All these thoughts had flown through Josh’s mind before he realized with a thud of shock that Ten-Foot had not been close enough to punch him.
It had been Rollins. While Josh had concentrated on Ten-Foot, de’d delivered a thumping blow to the side of Josh’s head.
Rollins, who was now stepping forward to straddle Josh, arms curved like an ape’s with his fists ready to strike. “You will do as I order! There will be no mutiny on my ship!”
Tally came forward to try to protect her father, arms raised, while Ten-Foot took two steps back. Rollins bore down on Josh, his fist almost whistling like a cartoon as Josh tried to raise his arms and kick out with his feet.
The blow never landed.
“Captain!” Spackman was holding Rollins’ arm back, the fist just inches from Josh. Josh rolled away and leapt to his feet.
“Calm down, Captain, please!” Spackman’s face was full of shock and fear. He seemed as surprised at Rollins’ actions as Josh had been. Tally, bless her, moved between Rollins and Josh, fists raised and her legs in a fighting stance. Along with parkour, climbing, and other urban sports, kickboxing was another of her hobbies.
Rollins’ face offered a map of the route to the Land of Rage. He stared incredulously from Spackman’s hand on his arm up to Spackman’s wide-eyed face. And then Rollins swung his free hand at the crewman. Spackman dodged the blow easily as he released his captain and stepped back.
“Captain Rollins!” Josh had regained some of his composure, and joined Tally by her side. “You may be in charge here, but something is happening that neither I nor you understand. You think it might be gas or something of that nature, but I’m not so sure. The one thing I do know is that we all need to calm down, and you need to stop hitting people, or I will make sure you’re arrested for assault by Morehead City PD the second we make it back to port. I brought these probationers here on this trip to show them there are other ways to look at life, beyond violence; I didn’t expect them to be right back in the gutter.”
And with those words, Josh checked himself.
He had no idea where the anger in that speech had come from. As an ex-cop, conflict resolution had been one of his major skills back in the police department days. Helping everyone to stay calm under pressure and deescalating a bad situation was never achieved by shouting or making threats, as he had done there. That was Situation Control 101.
What the hell was going on? It was like twenty years of his professional law enforcement smarts had been thrown over the side of the ship in one fell swoop.
And what was Tally doing getting into a fighting stance like that? Yes, she was brave as a lion and fearless as a hungry wolf, but like Josh, she was firmly of the speak first, fight last school.
Rollins’ fists were still bunched, his face flushed with rage. His eyes darted from Spackman to Ten-Foot to Josh in a never-ending motion that seemed to telegraph the fact that he was confused as to who to strike first.
The recovering crew and the probationers were on the periphery of this, too, all looking fearful and confused. Not only had they all been struck down by the crushing headaches, but now the situation was being layered over with near insanity.
Josh took a breath, and began in his head to count to ten to calm himself as best he could before he attempted to take charge of the situation.
He only got to count to six.
“There’s no signal, Captain! The satellite set is kaput!” Petersen, blond hair fluttering in the breeze, was making his way back across the deck.
Rollins blinked. For a moment, he wore the face of someone baffled to find themselves where they were, as if being forced to wake up from a deep sleep and still wrapped in the tatters of dreams.
Then, Rollins grasped a nearby rope and sagged. He sighed and wiped a hand across his mouth. The moment stretched out and caused a vacuum that someone needed to fill.
“Okay, Ten-Foot and the others, get below. Let’s let the crew do their jobs.” Josh clapped his hands together like a shepherd with his sheep. “C’mon, let’s do this.”
The probationers began to move awkwardly towards the hatch that led down into the innards of the Sea-Hawk, their faces still unsure, but showing they knew their freedom might depend on what Josh reported when they got back to shore.
All of them, of course, except Ten-Foot.
Ten-Foot stood his ground, even folding his arms across his chest to make his point. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or what happened to our heads, but I ain’t going nowhere until we find out.”
