Supernova EMP Series (Book 2): Deep End Read online

  And his first encounter with this new world had seen him lose everything dear to him, and end up in irons in the grip of a fresh tyranny he could only guess the extent of.

  He had no idea what he would find at the camp he was being transported to, or who this ‘Trace’ would turn out to be, or what awaited him after the cryptic ‘You’ll be the one helping us’ line from Harve, but the doom-laden hollow in his gut was nothing compared to what he felt when the party turned off the track, beginning a descent along a bumpy, unpaved track down into a deepening trough between grassy banks, and what he saw above him.

  If the chill of the afternoon rain and the strained atmosphere of the men around him hadn’t been enough to extinguish the one spark of hope he had of Tally being rescued, then the ten, black and bloated bodies, hung from gibbets by the side of the road and swinging in the wind, snuffed it out of him forever.

  2

  Maxine’s mom, Maria, hadn’t stopped screaming or kicking the walls of her room all night.

  The seething rage emanating from the upstairs of the ranch house came in stark contrast to the surreal attempt at normality below.

  Maxine’s dad, Donald, had given them soup from cans and coffee brewed in the grate of the wood-burning stove. Storm’s eyes had kept flicking to the ranch house ceiling as they ate, the sounds from above shifting from screams to wails to chattering obscenities. Maxine wanted more than anything to go up to the room and comfort her mother, to see if there was anything she could do to help, but Donald had forbidden her with one stiffly raised hand.

  “She’ll kill you when she’s like this. We just have to wait. I can’t even get near her right now. In the morning, she’ll have exhausted herself, and she’ll sleep for a few hours. After that, I can get in, clean her up, and give her some food.”

  Her dad’s face was more lined and creased since the last time Maxine had seen him a little over a year ago. Back then, he’d been a well-appointed seventy-year-old rancher. Hair white but still bountiful, strong-armed and sure of foot. He’d had to be in order to work his two hundred head of cattle micro-ranch on the outskirts of Pickford, West Virginia, for nearly fifty years. Donald was what in the past would have been described as a “man’s man.” He liked to yarn with his buddies on the front porch, drink beer, work hard, and carry himself with proud and steely morality. He liked Johnny Cash and sour mash whiskey, and was himself tall and broad as an oak.

  However, since the supernova had hit, and the effect it had had not only on the people of West Virginia, the population of the nearest town, and, specifically, on the woman he loved, Donald’s tree trunk frame had gotten the look of a hollowed-out canoe. He was still afloat, but he didn’t look like he’d survive a trip through many more rapids.

  Maxine noticed a considerable slowdown in his movements, his mouth pursed with thin lips, his red-rimmed eyes downcast… and he was prone to deep, resonant sighs that either he didn’t realize he was emitting, or he didn’t care who heard them.

  Maxine had never seen her dad appear so tired and worn… until now.

  Looking at Donald and Storm side by side at the table made them seem like they were on the same point in their personal continuum, too—pale, exhausted, and seemingly tiny in their chairs.

  “We can’t leave her like that,” Maxine said softly as Donald ate two mouthfuls of soup before pushing his can aside.

  “I haven’t left her, Maxine. You think I haven’t tried to help her?”

  “No, I’m not saying that—but she needs to take something to calm her down maybe…”

  “She’ll bite off your fingers.”

  Donald held up his hand, and she saw there was a ring of scabs over a healing bite wound in across the palm.

  Maxine looked at the brown crusts with wide eyes. It would have been a shocking enough sight at the best of times, but to find out that her mother had done that to her father….

  “She musta heard you arriving, and it got her riled up. Don’t worry, she can’t hurt herself up there; there’s nothing sharp or dangerous in the room. I have the situation under control, but you hafta trust me, Maxine. You have to let me deal with her in my own way.”

  “She’s not one of your animals, Dad. You can’t just keep her locked up and feed and water her when necessary. She’s my mom,” Maxine choked out.

