The complete collapse of civilization had happened almost immediately. In Boston, she and Storm had only just escaped with their lives as people had become murderous and nearly insane. Destroying everything they could, burning buildings, attacking their fellow Bostonians and killing them… Initially, she’d thought the effect was localized, but when they’d escaped the city, they had met others who may not have been as intensely insane and unpredictable, but who’d been just as dangerous. As she lay there looking at the sky’s newest nebula, Maxine wondered if the effects streaming from it would last forever, or, if like a tide, once it had passed or receded, at least the machinery of the Earth would start to work again.
She looked from the nebula to the window in the ranch house behind which her mother was locked.
Were those same particles, or whatever the exploded star had been spewing out, constantly rushing through the minds of those affected? Would the tide reduce there, too? Would there be a time when her mother, driven to this incomprehensible state, would suddenly find her mind her own again?
Maxine didn’t know and could not even guess.
But it seemed in that moment that she might never find out, as first one muzzle flash, and then the boom of a gun blast, and then after a second, another harsh flash filled the window of her mother’s bedroom, to be followed by the unmistakable rapport of a second gunshot.
3
They reached the camp just after nightfall, having left behind the avenue of the hanged an hour or so before. Josh was sick to his stomach after seeing the bloated faces and the rusty chains around the necks of the dead. He’d counted over fifty such bodies as the wagon went past, all in various stages of decomposition, before the track had turned into a low valley through which a narrow waterway sparked and flared in the lowering sun.
The rain had eased off as the sun had fallen below the cloud base, illuminating a landscape of stumpy trees casting long shadows.
Harve had kicked his horse on, leaving Josh to Steve and Jackdaw.
“Is that where we’re going?” Josh nodded towards the collection of white tents and trailers corralled on the other side of the river, across an iron-framed bridge.
“That’s the spot,” Steve breathed out heavily, as if it didn’t feel much like coming home to him, either. “My advice to you if you’re in the mood to take it, fella, is to not ask too many questions once we get there. Just provide the answers. If you want to stay alive.”
Steve’s advice sounded genuine enough for Josh to nod and push the myriad of questions he wanted to ask back down his gullet. They could wait. He had to stay alive to find out what had happened to Talley, and then he had to get them both out of here.
The wagon rolled across the bridge, and the smell of the camp started filtering into his nostrils. Wood smoke, human waste, cooking, and something else… the scent of something like anxiety and fear.
Sweat. And plenty of it.
Also, underneath all those more pressing aromas, there was still the tang of salt from the ocean in the air, and although they’d moved many miles, Josh realized that the distance they’d traveled hadn’t been all inland, and might have run parallel to the water in some respect.
Night closed like a lid then, and if Josh craned his stiff neck up to look over the side of the wagon, he could see open-flamed torches, braziers, and campfires burning between the trailers and tents. Shadow people moved around the fires, and on the breeze, he could hear someone playing a guitar, along with a flutter of laughter and an argument, the words of which he couldn’t make out.
Josh could see perhaps a hundred tents and several trailers—Airstreams and the like, which were not attached to trucks, but had been modified to be hitched to horses or mules.
Ruddy faces with glittering eyes in the firelight watched the wagon roll past. There were horses dotted around the camp, as well as dogs begging for scraps by the fires. Women watched from the open flaps of the tents, and there were also small children, naked from the waist down, trotting around in the grass with their hair awry and their faces dirty.
It was like an army camp had married a refugee camp and had this construct as a child.
Gunshots followed by raucous laughter made Josh spin his head to the other side of the wagon. Two men were firing Glocks into the air with wild abandon, followed by a hopping dance around a campfire. Their chins were greasy from eating chicken legs pulled from fires, and there was the stench of cheap hooch as the wagon rolled past. Cheap hooch and acrid vomit.
They reached the center of the camp and found a large, early 20th century Colonial that had delusions of being a set for Gone with the Wind. It had, quite frankly, seen better days. There was a neoclassical pillared entranceway that jutted out from the porch, which had been blackened at some point in a fire. Some of the twelve windows on the front side of the house were boarded up, and it looked as if someone had taken an ax to one of the pillars holding up the roof over the veranda.
The house itself was set back from the rest of the surrounding tents and fires, separated by a picket fence that had once been neat and white but now, in the flickering lights, Josh could see had been damaged in places, and all but knocked over in others.
It was less Gone with the Wind, more Universal Horror.
Steve brought the wagon to a stop, and Jackdaw peeled away on his horse to go up to where the camp continued beyond the Colonial. Steve jumped down as Harve came out of the house and jogged down the steps to the track.
More than anything in the world, Josh wanted to ask him if he knew if anyone resembling Tally had been rescued, but he remembered what Steve had said, and he waited, even though the question was burning away in his throat like a red-hot flame.
Harve used a key to unlock the leg irons and then dragged Josh off the wagon and handcuffed his arms behind him.
“I’m not going to run,” Josh said truthfully. “You don’t have to do this to me. I want to see if Carly brings back my daughter. I have no quarrel with you. None at all.”
