Tally reached the lip of the hole but held back. She didn’t know who was around—if the gas station fighters had moved on or not. She hauled herself to the top ledge and peered around as best she could, like a rock-climbing periscope. All she could see were beetles moving through the mulch, and all she heard was the susurrating breath of the wind moving through the branches of the trees above her.
With a sigh that was one part relief and three parts exhaustion, she rolled herself out of the sinkhole and gratefully filled her lungs with cool air while her limbs vibrated and sang their release from exertion. It was always like this after a climb. A feeling of joyous euphoria, wholly addictive and desirable. For these few moments of triumph, there was a sense that all the problems and issues with the world could be pushed to one side. There was just Tally, the climb, and the achievement.
When she was sufficiently ready to get going, she rolled onto her knees, used a broken branch to hook out the root which had saved her life, and then hauled up the pack and the boots.
Now the hard part.
Finding Henry and Greene.
They had to have a plan. Both Maxine and Donald agreed on that. A plan about what to do if Creggan’s men turned up unannounced and found Maria miraculously resurrected from the grave. There was no doubt that, even in a present state, Maria could pass for someone uninfected. Although she was no longer fighting or screaming, and she was eating––with her fingers if not cutlery––as well as allowing Maxine to care for her washing and dressing needs, Maria was not speaking. Other than to say Donald at random intervals.
So, it was decided that they’d keep Maria in the ranch house during the day, where she couldn’t be seen by anyone overlooking the property, and then they’d take her for recreational walks only after sundown.
Someone was assigned to have Maria in sight at all times of the day within the house, which again made the work for those tending to the business of the farm all the more difficult. An alarm system was decided upon, too—that if anyone was seen approaching the house, a cowbell hanging from the veranda roof would be rung, as if signaling to the cattle to come in for feeding. In reality, it would alert whoever was with Maria to take her up to Maxine’s room and sit with her until the danger had passed.
It wasn’t a perfect system, but it would work for now, because Creggan and his men hadn’t been to the ranch since the inventory visit. In fact, no one had been seen in the vicinity of the farm now for several days, and that lack of contact was making Maxine antsy.
“I don’t know how long I can live like this, Dad.”
They were in the paddock pouring feed into the troughs set out for the cattle to come eat from. It was a hard, two-person job now that there was no tractor to drive the feed out to the pasture. It all had to be carried by hand in plastic panniers and poured into the galvanized troughs. The one time they’d tried to utilize the buggy and Tally-Two, the buggy had almost keeled over on the uneven ground. This would have to be done by human, not horse power. It was a backbreaking task, and with autumn approaching, and maybe a harsh winter to follow, Maxine was wondering how sustainable life on the M-Bar was going to be.
Tinkerman’s plow had allowed the ground of the fallow pasture to be turned, but it was generally the wrong time of year to sow the seeds to grow for next year’s feed. Sure, the cattle could eat the grass that grew naturally, but that wouldn’t sustain them through the next winter, and how would they even begin to harvest it without a tractor?
Donald finished shaking the last of the nuggets of feed from the pannier into the trough before he looked up and fixed Maxine with his hardest stare.
“There’s only one way I’m leaving the M-Bar, Maxine. And that’s in a box. I’m not giving this up because it’s hard. I’ve been working hard since the day I was born, and this is my home. It will stay that way.”
“All I’m saying is that we’re okay now because we have enough feed to get us through the winter, but what about next year? What about when Creggan and his men come to requisition what little we have stored in cans and sacks to feed ourselves? They’re going to come, Dad. They can’t live in Pickford, in the numbers they are, without using up what they’ve salvaged from the Wal-Mart. They are going to come for us and what we have sooner or later. And they will come with guns, and they will take what they want from us. We won’t be able to stop them. You have to see that.”
“What I see is a daughter not wanting to stand by her parent, not wanting to help protect their property, and ready to roll over because she’s too chicken to fight.”
