Halley pulled more containers of iron oxide off the shelf and stuffed them into his pack. “Just look at this place, Josh. Every Target, every Home Depot, every damn 7-Eleven on the planet has been looted, strip-mined, and even burned to the ground almost. And yet this place is almost untouched. It didn’t even cross people’s minds to come here because they wouldn’t know what to do with any of this stuff. Sometimes I think the whole destruction of the world was a positive thing, Josh. A culling of the shortsighted and the ignorant.”
Halley finally paused upon catching sight of Josh’s astonished face.
“Well, obviously, I’m just riffing on a theme.” Halley coughed, pushed up his glasses with his index finger, and broke eye contact with the ex-policeman. “I didn’t mean to…”
“We’ve lost a lot of good people,” said Jingo. “I’ve lost a lot of good people.”
Halley pulled his pinched fingers along the line of his lips as if he was closing a zipper and nodded at the young Maryland Defender. Jingo was a good fighter, but he was also a man who had had to be pulled back a couple of times by Karel because his overenthusiasm had crossed the moral lines which needed to remain in place, but Josh could see how Halley’s words had affected him.
“I get it,” Jingo continued. “Yeah, there’s nine billion people out there who took everything for granted. They have no idea how anything works, how to make even a candle or a bar of soap, let alone treat a tooth abscess or, yes, see the potential of these chemicals and use them appropriately. But that’s freedom, Mr. Professor. They got to choose what they wanted to know. And because of that, we get to use all this to our advantage. If Gabe and his Harbormen knew about this place, it would be me and you they’d be using it against. So, I guess it’s an ill wind that brings no good. And that’s me riffing on a theme, Mr. Professor. You’re not the only one here with opinions.”
Halley closed his pack and heaved it onto his back, his eyes flicking up to Josh’s gaze. Josh felt like the scientist was looking to him for some sort of support, or at least hoping he’d mediate between the two of them. But Josh wasn’t in a position to do that. He knew he agreed with Jingo. “Don’t despise the people who don’t know what you know, Halley,” he said instead. “Takes all sorts to make a world. Our job—your job—is to help us to get our world back. If that means only you’ll know how to make soap, then I guess I can live with that. I hope you can, too.”
The three of them didn’t speak a word to each other on the way back to the house.
Karel, Poppet, Filly, and Martha had been sent out looking for bottles and any gas they could syphon from abandoned vehicles to use for the Molotov cocktails Donald was planning to construct. They’d returned several times to the house with plastic bottles of gas, and many more glass bottles for the explosives, all recovered from bars and residences in the surrounding area. Their booty was piled in the corner of the den, along with tubs of nails and screws found in a hardware store. Poppet tore up rags while Filly and Martha filled bottles with gas and shrapnel to make the cocktails.
Josh surveyed the work, his nose wrinkling at the smell of the gas as it was funneled into the neck of wine bottles. “Takes me back,” Poppet said. “Joey’s preferred method of encouraging guys who wouldn’t pay up for protection was the judicious use of a Molly. I liked making them, but I wish I’d gotten really good at it.”
Poppet winked at Josh and Karel looked on with an expression caught between horror and admiration. Poppet took the torn rags and fed them into the necks of the bottles. “Of course…” Poppet continued, her New Yorker drawl becoming more pronounced when she talked about her mob boss husband and the nefarious exploits she’d been party to, as always, “…Joey very rarely had to use them. All it took was him sliding one along the counter and taking out his zippo. You’d be surprised how quickly someone will find the cash to pay up when you wave one of these beauties under their schnozzle.”
As ever, Poppet spoke about these things as if they were the most natural things to be recounting in the whole world. Josh, even when he’d been a police officer, had had zero dealings with the New York mob. In fact, his view of that world had largely been formulated by watching movies and TV shows, where the things Poppet talked about had seemed fanciful at best and downright laughable at worst. Like a cartoon version of Mafia activity. And over the months since he’d met Poppet, her skills at stitching gunshot wounds, using weaponry, and now constructing improvised explosives had proved to him that she was as authentic as the stories she told suggested she was. Poppet was a remarkable woman who Josh had come to like, trust, and admire in equal measure—even considering the fact that, if they’d met five years ago and he’d known what he knew now, he’d have had to lock her up and lose the key.
