Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Josh carried on climbing, the wet rope biting into the palms of his hands with a stinging burn. The wetness of the rope and the dampness of his hands weren’t a good combination. He was holding on overly tight as he climbed, too, and that made his hands sore as hell.

  He’d gotten far enough above the waterline now for him to be coming into view of the lowest sets of cabin windows. As he got close to the glass, he tried to steal a look inside. The room beyond was dim, as he’d expected. There was a bed, a wardrobe, a small desk, and an upended gin bottle in a wastepaper basket. Josh tried to push and pull the window open, but it was stuck fast.

  There were still another thirty or so feet to climb to reach the deck when Lemming finally found the courage to get onto the bottom rungs of the ladder. He climbed slowly, and Josh saw as he looked down that the boy was climbing with his eyes closed.

  Josh couldn’t help but grin to himself. These boys had been gang members; they’d been criminals—probably still were, or were at least willing to take up that lifestyle again—but take them out of their comfort zone, and what did you have? A kid afraid of heights with too much pride and fear of Ten-Foot to go back to the Sea-Hawk without completing his mission.

  He’d now reached the level of the first row of cabins that were set back from the hull behind railings, and beyond those a veranda. He saw a sun lounger, a pile of clothes, a palm potted in a tub, and a smashed, expensive-looking digital SLR camera. But what Josh also saw as he came level with the railing was something much more inviting.

  “There’s an open door here, guys. I’m going to try to get into the ship here.”

  There was no reply, as the boys were still climbing, their faces grim. Lemming managed a curt nod, but Banger’s eyes were still closed as he hauled himself mechanically upwards.

  Josh shook his head and stepped one foot across the railing that fronted the verandah. There was a delicious moment of vertigo as he reached one hand across to grip the chill metal, and he was suspended between railing and ladder, and then he made the leap of faith, bringing his other two limbs across, and then he all but fell over the railing onto the veranda.

  He lay there momentarily in an ecstasy of relief, and then he got to his feet. He looked back over the side at the Sea-Hawk, which was still pretty much where they’d left it, and then down the side of the Empress to the boys on the Jacob’s ladder. They were making steady but painfully slow progress, and he briefly wondered if, on the way back, it might be easier just to throw them over the side and let them swim back.

  Josh thought briefly about calling to the boys so they would know where he was entering the liner, but decided that that might not be the wisest course of action. He didn’t know who or what was waiting for them inside, and it might be best to not make their presence known until he knew it was safe.

  Josh wiped a hand across his mouth and turned to the cabin. There was a sliding glass door, which was open just enough for him to squeeze though. The room beyond it was laid out very much like the cabin he’d already looked into. Just the nautical equivalent of a mid-range hotel room on land, with a couple of ahoy-me-hearties touches of décor, like varnished deck wood surrounds to the mirrors and the desk, and a ship’s wheel set into the headboard of the bed. Other than that, it was pretty standard. There were signs of habitation, though. A suitcase spewed a collection of smart clothes and expensive lingerie over the carpet. A paperback novel had been dropped like a dead bird beside them. The wardrobe door was open, and the flat-screen TV on the wall had been smashed and half-wrenched from its mooring. The first sign Josh had seen that the behaviors experienced on the Sea-Hawk since the supernova had been replicated somewhere else. Whoever had taken issue with the TV had done so with terminal ferocity. There were dots and sprays of blood on the surfaces and wall near it, as well, which suggested that that frenzy had been carried out with bare hands.

  Josh wished then that he’d at least brought a knife with him to defend himself. Who knew who or what awaited him on the other side of the door?

  Josh reached for the door handle and turned it. The sound of the lock clicking open was so loud that it almost stopped his heart there in his chest. He’d been in such near silence, other than the shushing of the waves and the gentle breeze outside, that he’d not anticipated how loud the door opening would be.

