Maxine had squeezed her hand over his shoulder.
“I know, Dad. I know.”
“And she went down unconscious. I tied her up with clothes line and waited for her to wake up. Which she did, about ten minutes later. She was wild, Maxine, wild and crazy. Spitting, screaming, and growling. I went to the phone, tried to call Dr. Challis, but the phone was out. There was no power in the place. So, I carried her best as I could to the truck to take her to the emergency room, but the truck was dead. Nothing was working. Nothing on the TV, the radio, nothing. The world had gone dark.”
Donald had begun drying his hands on a towel by then, scraping roughly at the skin of his arms, making the liver-spotted flesh red and raw.
Maxine had wanted to go further than just the hand on his shoulder, and pull him into a full hug, but hadn’t been able to. It had been like the barriers which had fallen slightly were back up.
She hoped they would come down again in time.
And so, she sat with her mother chained to the bedside wall, with the key in her hand and her father’s words echoing around her head. The desperation of his experience on that night rushing through her now.
What should she do?
Could she risk letting her mother free? Would that be too dangerous to Maxine, Storm, and her father? Would she be able to cope better than her dad? Or… would she find herself fighting on the floor with her mom?
Or would she respond differently to Maxine? Would she allow herself to be released, and perhaps listen and respond to Maxine’s training as a nurse?
Maxine stood up and took a step.
Maria exploded from the bed in a savage whirl of limbs and blood-flecked spittle.
Tally’s heart felt like it was about to burst out of her chest and drag her headlong out of the substation storeroom.
She was ready by the substation’s door, breathing hard. Not from anxiety, but to oxygenate her body and get the adrenaline circulating that would prepare her for the explosive movements she’d need to carry out in the next minute.
The ladder she’d found in the back of the storeroom leaned against the well. The dead man’s rucksack, which she’d found among the pallets and crates, undisturbed by whoever had attacked him, now contained the cans of beer, the candy bars, rolls of paper to use as fire starters, an empty plastic water bottle, the lighter and the fire ax––blade in the bag, haft sticking up between the zippers at the top. The zippers weren’t fully closed, so she’d be able to draw the ax when she needed to. She hoped she wouldn’t have to, but that depended on what happened when she left. Her supplies were meager, but they would have to do until she got to the nearest town.
Tally had slept in the storeroom. The idea for the actions she’d decided on had come as she’d seen the toe of the ladder poking out from behind a couple of crates of circuit breakers and copper busbars. As she’d lit the area up with the flame and lighter, she’d reached down and the ten-foot ladder had come out giving her the idea for what to do––as if her fairy godmother had touched her head with her glittering wand.
It would be a risky course of action, but when she considered all the angles of the situation she found herself in, it seemed the best. And it would give her the best chance of getting away.
She didn’t feel entirely rested, because a few times every hour she’d woken to go to the door and listen for sounds of any activity outside. She’d heard nothing all night. Perhaps whoever had been out there trying the gate had moved on, uninterested in Tally, but she thought it more likely they were waiting, hidden with good sight of the gate to ambush her when she unlocked it.
But Tally wasn’t going to unlock the gate. She was going to leave the compound by a different route. Now her limbs were warmer, her muscles more relaxed, and the sugar rush from the candy bars had given her the boost she needed; she was ready.
Opening the lock to the gate would leave her too exposed. She remembered that the mechanism was tight, the outside of the lock stained and old. There was no guarantee that the lock would open the first time, so the exposure wasn’t worth the risk.
She’d reasoned that she couldn’t stay in the substation indefinitely, either. She had maybe three days before her supplies ran out. She certainly didn’t know how much fuel was left in the lighter. There was no water—just the beer—and less than ten candy bars. Those numbers didn’t increase her level of survival in any way whatsoever.
So, she had to get out fast, and away from here even faster.
Thing was, moving fast through a complex environment of obstacles was exactly what her love of free-running—parkour—had prepared her for. She wasn’t competition standard in the same way Storm was as a track athlete, but she was strong, wiry, and unafraid. All the things that you needed to be a good free-runner. She’d gotten into the discipline in school, enjoying both the high-intensity training and the sheer exhilaration of flying over concrete, not to mention her love of the feeling of ground rush when hanging high up over space.
Based on that, she’d made her plan, and she was ready to carry it out.
All she hoped was that whoever was outside—if indeed they still were—would be cold and achy from their night in the grass, perhaps wet and tired, and Tally would have the drop on them.
Tally knew that there were too many overly optimistic thoughts in there, and that whoever was out there could have military survival training, making them very prepared for anything. The thing that suggested to Tally that this might not be the case was that anyone with military training, tactical awareness, and a pile of survival smarts would probably have been able to get through the gate or over the razor wire fence already, and would have made it into the substation compound during the night.
Tally’s position, still in the storeroom, ready with rucksack and ladder—alert, awake, and crucially unmolested by person or persons unknown—made her more positive reading of the signs seem more likely.
