Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End

  Supernova EMP

  Dark End

  Deep End

  Bitter End

  Final End

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, APRIL 2020

  Copyright © 2020 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Grace Hamilton is a pen name created by Relay Publishing for co-authored Post-Apocalyptic projects. Relay Publishing works with incredible teams of writers and editors to collaboratively create the very best stories for our readers.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  They’ll either find salvation or face damnation.

  Screams of agony. Cries of terror. The sounds of a dying civilization echo all around Josh Standing as he navigates the aftermath of this new post-apocalyptic world. All traces of modern advancements have been wiped away by the supernova EMP when he washes ashore on the Georgia coast.

  Alone.

  And when a psychotic gang takes Josh prisoner, he’s torn between grief and gratitude that his daughter isn’t discovered nearby. Josh swore long ago to serve and protect—and he desperately wants to help the other prisoners—but his daughter needs him, too. If she’s still alive.

  Circumstances are only slightly better for Josh’s wife Maxine and their cancer-stricken son as they settle at the family farm in West Virginia. There, they discover Maxine’s beloved mother has been heavily effected with the aftereffects of the supernova, and her battle-hardened father struggling to keep the family together. Even worse, a local militia is targeting the farm for its resources, which causes further dissention in the family over how to handle the attacks.

  When the dust from the firefights settle, the choice between duty and family will be the difference in who is left standing.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  End of Deep End

  Thank you!

  About Grace Hamilton

  Sneak Peek: Bitter End

  Also By Grace Hamilton

  1

  Josh put up his hands.

  Whatever the man behind him said next was whipped away by the surf crashing against the black rocks where the lifeboat had been wrecked.

  Shoved squarely in the middle of his back, Josh pitched forward to sprawl in the sand.

  “I said, who are you?”

  The voice’s accent suggested the owner of it was American, at least. It still didn’t tell Josh where the Sea-Hawk’s lifeboat had been smashed to pieces, but it was a fair assumption they hadn’t made landfall thousands of miles from their launch point in North Carolina.

  “I didn’t hear you ask. The waves.”

  Josh was cuffed around the back of the head hard. “You heard it the second time. Who are you?”

  Josh lifted his chin out of the sand. “Josh Standing.”

  “And what are you doing on our beach, Josh Standing?”

  “We were wrecked here.”

  “We?”

  “My daughter, Tally, and our friend, Poppet. We were thrown off our ship into the lifeboat. The currents caught us and the boat was smashed to pieces. Have you seen my daughter?”

  Josh was cuffed hard by the hand again, then grabbed by the material of his sodden shirt. “Just answer the questions until you’re given permission to do otherwise.”

  The man yanked Josh up onto his knees. Josh looked sideways. The man was blond-haired, in a checkered shirt and jeans. He was perhaps in his late twenties, and a straggly beard made a fair attempt at covering his jaw. He held a snubby Colt Cobra—the same make and model Josh had bought for his wife, Maxine, to hide in a lockbox beside their bed for protection when he worked nights. Back when he’d been a cop. Back before Cody Zem. Back before he and Maxine had drifted apart. Back before his son, Storm—or Tic-tac as he was sometimes called—had gotten sick with cancer.

  And back before he’d lost Tally.

  “I need to find my daughter. I didn’t see her get out of the water. I was knocked unconscious. Please. I’m unarmed, I’m half drowned, and I have no idea where I am. Please. Let me find my daughter.”

  Checkshirt slapped Josh’s cheek with his free hand and his eyes blazed. Josh couldn’t tell if it was with inherent badness or whether Checkshirt was another victim of Supernova Supercharge, but he was definitely on a hair trigger in his head, and Josh hoped that didn’t extend to the Cobra.

  “Get up. Don’t give me any excuse to shoot you.”

  Josh got up. He was a full head taller than Checkshirt, and even though the man was younger, Josh reckoned he could take him down in a one-on-one.

  “Can I put my hands down? Please?”

  Checkshirt leveled the Cobra, but nodded. “Steve!” he bellowed over his shoulder. “Got a live one!”

  From over a grassy dune ahead, a figure came into view and then stomped down through the sand. Steve was African American, mid-thirties, and wearing a Dodgers T-Shirt that did nothing to conceal his physical size. A black Heckler & Koch swung barrel-down from his shoulder, and there was a thick-bladed Bowie in a sheath on his belt.

  Josh could take down Checkshirt in a fair fight. Steve was a whole other ball game entirely.

  “Graves and Stillson have taken the Vancouver 28 out. Should catch up with the ship in an hour or so. Whoever’s piloting, it looks like they don’t really know what they’re doing,” Steve finished, looking Josh up and down, seemingly appraising his threat level in much the same way Josh had done with him.

  “You’re going after the Sea-Hawk? You saw it?”

