Maxine moved her head a little more into the gap, and a hand fell on her shoulder. She looked around, seeing that her dad was shaking his head.
Maxine shrugged off his hand. “I just need to see…” she whispered.
Her dad’s face was grave, but he gave the smallest of nods. Maxine put her head around the door again and tried to locate Karel. Perhaps seven yards away were three crates. The guns and grenades that they had been shown by Ten-Foot and Goober earlier. Maxine looked closer and saw that Karel’s foot was visible between two of the crates.
“Why did you kill him, Ten-Foot? Why did you knife Jingo in the back like a damn coward?” Karel demanded.
Scally’s sobbing continued, and Maxine ducked as Ten-Foot’s hand holding his pistol came over the top of the freezer like a periscope. Two bullets slammed into the top of the crate which was keeping Karel from view.
“Stop firing in there!” Maxine shouted. “Ten-Foot, you’re firing at a crate of grenades. Are you trying to blow us all up? Do you want to die right now, right here?”
The hand came up again and fired twice more, the bullets tearing the wood of the crates and blowing splinters into the near darkness. “Yes! Yes! I do wanna die! You think I wanna live like this? You think I like what’s going on inside my head!”
Ten-Foot fired once more, and this time Karel stood up and fired two shots in return. The slugs spat across the space and tore chunks out of the wall on the other side of the hold.
“Karel! For God’s sake!” Maxine screamed.
“He killed Jingo! He’s going down and I’m taking him down!”
The click of someone clipping a new magazine into a gun sounded out, and then three more shots came in such quick succession that it was impossible for Maxine to tell who had fired them.
Maxine bit into her knuckles and looked back at Donald. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“Ummm, I know you’re all a little tense, but if I could just squeeze past?”
Maxine and Donald looked up with incredulity as Halley came up behind them in the galley, turned sideways, and then, without an apparent care in the world, threaded himself through the crack in the doorway and then walked unarmed into the hold.
Josh arrived just ten seconds later.
“Where did Halley go?” he demanded, kneeling down behind Maxine and Donald who were covered by the door. Tally and Henry were pressed against the other side of the doorway, over against the range with their weapons ready.
Maxine pointed into the hold. “Couldn’t stop him; he just walked through. He’s not even armed. What the hell is going on?”
Josh shook his head and rubbed the sore spot over his sternum where Halley had elbowed him and pulled away. Josh and Goober had finished extinguishing the fire and come out into the corridor where Jingo’s body had been lying next to the unconscious––or so he’d thought––Halley. Josh had just kneeled to check on the scientist when the man’s eyes had snapped open and he’d sat bolt upright. “Where’s the boy? Where’s Ten-Foot?” Halley had asked, already trying to get to his feet and slipping in the blood leaking from Jingo.
Halley had looked down at the body with a mixture of disgust and annoyance as he’d finally gotten fully to his feet.
“Who did this?” was the first and most reasonable question Josh had thought he could ask, but he’d thought he knew the awful truth already, and there was going to be hell to pay if it was true.
But Halley hadn’t answered him. He’d just rubbed at the bruise on his head and pulled away from Josh. Instinctively, the ex-cop had reached for the scientist and pulled him back by the shirt.
The explosion of pain in the center of his chest as Halley’s elbow had stabbed him unexpectedly had taken him by surprise and had hurt not only his body, but his ego, as well. Halley was not a fighter; he was not a fantastic physical specimen. He had years on Josh, and he was built like a willow tree. But even though his nose had been bleeding and there’d been signs of a nasty contusion on his forehead, he’d been away from Josh in a second and bounding off down the corridor like Jack Frost over the rooftops of Olde London Town.
It had been a few seconds before Josh had managed to regain his composure enough to follow him. “Wait!” he’d called after the disappearing body, but Halley had done nothing of the sort.
Halley had been gone and Josh was already playing catch-up.
Running out into the rain on the deck, he’d seen Halley’s shirt flapping behind him with the freshening wind. Halley had been asking one of the probationers where Ten-Foot had gone, and with a word and a pointed answer to his question, he’d been moving into the enclosure and heading for the hatch before Josh had been able to get into catching distance.
