The young man nodded and wiped his watering eyes with the back of a grubby hand. “They didn’t stand a chance.”
“What’s your name?” Tally asked as Henry rolled back the young man’s shirt over his shoulder and began to clean the wound. “I’m Tally, and this is Henry.”
“Greene. Greene Davidson.”
“Were they your folks?”
“No. We met a couple of weeks ago on the road out of Atlanta. Just fell in together.”
“Like us,” Henry said, nodding to Tally.
“Where were you headed?” Tally continued.
Greene shrugged, which made him wince again. “Nowhere in particular. We figured if we kept moving, stayed off the roads as much as we could and away from the cities and towns, we’d be able to forage enough to keep fed. We stayed in isolated places overnight if they were empty. Made camp in the woods if we couldn’t find a place. It was okay… well, as okay as anything in this madness can be.”
Henry finished dressing the wound and rolled the top of Greene’s shirt back up, closing the tear in the material with a couple of safety pins. “That’ll do until we can get you a new shirt.”
Tally was still wrinkling her nose at Greene’s stale body odor. He needed a bath first before putting on a new shirt.
Greene looked up at the crowding trees as their branches snickered in the breeze against the dark sky. “I’d feel safer if we were moving away from here…”
“You can stay here if you like. I’m going back to your camp.” Henry stood up, then pulled his sidearm and racked it ready.
“Why?”
“Waste not, want not. First rule of survival.”
Dawn began to show its sleepy face through the trees as they recovered what they could from the campsite. Greene had come with Tally and Henry because, as he’d said, he’d rather be with them than alone.
The three bodies had had their throats slit and had bled out where they lay. Only one of the women, the one Tally assumed she’d heard scream, had showed any sign of struggle, as there were defense wounds on her hands, and her face was a frozen mask of fear. Eyes open still, mouth wide, with a froth of blood around the lips.
They gave the bodies some dignity by covering them with cut-down branches, and then Henry cast his eyes over what they could recover.
In all honesty, there wasn’t a lot to recover. The group had mostly lived from day to day. There were more empty cans of soup than full ones in a rucksack. Small water bottles which Greene said they refilled as they went. None of them were hunters, Greene told them, or even knew the first thing about fishing, so they’d looted where they could and traveled as light as they dared. They didn’t even have a tent or temporary shelter.
“I was a software developer,” Greene said, recovering his own rucksack and hefting the strap onto his uninjured shoulder. “I wasn’t into the wilderness or any of that crap. But you can’t stay in the cities now. That’s actual suicide.”
Henry agreed. “It’ll be decades before we can get back to the cities. By that time, they’ll have all been burned to the ground. And once everyone has stopped killing each other, who knows how many people will be left to go into them anyways?”
Tally hugged herself, then continued picking through a rucksack that had belonged to one of the women. She found clean underwear, and a number of paperback novels with lurid romance covers. Who had time to read anymore? And who had the strength to carry books instead of food? Tally shook her head. The three dead and Greene were only living on borrowed time anyway––damn it, who wasn’t these days?––but it still didn’t make the deaths any less troubling. If people were out there in the woods hunting in a pack just for the hell of it, their brains twisted by the supernova, then they should take that into consideration when moving and camping.
The trees around the clearing were closely packed and gave a claustrophobic atmosphere to the area where the bodies were now humped under greenery. The dawn light seemed to make the area more threatening than the darkness, though, because now she could see how vulnerable they were to a sneak attack. Too many places for killers to hide and spring out on them unannounced.
“I think we should get going; get a few hours between here and where we next stop. Henry?”
Henry looked up from where he was putting the remaining paltry number of soup cans into his rucksack. “For sure.”
“Where are you headed?” Greene asked. The implication was clear—he wanted to come along, too. There’d been a hopeful twang to his inflection.
“We’re heading north. My grandparents’ farm in West Virginia,” Tally answered, getting up and cleaning the dirt from her hands. Greene’s face showed that he wished she’d offered him the chance to tag along without him having to ask.
