He knew the answer Tally might want. He knew what he should do for the sake of his family, but could he just abandon the probationers to a world gone crazy?
He didn’t know, and he said so.
Tally’s lips tightened, but she didn’t say anything. This was going to be an argument for another time, Josh thought. At some point, he was going to have to choose, and he knew which choice his family would want him to make. But could he? Could he leave these kids to their own devices after he’d spent so much time and effort to keep them safe this long?
The silence remained unbroken by Tally and Josh. He could feel the renewed tension between them, which he hadn’t felt since the first night of the disaster.
She was looking ahead, across the wheel, and avoiding eye-contact. Josh stood beside her, his hands thrust into the pockets of his hoodie, making fists as a place to hide the frustration and uncertainly threating to break out all over his face.
“Oh, why don’t you shut up, you foul-mouthed scum bag?”
CLUNK.
Tally and Josh turned as one.
Ten-Foot was unconscious, and Poppet was standing over him with a length of pipe.
“And when you wake up, if you don’t keep that trap shut, I’m going to brain you again, kid. See if I don’t!”
“You just need a three-foot length of wood or… hey, what about my piece of pipe?”
Poppet brandished the pipe she’d used to belabor Ten-Foot into unconsciousness and said, “We put it upright on the deck in the sun, pull the sails in so we’re just on the current, throw your sea anchors out so we don’t move too much, and then mark the top of the shadow with a coffee mug or whatever, wait twenty minutes, and see where the shadow has moved to and mark the top of that.”
Tally and Josh looked at Poppet with utter confusion. Since she’d been motivated to wallop Ten-Foot into the land of nod, she’d hardly stopped talking or rested to take a breath. They were doing everything wrong; she’d said. Everything.
“If you can’t tell what the time of day is, you can’t get an accurate bearing on traveling west. None of your onboard clocks are working, right? They were all digital, and none of you have a decent wind-up watch, right?”
Tally and Josh nodded.
“Okay, so you have to get an accurate bearing. This works best on land, but if we can stop the boat on the water as best we can, we can use this method to get an accurate direction. You with me?”
“Not really,” Josh said, “but carry on. You sound like you know what you’re doing.”
“I do. Sham-pag-nay was just my little joke with Joey. You didn’t really think I thought it was called that, did you?”
Josh said nothing, but he could feel his cheeks reddening.
“Shame on you, Mr. Interloper. Okay, I have no idea what they’re teaching to people and you kids these days, but back in the mists of time, we learned how to find our way out of a tight spot if we had no compass miles from home. I guess you didn’t teach your daughter that, either, huh?”
“Well… I…”
Poppet winked at Tally. “World’s worst father, right? No… don’t answer that, his ego has taken enough of a battering today already.”
Josh shook his head, but let her go on.
“So, after twenty minutes, you put your left foot on the place where the first shadow finished, and your right foot on the second. Then that means you’re facing due south, and that means…”
“That your right arm, held up, at a right angle to your body will be pointing west,” Tally finished.
Poppet ruffled Tally’s hair. “Smart kid, Mr. Interloper. You sure she’s yours? Look… guessing the time is a mug’s game; you’ll nearly always be wrong, and just trying to keep the sun on one side of the boat will probably have you going in circles. Trust me. This way, we’re a tad more accurate, and we know west is really thataway. All we do is check the shadow every twenty minutes and get our heading in that direction. Got it?”
They did.
“After twenty minutes, you’ll be able to see how far off course you’ve drifted, and how much your wheel needs to be turned to get the boat back on true west. After a couple of hours, you’ll be able to compensate for it automatically. Same with the tacking. If you’re doing a 20-degree tack along the wind, all ya gotta do is add or subtract that twenty degrees to either side of your west line. Oh, and when night time comes, I’ll teach you how to find truth north with the pole star and the big dipper.”
In between teaching Ten-Foot to keep his mouth shut, and marking shadows on the deck cast by her pipe, Poppet took Josh to one side and said, “I’m just sober, Mr. Interloper, and I’m grieving. Make the most of it. I’ll crash and burn eventually. I always do. Oh, and where do you keep the rum?”
24
Maxine was dragged back down the corridor and to the top of the stairwell by the soldiers. Jonstone walked ahead, seemingly delighted to carrying out the summary execution immediately rather than having to lock Maxine up until an expiration date.
“Carron’s good like that,” she confided, “he doesn’t want us babysitting looter scum when we could be fighting the insurgents.”
“You can’t do this. It’s unlawful!”
“We are the law,” Jonstone said. “The city is under martial law, and that makes us judge, jury, and executioner.”
“This can’t be right! I’m a citizen!”
“You’ll be welcome to make any complaints you wish to the relevant authorities once sentence has been carried out. Oh, forgive me, that won’t be possible, of course.”
Jonstone sniggered at her own awful joke as the soldiers turned in the stairwell and began to thump Maxine down the next flight.
But if she was going to be taken down to the parking lot, put against a wall, and shot in the next two minutes, then she had nothing to lose. She had to at least try to get free, even if it got her shot two minutes early. If she just let the soldiers carry her down the stairs, she was dead anyway.
