For that to happen, though, at a bare minimum he would need to be able to signal to her and let her know where Donald was being kept.
The coffee, the bread, and the jelly, however, were a welcome addition to the morning.
“So, I’m glad to hear you got the all-clear from Doctor Hauser.”
Josh nodded as he chewed.
“I’ve also taken the liberty of having one of my explosives guys take a look at your grenades. Just to check them over. I’m sure you understand. I’d hate to make a deal with you for five thousand grenades filled with Play-Doh. Good for the kids of the town, but not so good for me.”
“No pushback from me on that account, Mr. Creggan. The weapons I have access to are legit, and you’re welcome to have a share of them…”
Creggan’s eyebrow arched. “A share…?”
Josh swallowed the bread. “Well, yes. I would need to keep stock for myself, of course—just in case things don’t work out here for me, I’d need materials to trade further down the line.”
Creggan considered this, his usually full lips now thin and bloodless. “Well, I can appreciate that, Mr. Rennie, of course. But we would have to see some goodwill from you. The goodwill that extends beyond a handful of grenades and a pretty story.”
There wasn’t a chill undercurrent in the room that Josh could detect right now, but he guessed that things could turn if he didn’t play this right. “And I appreciate that, too. Which is why, as I’m sure you correctly surmised, I have a slightly larger stockpile of weapons close by.”
“A smart move not to bring them all into town at once.”
“I hope so. You don’t know who you can trust in these troubled times.”
“No, indeed,” Creggan agreed. “If you’ll take Randy to where you’ve stowed your smaller cache, he’ll help you bring them into town.”
Josh really didn’t want to leave town with a bodyguard. Least of all Randy. There were plenty more baubles sitting with Karel up on Copper’s Bluff that he could bring down, but getting up there alone would be imperative.
“I’m happy to go to get some of my weapons and bring them down to you, Mr. Creggan, but you’ll appreciate that until I know we can both trust each other, I’d rather do that alone. If it’s all the same to you.”
Creggan steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them. “I completely understand, Mr. Rennie. You could just go on your merry way, I suppose, and see what the next town brings.”
“I could,” said Josh, “but with the deepest respect, I don’t think you want me to go. Not until you’ve ascertained I’m on the level with what I have to offer, at least. And, I have to tell you, I’m tired of wandering, so I’d just as soon stay if you’ll have me, given what I’ve seen of this place. You’ve not treated me like a prisoner, it’s true, but you’ve not given me anything like freedom… yet. That suggests to me that you don’t want to scare me off trading with you.”
Josh sensed that Creggan’s greed might outstrip poker tactics. Creggan was the kind of man who wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to get his hands on the mythical serious weaponry. Creggan crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. Josh felt immediately that Creggan didn’t appreciate having his motivations so baldly exposed. Josh had scored a direct hit on the man’s pride.
“How long would it take you to go there and back again?”
It was another poker player’s bluff made as a way of recovery, but an easily read tell. Creggan obviously wanted to ascertain how far away the cache was. Armed with that information, he’d be able to send out search parties to look in the likeliest places. He had the manpower and the resources. Josh had come in from the south, and that would be their first area to search. Yes, the woods were dense, and the terrain challenging around Copper’s Bluff, but it wouldn’t take them long to stumble on Karel.
“Three days, round trip,” Josh lied. “Day and a half there, day and a half back, with an overnight stay. However keen I am to meet your requirements, I’m not traveling at night. Too many crazies—too many everywhere.”
“Then you can set out right away,” Creggan pushed.
The rain whispered against the window of Creggan’s office, and Josh made a pained face. “Have some mercy, Mr. Creggan—let’s at least wait until the weather clears.”
Creggan thought for a moment. Josh could see the calculations going on behind his eyes. Josh knew he was going to send someone to trail him, whatever Creggan might say to the contrary. Pretty soon, they were going to miss Gerry, too—the hunter Karel had extracted so much information from—if they hadn’t already, and that might arouse suspicions if they connected Gerry’s disappearance with Josh’s arrival. “Alrighty, Mr. Rennie, I think our hospitality can extend to another night before we get down to business. I hope to see you outside the town hall again tonight.”