Her husband, Joey Langolini, had reeked of authentic power and real menace. They’d come under sustained attack while on the ocean liner named Empress, the aggression sourcing from the remnants of the passengers and crew. Joey had died giving Josh the time to save Poppet and get off the ship—and that had further tempered the bond that had grown between them.
Josh pushed Karel’s chin up to close her mouth with a soft click. “Don’t worryaboutit,” he said in his best Joe Pesci accent. “You’ll get used to it.”
Karel didn’t say anything. She just shook her head and went back to the window to keep lookout.
Halley was keeping his head down, too, making his thermite mixture from the iron oxide and aluminum powders. Mixed in the correct ratios and set alight, thermite would produce an aggressively hot exothermic reaction that they planned to use to get into the back of the warehouse by burning quickly through the thin metal of the wall, thus saving themselves the difficult task of fighting their way through the guards at the front entrance. Donald had been impressed by Halley’s suggestion to make and use thermite in this way, and that’s why he’d encouraged him and Josh to go and get the materials that were needed.
Halley had been working and mixing for some hours now, and had moved on to packing lines of the rust-colored powder into plastic cable-trunking which Donald planned to use to frame charges that would burn their way quickly into the side of the bonded warehouse. In this time, Halley had been the quietest Josh could remember since he’d met him. The conversation in the chemistry department’s storage area had stretched a distance between them that Josh thought it was now time to close. If they were going to survive and make any of this work, they needed to be together, and he figured Halley was someone who could be temperamental and a bit of a sulker, but enough was enough. He had been more than a little annoyed at Halley’s attitude, but then, if he felt as he did about his own situation—with his wife and son still in the lion’s den—and how that was mirrored for Halley by Grace, it wasn’t beyond the realm of logic to see how such stress could present itself as angry grief. Since the supernova, Josh had felt moments of instability in his mood that had also seemed out of the ordinary, more than just reactions to the situation. So, now, Josh felt the best thing to do was be the peacemaker.
“Looking good, Robert,” Josh said, sitting down on the floor next to Halley and picking up one of the thermite-packed yard lengths of two-inch cable-trunking. Karel and the others had been tasked with finding some, and as had happened for them in the university’s chemistry department’s storage area, they’d found more than enough for their needs—who needed electrical cable-trunking in a world where there was no electricity anymore?
Well, no electricity for a while. If Halley was right, he might be able to bring some power back with his copper filigrees and batteries.
“It’ll do the trick,” Halley replied. “The tough thing is going to be getting it to ignite when we want it to. But I have an idea about that.”
Josh smiled. “It’s your ideas we need you for, Robert.”
Halley sighed. “I’m sorry. Sorry about what happened up at the university. I didn’t think. My mouth… it runs away with me sometimes.”
“Yeah. I get that. As far as I’m conce
rned, we’re good. Water under the bridge.”
Halley smiled and spooned more thermite into a piece of trunking before he began tamping it down with his thumbs.
“I meant to ask you,” Halley said as he worked, “about Storm.”
Josh tensed. No one had spoken to him yet about what had happened in the throne room. Not even Donald. Perhaps they guessed it was all too raw and were waiting for Josh to say when he was ready to speak about nearly being shot by his own son—a son who, inexplicably, was now calling another man “Dad.”
Josh didn’t feel like he was ready to talk about it, either, and was in the process of raising his hand like a crossing guard’s stop sign, but he didn’t even get that far.
There came a sudden commotion by the front door, and a soft exclamation from Poppet, and as Josh looked around, he saw Donald staggering through the door with fresh blood streaking his face in thick lines.