“Keep the ship steady going south!” he’d shouted back to Dotty-B at the wheel, and she’d acknowledged him with a confused nod. “And get on with killing the lights! Gabe’s ship is still following us!”
Two of the young probationers, Lash and KK, had taken off from their positions at rigging stations, heading across the deck towards the oil lanterns as Josh had ducked inside the enclosure and run towards the gunfire and screaming coming from the hold.
By the time he had reached the galley, the scientist had already slipped past Maxine, Donald, and the others.
At least the firing had stopped.
Josh rubbed at the painful and tender nub of pain in the center of his chest as Maxine sneaked another glance around the edge of the door, peering into the murk of the hold.
Josh strained to look past her, too. All that could be heard from the hold now was Scally’s ragged sobbing coming from somewhere behind the barricade of the metal freezer. Josh picked out Karel’s head and Halley’s back as he moved towards the freezer.
“Ten-Foot?” Halley called. “It’s me. The professor. You going to put that gun down and come out so we can talk about this?”
“What, so that crazy bitch can shoot me in the face?” came the reply.
“You said you wanted to die!” Karel spat. “Stand up and I’ll make your dream come true right now, you absolute coward!”
There followed a stream of Polish profanities that Josh didn’t have to use too much imagination to decipher.
“You don’t know what you want. Do you, Ten-Foot? Let’s face it. You’re confused and scared as well as angry and sad. You’re everything, aren’t you?” Halley was taking more steps towards the boy’s hiding place.
There was no reply from Ten-Foot, but at least the gun didn’t appear again to shoot the professor where he stood.
“Look, I get it,” Halley continued. “You’re not thinking straight. The switch has been flipped again. I saw it in your eyes when you came into the engine compartment. I saw the confusion on your face. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“He stabbed Jingo! Don’t give him excuses!” There was a sob in the middle of Karel’s tirade. She sprung up behind the crate and emptied her clip over Halley’s shoulder into the hull beside him. To Halley’s credit, he didn’t even flinch, and only brushed the raining splinters from his shoulders as if he were removing dandruff from a funeral suit.
Josh watched as Halley turned his head to give a shadowed but clearly compassionate look towards where Karel was standing. “I’m not giving Ten-Foot an excuse, Karel,” he said. “You know what the supernova has done to millions of people. It’s done the same to all of us. For some of us, it’s been low-grade; for some of us, a permanent insanity. But Ten-Foot is just like my sister…”
The words had caught in Halley’s throat. It was the first time Josh could remember that he’d spoken about his sister since the raid on Jaxport and her death. Halley swallowed, wiped a hand across his mouth, and turned back towards where Ten-Foot was hiding. “It’s true. You’re just like her. She was afflicted and affected in the same way by the Barnard’s field. One moment, she could be sane and rational. And sometimes crazy like a fox. I helped her.”
“Don’t lie to me!” Ten-Foot’s anguished voice
came spiraling up from behind the metal box, fully entangled in Scally’s sobs.
“I’m not lying. I promise I’m not.”
“You’re just trying to trick me! The king said there would be times when people tried to trick me! Times like now!”
Halley took another step. It would be the work of a second for Ten-Foot to raise his hand and shoot the professor where he stood. He was so close now; it would be harder for the boy to miss him than hit him.
“Halley, come back!” Josh hissed, but the scientist wasn’t taking any notice. He hadn’t before, and there was certainly no sign that he was going to from this moment forward.
“Ah, there you are, Josh,” Halley said as he turned his head, as if he were just asking a colleague to back him up on a verbal report related to a piddling piece of project management. “Actually, that’s a good thing that you’re here. You can confirm my story about my sister, Grace, can’t you? When you saw her all those weeks ago, when I trapped you in her house, was she or was she not being successfully treated by me?”
Josh stood, but he kept himself half in and half out of the doorway, his pistol ready in case this wild gambit by Halley went south. “It’s true, Ten-Foot. Halley has discovered that water can somehow block the effects of the supernova on the human body.”