Harve snorted. “Yeah, well, we have a quarrel with you, Josh Standing, and we’re about to get to the nub of the argument, so to speak.”
Josh ascended the steps onto the veranda. The front door wasn’t original to the building, or at least that’s the way it appeared. It was covered in studded steel plating. It was such a hefty door that, if you were trying to break into the place, it might be easier to smash your way through the wall.
The entrance hall was marble floored, with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. They were obviously dark, but at least the opulence had been maintained inside the building. The hallway, lit by candles and increasing the horror movie vibe, had five doors leading off from it, and a wide marble staircase led to the upper floors. The marble banisters and the balustrade were cracked and smashed in places.
There’d been a fierce gun battle in this entranceway in the not too distant past.
“Is this him, Harve?”
The voice from the shadows at the top of the stairs, just out of reach of the candles in the hall, was musical and intelligent. A refined voice of a southern gentleman from another age. Josh saw a delicate hand come out of the shadows, followed by an arm in a yellow-checkered jacket.
The man reached the top of the stairs as Harve answered, “Yes, Trace. Washed up on the beach. Said he was on the clipper.”
Trace was a man of perhaps thirty-five. He was dressed like his voice sounded. In a dapper yellow suit with thin green lines, which could have come from a 1930s musical. He held a black, gold-topped cane in the crook of his arm like a regal scepter, and his hair was slicked back to provide a widow’s peak Josh could have shaved his face on.
Josh blinked.
Trace was also wearing spats over patent leather lounge shoes.
The violence of the day had mutated into weirdness, and Josh suddenly wondered if he was still asleep in the back of the wagon.
Trace came delicately down the steps, his dark eyes all aglitter in the candlelight. He carried just a
little more weight than was good for the line of this jacket, and there was the suggestion of a double chin behind his razor-edged goatee.
If Trace was the kind of man who liked to make an entrance, he was certainly succeeding.
For all his neat clothing, well-carved facial hair, and the soft steps he took as he descended with all the care of a dancer, Josh could feel the unpredictable danger of the man emanating from him like a silent siren of alarm.
Trace’s eyes were fixed on Josh, too, in the same way Josh’s eyes may have fixed on a donut when he’d been a cop. There was hunger in the gaze that sent a series of shivers down Josh’s spine like a wave of blue fire from a match dropped into a puddle of spilled gas.
“Well, well.” Trace was close to Josh now. “Hello, Mr. Standing.”
Josh could smell Trace now. A delicate aroma of rose water and hair oil. Perhaps a hint of lavender. There were so many contradictions on display between the man and his surroundings. A southern gentleman in a bullet-riddled house, dressed for a night on the town in a limo with white-walled tires, in a house surrounded by a camp of rootin’ tootin’ ne’re-do-wells that was reached along an avenue of strung-up bodies as a welcome to the uninitiated.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Josh said, trying polite out on Trace.
“Yes. Yes, I do. My name is Trace Parker, and this is my world.”
Trace had said it like he meant it, and Josh believed him.
“What’s on the ship, Mr. Standing?”
“Ten probationers from Jacksonville, North Carolina. I’m their probation officer.”
“Criminals?”
“Hopefully ex-criminals.”
Trace smiled. “Hopefully.” He’d rolled the word around his mouth slowly and with precise annunciation. “Not a lot of hope left anymore, Mr. Standing. Not in these parts. Not for… you.”
Trace took the cane and touched the silver end to Josh’s chin. The metal was cold, and there were sharp edges. It felt solid and heavy against his skin. Josh’s eyes were at the wrong angle to make out the casting or the carving on the end of the cane, but he would bet it wasn’t at all pleasant.
“Criminals aside. What supplies? What armaments?”
Josh didn’t know if Trace’s men had already made it to the Sea-Hawk and found the truth of the situation, but there was no point lying, especially as he didn’t want to incur the wrath of Trace Parker—which he could feel heaving below the man’s surface like a shark ready to strike. He wasn’t going to give him any reason to unleash it.
“Three submachine guns we got from the ocean liner Empress; four handguns. Some fire axes. There’s enough food for a few more weeks, for a dozen or so people. Canned mainly. We’d rationed it out sensibly.”
Trace weighed up the answer. If poker was his game, Josh wouldn’t bet his wages on a match-up. Trace nodded again. More to himself than to Josh.
“Is there any news of my daughter?”
Trace cocked his head, fixing Josh with the stare of an innocent child seeing the full moon for the first time. It was as if his face was surprised by the wonder of Josh’s words.
The cane came down in one scything arc which exploded against Josh’s hip with all the ferocious savagery of a boot heel coming down on a cockroach.
The pain sucked all the air from Josh’s lungs, and he felt like his eyes were going to pop in his head. Unable to stop himself from falling, he keeled forward, hands still handcuffed behind his back.
Josh’s shoulder and cheek slammed into the cold marble, and suddenly Trace’s spats were huge in his vision. It was almost a comical cartoon of a view. Giant spats beneath yellow pants, and a pain in his hip that felt like it was being dug out with the shattered end of a broken bottle.
Josh found a breath and sucked it from the dusty marble of the hall floor.