It wasn’t that Tally had any real reason to doubt Greene, but there was something stopping her––a sense that maybe someone who was a little on the fat side, with no discernable survival skills or smarts, could be more of a hindrance than a boon.
And then she hated herself for even thinking it. He was a guy in need, and you didn’t turn down a guy in need. What had she become?
Damn the supernova. Damn this world.
“You can come along if you want,” she said.
Greene’s smile rivaled the dawn light.
“No! Maxine, no!”
“It’s just for the night. We take her up to the lodge. I’ll make sure she can’t get free and come back to the ranch, and when Creggan has come and seen the grave, and they’ve done their inventory, then we can decide what we’re going to do next. There’s no point starting a war now!”
Donald thumped the kitchen table and looked up to the ceiling, as if his eyes could drill through the timbers right into the room where his wife was imprisoned.
“If they come here, Dad, and they think she’s infected, they’ll kill her. That’s what they’ve been doing in Pickford! Killing anyone who’s been affected like Mom. They think it’s a disease. A plague. A biological weapon. They might even kill us because they think being in contact with her has infected us, too.”
Through the window, she could see Storm out near the paddock beneath an oak, digging the grave she’d asked him to. Storm was getting stronger by the day. No longer suffering from the chemotherapy he’d received in Boston all those weeks ago. The last course of treatment seemed to have done the trick, and it gave Maxine the hope that his cancer would never return. If it did, in this post-supernova world, then who knew how her son might survive? Storm rested his hands on the shovel and took a breather. His face was healthily flushed as he surveyed the mounds of dirt and sod he was creating.
“Tell Storm to leave the grave open. If Creggan comes here, I’m going to kill him.”
Maxine sighed and reached across the table to take her father’s hand. The years peeled away, and suddenly, feeling the back of his hand under her palm, her mind was transported back in a flash of teenage memory to a time when she would have reached for his hand, and Donald would have stiffened rather than responded. A time when she’d told him she was moving from the farm to the city to study, and that she’d made up her mind and that was that. Donald had stiffened in exactly the same way he did now, as if he were a dam about to burst with rage and anger, but because he didn’t want to lose the control, he held himself in, denying the expression completely. Maxine imagined Donald doggedly putting the stones back into the wall of his self-preservation, which her notion of letting Creggan come to the farm, had displaced. Donald was getting himself back behind his baseline tortured equilibrium in front of her. He wouldn’t make eye contact with her, staring instead at a spot on the wall behind her, his lips thin and bloodless. His eyes filmed over with tears that refused to fall over his eyelids’ lips.
“Dad, please. He’s coming up here tomorrow. I wouldn’t put it past Creggan to come early, maybe even tonight just to keep us off balance. Let me take her. I’ll make sure she’s comfortable, and we can go get her as soon as Creggan and his men have gone.”
<
br /> Donald said nothing. The muscles at the side of his mouth bulged.
He said nothing.
But he didn’t say no.
The lodge was the grand name for a shack that Donald had built deep within the pines and used for years as a place to store equipment and canned goods for hunting trips that had become less of an event as he’d gotten older. The door was still padlocked, and although one of the small windows next to the door was broken—perhaps by a falling branch in a storm—the lodge itself was intact.
Maria had walked alongside Maxine, across the fields and away from the ranch to the closely forested foothills of Alleghany Mountain. The day wasn’t too warm, and Maxine had balked at tying Maria’s hands together with farm rope, but knew there’d been no choice. What was strange was how Maria, still wild-eyed and tousle-haired, had come from the room without incident. It was as if the mere fact that she’d been locked up in the room had been the thing that had angered her the most. When they’d been outside the ranch house and ready to set off, Maria had faced the sun, as if drinking in the radiance of something she hadn’t experienced for a long, long time.
Maxine didn’t want to steer her mother on a lead, and so she’d tied a rope around each of their waists with a yard and a half of linking rope to keep her mother close as they walked—close enough, she figured, to catch her if she made a break for it.
