It was only the intervention of Josh that had saved Tally on that roof and caused Greene to be catapulted off it. There’d been no sign of him on the ground when Tally had looked for him, though, and she hadn’t seen him again until their time in Castle Jaxport—when he had smiled at her from the bleachers, large as life and twice as ugly.
When Henry had given Tally the prearranged signal for them to try to disarm the guards in the throne room and she had gotten her hands on a MP5, the first burst of gunfire she’d sent towards the crowd had been to where Greene had been sitting the moment before. But just as it had been when she’d looked over the edge of the ranch house’s roof, Greene had once again performed his disappearing act.
In the heat of battle and subsequent headlong rush to escape the castle, she’d not had time to think about Greene still being alive. A case of point, when it had popped up in her thinking over the last few days, she’d wondered if he had really been there in the bleachers at all.
When Henry and her grandfather had been felled by vicious blows from behind, and she’d been poleaxed by a crashing right hook to the chin and carried off to God knew where, she’d had to admit that Greene really had been in the bleachers, that he’d really survived his fall from that roof, and now he totally was making up his mind about if he should end her life.
They were in a brick-walled basement for the debate.
The walls were dry, and the place was obviously being used as a storage area for Gabe’s forces. There were stacks of canned goods, bottled water, and other cased sundries against one wall. There was a clipboard with an inventory pinned to it hung from a nail in the wall. That inventory looked like a stock list for the goods stored in the room, suggesting to her that they’d come back toward Jaxport. Tally couldn’t hear any sounds of activity from beyond the basement, so she doubted she was in the castle itself, but she guessed there was a good chance she was somewhere in the Jaxport harbor area.
Greene was hollow-eyed and his skin was almost translucent in the thin light that came through a dusty skylight—which again gave no indication about the location of the basement. His hair was a mess and his hipster beard had begun growing out in unkempt curls and dreads.
The madness, whether supernova enhanced or all his own, was twisting his lips and exposing his teeth as he spat words to himself under his breath.
Tally had seen this kind of thing on plenty of faces of people since the supernova had hit. Their mental processes seemed to be working in two directions at once—minds being pulled back towards sanity in one second, and away to madness in the next. And in the middle, a festering ball of confusion that could go one way or the other. She’d seen the effects it had had on her grandmother, Maria. She had been so crazy that Tally’s grandfather had had to chain her to a bed on the upper floor of the ranch. She would use her fingers like claws if you got too close, and would try to bite out your throat if you chanced into her orbit. And yet, just before the battle for the ranch, she’d become calmer—not exactly lucid, but the murderous rage had dissipated. Tally had seen a similar thing with Ten-Foot on the Sea-Hawk. Always a boy who was quick to anger, and one with criminal intent, he’d also wavered between the two extremes. Greene was going through the same thing now, and it was impossible to tell which way he was going to go when it came to his actions.
He’d had the wherewithal to attack Donald and Henry, then spirit her away, but since he’d brought her here unconscious and tied her up, her waking had seemed to aggravate his condition, and he’d descended into what she could only describe as ‘textbook crazy.’
“I can’t decide if I’m going to marry you or kill you, too, true, blue…” were the first words she’d heard from him as she’d awoken to this nightmare.
There were flecks of white spit at the corner of his mouth and in the curls of his beard.
Tally tried to move her chin against the gag and loosen it so that she could speak to him, but there was little give in the material. She was going to be a silent partner in whatever transaction would be taking place here.
Greene crouched down in front of Tally, and he was close enough for his breath to fall warm on her cheeks. A wall stood behind her, so she wasn’t able to move away any further. His eyes looked like they were puddles of rusty water in the bottom of an abandoned well. He’d been rubbing them, or they were being irritated by an infection making them look ruddy and painful. There were broken teeth—just snapped off stumps, some of them in his mouth—and behind them a tongue curled and wound like a dry snake.
