Donald sat silently at the table, his head in his hands. He hadn’t spoken a word since Maxine had taken him downstairs after running to the house upon seeing the muzzle flashes and hearing the gunshots from her mother’s room last night.
Heart pounding, she’d burst into the house and pelted to the stairs. There’d been nothing but silence in the house as she’d sprinted up the stairs three at a time, terrified of what she expected to find in the bedroom when she got there.
As she’d launched herself down the corridor, the first sob had reached her ears, and it hadn’t been her mother crying.
Hanging onto the doorframe to swing herself around using her forward momentum, she’d come across a scene from her own personal version of hell.
Her mom, Maria, was in a stained nightshirt, frozen in fear, her eyes wide with shock. Her hair was mad-professor wiry, grayer than Maxine had ever known it. Maria had lost at least forty pounds since last year, and skin hung from the undersides of her arms like flapping sacks. Her chin was etched with deep wrinkles and slathered in saliva.
She was chained by one wrist and her ankles to iron rings which had been set into the wall. Iron rings that Maxine certainly didn’t remember being there before. Maria’s legs were drawn up underneath her, and her eyes were fixed on Donald.
Donald was on his knees in the center of the room, sobbing. For all Maxine knew, it was the first time in his whole life he had cried, and he was sure making up for it. His head bobbed as fat tears fell on his shotgun and the floor. Donald’s shoulders shook and his back quaked. The noise coming from his mouth was not one that Maxine recognized, either. It just didn’t compute as a sound her father would make. This bluff man’s man farmer and Vietnam veteran.
It sounded like a chain being dragged through a tree trunk.
It sounded like a collapse in a worked-out mine.
It was a sound from the end of the world.
Both shots had been pulled wide at the very last moment. Sent into the wall three feet to the right of Maria. Donald had gone there with the idea of putting her, and then maybe himself, out of their collective misery, but in the final analysis hadn’t been able to carry out that dark purpose.
Maxine didn’t know if it was a genuine feeling of hopelessness that had overtaken her father, or if the effects of the supernova had pushed him towards the unthinkable now that Maxine and Storm were there to look after the farm, but whatever it had been had robbed Donald of his immense strength and stoicism.
He’d let her lead him down the stairs to the kitchen table where he still sat, the cup of coffee Storm had made him in the night still undrunk by his side. Forehead resting on the palms of his hands.
Maxine had approached her mom in the half dark, the only light coming through the window from the stars and the smudge of the Barnard’s Nebula.
She’d sat by her mom, and tried to hold her, but the older woman’s body had stiffened, not yet ready to let go of the fear. Maxine had checked her over as best she could and found that no pellets from the shotgun had gone astray.
Maria hadn’t made eye contact with Maxine after ten minutes of trembling silence. There had been no look of recognition, no joy at seeing her daughter, no wide smile or tight hug. Just the hollow look of a person whose mind was no longer in residence.
The best Maxine had managed before Maria had finally moved away from the wall and rolled onto the bed, pulling the blanket up around her bony shoulders, had been to squeeze her mom’s hand before it was snatched away like the limb of a wary animal disturbed by a predator.
Maxine had closed the door behind her with a sigh and a feeling that everything good and wonderful about her remarkable mother had unraveled and lay tangled up in a mess that, if one were to pull at the threads of it, would be freed, but just get caught up in ever tighter knots.
She’d then sat with Donald, who’d been equally uncommunicative until the first dawn light had begun to fan the sky, bringing deep black shadows to the room.
“You want a can?”
“Hmm?” Maxine looked up, snapping out of her review of the previous night.
Storm was holding a can of corned beef, the exact same brand he’d given to the dog. Maxine shook her head.
“If I ate anything, I’d throw up. I know it.”
Storm shrugged and opened his can, digging at the contents with a fork at the other end of the kitchen table. He’d told Maxine on the last leg of the journey to the M-Bar that the chemo-induced ulcers in his mouth had almost healed, and he was starting to enjoy eating without it becoming a stinging agony.
Corned beef wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but after the months he’d gone through with a mouth that had tasted like the floor of a tortoise cage, making him wince even when he sketched a smile, it must have tasted like a prime ribeye with a rich sauce, Maxine considered.
“Can I get you anything, Grandpa?” Storm offered, but Donald was just a statue of stiff flesh and misery. His eyes closed, his mouth set and shoulders hunched.
When Storm had eaten half the can, he stood up. “I’m going to have a look around the farm. See if everything is okay.” He scratched his head. “Not that I’d know if it was or not. I mean, I really don’t know one end of a cow from another.”
“One end moos, Tic-tac. One end doesn’t,” Maxine said.
“Gotcha.” Storm headed out and walked with Bobby jumping around his legs towards the pasture.
Maxine reached out to stroke Donald’s hand. The skin was dry and papery. Perhaps he was a little dehydrated. As a nurse, Maxine was well aware of the signs and symptoms of that condition. Skin, when pinched gently, should bounce back into shape immediately, but when dehydrated it would take a second or so, and wouldn’t flatten completely for a few more. She didn’t want to start pinching her father, so seeing as he didn’t pull away when she touched him, she tried a more direct route. “I’m going to make you some coffee, Dad. You haven’t had anything all night, and you really should take something. We don’t have to talk about what happened if you don’t want to. I have a pretty good handle on it anyways. But I don’t want you making yourself ill. Okay?”
