Supernova EMP Series (Book 3): Bitter End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Halley switched off the buzzer. “The truth is, I’m not entirely sure of the details. I have an idea, but I need to do more experiments. I need to work on it. But this contraption, I think, is proof of concept; proof that the Barnard’s Star explosion has spread a sort of…umm…stop me if I get too technical here, but it’s spread a sort of suppression field through the solar system. In some way stopping the free movement of electricity along highly conductive metals. If it had stopped all electricity, then you and I would be dead, too. It’s a suppression field that has some…um…sorry, your majesty…am I boring you?”

  Gabe’s eyes were glittering, the potential of what Halley was offering him writ large across his face. It was like a door had been opened on the vault of his avarice, Josh thought, and it was there for all to see.

  Storm was looking at Gabe expectantly, like he was waiting for the next order from the man he now thought to be his father. And perhaps Gabe was his father––Josh, in all honesty, didn’t know—but he wasn’t yet ready to give up on the boy. Even if he’d just been pointing a gun at him.

  “Listen to Halley, Gabe. I believe he can do what he says.” Josh was speaking to the king, but he was looking at Storm. Storm’s eyes moved from Gabe to Josh, the expectant and confused look still there.

  Gabe turned his focus on Josh. “I don’t remember giving you permission to speak, dead man.”

  “You didn’t,” replied Josh. “But you’re not stupid, Gabe. If I know one thing about you, you’re far from that. Halley is offering you a chance, and you should take it. I’ve seen him almost cure his sister of the madness before she was dragged back here. If he can do it for her, he can do it for everyone. I believe him when he says he can fix the problem with the electricity, too.”

  A shadow fell across Gabe’s face for the first time. The crowd was restless, but quiet. A sense of doubt had begun washing over the throngs of people, as if they needed the correct pointer from Gabe. The king scratched at the back of his head. All eyes in the throne room were on him. As Josh glanced around, he could see that Gabe was the focus of everyone’s attention.

  Everyone except Tally and Henry.

  They were looking at each other.

  As the crowd awaited a pronouncement from Gabe about what would happen next, whether he would take the deal or continue with the execution, Tally and Henry’s eyes were locked together.

  Henry gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  Tally screamed.

  The guards, their attention broken, looked at Tally, and Henry pushed himself back, crashing into the guard nearest him. He wrenched the MP5 from his hands and began to fire. Running backward and low.

  The bullets spat from the muzzle across the crowd in the bleachers and the Harbormen dived for cover. Josh sprawled sideways and crashed back to the wooden floor. Around him, as he tried to cover his head, he could hear bullets smashing into the raised platform where Storm and Gabe were standing. The crowd was screaming.

  Splinters rained down on Josh’s head and he heard more staccato gunfire from other weapons. The air buzzed with bullets and the sound of running feet. There was a full-scale panic erupting around him. A body fell across him moaning, blood pumping from it onto the back of Josh’s neck. He weighed up the risk of moving from beneath it and trying to get to Maxine or Storm, but then another bullet struck the body, giving the lie of animation to the lifeless corpse and clarifying that he needed the cover.

  Someone had begun screaming orders, but it wasn’t Gabe. It might have been Ten-Foot, but Josh couldn’t be sure. He risked a look to his left, to where Maxine had been kneeling and pleading with Gabe, but she was no longer there. He tried to look up at the stage next, but couldn’t see above the wooden edge—he was too close to it and the angle was too acute.

  Josh wriggled. Whoever was lying dead across his back was heavy and bony. There were the raucous sounds of continual gunfire all around him, though, and the air was thick with the acrid stench of it. Someone pulled at Josh’s ankle, and for a moment, he felt himself being dragged backwards with the dead body wobbling on top of him. Then there came a nearby male scream, his ankle was released, and he heard the thud of the body of a Harborman crashing to the floor in his line of sight, a line of bullet holes across his neck and skull.

  More gunfire discharged close by and Josh heard shouting from a voice he recognized. “Get Josh! Get Josh now!”

  Donald.

  His voice was gruff and full of power, the words punctuated by shots clattering all around them. Josh hefted himself onto his knees, the bleeding body on top of him rolling off and star-fishing onto its back with a rubbery flop.

  Josh kept his head low where he crouched, but was desperate to see where Maxine and Storm were. He scanned the dais where the throne had been knocked over and where white stuffing was erupting from bullet holes in the red velvet. Of Maxine, Storm, and Gabe, there was no sign.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. He spun, fists bunching.

  It was Poppet. She was pulling him backward while firing over his head towards the bleachers.

  Many of the crowd members had gone off in a blind stampede, but there were still one or two Harbormen being pinned down by Donald and the others’ fire.

  “This way. Now!” Poppet said, ejecting the mag from her pistol, sliding in another, and racking the barrel.

