Josh shook his head. “Not as far as I know. There’s plenty of local setups getting together. Some might be okay, but there are plenty of others who are dangerous and murderous. We’ve run into one such bunch a few times, and…”
Halley held up his hand like he wasn’t at all interested in the rest of Josh’s answer, which as it turned out he wasn’t. He pointed at Jingo. “I must say Jingo is by far the most interesting name I’ve heard in a while. Tell me, lad, how did you come by it?”
Jingo peered back at Halley, but just like Henry, he didn’t seem to see the point of holding back information if it kept them alive. “I’m James Gold. At school, I was Jim Gold. Jim Gold. Jingo.”
Halley sighed. “Oh, isn’t magic simply disappointing when we get to look behind the curtain? Oh well, perhaps you’ll all turn out to be interesting as people, but looking at you, I’m not so sure about that. Wait there….” Halley snigged at his own joke, and then added, “I’ll be back in a little while. Got a couple of experiments on the go that need to be checked on.”
And with that, he went upstairs.
Henry shuffled over to Karel’s back on his side, and her tied hands fumbled at the gag stuffed in his mouth, finally pulling it out and gaining a long sigh of relief from Henry.
“Sorry,” he said when he got his breath. “I guess the buzzer is too tempting for anyone to resist.”
Karel and Josh agreed.
“We should have just set the place on fire to see who’d run out,” Jingo commented.
“Thanks,” said Henry. “I love you, too.”
Jingo dropped his eyes. “Yeah. Sorry—wasn’t thinking.”
“So, what are we going to do?” Karel asked, straining at her bonds and getting nowhere.
Josh shook his head. “I don’t know, but in a world gone mad, it still gets a chance to layer on extra weirdness.”
“You think we could chew through this rope?” Karel asked with apparent earnestness.
Josh recognized the rope as the same kind from Tally’s collection of climbing gear. Nearly un-frayable, made that way so as not to resist getting damaged on rocky outcrops. It had the tensile strength to hold up an elephant and it gripped hard against its own knots. “You could try,” Josh said, “but I don’t figure you’ll have much luck finding a good orthodontist to fix your crowns. This stuff is tougher than tough. Unless we’re left alone for a good few hours or more, I think we’re going to have to wait for our host to release us.”
“You think he will?” Karel asked, unable to keep the edge of incredulity out of her tone.
Josh shrugged. “Maybe. He doesn’t strike me as a murderer. Dangerously smart, yes. Anyone who’s figured out a way to make a battery work might be the most important man on the planet right now.”
“And doesn’t he act like it,” Jingo commented resignedly.
“All I hope is that the others don’t come into town looking for us. While we’ve got people on the outside, we might have some bargaining power,” Josh said quietly.
“Oh, I don’t really think so,” said Halley’s voice from above them again. He’d obviously been listening to them from above the whole time. “And you’re right about the teeth thing, Josh. I really am a very smart guy, but even my skills don’t run to dentistry. So, while I have your full attention. Who wants some coffee?”
Later, Halley returned to the basement with tea and coffee on a tray, as well as some cookies piled in a little pyramid on a plate. He pumped them for information about why they were there and where they had come from, as well as the situation in the rest of America outside Eagle Rock. Josh gave him a potted history of the Sea-Hawk and what had happened, how they’d made it to shore, and the adventures and trials they had had along the way. In the telling, Josh found himself getting ever more desperate to speak to Maxine again, and to find out the truth about Storm—he left that angle out of the tale altogether, as it was too painful to recount. Even to a stranger.
“I am truly sorry about your wife and son, Josh. You must be beside yourself.”
“It’s pretty tough, yes, but we’re on their trail. If we can catch up before Jacksonville, then maybe we might be able to rescue them.”
Halley lifted the cup of lukewarm coffee to Josh’s lips again. He had given them all sips by turn, and the coffee—although not that warm—was at least giving Josh the caffeinated buzz he needed to keep focused. Halley seemed genuinely distressed by the story of what had happened to Maxine and Storm. And when Josh had told him about the conversation with Storm on the Sea-Hawk, Halley had gotten up, paced around, and near enough kicked the basement wall in frustration. “Those fools. They wouldn’t listen to me. Laughed at me. Not every conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory. Sometimes they’re the real thing. My contact at the NSA was unimpeachable. And so it proved. The Earth has been hit by a storm of dark matter particles, super-charged neutrinos, and all manner of other exotic particles. We’re still in the wash of it now. It’s causing a near electromagnetic pulse effect, which has dampened down all electronic transmissions to almost zero. It’s caused untold havoc in the minds of vast swathes of the population, sending many of them insane—I have an idea about something we can do about that, too—but I need more subjects to work on.”
“Subjects?” Josh asked, trying to stem the stream of consciousness from Halley’s mouth.
“Yes. Subjects. I built the trapdoors and created the buzzer just in case of an attack by some of the worst affected.”
“And did you catch any?” Karel asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Halley. “I have three upstairs right now. As soon as I can trust you, I’ll let you meet them. They’re quite sane now. Well… mostly.”