3
They found Henry where Donald said they’d been attacked, not one hundred yards from the house. The boy was alive but unconscious. Josh helped him to sit up and looked at the gash on his head where, like Donald, he’d been half-brained with a house brick.
Henry’s eyes were blurry with a possible concussion, and he found it difficult to talk, but he managed to say they’d been attacked from behind as they’d been making it back from a boatyard where they’d found the craft they needed for the assault on Jaxport. Donald had gone down first, and then something had clattered into his own head, and he’d immediately gone unconscious.
Donald told them he had come staggering back to the house to get help upon realizing that Tally had disappeared and Henry was unarousable. Whoever had attacked them had been savage and uncompromising, but at least they hadn’t killed them. With Tally gone, however, the mercies to be counted were small.
Josh and the others searched for Tally in the surrounding area as best they could in the darkness. There was no trail to follow and no obvious sign of her or those who’d attacked them. The houses were dark and unwelcoming, and as Josh stood with Poppet at the head of the street looking down the rows of cold, dead-eyed buildings, Josh was suddenly overwhelmed by the task. The entire deserted city was laid out before them in the gloom. They were searching for a needle in a haystack of needles.
“We’ll try again at first light,” Poppet said. “We might be able to find something that leads us to her.”
Josh shook his head. “The trail will be cold by then. Whoever has taken her could have her back to Jaxport within the hour, or well on the way to anywhere else.”
Josh could see on Poppet’s face that she agreed he was speaking logically. The longer they left it, the harder it would be to find Tally, and yet, with just the nine remaining members of their party, two of them still reeling from major thumps on the head, searching a city—even the immediate vicinity—was a near impossible task.
“Back before this, we would have had dogs, manpower, helicopters, thermal imaging, house-to-house calls, roadblocks… you name it.”
The crushing change in the world since the Barnard’s event had never felt more acute than it did now.
“Taken from under my nose a hundred yards away,” Josh spat as they searched through another deserted north Florida house, its rooms dank and chill even in the still warm humidity of the even.
“If we still had the dog, maybe we might have a chance…”
But he knew he was clutching at straws.
Josh returned to the others with Poppet just as dawn began to pink the sky. Exhausted and hollow, he crashed down on the sofa next to Donald, who looked an extra seventy years older in the weak light.
“I’m sorry,” the old man croaked. “They came out of nowhere. I reckon whoever it was, was waiting for us.”
“Maybe Gabe’s men have been watching us the whole time,” Karel said. “Waiting to see what we were doing. There’s been no patrols that we’ve run into for days. The Harbormen have been keeping to themselves—maybe they had us under surveillance. Jingo and I will go out now, see what we can find. Make sure no one’s watching the house at least.”
As Karel and Jingo geared up, Henry tried to stand, but he was still wobbly on his feet. Poppet helped him back to a chair. Martha had put a pad on the wound on the side of his head to stanch the bleeding, but his eyes were still revolving like cherries on a slot machine.
“We’ve got to find her. I can’t… we can’t…”
Poppet sat with Henry and put an arm across his shoulder. She kissed the uninjured side of his head and gave him a squeeze. “Easy, soldier. You and Grandpa over there just need to chill for a few hours. We’ll do the searching. You go out there, and you won’t know which way is up.” That said, Poppet slipped Henry some painkillers from their dwindling supply. “If only we had Larry here.”
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Banks, the retired West Virginian surgeon who had been with them since he’d performed an appendectomy on Storm, had not been brought out into the throne room with the others on the night of their escape. Like Maxine and Storm, he was—they surmised—still in Castle Jaxport with Grace and the others. His condition was unknown, but after having had his hand shot up, the aging surgeon had been having trouble keeping things together and had dropped into a depressive funk. He did, however, come alive when he had some good old-fashioned doctorin’ to do, and had worked well with Poppet as she’d become his chief theater nurse on several occasions on the trail.