Josh cocked a questioning eyebrow, but he knew the answer before Creggan opened his mouth.
“Got a couple more hangings to officiate. A mayor’s job is never done.”
The rain fell out of the sky for the rest of the day. Josh wasn’t allowed by Randy to have his weapons or pack back—“You can have them when you head out tomorrow,” the man had commented, upon being asked—but he was allowed to sit in the bar below his room.
The bar was a western throwback that Josh had been almost oblivious to last night when he’d been marched through it by Randy. There was a wall of mirrors, in front of which were a myriad of bottles, but the draft beer dispensers weren’t working and the beer bottles in the refrigerators were warm. The tables were small and round with ancient-looking, though not necessarily old-time style, wooden chairs around them. Someone played a beat-up piano in the corner, and the men of Pickford (for it was exclusively men in the bar) came and went, and Josh sat there drinking warm cola and trying to work out what he was going to do.
Beer and spirits were rationed—money being a pointless commodity right now—so Josh was issued with a book of tear-out coupons which he was told by Randy were supposed to last him a week for alcohol and food. “Water is free. We have two fresh sources in town. Alcohol, we scavenge from the surrounding areas. We have hunters going out every day to bring back grub. And we have a deal with some of the local farmers.”
“A deal?” Josh felt his gut tightening at the suggestion of a deal. He knew exactly what kind of deal the men of Pickford offered to the local farms. It had been their bare-faced protection racketeering which had led to the bloody confrontation at the M-Bar, the death of Maria, and Josh’s foolish mission to save Donald.
“Yeah. We look after them, they look after us,” Randy said with a smile that suggested the full subtext of implied violence and threat beneath it. “Anyway, I have to go now,” Randy said, getting up from the table. “My turn to organize the hanging tonight.”
Josh eyed him coldly, trying to find a word that wouldn’t start a bar fight with the thin twenty-something.
“No need to be squeamish, Rennie. It’s just an old farmer who got himself above his station and came into town to cause trouble. We’re bringing the other farmers in the area into town to watch. It’ll be instructive when we stretch Donald Jefferson’s neck.”
12
The boy went limp and his hands fell away from Storm’s throat. He slithered away from Storm, his arms flapping, until gravity upended him out of the buggy and he crunched to the rain slathered road. His body falling away revealed Tally. She’d yanked his head back by the hair and shot him in the base of the spine. Once he lay on the road, Tally finished the grim task and put the boy out of all their misery with a shot to the head.
The smile on the dead boy’s lips chilled Storm’s whole body as he looked over the side of the buggy to make sure he wasn’t coming back to strangle him again.
“You okay?” Tally asked, wiping the slick of rain from her face as it kept falling.
Storm nodded. “I think so. Thanks. I… wasn’t strong enough to…”
“It’s okay. You will be.”
<
br /> Tally lifted her SIG and fired two shots back behind the buggy. Storm heard bodies thudding to the ground. He reached down between his feet to retrieve the Beretta he’d been looking for as the boy had come at him. It felt slick with rain in his hand, but when he looked down, he saw it wasn’t rain—it was the boy’s blood.
Tally stayed with him until the battle was over and she and the others had dealt with all of the attackers. Three of Keysell’s men had died in the onslaught of axes and baseball bats. Keysell was his usual pragmatic self afterward, noting that the forest around them didn’t present a sustainable defensive area, so they covered the bodies of their dead comrades with ferns to give them what dignity they could, and after a brief pause for a silent prayer, he moved the party on away from the scene of the battle.
The rain persisted for much of the day, and it was only when the sun dropped and the sodden trees were retreating into the wide mountain’s darkness that the falling droplets began to abate.