Josh’s mind skipped to a more practical track. “Professor Halley. Please, can you or someone get word to my daughter outside town? She’s going to be awful worried that we haven’t come back from here yet.”
Halley thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what. I don’t think you’re government—you don’t have that smell—and I don’t think you’re blackhats, either. If you were, you would have done what young James Gold here suggested and just set the place on fire to smoke, as they say, me out. Why don’t I let one of you—not James Gold, I stress, as he’s the least trustworthy of the lot of you—go back and get the others? The rest of you stay here, with all the weapons, and we’ll see how well you can be trusted. I assure you this house is defended in ways you can only guess at.”
At the end of that, Josh felt like taking a gulp of air for Halley. The professor had made the ex-cop feel winded just by talking without taking any breaths of his own. He considered Halley’s proposition while his own breathing stabilized. What choice did they have, in all seriousness? They were captured and helpless.
“That’s fine,” said Josh after rolling the thought around his head a few more times. “Henry, you feel up to it?”
Henry didn’t need to be asked twice, and Halley untied him. Henry followed the professor up the stairs while rubbing at his wrists and arms to get the circulation back into them.
“I don’t think he likes me,” Jingo said.
“That’s okay,” Karel replied. “I don’t really like you, either.”
While they were waiting for Henry to return, Halley removed Karel and Josh’s bonds—after taking away and hiding their weapons upstairs in the house—and told them, “Come with me and let me show you something.”
He took Josh and Karel up into the house and across the floor that was directly above the basement, with its trapdoors, and Josh couldn’t help himself walking gingerly across the floor, expecting it to hinge open at any moment.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Halley said, pushing his glasses up his nose with his index finger, indignation clear in his voice over the fact that Josh didn’t trust the ground beneath his feet. “My carpentry and engineering skills are almost as good as my astrophysical skills.”
“Self-praise is no recommendation,” Karel countered.
“No, but i
t does feel nice,” Halley said as he motioned with the gun for them to walk up the stairs into the gloomy top floor of the house. “Wait outside the third door on the left.”
The landing was warm and dark, and Halley followed them with an oil lantern; the shadows swung black and crazy as he came up behind them. He stood beside the door he had indicated, pushing his glasses up again since they’d already slid down from the sweat on his face.
“The problem, you see, is shielding. Particles from the supernova are rushing through the solar system in a foaming blanket of tidal forces. They’re so small, on the quantum level, that they pass through most solid objects like they’re not there. How is your quantum theory?”
“Rusty,” said Karel with maximum sarcasm.
“Well, that’s to be expected,” Halley replied, ignoring her barb. “All you need to know is that some unknown particles—the likes of which I don’t have the equipment to even guess at the make up of—have in some way interacted with the human brain. All our brains. But to a lesser and greater degree. I don’t fully understand that process yet, but you remember the first night? How it was like a switch had been flicked and suddenly millions of people were burning and killing?”
Josh and Karel nodded.
“Well, something came in on that event. Something that was pushed here on the bow wave of the explosion. Those particles, exotic and rare, are swarming through the solar system now, and they’re zooming through us like we don’t exist, but whatever they are, they’re making physical changes to the production of dopamine, noradrenaline, and a dozen other chemicals that regulate our mental health.”
“This is going way over our heads. Well, mine at least,” Josh admitted.
Halley had to push up his glasses again. “It’s not going above your head; it’s going through it. But come in here and I’ll show you the practical upshot of what I’m speaking about.”
Halley opened the door to the room into a shadowy, good-sized bathroom.
The room smelled of water––cold water—the way a room does when there’s been a body of it lying still for a very long time. Josh could hear ripples and eddies of it moving across the surface of the huge iron, claw-foot bath at the far end of the room.
“You see, I’m not sure if you know this, but an electromagnetic pulse—the kind that knocks out all electronics; the sort of thing the Barnard’s event is mimicking, for instance—is severely negated if the electronics are underwater. They’re shielded. I wondered if that could be the same for humans, too. It’s a bit of a leap, but you never know, do you? Anyway….” Halley turned to the bath. “Grace?”
There was a splash, and a woman’s head appeared above the edge of the bath, water cascading from her hair. She was in her thirties, thin, and bedraggled… and she had a snorkel in her mouth. She took it out, smiling at Halley. As she sat up further in the bath, Josh could see she was wearing a flowery one-piece swimsuit.
It was one of the weirder sights he had seen in his life—that was for sure.
“Josh, Karel. Meet my sister, Grace. This is her house, and… I’m pretty sure I’ve cured her.”
“He has,” said Grace, from between chattering teeth.
Josh reeled. This crazy Frankenstein setup was insane. Putting someone in a bath cured the Barnard’s effect? It just couldn’t be that easy… surely.
“When I got here, Grace was terrified, almost out of her mind. She was paranoid and near suicidal. Almost unintelligible, unable to articulate her thoughts in any meaningful way. How she’d survived, I’ll never know—eating berries and whatnot from the garden when she was sure she could get in and out of the house unseen, I suppose. She attacked me with an ax when I found her. I only managed to save myself by knocking her unconscious.”
Grace pointed at her head. “Still got the scar. But it was worth it.
