Supernova EMP
Dark End
Deep End
Bitter End
Final End
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, APRIL 2020
Copyright © 2020 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Grace Hamilton is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Post-Apocalyptic projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.
www.relaypub.com
Contents
Dark End
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
End of Dark End
Deep End
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
End of Deep End
Bitter End
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
End of Bitter End
Final End
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
End of Final End
Thank you!
About Grace Hamilton
Also By Grace Hamilton
Blurb
Only the strong will survive when civilization collapses.
Barnard's Star, light years away from Earth, went supernova, and now, six years later the influence of that catastrophe is just reaching our planet. When the resultant EMP strikes Earth, the world is sent back to the Stone Age. Yet it soon grows evident there are worse things hidden in the dark matter hurricane. Unbearable headaches strike without warning. Human aggression goes off the charts. Small disagreements become bloodbaths.
Josh Standing took an oath to serve and protect those of their North Carolina community. That didn’t change when he left the police force to become a probation officer. If only his wife understood his drive to rescue tomorrow’s troubled youth. But Maxine’s greatest concern is to ensure their son survives the cancer that has ravaged his body. As their marriage circles the drain, she takes the once promising athlete to face the final pronouncement of the Boston specialists—alone.
But the fractured family has never needed each other more.
In the immediate aftermath of the EMP chaos, the separated Standings decide to make their way toward the family farm in West Virginia. However, getting to Maxine’s prepper parents is no small task in a world that’s swiftly turning into kill or be killed.
And when events threaten to separate them further, Josh is faced with an unthinkable choice in this thrilling post-apocalyptic series.
1
Two days before the Earth went insane, Josh Standing was trying hard not to bring an end to his own personal world.
Josh made a fist and tried to shift the anger and frustration that wanted to come out of his mouth and stuff it down into the bones of his hand. All he succeeded in doing was thumping the desk in front of him, smacking his knuckles on the satellite radio. He cursed under his breath at the stinging pain.
“What’s wrong?”
Maxine’s voice was coming through from Boston tinny and thin. Even in that state, her own worry came through loud and clear across the degraded signal.
“Nothing,” Josh muttered. “I hit my hand. Get Storm on so I can speak to him.”
Maxine’s sigh came through loud and clear, and Josh sucked on his grazed knuckles as much to soothe them as to stifle the stream of words laced in fear that threatened to rise to the surface.
Twenty-two years of marriage and two kids—Tally now eighteen and Storm twenty-one—had educated both parties enough for them to know exactly which buttons to push despite the agreement not to fight when it comes to Storm. Josh and Maxine argued now in very much the same way as they’d used to make love; hot and fevered, neither taking any prisoners in the pursuit of liberation from internal tensions that had grown over the years. Now the goals seemed to be to hurt each other just as deeply as they’d once wanted to give each other pleasure. Same drives employed, different destinations.
Josh had promised himself before this call that he would not fight with his wife; especially with Storm there. It was a promise he was already coming perilously close to breaking as old hurts surfaced with each sigh coming out of her mouth. It wasn’t that he was blameless in all this, as he knew he wasn’t. It took two to tango, after all. And it only took one to be the bigger man, to apologize, to be the first one to apologize—but Maxine and Josh had pretty much reached the point where no one was willing to go first in pouring the much-needed oil on the troubled waters of their marriage.
“Toe-tac.”
A sliver of guilt cut into Josh’s heart as the voice on the transmitter ch
anged to that of his son. That Storm was obviously trying to take the potential for heat out of the situation by using the silly ritual greeting they’d developed when he was younger gave Josh pause, and he didn’t offer the expected response right away. When Josh had still been a cop, he’d tried to teach then four-year-old Storm, tic-tac-toe, and although the boy had grasped the game, he could never get the name right. Storm would say “Let’s play toe-tac-tic” and Josh would immediately reply “tic-tac-toe.” Over time, this attempted corrective had become their standard conversational opener, and Toe-tac and Tic-tac had morphed into nicknames of sorts. And here, still fizzing with his irritation that Maxine was there and he was here, Josh hesitated. He wet his dry lips, and tried to get back in the game. It had been Storm’s decision to make the trek with just his mom, but it still grated against Josh making him feel raw.
“Toe-tac… You there, dad? Has this stupid thing gone down again?”
“I’m here, son.”
“Then…” Storm’s voice caught a crack, “say the words.”
It wasn’t like you could hear cancer as a tone in someone’s voice, but the effects of it could be easily identified if you knew what to listen for. The breathiness of fatigue, the shudder of pain, the trembling of uncertainty over one’s personal future. Maxine and Josh had not necessarily become the cliché of a couple who’d stayed together because of the kids, they were damn close. Had Storm Standing’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma not been diagnosed less than a year before, then Josh and Maxine might never have reached the stage of almost becoming that cliché.
“Hey Tic-tac, how’s things?”
“Pretty rough.”
Storm was in Boston, eight hundred miles and change from the Standing family home in Morehead City, North Carolina. He was having his final R-CHOP chemotherapy sessions in the Travis Institute. A long way to go for chemo, but the oncologist there, Sudhindra, had been a friend to both Josh and Maxine since their college days, and had all but fallen over himself to help in the only way he could when he’d heard about Storm’s initial diagnosis over the social media telegraph. “It’s the least I can do, Josh,” he’d said in his high, earnest voice, which had seemed fired out of the past like a flaming arrow of hope on the telephone.
