Supernova EMP

By Grace Hamilton

This action-packed, post-apocalyptic series is now available in a box set of over 1,500 pages!

When civilization collapses only the strong will survive.

Josh and Maxine Standing's marriage is circling the drain. But the fractured family of four has never needed each other more than when a supernova EMP strikes Earth and sends humanity back to the Stone Age.

The shrieks of a dying civilization echo all around as they combat the chaos to reach the West Virginian family farm. However, it's not just a firefight for valuable resources that awaits them when long-festering secrets and betrayals come to light and threaten to permanently tear the Standings apart.

Black and white no longer exist in a post-apocalyptic world swirling with shades of gray, and the Standings must find a way to survive the dark matter hurricane and stitch their frayed family back together. Or face complete annihilation at the hands of a maniacal madman who will do anything—and destroy anyone—in his quest to dominate.

This thrilling post-apocalyptic box set includes all four novels in the Supernova EMP series:
Dark End
Deep End
Bitter End
Final End

Prepper survivalist author Grace Hamilton invites you to step into a post-apocalyptic, EMP-ravaged world filled with strong, resourceful characters, survivalist knowledge, and edge-of-your seat action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Relay Publishing
• Release date: Jun 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201469719

Book preview

Supernova EMP

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

CONTENTS

Dark End

Blurb

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

End of Dark End

Deep End

Blurb

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

Bitter End

Blurb

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

End of Bitter End

Final End

Blurb

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

Epilogue

End of Final End

Thank you!

About Grace Hamilton

Also By Grace Hamilton

Dark End

BLURB

Only the strong will survive when civilization collapses.

Barnard's Star, light years away from Earth, went supernova, and now, six years later the influence of that catastrophe is just reaching our planet. When the resultant EMP strikes Earth, the world is sent back to the Stone Age. Yet it soon grows evident there are worse things hidden in the dark matter hurricane. Unbearable headaches strike without warning. Human aggression goes off the charts. Small disagreements become bloodbaths.

Josh Standing took an oath to serve and protect those of their North Carolina community. That didn’t change when he left the police force to become a probation officer. If only his wife understood his drive to rescue tomorrow’s troubled youth. But Maxine’s greatest concern is to ensure their son survives the cancer that has ravaged his body. As their marriage circles the drain, she takes the once promising athlete to face the final pronouncement of the Boston specialists—alone.

But the fractured family has never needed each other more.

In the immediate aftermath of the EMP chaos, the separated Standings decide to make their way toward the family farm in West Virginia. However, getting to Maxine’s prepper parents is no small task in a world that’s swiftly turning into kill or be killed.

And when events threaten to separate them further, Josh is faced with an unthinkable choice in this thrilling post-apocalyptic series.

1

Two days before the Earth went insane, Josh Standing was trying hard not to bring an end to his own personal world.

Josh made a fist and tried to shift the anger and frustration that wanted to come out of his mouth and stuff it down into the bones of his hand. All he succeeded in doing was thumping the desk in front of him, smacking his knuckles on the satellite radio. He cursed under his breath at the stinging pain.

What’s wrong?

Maxine’s voice was coming through from Boston tinny and thin. Even in that state, her own worry came through loud and clear across the degraded signal.

Nothing, Josh muttered. I hit my hand. Get Storm on so I can speak to him.

Maxine’s sigh came through loud and clear, and Josh sucked on his grazed knuckles as much to soothe them as to stifle the stream of words laced in fear that threatened to rise to the surface.

Twenty-two years of marriage and two kids—Tally now eighteen and Storm twenty-one—had educated both parties enough for them to know exactly which buttons to push despite the agreement not to fight when it comes to Storm. Josh and Maxine argued now in very much the same way as they’d used to make love; hot and fevered, neither taking any prisoners in the pursuit of liberation from internal tensions that had grown over the years. Now the goals seemed to be to hurt each other just as deeply as they’d once wanted to give each other pleasure. Same drives employed, different destinations.

Josh had promised himself before this call that he would not fight with his wife; especially with Storm there. It was a promise he was already coming perilously close to breaking as old hurts surfaced with each sigh coming out of her mouth. It wasn’t that he was blameless in all this, as he knew he wasn’t. It took two to tango, after all. And it only took one to be the bigger man, to apologize, to be the first one to apologize—but Maxine and Josh had pretty much reached the point where no one was willing to go first in pouring the much-needed oil on the troubled waters of their marriage.

Toe-tac.

