across the flesh became too much to bear. He belted Josh across the chops with a swinging back-hander. Josh took the blow that snapped his head to one side with a spray of blood and spit, but countered by forcing his knees up into Gabe’s midriff, grappling the other man’s forearms as they came in again to punch and claw.

  “You can’t do anything cleanly! You’re so broken inside, Gabe, that you think you have to keep proving yourself! What’s it like to live with so much hate… for yourself?”

  Josh was pressing down on the side of Gabe’s neck with his forearm.

  Gabe stopped struggling suddenly, going limp. It took a moment before Josh realized it wasn’t the pressure on Gabe’s neck that had caused him to stop moving, though. He had the gun in his hand and was trying to bring it around to shoot at Josh again.

  The arm came up, the butt of the gun landing hard against Josh’s side, but the muzzle not yet pointing at him.

  “Well, I’m not waiting now, Josh! Now I’m taking you out, and I’m going to enjoy…”

  The sentence never finished leaving his mouth, as the shock of a burst of cold seawater fell on them through the hatch at the top of the stairs like a waterfall. The weight of water crushed them back against the deck and then lifted them up. Gabe’s gun arm came free, and he started to turn towards Josh’s chest.

  The water between them frothed white as an eruption of bubbles from the venting corridor burst through. The gun fired in the confusion, and Josh felt something tear at the top of his arm where Gabe had already twisted in the piece of broken bottle.

  But the bullet didn’t hit anywhere vital. In fact, all it seemed to do was sear the already ripped-open wound.

  Gabe began shaking and squeezing the gun’s trigger. It didn’t fire again. Either it was out of ammo or it had been screwed up by the seawater. The corridor was now almost completely full of water, floor to ceiling––from where he and Gabe struggled all the way to the cabin.

  Josh hadn’t taken much of a breath before the water had poured in, and so his lungs were already starting to ache. He pushed up, heading for the cabin, kicking out at Gabe’s face as his body slid clumsily over the other man.

  His boot came away in Gabe’s hand as he made a desperate grab for Josh’s leg. With a harsh yank, Josh was free and swimming upward.

  He surfaced in the cabin. The back wall was now the ceiling, and the bodies of the guards were churning around in the water with the huge mahogany table. It thudded into the side of Josh’s head as he prioritized his breathing rather than avoiding it, and he was momentarily dazed, seeing stars.

  Shaking his head, Josh tried to clear it and reached for the window, where the night sky and the smudge of nebula were his only route of escape. His fingers came away empty. He’d have to wait for the water level to rise a little more––which meant the Grimoire was ever closer to being submerged completely.

  Gabe surfaced three feet away, shaking the water clear of his face and letting the blaze of his eyes cook the rest of the seawater from his skin. The level of flood had gone another few inches up the cabin wall.

  Josh jumped again for the window. This time, his fingers caught on the broken wood of the frame and, as he hauled himself upward, the disappointingly sick sound of the frame snapping away from its moorings sent him splashing back down. Rigging from the deck above the cabin was flailing about outside the window. A Harborman’s drowned body slithered past.

  Gabe was on him again. He had thrown away the gun and was now free to use both hands to grab handfuls of his hair and T-shirt.

  Josh went under, the sting of seawater in his eyes and the foulness of its salt in his mouth and throat. He punched out at Gabe and tried to
kick, but all the blows were made ineffectual by the water and the turbulence in it.

  Josh broke the surface again and clawed at Gabe’s eyes. “You keep fighting, we’re both gonna die!”

  “Then let us die!”

  Gabe returned the compliment, trying to get the nails of his thumbs into Josh’s eye sockets.

  “Damn your eyes!”

  Josh stopping clawing at Gabe, put his forearms together, and broke Gabe’s grip on his face by forcing his arms apart. While doing so, he prepared his neck and shoulders and sent the fastest and most vicious headbutt he could muster through the gap, crunching his forehead into Gabe’s nose.

  With a shocked gasp, Gabe fell away into the water, blood running free from his nostrils, and Josh was leaping upward again.

  The sea outside was lapping over the edge of the hole in the window now as the highest waves began to claim the last of the ship.

  Josh kicked upward, his hands on the broken wood of the frame, and then he was out into the turmoil of bubbles and chop. Kicking off the boat and pushing away the tangling ropes, he headed up to the surface. Just as his head broke into the air above the ocean, he felt something snag on his boot.

  Without a second breath, he was pulled back under.

  The Grimoire was completely submerged, only the last of the air keeping enough buoyancy inside to stop it from crashing completely down onto the seabed.

  Josh tried to kick, but his ankle was held tight.

  In light from the full moon and Barnard’s Nebula, the shimmering blue dark of the water above the hanging bulk of the Grimoire was full of sparkles and lights as he looked down. At the end of his leg, he saw that Gabe had his foot—the one without the boot—wedged in the crook of his arm and shoulder.

  Gabe was trying to pull him down with the ship. The scabbed wound on the side of his face seemed to extend the cruel curl of his lip almost all the way to his ear, making his mouth huge and terrible.

  Beyond him, Josh could see that Gabe had made it through the same broken window, but that his own foot had become entangled in the smashed spars of wood, and a length of rigging which had fallen from the top deck was curled tight around his ankle, as if the ship was refusing to let its master go, or hoping he would pull it back out of the water.