Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End

by Hamilton, Grace

  There’d been so much commotion in the area, he figured he’d not have been seen at all during the hunt for Filly—who appeared to have made it out of the bar through the exit to the cellar without being captured, and then had run away into town.

  Josh hoped the little man with the bad hair had gotten away from his pursuers—who were now scouring the town in a more organized way. He knew that his cop-sense had accurately allowed him to press all of Filly’s buttons, but that still left a bad taste in his mouth—especially knowing what might have happened after they’d claimed he was sick.

  Randy came back to check on Josh an hour later. He’d heard about the fracas, and eyed Josh suspiciously when he questioned him about it.

  “It wasn’t me, Randy,” Josh said. “I didn’t think Filly was ill or anything. The others put two and two together and made seven. They heard him screaming at me and thought he was completely off his rocker.”

  Randy sipped at the beer he’d opened and poured for himself from behind the bar in the absence of Filly. There was machinery whirring behind his eyes, signaling his thoughts. Was he in on the deception? Did he know what Creggan and Hauser were perpetrating here?

  “Okay,” Randy said. “Whatever your beef with Filly, it exposed him for what he really was. A crazy. You did a good thing. We’re grateful.”

  All indicators were that he had not done any such good thing, in that case. “Thanks, man,” Josh said. “I just want to fit in, you know?”

  “You give those weapons over to Creggan and you’ll fit right in, Mr. Rennie. That’s a dead cert.”

  Josh chanced a change in the policy of his being babysat. “So, am I good to lose my shadow? I had plenty opportunity to leave town while everyone was searching for Filly, but here I am. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Randy shrugged. “I don’t see why not. Make sure you’re outside the town hall at eight p.m. That’s showtime.”

  The use of the word showtime made Josh wish it had been Randy he’d started the bar fight with. If there was a man who deserved to be hunted through the streets for his life, it was Randy.

  Later in the afternoon, with Josh having showed that he was at least on the surface trustworthy, Randy moved on to other duties. It didn’t seem that anyone else was tasked with keeping an eye on Josh. As the rains finally stopped, he went to the town square twice more in order to make sure that the message written on the back of his hand could be seen by Karel if she hadn’t seen it already.

  With the rains abated, men were working at the gallows, re-rigging it with fresh ropes that were already noosed. They put up three lines, and Josh wondered which other poor victims of Creggan’s vagaries were going to be put to death alongside Donald that night.

  He walked past the police station a couple of times, checking it out for rear exits and ways of getting into the underground spaces where he’d last seen Donald—and been so close to death in Hauser’s laboratory. There didn’t appear to be any way down into the cells other than through the main building itself. He noticed a fire escape at the back of the building that had been chained closed and a row of barred windows along one wall. But the bars were there just for security, Josh guessed, with the rooms beyond them designed more as sheriff’s offices, storerooms, and information processing areas with dead-eyed computers still on the desks.

  There was very little activity going on in the police station that Josh could see for himself, but he didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he was casing the joint.

  He took the time to look around the area of damp grass where the gallows had been erected. Fifty yards from the town hall on what had once been an ornamental garden that likely hadn’t been tended to since before the supernova. There was a sculpture of an obscure Civil War general who had some tenuous link to Pickford. His forlorn face and mustache dripped with leftover moisture from the downpour, his sightless eyes overlooking the gallows and, beyond them, the town hall.

  There was a civil war going on in America right now, too, Josh thought. A war between people like Creggan, who saw every opportunity to feather their own nests and grab power, and people like… well, himself… who believed the rule of law was something worth defending. And that law wasn’t just the survival of the fittest. Josh had been brought up by his father to believe a party should move at the speed of its slowest member. That didn’t mean you shouldn’t fight and be prepared to die or kill for your survival, but that helping those around you would lead to a better world for everyone.

  Selfishness was never, Josh thought, a good look.

