“But what if it was Halley?” Josh persisted. “We don’t know if he’s alive or dead. If he’s alive, he’s going to be one of the most valuable people right now.”
“More than our kids?” Maxine had asked tartly.
“No, of course not. But they all might be together. We should go that way!” Josh had said, pointing to the mountain along the route that the low-flying helicopter had taken.
And then the distant clatter of gunfire had turned all of their eyes downstream. The battle sounded like it was raging fiercely and continuously.
“That might be Storm and Tally being attacked!” Maxine had said, and that had been the last of the discussion. With one last yearning look across the tops of the trees towards the mountain, Josh had been swept along with the party, downstream and towards the gunfire.
Their speed was reasonable under the circumstances. The muddy, rocky banks of the river were easily traversable for the time being, and when great limestone slabs couldn’t be easily climbed over, the route around them through the jungle trees was easily followed. Within five minutes of their mission downstream beginning, the gunfire stopped. If anything, however, that quickened their pace, and Maxine became even more keen to get down to where the sounds of the battle had come from in order to find out what had happened.
Within half an hour, they came to a bend in the river, where they couldn’t see more than a hundred yards ahead.
And that’s when the firing started up again.
“Get ready,” Josh said, unhooking his pistol from his belt and racking the barrel. “We don’t know what’s going on around there, or even if it’s anything to do with our people. We might have just stumbled on someone else’s war. So, we take no unnecessary risks, clear?”
Everyone with a weapon nodded and made them ready. There were a couple of submachine guns of the AK-47 variety, but most everyone had pistols, and Josh knew that, in terms of what they had carried up from the beach, ammunition was at a premium. They had hidden what ammo they couldn’t carry before they’d lit out that morning, so it was comforting to know there was a small cache of back-up firepower if they needed it, but that didn’t make the idea of going into battle now any more appealing.
“Keep down and move slowly,” Josh said to the others as he began to move forward.
The sounds of battle now seemed much more urgent and fiercer than it had before. Compared to this, he felt that the first battle had sounded a little one-sided. Now, what they could hear sounded like there were shots being fired from all directions as gunfire rattled and reverberated around them.
Moving forward with his head down as best he could, Josh covered the uneven ground with the SIG sitting heavy and cold in his hand. He had three spare mags in the back pockets of his jeans. If they got involved in a firefight, though, he wouldn’t be able to continue firing indefinitely, and this thought was sharpening his thinking. He wished he’d been able to persuade his group to follow the helicopter. They had no idea right now what they were walking into. He understood Maxine’s desire to find their kids—and hell, he felt it acutely, too—but if they all got themselves dead or injured, they wouldn’t be finding anyone today. Or on any day after this one, for that matter.
The trees on the corner of the bend were thin enough now for him to make some sense of the battle that was raging beyond them. He saw a small freshwater bay where a group of white-walled, high-end residences had been built in a secluded but idyllic jungle location. Smoke and muzzle flashes were coming from the houses out across the water, and as Josh looked on, following the line of the fire, he noticed a small oared craft bobbing in the water. Men dressed in the red of the Harbormen were firing into the houses, returning the fire that was being sprayed upon them. They had metal SWAT shields with view holes, and were taking shots from behind them. Josh could see one red-clothed body lying face down in the water.
“Gabe’s men,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Well, there’s a thing, Boss Man,” Ten-Foot said, close to his ear between the crackling reports. Josh could hear the grim humor in the boy’s voice with its near sing-song, I told you so tone.
“Yes, thanks for the update. I can see well enough.”
“Who are they firing on?” Maxine asked, the concern making her voice tight as a drum.
“I can’t see,” Karel breathed. “But they’re putting up a fight.”
“Our enemy’s enemy is our friend,” Josh said. “Whoever is in the houses might welcome a bit of support. But no one is to get themselves killed.”
Karel snorted a laugh. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Karel and Josh began organizing the probationers who were armed into two teams. One team would be led by Karel, and they’d go back until they were properly out of sight, then cross over the river at a narrow point and come back, so that they and the other team could attack the Harbormen and their boat simultaneously from both sides of the river, where the natural bay was formed. Josh would take Ten-Foot, Maxine, Marshal, and Scally, while Karel’s team would consist of Henry, Goober, Lash, KK, and Lemming.
“Wait,” Maxine said, looking across the water and shielding her eyes against the afternoon sun. Josh followed her finger to the shoreline and stopped by a burned-out house. Someone was running for the tree line. Head down, pelting along as fast as they could.
All of the firing from the houses had stopped, but the fire from the Harbormen was intensifying. “Maybe they’re out of ammo,” Josh offered as he tried to figure out who the running figure might have been.
Then another came, ducking and zigzagging as they ran out of the back of the house following the first figure.
A barrage of automatic weapon fire cut across the riverbank up to the trees, and the figure, suddenly transfixed, spun and fell, their arms splaying outward.
“Did you see that? Did you see who it was? Who was hit?” Maxine asked, her voice desperate.
