Storm offered Maxine the weakest of weak smiles. Prior to this, he hadn’t really considered the effect his debilitation was having on the party. In a pre-supernova time, there would have been a home to rest in, no threats to life and limb, and no need to move with increased expediency between two places for survival. Just when he’d thought things were on an uptick in terms of how he was improving, something like this—a possible threat they wouldn’t just be able to run away from without causing him more injury—brought home the precariousness of the situation.
“Do you think it’s Creggan’s men?” Maxine asked as Keysell came back to the buggy.
“They didn’t find anyone. Or evidence of anyone. Could have been an animal, I guess. A bird, maybe. But better to be safe than sorry. Creggan’s men could easily get ahead of us, or track us through the woods, if it is them.”
That chilled Storm.
They moved on again, and then the rain came. It was a miserable, soaking spray which fell in gusting sheets. Storm and Maxine had some protection from the worst of it under the buggy’s canopy, but the others in their fatigues, tactical gear, and summer coats caught the brunt of it.
Tally-Two seemed to be the only member of the party to welcome the rain; her ears pricked up and her back seemed to shiver in equine ecstasy as the cooling showers splashed onto her. She’d not had too much rest that day, so it was a good and refreshing experience for her, at least. The only other non-human in the party, Bobby, looked bedraggled and thoroughly grumpy. As the rain came down, he would look longingly up into the buggy where Maxine and Storm huddled, waiting for the cue to be given so he could jump up.
The cue never came, and so he would trot about for attention. Trying to miss the raindrops or barking at them ineffectually like a Canine King Cnut trying to turn back the waves.
It was because Bobby was already barking his annoyance at the soaking the rain was giving him that no one took immediate notice of him when he started to bark at the rush of people who’d come out of the trees behind the party. Everyone was shivering in the rain under their oilskins or wrapping their coats around them as the gray sky fell upon them. It was only when Bobby yelped in pain that the Defenders in front of the buggy started to look behind them.
The gloom of the rain, the hiss of it hitting the blacktop, the rattle of machine gun fire, and even the muzzle sparks seemed muted, as if the weather was sucking the color out of the very air.
Storm stuck his head outside the buggy and looked backward.
Some Defenders were finding targets to fire at in the morass of people—there were perhaps thirty of them—who seemed to have come from nowhere. They were a ragged band in torn clothes, with wild eyes and hatred in their faces. Some held axes, some baseball bats, and others were using their hands like clubs. There was a child who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. He was swinging a golf iron like a sword.
Bodies were flung and sent dancing away like dervishes as bullets crashed into them, but others in the party had gone down under a desperate pile of haggard, dirt-smeared attackers.
There was a terrible moment when Storm realized he couldn’t pick out Tally in the crowd. He fully expected to see her jinking away, but he couldn’t see her at all. Maxine had already jumped down from the buggy, her sidearm drawn. Storm watched as she moved forward, gun arm raised—taking two of the attackers out with two muffled concussions.
Keysell was on his back in the road, kicking out at a woman who had beaten him across the midriff with a baseball bat. She went down as Henry shot her from behind. The clatter and rattle of bullets were dulled by the air, the reports robbed of their echo by the sodden trees but blatting on like a misfiring motorcycle. Storm felt a hand on his shoulder from behind, and hoped to turn in the buggy and see Tally’s face. But when he looked, there was only the screaming face of a spike-haired teen, his teeth exposed in a ragged tear across both his flapping cheeks. His eyes were alight with rage and his fingernails were clawing into the material of Storm’s anorak.
Storm punched weakly with one hand while reaching down beneath his seat in the buggy. The attacker’s hands yanked him back before his fingers could snag what he’d been reaching for and, as he was pulled back, he felt the skin over his stomach wounds stretch and strain.
Storm punched again. His knuckles slammed into the teen’s open cheeks. The teeth, rotten and loose, hinged back in the mouth. Storm grabbed the teen around the throat and forced his head down, bringing up his knee at the same time to deliver a crunching blow to the side of the boy’s head.
