Josh scratched his head. “You think there’s any point in trying to talk to them?”
Donald shook his head. “If they wanted to talk, Creggan would have sent someone here to talk first. He’s a deal maker, not a warlord—but we challenged his authority. This is a piece of PR as much as it is a military action. He wants to show the people back in Pickford, and in the surrounding homesteads and farms, who’s boss in these parts. I reckon he’s been waiting for something like this for a while now, so that he could build up his clout. We played directly into his hands.”
Josh looked at the old man, noting that Donald’s eyes were wide and bright, alive with his tactical intelligence. A man who’d fought with honor in Vietnam and never traded one ounce of his bravery for civilian glory. A quiet, strong man who had never been emotionally available to his daughter—something she had often bemoaned to Josh during their marriage. Maxine had always been of the opinion that Donald hadn’t been in her corner from the start, wanting a son and not a daughter, and perhaps she’d been right. But Donald was full of smarts and intelligence and emotionally charged gumption now. The emotions in him might not exactly be available in the traditional way, but they were if you lit the right fire under him. And this was the right fire to get those emotions burning in him.
Defending his family, defending his property, defending his sense of justice.
Josh hated himself a little more for keeping the death of Maria from him, but it might crush the fight out of him when they needed Donald to be firing on all cylinders during the battle.
And what of Maxine?
With just the thought of the question, Josh was cut across the heart by the sudden question looming up from the depths of his subconscious—where he’d trapped it—based on those last words from Maria. The mention of Gabe Angel, the jock who’d once been his friend back in college—whom he’d subsequently beaten to a pulp in the parking lot of a Raleigh roadhouse for putting his hands on Maxine.
Gabe had been her first boyfriend, and Josh, shy and gawky Josh, had carried a torch for her from afar until he’d no longer been able to stand seeing her manhandled and chewed out in a public spot. He hadn’t stepped in between them for any ‘Knight in Shining Armor Carrying the Damsel off from Danger to his own Castle’ reasons. He’d thought Maxine was way out of his league. He’d only wanted to do what was right. That she’d eventually fallen for him months later had been a bonus he could never have guessed at or hoped for. And then, to hear from Maria’s lips that he might not be Storm’s father—and that Gabe Angel was in the frame—was a shock that kept bursting open in him with thorny agony.
“You okay, son?”
Josh blinked.
Donald had a hand on his shoulder. “Look like you zoned out there for a second. We need you in the room, Josh.”
Josh wiped at his eyes, glad to feel there were no tears on his cheeks. “Yeah, I’m good. Just… you know, trying to think a way out of this.”
“You and me both.”
Josh returned to his position below the kitchen window, clamping the thoughts about Maria and Maxine back down hard. There was no point thinking about it now, and Donald was right. He needed to focus.
Creggan’s men seemed to have settled into the long haul, as Donald had guessed. They were still firing occasionally from their cover behind the carcasses and farm buildings, but there appeared to be no more attempts at advancing closer to this part of the ranch house.
Neither Josh nor the others had fired for nearly three minutes, preserving ammunition where they could. And he could still hear firing from the side of the house, which would account for Poppet, who had gone to check on Maxine. But there was no firing from behind them.
Perhaps Tally and Greene were preserving their ammunition, too. But it occurred to Josh that he hadn’t heard any firing from behind him for a while.
“Hang on here. I’m going to check on Tally and Greene.”
With nobody protesting, he made his way out of the kitchen door and past the front stairs to the living room.
He was surprised to see the window boards and drapes down over the smashed window. And then his head flipped through a series of double-takes at noticing the body of Laurent lolling on the sofa, the sliced flaps of his open neck wound thick with congealing blood.
Josh looked wildly around for his daughter or Greene. “Tally?” he called.
Nothing.
Next, he shouted her name. There was a thump and a crash from the top of the ranch house’s backstairs, and so he ran towards them. Past Laurent and the destroyed TV.
But he didn’t make it to the stairs.
A figure who was all in black, gas-masked and festooned with tactical equipment and a vest, stepped into his path and pointed a black, semi-automatic pistol at his forehead.
And then pulled the trigger.
3
The bullet wasn’t meant for Josh.
It blasted past his ear as he flinched sideways, and he heard a gurgling roar followed by a thud. The figure in black barged past Josh to reach a fallen figure in a checked shirt and jeans. The figure lifted the bearded man’s head and looked into his face.
“Just making sure of the kill,” the black-dressed figure announced in what was a woman’s voice, slightly accented. She pulled off the gas mask with a sucking plop and revealed a thin but well-proportioned face with blue eyes and a mist of fine blond hair around her head. When she saw Josh watching, she hurried to him and pushed him back against the wall, away from the exposed window. “Don’t worry. I’m the cavalry,” she said, grinning. “I saw chummy over there through the window, and you looked like the good guy in this particular game. I don’t like to see the good guys taken out. So, I leveled the playing field.”
“Who are you?”
“Karel Krzysztof. Third Maryland Defenders, out of Cumberland. We’re looking for our surgeon. Lawrence Banks. If Maxine’s around, she can explain.”