Josh had felt an anvil hit him in the gut with the sight of the fall. The hair, the body, the way she had sprinted before the bullets had torn up the mud around her… “I think…” he said, “I think it was Tally.”
Tally lay with her face in the sand and the mud. The bullets flew overhead, singing their way into the bushes and smacking into the trunks of the palms.
She’d known that the Harbormen would start to fire as soon as they saw her running. That had been the plan. Poppet had already made it to the trees, as per the tactic outlined by Donald.
Back in Vietnam, he’d said, one of the ways to get the enemy to come close enough to make hitting them a sure-fire thing was to make them believe you were pinned down, out of ammo, when the only choice for you would be to make a break for it.
Poppet had gone first to give the Harbormen on the boat the idea that they were heading away from the house. Storm and her grandfather had taken up positions on the veranda behind a low wall, and they were waiting there with the rest of the machine guns and the magazines.
Tally’s job had been to be seen running up the beach for just long enough to draw their fire, and then hit the ground if they started firing before she reached the trees. They’d done just that, and Tally had made her drop as spectacular as she could. Throwing out her arms and spinning a full three hundred and sixty degrees to fall on her face. The boat wasn’t far off in the bay, with its Harbormen firing from behind their SWAT shields, but Tally’s zig-zagging run had kept her safe. The fall had been pure theater, and now that Donald and Storm were lying in wait, all Tally had to do was sit tight, face down in the mud, and hope the Harbormen didn’t get off on shooting bodies they already thought were dead.
It had been a huge shock, seeing the Harbormen paddling towards the houses across the small bay. They’d opened fire first upon seeing Donald and Tally out on the veranda, which suggested they’d been scanning the shoreline with binoculars. Knowing the Harbormen had survived the storm on the Grimoire had been a difficult notion for Tally and the others to get their heads around, but the evidence was the
re before their eyes. Gabriel’s Harbormen were in that boat and sculling towards them. Could even Gabe be on the boat?
As they’d dove for cover and the boat had gotten closer, Poppet had opened up from the house. Storm had stood there in the doorway, looking out to the boat as if he’d believed they wouldn’t shoot him—not the boy they thought was Gabe’s son, surely—but as the bullets had exploded all around him, chewing into the doorframe and breaking what had been left of the windows in the house, Storm’s face had told Tally that he’d suddenly realized the Harbormen were more than happy to shoot at him, binoculars or not.
Once they’d gotten themselves some vantage points to fire from, it had soon become apparent that they were outnumbered and outgunned. The shields that the Harbormen had put up, firing around and through them, allowed them the luxury of strafing the house to their heart’s contentment. Their wasteful use of their ammunition also told Donald that they had plenty on board the craft—much more than they themselves had.
“We continue firing, we’ll run out of ammo pretty soon,” Donald had said grimly. “But if we try to conserve our ammo, they’ll just wait us out. Maybe wait until dark, put themselves ashore, and come at us from both sides. We’re done for if we don’t force them to shore in daylight.”
Storm’s mouth had been tight-lipped, his eyes hot with anger. Tally had easily been able to see the state of confusion in her brother. “Maybe they know the truth, too,” was all she’d said to his pale face. “Are you with us? Storm? Are you going to help us?”
Storm had fixed her with the saddest of expressions then, as if the banquet he thought he’d been promised had been swept off the table and into the garbage in one swift movement. But he’d nodded gently, and Tally had known from his face that he would fight alongside them.
Donald had then outlined his plan, which Poppet and Tally had implemented.
The sky was moving towards late afternoon now. It would be night in a few hours, and as Tally lay in the dirt, she thought she could feel the heat of the day starting to wear off and the wind starting to pick up in the trees.
The Harbormen had stopped firing, and all she could hear across the stretch of water was the plopping and splashing of the oars moving ever closer. She wished she’d fallen in such a way that she could see behind her, so she wouldn’t have to rely on only what she could hear.
The explosion took her so completely by surprise that she almost forgot she was playing dead, and nearly sat up to see what was going on. A gritty rain of sand and water had been thrown up by the explosion, too, and it fell on her back as she lay there. There was more firing now, but it was coming from the wrong direction. It wasn’t coming from where she expected, from the house where Storm and her grandfather were staked out and waiting.
There were screams and shouts from voices she didn’t recognize, as well as more firing.
Poppet was crawling on her hands and knees away from the trees, coming towards Tally. She flattened herself on the ground beside her, and Tally saw a grin on the older woman’s face. She was laughing.
Facing her, Poppet gave a rebel yell and thrust her fist in the air.
Then, boom—there were hands on her, and voices she did recognize. “Tally! Tally! Are you shot? Are you okay?”
She was being manhandled over onto her back, and her mom’s face filled her vision.
“Mom!” Tally sat up now and wrapped her arms around Maxine. Squeezing as hard as she could, not really understanding what was going on. There was still firing going on, but it was sporadic, and accompanied by a number of cheers.
Then she could hear Donald saying, “Josh! My God, you’re alive, you’re alive!”
Tally unburied her face from her mom’s shoulder and looked out across the bay. The Harbormen were sculling away into the distance, heading back the way they’d come. There were four Harbormen’s bodies lying in the water now.
