Supernova EMP- The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Two miles.

  Tally wondered if her dreams would come true, or if they would turn again to nightmares.

  Whatever the outcome, she could no longer just walk.

  Tally began to run.

  24

  Progress was swift on the horses, and Josh figured they were averaging around thirty miles a day as they climbed the states from Georgia to West Virginia and approached their final destination, the M-Bar Ranch. The ashes of the memory of what he’d found at the farmhouse of Charles Grover Pattison glowed in his mind as they traveled. He hadn’t discussed what he’d found at the farm, and simply told Poppet that he’d been a wuss and just couldn’t bring himself to kill the goat with the Remington.

  Poppet had found the notion hilarious and told him that she would have had no such qualms. She was heartily sick of canned soup, boiled rice, and bland pasta.

  Josh only remained glad that Poppet had been able to rediscover her sense of humor without resorting to alcohol. Not that they had any, or had found any in the deserted homesteads they’d looked in—those few which hadn’t yet been burned out in the orgy of violence that was sweeping across the country.

  They traveled on roads where they could, and would, get off them if the map suggested they’d go through even the smallest of towns. Traveling cross-country was a different kind of risk from going through the towns, but it was a risk, nonetheless. There might not be people around to attack or steal from them, but a river without a convenient bridge was just as much an obstacle to be thought around as any group of threatening locals.

  One of the positives to the journey, if such a thing could be found, was that his admiration for Poppet was growing by the day. Not in any kind of potentially romantic way, although even at ten years Josh’s senior, Poppet was a fine-looking woman, but he admired her more and more as a person.

  She may have come out of a violent and deeply corrupt life, but she’d been equipped with many skills that made the journey they were making now safer and quicker. Poppet had an almost preternatural sense of direction to go along with her quick-witted sense of humor. She could read the landscape when they were off-road, and invariably took them to where they needed to be on the other side of a town or city without having to consult a map.

  Back on the Sea-Hawk, she’d used a smart trick to work out which direction to sail the ship because the Barnard’s event had destroyed the capacity of the ship’s compass to give a true heading. She’d used the shadows cast by an iron bar fifteen minutes apart to help them find true south, so that they could sail west and back to the coast of the U.S. That they’d ended up in the clutches of Trace Parker hadn’t been her fault. At least they’d been on the right continent.

  She could shoot well—she and Joey had enjoyed many weekends of skeet shooting over the years at their summer home in upstate New York. When they disturbed game in their travels, she could usually bring it down and enjoy helping Josh prepare and cook it. One day a grouse flew into her sights, and although she complained they didn’t have time to hang it until it was high, the meat of the bird was rich and full of flavor.

  Poppet was also wise in a way that Josh hadn’t been previously aware of. She could read him well, and as they rode on, she said something to him that turned his thinking inside out.

  “You know,” she said, as if she were going to ask him what he wanted for dinner, “there are, in my experience, three types of married men.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve been working on which kind you are. I can tell you if you’re interested.”

  “How could I not be after that setup?”

  She laughed and continued. “In my experience, there are the ones who can’t stop talking about their wives. They want you to know how not available they are, about how there’s this barrier around them that is sometimes fear and sometimes pride, but they’re putting it out there constantly that they’re off limits. Man, I’ve met so many men like that. I’d never have to open my mouth before they were telling me what her favorite color was, who her stylist was, where she bought her shoes, and what she’d bought him for his birthday and Christmas. All so I knew, no touchy-touchy. They were on the outset of the bounds. You, Josh, are not one of those men.”

  “The way you describe them, I’m glad about that.”

  “You should be. They’re very faithful, but gahd, they’re dull. Just because I want to be your friend doesn’t mean I want to dance the horizontal tango with you.”

  Josh smiled. Poppet, when she wanted to be, was great fun.

  “Then there’s the second kind of married man. The shark. He wants to swim in other oceans. He has the confidence that if he crashes and burns, he has the little woman to go back to and lick his wounds, so he hunts in the shallows and the depths, with his little ring of white skin where his wedding ring should be shining like a lighthouse. And what do lighthouses signify?”

  “Sharks and lighthouses. My wife would call that a mixed metaphor…”

  “Did I go to college? Bite me. So, Mr. Smarty Pants, what do lighthouses signify?”

  “Danger.”

  “Precisely. Stay clear of sharks, I tell my girlfriends. If they don’t eat you, the missus might.”

  “And am I one of those?”

  “No, Josh, you’re not.”

  “So, I’m the third kind?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And he is….?”

  “The clam.”

  “We’re back in the ocean.”

  “Kinda. You can find freshwater clams donchaknow. Anyway, back to the clam. He doesn’t ever mention his wife, never talks about her, never gives anything away when he’s talking to me or when he’s talking to anyone.”

  “I just said she’d pick up on your mixed metaphor.”

  “But, curiously, that’s the first time you’ve mentioned her to me in any meaningful way since we met. Sure, you’ve said that you want to find her, but I know about Tally’s hobbies, I know about Storm’s illness, and Christ, I even know the names of your wife’s parents, but what do I know about Maxine?”

  Josh said nothing.