She’d have one chance to get this right, and one chance only.
Maxine drew in a deep breath and waited until the soldiers were taking their second step down the next flight. She couldn’t move her arms, but she could move her legs. With all the strength she could muster, she kicked out with both her heels at the step, pitching the soldiers forward and crashing the three of them into Jonstone’s back.
With a yell, a tumble, and a ball of whirling limbs, the four of them rolled, crashed, and thudded down the stairs. Feeling her arms released, and half a second beyond everyone else because she’d known what was coming, Maxine tucked her head into her chest to protect it as they tumbled and reached for the sharp piece of metal that had been constantly sticking in her side as she’d been taken up and down the stairs.
The SIG-Sauer P320 came out of the holster nearly as soon as they crashed into the wall at the bottom of the flight. Jonstone’s face was smooshed into the concrete with a small crack as her nose broke. Maxine got onto first one knee, then up to standing, covering all three with the SIG as she came up.
“Now, please. Don’t make me shoot any of you. But remember, I only need one of you to get what I need.”
One soldier was unconscious from the fall, but the other two raised their hands. Maxine reached down, took the other soldier’s SIG, and put it in the pocket of her cargo pants. “Your gun please, Jonstone,” she said levelly, and Jonstone obliged.
“You won’t get away with this,” she said.
“Maybe not, but I’m hoping by the time they find you; I’ll be long gone. Now… carry Private Sleepyhead down the stairs, and take me to the dispensary.”
The dispensary sat at the back of the building. It was well stocked, and looked as though it had been restocked recently, too. Possibly with medications looted by this unit, from pharmacies in the surrounding areas. The door was locked, but Maxine guessed correctly that Jonstone had a key. It seemed like the complacency displayed by the lack of guards at the entrance to the hospital was matched t
hroughout the bottom floor, too. Either this was a group of soldiers who were supremely confident in their abilities to deal with any given situation, or they just weren’t very good at their jobs.
It was probably a combination of both.
Covering Jonstone and the other soldier with the SIG, she told them exactly what drugs to collect for her, and then instructed them to put them in the pack she’d recovered from the stairwell.
Sleepyhead was coming around, and so Maxine told Jonstone to use the handcuffs from his belt to secure him, stuff his mouth with cotton wadding, and then secure the conscious soldier in the same way. When the female soldier had finished with the wadding and surgical tape, Maxine fixed her with the SIG.
“Now, Major Jonstone… I’d like you to take off your uniform.”
Jonstone’s uniform was tight across Maxine’s shoulders, and the pants legs needed to be rolled up inside her boots, but with the shirt done up across the front and the cap on her head, Maxine felt she looked the part, if not feeling it entirely.
She figured that walking back through the hospital to the entrance would be safer dressed as a soldier in case she ran into anyone from the floor above. Jonstone and her soldiers had been covering the entrance when Maxine had come in, and since she hadn’t heard the major ask anyone to cover for them, Maxine assumed that there wouldn’t be anybody to check her on the way out.
A pair of soldiers turned a corner ahead of her and began marching briskly down the corridor towards her. Maxine’s mouth became a desert, and her heart fluttered in her chest on hummingbird wings.
The soldiers, however, didn’t challenge her and didn’t look twice; they just saluted as they passed, and apart from nearly forgetting that she should salute them back, and not being sure how to do it convincingly, she must have passed muster because the soldiers continued down the corridor. And within thirty seconds, she was out of the hospital and walking across the parking lot to the exit road.
Maxine resisted the urge to look back, and fought an even more intense one to break out into a run. It wasn’t until she felt that she was completely out of sight of the hospital that she did hit the sprint button, running herself out of town.
Out of breath and out of energy, Maxine collapsed next to Storm, who lay next to the tent on the dry and mulchy woodland floor. He didn’t look like he’d moved since she’d left him four hours before. His eyelids fluttered, his mouth clearly dry, and his voice came on the airwaves like a poorly-tuned radio.
“What… kept… you?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
She helped Storm take painkillers and swallow some antibiotics, and then she dressed the suppurating scratch on his arm. He was a mess, but at least there were more than enough drugs now to get them to the farm in West Virginia.
“You joined… the Army. Did I miss… a meeting?”
Maxine was changing out of the uniform into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. It wouldn’t do to draw attention to themselves by keeping the uniform now that they were getting back on the road. “Let’s just say I was temporarily drafted, and then I resigned my commission.”
“What happened, Mom? You look wasted. Stop… deflecting… tell me…”
Maxine began hitching Tally-Two back to the harness and buggy. “I came into contact with the first authorities we’ve seen since we left Boston. Real authorities, not pretend like McCready. They were Army.”
“The Army are there? That’s… awesome! Everything will be back… on track soon.” Storm’s excitement caused him to have a coughing fit that eventually made him lie back down clutching his stomach.
Maxine smoothed her hand across his forehead. “It’s not the Army I remember, Storm. Whether they’re a rogue unit, or carrying out their correct orders, all they’re interested in is hoarding all the stuff they can find, and killing anyone they feel might impede that mission.”