  And yet, it was his insistence on carrying that idea through that—he knew—had caused the issues in his marriage. He hadn’t found the balance. He hadn’t worked with Maxine to achieve the needed balance—he’d just gone off and gotten himself the job as a probation officer, and his family had suffered as a result.

  The twist and ache of Storm’s provenance, of course, didn’t help when it came to thinking he should have done things differently. Maybe he’d known all along—deep down, on a subconscious or psychic level—what the truth was about Storm. And then he remembered that he thought psychic powers were the height of bunk, and he shook his head. It wouldn’t do to blame outside influences on the decisions he’d made that had affected the family. He had to stand up and recognize there were no excuses. Storm was his son… if not by genetics, well, then by dint of length of relationship. He had a way to go to try to fix the relationship with both Maxine and Storm, sure, but finding and springing Donald was the start of that process.

  He looked at his watch.

  Five thirty p.m. He had two and a half hours to get this done, and if Karel had seen the thrice-written message on the back of his hand through her field glasses, then…

  He saw her across the street.

  Karel was in town, as she’d said she would be. She’d laughed at him before he’d gone into Pickford, when he’d said that she might have trouble getting in past the sentries and roadblocks. “It’s not me I’m worried about getting into Pickford, you big old stupid lunk. It’s you with your galumphing feet and your bull elephant stealth. Why do you think I left you behind when I went to get Gerry?”

  And she’d been right. She was walking with her head down, out of her tactical gear and wearing Gerry’s anorak, with her ponytail coming out of the back of a baseball cap.

  The message written on the back of Josh’s hand had told her to meet him at the town hall at five thirty p.m., and she was precisely on time… but she walked past the colonnaded steps and plaster porch without making eye contact with him.

  They couldn’t be seen together in the open street, as that might raise questions in anyone who was taking an interest in Josh. He was well known already. Karel, head down and baseball cap in place, her hands deep into the pockets of her coat, might have been any blond-haired woman in the town. If there was one thing Josh had noticed about Creggan and his men, it was that they might be paranoid, but they did have faith in their security.

  A fat lot of good it’s done them.

  Karel continued down the main street and turned into the alley between two burned-out stores. One had been a hardware store, the other a barbershop. When Josh got to the alley, Karel was almost at the end. As Josh turned in, he saw her bend, as if to tighten a shoelace, and then she was up, had turned the corner, and was gone into the gloom.

  Josh had expected her to wait for him in the alley. It seemed like a good, out of the way place for them to meet, but she’d continued on and was now completely out of sight. Josh quickened his pace, and if he had been totally focused on catching up with Karel, he might have missed it.

  Where Karel had dropped to tie her shoelace, Josh saw a half-brick that had been torn from a wall of the burned-out store. A corner of white paper was sticking out of it. Josh looked around to see if he was being watched as the afternoon twilight dimmed the alley and deepened the shadows.

  He kicked the brick with his toe and picked up the piece of paper.

  He unfur
led it, finding it contained one sentence.

  We have a problem. Meet me behind the police dept. building in one hour.

  14

  Clitheroe had been nailed to the wall of the school from which he’d launched the attack on the Cumberland Community Hospital. Maxine couldn’t be sure if the portly, mustachioed leader of the Third Maryland Defenders had been alive or dead when the Harbormaster’s men had crucified him, but his body was well on the way to putrefaction now.

  The tables had turned in Cumberland again, and that became more and more clear as Maxine and the others were brought into the city by Ten-Foot and his red uniformed forces; they had seen flashes of red everywhere. Flags had been raised—crudely painted H’s surrounded by a ring of white stars on a red background. The designs on the flags looked as if they’d been slapped on by unpracticed hands, but the message coming from each flag was clear—the city was under new management, and if you got in the way of that, you were nailed to a wall.

  Ten-Foot had told Maxine and the others very little, other than that they were going back into town to get supplies, and that then they would be going south to meet the Harbormaster in northern Florida. Storm had been allowed to ride in the buggy, but Tally-Two was driven on by a Harborman (as Ten-Foot referred to his men) and Maxine was left to walk alongside Larry and Poppet.

