In front of them, Crane stood up and sketched an embarrassed wave.
“Sorry,” he said. “Jayce and her boys picked us up before we had a chance to get anything and brought us here. They were going to come looking for you guys, but when we told them where you were headed, they knew they just had to wait for you to fetch up here.”
Jayce smiled and crashed her bulk down on one of the sofas. “Well, aren’t we all a happy family? So, you’re the guys who’ve been keeping us locked down in this city with a bunch of crazies—shooting at us whenever we try to get out. Give me a really good reason why we shouldn’t just shoot you ourselves?”
Josh stood his ground. “I guess if you’d wanted us to be dead, you wouldn’t have saved us at the barricade.”
“Good point,” Jayce said, her face becoming grave. “Crane here told me the story. Luckily for you, we found him first, or we really would have left you to the crazies.”
The mood settled into one of exchanging information and introductions. Elvis and Jayce had met up on the night when the effects of the Barnard’s Star supernova had come down on everyone. She’d been a detective in the Savanah PD and Elvis had worked in Ballantine’s. They’d taken refuge here, as the city had turned to chaos, and collected a number of sane compatriots to do what they could to survive the initial mayhem. When things had seemed hopeless, and it had become clear that the government or the National Guard weren’t going to turn up to bring order, they’d tried to leave the city. But at every turn, they’d met resistance from Parker’s teams of killers. They hadn’t really known who was behind stopping people leaving Savannah, or why they were doing it, but had sure enough understood that no one was meant to get out. “We thought it might be a plague? That maybe we were all infected? But Crane tells us it’s all because some headbanger named Trace Parker is working for a bigger headbanger called the Harbormaster. And we’re basically just crossfire fodder. That about the size of it?”
“If only it was,” Timothy said. He looked at Crane. “Did you tell them about the kids?”
Crane nodded. “But I don’t think they believed me.”
“Sounds like something out of a horror movie. I’m really having trouble getting my head around it,” Jayce said, looking like she thought someone wasn’t totally on the level.
So, Josh and Timothy put the jaws of Jayce and her buddies on the floor as they corroborated Crane’s information about their children, the cage, and what would happen to them if they didn’t return with armfuls of gold and diamonds.
In a world where everything had already fallen off the hinges, hearing about the plight of the children sucked the air out of the room. When Josh and Timothy had finished, all that could be heard was the ticking of a carriage clock on the marble mantle above the fireplace.
The only thing Jayce could think to do, it appeared, was to change the subject. To focus on something, she could fit into her head.
“Salvage jewelry? That’s insane,” Jayce said.
“Not as insane as putting these guys’ kids in cages,” Josh spat. “But there’s no talking to Parker. Believe me, I tried, and I have the bruises to prove it.”
“I’m sorry.” Jayce gave a small shake of her head and puffed out her cheeks. Elvis was looking at his shoes, and the others were expressing their sympathies through their eyes.
“Thanks,” said Timothy. “But because of that, we can’t stay here. We have to get back. Soon.”
Josh filled in some gaps. “I think Parker’s hoping that driving you all back into the city to do all the killing for him will sanitize the place. He figures guys like you will wipe out the crazies, and then he can come in and mop up after you. But it was taking too long, and there’s pressure on him from above. So, he’s been sending people like us in to salvage what we can. But it’s inefficient and costly.”
“We’ve got a pretty good thing going here right now. Plenty of food, more ammo than we can use, and if we can get that vault open, we’ll have enough firepower to break us out of the city past Parker’s men,” Jayce said.
Josh raised an eyebrow. “Firepower?”
“RPGs and grenade launchers,” Elvis said, and the huddle of Jayce’s guys smiled and nodded. “Ballantine’s did a little… arms dealing on the side.”
Elvis looked at Jayce. “But don’t tell the cops.”
Jayce held up her hand in mock surrender. “Elvis, I swear on your grave at Graceland that your corporate secrets are safe with me.”
Elvis smiled and Jayce playfully punched his shoulder—and silence, save the ticking of the clock, came back to the room. As the slanting rays of the horizon-bound sun painted the walls a deep orange, Josh thought it could not be lost on any of them how stuck they all were in an impossible situation.
And then something shifted within his thoughts. Shifted them from the dark towards the light.
He filled the vacuum. “As Timothy said, we need to get back to Thunderbolt soon with the loot, but I think I have an idea how we can work something out for all of us.”
They made it back to Thunderbolt largely unmolested—what roaming threats there were kept themselves to themselves. The real threat to Josh and the others was from Timothy.
“It’s not going to work,” he kept telling Josh as they walked. Crane and the others were theoretically onboard, but Timothy, the dentist, was becoming a toothache in the middle of Josh’s plan.
“It will if you hold your nerve and keep your mouth shut.”
“You’re playing with our children’s lives! You’ve got no skin in this game.”
Josh thought of the skin he did have in the game. His missing, possibly dead, daughter. His son, who knew where and on the cusp of cancer’s damnation, and a wife who—based on their last conversation—might never want him back in her or his children’s lives again, supernova or no supernova. And here he was staying with these guys, coming up with a plan that might release all of them and save their children, when by all rights he should have been miles away from here, looking after his own… As he thought of this, there was a black gall rising in him. As Timothy whined on, and yammered his concerns to anyone who would hear, Josh found himself reaching for his MP5…
No.