“What did you say, Mr. Standing? I’m sure I didn’t quite hear you.”
Josh said nothing.
“That’s better,” Trace replied to the silence.
Josh was dragged up two flights of stairs by Harve and Steve, then put in a room that was just bare floorboards with one window which had been covered in a sheet of metal riveted into place. It had the same sense of workmanship as the door to the front entrance of the mansion.
Trace had not asked Josh any more questions. He’d turned on his heel and walked quickly down the side of the stairs to disappear through a door in the gloom of shadows.
Steve and Harve had seemed to know what was expected of them and hooked their arms through Josh’s and bumped him up the stairs.
Josh’s hip throbbed and ached, but as the hours passed, and the night deepened into the pre-dawn, the bright pain dulled to warm embers of discomfort. He lay on his side and tried to move the leg through all expected movements. There was no crunch of bone or sense that anything had become dislodged internally. It would hurt for a few days, but there didn’t seem to be any lasting damage—for which Josh was thankful.
He was more worried now about Tally being rescued and brought back to the mansion than he’d been over Harve leaving her where she’d been. Josh had correctly surmised Trace’s unpredictability and had his theory proved in the most spectacular fashion.
Bringing Tally back here, into this situation with these men, printed a new dread on the layers of fear and anxiety already present.
The microcosm of what had become of the world had been there on the Sea-Hawk and the Empress. The murderous ideation, the increased aggression, and the desperate measures people would take to survive by taking out their opposition. Josh wondered what Trace Parker had been before the supernova had hit. What kind of man had the potential for this? To have in just a few short weeks attained the set-up he had in the mansion. To have men like Harve and Steve following him. What did he have over them? What was Trace’s secret?
If it was just pure violence and threat, then Trace wasn’t the obvious man to employ those tactics. But it seemed that the people around him were genuinely scared of him, so much so that they would do his bidding in this way.
Thinking about Trace gave Josh a welcome respite from the pain in his hip and thoughts of Tally’s plight.
When his head was clear enough, he started to take more of an interest in his surroundings and to see what his options might be. With his hands still handcuffed, those options were going to be severely limited, but at least they’d left his ankles unbound. Perhaps Harve and Steve believed there was no way out of the room and nothing in it for Josh to use, but that wasn’t going to stop him looking. It was clear now that if he was going to escape with Tally when she arrived, he was going to have to be ready.
The room was perhaps fifteen feet along each wall. High-ceilinged and a little drafty. The floorboards were old and warped, the varnish cracked. One by his shoulder wobbled side to side as he leaned against it. There were two screw holes at the end nearest to him, but only one screwhead was visible. A sizable chuck of corner had been broken away at some point, probably by someone clumsily lifting the floorboard to look beneath it. If there was a loose screw Josh could get his hands on, one thin enough to fit into the keyhole in the handcuffs, he might have a chance of opening them. The handcuffs weren’t fixed-center cop-issue; they were on a short chain, and as Josh felt around the mechanism, he could feel exactly where the key would go to open them. Sadly, they weren’t recreational handcuffs, either, with a spring release lever on the edge.
Josh was still barefoot, and he knew that when the pain in his hip subsided, there would be the opportunity for him to try to bring his legs through his arms and get the cuffs into a more accessible position. But before he did that, he’d need to make sure he had a screw or a nail ready to pick the lock. It had been his party trick when he’d been in college, and it had been a while since he’d attempted the switcheroo, but Josh was still pretty much in shape, and his decreased food intake over the past few weeks had, if anything, made his frame leaner. He was no Houdini, but getting his legs through his arms while still handcuf
fed was a distinct possibility.
“Up here!”
Josh started. He’d been so focused on the floorboards, the loose screws, and the idea of using one to get free of the handcuffs, he’d completely lost track of what was going on outside the room.
Footsteps came down the corridor.
Something was being dragged along beside the feet.
A jangle of keys.
A fumble in a lock.
A door opening.
Not the door to this room, but another—perhaps across the hallway.
Steve’s voice thrummed the air. “Harve isn’t happy with you, Carly. And he’s not going to like this.”
“We’ll see what Trace says in the morning.” Carly’s voice. There was a strain to it… he had to be carrying or lifting something. “I didn’t risk my life on those rocks for nothing. Help me get her inside.”
4
The next day dawned fresh and blue. The mountain was all pinks and russet. The cattle in the pasture grazed, and Bobby, the farm dog, barked because his routine had been interrupted.
The dog didn’t understand why Donald hadn’t come out of the ranch house already to feed him and the other animals, to get the day started. He barked at the screen door while Storm searched for some food to give him, going through cupboards without finding much luck. In the end, he opened a can of corned beef and put it on a plate by the door.
Bobby looked like he couldn’t believe his luck.
“You’ve made a friend for life there,” Maxine said to her son as the farm Collie licked his hand before scratching at its ear and barking orders for the rest of the morning routine to be reinstated.
Maxine wiped the soot from her hands, left over from where she’d been starting a fire in the grate to boil creek water for coffee. She turned from the view over the farm toward Alleghany Mountain back to the interior of the kitchen.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 3