Josh nodded. “Please, I don’t want any trouble. I just want to get back to my ship. I have no idea why it’s sailing away, and if I don’t get back to it soon, I’ll never be able to get back to it.”
Poppet stamped her foot again. Any work Joey had put in before she’d arrived on the scene to show that he was a force to be reckoned with was being swiftly eroded as he acquiesced to her tantrum.
“Lazzy!” Joey screamed down the deck. “Lazzy, where the hell are you?”
If he was expecting a reply, it didn’t come. He turned back to Poppet instead, who had thrown the bottle over the side of the liner and was using her index finger to wipe any residue of liquid from the bowl of the champagne glass, then sucking it off her skin with lips so red you could have squeezed strawberry cordial from them.
“Poppet, I don’t know where Lazzy is and I don’t know where Barney is. They’re trying to get the rest of the crew and deal with this guy’s accomplices. As soon as they’re free, I’ll send them down to the hold and we’ll get you everything you want.”
Poppet stopped sucking on her finger and fixed Joey with a stare which was entirely the equal of the one he’d met Josh’s eyes with. “You go down into the hold, Joey. You go and you get it for me.” She shrugged, and then added, “If you find Lazzy and Barney on the way, you can send them. But I want at least four bottles, and try and get some cold ones. Warm sham-pag-nay makes my nose itch.”
“Help me to sit up. Please.”
Dotty-B had been nearby for some time, her hands working a cat’s cradle, looking at Ten-Foot’s back as he steered and hollered his commands to the others. Occasionally, when Tally had looked up, she’d caught Dotty-B’s eye, and the girl had looked down as if embarrassed.
Tally had one shot at this, and it might be her only chance. “I can’t get myself up. Please. Just pull my arm. I can’t move.”
Tally had, over the preceding minutes, dropped down the stanchion into an awkward position on the deck that was one- half fetal, and one- half treble clef. Her arms were aching, and she felt sure her feet would be blue within her sneakers, such was the lack of circulation afforded by the ropes around her ankles.
Dotty-B bit into her thumbnail. Her eyes flicking back to Ten-Foot, who was holding the wheel like he was in a perfect dream, face set to the sails and the sky. In his happiest of places by the expression on his face.
“Please,” Tally implored again.
Dotty-B came to Tally and helped her sit up, pulling her into a sitting position and off the stanchion, so that the flat of the gunwale was against her back and her shoulder was wedged in place. She wouldn’t fall over again. “Thanks.”
“It’s okay.” Dotty-B started to get up.
“Don’t go. Please.”
Dotty-B looked nervously at Ten-Foot, but stayed. “What?”
“I don’t think you want to go to Africa, either. Right?”
Dotty-B said nothing, but her face told Tally that she’d hit the nail on the head. “And I’m guessing you’re not too happy about Banger being left behind on the Empress. You and him had a thing, right?”
Dotty-B’s eyes dropped. “I don’t think I should…”
“If we’re going to get home, get out of this mess, Ten-Foot’s mind needs to be changed. Without my dad back on the Sea-Hawk we’re screwed. You know that and I know that. And without Lemming, you’re going to be very unhappy. And you and I both know that’s the truth, too.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it.”
“You don’t think so?”
Dotty-B shook her head.
And so, Tally explained to the girl exactly what she could do about it.
“It was supposed to be a second honeymoon.” Joey was walking behind Josh down the stairs into the belly of the Empress, his gun still pressed between Josh’s shoulder blades. “I should have known after the first honeymoon what I was getting myself into. But that’s the problem with thinking with your pants and not with yer head. Everything else, I use my head. But, ya know, the fair sex will always be my downfall. It’s not like I don’t have insight into that, it’s not like I couldn’t change it if I wanted to… but I can’t. So, here I am, taking you down to the hold to get sham-pag-nay for my lush of a missus, while up above, our only chance of getting off this ship sails away, and the last of the crew and passengers try to hunt us down. Keep your hands up, Mr. Interloper.”