  “See? The clam. Look, Josh, there are men who don’t give anything away. Nothing at all. They have no tell, as guys around my Friday night poker game might say. But you’re not that guy. You’ve not clammed up about anyone else in your life––except Maxine.” Poppet raised her eyebrows and cocked her head. “So, Josh, are you gonna tell me what the hell is wrong with your marriage?”

  Josh looked away.

  In the months before the supernova, he and Maxine had barely spoken outside of talking about the welfare of their children. Although he had never articulated it to Maxine, he felt that she’d resented the work he did in the probation department with the young offenders, feeling it was talking up too much of his extracurricular time––especially when Storm’s initial diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had been confirmed, and he’d begun traveling from North Carolina to Boston for treatment.

  When he’d told Maxine that he would be away on the Sea-Hawk with ten probationers on a team-working and trust trip out into the Atlantic, she’d not so much hit the roof as frozen over. Considering there had been so much passion when their relationship had started in Raleigh, the years after that had pretty much been plain sailing. That was, until Josh had left the police force when a young man he’d been mentoring in an outreach program had been stabbed to death in an alley. The hit he’d taken then had sent him into a spiral out of the police force and into the probation service, and put him to running his yearly trip out with the kids on his caseload who he thought would benefit the most from the experience. Maxine’s chill had extended to Tally and Storm’s treatment of him in some respects, but he’d been able to get some kind of thaw going with his daughter with the situation on the Sea-Hawk, and he was hoping he’d be able to do the same with Storm and Maxine when they got to the M-Bar.

  But to Poppet, he said nothing.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Clam, you don’t need to
answer. I can see it all in your eyes.” Poppet paused and then smiled. “Look, we’re in hell’s handbasket here, and we have very little chance of getting out of it. You’ve been there for me, and I wanna be there for you. And you can take that look off your face, Mr. Clam, I don’t mean it like that. You’re definitely not my type. You’re not a gangster for a start, and you don’t own half of Atlantic City. What I’m saying is, Josh, right now we’re all each of us has got. If you need an ear, I got one for ya.”

  Josh couldn’t say anything right then, as the memories of the weeks leading up to the supernova rushed through his head like spring floodwater. He hadn’t spoken to anyone about his marriage—and least of all spoken to the woman who should be at the head of the queue for that conversation, Maxine.

  “When I’m ready, maybe I will. But I think there’s someone I need to talk to first.”

  “The pearl inside the clam,” Poppet said as they rode on into the hot afternoon. “And before you say a word. Oysters Schmoisters, Mr. Smarty Pants!”

  Some days later, as they traversed Route 84 to the border with West Virginia on the road that would eventually lead to Pickford County and the M-Bar, they tied up the horses in the parking lot of a burned-out motel. They’d gotten into the habit in recent days of opening up abandoned cars. Josh had suggested the vehicles could hold a wealth of useful items. And so, it proved. There were no end of lighters and lighter fuel containers, and some cars had even been traveling from stores when the supernova had hit. Their drivers, perhaps in the grip of the madness, had abandoned their cars and their shopping. Josh and Poppet had scored cans of meat and fruit as well as a myriad makes of soda. There was plenty of boxed food that could be carried on the third horse’s pack. A couple of oil lamps had been a good find, as they’d neglected to take any from Parkopolis and thus had to rely on the light from their fire at night. The oil lamps could be used to go to and from their designated area for the production of human waste. That certainly beat stumbling blindly through the brush to find a decent place to relive oneself.

  They’d found that cars which had been unmolested were the best and would bear the best results, and although the motel was burned out, there were a dozen or so cars in the front lot which, apart from a few smashed windows, were enticing in their potential.

  Poppet took a crowbar they’d found three days before and used it to systematically pop all of the trunks she could as Josh went around using the butt of his rifle to smash side windows to see what he could salvage from inside. The other good thing about salvaging from abandoned cars like this was that you weren’t in an enclosed space, so you’d be able to see all around you as you worked.

  Josh felt a strange and vicarious thrill breaking into the cars like this. Doing the one thing that the probationers on his caseload would have done as a matter of course several times a day before they’d gotten themselves into the justice system and into Josh’s orbit; it was indeed a weird one-eighty in his life. He squared the feeling with himself by pointing out the exceptional circumstances, and knowing that he would never take from a car that someone was living in.

  They’d found enough evidence of that along the way, too. People without shelter had taken refuge overnight in cars. They’d passed several where someone was still asleep inside their vehicle in the early mornings on the road. Both he and Poppet elected not to wake such occupants as they trotted by on the other side of the road, because you could never be sure what state of mind the person in the car would be in. Even those in the grip of the Barnard’s Star madness had to sleep sometimes, and you wouldn’t know what mood they’d be waking up in. Josh figured the best thing to do out on the road was wait for anyone else to talk to him and Poppet first. It seemed that was now a common way of dealing with the situation of meeting others. From what he’d seen of the crew and probationers on the Sea-Hawk, and what he had experienced himself, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to the change in anyone’s mental states. It seemed to be nothing less than random, and all the more dangerous because of it.