The least he could do.
The least Maxine and Josh could have done, the ex-cop thought, was to set aside their differences, and concentrate on their son’s recovery.
The least.
They hadn’t been successful.
Storm’s treatment had been fraught with side effects and debilitating post-chemo complications. Basically, to poison and kill the cancer, you had to poison and very nearly kill the body. Storm had said to his dad on many occasions that the treatment was worse than the cancer itself. “It isn’t worse than dying,” he’d say, “but sometimes I’d choose that over this.”
Once the poisons with the long and complicated Latin names (which Josh was convinced, if translated into English, would come out as ‘Kill-O-Matic’, ‘Vom-a-Cause’, or ‘Die-O-Sure’) had been pumped by Sudhindra and his team into Storm’s body, there would be a sudden and alarming deterioration in Storm’s condition. The first course of drugs some sixteen weeks before, which Josh had made the trip to Boston with his son for, had caused him to think his son had relapsed and been pushed close to death, such was the change in him. The sickness, the pain, the hair coming out in clumps, the pallor and the listless… nothing… in his eyes. He’d raged at Sudhindra, talking of lawsuits and lawyers, and the tiny Indian in the too-large white coat had smiled, taken Josh by the hand, and explained for perhaps the thirtieth time that, “This is all to be expected.” And that, “The body doesn’t enjoy being poisoned, but the cancer in Storm’s lymph and skeletal system will enjoy it even less.” You would think that in a time like this, he and Maxine would unite as a team, but watching their son go through all this only seemed to cement their growing disunion.
“I’m sorry, son,” Josh said now, snapping back to the matter at hand. “It’s your last course, though—after this, it’ll be only up. You’ll be back on the track training before you know it.”
“I hope so.” Storm didn’t sound so sure. “How’s the vacation?”
Josh’s stomach knotted at the word. A Maxine word if ever there’d been one.
Because he knew Maxine was listening in on speaker, Josh had two choices. He could correct his twenty-one-year-old son and say he wasn’t on vacation, and this wasn’t a fun trip; it was strictly business and it was part of his job. Or he could not rise to the bait she’d placed on Storm’s hook and just roll with it.
He chose the latter. “Oh, it’s all okay here. Everyone is basically outside looking up at the sky. Are you going out to look? It’s damn beautiful. Never seen anything like it.”
“We could see it all from the window of the hotel once we pulled back the drapes. It’s amazing. Like a bag of jewels spilled in a corner of the sky.”
Josh smiled at the comment; if Storm hadn’t been such a strong runner before his diagnosis, he could just as easily have been a strong and descriptive writer. Now that he was getting a second bite at the cherry of life, perhaps he could be both. His job as an administrative assistant in the accounts department of Morehead Mercy, in thanks part to Maxine being a nurse specialist at the same hospital, was being held open for him. It would give him something to help get his life back on track. The running… that might take a little longer.
“Did you see the news last night?”
“Nope. What did I miss?” Josh asked. Normally, he was a more than a little hardcore news-junkie, but out here, there were too many other distractions to keep him busy—distractions that also helped him concentrate on something other than the collapse of his marriage and the illness of his son, if only for a few weeks. And that brought another cold chill of guilt to his mind, which he was determined not to show in his voice.
How did it all come to this? he thought. How?
Storm continued, “Professor Halley, the TV science guy, he was going so crazy on Conan last night that they had to cut to commercials, and then he went psycho on CNN and they just shut him down. He was saying some pretty crazy stuff. I thought you might…”
“Not had time, Storm, sorry.” It’s not a vacation. But he kept that last part to himself.
Storm’s voice had an enthusiasm in it that belied his physical frailty and fatigue right now, and it suddenly felt good for Josh to hear that tone in the boy’s voice; it had certainly been a while.
Professor Robert Halley was tangentially known to Josh. A pop-culture scientist who’d used to have his own show back in the late 90s, where he would debunk science myths and promote rational inquiry. He’d been a massive proponent of space exploration when firing tax dollars beyond the Earth’s atmosphere had not been a hugely popular stance to take. That’s when he’d fallen out of favor with the networks, and instead retired to write books and travel the lecture circuit. These days, he often turned up on talk and news segments as a Rent-A-Science-Dude—a man in his late fifties with bug-eyed glasses and hair in a dirty-blond ponytail that made him look like a refugee from the Grateful Dead rather than MIT.
Josh remembered Storm watching him on YouTube when he’d gone through his question everything phase, and considered Halley a great communicator, if a little weird.
“He thinks there’s going to be some kind of problem with the supernova.”
Two nights ago, a sparkling smudge to the side of Orion’s belt had lit up the night sky like a smeared moon. First, it had been a white dot, which the people who’d first seen it had thought to be an approaching aircraft, but it had grown visibly as the watchers had observed it with increasing concern. When it had become a blurry, pearlescent splotch on the night sky, like the negative image of a Rorschach test, the world’s media had gone into overdrive. Mainly because of the new light in the sky, but also, it seemed, because NASA and all the major observatories of the world had been taken completely by surprise.
Once the telescopes and instruments of the world had been trained on the still growing object, now brighter than the stars around it, jaw-dropping information had begun spreading. Barnard’s Star—at six light years’ distance, the closest star that could be seen in the Earth’s northern hemisphere—had exploded. The supernova, catastrophically destroying itself in a stellar detonation, had thus sent out a wave of light that was now, six light years later, becoming visible on Earth.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 1