  With a grim smile, he opened the door fully to show the dim corridor beyond. It was like any hotel corridor that he’d seen before. There was a functional blue carpet, and rows of doors down both sides along the corridor. The place wasn’t completely dark, as he’d been expecting, because every so often there would be a portside cabin open, disgorging a wedge of sunlight into the corridor.

  It would be pitch black at night, but for now, there was more than enough illumination to make things easy for him to move safely.

  There were plenty of signs as he moved along the corridor that some passengers as least had gone on violent rampages. Some doors had been torn off their hinges. More rooms had been completely trashed. One looked like someone had tried very hard to start a fire in it. The ceiling of the corridor closest to that open door was blacked with soot and scorched from heat. As Josh looked into the room, his nose was assailed by the stench of burning plastic, as well as the sharply unpleasant buzz of rotting meat. The half-burned body of a man in what was left of a white uniform lay curled up in the corner of the room, his face a wrench of agony and his arms brought up like claws as his had muscles contracted and tendons snapped.

  Josh felt nausea rising from his gut and moved on. There was nothing for him to do there.

  At the end of the corridor were signs telling the passengers where the various areas of the ship could be found from this location, along with what Josh had been looking for most of all—directions to the stairs to the upper level. He made a note that his access to the Empress had been made on deck nine, portside corridor five, and the cabin he’d come out of was numbered 17a.

  The stairs were through a set of glass doors that had been smashed with fire extinguishers. The carpet was littered with glass and more blood, so that Josh felt conscious of the noise his feet were making as he crunched into the stairwell.

  There was blessed relief that the stairs were lit, too. Up above, a skylight provided ample daylight for Josh to begin his ascent.

  Echoing footsteps, that he heard after three flights made him freeze.

  Unless Lemming or Banger had carried on up the ladder to the deck above rather than gaining egress in the same way he had, those footsteps belonged to someone who’d already been on the ship.

  The footsteps were loud, and they were running. They thumped and echoed down the stairwell, but they didn’t sound like they were coming from the stairs themselves. Josh listened hard. It was impossible to tell which direction they were heading in, or how far above him they were.

  He looked down; half-hoping Lemming’s head would appear a few flights below to at least give him the semblance of a reassuring presence. But no face appeared.

  The footsteps echoed off into the distance and disappeared beyond his range of hearing, and so Josh continued upward.

  On the next deck, he stuck his head out into the corridor to see if the rooms had received the same treatment as those below. The destruction here was, if anything, a lot worse, and there was a deeper stench of burning. Josh reckoned the Empress and ships like her had been built from the most fire-retardant materials possible, and getting attempted arson to spread from room to room had been near impossible.

  The cabins here were much larger—staterooms, even—with en suite bathrooms and lavishly sized lounges. They also carried the same smell of corrupt flesh. There had been a lot of dying on this deck, and Josh didn’t feel like going around to find out how much, so he ducked back into the stairwell and continued up.

  Thump thump thump.

  More footsteps, running. This time nearer and more urgent. Kicking through debris as they ran. Crunching on glass. Then a second set, and then a third. All echoing
from all directions around him. Josh pushed himself back against the wall of the stairwell and tried to think himself small.

  Either someone was being chased, with two pursuers, or there were three heavy-booted people running to somewhere they had to get to, fast. The footsteps bashed and crashed past an open door above, and Josh saw fleeting shadows cast into the stairwell. He clunked back against the metal; the back of his head painful against the cold white steel. There was a breeze coming in from outside that he’d not felt before, and so he guessed that he must have reached the open deck level he’d been aiming for.

  He waited for the running footfalls to diminish as they had before, and then made his way as silently as he could up to the access door to the deck. The flooring beyond was all steel deck plate, painted green; beyond it, the sky was still overcast through the doorway, and the sea beyond that gray. He took a breath and leaned his head out the doorway to look along the deck. There was much destruction. The canvas of smashed deckchairs flapping in the breeze alongside tumbles of smashed glass. The body of a woman in a bikini lying face-down in the carnage was the source of a dried bloom of blood spread from a gunshot wound to the side of her head.