Keysell kept them going for an hour longer in the dark than they normally would have gone—it was easy enough to follow the road at night since they were walking without any true speediness. They camped yards from the road and managed to get two large fires going in a clearing, allowing them to cook and dry what clothes they could. The night was not awfully cold, and so the sight of people stripped to their underwear but still heavily armed to the teeth as they guarded the perimeter and their clothes hung drying in the smoky air was a little surreal, to say the least, but there were no more attacks, and no sense—for now—that they had been tracked.
Storm found himself stationed by the fire, able now to sit up without it causing him too much discomfort, and he did what he could to tend the boiling pots of water for coffee. Keysell came to fill his cup from the bubbling surface of the water, and Storm put a hand on his arm as he turned to move away.
“Wait. Please.”
Keysell, his face appearing ever hollower in the firelight, turned his gray eyes to Storm. His face was ruddy, but also tight with annoyance.
“I wanted to say how sorry I am. About your men. They died… because of me. Because I’m in that stupid buggy. I just wanted you to know how grateful I am, to you and them.”
Keysell sighed and crouched down on his haunches. As he came forward into the firelight proper, Storm could see there were bruises caused by teeth marks on his shoulder. The skin hadn’t been broken, but the bites looked frenzied, their results painful. To go along with this, Keysell winced as he sat. “I am beyond unhappy my guys went down, Storm. I’ve known them for years. We trained together, we fought together, and we were there for each other. They weren’t just my guys. They were my brothers. We stood up when everyone else was falling away.”
Keysell’s eyes were bright as he remembered them. Storm had been thinking about what had happened all the way through the day since they’d left behind the bodies of the Defenders. The first thing he’d realized as they’d pulled away was that he hadn’t even known their names. These men who had defended him. That’s what had driven him to start this conversation with Keysell now. He felt he had to tell him exactly how his thinking was going—not out of any sense of self-pity—but just so Keysell knew the score.
“I know,” Storm said quietly. “You’ve laid everything on the line for us.”
Keysell shook his head. “No. Not for you.”
Storm didn’t understand, and his face must have conveyed that confusion to Keysell because the man smiled. “Kid, we came to get Larry. To get Larry and return with Larry would have meant traveling through these woods either way. There’s no other way around it. The mountains are between Cumberland and your ranch. Always have been, always will be. The people who attacked us—poor tortured souls that they are—would have been here anyway. So, again, I don’t blame you. I’m angry at myself that I couldn’t save them. I’m sad that they’re gone. But that’s what we signed up for when we joined the Defenders. We knew this day might come. If not here, then in Cumberland or beyond. The world has changed forever, kid. This won’t be the last bunch of brothers I’ll be mourning. And maybe those here’ll be mourning me at some point.”
Keysell took a slug of the coffee and, after swilling it around his mouth, swallowed decisively. “None of this would have happened if we hadn’t let Larry come out here and play angel. Yeah, we could have jealously hung onto him and kept him for ourselves, but that’s the risk you take in trying to do the right thing. It’s not your fault, kid, so we’ll have no more of this talk, yeah?”
Storm nodded. “Put into perspective like that… I guess you’re right.”
“Of course, I’m right,” Keysell said, draining the cup and dipping it into the pan for more. “The new world is about where you are now. It’s where you stand. Everything from now on is going to be like this. We can’t rest; we can’t take our foot off the gas when it comes to the fight back. If we’re going to ever get things back to how they were before, we can’t go through life wasting our time regretting and bellyaching about yesterday. There is today and there is tomorrow. Remember that, kid. Only today and tomorrow.”
In the shelter Henry and Tally built that night for Storm and his sister, he lay awake for a good few hours. He listened to the fires burning out and the guards Keysell had placed around the camp walking around, checking the approaches. The forest seemed more awake than usual. As if the day’s rain had suppressed the wildlife during the day, and they were determined to get out and about now whatever the time of night. Wings fluttered through the trees. Owls could be heard hooting in the distance. Weird calls from other animals echoed through the darkness at regular intervals.
