Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Maxine shook her head as the bad thoughts tumbled through her mind at a frightening pace. She was speculating catastrophes wildly.

  This wasn’t her in any way, shape, or form.

  If there was one thing anyone could rely on, it was that she’d be a cool head in a crisis. That’s what she knew her colleagues would have said about her, and now here she was, a knot of anxiety tightening in her gut and every worst-case scenario shouldering its way out of her mind like a passenger desperate to escape from a burning aircraft.

  Maxine took three deep breaths, wiped her mouth, and held the SIG-Sauer with two hands again, pointing it at the door to McCready’s apartment.

  This was not her. These thoughts were not her.

  Maxine knew that she wouldn’t have the luxury of time to consider what to do. McCready would open the door and he would see the gun. He would either have his gun out, ready to fire, or he would slam the door shut and then Storm would be in extreme danger.

  She would have to shoot first.

  There was nothing else for it. As soon as the door opened, she would have to squeeze the trigger, and she would have to shoot McCready where he stood.

  It was the only way.

  But, could she?

  Could she do that?

  She shook her head again and blinked. More thoughts crowding in. Now there were doubts.

  Doubts that this was the right course of action. Doubts that maybe she should try to talk to McCready, and maybe she wouldn’t need to shoot him after all. Maybe she could reason with him. Perhaps McCready was better now. Perhaps McCready had calmed down, and perhaps…

  God. No! Stop it!

  Her thinking was all ends-up. The thoughts running like an out- of- control train to smash into the buffer the door of McCready’s apartment represented. If she didn’t get control of her thoughts now, she was going to crash and burn whatever she did.

  Think about Storm. Think about getting him out of there.

  Think of Storm.

  The door shook as, behind it, the security cage rattled.

  She knew she was choking the gun.

  “Not so tight,” Josh would say. “Don’t strangle it.”

  The second padlock was being shaken loose.

  “Let the gun go up naturally.” Josh again.

  The third and final padlock.

  “Squeeze and discharge… squeeze and dis…”

  The door opened. Maxine began to squeeze.

  In the doorway was Storm.

  The gun discharged.

  Storm had gotten a small splinter of door wood in his cheek, but was otherwise unharmed. Physically, that was. Psychologically, he might never be the same again.

  Maxine had hugged him in the doorway for a long time, apologizing, until she’d looked over his shoulder and seen McCready’s dead body face-down in the hall.

  McCready’s skull had been beaten in and there was a small pine wood stool next to his body that was smeared all over with blood. His gun was still in his holster and he’d lost one shoe. A long trial of blood lay behind him. He’d crawled almost to the door as Storm had attacked him with the stool, but eventually, as the injuries and blood loss had become too much, he’d collapsed five feet from the door, his hands outstretched and his face flat against the floor.

  They’d stepped over McCready and gone back into the rancid kitchen, sat down, and cried together.

  “He was screaming. He’d seen you through the window and he was getting more insane, angrier. He turned his back. I picked up the stool and I hit him. He fell. I hit him again. He crawled towards the door and I kept hitting him until he stopped moving. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Maxine looked at the SIG-Sauer on the kitchen table where she’d left it. The gun that had nearly killed Storm, and would have if she hadn’t realized at the last possible nanosecond that it wasn’t McCready opening the door. It certainly put her worry about accidentally shooting her own toes off into perspective. “It’s okay,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

  She hugged her son again and, looking at the fading light through the afternoon window, added, “We’ll leave in the morning. You go and find your clothes. I’ll deal with… with him.”

  Maxine pulled McCready’s body into the room where she and Storm had spent the night and covered him with a sheet from the bed. She wasn’t squeamish with the dead. She had seen more than her fair share of corpses as a nurse, but there was something very different about this one. McCready had been killed by her son. Just touching McCready made her heart turn to ice in her chest. But she’d been right to say he’d done the right thing. However terrible it might seem; McCready had been a danger to both of them.

  And it wasn’t until she joined Storm in McCready’s bedroom, where she found her son sobbing and pointing at an open wardrobe, that she realized how much of a danger he had been.

  There were three bodies in the bottom of the wardrobe, all wrapped in plastic garbage bags and then covered in Saran Wrap. There were polaroid pictures of the dead bodies lying on McCready’s bed before they’d been wrapped up, the pictures stuck to a mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door.

  The bodies were all male, with ligatures around their necks where they’d been strangled, and one of them was the real McCready. She recognized his misshapen face from the ID badge in the kitchen drawer.

  Soon enough, Maxine had helped Storm get dressed. The business with… Whoever’s killing had sapped his strength down to a nub of energy that made him operate now just on automatic. He didn’t have the wherewithal to speak, and he moved stiffly and with the awkwardness of illness—his tongue working on the ulcers in his mouth, his eyes sunken and watery. She’d given him the SIG-Sauer to put in his bag, and she’d taken Whoever’s Smith & Wesson from the body in the spare room, along with the bag of Storm’s medication and boxes of extra ammunition.

  They also took what tins they could carry from the kitchen, and some bottles of water, and left as the city’s cloak of darkness descended again.