  Donald’s eyes flicked up. They weren’t exactly full of tears—of course, Maxine had never seen her father cry. Indeed, if you looked up stoic in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Donald next to it—but there was at least a mistiness to the orbs which suggested normally unused emotions were bubbling to the surface.

  “I know she’s not one of the animals. But please do me the credit of knowing I’m looking after my wife in the best way I know how, and I’ll thank you not to interfere.”

  There couldn’t be silence, not with the sounds of distress coming from upstairs, echoing through the house and hacking at their hearts, but the voices around the table fell silent for a while, until Storm, looking from Donald to Maxine, then back to his grandfather, asked how the farm was adjusting since the supernova.

  Donald looked like he was relieved to have something else to talk about, and Maxine felt a little of the tension drain out of the room. “Well, there never was much money to get us started on a huge agribusiness. We keep things traditional here. Organic, the hipsters might call it.” Donald smiled and winked at Storm. “You a hipster, boy?”

  Storm shrugged. “Second gen millennial, Gramps—if you’re gonna start handing out labels. You’ll need water wings if you’re gonna use words like hipster; that’s so ten years ago that its voice has broken and it’s about to start getting interested in girls.”

  Donald laughed, and ran his hand through the peach fuzz of hair on Storm’s head, where hair was gamely trying to grow back after the chemotherapy he’d received for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The illness that had taken Maxine to Boston for treatment in her college friend’s clinic. “Still giving as good as you got, boy. That’s good to know. We’ll make a farmer of you yet.”

  Storm didn’t look like that was the career path he’d be choosing, even if his admin position at Morehead Mercy Hospital, where Maxine was a wound care specialist, hadn’t been destroyed by the supernova.

  “Boy, you can look like that as much as you like. But you’ve seen the way America—and maybe the world—is right now, and it’s not the gunman or the scientist or the politician who’s going to get the world back on its feet. It’s the farmer. We’re gonna need farmers more than we’re gonna need bullets.”

  “You think the situation is going to recover, Dad?” Maxine asked, feeling a chill for the first time even though there was a good fire burning in the grate.

  Maxine’s mother sounded like she was stomping her foot down on the floor above them, rhythmic and incessant. One beat every three seconds.

  Donald’s shoulders hunched, as if the beats were being made against his own spine. “I don’t know how we get back from this, Maxine. No idea at all. There’s been no radio or TV since that night. There’s been no authority swinging by to see if we’re okay, or to even take a census. None of my neighbors have heard anything at all. We’re in the dark. Even after the worst natural disaster, you’d think things would be getting fixed up by now. No one’s seen FEMA, the police, the National Guard, or the Army. Not even the Red Cross. Did you see anything on your way here?”

  “There were some troops back in Cumberland, but they didn’t look like regulars. I think they were operating for themselves because they had the guns and the equipment to be able to do so. I don’t think there was anything like a normal chain of command they were following,” Maxine said, thinking back to her run-in with General Carron in the Cumberland Community Medical Center. If she hadn’t fought like a wildcat in a cage to get away from them, then she wouldn’t have been here to tell the tale. She’d escaped on her way to being shot for looting in the parking lot. That didn’t sound like the kind of authority she’d want to be
under any time soon. She didn’t elaborate for her dad or for Storm, though—she didn’t want to depress them any more than they already were, so she tried to block the noise from above out, however much she ached to see her mother. She concentrated on the practical… for now.

  “Surely, it’s impossible for us to make the ranch work—just the three of us? We’ll need help. More hands.”

  The M-Bar Ranch had been a lot bigger when Maxine had grown up there, but as time had passed and her parents had gotten older, they’d sold off parcels of land to surrounding farmsteads in order to consolidate and make the small business more manageable. But even at forty acres of pasture and rotating crops, the M-Bar wasn’t an easy proposition. And especially now that all of the systems and businesses that fed into it had disappeared overnight. It seemed too daunting. Plus, Donald had always wanted to do most of the work himself, and wasn’t one for delegating to farmhands and the like. “I like to get my hands dirty,” he would say when she’d been growing up. “If I have the breath, I can do the work.”