Back in Boston, at the start of all this, when he and his mother had been held against their will by a crazed and psychopathic man pretending to be a policeman, Storm had taken the chance when it was presented and beaten him to death with a wooden stool. He’d acted in a frenzy of self-defense, anger, and desperation. He didn’t really remember all that had happened, but he knew that he had started with a savage blow and that, when he’d been finished, the back of the man’s head had been crushed and there’d been blood up the walls. Storm had stood there, breath ragged in his chest. Hands trembling as the stool had dropped from his fingers. Storm had never thought there would be a situation where he’d have to fight for his life against others, rather than just against his cancer. It hadn’t been guilt that had overtaken him back then—just an incredible sadness that this was how the world would be from now on.
Storm held the boy’s head down, pushing it further and further to the floor of the buggy. There was more firing around him. The rain was battering the roof of the buggy, and the boy in his hands was scrabbling with his fingers at Storm’s clothes, his feet kicking outward.
Storm didn’t know how much longer he could hold on. He pushed and tried to shift his weight, but the boy was finding purchase with his knees and starting to push his body back up.
Storm was losing the battle to keep him down, and there was no one to come to his rescue—everyone else was too busy fighting their own battles.
The boy roared and lifted his body up, rising between Storm’s knees. His mouth offered an impossible, cheek-torn smile, his eyes like crazy-diamond fire, and his clawed hands reached for Storm’s throat.
11
Doctor Hauser was a drunk.
Her face was creased with premature aging and her teeth were nicotine-stained. Her eyes sat like cold black pebbles laying in red-rimmed pools. She had a hacking cough, and she kept the blood-spattered white coat wrapped around her like a shroud. She was so tall and thin; you could have run a flag up her and expected someone to salute it.
Josh had been taken to the cell at the end of the corridor as the door had been shut on Donald’s bloody body, and told by Randy to sit down on a chair against the wall.
The cell was large compared to the others, and there were fixings on the wall that would have accounted for three or maybe four bunks. The room now held a couple of benches. On one of the benches was an ancient-looking microscope—mirror type, rather than electric—and next to it were a number of test tubes held up in frames. There was a Bunsen burner that was attached by a rubber hose to a camping gas canister beneath the bench, books with sciency titles, and bottles of chemicals with indistinct labels that looked like they’d been shipped in from the set of a Universal horror movie, and amongst all this stuff, Hauser moved like a praying mantis looking for a mate’s head to bite off. The stench of old alcohol seeped from the woman over and above the smell of the chemicals.
When she’d brushed past Josh coming into the cell, the pocket of her white coat had thudded heavily into his side. The dull pewter glint of a hip flask in the pocket had caught Josh’s eye enough to confirm that Hauser was in the thrall of a higher power than Creggan.
She moved between the benches now, alternating between tutting and sucking on her teeth. She’d taken a vial of blood from one of her pockets and used a pipette to transfer some of the blood onto a slide, which she’d then smeared with another and placed into the microscope. There wasn’t enough natur
al light for her to use the mirror to reflect light onto the sample, so it seemed she’d developed a clever idea where a small ribbon of magnesium was set ablaze in a little metal tray to provide a few seconds of bright white light that allowed her to make use of the microscope.
The magnesium hissed and sparked, a blinding point of light in the room that threw crazy shadows around them and scarred Josh’s retinas.
Blinking and rubbing at his eyes, Josh looked back towards Hauser as the magnesium strip burned out. The doctor rubbed the small of her back as she got up from the microscope, her face a grimace.
“Impressive solution to your lighting problem,” Josh said. It was pure flattery and he knew it, because Hauser’s laboratory was pure theater. There was no disease to find, and so the pretense had to be maintained by the systems around it. Hauser might not even be a doctor, for all Josh knew.
“Thanks,” Hauser said. “It’s not easy to run a lab in the bowels of the police station, but diseased crazies burned down the school.”