The breath was sucked out of Maxine’s chest, and her head buzzed with the insult. On the tip of her tongue was the notion that her father had been ready to slay her mother because he hadn’t known how to cope with her, but she bit back the bitterness. This was not the time to get into a fight with her father, which his stubbornness wouldn’t allow her to win anyway—even if he did believe what she was saying to be true.
“How long do you think we can keep Mom hidden from them, Dad? How long before we screw up and she’s found? You know what they’ll do to her? And us, for lying to them? Creggan is too smart. He’s not going to let it rest. He knows it was too convenient to find Mom’s grave just two days after saying he was going to come up here to talk to her. Maybe they already knew how you were coping with her. Maybe that’s why he brought her up when I went to see him. We’re living on borrowed time, Dad.”
Donald pushed back his Stetson with his finger and looked at the dirt, chewing on his lip. There was a world of thoughts going on behind his eyes that Maxine knew she would never be able to fathom. Yes, the tectonic plates had shifted, and he’d let some of it go when it had become apparent that Maria was in a different, calmer phase of her mental health crisis, but he still had a lifetime of practice when it came to keeping things behind his curtain of stoicism.
“Maxine, I don’t want to hear no more talk of leaving the M-Bar. I’m not prepared to even think about it. If you want to leave and take your boy with you, then I won’t stop you, but I will not leave my land because of a few jumped-up, local self-appointed officials and the notion of hard work. This is my final word on the matter, and I’ll thank you not to mention it again.”
The doors closed behind his eyes, and Maxine knew that really would be the final word. She had tried, and she had failed.
“Donald.”
They both spun, and Maxine gasped as she saw that her mother was out of the ranch and standing next to them behind the fence. Her face still held that beatific smile, and her hands were clasped demurely in front of her.
“Mom, what are you doing out of the house?”
“Donald,” Maria replied flatly.
Donald was taking the direct route; he was already climbing over the fence to get to his wife.
The realization what Maria being out of the house might mean banged like a thunderclap through Maxine. Storm was supposed to be watching Maria. He was diligent, and he could be trusted to carry out a task like that without fouling it up. If Maria was out of the house, then it followed that…
“Storm…” Maxine hissed, and she almost vaulted the fence to run towards the ranch.
Please let him have just nodded off at the table. Please let him be asleep, and I can wake him and give him a good talking-to for not telling me he was too tired to look after Mom while I helped Dad. Please let him be okay. Please… please…
She crashed up the steps to the veranda and burst through the door into the kitchen.
Storm was on the floor, a sheen of sweat across his face and his eyes screwed up with pain. He was holding his hands across his belly and pressing in. For a terrible moment, Maxine thought his hands might be covering a wound. Perhaps Maria had found a knife and…
Maxine fell to her knees beside Storm, but there was no blood, no wound.
His eyes flickered open as he saw her. A hand came away from his belly and hooked onto her wrist, squeezing fit to break it. “Mom… I’m sorry… I can’t… Grandma�
�� the pain… I…”
And with that he fainted dead away.
22
Jayce insisted Josh and Poppet take three horses. Two to ride and one to carry whatever supplies they could pack onto it. Steve rolled and packed a tent for them before helping them find what they needed from the remains of Parkopolis, which some people were now jokingly referring to as Joshtown.
Truth be told, after the initial euphoria of reuniting the hostage children with their parents, there hadn’t been a lot to joke about. The camp was a smoking ruin, and many people had died in the pitched battle—Elvis among them, when he’d been shot while attempting to reload the launcher that had atomized Trace Parker at the cage.
Steve was helping Jayce organize the burial of the dead, and a deathly pall of mourning hung in the air over the ravaged battleground. The stench of death was everywhere, and those men of Trace’s who hadn’t surrendered when they’d found out he was dead had fled the field with what they could carry, leaving a rag-tag band of Jayce’s people, the children, the parents who had survived, and the men Steve had said were okay not to shoot where they stood.