Storm thought a lot about what Keysell had said. He had to admit to himself that he was right. There was no time now to wallow in one’s own misery over what had changed about the world. If you really wanted to survive tomorrow, then yesterday had to be cut loose and you had to face forward.
And that meant facing forward to a life without his father.
His heart tolled like the bell of doom in his chest at the thought, but he knew that he couldn’t rely on Josh anymore. How could he? Josh had abandoned the family and him in their hour of greatest need—Storm’s illness—to show what his priorities really were. He’d made Maxine sad beyond the point of grief, and she’d been left to stand by her son while Josh had gone off to sea with his surrogate children.
And then, causing the burns to Maxine’s hands and face. Yes, he’d said it had been an accident, and he hadn’t meant it, but that just made him more of a liability in Storm’s eyes.
Going forward, the supernova now presented Storm with a clean break from his past. He had survived much. Cancer. Surgery. The attacks. And he had done all that without Josh—if he needed clear evidence that he didn’t need his liability of a father around him anymore, then this was it.
As he rolled into his blanket and closed his eyes to the sounds of the mountain forest at night, Storm felt sleep approaching him as easily as it had last night.
The decision, as far as Storm was concerned, was made.
Josh was part of yesterday. And that was that.
The road into Cumberland was easier than it had been for the last two days of traveling, and everyone on foot in the party seemed, from Storm’s vantage point in the buggy, to have more of a spring in their step.
“Not long now,” his mom said, holding onto the reins next to him as a shaft of welcome sunlight illuminated the area around them—as if the sky itself wanted to fill them with optimism.
The weather had held, and there’d been no more evidence of crazies in the woods or on the road. There were bound to be more of them around, but the party hadn’t encountered them, and that was seen as a good sign. “Maybe they’re all migrating up to the woods now?” Henry had speculated when he and Tally had joined Storm and his mom for a short break to feed Tally-Two and let her drink from a roadside stream.
“They must be getting driven out of a lot of towns and cities,” Maxine said.
<
br /> “Or killed in places like Pickford,” Tally offered morosely.
The mention of Pickford pinged thoughts around to Josh and what might be happening there with Donald and Karel. But there was no answer to the unspoken questions hanging in the air. Just eyes not meeting other eyes in the pregnant silence, until Storm decided he would move things on. “Are we going to stay in Cumberland, Mom?”
Maxine, tracks skipping in her mind if her face was any guide, nodded. “I think so. Yes. Clitheroe and the Defenders comprehensively took care of General Carron when I came for Larry. They said they were going to set up a defensible area of town, and then try to get some kind of food distribution program set up. Carron had stolen and scavenged plenty of it from the city already and stockpiled it in the hospital. There’s a lot of medication and supplies. Larry will be able to run the hospital as a community facility again. I think Cumberland is well-placed to be the kind of town we need right now. A place for the people and by the people.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Storm grinned. “Sounds familiar.”
That raised the mood around the knot of folks surrounding the buggy. Poppet and Larry came over to check on Storm’s abdomen and Maxine’s dressings. Larry took those which had still been on Maxine’s hands and face away, and declared her “good to go.” Storm’s surgical wound, he said, was “healing nicely” and there was no “hint of infection,” but he noted that Storm should continue with the strong antibiotics for the next week at least, adding they would need to stock up on them when they got into Cumberland proper.
They moved off again along US-220 for the last eight miles into the city, Bobby, the farm dog, skipping along with the horses, seemingly reflecting the positive mood of the humans as they approached their final destination.
As the buildings along the road became more prevalent, the areas of devastation also became even more apparent. Most of the fires that had ravaged the area in the last month had burned themselves out, but there were still the occasional columns of smoke rising here and there. They were too far from the road for the group to tell if they were unattended, or campfires of survivors, but Maxine said, “If Clitheroe was true to his word, the people left in the city would have been moved by now. Maybe these are some outliers not wanting to join the Defender’s New Order—but more likely just fires burning on their own.”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 12