  She held onto the fact that, although Keysell had been left to die in a puddle of his own blood, and the rest of the Defenders had been shot down by the cavalry or scattered to the winds, she hadn’t seen the bodies of Tally or Henry. So, there was a good chance they had been able to escape.

  Once they got past Clitheroe’s body on the outside of Lincoln Memorial Elementary, Maxine and others, hands tied behind their backs, were taken into the building and along the corridors to where Clitheroe had once had his headquarters. The large room in the administration block had been scarred by bullets. The windows had been broken. There were puddles of blood, which had been covered in sand, and the tables where Clitheroe had done his planning for the successful raid on the hospital were still in place.

  “Wait here,” Ten-Foot said to the captives as two Harbormen covered them with their weapons. Ten-Foot walked across the room to where a knot of red-uniformed Harbormen were talking in low tones. Ten-Foot approached a tall, Slavic-boned, arrow-straight man in his forties with a floppy brown fringe, his hair completely shaved from the back and sides of his head. Ten-Foot saluted him sloppily. The Slavic clapped Ten-Foot on the shoulder and smiled. “You’ve done well, boy. Done well, indeed! We’ll make an officer of you yet.”

  Maxine could see that Ten-Foot was enjoying the praise. She was only tangentially aware of who Ten-Foot was. She thought that maybe Tally or Josh had mentioned him to her back when the team-building trip on the Sea-Hawk had been in its planning stages. A young, perhaps seventeen-year-old—now, maybe eighteen years old—street criminal with a string of convictions who’d been in the last chance saloon of Josh’s care before he’d inevitably be swallowed up by the state penitentiary system. He had been one of the ten probationers—six male and four female—who Josh had been concentrating on in his caseload while his son had been away in Boston being treated for cancer.

  And look how that had turned out.

  Ten-Foot and the Slavic peeled away from the gaggle of officers and came over. The Slavic stood there looking from Larry to Poppet, and then between Storm and Maxine. His eyes rested on her, looking her up and down. “I’m telling you now, Ten-Foot,” the man said, as if Maxine wasn’t there in front of him, or as if he was discussing the acquisition of a prize pig, “you get this one back to the Harbormaster and you’ll be able to write your own prize. I’m only sad I’m not going back with you to take the glory for myself.”

  Ten-Foot’s face split into a wide grin. “You get Standing and his bitch daughter, Jank, and we’ll both be ridin’ high in court.”

  Maxine had no idea what they were referring to, but the meaning was clear and it didn’t sound at all good. “Josh helped you, Ten-Foot,” she spoke up. “He took you on that trip to give you a chance to prove yourself. And this is how you repay him?”

  Ten-Foot giggled. “How I want to repay him is to have you alone in a room with chains and a knife so I can show you what a real man feels like. But there’s someone ahead of me in that queue. I’ll just hafta make do with the fantasy.”

  Jank threw his head back and laughed. He walked back to the other officers after saying to Ten-Foot, “You crack me up, Ten-Foot. Take all the supplies you need for the trip and set out this afternoon. Don’t dawdle. He’ll want you back with the prize ASAP.”

  Maxine and the others were huddled into a small storeroom off the main office area and locked in—mercifully, with their hands untied.

  Storm, who had been made to walk from outside the school to the administration block—slowly and painfully—was drained of all energy. But when Larry looked at his wound, he saw it was still intact and remained uninfected. “You’ll need access to the antibiotics again soon,” was all he commented—it was the most he could bring himself to say, it seemed. Larry looked hollowed out by the news of what had happened in Cumberland. Clitheroe and his Defenders had been on the side of the angels, and the red devils had come from nowhere and crushed them with superior forces.

  “Who is this Harbormaster?” Storm asked when there was enough strength back in his body to make the words. Larry shrugged. Maxine shook her head.

