Gabe was entirely caught up. His last desperate action had been to grab hold of Josh in an attempt to drag him back down so that they’d die together.
They were locked together, and Josh needed oxygen.
He tried kicking out with his other foot, but Gabe was too nimble in the neck. Each downward stab with his heel went to either side of Gabe’s grinning face.
Gabe knew.
Gabe knew he was going to drag Josh down and drown him. Josh could see it in his eyes. The burning eyes that proved he was not Storm’s father, but the same eyes that were enjoying drowning the man who was.
If I can’t have him, neither can you, Gabe’s eyes seemed to be saying.
The blackness from encroaching oxygen starvation was filling in the corners of Josh’s sight. The shimmering lights were dimming. There was one last gulp of air in his mouth. He felt his insides shrinking and that his brain was being sandpapered smooth.
The smile on Gabe’s face became the whole of his vision, and as he looked down, ebony blocks of death began to build their walls in from the edges of his sight.
Gabe’s smile widened, if anything, as he looked up, and then he began to form his lips around a silent word.
Josh didn’t need to be a lip-reading expert to know what the word was as the Grimoire began to lose the last of its buoyancy and drag them both down.
The word was “Storm!”
Someone was swimming down past Josh, legs kicking, his arms sweeping hard in the water, punting his body downward.
“Storm!” Gabe’s silent mouth said again. His face and eyes were almost all the one smile.
His son had come to rescue him.
Gabe smiled all the way until the knife in Storm’s hand was buried to the hilt in his chest.
And even as Gabe’s arms released his foot, and Josh was able to float back to the surface, the smile only left Gabe’s face when it was obscured by the cloud of blood pouring out from his heart.
Epilogue
There are moments.
When the pieces have fallen, when the game is over, when the accounting is done, and when the graves have been dug, there are still questions to be answered.
There would always be.
They buried Poppet in the grounds of the Bluehills center, in a plot that overlooked the rapids—a little ways back from the cliff edge, but out of the trees so that there would always be many acres of sky over her last resting place. No one really had many words left for the ceremony, such was the exhaustion among them all, but Tally’s father managed to find a few sentences of gratitude for the woman who had at various times, since the effects of the Barnard’s supernova had hit the Earth, saved the lives of all of them in various ways.
Tally just listened as Maxine and Josh stood arm in arm, before they all took turns filling in the grave with the fresh dry earth.
Storm stood close to Josh and Maxine. Tally didn’t know how much they had Poppet to thank for what she’d said to her brother, but as the light had gone from her eyes, Storm had run away from them, tearing off his shirt as he ran, and dove into the water. Swimming hard as if his life might depend on it. Swimming hard because Tally’s father’s life did depend on it, she’d later found out.
The howling wind from the rotor blades of the helicopter flying in low had disturbed the surface of the water enough for Tally to lose sight of her brother, but it had been clear where he was heading. Gabriel’s boat. The Grimoire.
It had only been when her father and brother had made it back to shore, and the U.S. Navy helicopter had landed on the beach, that Tally had realized that Storm had gone to save his father, not kill him.
The helicopter, a Sikorsky SH-60B had been the most welcome sight many of them had seen in a long time, and Tally had been amused when Henry had told her, after he and Karel had hauled Donald through the waves to the shore, that the helicopter’s nickname in the Navy was the Seahawk—that seemed more than appropriate, seeing as they’d lost one and found another.
This Seahawk was commanded and piloted by Commander Frederick Morris, a lean, thin man who looked like he’d been chiseled out of bone, but who had a surprising twinkle in his eye. He’d greeted Maxine and Tally with a salute and a smile as he’d sent his six men down to the water’s edge to help Josh and the others up the beach.
With Morris and his men was Lieutenant Commander Nathan Ondoke, from the Navy’s research laboratory. The man who had, in parallel to Halley, solved the problem of shielding equipment affected by the supernova with cages of copper wiring. He was a compact African American who looked like midnight poured into a uniform, and Tally had immediately thought he was far too good-looking to be a science geek. But a geek Ondoke was, and since the battle on the beach, he’d spent as much time as he could going over theories and plans with Halley.
Tally had seen that Halley was more than a little put out to find that he was not the only savior of mankind’s technology, and that Ondoke and possibly many others with the requisite knowledge had found the same solutions—but he’d also been buoyed to find out that the Navy officers had gotten no ideas about how to combat the so-called Nova Madness. Ondoke and Morris had listened with eager ears to Halley’s dietary and hydrotherapeutic solutions to the behavioral changes wrought on the minds of humanity.
Morris was an officer on the Ticonderoga-class U.S. Navy cruiser Lake Champlain, which had been docked on Dark Point’s decommissioned naval facility just before the supernova had hit. “We’d had engine trouble. Dark Point was easier to get to so that we could affect repairs, rather than limping back to the mainland. Then everything went crazy. While we defended the ship from hordes of local attackers, Ondoke and his team got on with finding a way to make things work again. It’s taken us this long to get the bird up in the sky. Good to be flying again, that’s for sure.”
