Donald’s eyes flicked up. They weren’t exactly full of tears—of course, Maxine had never seen her father cry. Indeed, if you looked up stoic in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Donald next to it—but there was at least a mistiness to the orbs which suggested normally unused emotions were bubbling to the surface.
“I know she’s not one of the animals. But please do me the credit of knowing I’m looking after my wife in the best way I know how, and I’ll thank you not to interfere.”
There couldn’t be silence, not with the sounds of distress coming from upstairs, echoing through the house and hacking at their hearts, but the voices around the table fell silent for a while, until Storm, looking from Donald to Maxine, then back to his grandfather, asked how the farm was adjusting since the supernova.
Donald looked like he was relieved to have something else to talk about, and Maxine felt a little of the tension drain out of the room. “Well, there never was much money to get us started on a huge agribusiness. We keep things traditional here. Organic, the hipsters might call it.” Donald smiled and winked at Storm. “You a hipster, boy?”
Storm shrugged. “Second gen millennial, Gramps—if you’re gonna start handing out labels. You’ll need water wings if you’re gonna use words like hipster; that’s so ten years ago that its voice has broken and it’s about to start getting interested in girls.”
Donald laughed, and ran his hand through the peach fuzz of hair on Storm’s head, where hair was gamely trying to grow back after the chemotherapy he’d received for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The illness that had taken Maxine to Boston for treatment in her college friend’s clinic. “Still giving as good as you got, boy. That’s good to know. We’ll make a farmer of you yet.”
Storm didn’t look like that was the career path he’d be choosing, even if his admin position at Morehead Mercy Hospital, where Maxine was a wound care specialist, hadn’t been destroyed by the supernova.
“Boy, you can look like that as much as you like. But you’ve seen the way America—and maybe the world—is right now, and it’s not the gunman or the scientist or the politician who’s going to get the world back on its feet. It’s the farmer. We’re gonna need farmers more than we’re gonna need bullets.”
“You think the situation is going to recover, Dad?” Maxine asked, feeling a chill for the first time even though there was a good fire burning in the grate.
Maxine’s mother sounded like she was stomping her foot down on the floor above them, rhythmic and incessant. One beat every three seconds.
Donald’s shoulders hunched, as if the beats were being made against his own spine. “I don’t know how we get back from this, Maxine. No idea at all. There’s been no radio or TV since that night. There’s been no authority swinging by to see if we’re okay, or to even take a census. None of my neighbors have heard anything at all. We’re in the dark. Even after the worst natural disaster, you’d think things would be getting fixed up by now. No one’s seen FEMA, the police, the National Guard, or the Army. Not even the Red Cross. Did you see anything on your way here?”
“There were some troops back in Cumberland, but they didn’t look like regulars. I think they were operating for themselves because they had the guns and the equipment to be able to do so. I don’t think there was anything like a normal chain of command they were following,” Maxine said, thinking back to her run-in with General Carron in the Cumberland Community Medical Center. If she hadn’t fought like a wildcat in a cage to get away from them, then she wouldn’t have been here to tell the tale. She’d escaped on her way to being shot for looting in the parking lot. That didn’t sound like the kind of authority she’d want to be under any time soon. She didn’t elaborate for her dad or for Storm, though—she didn’t want to depress them any more than they already were, so she tried to block the noise from above out, however much she ached to see her mother. She concentrated on the practical… for now.
“Surely, it’s impossible for us to make the ranch work—just the three of us? We’ll need help. More hands.”
The M-Bar Ranch had been a lot bigger when Maxine had grown up there, but as time had passed and her parents had gotten older, they’d sold off parcels of land to surrounding farmsteads in order to consolidate and make the small business more manageable. But even at forty acres of pasture and rotating crops, the M-Bar wasn’t an easy proposition. And especially now that all of the systems and businesses that fed into it had disappeared overnight. It seemed too daunting. Plus, Donald had always wanted to do most of the work himself, and wasn’t one for delegating to farmhands and the like. “I like to get my hands dirty,” he would say when she’d been growing up. “If I have the breath, I can do the work.”