So, she wasn’t a medical doctor. A doctor of science, maybe.
“You were a teacher?” he asked.
Hauser fixed him with a tart state. “I still am a teacher. And once we get this plague under control, I’ll be able to be one full time.”
Hauser pulled a metal stool towards her and arranged her tiny backside on it. As she sat, Josh saw that her pipe-cleaner legs had thick knots for knees and ankles. The skin showing below the cuffs of her trousers was mottled and wrinkled. She was a mess, physically, but that might not extend to her mental powers; she certainly looked exhausted, however.
“I’ll need some blood,” she told him. Hauser pointed to a disposable needle still in its plastic and paper sheath. “We don’t touch strangers until we’ve ascertained their plague status. I’d be grateful if you’d take the needle, prick your finger, and deposit a drop on the glass slide on the bench. I advise you to behave yourself.”
Hauser nodded towards Randy, who had stepped back and drawn his weapon, pointing it squarely at Josh’s chest. Josh got up and reached for the needle, raising his eyebrow conversationally towards Hauser. “I’ll be on my best behavior,” Josh said. “But… don’t you want to know anything about me? My name, where I’m from, what I’m doing here?”
“No real point yet,” Hauser replied. “I might see the disease in your blood, and if I do, Randy is under orders to kill you where you stand. No point developing a relationship if you’re going to be dead in thirty seconds, is there? Wastes my time, and what little time you have left.”
Josh nodded. “Well, if you put it like that…”
“I do,” Hauser said. And, taking the flask from her pocket, she unscrewed the lid and took a sizeable guzzle as Josh snapped the needle through the paper, pulled it out of the plastic casing inside, and pricked the pad of his thumb.
Once the drop of blood was smeared on the slide, Randy motioned Josh to go and sit back down. As he went, Josh noticed for the first time that the wall had four bullet holes in it above the chair, and there was the sheen of scrubbed plaster where, perhaps, blood and brains had been cleaned away—on at least four occasions.
That immediately put a different complexion on the proceedings. This might all be pure theater and developed to maintain a lie, but to show the veracity of the process, of course, it would make sense that Hauser would give the nod to Randy or his cohorts, on occasion, to show that they’d tested someone who she said had the imaginary disease.
There was going to be an arbitrary decision made that could end Josh’s life in an instant. He sat licking his suddenly dry lips. Looking down the barrel of Randy’s gun while Doctor Hauser put on a fresh pair of rubber gloves and transferred the slide to the microscope.
Josh considered his options, but there really weren’t that many. If Hauser flipped a coin in her head and it came down death’s head up, Josh was unarmed, there was a gun on him, and there was only one exit. Even if he got out of the cell, there were the card-playing deputies, not to mention the town of people gripped in the fear that Creggan and Hauser had whipped up.
About all he had was the bench he was sitting on. He might be able to use it as a shield as he rushed Randy—but he didn’t know if Hauser had a gun in the pocket opposite of the flask.
He could move before the decision was made, of course. Hoping to get the jump on Randy, leap up, roar, and take the bench with him and swing it at the gun.
He could also just get shot in the face for his troubles.
Randy’s hand was unwavering, the bead drawn on Josh, and even if he exploded to his feet now, there was almost zero chance of him not taking a slug in the heart, and then another one to the brain as he went down.
Hauser lit another ribbon of magnesium, and the room was filled with the blue-white sizzle of burning metal. The hissing and sparking went on for four seconds as Hauser bent to the microscope.
The harsh white light went out.
Hauser came up, rubbing again at her red-rimmed eyes. Her gaze bored into Josh. He could feel it raking his skin with its presence, and see the coin flicking in her eyes. She had the power of life or death over him in that very moment. And she hadn’t decided which way the coin was going to fall. How did she choose? What was it? Had she made her quota for this week? Or was Creggan expecting Hauser to off a stranger who’d come into town and looked like he might be trouble?