A sliver of guilt cut into Josh’s heart as the voice on the transmitter changed to that of his son. That Storm was obviously trying to take the potential for heat out of the situation by using the silly ritual greeting they’d developed when he was younger gave Josh pause, and he didn’t offer the expected response right away. When Josh had still been a cop, he’d tried to teach then four-year-old Storm, tic-tac-toe, and although the boy had grasped the game, he could never get the name right. Storm would say Let’s play toe-tac-tic and Josh would immediately reply tic-tac-toe. Over time, this attempted corrective had become their standard conversational opener, and Toe-tac and Tic-tac had morphed into nicknames of sorts. And here, still fizzing with his irritation that Maxine was there and he was here, Josh hesitated. He wet his dry lips, and tried to get back in the game. It had been Storm’s decision to make the trek with just his mom, but it still grated against Josh making him feel raw.

Toe-tac… You there, dad? Has this stupid thing gone down again?

I’m here, son.

Then… Storm’s voice caught a crack, say the words.

It wasn’t like you could hear cancer as a tone in someone’s voice, but the effects of it could be easily identified if you knew what to listen for. The breathiness of fatigue, the shudder of pain, the trembling of uncertainty over one’s personal future. Maxine and Josh had not necessarily become the cliché of a couple who’d stayed together because of the kids, they were damn close. Had Storm Standing’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma not been diagnosed less than a year before, then Josh and Maxine might never have reached the stage of almost becoming that cliché.

Hey Tic-tac, how’s things?

Pretty rough.

Storm was in Boston, eight hundred miles and change from the Standing family home in Morehead City, North Carolina. He was having his final R-CHOP chemotherapy sessions in the Travis Institute. A long way to go for chemo, but the oncologist there, Sudhindra, had been a friend to both Josh and Maxine since their college days, and had all but fallen over himself to help in the only way he could when he’d heard about Storm’s initial diagnosis over the social media telegraph. It’s the least I can do, Josh, he’d said in his high, earnest voice, which had seemed fired out of the past like a flaming arrow of hope on the telephone.

The least he could do.

The least Maxine and Josh could have done, the ex-cop thought, was to set aside their differences, and concentrate on their son’s recovery.

The least.

They hadn’t been successful.

Storm’s treatment had been fraught with side effects and debilitating post-chemo complications. Basically, to poison and kill the cancer, you had to poison and very nearly kill the body. Storm had said to his dad on many occasions that the treatment was worse than the cancer itself. It isn’t worse than dying, he’d say, but sometimes I’d choose that over this.

Once the poisons with the long and complicated Latin names (which Josh was convinced, if translated into English, would come out as ‘Kill-O-Matic’, ‘Vom-a-Cause’, or ‘Die-O-Sure’) had been pumped by Sudhindra and his team into Storm’s body, there would be a sudden and alarming deterioration in Storm’s condition. The first course of drugs some sixteen weeks before, which Josh had made the trip to Boston with his son for, had caused him to think his son had relapsed and been pushed close to death, such was the change in him. The sickness, the pain, the hair coming out in clumps, the pallor and the listless… nothing… in his eyes. He’d raged at Sudhindra, talking of lawsuits and lawyers, and the tiny Indian in the too-large white coat had smiled, taken Josh by the hand, and explained for perhaps the thirtieth time that, This is all to be expected. And that, The body doesn’t enjoy being poisoned, but the cancer in Storm’s lymph and skeletal system will enjoy it even less. You would think that in a time like this, he and Maxine would unite as a team, but watching their son go through all this only seemed to cement their growing disunion.

I’m sorry, son, Josh said now, snapping back to the matter at hand. It’s your last course, though—after this, it’ll be only up. You’ll be back on the track training before you know it.

I hope so. Storm didn’t sound so sure. How’s the vacation?

Josh’s stomach knotted at the word. A Maxine word if ever there’d been one.

Because he knew Maxine was listening in on speaker, Josh had two choices. He could correct his twenty-one-year-old son and say he wasn’t on vacation, and this wasn’t a fun trip; it was strictly business and it was part of his job. Or he could not rise to the bait she’d placed on Storm’s hook and just roll with it.

He chose the latter. Oh, it’s all okay here. Everyone is basically outside looking up at the sky. Are you going out to look? It’s damn beautiful. Never seen anything like it.

We could see it all from the window of the hotel once we pulled back the drapes. It’s amazing. Like a bag of jewels spilled in a corner of the sky.

Josh smiled at the comment; if Storm hadn’t been such a strong runner before his diagnosis, he could just as easily have been a strong and descriptive writer. Now that he was getting a second bite at the cherry of life, perhaps he could be both. His job as an administrative assistant in the accounts department of Morehead Mercy, in thanks part to Maxine being a nurse specialist at the same hospital, was being held open for him. It would give him something to help get his life back on track. The running… that might take a little longer.