Josh was having trouble taking it all in. “You’re… here to help?”
“Kinda. We didn’t know how much we could trust Maxine—didn’t know if you guys would let Lawrence come back later. These days, everyone wants a doctor as close as possible. So, after Maxine helped us out in Cumberland, and brought Doctor Banks here to see to her son, my commanding officer Clitheroe sent us along to make sure Lawrence comes back in one piece. Once we mopped up Carron’s forces, of course. But as soon as their general was out of the game, his chicken-ass irregulars gave up pretty soon. And so here we are.”
“How many of you are out there?”
Not answering just yet, Karel looked at the chronometer on her wrist and counted down from five to zero with silent lips.
Three booming explosions came from around the property, rattling the glass and shaking the walls. Karel smiled. “That’ll be them now. Ten of us, plus me.” She winked. “I guess that rounds up to twenty.”
“You’re attacking Creggan’s men?”
“Don’t know who they are, but they’re threatening the ranch where Banks is. That makes them legitimate combatants in my book, baby.”
Karel smiled again as a rattle of small arms fire struck up a tattoo-like cacophony in the near distance. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m needed outside with my men.”
And with that she was gone, leaping out of the broken window like an avenging angel, Glock spitting fire.
Josh blinked, looking around the room at the blood, the bodies, and the destruction. Karel had come and gone inside a minute, and yet in that time she had brought a whole bunch of hope that they would make it. If her force of ten men were any bit as brave, bold, and skilled as Karel, then Creggan’s men wouldn’t stand much of a chance.
There came the whump of another detonation that rattled Josh’s teeth. It cut across his thinking, and suddenly he remembered why he’d come to the back of the house.
Tally.
He’d come to find Tally, and she wasn’t here. He took a quick scan of the room, keeping his head down and trying not to presen
t a target through the smashed window, hoping against hope that Tally and Greene hadn’t already been made victims of the check-shirted man Karel had killed. Josh looked behind all of the furniture and came back around to where he’d started. Looking over the lip of the window, he didn’t see the bodies of either of them in the yard outside. What he did see were three figures dressed in the same fashion as Karel who were running between the outhouses firing MP5s and lobbing smoke grenades.
The fog of war.
Tally and Greene could only be one other place if they hadn’t braved the yard: they were upstairs.
Josh bounded up the stairs to the back landing. The attic hatch was open and the attic ladder was down all the way to the floor.
He got to the bottom of the ladder and tried to listen for anything from above, but the firing and explosions from around the farm made it impossible to discern any detail through the hatch. So, putting the Remington over his shoulder so that it hung by its strap, he began to climb the ladder. “Tally?” he called up as his head rose above the level of the attic floor like a submarine’s periscope. He’d never been in the attic space before, so he didn’t know if the mess of books and overturned boxes were its natural state or evidence of a more recent struggle, but the place didn’t in any way whatsoever reflect what he knew of the Jeffersons’ tidiness of mind and environment. There were books scattered all over the boarded-out floor, and overturned boxes spilling their contents of clothes and other discarded household items everywhere.
Josh hauled himself over the lip of the attic hatch as another series of explosions outside made the building shudder. The air in the attic was full of dust, motes of it flying through his vision as he focused and oriented himself.
Among the disgorged clothes, the open pages of some of the books looked ripped and exhibited boot prints left on the pages. Josh stepped on, moving past another overturned box—one that looked like it had been kicked in. There came a crash to his right as a box that had been precariously placed on top of another finally fell over.
There’d been a fight there, and it had been a recent one. Josh knew that not from the mess and the falling box, because as he stood below one of the attic windows letting in the natural light, he saw that it had been smashed, and the window itself had been flipped up out of its frame on old hinges.
And on that old gray frame of splintered wood was a handprint made from fresh, still wet blood.
Tally ran along the backbone of the roof towards the stone-faced chimney that rose between the tiles like the dorsal fin on a terracotta shark.
She looked back as her deft feet moved swiftly over the surface with sure balance and traction. Smoke, bitter and gritty, was rising in billows around the building. But it wasn’t the hot smoke of a fire. This smoke was cool and thick with a chemical odor. She didn’t know what it was, but thought it might help her progress towards the chimney by obscuring her from the attackers on the ground who might otherwise see her as an easy target and try to pick her off.
She could see that Greene was crawling up the tiles from the window, leaving bloody handprints as he went.
As he’d come for her in the attic when she’d tripped backward, she had kicked out with an accurate foot and sent the blade skittering out of one hand and into the air. To his due, Greene had gasped at the pain in his hand but hadn’t taken his eye off the blade as it turned in the air. He’d stuck out his hand to catch the knife as it had spiraled by and caught it in one smooth moment.
Unfortunately for Green, he’d caught it by the blade and sliced open the skin of his palm.
Tally had kicked him in the groin with her other foot and, as he’d doubled over, she’d gotten up and hammered open the attic window, shattering the glass in the process, but opening it out fully to fall onto the outside of the roof. She’d pulled herself up through the hole before Greene had had a chance to recover and follow her.