Maxine carried the chain from the bedroom in her rucksack, figuring on using it when they got to the lodge to secure Maria overnight. She wasn’t entirely sure how she would do that yet, but there were enough sturdy beams from when Donald had constructed it to provide a strong fixing point. She’d stuffed tools and fixings into the bag, too.
Maria had been humming to herself as they came into the trees, making childish noises of appreciation as they walked in their shade. She’d drunk from the canteen Maxine offered her—not holding the canteen itself, but allowing Maxine to bring it to her lips so she could sip at the water inside.
Once they sighted the lodge, five miles from the ranch and deep in the forest, it was already afternoon, and Maxine was ready to rest. She’d left Storm and Donald to finish the counterfeit grave, but had been exhausted enough already by her argument with Donald before she’d set off, and felt that tiredness all the more after their five-mile trek up to the tree line and beyond to the top of it. The weather was holding, however, and that seemed to be the only blessing visited upon them today in this hellish situation.
Maxine opened the padlock on the door and pushed it open on squeaking hinges. The inside of the lodge, just a dusty room with flat board walls, was dry and still. There was an empty gun locker affixed to one wall, its door swung open so anyone looking through the window could see there was nothing inside worth stealing. There were a couple of chairs, as well as a small table on which sat a cardboard box of canned meats. There was a wood stove to boil water collected from a brook running down from the mountain about five hundred yards to the west of the lodge, plus a couple of bed rolls tied with twine. There’d never been electricity in the lodge, but there were two oil lamps hung from hooks on a ceiling beam that would provide enough warm light to illuminate the space.
“Donald.”
The first coherent word from Maria that Maxine could remember hearing since she’d come back to the ranch hung in the air for three or four seconds before Maxine could bring herself to respond.
“Mom…?”
Maria was looking next to the woodstove. On a small stool, covered in dust and cobwebs, was a battered Stetson. Maria lifted her tied hands and pointed towards the hat. “Donald,” she repeated.
The hat was one of Donald’s cast-offs—filthy with age and frayed at the brim, but his all the same. And that moment of recognition from her mother blossomed a flower of hope in Maxine’s heart, that Maria might make it through this madness.
Maria walked towards the hat, and, of course, the rope that joined them together meant that Maxine had to follow.
Maria bent, picked up the hat, and held it between her fingers. Running them around the brim as if she were reading the very braille of memory.
But the next words she spoke toasted the flower of hope in Maxine’s heart immediately to ashes.
“Gabriel,” Maria said, her eyes fixing Maxine to her as surely as the rope. “Gabriel Angel gave it to Donald.”
16
The firing was coming from behind them.
Josh and the others ducked as the first ranks of people running from city hall went down in a welter of bullets. Bodies splashed down in their own blood as the machine gun rounds chewed into them. Josh couldn’t help noticing the blissful expressions on some of the dead as they went down, as if they were happy to be released from their torment. Such was the rush of people from the building that the next wave began tripping and falling over the bodies of their dead and dying compatriots.
Josh and his men found their own weapons and set to firing into the crowd of attackers. The city-hallers began to scatter, running back up Bull Street and around the corners out of sight.
It was all over in twenty seconds, and a terrible silence descended that was only punctuated by the sounds of boots thumping over the hood of one of the wrecked vehicles in the barricade.
“Are you guys crazy? Don’t you know coming out here in daylight is going to get you killed?” The voice was female and sounded like it had lived a thousand lifetimes already. It belonged to a thick-set woman who was nearly as tall as Josh. She looked to be in her mid-forties, with thick blond hair tied back in a rag. Her face was streaked with dirt and dust, and her clothes—denim shirt and pants stuffed into the tops of tan leather cowboy boots—had all seen better days.
“No, don’t answer that,” she said, holding up her hand. “Of course, you didn’t know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have done it.”