  Poppet cursed as she sprang the trunk on an old Ford, and Josh saw her falling backwards away from something he couldn’t see. He racked his pistol and jogged around to where Poppet was laid out on the concrete. Her face had taken on a green pallor, and she looked like she was about to throw up.

  Then the unmistakable smell of rotting meat hit his nostrils. When Josh had helped Poppet to her feet, he warily looked inside the trunk, expecting to find something that on balance he wouldn’t have wanted to look at. He held his hand in front of his nose because the smell was making his eyes water, but it wasn’t a body that they’d discovered—it was what remained of what had once been a young black bear.

  Some hunter had wanted to take his trophy home for mounting and had stuffed the corpse inside his trunk before driving home for the night. Perhaps he’d left his hunting grounds late in the day, knowing that he wouldn’t make it home, and so had booked into the motel for the night on the evening that the supernova had hit. Who knew? But whatever had happened, the bear was now in a very advanced state of decomposition.

  Josh pulled the trunk down on the rotting bear, and that was when he saw the eyes.

  There was a dark face pressed into the window at the back of the Ford. The eyes were quick and bright. Josh could see that the kid, who could have been anywhere up to the age of nineteen or twenty, was figuring out whether he should break out of the car left or right, depending on which way Josh went.

  Josh holstered his pistol and held up both his hands. “It’s okay, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re sorry about breaking into your car. We didn’t know you were in there.”

  The eyes blinked, the face on the kid unsure. Josh couldn’t make out if it was a male or female child. The hair was in short dreads, and the dark brown skin below it was giving away nothing behind the sheen on the glass.

  “Hey, we don’t want to give you any trouble,” he continued. “Look, we’ll just go back over here, out of your way. If you want to get out of the car and run, that’s fine, but if you want to stay and have something to eat with us, that’s fine, too. All up to you. I’m Josh, and this is Poppet.”

  Poppet gave a little wave. “Hey, kid.”

  They moved back a good thirty yards and weren’t pointing any weapons at the car. Doing their best to present the least amount of threat that they could.

  The kid in the car thought about what he or she would do for a long time. And then he or she nodded and opened the car door. A brown leg appeared from out of the car below the door, and another foot followed. There were sneakers and calf-length pants which were a dirty blue. As the kid emerged, Josh could see that it was a female. Maybe fifteen, maybe sixteen. Her features sharp and her eyes bright. Her lips were full and were fitted around a wide smile.

  “That’s it,” Josh said. “You can trust us. We’re not going to hurt you. I promise.”

  The girl nodded again. And then she lifted her Colt Detective Special and shot Josh where he stood.

  25

  The first thing Tally saw as she ran into the yard was her grandma’s grave. The drying mound of earth and the crude cross with Maria’s name on it hit her like a trip hammer and sucked all the breath from her body.

  The ranch itself had looked fine from the road as they’d approached. There’d been none of the usual destruction they’d seen in so many buildings along the way, either, which had filled her heart with the brightest optimism, but to be confronted with the grave as the first thing she encountered as she sprinted up from the road washed all feelings of joy from her.

  Which was why, when her grandmother and grandfather appeared in the doorway to the ranch house, she assumed that she’d fainted and was now in the grip of some feverish dream.

  Donald came over with Maria on his arm as Henry and Greene appeared at the entrance to the farm. “Are they with you?” he asked, pointing at the boys.

  It was all Tally could do to nod.

  “Why don’t you all come inside
and I can give you some coffee, some food, and explain everything, including the grave.”

  All Tally could look at was Maria, as if it was the first time she’d ever seen her, and she reacted to her grandmother’s constant smile by smiling back just as hard.

  “Where’s Mom? Is she here? Did she come here from Boston with Storm?”

  Donald sighed. “Yes, but the details are going to take a lot of explaining. Come on, let’s get you inside. We don’t know who’s watching the M-Bar right now.”

  Tally sat on the end of the bed and looked down at Storm. He’d lost weight since she’d last seen him, but his hair was growing back after the chemo. The first thing he’d whispered to her as she’d come into the room was, “Hey. No hugs. You might pop me.”

  So, she’d kissed his forehead and squeezed his hand instead.

  “Is it painful?”

  “What? Having to look at your ugly face close up again? Agony.”

  Tally grinned. “No, you moron, the appendicitis…”

  “I’d rather have the cancer back.”

  “Ouch.”

  “The antibiotics and painkillers Gramps are feeding me are helping, but I sure wish Mom was back with that doctor.”

  “I’m glad you made it here, though, brother mine. I was worried sick about all of you.”

  Tally filled Storm in briefly on what had happened on the Sea-Hawk and subsequently after reaching the shore.

  “Man, you have been through the wringer.”

  “I still wouldn’t swap places with you. It looks like we both have suffered a little.”

  “And Dad?”

  “I just don’t know. He could be anywhere, for all I know. If he’s able, I guess he’ll be making for here, but… who knows?”

  A silence descended that served to underscore how desperate the whole situation was to Tally. Her brother was seriously ill, her mom was out there on her own, her grandma was one of the crazies, and she had no idea if her dad was dead or alive.