Morris had told them that they’d seen the activity at Bluehills on one of their proving flights, and he’d ordered a ground team there to go investigate. They’d found Halley and the others, and when they’d been told what was going on with the Grimoire, they’d gotten involved.
“Sorry we almost blew you out of the water, Mr. Standing,” Morris had said to Josh. “Didn’t know you were on the ship. Professor Halley had impressed on us how desperate the situation was.”
“It’s okay,” Josh had replied. “We’re here and we’re okay, and that’s all that matters.”
Tally’s grandfather had been more than happy to have some military men around as he’d recovered from his ordeal at the hands of Gabriel Angel. Tally was simply glad to know that Donald would be okay—he’d been through the wringer in more ways than one—but in her enforced time with him on the island since they’d been washed up, she’d grown to feel closer to him and be thoroughly impressed with his levels of skills and wisdom. He wasn’t just a boorish old farmer from West Virginia; he was a good but complex man who she really hoped to get to know in the time they had left together.
Same with Henry.
Over the months they’d been together, she had liked him more than a lot. He’d been good to be around, he’d taught her a great deal, and they’d worked well as a team, she thought. But it had been when they’d been split up after the Sea-Hawk had sunk that she’d realized how close she felt to him, and how much she’d missed him when she hadn’t known if they would ever be reunited.
After the funeral, she went looking for Henry around the Bluehills center. She expected him to be doing something clever in terms of finding food or hunting for game, but when she did locate him, he was sitting in a clearing. The sunlight dappling through the leaves. He was cross-legged and he his eyes were closed.
“Hey, Tally,” he said without opening his eyes.
She sat down beside him. “How did you know it was me? You haven’t looked at me.”
“I don’t need to open my eyes to know what you sound like walking towards me. I don’t need to open my eyes to smell you on the breeze.”
“Are you saying I need a bath?”
Henry laughed. “No! I just… you know, like the way you smell.”
Tally smiled and Henry opened his eyes, turning his head to look at her. “What are you doing out here all alone?”
“Hoping you’d come looking for me.”
Tally began to laugh, and then she saw the earnest seriousness on the boy’s face. “Really?”
“Really,” Henry replied. “Really, really.”
They sat in silence. The afternoon was waning, and soon it would be twilight. It was a good, comfortable silence. There were sounds of wood being chopped floating over from the center, and in the distance, Morris’ Seahawk was clattering through the skies over Cook’s Hump, taking Halley to the Lake Champlain for more meetings with Ondoke and his team.
“Why did you hope that I’d follow you out here, then?”
Henry extended the silence just a little bit longer before he said, “Well, I didn’t think you’d want our first kiss to be in front of your parents.”
When the funeral was over, the grave had been filled in, and all the others had trudged back through the trees to the Bluehills center, Storm stayed behind and sat by the rectangle of disturbed earth as the afternoon fell away and the evening approached.
He put his hand on Poppet’s grave and tried to work out exactly what it was he was feeling now.
He was sad that Poppet was gone—of course, he was––but maybe her dying, and knowing she was dying, had spurred her on to saying the things to him that she had.
She’d had ample opportunity to tell him before that night, but the urgency and pain caused by the shot she had taken had given her the desire to make him promise to fix things with his dad.
His real dad.
The time with Gabe had been heady. A whirlwind of mixed emotions and joys. Halley had explained, after Storm had gotten back to the center with Josh, that Storm had been made vulnerable in his thoughts and emotions by the Barnard’s event, just like so many others.
Storm was still finding it difficult to accept that his mind had been changed by the supernova. “That was the problem when you were inside the mind that had been changed,” Halley had said. “You just can’t see it. You just don’t have the insight to recognize it. But whatever changes it made in you, it made you vulnerable to Gabe’s charisma and lies. But trust me, Storm, blue and blue can’t make brown. It’s never happened and it never will. Josh is your dad and that’s that. Any other problems you have with him are nothing to do with who your daddy is––just what he is.”
And that had rung true most of all. Yes, Storm knew who his father was now. One hundred percent… but that didn’t stop him feeling the residual anger he’d held onto all this time. The problems in the Standing family had begun a long time before the supernova––the family had cracked around his cancer, for sure––and he still resented Josh for not being there when he’d needed him.
“You can work it out, kid.”
The voice was inside Storm’s head. He knew it wasn’t real. He knew it was just his subconscious creating Poppet’s New York drawl. But he also knew, if she’d been here with him right now and not down there in the earth, that would be exactly what she’d be saying.
“You can work it out, kid, between you. Ain’t nothing worth losing your dad over. Tell him how you feel. Listen to why he did the things he did. Forgiveness is tough, but it’s the best way. No one should live the way Gabe lived. Capice?”
Storm patted the earth, and then he smoothed over the hand print.
“Capice,” he said, and he waited for the sun to leave this huge piece of sky to the moon and the Barnard’s Nebula.
It was newly dark down on the beach.
A slowly waning moon was cresting the horizon, but the smudge of the Barnard’s Nebula was already a quarter of the way to its zenith. The stars were dust around it, like snows in a blizzard. The closer her eye moved towards it, the less defined the pinpoints of light became.