She’d been followed over the barricade by a man who appeared to be in his thirties, just as dusty and crumpled as the woman. He had a beard you could hide a rat in and was slinging an AR-15 by its strap over his shoulders. He walked stiffly past Josh and the woman to the straggling line of people who’d been shot. Those who were still alive, he dispatched quickly and cleanly with a Beretta pulled from a leg holster.
“We can’t leave them alive,” the woman responded to the look of distaste on Josh’s face. “They try to attack again. They crawl after us. If you don’t finish them off, then when they can’t get at you, you just hear them sobbing all night. It’s… kinder this way.”
Josh shook his head and sighed. The woman had spoken so matter-of-factly, as if she were reeling off a shopping list or what she wanted to watch on the tube that night. “I understand. It’s just…”
Josh didn’t get any further, as he was interrupted by Timothy groaning, resting his hands on an overturned SUV and suddenly vomiting copiously, only just avoiding his shoes with the spatter.
“It got me like that the first time,” the woman said to Timothy.
Timothy nodded as he retched.
Her name was Jayce Barker, and the man was Elvis Mandle. Once Jayce had gotten over laughing, like she said she did every time she introduced Elvis to other people, she led Josh and the others across the barricade and into the store next to Berkovich Jewelry and Couture Pieces. There was a nondescript entrance, a discrete frontage, and a name above the door, Ballantine, which didn’t in any way prepare Josh and the others for what lay inside.
It was a gun store. And not just any kind of gun store.
Beyond the nondescript entrance was a hefty security door which had to be opened with three keys. And through that was a glittering Aladdin’s Cave of weaponry and ammunition. This was the kind of luxury gun store where billionaires sent their assistants to buy silver-plated Purdeys. There were racks and racks of high-end firearms from manufacturers such as the aforementioned James Purdey & Sons, plus Holland & Holland and Westley Richards as well as such Italian manufacturers as Fabbrica Armi d’Abbiatico e Salvinelli and Perazzi. There was a display for a BA338TP hu
nting rifle that looked like it had been made for a science fiction movie, which boasted not only a “Jet Lock Targeting System”—Never miss another shot!—but also a price tag that looked like it could finance a science fiction movie all on its own.
Josh asked Timothy for the map and the instructions from Harve. Ballantine’s wasn’t marked on the map or the scrawled piece of paper. That meant that Harve, Parker, Lacy, and whoever the Harbormaster they were working for was couldn’t know about this place. Looking around the space with its myriad of weapons, Josh thought that if they had known about it, they would have been there already. In spades.
“We didn’t know about this place,” Josh commented, looking around in wonder.
“It’s not the kind of place that needed to advertise,” Jayce said. “It’s the kind of place that, if you had to ask where it was, you knew you couldn’t afford to buy anything there. Come on up. Meet the others.”
At the back of the store was another security door that led to a set of concrete stairs placed next to yet another security door marked “Vault. Strictly No Admittance to Unauthorized Personnel.”
Josh and Timothy exchanged glances as they followed Jayce and Elvis up the stairs. What could be kept beyond this door that needed to be kept away from the treasures in the main store? At the top of the stairs was a cramped corridor leading to a small, wood-paneled office that looked like it dated from before the Civil War. There were the obligatory dead-eyed computer monitors, but also green steel filing cabinets, ink blotters, and leather chairs that spoke of quiet business acumen and whispered conversations. Beyond the office was a large room that, when Ballantine’s had been operational, might have served as an area for entertaining favored clients. Long green leather antique armchairs set against more wood-paneled walls, a long mahogany boardroom desk, an empty fireplace, a drinks cabinet, and dark portraits in oils showing men in historic garb pointing their rifles and shotguns at various flocks of game birds, with their faithful gundogs at their feet to patiently guard a brace of pheasants. If it hadn’t been for the motley crew of Jayce’s people, numbering around ten, and the sheepish faces of the men Josh had sent to Raynesford Jewelry, he might have thought he’d been transported back in time to Merrie Olde England in a time machine.
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 14