Josh shook his head and pulled Tally’s head close to his mouth so that he could whisper into her ear. “Get the others down below and break out the chocolate or cookies. I’ll deal with this tough guy and be down with you in a minute.”
“I don’t want to leave you…”
“Tally, please. Do as I say. I’ll be a minute. I promise.”
Tally bit her lip, but nodded her head just the same and joined the snake of probationers at the edge of the hatch.
Ten-Foot had not said anything else; he remained stock still, ready for whatever might be thrown at him.
Rollins was a big man, and tough as tempered metal, but there was no way that he could go up against Ten-Foot on his own and triumph in a physical fight. His face seemed to be transmitting that understanding, too. Until, that was, Petersen gauged the tension in the air and stepped up beside Rollins. Then Spackman, who was still eyeing the befuddled Rollins with confusion, turned and stood beside his captain, too. All three men stared down Ten-Foot as the wind slapped at the sails above their heads and the bow of the ship hissed, cutting its way through the waves. The waters were getting heavier, there was no doubt, and the crew needed to be dealing with the concerns of the Sea-Hawk, not getting into complications with a Morehead City baby gangster with a bad attitude.
“Ten-Foot…” Josh began, using the boy’s nickname rather than his given name, this being a small acquiescence that he hoped would soften his attitude enough to get him below. “Look at the weather, you can feel it’s getting worse. The wind’s up, and we need to let the crew get on with this. We can go down, you and me, and we can talk about this. Iron out our differences… yeah?”
Ten-Foot didn’t move, but he did speak. “You gonna send a bad report on me when we get back, Mr. Standing?”
The deal. Always a deal with Ten-Foot. The only way to get anywhere with him was to make him think you were giving him something he wanted. The currency of the street and the imperative of saving face.
“We can go talk about it. We’ve all had a shock. I got hit as hard as you. I don’t know why it happened, so maybe there are extenuating circumstances to your behavior. So, let’s get out of Captain Rollins’ way, and see what we can come up with, yeah?”
It took a moment, but Ten-Foot nodded. He walked towards the hatch.
Rollins visibly relaxed, too, as Petersen retook the wheel and Spackman went to speak to the five other members of the crew who had been standing yards away, unsure of what to do or how to react.
“Keep that boy off my deck,” Rollins growled as Josh started to back away. “If you don’t, you’ll follow him over the side.”
Josh knew that arguing right now wasn’t going to make things any better, but along with the headaches, there was something else going on here. He’d felt it himself… the rising anger, the willingness to fight. He’d seen it in Rollins—and had the bruise on his chin to prove it—and seen it in Tally and Ten-Foot, even though he’d been putting his freedom in real jeopardy.
This wasn’t just a case of gas or mass hysteria. Something was happening to all of them, and it sent a shiver of fear up and down his spine like iced water. All he did was give a nod to Rollins to keep him sweet, and then he went to the hatch and followed Ten-Foot below.
Tally and the probationers were in the male passenger cabin situated below the main deck in the middle of the ship. There were enough bunks for eight people, plus a draped-off area at the back with two more bunks,
where Josh and Tally had stowed their gear. Beyond that area was another cabin for the female probationers. Josh had been glad that his bunk was between the two groups. That meant any midnight liaisons between the sexes would be more difficult. Already, Josh had noted how close Dotty-B was getting to Lemming Field. He’d had to break them up several times. Dorothy Blaine was the seventeen-year-old who went by the moniker Dotty-B and had a rap sheet consisting of many TADAs, possession with intent to supply, and around a dozen charges of petty larceny. Carl ‘Lemming’ Field was eighteen, looked thirty, and had a criminal career a forty-five-year-old con man would have been proud of.
This cabin smelled of old socks, young men, and the residue of cigarette smoke. Smoking below decks was strictly prohibited, but allowed in one area topside, so it was a smell that had been carried down on the probationers’ clothes.
Tally was doling out candy and cookies and cokes from the lockbox in their section of the cabin. Ten-Foot had already jumped up onto his bunk as Josh came in behind them and shut the door on the short corridor behind them.