If they’d had him there now, he’d have been able to monitor Donald and Henry for possible signs of concussion and give them the care they needed. “Me,” Poppet said ruefully, “I’m just making it up as I go along. As usual.”
Josh drank some water to slake the dry anxieties collecting in his mouth. He wanted to get back out there and search for Tally, but the enormity of the task felt like a crushing weight on his shoulders. They had looked in maybe two hundred houses in the last few hours before the exhaustion had crippled him, and they hadn’t found her. And yet he knew that she could still be in any of those houses. In the roof spaces, in the basements they’d missed… anywhere.
“Tally could still be within a hundred yards of us and we’d never know it. We just don’t have the resources to find her.” He sighed and thumped the arm of the sofa. “Our best hope is that she escapes and finds her way back.”
“Escapes from what, though?” Henry asked.
No one could answer that question, and the room was silent for some time. The black mood of the people there sat at odds with the lightening sky that was turning Florida blue outside as the day picked up speed.
Halley had finished making his frame charges and was now constructing his detonators from thin, twelve-inch lengths of doweling, 9-volt batteries, and lightbulbs, all wrapped in small copper wire cages to ensure the electricity wasn’t suppressed by the Barnard’s field. “It’s a little more complex than I would have wanted, but them’s the breaks,” he said to no one in particular when the silence in the room had become almost unbearable even for Josh. “Usual way for igniting thermite is to use magnesium strips—you light them and get your backside as far away as you can as fast as you can. But guess what? No magnesium to be found at the university. Guess they’d run out and were waiting for supplies when the supernova hit. You can always try a match, but that’s dangerous, and I really don’t want to risk burning my hand off. So, a lightbulb broken open to expose the tungsten filament, a 9-volt battery placed against it so both terminals are active, and the doweling rod to work through the copper cage and push the two together. Bulb lights up, ignites the thermite. Neat, huh?”
“Why not just throw a Molotov cocktail against it?” Donald asked.
Halley gold-fished. Then he put down his detonator and rubbed his hands through his hair. “Well, yes, I… well… I hadn’t… quite…”
“Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best,” said Donald, getting up and putting his Stetson carefully back onto his injured head. “Son, you are a big-brained and brilliant man, but let�
�s just say sometimes you lack the ability to see the wood for the trees.”
Josh felt immediately that the moment of levity had at least partially lifted the mood in the room. Tally’s abduction was still fresh and bitter, but he felt the exhaustion recede a little. Maybe it had partly been created by the Barnard’s event, or at least promoted by it.
Josh stood, took a breath, and, picking up a SIG from the table next to the sofa, racked it and slid the weapon into the holster on his belt.
“Let’s get out there and find my daughter,” he said.
Tally Standing was as scared as she had been at any time in her life. And that included all the times since the effects of the supernova had rushed over the rigging of the Sea-Hawk and turned everyone in the crew into murderous maniacs.
She was gagged and bound at hand and foot. Under the circumstances, she wished that she was blindfolded, too, and then she wouldn’t have been forced to look at the wreck of the man in front of her who was pacing and muttering and getting ready to choose whether to let her live or die.
Greene Davidson, since Tally had literally bumped into him in a forest in northern Georgia, had always been on the cusp of a great madness. The computer entrepreneur in his early twenties had been a royal pain to Henry and Tally as they’d moved north, getting them into serious trouble with his lackadaisical attitude and bull-headedness, but they had both, at least at the start, felt genuinely sorry for him and let him travel with them.
It had taken a while for the guy’s madness to truly show itself, but when her grandfather’s ranch had been under attack from forces in the nearby town of Pickford, Greene had slaughtered one of the captured attackers by slicing open his throat. That murder had convinced Tally that Greene had also murdered the party he’d been traveling with in Georgia—but had lied to her about it from the beginning, telling her instead that he was the only survivor of the attack. The madness in his eyes, and the way he’d handled a knife back then, not to mention the way he had chased her through the ranch house and up onto the roof, had sealed the deal.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 77