  In the other direction, Josh saw much the same, but without the body. Signs of the people who were running were absent, and as Josh listened, he couldn’t hear them at all. He ventured onto the deck, the wind catching at his hair and clothes, but a fear gripped at his heart. There was something very wrong about the view.

  He stepped to the railing to check what he was seeing. He craned over to look down, and saw the dinghy still tied to the Jacob’s ladder. So, he hadn’t changed from the port to the starboard side of the Empress. The presence of the dinghy confirmed it.

  The Sea-Hawk had left.

  16

  Maxine drove the buggy on.

  Two shots had twanged into the back of the buggy’s structure below where they were seated. Whoever was shooting was still determined not to cause injury to the horse, or to damage the buggy beyond repair, and that was the only thing keeping Maxine and her son alive right now.

  Maxine encouraged Tally-Two and flapped the reins along her glistening back. But however young and fit their horse was, they weren’t going to be able to keep this furious pace up for long.

  “I can see them!” Storm called. “They’re in a horse and buggy just like this one! There’s a guy with a rifle.”

  “Shoot back—let them know we can defend ourselves. Let them know we’re armed. Try not to hit them.”

  Storm nodded and aimed his pistol through the broken window in the back of the buggy.

  “Ha! They ducked and swerved all over the road.”

  “Did you hit them?”

  “Don’t think so. The horse is still coming, and the guy with the rifle is…”

  The bullet tore through the roof of the buggy, just above Maxine’s head. The tear in the material let in more light and ignited more blazing fear in her belly.

  Then she saw the ramp coming around the bend. It was leading off the highway, down into the valley. There was a sign that said Quarry Road, No Through Traffic. But she had no choice but to twist the buggy to the ramp and head down off the highway. The shots stopped, and she figured they had perhaps thirty or forty seconds before their pursuers reached the ramp and could draw a bead on them again.

  This was madness. Like something out of a wild west movie. Like the world had had a hundred and fifty years shaved off it and they were back to shoot-outs, posses, and chases on horseback.

  Tally-Two was breathing hard, and her flaring nostrils were thickening with foam. The ramp came onto a right turn which Maxine took fast, almost taking the buggy up onto one wheel, but they made the corner with inches to spare and ran on. Quarry Road dropped through the trees ahead of them; it was a thin track, steep and barely metaled. There were potholes dotting the surface, causing the buggy to jounce and snap back and forth. Maxine held the reins with one hand and used her other to make sure Storm was solid in his seat. One good jounce and either of them might be catapulted onto the road.

  They passed more signs for a quarry, telling anyone on the track to give priority to working vehicles, and up ahead, Maxine caught her first sight of a scar in the earth. Brown rock between the trees. A couple of steel hoppers and a broken-down truck.

  “That’s weird,” Storm said beside her. He was still looking back.

  “What? Weirder than we’ve already had this week? I mean, Storm, I’ve had my fill of weird, so what the hell do you mean?”

  “They’ve stopped.”

  “What? What do you mean, stopped?” After another moment to process his announcement, Maxine reined in Tally-Two and brought her speed back to a leisurely walk.

  “Look for yourself.”

  The track ahead was straight, and so Maxine chanced a look back. The pursuing horse and buggy had indeed stopped on the highest point of the track, and as Maxine watched with growing disbelief, she saw the driver turn his horse and buggy around and go back up toward the highway, disappearing into the trees.

  Storm had been entirely correct.

  “Weird,” Maxine agreed.

  “No through road, it said,” Storm ventured. “I guess they know there’s no other way out, so all they have to do is wait at the top of the track for us.”

  Maxine slowed Tally-Two to a trot, then a walking pace, eventually stopping her when the horse was ready. The horse dropped her head and stood still, her sides moving as she took huge breaths. “If it’s a dead-end? Why not follow us down.”