NO.
That was not the way. “Timothy, please, you have to understand that, yes, there is a risk, but I’m telling you now, the risk of not doing anything and just letting Parker and the others treat us like coalmine canaries while he threatens to kill your children is much worse. What happens if, the next time Parker sends you into Savannah, there’s no one like Jayce to come out and rescue you? What if you go down? What’s going to happen to your kid then? When she’s just a hungry mouth to feed and no longer has any value as a hostage? You think Parker’s going to leave her alive?”
Timothy’s face showed maximum conflict. He couldn’t refute Josh’s logic, but the plan, such as it was, would require him, Crane, and the others to put their lives on the line. However much Josh thought that Jayce would come through, that wasn’t everything; the weakest link were these men beside him. Timothy and the others. Perhaps the dentist was just articulating what the others were feeling inside.
That the scheme was crazy, and they were all heading for their doom.
“It’s got to be worth a shot,” Crane said, joining Timothy and Josh. “I’m scared, man. More scared than I’ve ever been in my life. But if I don’t do this… like Josh says, it could all be so much worse.”
Josh thanked Crane, and they walked on towards Thunderbolt with his guts hollow, but his head full of possibilities.
“What?”
Harve sat at the table in the room where they’d been briefed before the trip into Savannah. Lacy was nowhere to be seen. Just Jackdaw and Steve in attendance. The others had been sent back to their tents when the group had gotten back to Parkopolis, whereas Josh had been taken in to see Harve and report back with the bounty from the jewelry stores.
Harve had been looking through the bags of rings, bracelets, high-end
watches, and pearls when Josh had told him what they’d found in Savannah. Harve stopped putting a thick gold timepiece on his arm and stared at Josh.
“Say that again.”
Josh knew that he was taking an enormous risk, but it was the only roll of the dice he felt he had left. Harve was smarting from several humiliations prosecuted on him by Trace. He’d seen the way Harve had reacted to Trace’s anger at him, the bruises under his shirt from Trace’s cane. This was worth a shot. As long as that shot didn’t lead to one through his own forehead, or the bodies of the children in the cage.
Josh dropped his head, and spoke conspiratorially. “In the jewelry store on Bull Street. We found a deep vault. Locked up, but with a door of design and quality you wouldn’t expect to find in a store of that size. It’s the kind of door you put on a vault that absolutely must not ever be opened by the wrong people. I have no idea what they had in there. We tried to get it open, but… well, that’s why I want explosives. C4. Dynamite. God, even some black powder. We can get that in there, open the door, and bring back what’s inside.”
Harve was thinking about biting, so Josh threw more fuel on the fire of his humiliation—or, he hoped, of his ambition.
“I reckon Trace… or whoever… might be pretty happy with the guy who authorized the mission to get in the vault. I reckon someone like that might be looked upon very favorably…”
“What’s in it for you? Why are you even offering?”
Harve had bitten, but the hook still might come loose. When you’re lying, Josh knew, you’ve got to stuff that lie with as much truth as you could to make it plausible. Men like Harve would expect most people to think like them. To be driven in the same way. They didn’t consider themselves to be bad guys. They saw themselves as survival pragmatists, not evil. So, Josh told the best pragmatic lie he could. “I ain’t got no real skin in this game. I just want to be allowed to go and find my daughter. I’ll do this for you. You do that for me. Deal?”
Harve didn’t give anything away with his words, but his eyes, bright and wide, were doing all his real communicating. He paused. Thought. Then… “And if there’s nothing in there?”
“If there isn’t anything in there, then I’d suggest we just keep this between you and me for now. Well, and Steve and Jackdaw, of course… I’m sure they can be trusted…”
Harve licked his lips.
“You didn’t have to tell me this. You could have gone straight to Trace…”
Josh began reeling in his fish. “I can see the way the wind is blowing, Harve. I’m not stupid. I can see how much Trace is out of control…you’re not the kind of guy who would have thought up a scheme to put kids in a hole and threaten to set them on fire…”
Jackdaw was looking at his shoes, Steve shifting uncomfortably on his feet.
“You could get in the good books of someone higher up the food chain, Harve. You could… fix everything that’s wrong with Parkopolis.”
Harve slid the watch fully onto his wrist and stared at it for a full five seconds. Then he fixed Josh with a stare so hard, Josh felt it might just pop the back of his head off.
“Okay. I’ll get you the explosives, but if you cross me, Josh Standing… I’ll eat your heart.”
17
Weeks before Gabe and Maxine had had the fight in the parking lot where Josh had intervened, when she’d ended it with the charismatic jock and all-round popular guy, back home in West Virginia her mother had been badly crushed by a bull.
Maria had been caught between the huge animal and a fence when it had become ornery at her presence in the field; she’d been trying to bring a calf around that had been near-suffocated by its umbilicus during birth. Maria had suffered a fractured pelvis, Donald had shot the bull, and the calf had lived.