  She pushed him towards the bleachers on the other side of the throne room. They too were empty, but the number of red-garbed Harbormen’s forces who were dead and dying in front of the wooden wall fronting them told Josh the full story of the battle. Donald and other others had taken refuge there, firing across the throne room at the other side.

  Whether it had been through luck or the vagaries of desperation, they had succeeded in defending their position and were now receiving almost zero resistance from the other side of the hall.

  At Poppet’s prodding, Josh dived over the wall to land next to Halley and Donald. He sneaked a look over the rail and saw that Poppet was still walking backwards and firing across the hall. Her bullets were keeping anyone there well pinned down.

  She stepped through a gap in the wall and crouched down.

  “We gotta get out of here, Donald. They’re going to regroup soon, and if we’re not history, they’re going to make us history.”

  Donald nodded.

  Josh looked down the line. He saw Halley kneeling with his hands over his head. He also saw Jingo, Karel, Henry, and Tally, as well as Martha and Filly. But Maxine and Storm were nowhere to be seen.

  Bullets spat over their heads and everyone ducked. Henry put the MP5 over the rail and fired three bursts without looking at where he was firing.

  “Where’s Maxine? Where’s Storm?” Josh looked at Donald and implored him for answers with his eyes. “Where are they?”

  Donald shook his head. “One second, they were there; the next, they were gone. Gabe, too. I guess they were taken out behind the throne by Gabe’s bodyguards when the firing started.”

  The words clutched at Josh’s guts, but he shook his head and felt his body stiffen with resolve. “We can’t leave them here. It’s not happening.”

  “What do you want to do?” Poppet asked as she reloaded her pistol with another magazine. “Get out of here while we have a chance, and then work on a way to get back and rescue them, or die here—when fifty of those Harbormen realize we’re just sitting ducks and come back mob-handed? Maybe with grenades.”

  Josh shook his head. “You go. I’ll stay here and try to find them. Get Tally and the others to safety. If I’m on my own here, I can stay low and I can…”

  But that was the last thing Josh said. There was an explosion in his skull, a hot searing pain in the back of his head, and then a sudden blackness which took all the hurt away.

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  Available June 10, 2020

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  BLURB

  In the dawn of a new Ice Age, families everywhere are taking to the road to esca
pe the frigid landscape—but you can’t outrun the cold.

  No one could have predicted the terrifying impact of human interference in the Arctic. Shifts in the Earth's crust have led to catastrophe and now the North Pole is located in the mid-Atlantic, making much of the eastern United States an unlivable polar hellscape.

  Nathan Tolley is a talented mechanic who has watched his business dry up due to gas shortages following the drastic tectonic shifts. His wife Cyndi has diligently prepped food and supplies, but it’s not enough to get them through a never-ending winter. With an asthmatic young son and a new baby on the way, they’ll have to find a safe place they can call home or risk freezing to death in this harsh new world.

  When an old friend of Nathan’s tells him that Detroit has become a paradise, with greenhouses full of food and plenty of solar energy for everyone, it sounds like the perfect place to escape. But with dangerous conditions and roving gangs, getting there seems like an impossible dream. It also seems like their only choice.

  Grab your copy of Freezing Point.

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  EXCERPT

  Chapter One

  “What’s that?” Freeson asked, pointing beyond the wrecker’s windshield.

  Nathan squinted through the swirling snowflakes peppering the glass, but the wipers were struggling to give meaningful vision beyond the red expanse of his Dodge’s hood. He thought they were on the spruce-lined Ridge Road running between Lake George and Glens Falls but he couldn’t be sure. The cone of light thrown out by its headlights only illuminated the blizzard itself, making it look like a messed up TV channel.

  Without any real visibility, the 1981 Dodge Power Wagon W300 4x4—with driver’s cab, a four-person custom-sized crew cab behind that, a wrecker boom, and a spectacle lift—grumbled deep in its engine as Nathan slowed the truck. To stop the tires fully, Nathan had to go down through the gears rather than by the application of the discs. There was a slight lateral slide before the tires bit into the fresh snow. The ice beneath was treacherous enough already without the added application of fresh flakes.

  Who knows how thick the ice is over the blacktop, Nathan thought.

  With the truck stopped, he tried to follow Freeson’s finger out into the whirlpooling night.

  For a few seconds, all he could see was the blizzard, the air filled with fat white flakes, which danced across his vision like God’s dandruff. Nathan was about to ask Freeson what the hell he was playing at when he caught it. He saw taillights flicker on and the shadow of a figure move towards the truck’s headlights.

  Sundown for late April in Glens Falls, New York State, should have been around 7:50 p.m. The Dodge’s dashboard clock said the time was 5:30 p.m. and it was already full dark out on Algonquin Ridge.

  The world had changed so much in the last eight years since the stars had changed position in the sky and the North Atlantic had started to freeze over. The pole star was no longer the pole star. It was thirty degrees out of whack. Couple that with the earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis wrecking countries around the Pacific Rim, and the world had certainly been transformed from the one Nathan had been born into twenty-eight years before. And this year, spring hadn’t come at all. Winter had spread her white skirts out in early December and had left them there. It was nearly May now, and there was still no sign of her fixing to pick them up again.