“What the hell was all that?” Goober Nash was a wiry twenty-year-old with a string of credit card frauds behind him, as well as a murdered father. “I ain’t never felt anything like it. I thought my head wuz gonna ‘splode.”
Heads were nodding in agreement. Puck Gathers, a chubby ex-drug mule (well, he’d better have that behind him) and corner-boy was biting into a cookie, and crumbs spat from his mouth as he continued speaking. “The captain said it might be gas…”
“It’s not gas,” Josh said.
“Then what?” Tally asked.
“We’d smell it if it was gas,” Josh pointed out.
Ten-Foot shook his head. “No, man, we wouldn’t. Methane coming up from the seabed doesn’t smell; if we got caught in a cloud of it, we wouldn’t know…”
“Yes, we would,” Josh countered. Ten-Foot kissed his teeth, and Josh sighed. “Raise your hand if you were up on deck looking up at the supernova.”
Everyone raised their hand.
“Now, keep your hand up if you were smoking before the first headache hit you.”
Only three hands, including Tally’s, went down.
“If you were smoking and we got hit by a cloud of methane, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? We’d have been blown to kingdom come.”
Josh stared hard at the probationers, and Ten-Foot clamped his mouth shut. Now, Josh had the room. Good.
First things first. “Is everyone okay? Physically, I mean. No ill effects after the headaches? Some of us, me included, went down pretty hard—anyone got any injuries I need to know about?”
Josh looked around the room, but thankfully, everyone was shaking their heads.
“Good. Now, this might seem like an odd question… but how do you all feel?”
“Angry,” said Puck, spitting more crumbs, “but I ain’t gonna do anything about it, cuz I ain’t stupid, but I sure felt like it up there.”
Others were nodding their heads. Ten-Foot was impassive, seemingly not wanting to give anything away.
“Anything else?” Josh asked the room.
Everyone started as Goober punched the wall behind his bunk, then said “Oww!” and sucked at his knuckles. When the fist fell from his mouth, he fixed Josh with watering eyes. “That’s how I feel.”
More nods around the cabin.
Josh didn’t get any further as, from outside the cabin, they heard a scream that cut through the night and almost rattled the door in its frame.
Before anyone could react, the door crashed open and Spackman tumbled in. His face was streaked with blood from a wound that had sliced into the side of his head and bisected his ear.
“What the…” Josh managed, before Spackman shoved the door closed and yelled, “Barricade the door, barricade it now! They’ve gone crazy! And when they’ve finished killing each other, they’re gonna kill you all!”
As if to make his point, the door splintered down the middle as a fire ax tore through it, and the lights in the cabin went out forever.
4
Maxine dropped Ben’s arm and screamed, “Storm!”
Her son spun from the girl to see the red-headed man with the iron bar storming towards him, and he raised his arms as the metal began its arc of hatred towards him.
Red-Head froze, the bar held at the top of his swing as the back of his jacket creased inward in two places as if punched by an invisible man. He rocked, and dropped back and then fell forwards like a felled tree. It was only then, as Storm scrambled out of the way of the falling man, with his face now dotted with a spray of blood from the exit wounds in his attacker’s chest, that Maxine’s mind caught up with the sounds of the gunfire. Two bullets had been fired from behind her.
Maxine turned.
A policeman in a Boston PD uniform and a cap askew on his head was still covering the man he’d shot with his pistol. Legs spread, arms locked together, eyes unblinking. The policeman nodded to himself, as if satisfied that the man he had shot was not getting up again, and then he holstered his weapon.
He approached and held out a hand to Maxine. “Get up.”