Josh kept his hands high and did as he was told. He didn’t really want to turn into a de facto therapist for the gray-haired, retired mobster, but he figured it was best to keep him sweet, especially while the Colt Government was sticking in his back. “I can appreciate that, Mr. Langolini.”
Joey had given a potted history of his life as they had descended. A retired boss of the Langolini family, one of the lesser affiliates of the five families in New York, but they ‘got by.’ He’d handed over the sharp end of the family business to his sons and gone off on a cruise with Poppet, accompanied by his two bag men, Lazzy and Barney, for protection, and had planned to sail around the world for a couple of years, keeping Poppet sweet on her sham-pag-nay, and him sweet on his con-jool-gals.
Joey used his wife’s vernacular in a way that transmitted both exasperation and affection. As if he was caught constantly between the two conflicting emotions.
“If you make it out of this without a bullet in your head, Mr. Interloper, and trust me, I still haven’t decided if you will, don’t make any decisions with your pants. Trust me on that.”
“I won’t,” Josh managed to say with the maximum earnestness he could muster. Seeing as Joey was in a talkative mood, Josh speculated, “So, what happened to all the passengers and crew?”
“Bedlam and the night of the long knives all rolled into one. As soon as that damn super-thing appeared in the sky, everyone went out of their nuts. Even I felt strange, ya know? Couldn’t think straight. When I wasn’t falling over and blanking out, I was wanting to strangle people with my bare hands. That’s the thing, though, Mr. Interloper. Never do the dirty work yourself unless you have to. Always maintain what you might call a professional distance. You have to, in all cases, maintain plausible deniability, but here I was offing people like it was going out of fashion.”
Josh licked his lips from a mouth that had suddenly gone dry. The thought of the gun in the hands of a wise-guy who’d gotten a taste for indiscriminate killing in the last week didn’t really fill him full of confidence that he would make it all the way to the hold, let alone off the Empress.
“But all that seems to have calmed down now, I guess. Especially since most people left on the lifeboats.”
“All of the others?”
“Yeah, mostly. Panic swept through the ship like a brush fire. Everyone who wasn’t being killed, or trying to set light to the place, got into the lifeboats and tried to get away. Thing is, as we watched, they started killing each other on the lifeboats, too. They were capsizing and drowning by the dozens. By the next morning, all we could see were a couple of bodies and a few upturned boats. No idea if any of the others managed to paddle away, but you’re the first people we’ve seen since that night. Other than the whack-jobs still on the boat who are trying to steal our stuff. This way.”
They’d reached the bottom of the stairwell, and Joey pushed Josh towards a door marked CREW ONLY. The lock had been shot out, and the door swung with the motion of the Empress. It led into a darkened corridor which had none of the plush artifice of the passenger sections of the liner. It was mostly bare metal, utilitarian in the extreme and redolent with the smell of engine grease. Josh felt Joey press something metallic into his hand. He looked down. It was a Zippo.
“Light it, Mr. Interloper. Where we’re going, it’s as dark as night. No skylights down here. You make one bad move, and I’ll blow out your spine.”
Josh stepped into the dark.
18
Maxine and Storm were separated by Nan as the family, Ralph, and the others started to make their way to bed for the
night. There were enough rooms in the bowels of the ranch for Storm and Maxine to have one each, Nan said. Maxine had begun to argue, but she’d seen William start to tense and flutter his fingers near to the pistol on his hip, so she’d then agreed to go to the room she’d been assigned.
Ralph and Maxine hadn’t been able to continue their clandestine conversation because William had settled himself on a chair and watched them intently, ensuring there was nothing being said that Nan would find inappropriate. The ranch had taken on a much less welcoming demeanor after that, culminating in Nan allocating rooms to Maxine and Storm.