  A face loomed up in the headlights, red with the cold, hair salted with snow, the flakes building up on the shoulders of the figure’s parka. It was Art Simmons.

  Nathan zipped his own puffy North Face Nuptse winter jacket up to his chin, opened his door, and jumped down into the powder. The snow came up to his knees and he could feel the hard ice below the chunky soles of his black Columbia Bugaboots.

  Even through the thermal vest, t-shirt, and two layers of New York Jets sweatshirts, the cold bit hard into Nathan. Without the meager, volcanic-ash-diluted sun in the sky, the early evening was already steel-cold and the blizzard wind made it near murderous. He rolled his hips and galumphed through the snow towards Art.

  “Nathan! Is that you?”

  Art had, until recently, been a Glens Falls sheriff. He’d been a warm-hearted gregarious man whose company Nathan enjoyed a lot. But since being laid off when the local police department had shut down, he’d become sullen and distant. Seeing Art so animated now offered the most emotion Nathan had seen coming from the chubby ex-cop since before Christmas.

  “What’s the trouble, Art?”

  Art’s words tumbled in a breathless rush. Sharp and short, it was clear that the cutting air had begun constricting his throat. “Skidded. Run off the road. I couldn’t even see the road… I’m in the ditch… Been here an hour...”

  “Run off the road?”

  Art nodded. “Glens Falls has been overrun, Nate. Scavengers tracked me. If I wasn’t trying so hard to outrun ’em, I wouldn’t be here now. Hadn’t driven so fast, when I lost them through Selling’s Bridge…”

  Nathan had heard the rumors of small packs of raiders using snowmobiles to hold up residents in their cars, stealing supplies and invading homes. But he hadn’t seen evidence of them himself. He’d only been told by neighbors and friends they were operating in other parts of New York State, fifty miles further south than Albany, but not until now had he gotten any notion they might be as far up in the state as Glens Falls. But now that they were here, the lack of an operational police department in town might just make them bolder and more likely to try their luck with what they could get away with.

  “Where did they go?” he asked.

  Art shook his head. “Guess they lost me in the blizzard when I came off the road. Maybe gone off to track some other poor bastard. They won’t be far.”

  Freeson joined them in front of the truck, banging his arms around his own parka to put feeling into his fingers. His limp didn’t help him wade through the snow and his grizzled face was grim, but Nathan knew the determination in Freeson’s bones wouldn’t allow his physical deficiencies to stop him doing the job Nathan paid him for. The cold might freeze and ache him, but the fire in Freeson’s belly would counter the subzero conditions for sure.

  Freeson hadn’t been right since the accident, maybe. Quiet at times, and quick to anger at others, but he was always one hundred percent reliable.

  Together, they walked the ten yards down through the snow to the roadside ditch beneath the snow-heavy trees.

  An hour in the blizzard had made Art’s truck almost impossible to recognize. Nathan only knew it was a white 2005 Silverado 1500 because he’d worked on it a dozen times in the past ten years. The last time had been to replace a failed water pump that had fritzed the cooling system. Nathan smiled wryly. No one needed their cooling system fixed now—not since the Earth’s poles had shifted. Since that unexplained catastrophe, the Big Winter’s new Arctic Circle had been smothering Florida and the eastern seaboard, all the way up to Pennsylvania and beyond. It had frozen the Atlantic clear from the U.S. to North Africa.

  Art told them he’d been turning the taillights on and off every ten minutes to signal to anyone who might be passing, trying to preserve battery life at the same time. He said Nathan’s wrecker had been the first vehicle to show up since his slow-motion slide into the ditch.

  Nathan scratched his head through his hood and looked up the incline of Algonquin Ridge. The Silverado was trapped between two spruces on the edge of the ditch. The tail had kicked up as the front end had dropped, leaving the back wheels floating in space—or, would have done that if the snow hadn’t already drifted beneath them and begun to pack in.

  There was no leeway in the tree growth to get the wrecker onto the downslope of the road, either, though the easiest way out of this would have been to pull the Silverado down the thirty-degree incline. Instead, they were going to have to pull Art’s truck up the slope and fight gravity all the way.

  Nathan opened his mouth to tell Freeson to get back in the wrecker and start her up, but Art placed a hand on h
is shoulder and pointed into the trees. “Look.”

  Through the forest, three sets of Ski-Doo headlights were moving along two hundred yards up beyond the treeline. The blatter of two-stroke engines was dampened by the snow, but still unmistakable. This part of the ridge was well out of town and had once been a popular tourist trail. There were wide avenues between the spruce where summer people rode chunky-tired trail bikes, and winter people, Ski-Doos. They had room to maneuver.

  “They’re back,” said Art.

  Better get this show on the road.

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