  They couldn’t spend another night in that mausoleum. She vowed to tell the authorities about the apartment, and Whoever’s murderous life whenever she could, but guessed there wouldn’t be anyone along to investigate the serial killer any time soon.

  Why he’d saved Maxine and Storm that first night, she didn’t understand. And why he’d stuck with them, she didn’t know. But she didn’t have the energy to second-guess the mind of a serial killer. Perhaps, like others in the city and even herself, his mind had in some way been altered—she still couldn’t guess how—and he’d been on the cusp of really thinking he was a knight in shining armor, or had in some way had a plan that would end with Maxine and Storm being mummified in plastic and Saran Wrap, and left to rot inside one of his cupboards while he went out to find more victims.

  She just didn’t know. But as the first prickles of rain touched her face as they stepped out of the apartment building, she didn’t mind that she was about to get cold and wet, because maybe the rain would wash her clean.

  Maxine and Storm walked in silence.

  The streets weren’t entirely empty, but very much like earlier in the day, the two of them were very much alone, and people—if they were around—were keeping out of everyone else’s way.

  They stopped at a ransacked gas station on the Massachusetts Turnpike as they joined the routes that would lead out of the city. There wasn’t much left on the shelves, but there was a small amount of candy, and behind the cash registers, there were more disposable lighters which looters hadn’t yet snapped up. The smell of spilled gas permeated the parking lot and it looked as if someone had pushed a car to one of the pumps in an effort to get some fuel from the tanks beneath, in hopes of starting the car, but had obviously failed. They’d left the car and gone off, leaving just their handprints in the dust and dirt on the trunk of the car.

  Maxine considered staying the night in the convenience store, but the smell of the gas, and the city-wide epidemic of arson, suggested tha
t maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.

  There were plenty of places they could have broken into, but they were dark-windowed or burnt out. They would have no way of knowing who was in the buildings already, and how they would react to someone breaking into join them, so they kept on walking.

  Beyond the gas station, the roads were just lines of dead and crashed cars. Even in the rain, the smell of death was all around. They may have left bodies behind in the apartment, but there were still many bodies in the cars who had died as their vehicles had crashed. In the days that had passed, the pall of suppuration was starting to hang like a shroud over West Boston. At one point, they saw dogs rooting inside cars for sustenance, and she had a mind to shoot the dogs then and there to stop the desecration, but immediately figured that if the dogs weren’t bothering her, she should let them get on with it and save her ammo. She felt herself climbing down another rung away from the heights of civilization in that moment, and the feeling appalled her, but what else could she do? Her priority had to be Storm, and reuniting with Tally when she could.

  That thought hit her hard. She had no idea if Tally was alive. Had no idea if Josh was, either. Both of them out in the Atlantic somewhere, possibly in the same predicament as Storm and herself… What if they had no means of communication? Even if they did, who would they communicate with? No one in authority had been seen in Boston since the first night. It had been a free-for-all, and the city had burned, the people left to the dogs in the street.

  Maxine pulled her coat around her as they reached the ramp on the interstate that would take them, on foot, out of the city.

  She had a choice. South to home, or West. West to Iowa and her parents’ ranch.

  Each journey would be hazardous and arduous for Storm, who looked pale again and was popping painkillers.

  There was a chunky Honda CR-V by the side of the road. It had been abandoned, and one of the doors was still open.

  “Let’s spend the night in there,” Maxine said, her voice cracking because she’d hardly said a word since leaving the gas station.

  “Okay,” Storm said, looking grateful that they were about to rest, the hollows of his cheeks all the more pronounced in the light from the moon and the supernova.

  “In the morning, we’ll head out.”

  “Where?”

  “West,” said Maxine. “We can’t go to our home, but we can go to the place I used to call home.”

  13

  Petersen and Spackman had gone beneath the waves even before anyone had gotten a chance to look over the side of the Sea-Hawk.

  Josh and the others had scanned the waters for some time, ready with ropes or to launch one of the two lifeboats. But not one head or arm had appeared above the surface of the water. Whether the currents had taken the men down beneath the heaving waves, or whether they’d gone down fighting, neither man was seen again.

  Josh had hugged Tally as the pain from his knee burnt its way up his leg. It was only now, as the adrenaline of the race to pursue and capture Petersen was starting to drain from his body, that the masking effect it had had on him began to dissipate.

  In the end, he had to sit down on the deck and stretch his leg out in front of him. He didn’t think the joint was fractured or dislocated, but the ligaments and tendons had been forced in directions they weren’t meant to go, and the sprain that had been elicited from that force took his breath away with its savagery.

  As he sat down on the deck, the enormity of what had happened came rushing up to hit him. It wasn’t that Spackman was dead—he could mourn that loss, and feel grief about it, with the sharp regret of bereavement--but also it was the feel of the gratitude for the fact that Spackman had laid down his life to save the life of his daughter. Josh would forever be in the man’s debt for that. And now, as he looked at the rigging of the Sea-Hawk, and saw the unattended wheel spinning its own merry way at the stern with the sails fluttering, hearing the hiss of spray and the slap of the waves against the side of the ship, Josh realized there was no one else with the ability to sail the Sea-Hawk, even at the rudimentary level that Spackman had achieved.

