The weather had held, and there’d been no more evidence of crazies in the woods or on the road. There were bound to be more of them around, but the party hadn’t encountered them, and that was seen as a good sign. “Maybe they’re all migrating up to the woods now?” Henry had speculated when he and Tally had joined Storm and his mom for a short break to feed Tally-Two and let her drink from a roadside stream.
“They must be getting driven out of a lot of towns and cities,” Maxine said.
“Or killed in places like Pickford,” Tally offered morosely.
The mention of Pickford pinged thoughts around to Josh and what might be happening there with Donald and Karel. But there was no answer to the unspoken questions hanging in the air. Just eyes not meeting other eyes in the pregnant silence, until Storm decided he would move things on. “Are we going to stay in Cumberland, Mom?”
Maxine, tracks skipping in her mind if her face was any guide, nodded. “I think so. Yes. Clitheroe and the Defenders comprehensively took care of General Carron when I came for Larry. They said they were going to set up a defensible area of town, and then try to get some kind of food distribution program set up. Carron had stolen and scavenged plenty of it from the city already and stockpiled it in the hospital. There’s a lot of medication and supplies. Larry will be able to run the hospital as a community facility again. I think Cumberland is well-placed to be the kind of town we need right now. A place for the people and by the people.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Storm grinned. “Sounds familiar.”
That raised the mood around the knot of folks surrounding the buggy. Poppet and Larry came over to check on Storm’s abdomen and Maxine’s dressings. Larry took those which had still been on Maxine’s hands and face away, and declared her “good to go.” Storm’s surgical wound, he said, was “healing nicely” and there was no “hint of infection,” but he noted that Storm should continue with the strong antibiotics for the next week at least, adding they would need to stock up on them when they got into Cumberland proper.
They moved off again along US-220 for the last eight miles into the city, Bobby, the farm dog, skipping along with the horses, seemingly reflecting the positive mood of the humans as they approached their final destination.
As the buildings along the road became more prevalent, the areas of devastation also became even more apparent. Most of the fires that had ravaged the area in the last month had burned themselves out, but there were still the occasional columns of smoke rising here and there. They were too far from the road for the group to tell if they were unattended, or campfires of survivors, but Maxine said, “If Clitheroe was true to his word, the people left in the city would have been moved by now. Maybe these are some outliers not wanting to join the Defender’s New Order—but more likely just fires burning on their own.”
The columns of smoke were sporadic, and Storm thought they made the devastation feel even more lonely and deserted. As if the city was consuming itself without any human intervention.
When it came, in the form of the clatter of machine gun fire, screams and yells, and Tally-Two bucking in her harness, the sudden excitement came as a complete shock to all of them. Bobby barked once and ran off the road, haring into the derelict streets and away from the gunfire as, on the road ahead, there appeared a swarm of mounted cavalry bearing down on them, swords drawn and guns blazing.
Storm tore his eyes from the fast-disappearing dog. They were too exposed up in the buggy, so he pulled Maxine from the buckboard down to the dirt and covered her with his hands.
Bullets sang around them.
Tally was running for cover with Henry, and the Defenders were returning fire as best they could.
They were too exposed here as the horses’ hooves rang and crashed on the blacktop. Shouts from injured men sounded out as they went down and filled the air. Suddenly, the area around them was carnage. As Storm pushed Maxine’s head down, bullets spat around them. Dirt flew up in a vicious puff of grit, stinging his eyes and coating his lips.
Tally-Two whinnied and bucked, and rounds dug into the ground around her hooves and into the structure of the buggy.
Keysell was shouting orders to his men, but with a gargled cry, he was cut off in mid-sentence. Poppet was calling for Larry, her voice was punctuated with shots from her own rifle.
There were crashes as some of the attackers’ horses went down, and more screams and roars of frustration.