Karel was there, too, congratulating the probationers, slapping backs and laughing. As the boat of Harbormen disappeared from view, Tally felt another hand on her shoulder and she turned to see Henry—wonderful, brave, beautiful Henry who had been part of the mission to save them from the Harbormen. He was smiling, and his blue eyes under his ginger hair were alive with joy. Tally took his face in her hands and, for the first time since they had met, kissed him full on the mouth.
Henry put his head back in shock for a moment, and then he said, “Well, that was worth the shoot-out,” and then he came back in for the kiss.
Donald and Josh finished embracing, Tally had Henry still tight in her arms, and all that left was Storm.
He was standing away from the group, his face pale, sending glances over the water to where the Harbormen had gone. He made eye contact with Tally, and she could see that he couldn’t bring himself to look directly at her parents.
So, Tally decided to take the lead. Unhooking herself from Henry, she stood and jogged over to her brother, who looked lonely and lost all on his own. She took his hand. “Come on, come with me now.”
For a moment, he resisted, keeping his feet rooted to the spot. “I don’t belong anywhere,” he said. His eyes moved again across the water, and then to the knot of celebrating family and friends. “I don’t know what to feel anymore. I don’t know what to say to make it right, or better.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Tally said. “Just be, and everything else will work itself out. And you won’t help anyone by just standing here on your own. Come now.”
And so Tally led her brother back towards her parents, and left the three of them to find out what they meant to each other now.
20
“We can’t stay here. They’ll be back. And if Gabe’s with them, he’s not going to let this lie and leave us alone on the island. He’ll come for us, for sure. No doubt. He wants us all dead.”
Josh’s words had chilled Maxine, but she knew them to be the truth.
There was no time to enjoy the feeling of both her children and her father being alive; they had to move out and find a better place to stay where they might not easily be discovered. If there was no way of getting off the island yet, then they needed somewhere near water, with potentially good shelter that was easily defendable.
And Donald had reiterated that coldly and logically. “And we need to be out of here and on the trail before nightfall. That’s when we’ll be the most vulnerable to attack.”
It was Tally who told them about the Bluehills Activity and Whitewater Center.
She’d been going through some of the papers in the largest of the houses and found a map of the island they were on. Firstly, the map confirmed that it was Dark Point, the island Halley had pointed them towards with his compass, where he himself had a vacation home. The island was at the western end of the arc of Bimini islands in the Bahamian group about 50 miles off the coast of Miami. It was small in the grand scheme of things, less than ten miles across, and had the tall mountain, called Cook’s Hump, in the center. There was only one town of any note there, which lay on the opposite end of the heart-shaped island from where they were. There was a port there to land the supplies the residents and tourists had needed in happier times, plus dozens of vacation spots and hideaways for the rich that were spotted around the island.
A private paradise that had been a playground for the chosen few—and was now fixing to be their permanent home. If, that was, they could find somewhere safe and make a plan to deal with the Harbormen.
And, if necessary, Gabe.
The Bluehills Center was a four-mile hike upriver towards Cook’s Hump from where they were now in the retirement hamlet of Evergreen. Encouragingly, the route ran up a dirt track that would make it an easy and fast journey.
Maxine and Tally went around all the houses in the hamlet first, checking that there were no more maps or information about Bluehills that would lead the Harbormen to them, and then the party hit the dirt road. They moved quickly up the incline through the trees, away from the houses. Just an hour had passed s
ince the battle that had sent the Harbormen rowing away downstream for their lives.
Maxine didn’t want to let Storm and Tally out of her sight, and although she remained happy that Tally had brought Storm over to talk to her and Josh after the battle, when everyone had been congratulating themselves, she couldn’t tell if the boy was sheepish and embarrassed by his behavior or still sullen and angry. He hadn’t so far had many words for either Maxine or Josh, but at least he wasn’t spitting hate anymore, and it was clear from what Tally had told Maxine that Storm had been heartily confused when the Harbormen had tried to kill him just as hard has they’d tried to kill the others.
Maxine had really wanted to talk to Storm about Halley’s hypothesis, and tell him that she was more than overjoyed to know that whatever the problems they’d had before the Barnard’s event were, they were surmountable as a family—but, looking at his face and demeanor, she had decided that right now was not the moment to push that line of thought with Storm.
Maxine could see that Josh was biting at the bit to have the same conversation with the boy, and so she’d taken him aside to divert him from that course of action. For the moment. “Give him time,” she’d said. “He’ll come around. It’s been an impossible situation for him to be in. At least we know the truth now.”
“And you and me?” Josh had asked. If he couldn’t pick at Storm’s thread, then he would get his fingers into theirs, she thought. Maxine could feel that Josh was wanting very much for things to go back to how they’d been in the past. She’d very much come around to the idea that she wanted to be with him, and wanted them to be a family unit again, but only if she felt she could trust him to be there for them in a way that, over the last few years, had proved difficult for him. And she certainly didn’t have the space in her head right now to unravel that thread.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 93