Halley smiled, turning back to face the toppled freezer and the boy beyond it. “Look, I don’t understand it all yet. But I’ve been thinking about it. We all have chemicals in our brain that regulate our feelings and our moods. Whatever particles the Barnard’s explosion is spewing out, it’s having a physical effect on our brains. Maybe these particles—let’s call them Made-up-namium for now—maybe they are stripping the dopamine from our brains, causing the effects we’re seeing across the population. Maybe you, Ten-Foot, like Grace, had fluctuating dopamine levels to begin with, but not significantly low ones. Maybe your body pumps out more when you need it, I don’t know. But combined with the Made-up-namium, your mood wavers in and out of heightened aggression and serious mood swings. Sometimes you feel okay; sometimes you wanna kill the world. Yes?”
There came the longest second imaginable in the hold as Halley let that question hang in the air. Even the sounds of Scally sobbing became a low sniffle.
“I think I can cure you,” Halley continued. “On a permanent basis, Ten-Foot. I think I can cure the world one person at a time. Starting with you. But if you make Karel kill you, all bets are off. Put down the gun, son. Put it down and I promise you we can get this done.
Karel’s eyes were wide, her pistol—into which she’d slammed a fresh clip while Halley had been speaking—still pointing at the space Ten-Foot would occupy if he stood up.
Josh’s heart was the loudest sound in the world to his ears. His mouth was dry, and sheer tension gripped him like a giant’s fist as they waited for Ten-Foot to make his move.
A shuffling of bodies behind the freezer suggested that events were coming to a head. Karel’s arms steadied. Her eyes along the gun barrel were hard and sharp.
Halley was still as a flag pole, turned towards the freezer with his hand outstretched, as if imploring Ten-Foot silently to give himself up to treatment and a possible cure.
In the end, Ten-Foot didn’t appear from behind the metal cold store. It was Scally Lish. Her cheeks streaked with tears, and her bottom lip trembling. Hooked around her index finger was the trigger guard of a pistol.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “He’s given me his gun.”
12
They poured sea water, dredged from the side of the Sea-Hawk, into the hull of one of the lifeboats, and Ten-Foot, after some persuading from Halley, immersed himself in the water and used a snorkel to breathe. Henry stayed on hand, armed and ready in case Ten-Foot again made any attempts to harm anyone.
Karel stalked the deck above the hold where Ten-Foot was ensconced in the kayak. After Jingo’s body had been wrapped in a sheet and then dropped with as much dignity as could be mustered into the sea, and with dawn already beginning to claw its way up the sky, she had made it abundantly clear that she wanted to be left alone. She was still bone-shakingly angry, Maxine had observed. Her blond hair was hauled back into what looked like a painfully tight ponytail, and her jaw remained set. Her hands made fists as she carved a line up and down the deck. Not making eye contact with anyone. Not speaking. Just boiling her anger into a bitter tincture.
Maxine had watched Karel for a while, walking like an automaton. She felt for the woman, of course. When Ten-Foot had eventually emerged from behind the freezer, at which point Josh had gone fully into the hold to stand between Karel’s gun and Ten-Foot’s body, she’d thrown the pistol down with disgust and run up to the darkened deck—where she’d stayed for the rest of the night.
Halley had ignored everyone else and gone to Ten-Foot as if he were greeting a long-lost member of his family, rather than someone who minutes before had murdered one of their number while taking Scally hostage.
The boy’s eyes had been swollen with the unfamiliarity of tears. Maxine had gotten the impression that crying was not something that came easily to Ten-Foot. All she’d seen of him before the escape from Jaxport had painted him as a vicious and violent man—a near psychopath—who would accept nothing but full obedience, and who was in turn set gladly in the thrall of Gabriel Angel.