Did Creggan care about the grenades? If Creggan was a pragmatist, of course he did. And that made all this theater. But theater or no, Josh could see Hauser enjoyed her moment of ecstatic power when she could—at least in appearance—choose to kill a man or let him live.
There was a tiny smile curling at the corner of her mouth.
Perhaps she guessed Josh knew this was all pretense. She may have the body of a washed-up drunk, but he guessed her mind was sharp. It would have to be to carry out this great deception on the townsfolk of Pickford. She would have to be a fine judge of character if she could see right through him. Maybe he’d signed his own death warrant and the grenades really weren’t that important. They already had a good thing going on, and it would be madness to jeopardize that by keeping someone they weren’t sure of alive. He may well have killed Donald and himself just by walking into town.
All he could think about in that moment was the sobbing of the men being walked towards the gallows. Knowing for sure they were about to hang. The certainty of death. The foreknowledge it was all going to end there. Josh knew that feeling now, and that in seconds his life could be over. He was trudging towards the gallows represented by the microscope and whatever fickle fate conspired with Hauser in order for her to make her decision.
The curl of the smile on Hauser’s wrinkled lips froze. The coin clattered to the floor behind her eyes.
“Stand down, Randy. He’s free from disease.”
The thudding in Josh’s heart took a while to slow down, and it took until they were back on the street for his breathing to get back to normal. Josh had been in many a dangerous situation in his life pre-supernova, and many more post-supernovas, but he had never once been so pinned down behind a random decision-making process. His mouth was just getting damp enough for it to accept a coating of saliva when Randy took him to a bar, where Josh was told that a room for him had been made up.
The slight trembling of anxiety left his limbs as he lay on the lumpy cot in his room above the rowdy bar. Sounds of laughter and shouting came up through the floorboards.
Randy had locked him in the room, and for now, Josh didn’t mind one little bit, because that barrier at least kept him away from Hauser’s thin, cruel mouth and that smile of arbitrary execution.
The next day, rain came to Pickford.
It woke Josh with pattering against the window like the tapping of a ghost wanting to come in and haunt a house. Josh got slowly off the bed, though the gray light coming in from outside seemed to make the room darker. He tried the door, but it was still locked. He’d gotten off to sleep around three a.m., when
the partying in the bar downstairs had stopped.
He hadn’t seen Creggan as Randy had led him through the bar last night after leaving Hauser, but then, Josh hadn’t been in the frame of mind to take too much notice of anything—his thinking mostly coming out of a fog of anticipatory fear—but he thought he’d heard Creggan’s voice making some sort of speech in the rowdiness. He hadn’t been able to pick out any of the actual words, but he felt sure it had been the voice of the politician. Perhaps rallying his troops, perhaps celebrating the deaths of the traitors.
Josh used the bathroom adjoining his room and found fresh razors to shave, and a mirror to use them in. The water came from the faucet, cold and invigorating—perhaps fed by a wind pump or a gravity feed from a water tank above him. It looked fresh enough, but he knew better than to drink it non-boiled.
After half an hour, the key rattled in the outside lock and Randy opened the door. “Dale wants to see you.”
Josh was given an oilskin cape to drape over his head and back as Randy jogged him towards the steps of the town hall.
In the drizzle and low light beneath the rain clouds, the gallows looked like a wooden pier at low tide. Slimy with rain, wood darkened by moisture. In the daytime, they were less threatening, innocuous even—like a bandstand in the middle of any town in America—but the creaking echoes of the bodies still swung in Josh’s mind as he was hustled up the stairs into the town hall.
Creggan was waiting with hot coffee, fresh bread, and strawberry jelly which he doled out from an 18 oz. jar of Smucker’s like it was a normal morning in Pickford and this was a normal working breakfast.
But nothing was normal in this town. Josh’s priorities were to get himself license to move around the town without needing to be chaperoned or locked up in his room. When he had that advantage, he would be able to try to find out in how bad a way Donald was, and finally carry out the plan he had made with Karel to spring him.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 11