As Maxine sat on the edge of her bed, behind a window that had a wire mesh grille on the outside of the glass, with a dark night, lowering moon, and the Barnard’s smudge riding slowly across the heavens, she felt, not unreasonably, that they’d gone from a frying pan into the hotter fire.
For all Nan’s carefully considered benevolence and faux concern, it was clear that extricating themselves from the Childs’ ranch was going to prove a difficult mission, to say the least. She had a pretty good idea of where the buggy and Tally-Two were, but their guns, the rucksacks, and Storm’s medications were all hidden.
When Maxine and Storm had asked for the bag of drugs to be given back to them, Nan had fed Maxine a line about all the medications in the house being kept together, out of the reach of inquisitive children who might take them by mistake. All Nan had allowed for was for Maxine to tell her what drugs Storm needed before bed, and then she’d sent one of her boys off to wherever they’d been stored. The medication had been brought back in a tin cup, which Storm had used for water to wash down the tablets once he’d had them in his mouth. All the while, William had scowled and Nan had smiled serenely as the first coils of her control had been wrapped around this wing of the Standing family.
Maxine knew that, unlike Ralph, there was no need to threaten her at all with any potential harm to her son. All Nan had to do was keep them separated from Storm’s medication. That understanding, though, brought a wave of depression to Maxine’s thinking. She and Storm couldn’t just walk away from the quarry and pick up new supplies along the way; they had to be proactive, and they might need to fight their way out if push came to shove.
The last thing Nan had said to Maxine before leading her to her room had been that she hoped Maxine and Storm would “value becoming part of their happy band of survivors.”
Maxine had just nodded, and smiled thinly as the door had closed between them.
Her room was small and functional. There was a single bed, and an enameled wash basin and jug filled with cold water on a small, rough nightstand. Beneath a smoky oil lamp, there hung an abrasive-looking towel at the foot of the bed so that the room’s occupant could complete their ablutions. A china potty rested under the bed to accommodate calls of nature, and there was only a chair over which to hang her clothes—no cupboard or sets of drawers for possessions. Maxine had hoped that at least her rucksack with a change of underwear would have been returned to her, but there’d been no sign of their gear since William had ridden the buggy down the track.
At least, when Maxine sat on the bed and examined the bedding, she found it to be clean. Still trying to come to grips with the new situation, Maxine found herself reaching for the bedstead to keep herself upright, as if the world had shifted ninety degrees to the horizontal.
After a few minutes of deep breathing, and trying to center herself, she recovered her focus enough to start considering her options. There was nothing in the room which she could really use as a weapon. Not even a mirror. She might be able to break a piece of glass from the window, and wrap it in a length of torn blanket as a makeshift knife… but a sliver of glass against all the firepower of the Childs’ family was not an inviting prospect. The bed was made of wood, and the mattress was unsprung and stuffed with coarse wadding by the feel of it. The enameled bowl and jug were of thin tin, with blue painted lips. There was no heft or weight to them.
Then a thought occurred to her.
She pulled the potty from under the bed and studied it.
Perhaps brains rather than brawn might get her out of here.
Nan hadn’t been able to lock the door to Maxine’s room because there hadn’t been a lock—just a latch. She’d been so convinced that Maxine wouldn’t try to escape without access to Storm’s drugs, it hadn’t been necessary to put her somewhere confined.
Maxine padded slowly down the corridor, holding the potty with its sloshing contents out in front of her. If this was going to work, she would only have one chance—and her hunch was predicated on Ralph’s information that there would always be someone watching him, Mary, and Terry, stopping them from trying to escape. As far as Maxine could tell, there was only once entrance to the ranch, and that was in the family room, where the fire burned and most of the house activities were carried out; that would be the best place to put someone on guard.
Gentle snores came from behind the doors as Maxine passed them, and behind another she could hear the quiet sobbing of someone. More proof, if any were needed, that this was not a happy home. Nan Childs might, if called upon, rationalize her behavior in forcing people to join in with her safety in numbers philosophy, and might argue that she was doing right by her family in carrying it out. But what a price for safety, Maxine thought. What a price for freedom—if that freedom just locked you into a society which was controlled by threats and coercion. People might find banding together was the right thing to do, but without individual freedoms, it just meant swapping one set of vulnerabilities with another.