That Ten-Foot seemed to have changed again, so much; he’d rescued Tally from Greene and then helped them to escape on the Sea-Hawk, giving some credence to Halley’s hypothesis. Maxine couldn’t even admit to herself that she understood a tenth of what Halley was proposing, but he’d been so right about so much else, it was clear that his methods were worth a shot. Karel, she knew, would rather be taking a different kind of shot, and Maxine realized that Josh had put Henry on guard to protect Halley from Ten-Foot just as much as he’d done it to protect Ten-Foot from Karel.
Ten-Foot’s hands had stayed limp at his sides as Halley had actually hugged the boy, drawing him close and letting him bury his head in the professor’s shoulder. The scientist had whispered indistinct words to the boy then, who had eventually lifted up his head and nodded to Halley.
Scally, wiping her eyes and handing Ten-Foot’s gun to Josh, had walked out of the hold at a slower pace than Karel’s apoplectic headlong rush. She had paused only as she’d come across Maxine and the others in the galley, recovering her composure by the second now that her ordeal had ended.
“Thanks,” she’d said to Maxine.
In that moment, Maxine had seen the shutters these kids needed to protect themselves from their chaotic lives and dangers, and she’d seen them coming back down for protection. Scally was getting back into character as the difficult kid, the attitude merchant with extra sarcasm and a side order of street survival smarts. But before the shutter had come down completely, she’d kissed Maxine on the cheek and then gone back up to the deck to regain her place among the crew.
As the dawn’s light began to spread across the cloud-studded sky, and the wind threw raindrops at them like gravel—stinging their skin and hunching their shoulders—it became apparent that they hadn’t yet managed to shake off the Grimoire. It was a little further away than it had been during the night, but the sails were still visible, and through the binoculars, red-uniformed Harbormen could be seen setting extra sails, hauling on ropes, and generally busying themselves with catching the Sea-Hawk.
“Dammit,” Josh breathed as he pulled the binoculars away from his eyes after confirming that the other ship was still on their wake. “How the hell did they follow us at night with no light?”
Maxine shook her head. “It makes no sense.”
The sense of threat from the Grimoire was palpable, but also from the weather. Back in the captain’s cabin, Donald, Poppet, and Maxine reconvened with Josh.
“I don’t like the look of the weather. It’s closing in, the wind is up, and the sea’s getting more than a little choppy,” Maxine said. “I know a change in the weather when I see one. And it looks like goi
ng south, where we’re heading, is taking us into the teeth of something bad.”
Josh appeared to agree, but shrugged in defeat. “But if we turn around now, the Grimoire will have a better chance of catching us. And without the engine…” He looked at Donald.
Donald shook his head. His arms and hands were thick with oil and soot from where he’d been trying to assess the damage to the engine. “It’s kaput,” he said morosely. “Whatever Ten-Foot stuffed into it and set alight has taken away any chance of us getting it moving without a full strip-down and refit. And even if we had the time, we don’t have the spares to fix it. Not without spending time in port. We have to outrun the Grimoire on sail alone.”
Maxine crossed her arms across her chest. “Or we could fight it.”
She honestly didn’t know where that had come from. Maybe it was the situation, the dreadful uncertainty, or the dogged pursuit of Gabe’s ship. The sense, maybe, that striking back against Gabe, the man who had stolen her son from her, would provide a strong physic to assuage the helplessness she was feeling.
Whatever the case, Josh and Donald looked at her as if she were speaking Martian.
Poppet laughed with delight. “Go, Maxine! Hashtag Team Max!”
Maxine felt the colors in her cheeks rising. “I’m tired of running. We have all those grenades and guns. Surely, we have a chance of at least a fair fight…”
Josh shrugged again. Donald sucked in his cheeks. “If Ten-Foot is correct about that ship, and it does have a cannon, we’re going to be at least as vulnerable to them as they are to us. And we don’t know what else they have on board that we can only guess at.”
“They’ve certainly got some way of keeping tabs on us at night. They couldn’t have followed us as closely as they have without something we don’t know about,” Josh said. “And that increases the risk as far as I’m concerned. Let’s see how things go tonight. Right now, we’ve got enough speed and distance to keep ahead, so we should see if we can turn that to our advantage over time.”
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 86