  Josh was the last adult on the boat.

  And he had no idea what to do.

  “Ready?” hollered Tally.

  The call came up that they were.

  “Ready about!” Tally yelled from the wheel. The probationers began releasing line stays, and prepared to bring the sails across.

  “Le ho!” Tally completed the tacking commands and began to turn the wheel hard counterclockwise. The bow of the Sea-Hawk moved sideways and the tension in the sails began to drop. The probationers released the lines as the sails swung across the line of the Sea-Hawk above their heads. In the process, the canvas flapped, banged, went silent, and then, with a rush, filled with wind again, now driving the ship across the wind to complete this corner of the zig-zag course into it.

  The probationers tied off the ropes, high-fived, and slapped each other’s backs. Ten-Foot leaped onto the rail like a pirate and howled at the sky with a raised fist.

  Josh stood leaning against the rail, wind fluttering in his face, spray peppering his skin. The whole wide expanse of the Atlantic was grey with chop, the sky barnacled with fast-moving, streaming studs of clouds that were holding their cargo of rain for another day, and he felt a pride he’d not felt in an age.

  Spackman may have gone, but his ghost was in the probationers, and his words had been caught on reefs in Tally’s head. Her barked commands sounded authentic, and were understood by the probationer-made crew as the sails filled and the booms swung.

  “The compass is still fritzed,” Tally said as she moved the wheel to turn the boat by degrees into the headwind, finding the point where the onrush flapped and unfilled the sails, taking efficiency away from any forward momentum. She’d then turn the wheel back a degree or two, the sails would bulge again, and the ship would move true. “But as long as we can guestimate the time of day by the position of the sun, we can still be sure we’re going roughly west. It’ll be easier when the wind turns and comes at our backs—we’ll make better progress then, but for now we keep zagging and zigging onwards, and we’ll get there eventually.”

  “But where?” Josh asked, looking ahead to the bald, blank horizon.

  Tally shook her head. “I don’t know. But going west gets us nearer to Mom and Storm than east. Once we get in sight of land, I guess we’ll know which way to sail.”

  “And you think you and the… well, I guess… crew, are going to be able to do that?”

  Tally set her chin into the wind, her blonde hair fluttering behind her like party streamers and the sunlight reflecting off the Hi-Vis yellow of her life preserver. “We’re going home, Dad, and that’s that.”

  It seemed that while Josh had been spending his days in the engine room, fruitlessly working at trying to get it and the generator to fire up, Spackman had passed on as much knowledge as he could, such as it was, to Tally and the others. She, Ten-Foot, and Dotty-B were taking turns working the wheel, calling out the commands, and corralling the others into a team of proto-sailors.

  Josh knew that navigation was still the most difficult obstacle to overcome, but Tally was right—knowing they were going west, even if it was into the wind, was something; slow progress was still better than nothing. At night, they took in as much sail as they could, dropped sea-anchors—basically underwater drogue parachutes that kept the Sea-Hawk from being blown off-course—and hopped the current wouldn’t drag them too far back while everyone got some rest. They had no way yet of navigating at night. No idea which star to set a course by even, and the cloud cover was such that even if they had known how to navigate with celestial reference points, they wouldn’t have been able to see them. Josh wondered if the progress they made though the day was wiped out at night, with them being sent back to where they’d started by the current, but he kept that observation to himself. It wasn’t a good idea to hit morale a blow while they still felt they were making progress during
the day.

  Two things nagged at Josh over the next few days as the Sea-Hawk carved its erratic course across the ocean. The most present was the healing pain in the ligaments around his knee, and the other was trying to work out who had cut Petersen’s bonds.

  The erratic nature of everyone’s behavior, his own included, since the attacks of headaches and blackouts had already proved to Josh that no one could really be trusted one hundred percent. All Josh knew was that he himself hadn’t cut Petersen free, and he felt fairly sure Tally hadn’t. And Spackman was an unlikely option. But the others? Ten-Foot?

  Ten-Foot had already shown his aggressive traits to be amplified since the supernova—but he’d also helped chase him down, and why would he release Petersen? Why, considering how crazy the first mate had been, would anyone?

  It made no sense.

  But in the crazy days since his world had been turned upside down, Josh had wondered if the fact that there was no logical reason for Petersen to be released had made it even more likely to happen; such was his inability to predict what might happen in the minds of those around him, it made random craziness logical.

  That twisted up his thinking to a degree that concerned him greatly, and negated his ability to make accurate risk assessments of what might happen. When anything could happen, out of the blue, there was little he could do to predict possible problems ahead. The best he could do was to make the environment as safe as he could.

  While the others worked the sails, and tried to keep the ship heading vaguely west on the tack, he tried, as discretely as possible, to go around the ship collecting fire axes, knives, and anything else that could be used as a weapon, and he stored them in the captain’s cabin, which was the only place on the Sea-Hawk which had a sturdy lock for which he had a key.