The frenzied killing of the power worker could also indicate that there was no rhyme or reason to whoever had rattled the gate the night before. It meant the danger was multiplied if the killer or killers had returned through habit or instinct to the place the poor man had been killed, but Tally was sure she could outwit, and better, still outpace an adversary gripped by murderous rage—the kind she had seen from the crew on the Sea-Hawk, and the sort her dad had told her about from when he’d been on the Empress. Matching up against someone that crazy, but who still knew how to operate a gun, really didn’t bear thinking about.
So. Ready.
Tally gripped the aluminum ladder with one hand, thankful it was light enough to carry that way, and reached for the substation door.
Three… Two…
Tally yanked the door open, twisted the ladder through ninety degrees to the vertical, and leapt through the doorway.
The day was bright and clear, and Tally worked on memory rather than sight. She didn’t head for the gate, but swung left and headed for the fence nearest to the brick building. It was nearer than the gate by a good ten feet, and she was almost upon it, her eyes having fully adjusted to the bright morning in three seconds. Using both hands, she dug the base of the ladder into the gravel-covered earth and clanged the top of the aluminum ladder against the steel fence at just over forty-five degrees. There was a three-foot gap from the top of the razor wire to the top rung of the ladder.
Without thinking, Tally began to run upward without holding on with her hands, trusting her acutely honed sense of balance to keep her true. There were eight rungs, and as her legs pumped her up each one, she threw her arms wide––outstretched as the ground fell away beneath her.
Sixth.
Seventh.
Eighth rung.
Tally launched herself off the top rung. She had all the air she needed and flipped herself head over heels, clearing the razor wire with space to spare. She felt herself reach the top of her arc, and began at her highest point to prepare for landing.
Head and feet now on the right orientation, the grass on the othe
r side of the fence came up fast. A drop of fifteen feet was nothing to a free-runner of Tally’s experience. She put her ankles together, bent her knees, and prepared for impact.
Tally hit the grass with a whoof of expelled breath, and she carried forward into another roll designed to strip speed and momentum from her trajectory. Within a second, she was up and pelting away from the substation.
It was ten more seconds before she realized she could hear the thump thump thump of feet and the ragged breathing of someone in fast pursuit.
8
But the children. The children.
Flames gusted from the top of the Home Depot on East Victory Drive. They weren’t even in the city proper, and the devastation was already immense. Pillars of smoke rose thick-limbed and black all around the horizon, between the myriad of trees which had been planted for shade, and the low roofs of buildings yet to be torched.
Josh gripped the MP5 Harve had given him as they stopped on Route 80, five miles east of downtown Savannah. The sky was a grayish blue—the haze of smoke from the forty or so fires Josh could see were scraping the color from it—and the particles of soot blown on the gentle breeze were catching in his throat.
“I could just shoot you now,” Josh had said to Harve, clipping the magazine into the machine gun at the roadblock back in Thunderbolt.
Harve had winked. “Sure, you could. Go ahead if you want, but kill me, and six kids in the cage will be taken out and burned alive. It’s only three kids for someone like Jackdaw or Steve, so you could off one of them and save three kids from a roasting, I guess. But yeah, go ahead. Any time you like.”
Don’t think about the children.
Along with the MP5, Josh and the men with him had been given a shopping list of items to carry back with them.
A shopping list. It sounded so ordinary. So insanely out of whack with what it actually represented. They weren’t taking a trip down to the mall or going antiquing in New England; they were seven men walking into a burning city, filled with who knew what dangers, expecting to source items that had probably been looted already anyway.
The town of Thunderbolt was as far as Harve and the rest of Trace’s men had been prepared to go along with them, and where Josh and the others had been armed. Thunderbolt was relatively quiet, and other than Trace’s men, deserted. Everything useful that could have been taken from it had already been transported back to Parkopolis. But the quietness of the place was ultimately unrepresentative of the savagery that pervaded the air over Savannah like a pall of poison gas. Several bodies were hung from oak and palm trees lining Route 80, as warnings to anyone using this road to come out of Savannah. Other bodies lay where they’d fallen. Buildings were long burned out, and as they’d ridden into town on horseback, an all-pervasive sense of threat had been exuded from every broken window and wrecked car. A crude barricade was set across the highway about a mile west from where it crossed the Wilmington River.
Josh had been told by others in the scavenging crew that the last time they’d walked into Savannah from Thunderbolt, the Home Depot had as of yet not been burned, and so they were to go there first.
They hadn’t been allowed to ride into Savannah, either, instead expected to go in and out on foot. “Why?” Josh had asked.
“You’re more expendable than horses,” Harve had replied.
Now, Josh and the five men with him were three miles from the barricade, looking out across the deserted parking lot to the Home Depot as fire and smoke looped up from the roof in thick gouts.
“What’ll we do?” Ralph Plains was a dumpy, bald-headed guy who was losing his hair, sweating in the heat and at the situation he found himself in. Trace had the man’s son, a boy named Billy, in the cage.
Don’t think about the children.
Josh shook his head. “Looks like the fire has only recently started—which means it hasn’t spread, but will. It also means that the person or persons who set the fire are still around. It could be a trap to draw us in. They may have spotted us coming up from Thunderbolt and set this as a lure.”