“They were going to kill you?”
Maxine nodded. “I had a twenty-second trial, and was to be shot on the whim of their CO. I was lucky and got away, but I’m not sure how lucky anyone else has been. The way they spoke and acted; it was just another execution in a long line of them. The place they were in was hardly guarded. They just don’t think anyone will challenge them. They have the guns, the manpower, and what they see as legal force. You can’t go against that. We’ve seen the people out on the road. They look like refugees, and there’s others who are crazy—burning, killing, and hurting. This army should be out there helping the population, helping people like us, and they’re just sitting there on their backsides hoarding supplies.”
Maxine could see her hands were shaking, and she could hear the tremble in her voice. “This isn’t right. This isn’t how it should be. This is not how I imagined the authorities would act. I hope they’re rogue; I hope they’re outside the norm, but they seemed pretty relaxed in thinking no one was going to come and stop them. No one at all.”
Storm’s improvement over the next few days of travel wasn’t exactly miraculous, but his infections were tamped down, his temperature dropped, and some strength returned to his limbs.
Tally-Two remained as strong and willing as ever, and soon they were making nearly forty miles a day. None of the Army units from Cumberland came after them. They continued like that for the next five days, across the Appalachians, through the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia, without seeing anyone else in uniform. They crossed into Pocahontas County, and rested for their last night beside the road. They made camp beneath the broad branches of a Norway maple. The road bent away to the south-west, stretching into Greenbrier County, and then Maxine knew it would run arrow-straight out to her parents’ property located in the foothills of Alleghany Mountain.
Maxine had hoped that, the nearer they got to the ranch, she would start to feel better about their situation, but if anything, she felt worse. The hit she’d taken at witnessing how the Army had been operating, and trials they had faced along the way, had taken their toll on her emotional state.
She knew she had no idea what she’d find at the farm. Had no way of knowing if her parents were even alive, or if they’d been burnt out of their home like so many others. She’d been sweeping the faces of anyone they saw on the road to see if her parents were among the single walkers or the lines of silent refugees. She had not seen them, but that didn’t mean her parents were necessarily still at the farm.
Maxine had put the tent up while Storm had gone limping down to a thin stream running through the woods where they’d settled. He was able to walk for short distances now without being overcome by fatigue. He hadn’t thrown up for a good three days and some color had returned to his skin, but there was no way he was out of danger yet. They had enough medication for a few more weeks, and hopefully the effects of the chemo would have dissipated by then, but how would they know, in this forever changed world, if his cancer had been well and truly beaten?
And what did this new world mean for people with chronic conditions? What about those suffering with diabetes? Those with heart conditions? Cystic fibrosis? MS? Maxine felt a pall of darkness smoking through her as she considered the wider implications of what had happened for the first time. Her father was an older man, and he’d already had one hip replaced when his had been crushed between a steer and the pen wall. What would happen to someone who broke their hip now?
The consequences of those thoughts kept her awake through most of that night, listening to the rattling and bubbling in Storm’s chest. He was getting through the night without coughing fits now, and he was taking in most of the air he needed. The infection had mercifully not turned into pneumonia, but it had been a close thing.
The morning dawned cold and grey, and they didn’t bother with breakfast or coffee before they got on the road. They would be at the ranch in two or maybe three hours, and Maxine realized what she wanted more than anything was to get this over and done with. She was wired from lack of sleep, trembling with exhaustion, and felt that the blank space of
her future needed to be filled in one way or another.
The land around them flattened out into prairie and they left the trees behind. As the buggy spun its wheels across the smooth asphalt, a sense of foreboding began to well up inside her. When she saw the silver top of the grain silo rising up between the barns, and the outbuildings surrounding the ranch, she almost stopped the horse. What light was in the sky, coming from under the heavy cloud-cover, glinted off the silo’s curved roof like the warning beam from a lighthouse.
Here be rocks.
Everything Maxine knew she should be feeling—the satisfaction at getting Storm this far, all the way from Boston—was drained by the dark emotions brought on by her first sight of the farm.
“What’s wrong?” Storm was craning his neck forward, shielding his eyes and trying to look ahead to the ranch as they continued their approach. “Mom, what’s the matter? You’re as tense as a bow string.”
Maxine couldn’t find the words to tell Storm how every piece of strength she’d gathered to get them here, every ounce of resolve, was worn out and drained. It was an epic anticlimax that made her spine set like concrete, and her jaws all but grind her teeth to splinters.
“The barns and the ranch house are intact. There’s cattle in the fields, and I can see there’s feed crop to be harvested. Mom? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Maybe I have,” she managed to get out between her frozen lips.
She didn’t want to rein the horse in, but she did, and soon the farm was in touching distance.
Her father Donald, met them at the gate. He didn’t hug them; he wasn’t the hugging kind, and never had been. He shook their hands as if they were arriving to look over the property as prospective buyers. Then he led them on foot towards the house, after Maxine had silently unharnessed the horse and put it behind a gate to head off into a field. She was silent because she couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 24