The helicopter had long gone, and before Halley had flown away with Morris, promising to return in the next few days, he’d apologized to Maxine and the others. Not for anything he’d done, but for what he’d omitted telling them.
It had been Lieutenant Ondoke who had reminded Halley that a near-Earth supernova event like the one they had experienced could have––but not with any certainty––a catastrophic effect on the Earth’s ozone layer. Depleting it severely.
In all the confusion and fear, this had been something that had slipped Halley’s mind, he’d said––and it was another thing that might have made him just a little more resentful about Ondoke being on hand to take the shine off his superior knowledge, Maxine thought. Halley had told them to scour the residences in the Evergreen retirement settlement for as much sunblock as they could find. It would, over the next few years, become one of their most important resources to protect them against the increased UV radiation from the sun. Yet another danger they would have to face going forward. Skin cancer might just become the biggest killer in the future if they didn’t look out for each other alongside finding a quick and easy way to make a constant replacement supply.
Maxine had snorted to herself. She’d never been able to get a decent tan in her life, and now she might never get the chance again.
Damn you, Barnard. Whoever you were.
The blossoming relationship between Tally and Henry was a cause for some optimism for Maxine. As was Storm’s acceptance that Josh was indeed his father. She herself had been incredibly relieved by the science and genetic proofs Halley had provided. To have that dark nut cracked open in the heart of her fear was as warm a relief as any she had experienced in her life.
When she looked at Josh now, she no longer felt the slice of what might have been cutting through her. Yes, there were still a ton of things to talk through, and even more healing to be done––but at least that was something they could resolve.
Storm was their child. There could be no doubt of that.
That was a good basis to build from.
The warm wind coming off the water ruffled the hair around her face, and for the first time in a very long while, Maxine felt there were at least some certainties she could hold on to and appreciate.
Down along the beach in the moon and nebula light, she caught sight of two figures walking arm in arm. The figures stopped and kissed. Tally pulling Henry close with an unselfconscious move that reminded Maxine immediately of the first kiss she had given Josh all those years ago. Her pulling him in, not caring who was looking, not caring what anyone thought, because the most important thing was the kiss.
And so, Maxine reached up to Josh, who had been sitting alongside her and watching the moon and nebula rise with her, cupped the back of his neck, and pulled his head down to crush their lips together.
Josh hadn’t been expecting the kiss, but he didn’t reject it. Why would he reject something that he wanted almost as much as he’d wanted to know, finally, that Storm was his son?
He knew that, even before the Barnard’s event, he hadn’t been the best father he could have been. Everything had changed for him that day when Cody Zem, the young ex-carjacker who he’d taken under his wing to try to turn his life around, had been stabbed to death in a garbage-strewn alley. That one event had gone off in Josh’s life like a supernova and changed him forever, just like the Earth had been changed by Barnard’s Star.
He’d left the police force almost immediately and tried to become something different––someone different. A force for good, by joining the Probation Department and working with probationers like Ten-Foot and the others.
Such had been his single-minded focus on that job, he’d not left enough of himself for his own kids and his wife.
As he and Maxine had drifted apart, Josh had not felt able to be there when his family really needed him. Choosing to go out on the Sea-Hawk while Maxine had gone to Boston to support Storm in his treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had been a mistake that had turned into a catastrophe. When the supernova had hit, he�
�d been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, nearly nine hundred miles from his wife and son when they were at their most vulnerable and in desperate danger.
Josh knew there would still be reparations to be made for that foolish decision. Maxine’s duty had always been to her family. Josh had let his duty slip to include the needs of the probationers––who’d admittedly had terrible lives, too, and been on everyone else’s scrap heap––and he would need to make up for that decision, whatever Storm’s status was and however Maxine felt now.
But the kiss was a start. A good start.
She tasted good.
The closeness felt good, and as his lips parted from Maxine’s lips, the Barnard’s Nebula was sparkling in her eyes.
There would be so much more to do in the coming years. Working with Morris and the crew of his ship to try to get it running again. To begin to treat whoever they could on the island, and then get back to the mainland to spread the cures for technology and the mental health of the world, all across the country.
It would be an immense task, and it would require them to work harder and in more dangerous situations than they ever had before. They’d discussed this with Halley and Morris before they’d left in the helicopter.
Josh had wondered if Maxine would want them to put themselves at risk again by going back to the mainland to begin to rebuild.
“We could stay here,” Josh had said after the helicopter had flown away into the hazy distance over Cook’s Hump. “We have everything we could ever want here. We have a paradise of food and resources. We have Tally and Storm. We have Donald. We have each other. We could just let the world get on with fixing itself without us.”
Maxine had looked up at him, then reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand. “Thank you. Thank you for at least offering that, Josh. But even I know it wouldn’t be right for us to do that. Thank you for offering to put me and the children first. That’s the most important thing you could have done. But we have to go out there and help. Staying here is not an option.”
Supernova EMP Seriries (Book 4): Final End Page 25