Horses began circling the buggy and Tally-Two. Storm expected the next shot to be into the back of his head. There was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t reach the Beretta, which was still in the buggy, and Maxine’s SIG had spun away from her hand as they’d thudded to the dirt by the side of the highway.
Storm got a closer look at the riders, who were still firing at anyone who was firing back at them. They wore many different types of clothing, but there was a theme—red. They wore red T-shirts or hats. Red boots or red piping on jackets. They all wore body armor and guards on their shins, knees, and elbows that looked as if they had been spray-painted red at some point to hide the black beneath. Some wore red-smeared tactical helmets, and a couple were wearing football helmets sprayed the same. There was a definite attempt to make some sort of a uniform appearance. Of the faces Storm could see as the battle raged, they were of intermediate age and varied ethnicity. There were cavalry swords being brandished, for the love of God, and there was also modern weaponry in abundance.
And the sheer weight of numbers had caused the cavalry to gain the area around the buggy and suppress the Defenders and the others.
“That’s enough!” a voice called from a black stallion that foamed with sweat, its eyes rolling. “Cease firing, or we’ll kill the lot of you.”
The man giving the orders was no older than Storm, and possibly younger. Below the tactical helmet he wore was a black face with cheeks scarred and gouged sometime in the long past. The lines were well-healed, but provided a map that would lead any observer straight to the destination of seeing he was not a man to be trifled with. His eyes were cruel, his mouth set with a permanent sneer. He jumped down from his horse and stomped his well-muscled frame over to the buggy.
He used his foot to roll Storm off Maxine and then pulled her head up by the hair. Checking her face.
“We got the doctor!” someone shouted from the other side of the buggy.
“Looks like Clitheroe was telling the truth before he met with his maker,” the scarred boy said as he leaned in and scanned Maxine’s face even closer.
“Leave her alone!” Storm said.
Scarred sent a crashing backhander into Storm’s face. “That’s your one and only warning, Cancer Boy.”
The shock of realization that this scarred man knew who they were crashed through Storm, sending him rigid with fear. He had no idea who these people were. Who these horsemen represented. On the road from Boston to the M-Bar and then from the M-Bar to Cumberland, he and Maxine hadn’t encountered anyone even resembling them or their red garb.
The man got up. “We’ve got the mom and Cancer Boy. There will be a blond pretty thing called Tally around here somewhere. If you find Josh Standing, leave him to me.”
There came words of acknowledgment from the other riders. Some were dismounting, checking on their own dead and wounded, while others searched for Tally and Josh.
“Who are you?” Maxine asked. “How do you know who we are and where you’d find us?”
The man with the scars smiled and pulled a water bottle from his horse’s pack. He drank greedily, spilling the liquid down his chin and wiping it away with his sleeve as he smacked his lips.
“You mean Josh never mentioned me to you? I’m hurt, Maxine. Genuinely hurt.”
“I have no idea who you are or why you would want to find me.”
He smiled. “My birth name—not that it matters any—is Dolan Snare. But everyone who fears me calls me Ten-Foot.”
“It can’t be him. It can’t be!” Tally hiss
ed at Henry. There was a burning pain in her arm, and Henry was dragging her away from her brother and her mom. “Let me go! Henry, let me go!”
“If you don’t stop shouting, I’m going to punch you unconscious,” Henry said as he yanked her across the broken forecourt of a gas station and into the ruined guts of the town beyond. He was making her run low, behind walls, zig-zagging through smashed and burnt-up homes. And he wouldn’t let go of her. However much she yanked back, and tried to set her feet against him. He would pull her towards him, kick her boots from under her, and drag her on her knees until she got back onto her feet.
“If you want me to damn well carry you, I’ll damn well carry you. But back there, we’re outnumbered and outgunned. The best chance we’ve got of helping Storm and the others is to get away, then find out where they’re being taken. Now come on, or I swear I’ll punch you in the nose!”
Tally was dragged, half-running and half-stumbling, through two burned-out houses, her feet snagging on wood, slithering over blackened and smashed glass, and crashing into half-tumbled-down walls.