Donald nodded. “It’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure, but I’ve been getting by. I have seed to sow for next year’s pasture. As well as the Black Angus, I have chickens, some hogs, and last year we took on a small flock of sheep. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We can talk to neighbors. See what we can consolidate. Gram Tinkerman has a plow we can use with a team of horses. When Maria had calmed, before you came, I was about to go over to his place and talk about working out a plan. He doesn’t have beef, and I know he’s low on seed. We can work this out. And you’re right, we’re going to need a few hands. But for bed, grub, and lodging, I think we can persuade some people to join up with us.”
Donald, it seemed, had done a lot of thinking since the supernova. He continued, “The bulls did their thing with the ladies, and we’re going to have calves soon who’ll do well on the pasture we’ve got already. The creek is still fresh, and there’s good fishing there.”
Maxine admired Donald’s ambition, even if there were so many variables to consider. His attitude was comforting, too, but she couldn’t help wondering if his optimism was misplaced. “Not everyone is going to play ball, Dad. We’ve seen quite a bit of fighting on the way here. Once resources get scarce, there are going to be bad guys as well as good guys.”
Donald nodded slowly. “We can defend this farm if we need to. I’m not afraid to stand up and be counted on that score.”
Maxine’s eyes settled on the picture of Donald in his fatigues on the wall. A young man who’d gone to Vietnam and come back, like so many others, changed and hardened. A man who had been a corpsman, a combat medic equivalent in the Marine Corps, and had seen and been part of many battles. He’d been with the Corp when Saigon had fallen in April 1975, taking part in the largest helicopter evacuation in history. Then he’d come back to West Virginia to work his father’s farm, marry Maria, and start a family. She knew when he said he’d stand up and be counted just how much of that was the truth, and how far he would go to carry out that promise. He’d already stood up and been counted in one hellish situation, and post-supernova America might prove to be a different but as intense kind of hell for them all to stand up to.
She was suddenly washed by the coldness of being without Tally, and to a lesser extent Josh. Although Tally hadn’t been far from Maxine’s thoughts on the dangerous journey from Boston to the M-Bar Ranch in West Virginia, Maxine had been focused on keeping one child and herself alive, and it had only been when circumstances had allowed that she let herself think of the perilous plight of her daughter and husband.
Tally was a strong and healthy nineteen-year-old, in college and wanting to go on to study law. She was a badass runner, climber, alternative sports nut who lived it to the max, and when she wasn’t studying with her head in a book, she could be found monkey-vaulting over street furniture, back-flipping off a brick wall, or dangling five hundred feet over a sheer drop from a ’binered cam on fingertips covered in magnesium carbonate.
Maxine knew Tally had the smarts and abilities to survive, and as she was on a ship with Josh, that she would at least have a responsible parent by her side. Whatever Maxine’s diminishing feelings towards her husband were—as of late and more times than not, she’d thought about leaving him to his job and his focus outside the f
amily unit—she knew the man would keep Tally safe.
But the weeks, now nearly two months without hearing from them, leapt up in a little bloom of anxiety in her gut. Knowing that when the madness had struck the U.S., Tally and Josh had been out in the middle of the Atlantic with ten kids chewed up by their upbringing, their environment, and the justice system… well, that gave Maxine pause as she eyed Storm across the table.
She had already come close to losing one of her children to cancer, and although she didn’t know one way or the other if Tally was okay, she suddenly felt the distance between them playing out crazily in her mind like a reel whirling around because of a deep-hooked game fish.
The thumping from above came almost in time with the creaking, wooden-cased clock on the kitchen wall, its pendulum swinging in the candle light. Maxine could almost imagine that the one was timing the other.
Donald looked up at the clock, too. “I’ve made you up a coupla beds in the bunk house. Been using it as a storeroom since the 80s, but the bunks are okay and the mattresses are okay. You’ll sleep better out there.”