Before Josh had explained to Jayce that he needed to go, to find his own children and his wife, Jayce had hoped that he would stay. Help her find a safe place for the survivors, and help relieve and save the people in Savannah who hadn’t been overtaken by the madness.
Josh had hugged Jayce when she’d asked, more because right now he badly needed a hug than to thank her for her part in the overrunning of Parkopolis, but then he’d explained about Tally, Storm, and Maxine, and Jayce immediately understood.
“Please take what you need. Whatever you want, with our blessing. You’ve done enough for these people, now it’s time to look after your own.”
“Thank you. I needed to hear that.”
“And I’d be happy to repeat it.”
They left two days later once they’d helped with as much as they could. As Josh climbed onto his horse, a figure in a red-checked shirt with his arm in a sling approached from the direction of a new food store Jayce was organizing. A small girl walked beside the figure, and as they approached, Josh recognized Timothy.
It was clear that Timothy had been avoiding him since the battle and the return of his daughter, Gillian. They stopped close to the horse now, though, and Timothy held out his good hand for Josh to take.
Josh and Timothy shook. And then, without a word, Timothy turned and went back towards the crowd of workers. Before Josh returned to the matter in hand, he saw Gillian turn her head around, give a small wave, and mouth thank you at him.
They had to swing around Savannah rather than go through it before they could go north and take the highway up through Georgia, through the Carolinas on their way to West Virginia and the M-Bar Ranch. Steve had insisted that none of the men on the patrols had had a run-in with any young women matching Tally’s description, and he would have heard if they had. If Tally was smart—and Josh knew she was—she’d have done the same thing that Josh was doing now. She’d headed to one node point where all of the family would know to make for. The towns and cities were too dangerous, and there was no point in risking their safety going back to the house in Morehead City. They would head to the ranch. Josh was convinced as he’d ever be that this was the right choice.
Poppet had had the option to stay with Jayce’s set-up or move on with Josh, but the ex-gangster’s moll was sanguine and pragmatic to the maximum. Her reply had been simple. “You’ve helped keep me alive this amount of time, Josh. I think you’re my lucky charm. Either that or I’m your punishment.”
And so, they took a day to swing around Savannah and then start the journey north. Savannah’s fires could still be seen burning, and Josh felt that almost every city in the U.S., or indeed the world, would need to breed more people like Jayce and Elvis if they were to survive. He’d played his own small part in the liberation of one city from the tyranny of people like Trace, and beyond him the shadowy figure of the Harbormaster—who no one, as of yet, who knew the information had been willing to speak about, either in relation to who they really were or where they were located, let alone what they wanted. Even Steve only knew the barest of details. All Harve had told him and Jackdaw before setting off with the cart of children had been that they were going south, and that they would be met by the Harbormaster’s men along the way.
That already in America there was someone like the Harbormaster set up, ready to go, willing to take over and with the structures around him to achieve that goal by the fear of threat, violence, and torture suggested that there would have been a network in place which had easily been moved over from, say, organized crime, to the ability to control resources and men like Harve and Trace.
Just mention of the Harbormaster’s name had drained the color from the people who knew of his existence. Jayce hadn’t heard the term before, but recognized that unless they’d gotten organized themselves, they would have been under threat as soon as the flow of booty, looted goods, food, and potential slaves had dried up, at which point he would have been sending his forces to investigate. She figured that, as soon as they could, they would rescue who they could from Savannah, and perhaps head north in Josh’s wake. The further they got from the malign influence of the burgeoning power in the south, the better.
With Savannah well behind them, the sense that he was abandoning Jayce in some way––albeit with her blessing––when she needed him most, began to diminish, and he felt he could look forward with some hope to being reunited with his family.
He had no real idea if that fantasy would ever come true, but believing in it at least made him feel they were traveling in the right direction.