Donald said nothing. He remained seated where he was for another hour, ignoring the fresh cup of coffee Maxine had boiled for him on the grate. Staring at nothing, totally lost within himself.
That was until Bobby’s excited barking outside the ranch house was followed by Storm flinging open the door and shouting, “Grandpa! There’s a calf being born… and… and I think it’s stuck!”
Then, like a statue suddenly come to life, Donald rose slowly from the table, pulled his Stetson down from a peg on the wall, and turned simply to his grandson. “Show me.”
The words backing up in Josh’s throat threatened to burst out of his mouth and alert Steve and Carly that he was taking an interest in what was going on across the corridor. The pain in his hip caused by Trace’s cane was almost forgotten now as he hoped against hope that his daughter was being locked into a room just feet away.
He waited for the sounds of Carly and Steve’s footsteps to recede down the corridor before he risked a whispered communication, his lips against the wood of the door, forehead slick with sweat from the effort of moving.
“Tally?” Her name had been little more than a sigh laden down with a cargo of longing and parental concern. He couldn’t be sure if there was anyone else in the vicinity, though, and didn’t want to invite another beating, or worse.
No reply.
“Tally…?”
Again, nothing.
The sweat was running in his eyes; he blinked to clear them and chewed on his lip.
What if Tally was injured? Unconscious? Incapable of replying to him?
What if she were dying, feet away from him? Just out of reach?
A jumble of thoughts burst through his mind. None of them pleasant.
“Okay,” Josh whispered to himself. “Let’s do this.”
The trick with moving handcuffs from the back of a body to the front i
s not about flexibility, per se, but about speed and determination. Josh had seen the move the first time at a party when a friend had bet others there that they couldn’t restrain him in handcuffs. Mart Zimmer had been a cocky, handsome boy with more self-confidence than the smarts to back it up. What he’d lacked in intelligence, he’d more than made up for in likeability. Once a pair of cuffs had been acquired and there were a bunch of ten-dollar bills on the table among the beer bottles and bowls of Doritos, Mart had been locked into the cuffs behind his back. Josh, like everyone else there, had thought that Mart was full of BS, and laid his money down in the sure knowledge that he’d get the cash back once Mart had exhausted himself and scraped all the skin off his wrists.
Losing that first ten dollars had been a salutary lesson to Josh. Never underestimate the opposition, Josh had learned that day. When Mart had been free of the cuffs and his wrists were intact, Josh had decided that copying the move for his own party trick would make his life a little more interesting, and might bring in a little extra cash. Of course, once he’d learned the maneuver and his friends had all known he could do it, the trick lost its allure––especially because, with speed and determination, nearly everyone could learn how to do it, though the beauty of it was that most people didn’t know it was possible in the first place. The benefit was in the showing them they could.
Josh stood and took a breath, straining the cuffs apart behind his butt. The move was half brute force and half technique, and you had to get both of them right or you’d end up on your backside, or with the cuffs between your legs, looking foolish with nothing to show for it.
Josh pulled the short chain between the cuffs taut, bent his knees, and dropped hard and fast. The move hurt brutally against where Trace had hit his hip, but his shoulders had widened a little, his backside had been forced between his elbows, and like escapology magic, the cuffs were behind his knees.
Still using the momentum gained in the drop to carry on moving his arms, Josh scraped his wrists down to his bare feet and then flipped them over his toes as he brought his knees up to his chest.
Josh was breathing hard, and the starburst of pain in his hip was trying to push itself to the front of his consciousness, but now that the cuffs were in front of him, he didn’t have self-indulgent seconds to wallow in it.
He moved up onto his knees and came to the loose floorboard with the broken-away corner. He dug his fingers into the hole and pulled. The board, only attached at one side, came up easily. He looked into the floor space below and saw the thin, rusty nail which had been in the wood before the floorboard had been broken; it was laying among the dust and debris.
Josh fished out the nail and set to work on the handcuff lock latches.
He knew the best tool to get this job done would have been a bobby pin, but he had to improvise with what he had. It had cost Josh another forty dollars and several drinks to persuade Mart to teach him the next stage of the process. Working with the lock. The first thing Mart had told Josh was that pretty much all handcuff locks were the same. All of them. It seemed counterintuitive, but that’s the way it was, and so if you could learn to pick one, you could pick them all. Unless they were cop-issue solid cuffs, and very few of those turned up at parties where Mart exhibited his skills for beer and cash. And, when they did, he’d just politely refuse to continue. The locks in handcuffs were simple to the point of stupidity, and with a bobby pin could be opened pretty quickly by anyone with the ability to get the pin in the lock and trip the mechanism. But Josh didn’t have a bobby pin; what he did have was a nail and the determination to get to his daughter. The other thing working in his favor was that the cuffs hadn’t been placed on his wrists cop-style with the keyhole facing away from his fingers.