Maxine nodded. She’d had some crazy fantasy about getting back into her old room and sleeping there for the duration. But as it was across the hall from her parents’ room, and the noise being made by her mother was increasing in intensity, she knew she couldn’t sleep there, and if she was going to be of use to her dad in dealing with the ranch and her mother, then sleep would need to be found.
The bunkhouse was a converted barn, with red-painted wood with white sills to the windows and a steeply raked roof. In happier times, it would have looked like a picturesque addition to the M-Bar, but now as they trudged towards it, it only accentuated the distance between an agreeable past and this unholy present.
The whimpers and roars from the upstairs window of the ranch echoed behind them as Donald unlocked the bunkhouse door and shooed them inside. Her father had lit an oil lamp, and the space inside was welcoming.
“You haven’t told him,” Storm said when Donald left them and dragged his sorry shadow across the yard back to the ranch house.
“About what…?”
“You and Dad.”
The memory burst open in Maxine’s head like a dashboard airbag. She hadn’t thought about her disintegrating marriage in forever. There’d been no time. No space for it. She had almost forgotten why she was so angry at Josh––how he threw himself into his work to deal with his own feelings about, first, their growing apart, and then Storm’s cancer. The last time she had spoken to Josh, on the Sea-Hawk satellite phone, they had been cold, harsh, and bitter with each other. She couldn’t help speaking her mind, and Josh couldn’t help pushing back with sarcasm and bile. Was the marriage in a terminal decline from which it would never recover? Maxine didn’t know the answer to that. But Storm pointing out that she hadn’t mentioned it to Donald and hadn’t pronounced it dead maybe meant there was a thready bip-bip still coming from her marriage’s life-support machine.
“No, I didn’t. How do you feel about that?”
Storm shrugged. “I dunno, Mom. I really don’t. If Dad shows up, I don’t know if I’m going to have the energy to keep pretending to him, that he hasn’t let me down… let us down over all this. Maybe it’d be better if he didn’t come back.”
Storm blew out his cheeks and his eyes bulged with the shock of his own words. “Am I wrong to say that? I dunno where it came from. It’s just… god… as I’m getting stronger, I’m getting angrier about the whole situation between you and him.”
Any words of reply caught in her throat, so she hugged him instead.
Storm had never once mentioned to her how he was being affected by the way the Standing family was circling the drain. She had picked up cues from both her children, of course, but couldn’t give them an injection of hope or certainty she wasn’t feeling herself.
She kissed the top of Storm’s head. “We’ll work it out, Tic-tac. But I don’t know what that will lead to.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“Good.”
“But I don’t know how I feel about Dad right now.”
There were many minutes of silence where words would only have cut deeper wounds. So, she waited until Storm was ready, and when he was, she thought he must have settled on something, because he upped and changed the subject, bringing his face off her shoulder and kissing her cheek.
“Do you think you’re going to be able to help Grandma?”
“I hope so,” was the best Maxine could come up with.
So many questions. No answers. Not even the beginnings of any.
And with that, whatever optimism she had felt upon finally arriving at the M-Bar had now almost completely drained away.
Storm fell asleep on the top bunk almost immediately, his snoring a gentle and calming counterpoint to the noise Maxine’s mother had been making in the ranch.
Through a window which looked out into a clear night of scattered stars rising above the black bulk of Alleghany Mountain, the white smudge of the Barnard’s Star supernova hung like a tattered cloud of smoke. It was six light years away—Maxine understood that much about it, knowing that whatever forces it had unleashed when it had exploded had taken just over six years to reach the Earth. She had no understanding of what those processes had been; all she understood was the effects they’d had.