Josh checked himself. He was talking like a cop, taking charge. This was his first trip into Savannah after finding out what hold Trace had on the small population of Parkopolis—their children—and the people he was with should be leading here. It was their children who were in the direct line of fire. Josh didn’t even know if his children were alive, but one thing he did know was that they weren’t in an underground cage waiting to be set on fire.
Gerry Hobson, a thirty-year-old architect from Thunderbolt, had moved out of the town with his wife and young daughter Sophie when half the population had gone crazy on the Night of the Madness; he’d been captured two days later by Trace. Now, he licked his lips and fumbled at the grip of his MP5. This was a man who wasn’t used to holding weapons, let alone using them. He looked at Josh like a drowning man would look towards a guy on the beach with a livesaver. “Okay, Josh. You’re right. So, we should go on?”
Barney McClure, a fifty-year-old ex-Army sergeant with a buzz cut that was growing out iron gray above his ruddy, pock-marked face, shook his head. “No. We go in. I want to get this trip over and done with as soon as we can. I say we approach through the trees there, stay low, and go in an entrance furthest from the fire. I’m not prepared to risk my son by going further into Savannah than we need to. If we don’t get everything on the list, then maybe we reconsider. But I say we go in here.”
The three other guys nodded, Ralph and Gerry looking apprehensive, and Josh shrugged.
“Barney, I didn’t say what we should do one way or the other; all I did was suggest what might be going on. I don’t have a kid down in the hole…”
Don’t think about their faces. Don’t think about their eyes.
“Exactly,” Barney said, mounting the curb onto the grass shoulder at the side of the road. There was a path leading into the parking lot, and he started down it, barking back over his shoulder, “You’re not the one who has to shoulder the risks. We do. So, keep your opinions to yourself. We move out. Come on.”
The muffled crump of an explosion from somewhere inside the store caused them to check momentarily as they ran flat-out and heads-down across the parking lot. There was a burned-out Toyota Land Cruiser fifty yards from the store entrance, and Barney gave the signal for the seven of them to crouch behind it.
Josh looked around the side of the burned metal to the store. There were smashed windows along the front of the building. A couple of bodies lay on the concrete, bellies bloated. They’d been there a while.
“What can you see?” Barney hissed, tapping Josh on the shoulder insistently.
“No movement. The fire looks like it’s at the back of the store on the right-hand side, nearest the road. Can’t see anyone on the roof.”
“Okay,” Barney said. “We go left. Get around the back of the store and go in. Clear?”
Josh and the others nodded.
Barney led and Josh held the rear, looking forward and back as they ran, MP5 on his hip. He remained alert to any movement at all, but they hadn’t seen anyone since they’d left Thunderbolt—and that situation didn’t look like it was going to change any time soon.
You could just run. You could. No one would blame you. You could escape, get away. Leave Trace and his murderers behind.
The children. Don’t think of the children.
He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. He wasn’t built that way.
Protect and serve. That’s what he’d pledged to do back in the day, back when he’d been a cop.
He couldn’t leave those children to die, whatever it meant personally for him. It broke him inside, but he knew he couldn’t make any other choice.
Trace knew exactly what to do to make people do what he wanted. He had his finger hovering over the button, and he was not afraid to press it.
Three days ago, when Trace had proudly showed Josh who was in the below-ground cage, Josh had already picked up on his increased breathing, his sparkl
ing eyes, and the grin on his pudgy pink face. Trace enjoyed the power. Enjoyed turning the screw, and enjoyed exploiting the good in people for his own end.
What good man could leave those kids to burn?
Not this one.
Josh ran on. Towards the store, and towards whatever awaited him there. Away from Tally, wherever she was.
They made it to the rear of the store without incident. A dingy alley backed onto a wide area of dense scrub set between the store’s service entrances and the Harry S. Truman Parkway. Beyond a caged-off storage area was a wide, orange roll-up aluminum goods door, next to a fire exit with a do not obstruct notice on it. They could see smoke rising at the far end of the store, but this section was clear. Ralph tried the fire exit door and it opened easily. It had either already been broken into, or people in the store had used it to escape.
Barney went first, and this time Josh followed him, keeping the 180 degrees to their right under observation while Barney did the same on the other side, and the others came in behind them.
They’d entered the warehouse section of the store. Hundreds of pallets and storage cages ranged around them. Most had had their contents ripped down and opened already. Guts of open crates and packaging materials were spewed across the gray floor. An abandoned forklift sat frozen; its front section speared into a tower cage which had toppled backwards into another. The driver sat dead at the wheel, and the smell of rot coming off him made Ralph gag and cover his mouth
More cages had been pushed over, perhaps by hand, spilling hundreds and thousands of wood screws and galvanized nails. And there under the forklift driver’s rancidity was the clear stink of spilled oil insinuating itself into the rancorous atmosphere. When the fire reached the warehouse and met the oil, the place would go up like tinder. Time was not on their side. Josh looked up at the ceiling of the warehouse, and as if to confirm that assessment, he saw tendrils of smoke convecting through the roof girders and around the dead light fittings.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 7