Maxine reached the end of the corridor and looked out into the family room. The fire still flickered gently, but the last log on it was rapidly turning to white ash studded with flaring orange embers. The oil lamps had been extinguished, and so the only light came from the stone fireplace. It made huge shadows shift across the ceiling and the walls. They swam over the space like shoals of misshapen fish. It was from this whirl of hard darkness and dim light that Maxine picked out William.
He was sitting on the far side of the room from the corridor, upright in the chair, the side of his face in permanent shadow. His pistol in his lap sat held in his right hand, index finger out of the trigger guard, resting along the barrel. He was facing the door, seemingly ready to react to anyone who might try to enter or leave through it.
Because his face was obscured by the dark, Maxine couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. His shoulders appeared relaxed, but the gun looked ready. His head was neither forward on his chest, nor to one side on the headrest of the chair. He could have been alert to her approach, she knew, and all he would have to do was to turn his head slightly to the right to see her advancing.
Three yards.
Two yards.
Maxine paused, just three feet from the chair, holding the potty out in front of her, the surface of its contents settling as she stopped. It was here that she began to recognize the gentle snore under his breath, and pick out in the dimness that William was indeed asleep.
She wouldn’t have to go all the way through with her plan to use the contents of the potty as a distraction to be thrown over whoever was guarding the door, so that she might be able to reach in and get to their gun as they first registered, and then had to deal with, disgust at what had been thrown over them. Maxine had thought that it would be a worthy distraction, for sure, but was glad that William’s state of sleep meant a more direct approach, rather than her having to follow through with the icky plan.
Maxine began to lower the china container slowly to the floor, all the while keeping her eyes on William, unmoving and unaware in the chair.
With the pot a foot from the floor, the room suddenly echoed with a woody detonation and a sharp crack as an air pocket or an area of deep moisture exploded around the last log in the grate. The fireplace showered out sparks, followed by a shattering cannonade of hisses and crackles that William woke with a start.
He snatched up the gun and twisted in the chair. In
itially, Maxine could see that he was pointing it over her head, and that he hadn’t immediately registered her presence as she came down on her haunches.
That gave her the one chance she would have.
She launched the contents of the potty directly into William’s face from below. The shock of the liquid hitting his face made him bring his arms up, with him appearing to forget he had the gun in his hand. With that, Maxine was leaping forward, swinging the china bowl by the handle. It scythed through the flickering firelight and shattered with a heavy crack against the side of his head. Pieces flew and whirled, clattering into the wall and smashing into the floor.
William slid from the chair, poleaxed, and it was the work of a moment for Maxine to twist the pistol from his hand, prime the chamber, and put the barrel under William’s chin.
Droplets of the pot’s contents dripped around William’s hair and face, and his lips curled in revulsion as the unmistakable smell of urine assailed his nostrils.
“Now, William. Take me to my son.”
The crash of breaking china didn’t seem to have disturbed anyone in the bedrooms as they walked along the corridor. William moved slowly, with his hands held high, occasionally shaking his head to get droplets out of his hair.
“You’re gonna die for this,” had been the last thing he’d said before they’d left the living area.
“Possibly,” Maxine had returned, “but you’ll be going long before I do if you don’t take me to Storm now.”
William had spat the bad taste out of his mouth and led the way.
Maxine estimated that it must be three or four in the morning. She had waited as long as she’d dared, knowing, from her time working nightshifts in Morehead Mercy, that this was the prime time for nurses to succumb to tiredness if they were on a warm ward and they were on their 3 a.m. break.
It had also taken her that long to consume the contents of the water jug and ensure that the china bowl was as full of liquid as she could manage.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 1): Dark End Page 18