“I do believe we’ll find Tally again,” Poppet said as they made their way along another deserted road. Neither of them had spoken for the last couple of miles. They were both still coming to terms with the consequences of everything that had happened to them since Barnard’s Star had spread its spectacular internal and external influence over the people and technology of the Earth. Getting heads around that took a lot of processing. And as Poppet hadn’t spoken of Tally or indeed her own family to Josh since they’d gotten back to U.S. soil, it seemed out of place—a real non sequitur, as Maxine would have said. In all reality, it sounded like Poppet was trying to convince herself more than give succor to Josh. Josh eyed Poppet in her saddle. Her brows were tight, and she was sitting stiffly.
“Are you okay?”
Poppet snorted. “Oh, Josh, I am far from okay. But finding Tally and the others is something that makes this whole thing bearable. Losing Joey on that damned boat, coming back home to this nightmare, and suffering like I did coming off the sauce has been the very worst time of my life. Navigating all that is something I wouldn’t have planned to do, even if at the end it made me a better person. But helping you find Tally…. That’s a good thing to try to do in all this badness. I figure I owe you that, and I believe we will find her.”
“After we make it to the M-Bar, do you want me to come with you to New York? Find your family?”
Poppet smiled weakly. “There’s nothing and no one waiting for me in New York, you sweet, crazy man. When you marry someone like Joey Langolini, you leave all of your real life, and the people in it, behind. My parents are dead, my friends are long gone, and…”
“Your children?”
“Joey and I couldn’t have kids. That’s why we behaved like them. Holidays, parties, lavish and obscene spending—I dunno if you know, Mr. Ex-Policeman—but there’s an awful lot of money to be made from the vices of others. Sex. Gambling. Drugs. I’m not proud of what I got mixed up in with the mob, Josh, and in another time, another world, people like you would have eventually tracked my Joey down and put him away for a million years.”
“I guess…”
“The funny thing is, the trip on that liner was to be our farewell to the life. One last luxury extravagance before fading into the background, unhooking from the crime and the killing, and just
living our lives. Sure, Joey would probably have still wanted a gold toilet, but hey, some treasures it’s hard to let go of. And the irony is, he was okay with it. He was okay with the idea of a quiet retirement somewhere nice, away from the hustle… and look what happened.”
Poppet was looking up at the sky now. Through the clouds, up to where maybe the smudge of the new Barnard’s Star might be tonight when the sun went down. “Never make plans, Josh. Never live outside the moment, and make sure you live that moment to the very edge, because life really does pull the rug from underneath you at the most unexpected moments.”
Josh didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say to argue because, right now, Poppet was right.
Maybe when Storm, Tally, and Maxine were in his arms again, he would feel differently.
But not right now.
They made camp in a secluded picnic area off the highway. Josh pitched the tent while Poppet saw to the horses, taking them down to the stream to drink.
Josh cooked up some coffee, and they ate soup cold from cans—both because it was quicker and because they were both half-starved. Josh had never been much of a hunter, but he’d taken a selection of weapons from Ballantine’s and Jayce’s store that might make the process of shooting something to eat a little easier, but for now the cans would do. The chicken soup was rich and filling anyway.
They could see down into a shallow valley, where a ranch was situated at the intersection of two dirt roads. The land around it looked a little dry, and the grass in the pastures was taking on the brownish tinge of hay. No one had watered the land of the farm for some time now, and as Josh looked down the half mile of slope, he saw a solitary goat walking around on its own, chewing on the grass and minding its own business.
There was no activity from the ranch house… no smoke from the chimney and no one who he could see moving about in the yard outside. Of course, that didn’t mean there was no one down there, but a goat was not a prize it would be easy to give up. He’d never shot anything that big before—other than a human, that is—and the sense of it being something he was going to have to get around to sooner or later in this new nightmare existence propelled him down the slope, after calling to Poppet to tell her what he was up to. He carried his Remington Model 700, firing .308 Winchester magnum cartridges. He’d been assured by the reading matter that came with the new gun and its ammunition that it would happily drop a deer. So, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to deal with one goat.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 44