Small mercies. Take them where you can.
The nail was awkward to manipulate, but there was enough of an angle to feel for the latch and click it. The handcuff on his left wrist sprang open, and he was free.
There was no applause or ten-dollar bills to pick up, but the rush of freedom felt just as good.
He moved to the door.
It wasn’t a security door, and the lock looked original. There would be a simple latch inside on a ratchet for him to flip over with the nail. He put his tool inside the lock and felt around for resistance.
There.
Josh placed his ear against the wood and listened. He didn’t want the door to swing open on Harve’s hard face or the arc of Trace’s cane. The corridor beyond the door was silent. In fact, this whole area of the mansion was as quiet as the proverbial mouse.
He snicked the lock and found the next latch and clicked it. The chances of there being a third tumbler in the lock was remote, but he felt for it just the same.
Nothing.
The door opened easily onto the corridor. There was a little natural light, as dawn was pushing though the drapes over a window at one end of the corridor, but the day working its way over the horizon was going to be cloudless and bright from the oblong shape of the light behind the material. Josh would have preferred it to still be night to provide more cover for his escape, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
He stepped across the corridor. There were two doors which could have been the ones Steve and Carly had opened.
The first opened at the turn of the doorknob, and it clearly wasn’t where Tally had been dumped. Josh moved to the second door. With a hand near trembling in anticipation and the adrenaline produced by his escape, Josh tried turning the handle.
The door didn’t open.
Its lock was the same construction as that on the door he’d just gotten himself through, and knowing there were only two tumblers to snick open gave Josh added impetus. Heart thumping in his throat, mouth dry and feet cold on the floor, he completed picking the lock and opened the door.
Of course, it had been too good to be true.
Josh realized then how much denial he’d been in, in not considering other possibilities. He’d been so focused on trying to will Tally into the room.
Lying on the floor, gently snoring and with her wrists in handcuffs, was Poppet Langolini.
5
Tally had hiked away from the sea with no food, no weapons, and no idea where her dad was.
Crisis was becoming her new normal.
As the Sea-Hawk’s lifeboat had foundered on the rocks and been smashed, her father’s hand had slipped out of hers and he’d been lost to her. Her other arm had been snagged in a rope line, and she’d been hit in the face by a substantially-sized piece of orange plastic.
That plastic had turned out to be a lifejacket which must have lain unseen in the lifeboat when Goober Nash had made Tally, Poppet, and Josh jump into the water to it. She’d seen Goober order Lemming and Banger, two of the other probationers, to recover all the lifejackets and flares and rations from the lifeboat before it had been slipped into the water off the coast. Goober hadn’t been taking any chances, and had meant to make sure all of the safety equipment remained on board the Sea-Hawk.
Perhaps Lemming or Banger had left at least one or more floatation devices hidden under a tarp, taking pity on those who were being put off the ship, and Tally, half-unconscious, dazed and choking on the seawater, had been carried on the current because of it, unable to get back to where her father and Poppet were.
When she’d regained enough of her senses, she’d beached below a ridge of grassy dunes, exhausted and completely unaware of where she’d washed up. There’d been no sign of her dad, Poppet, or the Sea-Hawk. The tidal break had washed her around a short headland and across the small bay. The small strip of land across the water had blocked full sight of the sea, and she’d been alone on the windswept beach.
Tally had untangled the line from around her ankles where it had wrapped itself and unhooked her arm from the lifejacket. There’d been no signs of life in any direction, and if truth be told, she hadn’t even known if she’d landed on the same stretch of land where the lifeboat had been wrecked or somewhere else entirely.
She’d spent a fruitless hour calling for her father and Poppet until she’d had to come to the conclusion that she was on her own, and if she was going to get out of this situation, she was going to have to do it herself. Hopefully, she and her father would meet again soon, but searching for him blindly—and without any knowledge of where she was or where he might be—would get her nowhere.
After all, Tally had no idea if Josh and Poppet had drowned, or if they’d washed up or out to sea. And as the afternoon had threatened imminent rain, and she’d had only the clothes she was standing up in to aid her survival, she’d known if she didn’t want to risk dying from exposure, she’d need to find shelter to get dry.
She’d trudged up the dunes and looked across a bleak landscape of tussocked grass and muddy tributaries covering a vast area of wetland. At first it had seemed like she’d been dropped down into a wide-open, flat wilderness, until a gray line of transmission towers on the very lip of the horizon had caught her eye.
Tally had had no doubt that chances of electricity thrumming through the lines connecting the transmission towers was low––her experience on the Sea-Hawk and what she’d heard about the Empress from Poppet suggested that when the effects of the supernova had hit, everything had just stopped. This told her there was a strong possibility all machinery and generators on land might be wiped out, too––but those transmission towers would be leading somewhere, and they might lead to civilization.
Or what was left of it.
It had taken her almost to nightfall to maneuver herself across the marshy ground, wading through shallows over muddy sand. She’d had to swim a couple of times across deeper creeks, which had drenched her clothes all over again, but the exercise of crossing the landscape had dried her out between dips.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 4