“Thought you’d killed me, didn’t you? On that roof? Huh? Huh?” He cackled like a witch. “I’m tougher than I look, Tally. Tougher than you think, brink, stink.”
Tally had only her eyes to communicate with now, and she tried not to show the abject fear that was bubbling around inside her. Greene’s speech patterns were strange and unsettling, but she kept what expression she could neutral. Her best chance of getting out of this was to agree with him and not antagonize him any.
But that was easier said than done.
“Found my way here and King Gabriel took me in. Said I could join the court, I thought, fraught, wrought.”
Tally nodded, stopped, then nodded some more for emphasis.
“Castle Jaxport is a good place, and the king is a good man. I think so, don’t you? Clue? Spew? True?”
Tally had only the nod to reply with.
Greene yelled and slapped her across the face with a stinging blow, spinning her head sideways and knocking her body painfully onto her side.
“Don’t lie! I don’t want my wife to be a liar! I don’t! I don’t! I don’t! If you think he’s a good man, why did you start shooting the place up? Why did you try to kill the king? You’re a liar! Fire! Cryer!”
Greene stamped his foot in the way a toddler might to emphasize every rhyming word of his struggling thoughts. He made a fist and thumped it into his thigh seven or eight times in quick succession.
Tally’s cheek stung, but she was glad of the gag for the first time because it softened what would have been a horrendous blow to the side of her face. She implored Greene with her eyes, trying to convey her apologies, but his head was up and he was looking towards the skylight. He raised his hands to it and began to shuffle from foot to foot—he could have been about to break out into a rain dance, or he could have been psyching himself up to carry out an atrocity—Tally couldn’t be sure which might make more sense.
Greene’s body relaxed and his hands came down to his sides. He reached behind him and, from the belt in the back of his pants, he pulled a knife. A blade that, if it wasn’t the one he’d sliced open the throats of his traveling companions with in Georgia, was its exact cousin. Long and curved with a serrated top edge and a viciously sharp cutting edge that seemed to shimmer with its own inner light.
The light flickered up into Greene’s already murderous eyes. The tip of the knife was pointed slowly towards Tally’s body, too—like an accusation.
The wall was cold at her back, the rope around her ankles and wrists biting deep as she tried to slither along the wall away from Greene.
The wonky smile that twisted his lips sat pitched somewhere between a snarl and expectant anticipation. He licked at his lips with all the expectancy of a starving man about to fall upon his first meal in days.
Tally turned her head as a metallic clatter carried across the room. There was a metal-studded door on the opposite wall that was swinging open.
Dad! Dad! You found me! You found me! Tally screamed in her head. Her dad was going to save her again, just like he had on the roof.
The door swung fully back then, and Tally’s words froze in her mind like spikes of cold agony.
It was not Josh in the doorway. It was Ten-Foot.
4
Maxine sat across the huge mahogany table from Gabriel Angel. Candles burned in two large, ludicrously ornate candelabras. The table was filled with plates of food that were both hot and cold. There were slices of pork and beef as
well as a whole roasted chicken. Accompanying this, mashed potatoes and tureens of vegetables. Perhaps most of it had come from cans, but the sumptuousness of the banquet that had been laid out for just the two of them by Gabe’s servants was a sight to behold. The aromas alone were working their way from her nostrils to her stomach, and the rumbling that was eliciting had begun to get uncomfortable.
But if Maxine knew nothing else, she knew that she wasn’t going to touch one morsel of this food. She wasn’t going to break down and eat even though she was ravenous. She wasn’t going to give Gabe the pleasure of seeing her crack.
The last four days in the castle, since Josh and the others had made their escape, had been beyond tense. Maxine had been kept in her room alone. She hadn’t seen Storm or Larry at all. She thought she might have heard Grace howling at one point through the wooden walls, but there’d been no confirmation of that.