At the time, Maxine had been a few months into her nursing training and enjoying the freedom of being so far from home, as well as developing her relationship with Gabe. Sure, he’d been the brightest light in any room, and sometimes she’d felt more than a little in the shade, but she’d been growing ever closer to him. She’d known he felt frustrated that she wasn’t ready to take the physical side of their relationship to the level of fumbling on the back seat of his beat-up Toyota, but she’d felt that saving herself for her marriage night was the right thing to do. She’d figured any man willing to wait would be the one to marry. A little old-fashioned, she’d told herself at the time, but sometimes being a little old-fashioned didn’t do any harm.
In the end, the frustration Gabe felt had fully spilled over into rancorous fighting, and the relationship had died in a parking lot outside a roadhouse in Raleigh, NC, where Maxine had gone to study at the technical community college. It had been as far away from the damn farm, the animals, and her controlling father as she could countenance going, and yet still near enough for her to travel back to see her mom.
But before all that, when the relationship had still been golden, Maxine had asked Gabe to drive her home to be with her mother after that accident.
“Isn’t it a bit early to be meeting your parents?”
“No, you doofus. I need to go home. Mom’s in the hospital and… and…”
“And you don’t want to let on to your dad that you don’t have the fare for the bus.”
She’d looked up at him sheepishly. “No. I don’t want him to know that. It was hard enough for him to accept I was leaving home when I did, but if he knew how much of a struggle things are…”
“He’d come down here and drag you back over his shoulder, and probably give you a tanned rear for the trouble?”
“Yes.”
“I like him already.”
Maxine had playfully punched Gabe on the shoulder and the arrangements had been made. She’d begged a few days away from college and her job bussing tables in a Raleigh diner—which didn’t just not make ends meet, but actively kept them apart—and with that they’d made the journey in Gabe’s Toyota, keeping themselves fed on 7UPs and candy.
They’d met Donald at the ranch and, before Maxine had been able to get her words out, Gabe had pulled a plastic bag from the trunk of his car and handed it to Donald. “I know from Maxine that you’re none too pleased about her coming to Raleigh, and you’re probably none too pleased to have her turn up with her beau, so seeing as I thought it might be a good idea to get on the good side of the man who owns the guns on this property, I thought I’d bring you something of a peace offering.”
Maxine had looked at Gabe with some astonishment—not just because of the present, a brand-new Stetson that would replace the grubby farmer’s one on her father’s head—but because he had obviously rehearsed his speech quite a bit. It had been the most words she’d heard coming out of Gabe’s mouth all at once since she’d known him, and to think that he’d done that all for her had lit a fire for him under her heart.
Donald had been disarmed and impressed. He’d tried the hat on, it had fit perfectly, and once he’d dropped Maxine off at the hospital in his truck, he’d gone back to the farm to, as he’d put it, “get to know the boy better.”
And that had been a million years ago. Before the fight. Before Josh had beaten Gabe into submission, and before… before what had happened the next time Gabe had come into Maxine’s life.
Now Maxine was back at the M-Bar, and her mother was up in the woods, chained up in the lodge to keep her away from Dale Creggan and his men from the Pickford Regional Government.
Maxine was trying to keep her mind focused on the difficult discussions to come, but she couldn’t help the flashes of memory that cycled between Maria picking up the Stetson in the lodge and saying Gabe’s name, and those coming back to her relationship with Gabe, how it had ended, and how it had nearly started again. She almost physically shook her head to bring herself back to the here and now. She didn’t need her mind clogged up with all that at any time, let alone now that Creggan, Laurent, Black Hat, and White Hat were trotting into the yard on their horses.
Bobby was standing his ground
, barking as the horses approached. Storm had his rifle over his shoulder as he leaned against the dead truck, and Donald was standing over the fake grave, his shotgun leaned against the oak.
“Can it be?” Creggan asked, getting down from his horse. He’d changed from his suit into 501s, blue tooled boots, and a work shirt that had never seen any work that was covered by a leather waistcoat that looked like it could have been cannibalized from a cowboy fancy-dress party in the Grand Ol’ Opry. “Have you suffered a recent bereavement? Let me first offer my deepest condolences.”
“Last night,” Maxine said. “It happened last night.”
Creggan went over to the grave and studied the words on the wooden cross. He placed a hand on his heart, dropping his head in silent prayer, and when he looked up, his face was a mask of earnestness that could have fooled a saint.
“I cannot tell you how unhappy this makes me. I traveled here especially, to speak to Maria, and now I find this. I am beside myself, Mr. Jefferson, and to you, Ms. Standing. May one enquire…”
“She took her own life,” Maxine said simply, hoping there would be no need for detailed discussion. “Out in the barn.”
“She didn’t like the things that were happening in the world,” Donald said pointedly. Creggan would have to be the least self-aware person on the planet not to pick up the subtext, Maxine thought.
“I understand your concerns, Mr. Jefferson. Did she leave a note?”
“No,” Donald said, and with a finality that sounded like a door closing on an abandoned steelworks.
“Then I’m sure we can only guess at what her reasons were, Mr. Jefferson.”
Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Page 15