  Donald nodded. “It’s not going to be easy, that’s for sure, but I’ve been getting by. I have seed to sow for next year’s pasture. As well as the Black Angus, I have chickens, some hogs, and last year we took on a small flock of sheep. It’s not much, but it’s a start. We can talk to neighbors. See what we can consolidate. Gram Tinkerman has a plow we can use with a team of horses. When Maria had calmed, before you came, I was about to go over to his place and talk about working out a plan. He doesn’t have beef, and I know he’s low on seed. We can work this out. And you’re right, we’re going to need a few hands. But for bed, grub, and lodging, I think we can persuade some people to join up with us.”

  Donald, it seemed, had done a lot of thinking since the supernova. He continued, “The bulls did their thing with the ladies, and we’re going to have calves soon who’ll do well on the pasture we’ve got already. The creek is still fresh, and there’s good fishing there.”

  Maxine admired Donald’s ambition, even if there were so many variables to consider. His attitude was comforting, too, but she couldn’t help wondering if his optimism was misplaced. “Not everyone is going to play ball, Dad. We’ve seen quite a bit of fighting on the way here. Once resources get scarce, there are going to be bad guys as well as good guys.”

  Donald nodded slowly. “We can defend this farm if we need to. I’m not afraid to stand up and be counted on that score.”

  Maxine’s eyes settled on the picture of Donald in his fatigues on the wall. A young man who’d gone to Vietnam and come back, like so many others, changed and hardened. A man who had been a corpsman, a combat medic equivalent in the Marine Corps, and had seen and been part of many battles. He’d been with the Corp when Saigon had fallen in April 1975, taking part in the largest helicopter evacuation in history. Then he’d come back to West Virginia to work his father’s farm, marry Maria, and start a family. She knew when he said he’d stand up and be counted just how much of that was the truth, and how far he would go to carry out that promise. He’d already stood up and been counted in one hellish situation, and post-supernova America might prove to be a different but as intense kind of hell for them all to stand up to.

  She was suddenly washed by the coldness of being without Tally, and to a lesser extent Josh. Although Tally hadn’t been far from Maxine’s thoughts on the dangerous journey from Boston to the M-Bar Ranch in West Virginia, Maxine had been focused on keeping one child and herself alive, and it had only been when circumstances had allowed that she let herself think of the perilous plight of her daughter and husband.

  Tally was a strong and healthy nineteen-year-old, in college and wanting to go on to study law. She was a badass runner, climber, alternative sports nut who lived it to the max, and when she wasn’t studying with her head in a book, she could be found monkey-vaulting over street furniture, back-flipping off a brick wall, or dangling five hundred feet over a sheer drop from a ’binered cam on fingertips covered in magnesium carbonate.

  Maxine knew Tally had the smarts and abilities to survive, and as she was on a ship with Josh, that she would at least have a responsible parent by her side. Whatever Maxine’s diminishing feelings towards her husband were—as of late and more times than not, she’d thought about leaving him to his job and his focus outside the family unit—she knew the man would keep Tally safe.

  But the weeks, now nearly two months without hearing from them, leapt up in a little bloom of anxiety in her gut. Knowing that when the madness had struck the U.S., Tally and Josh had been out in the middle of the Atlantic with ten kids chewed up by their upbringing, their environment, and the justice system… well, that gave Maxine pause as she eyed Storm across the table.

  She had already come close to losing one of her children to cancer, and although she didn’t know one way or the other if Tally was okay, she suddenly felt the distance between them playing out crazily in her mind like a reel whirling around because of a deep-hooked game fish.

  The thumping from above came almost in time with the creaking, wooden-cased clock on the kitchen wall, its pendulum swinging in the candle light. Maxine could almost imagine that the one was timing the other.