Did you see the news last night?

Nope. What did I miss? Josh asked. Normally, he was a more than a little hardcore news-junkie, but out here, there were too many other distractions to keep him busy—distractions that also helped him concentrate on something other than the collapse of his marriage and the illness of his son, if only for a few weeks. And that brought another cold chill of guilt to his mind, which he was determined not to show in his voice.

How did it all come to this? he thought. How?

Storm continued, Professor Halley, the TV science guy, he was going so crazy on Conan last night that they had to cut to commercials, and then he went psycho on CNN and they just shut him down. He was saying some pretty crazy stuff. I thought you might…

Not had time, Storm, sorry. It’s not a vacation. But he kept that last part to himself.

Storm’s voice had an enthusiasm in it that belied his physical frailty and fatigue right now, and it suddenly felt good for Josh to hear that tone in the boy’s voice; it had certainly been a while.

Professor Robert Halley was tangentially known to Josh. A pop-culture scientist who’d used to have his own show back in the late 90s, where he would debunk science myths and promote rational inquiry. He’d been a massive proponent of space exploration when firing tax dollars beyond the Earth’s atmosphere had not been a hugely popular stance to take. That’s when he’d fallen out of favor with the networks, and instead retired to write books and travel the lecture circuit. These days, he often turned up on talk and news segments as a Rent-A-Science-Dude—a man in his late fifties with bug-eyed glasses and hair in a dirty-blond ponytail that made him look like a refugee from the Grateful Dead rather than MIT.

Josh remembered Storm watching him on YouTube when he’d gone through his question everything phase, and considered Halley a great communicator, if a little weird.

He thinks there’s going to be some kind of problem with the supernova.

Two nights ago, a sparkling smudge to the side of Orion’s belt had lit up the night sky like a smeared moon. First, it had been a white dot, which the people who’d first seen it had thought to be an approaching aircraft, but it had grown visibly as the watchers had observed it with increasing concern. When it had become a blurry, pearlescent splotch on the night sky, like the negative image of a Rorschach test, the world’s media had gone into overdrive. Mainly because of the new light in the sky, but also, it seemed, because NASA and all the major observatories of the world had been taken completely by surprise.

Once the telescopes and instruments of the world had been trained on the still growing object, now brighter than the stars around it, jaw-dropping information had begun spreading. Barnard’s Star—at six light years’ distance, the closest star that could be seen in the Earth’s northern hemisphere—had exploded. The supernova, catastrophically destroying itself in a stellar detonation, had thus sent out a wave of light that was now, six light years later, becoming visible on Earth.

The spectacle, and it surely was unusual, had turned almost everyone on the planet into an amateur astronomer overnight. The UFOlogists had called it alien intervention, and fundamentalists had called it a sign from their own particular deities of choice. Many people had been flocking to churches, and a similar number had flocked to bars. Humanity had done what it always did when something strange and wonderful happened–everyone reached for their crutch of choice and leaned on it as heavily as they could.

What was Halley saying? Josh asked, wanting to keep his son talking.

Crazy stuff, Dad. He said the government was keeping the truth secret, and they knew a lot more than they were letting on. He said he had sources within NASA and the NSA who were trying to get the news of the dangers out to the world, and they were being stopped at every turn.

Sure sounds crazy.

He looked terrible, Dad. Never seen him look so scared. Conan asked if Halley’s psychiatrist was as concerned, for a cheap laugh, and then on CNN they cut away from him, and he tried to get back in front of the cameras and you could see security hauling him off screen! It’ll be on YouTube. I can send you the link.

Thanks, I’ll get the popcorn.

Storm laughed. It was a good sound, and made Josh feel so much better. Despite everything, the fact that his son could still laugh, that Josh could still laugh, meant that things weren’t over yet. But they still had a long way to go and the distance didn’t help.

Halley was saying we’ve never had a supernova happen so close to our solar system before, so we don’t know what’s going to be riding the wave behind the light. Conan reached behind his desk and held up a surfboard, and said he was ready to hang ten in the stars like the Silver Surfer.

Josh could almost hear the audience’s laughter in his head as Storm relayed the story. He imagined Halley’s eyes, darting confusedly behind his bug-eyed glasses, his lips thin and his hands trembling on his knees. Public humiliation was the surefire way to prick someone’s bubble, and when you could add gas-lit layers of suggested crazy onto that, all the better.

What stuff riding the wave? Josh asked after a moment. What did he mean?

Dunno, Dad. They never really let him get it out, but he looked… well, he looked terrified.