She’d made it halfway to the chimney before Greene had moved a box to stand on—she guessed that was what he’d done anyway; he was too weighty and lumbering to have thrown himself upward as she had—and come after her.
Now he was clambering up to near the apex and walking along the tiles in a crouch, keeping a free hand on the cap tiles to maintain his balance. Tally placed a hand on the chimney and held on as she looked over the side of the ranch, trying to find the best way down. The rattle of machine gun bullets sent her ducking as chips of the stone facing on the chimney stack shot outward, having been cut across by a line of lead. Bits of stone and brick smattered her back like hard rain as she went down.
The smoke had cleared a little, and through the hole of air that she could use to see down to the ground, one of Creggan’s men had sighted her from where he was lying behind the carcass of a steer. He was using the side of the dead animal to steady his aim, sighting along the barrel.
The muzzle of his gun spat again, and its bullet hit the chimney breast exactly where Tally had been a second before. She’d thrown herself backward in anticipation of his next shot, rolled on the tiles to the opposite side of the roof, and was now splayed out like a starfish on the beach in order to stop her slide to the edge of the building.
From halfway along the roof, Greene’s head appeared through the smoke. He’d followed her trajectory and was throwing one leg over the cap tiles, the knife in his teeth again. He crabbed over the apex and began crawling towards Tally.
Tally twisted her head around to see what her routes out of this might be. If she’d been on the side of the roof where the slant of the outside chimney breast offered a precarious route down, she might have had options. On this side of the ranch house, though, the chimney stood proudly on the side of the building and had an edge that was vertical—it was thirty feet straight down to the concrete of the patio.
Thirty feet was quite a drop, even for someone like Tally who knew how to fall and roll. If the end point had been grass or even sand, she might have attempted it. But here there was a good chance she might just turn an ankle, at best, and at worst break a leg if she tried dropping down. Hanging from the end edge of the roof wasn’t an option, either. Even with the smoke billowing around her, she would still present an easy target as she clambered over the edge and prepared herself to drop. She’d also still be too close to the building to be able to ensure a clean drop down.
She had the skills and the agility to free-climb down the building, but again, she would still present an inviting target to the attackers. Attackers who now, as a shower of dirt fell like hard rain over her, were letting off explosives in the yard.
She couldn’t go over the side and drop.
She couldn’t climb down safely without being shot.
And Greene was inching towards her with a knife in his teeth and madness in his eyes.
Tally knew that her options were nearly zero.
So, she got up and ran at Greene.
As she’d hoped, it was the last thing he was expecting. His mouth opened in a circle of shock and the knife bounced down the tiles and out of his reach.
“You may be right about climbing to the top of things when you’re being chased, Greene, but you forgot the other saying that applies…” she said as she kicked him full in the face, snapping his head back and sending up a spray of blood, “and that the best form of defense is attack. I ain’t running no more.”
Greene lost his purchase on the tiles almost immediately upon the kick landing, and he began to slide with his eyes goggling and arms flailing.
Greene got lucky, however, and once again Tally felt his hand on her ankle. His dropping momentum pulled her leg from under her and she crashed to the tiles, following him down the incline in a bumping slide, her cheek scraping cruelly on the tiles and their metal ties.
Greene brought another hand around—the one slick with blood from his cut palm—and caught it in the material of her leggings.
They were five yards from the edge now, and another explosion outside the building sent up curtains of earth and stones which pelt
ed them from the sky like a biblical plague.
Greene was not trying to arrest his slide. His eyes were maniacal. “If I go over, you go over, lil’ piggy,” he said, and she noted that there was bloody spittle all around his chops, like someone who had been eating ice cream with too much raspberry sauce.
Greene’s feet were over the edge of the guttering now, and he was still pulling at her legs. She tried kicking, but his hands, not being employed as anchors like she was trying to use hers, were pulling her down further.
His legs were completely over the edge when Tally made a last desperate lunge for him. She took her hands off the tiles and sat up, leaning forward to punch him twice in the face. She bent forward, her backside juddering down, rolling the last of her dice.
And then Tally dug her thumbs into Greene’s eyes.
He screamed and let go of her legs, batting at her hands with his fists. There was too much of his body over the drop now, though, and as his last grasp had been on Tally’s legs, he couldn’t stop himself from falling completely over the edge. He disappeared with a last despairing curse and spray of bloody spittle.
But Tally had gone too far. Her legs were over the edge of the ranch house now, all the way to the small of her back—so her center of gravity was shifted, and the seesaw her body had become began to topple over. She threw out her hands to try to grab onto the roof, but they were so slick and slathered with blood and sweat from holding onto Greene’s face that she continued to slide.
A hand came out of nowhere and caught the material of her shirt, stopping her dead on the edge. Then another strong hand was lifting her under the arm, bumping her backside over the gutter to rest on the tiles until just her ankles hung over the edge.
Tally looked up as Josh said, “Now, that was closer than I would have liked.”
“You said it,” Tally replied, still trying to find some breath in her lungs.
“What the hell was going on? You were fighting Greene? What the hell happened?”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 3