  “We came up against him in Georgia,” Poppet said balefully, and recounted the story of what had happened in Savannah and outside of it. How Trace Parker—the effete and cultured but utterly ruthless monster, and the founder of a town of land-pirates and their town named Parkopolis—had not been at the top of his particular food chain as Poppet and Josh had first surmised. Parker had been working for someone called the Harbormaster—a person whose very name struck fear into the hearts of those who knew what he was capable of. Josh and Poppet had narrowly prevented a consignment of hostage children from being transported to the Harbormaster by one of Trace Parker’s lieutenants, but they’d found out little more about him.

  “Looks like his influence is growing,” Storm said. “If these uniformed goons are anything to go by.”

  “And what are they doing this far north?” Larry asked, his face grave.

  “They can’t be here just for me and Mom,” Storm surmised. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I guess,” Poppet continued, “we’re just a cherry on an expansionist cake. See, when my Joey’s business in one area reached saturation point, he’d have to move in somewhere else. He would send his boys in hard to another wise guy’s territory. He’d have to crack some heads, maybe waste a few others—but you go in hard. You go in fast, and you make a point of showing who’s in charge. That’s what all the uniforms and the flags are about. This guy, whoever he is, is making sure he gets as many towns and cities under his control as he can. It’s classic… what…? What are you guys staring at me like that for?”

  Maxine saw that Storm and Larry were staring at Poppet as if she was a space alien from the Planet Zog. Josh had told Maxine a little about Poppet’s past as Joey Langolini’s wife. Joey Langolini, the New York gang boss, racketeer, and made man. But also, a man who had saved Josh and Poppet’s lives by giving them time to get away from attackers on the Empress—a stranded ocean liner in the Atlantic.

  The example of what Joey would have done to increase his territory was exactly what the Harbormaster seemed to be attempting now. The correlation between the two strategies was entirely compatible—and without a different explanation to the contrary, completely inarguable.

  The Harbormaster was making his play for control. Whipping up an army that was ready to spread his doctrine across the whole of the country.

  “Yeah, well,” Poppet said defiantly. She wasn’t one for apologizing, Maxine observed. “That’s what’s happening now. Someone is filling the vacuum, and that someone is the Harbormaster.”

  Maxine le
aned back against the wall, knots in her stomach unfurling in her mind as images of Tally, Donald, and Josh played through it. She was back to square one, pretty much. Just her and Storm left together from her family, and an immediately uncertain future presenting itself.

  “That’s all very well and good,” Larry said, wiping a smut of dirt from the bandage on his injured hand. “But we can’t just sit by and let them get away with it.”

  Storm shook his head. “It may have escaped your notice, but there are only four of us in this room. There’s only one door out, and there’s a whole army of those suckers roaming the streets. Whatever we can and can’t do isn’t determined by what’s right or wrong; it’s determined by what’s possible. And right now, that’s pretty much nothing.”

  No one in the room was prepared to argue with that.

  They found Keysell’s body by the side of the road where they’d been attacked the day before. It was around two in the morning by the time they reached him. Henry hadn’t let them leave the basement until he’d felt sure the bleeding from Tally’s shoulder had been halted.

  The saber slash from one of Ten-Foot’s cavalry chargers hadn’t gone all the way down to the bone, but the eight-inch rent in Tally’s jacket—which had taken the brunt of the blow—had translated into a six-inch gash across her skin which had bled so hard that it had turned her whole sleeve the same red of the uniform of the man who’d caused it.

  Henry’s intent on getting her away and to safety had taken precedence over staunching her blood loss, and that’s what had caused her to check out of Consciousness Central and take a room in Hotel Oblivion. Henry had cleaned the wound with sterile water from his pack, sifted antibiotic powder liberally into the wound, and closed the lips of it with combat medic’s superglue.

  It would do for now.

  Her shoulder was crazy-stiff and felt numb all the way to her wrist, but she still had a full range of movement and all of her fingers—so Henry considered that she’d gotten off lightly.