  “We see everything along this coastline,” Checkshirt offered uncharacteristically, and then addressed Steve. “He’s looking for his daughter and another woman. Anyone found them?”

  Steve shrugged. “No one’s reported back that they have. Maybe they’ll wash up dead later.”

  The words cut through Josh like razors. There was a nanosecond where he thought about making a break for it, but he was shoeless on a wide-open beach up against two armed men. He wouldn’t get ten feet.

  “Please. Help me.”

  Checkshirt laughed. “Help you? Dude, you’re the one who’s going to be helping us. Move out!”

  Josh was handcuffed by Steve, and Checkshirt, who Steve called Harve, marched him away from the surf, the rocks, and any clue as to where Tally might be.

  Harve as a name suggested a middle-aged character from a garbage sitcom Josh might have watched on cable when he was growing up. A paunchy racist guy with questionable hygiene and no girlfriend. No threat at all.

  But
this Harve was anything but. If you cut him in half, he’d have danger written all the way through—not a physical danger, but the danger that comes when morality is subtracted from intelligence. Josh got the impression Harve was as sharp as the knife he’d happily stab him with.

  They trudged up the dunes, through the rough scrub, and came to a flat, windswept area of land that stretched to the horizon. There was a stony track, and four horses being watched over by a young man with raven-black hair tied back in a ponytail. Two of the horses were hitched to a rackety-looking market wagon, and the other two were saddled.

  Harve pushed Josh on towards the wagon.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “That depends on your level of cooperation, buddy,” Harve said without any tone in his voice that suggested he felt Josh was his buddy. “You do as you’re told, and we take you back to the camp to meet Trace. If not, we put you in a grave.”

  Steve climbed up onto the wagon seat, and Ponytail sat himself in the saddle of the nearest horse. When Harve had secured Josh in leg irons in the back of the wagon and padlocked the chains to a riveted rail, he patted Josh’s cheek. “Now, you be a good boy and I promise not to kill you slowly.” Harve grinned at something he obviously thought was a hilarious line and then got up onto the saddle of the last horse.

  “Do it!” he called to the others, and the horses headed off down the track.

  “Anything from the others, Jackdaw?”

  Ponytail shook his head. “Last I saw was them heading towards Maiden’s Point. Carly was bitchin’ about having to go down through the rocks. You know Carly. Always bitchin’ ‘bout something.”

  Josh heard Harve sigh like he knew all too well what Carly was like.

  “Can I ask a question?” Josh ventured when the party had settled down to a silence that was as stony as the track they were heading across.

  “If you must,” Harve said, not looking back.

  “I’ve been out at sea for a number of weeks. This is the first time I’ve seen land since the supernova. Catch me up?”

  Barnard’s Star, light years away, had exploded—the effects of which had taken just a little over six years to hit the solar system, and the consequences of that extrasolar event had hit the Earth harder than a baseball bat in the teeth. All the electronics on the Sea-Hawk had gone down, and a number of the crew had turned into insane murderers.

  As a probation officer and ex-cop who’d been taking a group of ten probationers on a team-building adventure, Josh had gotten a lot more adventure than expected.

  His nineteen-year-old daughter, Tally, had reluctantly come along when she’d rather have been at home partying or up in the mountains climbing. To further complicate matters, his son, Storm, and near-estranged wife, Maxine, had been in Boston. Storm had just finished his last round of chemotherapy and had been on the satellite phone when the first wave of madness had hit. In the last few weeks, Josh had lost emotional contact with his wife, and then physical contact with his son and now his daughter.

  It felt like his whole life had slipped through his grasp.

  “World’s gone crazy,” Steve said, reining the horses forwards into the teeth of a stiffening breeze. The wind was bringing dark smudges of clouds which, promised a needling rain if they didn’t make it to shelter soon.

  Harve didn’t look pleased that Steve had talked to Josh, but he didn’t say anything, just shook his head slightly. Steve faced forward and seemed to not be bothered that what he’d done had rankled Harve.

  Josh could see these men were an uneasy band—if they’d been thrown together since the Barnard’s Star event in tumultuous circumstances that in any way mirrored what he’d lived through on the Sea-Hawk, then the tension between them was understandable. Being chained up in the back of the wagon meant there was very little Josh could do to take advantage of their non-cohesiveness, but his grasp of situational awareness told him to bank the information for now. He might be able to use it to better his lot sometime in the future.

  “So, what’s the situation here?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Jackdaw commented.

  “I do. But please, the more I know, the more chance I have of finding my daughter.”

  Harve laughed then. “Where you’re going, your life expectancy will be what you’ll be concerned with more, not where your daughter is. If she’s dead already, she’s in a better place than you.”