“I’d been working on the theory as I traveled here from New York. But I hadn’t been able to put it into practice in any meaningful way. But, as you can see, it worked. Grace stays in the water for twelve hours a day, and that respite—the shielding by the water—seems to help her.”
Grace nodded. “My mind cleared like sunlight breaking through the clouds. I’d been tortured and near-suicidal for weeks. Robert saved me.”
“Of course,” Halley continued, “the current application is going to be impossible, but it’s a start. We can’t put everyone in the world in a bath. But the principle is sound. Water—the stuff of life—might have another property that will lead me to a cure.”
“Josh Standing! Josh Standing! Can you hear me?!”
A harsh male voice was coming in through the open window. A voice Josh didn’t recognize, but one that sounded like it wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Josh moved along the side of the bath to the window which overlooked the front lawn of Grace’s house. What he saw through it made him grip the windowsill like a man needing to grab hold of something solid when an earthquake hit.
The house was surrounded by a ring of Harbormen. Tally, Donald, Martha, Filly, and Henry were on their knees in the grass, their hands behind their heads and each with the muzzle of a gun pointing at their temples.
A tall, Slavic-boned Harborman stood by his prizes and called up to the house. “Come out now, Mr. Standing, and I’m sure we can reach an accommodation.”
He lifted a pistol and put it against Tally’s temple. “If not, I’ll just blow your daughter’s brains into the dirt.”
22
Castle Jaxport extended the length of the repurposed bonded warehouse. Construction going on inside, to build wooden walls and corridors, was continuing around them as they walked through surrounded by Harbormen… following in the wake of King Gabriel the First of America.
Maxine was beyond culture shock now and she knew it. The Harbormaster—Gabe Angel—had managed to convince enough people that he was the one to lead them from the fury of the supernova to accomplish whatever sort of kingdom this was. The evidence of it was all around them. In the light of a thousand or more oil lamps, the castle was taking shape.
Gabe talked as he walked. “How do you think the whole royalty thing started in the first place? No need to answer, guys, it was just a rhetorical question. I’ll answer it so you don’t have to worry your pretty little heads about the answer. Basically, men—it was nearly always men—started out as bandits; they robbed other people’s property and land. As they grew in strength and number, they managed to acquire more land, more property, and they won little wars in obscure conflicts lost in the mists of time. They became the established order by default, you might say.”
They entered an area of wooden walls that smelled freshly constructed, which were currently being painted by people working hard, who—and Maxine couldn’t get her head around this at all—turned and bowed to Gabe as he walked past them imperiously.
“Then these men realized that they had become the establishment. These criminals had established an order which allowed them to become the legitimate power in their lands. They made laws, they settled disputes, and they governed. They were still criminals, you might say, going off to fight larger wars to steal larger and larger parcels of land. But they made the laws. How can you be against the law when you are the law?”
Gabe stopped and turned. “Honestly, just another rhetorical question. It’s a failing of mine. Asking questions that I already know the answer to. You’ll get used to it. Anyway… to continue.”
The wide wooden corridor opened onto a space that Maxine guessed was right at the center of the warehouse. A wider aisle was banked on both sides by rows of freshly constructed, bleacher-like seating stands which looked able to accommodate a couple of thousand people. The bleachers led the eye to a raised wooden dais at the end of the huge space, on which—so help her God—Maxine saw there was a throne. An actual, golden throne with plush, red velvet covers and cushions.
Gabe continued to lead them along the aisle between the bleachers. He was warming to his task now, and Maxine guess
ed it was a speech he’d practiced and given many times before.
“Anyway, you become the law. You dress it up in, oh, maybe religion or pagan iconography—I’m not one for religious nonsense myself—and then you declare your divine or legal right to rule. And who can challenge you? You wrote the rule book, for goodness sake!”
Gabe laughed.
They were almost at the dais now. The Harbormen were taking up positions along its edge in an honor guard for their king.
Gabe skipped up onto the platform and turned, spreading his arms wide. “So… ahem… I did the same. And you know what?”
“Let me guess. Another rhetorical question?” Poppet asked in her most unimpressed New York way.
Gabe shot her a look of annoyance. “Next time, I won’t just shoot the horse, sweetheart.”
“I’ve been threatened by professionals my entire married life, sweetheart. And professionals don’t shoot horses.”
Gabe didn’t have a ready comeback for that, it seemed. He just smiled thinly in an ‘I like your spirit’ sort of way and continued with his lines. “People want to be led. They crave it. In these times of maximum uncertainty, they have flocked to me. They want a leader. Someone to tell them what to do. Someone who has the strategic skill set to acquire chattels and land. To feed them and clothe them. To make them feel safe. Look around you, Maxine. Look! These people already worshipped me when they saw I had the ability to save them, so it’s not exactly a leap to ask them to call me King, now, is it?”
No one spoke.
“That one, you can answer.”
Maxine looked from Ten-Foot to Poppet, to Larry then Storm, and finally back to Gabe, up there standing by his golden throne, wearing his golden crown. “I’ve seen a lot of insanity since this all hit, Gabe. I’ve seen madness on levels I could not believe. But I’ve never seen anything as crazy as this.”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End Page 21