Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End

by Hamilton, Grace

  Seeing Maxine again had brought a rush of regret and bubbling hope. Not, frankly, the combinations of emotions he’d have expected to feel at the moment when he saw his wife again after so much time. They’d embraced, of course, but even in the middle of that, he’d still felt the distance between them. There was a wealth of unresolved arguments and recriminations that they just didn’t have the time to deal with right now, such was the situation with Creggan and the M-Bar.

  So, he’d kissed her cheek, said, “We get through this, and then we’ll get through that,” and let her take Doctor Banks to see Storm in the downstairs room they’d converted for him now that he was unable to get up and down stairs, such was the pain.

  If the M-Bar was about to be attacked, Maria would be safest in her room, and so Josh led her into it and set her on the bed. A chain with a cuff at one end was still attached to the wall, and as Josh gently took Maria’s hand to clip the cuff into place, Maria’s demeanor changed as if he’d just flicked a switch.

  A full-throated yell of rage escaped her throat and her nails clawed at Josh’s eyes. There was spittle spraying from her mouth, and he managed to just deflect her hands upward, though her fingers became tangled in his hair, pulling it at the roots and sending bolts of pain through the skin on his skull. Her feet kicked and her knees crunched into him. There was so much sudden momentum in the attack that Josh was rolled over backwards, crashing to the floor.

  “It’s me, Maria! Me! Josh! Stop!” he cried out as her knees landed on his chest, feeling like it was re-cracking his injured rib. Then her fingers yanked at his hair.

  Josh gave himself one chance to get her off as gently as he could. He couldn’t bring himself to hit Maria to stop her attack, so he began by trying to peel her fingers from out of his hair.

  She leaned forward in a screaming rush and bit into his wrist. The pain bloomed hot along his arm, and he felt the skin break open to bleed.

  “Maria! Stop! Please! Stop!”

  And she did.

  Not because of anything Josh did, but because a bullet tore through the window of the room and the board covering it. First one, then a second, a third, and a fourth and a fifth.

  The battle over the M-Bar had begun.

  Maria slumped forward onto Josh.

  For a second, he thought she’d fainted, and then a groan left her mouth that was accompanied by a warm wetness spreading between them. Maria’s fingers had released from his hair. Her body didn’t have the total limpness and lack of muscle tension of a dead body, but she was very still.

  He rolled her off and saw that the front of her blouse was a blossoming flower of blood, filled with air bubbles. There was a rattle at the back of her throat that spoke of the start of labored breathing. Her eyelids flickered.

  “Maxine…” she said. “Maxine…”

  Josh saw the tear in her blouse was spilling blood hard. It was rising like water from a spring, running down and pooling on the floorboard.

  Two more shots slammed into the board at the window, and he heard someone from within the M-Bar returning fire from downstairs.

  Josh could see that Maria was dying. If he left her to get Maxine, there was a good chance she’d die before they came back.

  “It’s okay, Maria… Mom… hold my hand. I’m here.”

  “Maxine…” Maria repeated. “You need to tell him. You really need to tell him…”

  It was the most lucid sentence Josh had heard from Maria since he’d gotten to the M-Bar. Perhaps the shot of the bullet, the blood loss, the closeness to death… perhaps it was overriding the influence of the damned star––like with the person he had shot in the Savannah Home Depot, the one who had thanked Josh as he’d died––was there a moment just before death when the influence of the supernova was relinquished and clarity of thought returned?

  “Maxine… you have to tell Josh…”

  Whatever Maria wanted to get across in her last moments was occupying all the capacity she had left. There was blood streaming from the side of her mouth, her face was creased with pain, and the rising and falling of her chest was ticking down to zero.

  Josh had seen enough people die to know the end wasn’t minutes away, but more likely seconds. Maria’s eyes were milky and dull. Her hand in his had lost all its reciprocal grip. If Josh let it go, it would fall to the floor without any will from Maria to stop it.

  Josh leaned down to Maria’s mouth. “I’m here, Mom. What do you want me to know? I’m here… if you need to tell me, I’m listening… it’s me, Josh.”

  Maria’s eyes fluttered and the pulse in her neck became a tiny vibration beneath the skin. Her mouth breathed a long sigh, and on the sigh came Maria’s last words.

  “You have to tell him, Maxine… about Gabe… You have to tell him… who Storm’s father really is…”

  Tally stumbled out of the kitchen and back into the living-room. Donald, Poppet, and Henry were firing out of the windows on Creggan’s men as they advanced and dodged. But they were running low on ammo, even though they’d brought much of their store into the kitchen.

  Tally had told them she would go and get what they needed from the store in the utility room at the back of the ranch, but as the bullets thudded into the ranch house, smashing glass, cracking into the walls, and tearing through the roof, Tally, keeping her head down as the wall spat plaster and splinters of wood, came to a stop in a moment of utter shock.