She’d been brought food by Harbormen. Simple fair levered from cans, but it had sustained her. Thirty or so hours ago, however, they had stopped bringing her food. All that had been left in her room in the interim, all brought by the silent Harborman who had before been bringing her meals, had been bottles of water. When she’d asked about food, no answer had been forthcoming. And so now she was hungry as hell.
But she was not going to eat. And she’d told Gabe so.
Gabe had nodded, dumped a slice of pork on his plate, then carved it like he was dissecting a cadaver.
The dining room was attached to Gabe’s quarters. Gilt-framed mirrors were hung along the walls, but unlike what could be seen in much of Castle Jaxport, there was red carpeting across the floor. There were no windows to the outside world, as they were in the very heart of the bonded warehouse, but the mirrors gave some sense of space and multiplied the candlelight agreeably.
“Your husband is a bit of a die-hard, isn’t he, Max? Never gives up. You know, I should have just killed him when I had the chance.”
“Maybe you should have.”
“It won’t be a mistake I make again, believe me.” Gabe poured himself another goblet of wine and drank half of it in two gulps. He burped theatrically and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“You love to play the part, don’t you?” Maxine asked.
Gabe shrugged. “I’m not playing, Max. This is the real thing.”
He waved a hand expansively around the room. “These people really do believe in me. I came into their lives at precisely the right time. They were looking for someone to take the lead, and I wanted to lead.”
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, Gabriel.”
Gabe smiled and took another swallow of wine. “Don’t think, just because Josh got away, that you can do and say what you want, Max.”
“You won’t find him. He’s too smart for that.”
Gabe laughed. “Find him? Maxie, baby, I don’t need to find him. I have his wife and his… well, I won’t say son… that wouldn’t be entirely accurate, so let’s just call Storm a boy he used to know. Josh will come to me, and you know it. The last boy scout won’t be able to help himself.”
That bit into Maxine, because she knew it to be true, but again, she was determined not to show it.
“I’m surprised you never told him about us and that day at the hotel, Maxine. Surely, married couples should share everything?”
Years after Maxine and Gabriel had split after a fight outside a Raleigh roadhouse—a fight in which Josh had physically intervened and bested Gabe there on the tarmac—Gabe had turned up at Maxine and Josh’s married home, full of apologies and decrees that he wanted to ‘make things better in a grown-up way.’
Maxine had given him the benefit of the doubt and gone with him to lunch, where Gabe had secretly taken photographs of her at the table and then, at some point, slipped a drug into her drink. She’d woken, hours later, in a motel room. Her clothes awry, her memory shot, and her fingernails caked in blood that wasn’t her own.
A couple of weeks later, she’d found out she was pregnant with Storm.
“Nothing to say?” Gabe raised an eyebrow.
“Why am I here?”
“It’s the first day of the rest of your life, Max. Every king must have a consort, and I have chosen you.”
“You’d have to drug my drink again.”
Gabe smiled. “That’s not what you said when I asked Storm to kill Josh. I seem to remember that you promised me the universe if I would only spare Josh. Well, Josh is spared. So… where’s my universe?”
“Josh spared himself, Gabriel. All bets are off.”
Gabe put down his drink and twisted his fork into the pork on his plate, then lifted the quivering slice of meat up to his lips. He kept his eyes fixed on Maxine the whole time he chewed. After he swallowed, he poured and swallowed another few mouthfuls of wine.
“I have all the time in the world to break you, you know.”
“I don’t care about myself, Gabe. Don’t think that I will give into you to save myself—I’d rather Josh and Tally got away from your influence and never came anywhere near your pretend kingdom. You can’t threaten me by saying you’ll hurt Storm because I know it to be a lie. You won’t hurt your own son…”
Gabe raised a finger. “So, you admit it, he is my son? You knew it all along?”
“I had no way of knowing.”
“And yet, you could have had a simple paternity test to find out the truth.”
“Yes, I could have.” Maxine had said the words quietly because she knew the way the conversation was going to go even before it did.