The complete collapse of civilization had happened almost immediately. In Boston, she and Storm had only just escaped with their lives as people had become murderous and nearly insane. Destroying everything they could, burning buildings, attacking their fellow Bostonians and killing them… Initially, she’d thought the effect was localized, but when they’d escaped the city, they had met others who may not have been as intensely insane and unpredictable, but who’d been just as dangerous. As she lay there looking at the sky’s newest nebula, Maxine wondered if the effects streaming from it would last forever, or, if like a tide, once it had passed or receded, at least the machinery of the Earth would start to work again.
She looked from the nebula to the window in the ranch house behind which her mother was locked.
Were those same particles, or whatever the exploded star had been spewing out, constantly rushing through the minds of those affected? Would the tide reduce there, too? Would there be a time when her mother, driven to this incomprehensible state, would suddenly find her mind her own again?
Maxine didn’t know and could not even guess.
But it seemed in that moment that she might never find out, as first one muzzle flash, and then the boom of a gun blast, and then after a second, another harsh flash filled the window of her mother’s bedroom, to be followed by the unmistakable rapport of a second gunshot.
3
They reached the camp just after nightfall, having left behind the avenue of the hanged an hour or so before. Josh was sick to his stomach after seeing the bloated faces and the rusty chains around the necks of the dead. He’d counted over fifty such bodies as the wagon went past, all in various stages of decomposition, before the track had turned into a low valley through which a narrow waterway sparked and flared in the lowering sun.
The rain had eased off as the sun had fallen below the cloud base, illuminating a landscape of stumpy trees casting long shadows.
Harve had kicked his horse on, leaving Josh to Steve and Jackdaw.
“Is that where we’re going?” Josh nodded towards the collection of white tents and trailers corralled on the other side of the river, across an iron-framed bridge.
“That’s the spot,” Steve breathed out heavily, as if it didn’t feel much like coming home to him, either. “My advice to you if you’re in the mood to take it, fella, is to not ask too many questions once we get there. Just provide the answers. If you want to stay alive.”
Steve’s advice sounded genuine enough for Josh to nod and push the myriad of questions he wanted to ask back down his gullet. They could wait. He had to stay alive to find out what had happened to Talley, and then he had to
get them both out of here.
The wagon rolled across the bridge, and the smell of the camp started filtering into his nostrils. Wood smoke, human waste, cooking, and something else… the scent of something like anxiety and fear.
Sweat. And plenty of it.
Also, underneath all those more pressing aromas, there was still the tang of salt from the ocean in the air, and although they’d moved many miles, Josh realized that the distance they’d traveled hadn’t been all inland, and might have run parallel to the water in some respect.
Night closed like a lid then, and if Josh craned his stiff neck up to look over the side of the wagon, he could see open-flamed torches, braziers, and campfires burning between the trailers and tents. Shadow people moved around the fires, and on the breeze, he could hear someone playing a guitar, along with a flutter of laughter and an argument, the words of which he couldn’t make out.
Josh could see perhaps a hundred tents and several trailers—Airstreams and the like, which were not attached to trucks, but had been modified to be hitched to horses or mules.
Ruddy faces with glittering eyes in the firelight watched the wagon roll past. There were horses dotted around the camp, as well as dogs begging for scraps by the fires. Women watched from the open flaps of the tents, and there were also small children, naked from the waist down, trotting around in the grass with their hair awry and their faces dirty.
It was like an army camp had married a refugee camp and had this construct as a child.
Gunshots followed by raucous laughter made Josh spin his head to the other side of the wagon. Two men were firing Glocks into the air with wild abandon, followed by a hopping dance around a campfire. Their chins were greasy from eating chicken legs pulled from fires, and there was the stench of cheap hooch as the wagon rolled past. Cheap hooch and acrid vomit.
They reached the center of the camp and found a large, early 20th century Colonial that had delusions of being a set for Gone with the Wind. It had, quite frankly, seen better days. There was a neoclassical pillared entranceway that jutted out from the porch, which had been blackened at some point in a fire. Some of the twelve windows on the front side of the house were boarded up, and it looked as if someone had taken an ax to one of the pillars holding up the roof over the veranda.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 27