  Donald looked up at the clock, too. “I’ve made you up a coupla beds in the bunk house. Been using it as a storeroom since the 80s, but the bunks are okay and the mattresses are okay. You’ll sleep better out there.”

  Maxine nodded. She’d had some crazy fantasy about getting back into her old room and sleeping there for the duration. But as it was across the hall from her parents’ room, and the noise being made by her mother was increasing in intensity, she knew she couldn’t sleep there, and if she was going to be of use to her dad in dealing with the ranch and her mother, then sleep would need to be found.

  The bunkhouse was a converted barn, with red-painted wood with white sills to the windows and a steeply raked roof. In happier times, it would have looked like a picturesque addition to the M-Bar, but now as they trudged towards it, it only accentuated the distance between an agreeable past and this unholy present.

  The whimpers and roars from the upstairs window of the ranch echoed behind them as Donald unlocked the bunkhouse door and shooed them inside. Her father had lit an oil lamp, and the space inside was welcoming.

  “You haven’t told him,” Storm said when Donald left them and dragged his sorry shadow across the yard back to the ranch house.

  “About what…?”

  “You and Dad.”

  The memory burst open in Maxine’s head like a dashboard airbag. She hadn’t thought about her disintegrating marriage in forever. There’d been no time. No space for it. She had almost forgotten why she was so angry at Josh––how he threw himself into his work to deal with his own feelings about, first, their growing apart, and then Storm’s cancer. The last time she had spoken to Josh, on the Sea-Hawk satellite phone, they had been cold, harsh, and bitter with each other. She couldn’t help speaking her mind, and Josh couldn’t help pushing back with sarcasm and bile. Was the marriage in a terminal decline from which it would never recover? Maxine didn’t know the answer to that. But Storm pointing out that she hadn’t mentioned it to Donald and hadn’t pronounced it dead maybe meant there was a thready bip-bip still coming from her marriage’s life-support machine.

  “No, I didn’t. How do you feel about that?”

  Storm shrugged. “I dunno, Mom. I really don’t. If Dad shows up, I don’t know if I’m going to have the energy to keep pretending to him, that he hasn’t let me down… let us down over all this. Maybe it’d be better if he didn’t come back.”

  Storm blew out his cheeks and his eyes bulged with the shock of his own words. “Am I wrong to say that? I dunno where it came from. It’s just… god… as I’m getting stronger, I’m getting angrier about the whole situation between you and him.”

  Any words of reply caught in her throat, so she hugged him instead.

  Storm had never once mentioned to her how he was being affected by the way
the Standing family was circling the drain. She had picked up cues from both her children, of course, but couldn’t give them an injection of hope or certainty she wasn’t feeling herself.

  She kissed the top of Storm’s head. “We’ll work it out, Tic-tac. But I don’t know what that will lead to.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “Good.”

  “But I don’t know how I feel about Dad right now.”

  There were many minutes of silence where words would only have cut deeper wounds. So, she waited until Storm was ready, and when he was, she thought he must have settled on something, because he upped and changed the subject, bringing his face off her shoulder and kissing her cheek.

  “Do you think you’re going to be able to help Grandma?”

  “I hope so,” was the best Maxine could come up with.

  So many questions. No answers. Not even the beginnings of any.

  And with that, whatever optimism she had felt upon finally arriving at the M-Bar had now almost completely drained away.

  Storm fell asleep on the top bunk almost immediately, his snoring a gentle and calming counterpoint to the noise Maxine’s mother had been making in the ranch.

  Through a window which looked out into a clear night of scattered stars rising above the black bulk of Alleghany Mountain, the white smudge of the Barnard’s Star supernova hung like a tattered cloud of smoke. It was six light years away—Maxine understood that much about it, knowing that whatever forces it had unleashed when it had exploded had taken just over six years to reach the Earth. She had no understanding of what those processes had been; all she understood was the effects they’d had.