  There was blood all over the floor of the living room as if a pig had been stuck and hung to bleed in a slaughterhouse. Where she would have expected to see Laurent on the couch was now a drained, dead thing. Skin white and empty. A red, bloody bib of scarlet painting his shirt the color of death.

  Behind him, bowie knife still in his hand, was Greene. He was smiling at another triumph, his eyes twisting darkly and his mouth open with excited expectation.

  “Ooops,” Greene said, like a kid who’d accidentally trod on a snail after a rainstorm.

  Tally was struck dumb. All she could think of were the bodies she and Henry had found after Greene had run into them in the forest.

  Their throats had all been cut in exactly the same way.

  Larry had given Storm a local anesthetic from a syringe, sinking it into the area where he was going to perform the operation on the boy’s abdomen. He and Maxine had washed up as best they could, then spread the contents of sterile packs and linen over where the operation was to take place. Maxine had laid out the roll of scalpels, forceps, retractors, stitch kit, and cotton wool, all ready for the first incision.

  Storm was sweating from fever as much as from fear. Maxine wanted to hold his hand, but now she was gloved up and observing all the rituals of aseptic technique that she could.

  “I’ll hold your hand when we’re done, Storm, and then I reckon I’m never going to let go of it.”

  There hadn’t been time for any real meaningful words of reunion when Maxine had come to Storm’s room with Larry. The doctor had wanted to get down to business as soon as he could. The sooner he got the appendix out and cut away the infection, the sooner Storm would be on the road to recovery, he’d argued.

  Storm looked away as Larry picked up the scalpel and brought it down to the boy’s exposed belly.

  Maxine had assisted at countless surgical procedures in her many years as a nurse, and she had been calm, professional, and centered throughout all of them. But as the edge of the blade pressed down and opened a white-lipped wound, which soon began to well with blood, she promised that she would trade anything she possessed to make sure her son came out okay on the other side.

  The firing from outside started as the surgeon lifted the scalpel from the wound. Maxine reached in with a swab to wipe the blood from the iodine-smeared wound.

  Maxine’s eyes met Larry’s, which were dancing above his mask as the bullets slammed into the building and plaster sifted down from the ceiling.

  “What are we gonna do?” she asked, unable to keep the rising panic from her voice.

 
“Nothing we can do,” Larry said, picking up a retractor. “He’s open. We’re going to have to finish what we started.”

  Two bullets thumped through the board over the window and zinged across the room. Maxine ducked as the wall behind her cracked open, spitting dust.

  She looked at Storm. His face was smattered with a spray of misted blood.

  “Oh God! Storm! Are you hit? Storm…!”

  Storm’s eyes were wide, his face dotted with crimson, but he gently shook his head. “No,” he said gently. “I’m not hit.”

  “But unfortunately,” Larry said, a gasp of pain preceding his words, “I can’t say the same about me.”

  Larry was holding up his hand. The blue nitrile glove on his right hand was destroyed, the fingers uncovered beneath it suddenly a Chinese puzzle of flesh and bone.

  As the blood from Larry’s wounded hand dripped down onto the bed in thick, slow droplets, Maxine’s world closed down around her to a cold tunnel of pitch-black fear.

  End of Deep End

  Supernova EMP Series Book Two

  Dark End, 11 March 2020

  Deep End, 8 April 2020

  Bitter End, 13 May 2020

  Final End, 10 June 2020

  PS: Do you love EMP fiction? Then keep reading for exclusive extracts from Bitter End and Surviving the Swamp.

  Thank you!

  Thank you for purchasing ‘Deep End’

  (Supernova EMP Series Book Two)

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  About Grace Hamilton

  Grace Hamilton is the prepper pen-name for a bad-ass, survivalist momma-bear of four kids, and wife to a wonderful husband. After being stuck in a mountain cabin for six days following a flash flood, she decided she never wanted to feel so powerless or have to send her kids to bed hungry again. Now she lives the prepper lifestyle and knows that if SHTF or TEOTWAWKI happens, she’ll be ready to help protect and provide for her family.

  Combine this survivalist mentality with a vivid imagination (as well as a slightly unhealthy day dreaming habit) and you get a prepper fiction author. Grace spends her days thinking about the worst possible survival situations that a person could be thrown into, then throwing her characters into these nightmares while trying to figure out "What SHOULD you do in this situation?"

  You will find Grace on:

  BLURB

  The truth will be revealed, whether they’re ready or not.

  The firefight for the M-Bar’s valuable resources rages on in the post-apocalyptic madness, but the Standings are finally standing together… until secrets that Maxine has tried to keep buried come to light. And when they do, they threaten to severe the last tenuous strands holding the family together.

  Reeling from betrayals that cut deeper than flying bullets, Josh Standing follows after his revenge-seeking father-in-law. He doesn’t seem to have much choice, as it seems the Standings are collapsing from within and there isn’t anything that can keep them together.