Maxine pointed to Ben. “I can’t. I need to help him. I can’t just…”
The policeman was perhaps in his late forties, thick-set and with what Josh had always described in his fellow officers as a donut belly—a paunch attained from too many donuts snatched on duty between calls. The policeman’s eyes were gray, and flecks of gray hair curled with unruly persistence from beneath his cap. When he spoke again, there was a soft Boston Irish burr to his voice. “Lady, we need to get out of here; the hotel is on fire and I ain’t got no equipment to move the car or the debris. And anyways, I don’t think this young man is going anywhere at all.”
Maxine followed the officer’s finger. Ben’s head had flopped backward and a widening pool of blood was seeping from beneath him.
Maxine checked his pulse, and then felt down below his waist and along his thigh. A sliver of metal was embedded there, and her fingers came away slick and sticky. The blood was dark and arterial. Even if he had stood a chance of getting free, the blood loss would have killed him in moments. Maxine wiped her hands on her own thighs and got up.
“Thank you. You saved my son.”
They began walking over to Storm, who knelt between the two bodies.
“I’m McCready. I don’t know what the hell is happening, but we need to get out of here, and we need to get out now.”
“If you don’t know what’s happening and you’re with the police, then we’re in real trouble.”
“Tell me about it, lady,” McCready said, casting his eyes around the lobby. Many of the able people had left already, spooked by the situation, the fire, and the shooting. But there were still screams floating in from the dark streets outside—screams that ran through an eerie quiet in an absence of normal city sounds—which seemed even louder than those notes of distress.
Storm was wiping Red-Head’s blood from his face as Maxine knelt to check the girl. No pulse. Pupils fixed and dilated. As Maxine felt around the back of the girl’s skull, the pulpy crunch of loosened bones told her that the girl had suffered an appalling injury that may have killed her outright.
“I’m sorry,” Storm said lamely, as if it had been his fault. Maxine squeezed his arm.
“There was nothing you could do.”
McCready had pushed his cap back from his forehead and had another hand on his paunch as he looked around. Smoke was billowing from a stairwell, and also escaping from the crack in the elevator doors. Maxine got up and pulled Storm to his feet. His cheeks had the best color she had seen in them since before the chemo had started, but she could tell from his breathing that the lack of energy was catching up to him, and that flush in his face wasn’t an expression of health, but of fear and worry.
“Okay, let’s go,” McCready hissed as the dull thump of an explosion reverberated through the hotel and a rain of glass fell down onto the plaza
outside the back entrance to the building.
“We can’t,” Storm said. “I don’t have any of my meds.”
Maxine looked at the stairs and the gusts of smoke coming down from above.
“We can’t go back to the room.”
“But…”
Maxine turned to McCready. “Will you come with us back to the hospital? It’s only two blocks. We need to get more meds for my son from the Travis Institute.”
McCready sighed. “Lady, I…”
“He’s had cancer. He needs these drugs or he’s going to get ill. You saved him once, Officer McCready. Are you going to make that good work a waste of your time?”
McCready’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, his mouth barred by white strands of spittle. He smacked his lips and swallowed. “Okay, lady, but I really should get you people somewhere safe.”
“You can do that after we have the medications. And please, Officer McCready…”
“Yeah, lady?
“For God’s sake, stop calling me ‘lady’!”
The streets had gone insane.
The only light came from the smudge of the supernova in the sky and the brightness of burning buildings. There were three kinds of people outside the hotel. Those too frightened to move who sat on the sidewalk curb hugging themselves, staring up at the sky. Those who were running in a panic that seemed to have welled up from nowhere at the moment the headache had subsided. And those who were looking for someone to fight. Someone to blame for the way they were feeling and the horror that had been visited upon their city.
Maxine, Storm, and McCready threaded their way through the devastation. There was no logical reason for the fires. They seemed to be springing up randomly all over, from roofs and windows. Cars burned in the street, some with bodies still inside, cooking in the conflagration.
It wasn’t until Maxine saw a light in the upper windows of an apartment, as a woman used a cigarette lighter to catch the curtains of the room she was in alight, that the sickening realization came to her—that, along with the darkness and the panic, some people had been gripped with a destructive urge to destroy and burn.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 4