“But you didn’t, did you? You didn’t want to be confronted with your own adultery even if it might confirm the opposite. You just wanted to leave well enough alone and hope I never turned up again, didn’t you, Maxie? But look, here I am!”
Gabe stood on his chair, stepped up on the table, and walked the ten feet towards her, kicking plates and bowls in every direction as he moved. He tossed her empty plate to one side and cleared a space for himself to sit down on the table edge, dangling his feet on both sides of her chair. There was a trail of destruction behind him, and their eyes were locked tight together as he leaned forward. Maxine moved back as far as the chair back would allow, but Gabe’s feet stopped her from getting out of the chair completely.
“Max, now is the time for you to confront what you did that night.”
“I was drugged! I couldn’t stop you!”
Maxine could still reach for a knife if she dared. There was one on the table next to Gabe’s thigh. It was silver, ornate, but it had a point that would slice into him if she wanted to do it. If she wanted to take the chance. Storm was safe, whatever she did. Perhaps Josh would realize that there was no way he and a small number of combatants would be able to go up against Gabe and the Harbormen. They must know it would be certain death.
Maxine weighed up the move in the seconds she spent counting Gabe’s heavy breaths—if she reached for him and stabbed him now, there was a good chance he would kill her in a fit of rage, and then she would be out of this mess of a situation. Out of it once and for all.
She might even take Gabe with her. Especially if she lunged for his throat where, this close up, she could see a throbbing vein that she might, if luck was with her, reasonably be able to sever.
Gabe was transfixed by her. His eyes still drilling into hers.
He smiled. “You think I don’t know what you’re contemplating, Maxie? You think I don’t know you so well—even though we’ve been apart all this time—and know what you’re planning? Why do you think I made sure there was a knife there for you to use if you wanted to?”
Maxine’s eyes flicked to the blade and back to Gabe.
Surely, he couldn’t…
But he could, and before she could assemble another thought, Gabe reached down past his thigh, picked the knife up by the blade, and held it out for her to take.
“Be my guest,” said Gabriel Angel, and he pushed the knife towards her.
; They had searched all day and not found Tally. Even with Henry and Donald more or less fit to search, they’d traveled through the Jacksonville suburb meeting no Harbormen, and no residents other than rats and the odd stray, starving dog.
They’d moved as best they could in the hard shadows cast around the buildings by the late autumn sun, strong as it was. The air felt humid but not hot. Clouds in the sky might threaten rain at some point, but while they’d searched, the weather had held. They’d split into three groups and quartered the surrounding area in as systematic a fashion as possible, trying to be as thorough as they could with the houses and stores they searched, and then meeting back up at designated times to check on each group’s progress and to designate new areas to search.
Josh had managed to keep his energy up for a good few hours, but as the day moved into the afternoon, he began to flag. Karel handed him her canteen of water as he rested against the wall of another deserted residence. They had no reason to believe Tally might be here, and again, the futile nature of the expedition was seeping up through Josh’s thinking.
“If we haven’t found her by this evening, I can only assume that she’s been taken to Jaxport, and we’ll have to get her out with the others.”
Karel took the canteen back as she nodded. “I think you’re right. Maybe a Harborman found them, got lucky with Donald and Henry, and took her back because he knew Gabriel would want her more than almost any one of us. Except you.”
Josh couldn’t fault the Defender’s logic, but still replied, “But the one thing that makes me suspicious is that whoever it was didn’t kill Donald or Henry. Why wouldn’t he? He had them at his mercy.”
“It’s a crazy world, Josh. And it’s getting crazier all the time.”
With nothing more to be said, they searched the house and found the nothing they were expecting. Josh felt his feet dragging, and his eyes told him he needed to rest. However desperate he might be to find his daughter, all evidence was now pointing to her not being anywhere in the vicinity, and if they were going to attack Jaxport in order to mount their rescue mission, then they would need to be rested and alert if they were going to have any chance in a firefight with Gabriel’s men.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 78