  Josh had no idea what Harve meant, but the laugh, all hollow and void of humor, chilled him sufficiently to still his tongue. There was no way out of the leg irons, and he was a passenger to wherever these men were taking him, so there was no point wasting energy on Harve and the others. Energies he would need, should opportunities to escape presented themselves.

  Well, at least I hope they do…

  The spit of sandy scrub where Josh and the others had washed up turned, after an hour or so, into open grassland. This landscape was cut by a single strip of blacktop looking like it came from and was going to nowhere.

  No signage appeared along the route to give Josh any clue where he was. The rain stayed off, but the air had little warmth. The clouds scudded busily overhead, and the tussocked grass to either side of the road sighed and rustled in the wind.

  Josh’s three captors said hardly a word to each other. Their faces remained set and stony. Perhaps they were concerned about what might happen when they got to wherever they were going, and the reaction of this person called ‘Trace’ who Harve had said he was taking Josh to see. There was certainly something more in the atmosphere surrounding the two men that suggested their silence wasn’t just about the personal tensions between them, not even in the apocalyptic situation they’d found themselves in.

  This didn’t bode well, and as the horses clip-clopped on and rain began to fall, Josh felt even more disconnected from the beach, Tally, and Poppet. Since the supernova and its effects on those around him, Josh had found in his more reflective moments—which had been few and far between—that a sense of dread and anxiety had crept up on him. He would never have described himself as an anxious guy or susceptible to sad thoughts before the supernova, but where some of the crew and probationers on the Sea-Hawk had become murderous and overly aggressive, Josh knew he’d been changed, as well. As if there wasn’t enough going on for him to deal with on the outside; he didn’t look forward to having to battle any internal demons focused and enhanced by whatever had hit the Earth.

  Josh shook his head and held his face up to the rain, trying to use its cleansing sting to wash away those black thoughts bubbling up from his mind. He needed to be at his best if he was going to get out of this, and letting that dreadful tide rise within him wouldn’t be helpful.

  As the rain eased, Steve and Harve looked back sharply when they heard drumming hoofbeats on the road. Josh opened his eyes from where he’d been concentrating on squashing the negativity back down to see a horse and rider almost upon them.

  The rider was burly, with wild black curls of hair framing a bearded face. As he approached, Josh saw the face was ruddy and the lips thin, with a chin that jutted with self-importance.

  Harve turned his mount around to face the newcomer as he pulled his horse to a stop. “Where’s Leif, Carly? What’s the deal?”

  Josh noted again that Carly—the one Jackdaw had described as always bitchin’—was indeed someone who oozed attitude.

  Carly reported back with barely disguised contempt for Harve’s apparent position of authority. “Back at Maiden’s Point. I’m heading to camp to get some ropes. We found someone trapped in the rocks. Got themselves wedged in and can’t get out on their own. Need some ropes and tackle.”

  Harve rolled his eyes. “Why are you bothering? We don’t have time for this.”

  “Harve, you might enjoy casual sadism, but I ain’t leaving a woman to die in the rocks. That might be your way, but it ain’t mine.”

  And with that, Carly kicked his horse forward and was off. Harve shouted after him to come back, but
Carly was gone, clattering across the tarmac like someone’s life depended on it.

  Josh’s heart was clattering like Carly’s horse.

  A woman? Trapped in the rocks?

  All he could think of was Tally, washed up, regaining consciousness, and trying to use her climbing skills to get herself out of the water over the savage black rocks. Tally was an excellent climber and free-runner, but if the fatigue and exhaustion Josh felt were in any way replicated in his daughter, then perhaps she’d slipped… made a mistake and gotten herself stuck.

  Josh thanked whoever was looking over them right now that it had been Carly and not Harve who had found her, because it seemed Harve wouldn’t have bothered to rescue her. He’d have left her to die.

  The party moved forward in silence, the tension still lingering, with Josh feeling that Steve and Jackdaw were trying not to exacerbate Harve’s anger by discussing Carly’s behavior with him.

  But Josh couldn’t help clinging onto the first new leaf of hope in the forest of his dread. He looked back with unalloyed hunger at the route they had traveled, across the windswept landscape, back towards the sea through the pitter of rain, willing Tally to be okay—to be saved.

  When Carly came back past them again at a near gallop, he didn’t even bother to stop and speak to Harve and the others. There were two other riders with him, both with their faces down in the rain, hats jammed onto their heads, ropes and gear slung over their shoulders. The Stetsons blackened with rain, their coats slick with it, and the sudden clatter of hooves all spoke of another time, and another place. As if Josh was looking back down through a tunnel of time to a past where America had been a lawless and dangerous place. The black silhouettes of the riders haring off into the distance like a posse in pursuit of a fugitive, or a gang fleeing from justice, brought home to Josh in one hard hit the uncompromising truth that, while he had been at sea, the country he had known had been upended, and its treasure scattered like garbage.