When they’d been running for over five minutes, and the breath was hot nails in her throat, Henry pushed her down some steps into half-darkness. It was the basement of an old house. The top of the building was open to the sky and light spilled from the entrance down the cement steps into splashy puddles leftover from the rain.
“Ten-Foot… how can it be Ten-Foot?” Tally asked, feeling suddenly woozy. She crashed to her knees in an inch of water. It soaked up through her pants and chilled her legs.
She was wet elsewhere. There was a buzzing in her ears. It was her arm that hurt. It was wet from the puddle.
No. Not from the puddle.
It had been wet before. The air had cooled the wetness around a burning pain.
A pain that was rising up, big and black. Blotting out the light from the stairwell.
The last thing she said before the lights went out around the clutch of pain clawing at her arm was, “Ten-Foot… it can’t be Ten-Foot.”
13
It had taken all of Josh’s strength to resist finding a gun, then launching a solo assault on the police station himself in a mad attempt to spring Donald.
Impulsiveness like that would get them both killed, but there was now a ticking clock. He had perhaps six hours to get word to Karel up on Copper’s Bluff and put some kind of plan into operation. Six hours at most, and he had to signal her on the hour—so there were only so many chances to do it.
He looked at his watch. Ten minutes to one in the afternoon.
Maybe he could get out of the bar undetected. Randy had left him alone thirty minutes ago, and the other customers in the bar were mostly ignoring him. He’d caught the odd sideways glance from some of the plaid-shirted clientele, but they were more interested in arguing with the barkeep—a sallow man with thin, greasy hair rolled across the top of his head to give the impression he wasn’t as bald as a coot. The customers called him Filly, and Josh heard the odd under-the-breath remarks from some of the guys about the barkeep’s comb-over followed by sniggering laughter. Filly himself didn’t respond—he just carried on methodically cleaning glasses with his white towel like he was strangling a child.
There was no way Josh was going to be able to walk out of the front entrance of the bar without being noticed, though. Randy or no Randy, it would be foolish to try.
He guessed that Filly or someone else had been charged with keeping a close eye on him. Perhaps the reason no one had come to speak to him at the table was because they’d been warned off by Creggan through Randy, too. It would make sense that they wouldn’t want too much information getting to Josh about Pickford until they were good and ready to welcome Mr. Rennie into their fold.
He would have to cause a diversion. And the antipathy between the drinkers and the barkeep Filly gave Josh what he thought was an opportunity.
Josh approached the bar and put his empty glass on the counter.
“Another?” Filly asked, putting down the latest throttled glass and eyeing the men who’d been laughing at his hair like he wished his eyes were razors.
Josh knew the look.
The impotence of the permanently resentful, the lot of the little man without the stones to stand up for himself. This was the kind of guy who sat in the near dark with neon lights flashing in his face from the signs outside his motel room, those lights oscillating in time with his resentment and self-pity. The kind of guy who, when he breaks, buys a gun and shoots up the nearest shopping mall to prove what a man he really is.
That’ll show ‘em!
And it was a type that Josh knew he could manipulate to his advantage right now, and for just the diversion he needed.
“Another? No thanks, baldy.” Josh had kept his voice low. The laughter from the other guys in the bar would cover it.
Filly looked at Josh like he’d just stepped on his mother’s throat. (A mother who—if the world hadn’t changed—Filly would still have been living with in her basement… reading porn and scanning incel websites, no doubt.) “What did you say?” Filly asked, and then repeated with trembling determination. “What. Did. You. Say?”
Josh leaned forward, with his hands on the bar top. “Do you want me to repeat it? Really? I mean, it’s bad enough you wear your hair like that to try to show everyone else you’re not bald, but you want me to point it out to you again?”
Josh was still being careful to keep his voice down. At the tables, laughter had become a bunch of raucous conversations about Creggan and his plans. And that was exactly how Josh wanted it.