  “Because they know we’d have killed them,” said a woman’s voice off to their left. Before they could turn, they heard a gun click as it was cocked, and so they froze. The voice, hard-edged and containing a razor of precision, continued. “And so, I guess you better tell me what you’re doing in Freddie Klane’s buggy, lady, or I reckon I might have to kill you myself.”

  The woman, when Maxine and Storm had eventually been allowed to turn around, showed herself to be thickset and ruddy-faced. She could have been any age from forty-five to sixty-five. Her features were pinched into the center of her face, which gave her a hook-nosed visage studded with dirt gray eyes that moved quickly and precisely. Her checked shirt hadn’t seen a press in a thousand years, and her neck had been engrained with work dust. She wore thick jeans stuffed into black, steel-toed boots. Her mouth did the minimum amount of moving to let her words out, but as they sliced from her, it was clear that she would brook no disagreement or argument.

  A man perhaps half her age, and dressed in similar work clothes, jumped up onto the buggy and disarmed first Storm and then Maxine. Pocketing their pistols, he began rummaging through their rucksacks. He came up with a bright smile on his lips as he pulled out the bag of Storm’s medication, but the woman shook her head.

  “Put it back, William, we’re not thieves.”

  William nodded and replaced the bag in the rucksack, but Maxine caught the look of resentment on his face.

  “Get down from the buggy, please,” the woman said, waving her shotgun at Maxine’s midriff. “We’re not thieves, but we will defend what we have. And if that means giving you both barrels, I don’t mind that at all.”

  Maxine stepped down from the buggy and raised her hands. “I’m Maxine Standing, and this is my son Storm.”

  The woman smiled. “Storm, eh? Why, you don’t look like a Storm; you look sicker than a young foal. I don’t think I’ve met anyone so able to disprove the theory of nominative determinism.”

  So, she’s got a sense of humor at least, Maxine thought. I’d much rather have a gun pointed at me by a person who knows how to laugh than not. “He’s had cancer. Just finished chemo.”

  “Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” Storm offered. “And I blew the storm out of my name beating it. I’m not as weak as I look.”

  The woman guffawed heartily and lowered, then broke, the shotgun. “I’m going to like you, Storm.”

  “I’d like you even more if I knew your name,”
he said levelly.

  “Nancy Childs is the name. You can call me Nan. Everyone else does. That’s my boy William, and you’ll meet the rest of our merry band when we reach the house.”

  Maxine started and stepped away fearfully as William slapped the reins across Tally-Two’s back and giddyapped her into a trot.

  All their worldly goods and Storm’s medicines jounced off down the track towards the quarry. Nan fitted the shotgun into the crook of her arm and began to follow it. “Walk with me,” she said, as she struck off into the deepening gloom as the evening fell towards dusk.

  The house was an ancient ranch-style property with a gently pitched roof, screens over every window, and smoke curling from a chimney. It was poised on the lip of a long dugout quarry like an act of defiance. There were pens for pigs and goats, and three chicken coops. The house was in the shadow of three near-derelict grit hoppers that looked like they’d been brought back from a time travel trip to the 1930s. To complete the illusion of anachronism, as young woman was pumping water from a standpipe into a pail, and a toddler was running up and down by the fox fencing around the chicken coops in bare feet and only a grubby white vest. The young woman stood up from the standpipe and, hauling the galvanized bucket up and sloshing some of the water over the side, called to the child. “Terry, come inside now.”

  The boy looked crestfallen, but giving one more shake to the fox fence, he skipped over to the woman and followed her inside the ranch. There was no sign of the buggy or Tally-Two, but as they approached the ranch and the hoppers, Maxine could see there were a couple of barn-like buildings that could have been either work-sheds for the quarry or constructions associated with the ranch, and they were plenty big enough to accommodate the buggy and the horse.