  And then they hear of a new horror: People are being rounded up and systematically slaughtered or enslaved by a single man leading a train of carnage. He’s ruthless, he’s cunning—and now he has Storm Standing, too.

  To save her family, Maxine will have to come face-to-face with her past and stand down her worst fears if she has any hope of stopping the man threatening her family.

  Before her final secrets become the death of them all.

  Get your copy of Bitter End

  Available May 13, 2020

  www.GraceHamiltonBooks.com

  EXCERPT

  Chapter One

  Josh Standing, who had lost his family and then found them again, no longer felt sure of who they were or how he fit in to their lives. But, for now, he had a more pressing concern to attend to.

  He had a dead woman in his arms, and there were bullets smashing through the windows of the bedroom where he knelt.

  The M-Bar Ranch was under attack. If Josh didn’t defend the property right now, the notion that had been placed in his head by the dying woman—that he was not the father of his son—would be moot. Moot because they’d all be dead anyway.

  Maria, who was Josh’s mother-in-law, had been attacking him when she’d been hit by one of the bullets slamming into the ranch. They were being fired on by Dale Creggan’s men. As she’d died, a moment of seeming lucidity behind her blood-smeared lips had led her to implore her daughter to tell Josh the truth about who Storm’s father really was.

  Now, that rabidly screeching, murderous woman, smothered in the slaver of a rabid madness and the blood from her injuries, looked like the broken fossil of a small bird.

  Josh laid the limp and now pathetic form of Maria Jefferson down onto the floorboards. Moments before, she had been attacking him with all the fury of psychotic insanity—an insanity that seemed to have been visited upon ninety percent of the world’s population. The effects of a supernova that was something like six light-years from Earth had rushed over the planet in a welter of madness and technological destruction, causing savage insanity to well up in billions of minds since that moment.

  Josh closed his eyes, ducking as another bullet spat through the second-floor window beside him, punched a hole through the ceiling and sent out puffs of white plaster and splinters from ceiling beams.

  Josh got up and, keeping low, went to the wall at the side of the window and looked out through the bullet holes in the boards which covered it.

  Creggan’s men hadn’t yet made it as far as the yard, but the pasture beyond the yard, where the cattle had been corralled, was a bloodbath of dead beef. Creggan’s men, advancing, had shot thirty of the animals to use as cover. The rest of the herd had stampeded away from the gun battle. Josh could see the retreating forms of the animals as they ran along the road away from the ranch. From there, some of the terrified animals had broken for the plain that eventually led up to the foothills of Alleghany Mountain.

  Puffs of smoke below told Josh the tale of those left downstairs—his father-in-law Donald Jefferson, his daughter Tally, and Poppet Langolini, Henry Grange, and Greene Davidson—who were defending the ranch with vigor at the moment. Keeping Creggan’s men pinned down for now, too. But it wasn’t a situation that could last forever. Ammunition was finite, and if the quick forms of the attackers dodging behind the dead carcasses and moving about on the hillside were anything to go by, Josh and the others were outnumbered ten to one.

  Josh had a sidearm, a Glock in a holster on his hip, but it wasn’t a gun that would be a useful defensive weapon from up here. Downstairs, he had a bolt action Remington Model 700 that fired hefty .300 Winchester magnum cartridges, which he’d liberated from an exclusive gun store in Savannah, Georgia. He’d placed it with his pack at the bottom of the house’s front stairs. With that weapon, with its scope and range, he’d be better placed to pick off attackers as they made themselves available to him.

  Josh ducked away from the window as the board before him rattled and warped—bullets tearing through it to smash into the far wall of the room.

  He ran for the door, got out into the corridor, and made for the stairs.

  The front range of the ranch house was mostly made up of the large and generous kitchen, a storage area, and a utility room. Donald and Henry had boarded the windows there, too, but left enough of a gap below the plywood to observe and shoot through. Josh came into the kitchen with the Remington already in hand, clicking the bolt and chambering a round.

  Donald, in his early seventies, was tall as John Wayne and wide as the West Virginia sky. He and his shotgun remained focused outside as Josh came in. Henry, nineteen, red-haired, and keen as mustard, kneeled below the windows with his MP5, taking the occasional shot through the gaps beneath the board in front of him.

  Poppet Langolini, a self-described ex-gangster’s moll in her early fifties, blonde and brassie
r than a vintage Italian espresso machine, was loading shells into weapons and changing magazines in others on the kitchen table. She was getting them ready to pass to Donald and Henry as they were needed. She was an excellent sports shot herself—a long-time skeet shooter and hunter—and Josh knew this would only be a temporary respite from her getting back into the fray.

  When Josh came in, bullets were rattling the frame of the house, glass was falling with shattering crashes, and the air was full of dust. Josh couldn’t help being glad the old man was concentrating on the attackers. He didn’t want to meet Donald’s eyes and have to tell him right now that his wife had been killed. This wasn’t the best environment in which to receive the worst of news. Instead, Josh took the Remington to a window and began sighting through it.