Filly’s face was going red from the neck up, like a tall glass being filled slowly with strawberry daiquiri. Josh knew that a man like Filly would take longer to break to violence than an average Joe who punched first and asked questions later, but all he needed for his improvised plan to work was to get the barkeep to his snapping point.
The men drinking at the table would do the rest.
The final push would be to make Filly begin vocalizing louder than he had been, to draw the attention of the others in the bar. If the supernova had worked any kind of change inside Filly, then now would be the time for it to lower the boom on his lifetime’s suppression of his emotions, to open the door on the molten anger that men like him always kept inside rather than expressing.
“Must have been terrible for you…” Josh winked.
Filly seemed unable to stop himself as the pressure built inside him, to the point where Josh worried that steam was going to come out of his ears now that his face was full. “What? What was terrible?”
Filly’s teeth were gritted, and all the blood had been sucked out of his lips.
“The plague. Must have been… hair raising.”
And that did the trick.
“Get out of here! Get out, you gahdamned piece of cow dirt!”
Josh was already stumbling backward as if he’d been punched. He fell across the nearest table and the guys around it sprang back yelling and cussing. As Josh rolled off the table and thumped to the floor, he pointed at Filly and shouted, “He hit me. He damn well hit me!”
Josh figured that trying to start a bar fight would provide the necessary distraction he needed to get out of the bar. “He spat at me and said we were all damn animals! All of us! Who the hell does he think he is?”
The men at the table, and the others in the room, turned their eyes on Filly.
A little fisticuffs, and a few broken chairs would have given Josh the cover he needed, but then he saw that he’d miscalculated by a very wide margin.
Filly’s face was flushed with anger, and there was the sweat of anxiety beginning to sheen across it. The drunk guy nearest to Josh as he got up didn’t run over to remonstrate or throw a punch. He just pointed at the barkeep with a trembling finger. “He’s got it! He’s got the sickness! He’s got symptoms! He’s gone crazy! Look at his face!”
All eyes in the room were now on Filly, and the tide of his anger had gone out, so that
down the backwash was pure fear. Josh suddenly realized that the disease cooked up by Creggan and Hauser hadn’t been well-delineated or described. Keep it as vague as possible, and you can keep people scared, and then you can keep them controlled.
“Don’t listen to him!” Filly screamed, pointing at the man who’d shouted. Filly shook visibly, and the trickle of sweat from his fabricated hairline was turning into a torrent. He dropped the glass he’d held onto the counter and it smashed. His voice had become a strangled squeak, and his eyes were full of tears.
Josh now saw that Filly had been pushed to the edge. It was an edge the guys in the bar were not used to. Their paranoia was wound tighter than he had ever imagined. He’d made a miscalculation that might lead to murder. “No! Wait…” Josh began. “You can’t assume…!”
But he was pushed aside, forgotten as the men began to walk towards Filly, unholstering their side arms. “He’s mumbling to himself—look! Crazy!” shouted one.
“I ain’t drinking in this bar again. Who knows what he’s slipped into the drinks?” said another. Josh watched as two of the men with a drink in their hands looked into the liquid and threw the glasses away, letting them smash on the floor.
A thick-set man with a stubble-rough chin pointed at Filly. “He sure don’t look right. Look at his eyes now!”
Two of the other men leaned forward without taking a step, studying Filly—whose face was getting redder, if anything, and whose eyes were darting between the men and the door.
In a paranoid town like Pickford, there must have been many times when this same sort of thing had been played out—perhaps for legitimate concerns over someone’s mental health or because someone was trying to get someone else in trouble. Whatever the reason, people who lived on the edge of plague-terror were easy enough to manipulate. It was what Creggan had trained them to be.
Terrified.
Josh tried again, putting a hand on Stubble’s shoulder. Stubble elbowed Josh in the gut and pointed the gun at him. “You touch me again, fella, and this first bullet is for you!”
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 63