Josh thought of the others now, outside currently looking at the smudge. The sky over this wilderness was wide and cloudless tonight. The young people in his charge weren’t what you’d call readers of Nature or National Geographic, but even they had been moved to kick back, forget their attitude for a few hours, and look up at the beautiful spectacle high above them, moving slowly across the sky. Josh had been tempted to stay outside with them longer, but his call to Maxine and Storm had been scheduled already, the satellite time booked. Even a tense moment with Maxine was worth it to rub away the guilt he felt about being out here instead of in Boston with his son.

This was what Storm wanted, he reminded himself for the umpteenth time.

Josh knew that he could have bugged out of the trip, too. His boss would have understood. He knew that, if he’d not stuck his heels in and made sure his eighteen-year-old daughter Tally had also come along with him—instead of giving in to her insistence on staying home while both parental units were separated by space, time, and emotional breakdown—he’d have had more than enough reason to back out.

But Josh wasn’t the backing out kind.

This trip had been planned for more than a year. It was important not just to Josh and his bosses in the Morehead City Probation Service, but could and should be important to the young men he’d brought out here.

These were kids who’d been let down their whole lives by their peers, their parents, and, yes, the system Josh was a part of. And as no one else in the department had had the time or the inclination to replace him on the trip… well, if Josh hadn’t gone, then the trip wouldn’t have happened. And under those circumstances, he’d have just become another letdown for those kids, one in the long line of letdowns. Just another blur in their headlong trajectory toward lawless oblivion.

Granted, when Storm had heard all this, he’d been insistent that his dad make the trip. Those kids need you more than I do, Dad, he’d told Josh. And that he’d already been with him through all the others, he’d prefer it if it was just mom this last trip. No fuss. No celebration. Just business as usual was what Storm wanted.

Josh couldn’t stop the cancer himself—and he’d researched and read every medical article out there, called every doctor, tried everything—but what he could do is give his son what he asked for. Some control over his life. Even if it broke his heart.

Still, he’d weighed it up.

But this was Storm’s last course of chemo, and Maxine, a Wound Care Specialist Nurse at Morehead Mercy, was more professionally equipped to deal with the side effects from the constant poison infiltrating their son’s body whereas he was more apt to rail against the unfairness of it all. So he had come out here—Tally almost kicking and screaming, but in the end accepting that she wasn’t going to be left alone to her own devices—and he’d ridden a wave of guilt every damn mile of the journey.

Fzzzt!

The satellite radio buzzed and crackled. The indicator lights flashed, and somewhere inside the box, something electrical made a sick, crunching sound.

The light over his head flickered and the wood-paneled room was plunged momentarily into darkness before, after two or three seconds, the light regained its luminosity and the satellite radio box stopped flashing and burping.

Storm? Storm? You still there?

Silence.

Josh twisted the dials and turned the machine off and on again in the universal answer for all errant tech, but the machine only lit up; it didn’t connect. There wasn’t even the usual carrier signal for him to lock onto. The lights were on, but nobody was home.

A thudding headache kicked in behind Josh’s forehead. A proper ten-tonner. The iron of it kicked against his skull and almost rattled his teeth out of his jaw. He’d suffered migraines as a kid, but thought he’d outgrown them since he hadn’t had one like this since before college. There were painkillers back in his pack, stored beneath his bunk, but such was the eye-squinting ferocity of the pain that Josh didn’t know in the moment if he’d be able to get upright and reach them.

And then, almost as if a switch in his head had been flicked, the dagger of pain sheathed itself softly back into a dull ache and he could open his eyes without wanting to throw up.

What the hell was that? he breathed aloud to the empty room. He blinked a couple of times and rubbed his temple. Perhaps it had been his body reminding him that the last year had been pretty intense, what with Storm, the growing emotional distancing with Maxine, and the trip.

He shook his head as much to clear the pain as to get the truth of how hard he’d been pushing himself out of his mind.

Josh sighed, rubbed his eyes, and got up, vowing to try again later with the satellite radio, figuring Storm would be up a few hours more to observe the smudge hanging with its starry glitter like a party in the sky.

He walked to the door, more unsteady on his feet than he’d expected, and having to lean heavily on the door jamb as he pulled the beautifully tooled and brass-handled door open.

The gust of a stiff but not unpleasantly chill breeze washed over his face as he climbed the ladder. The dark sky above was a dusting of stars, and the Barnard’s Star Supernova cloud, still constantly expanding and brightening, now totally owned its corner of the sky.

Halfway up the ladder, before his head crested fully into the open air, the pain kicked back into his temples, taking his breath out of his lungs in one agonizing thump. A moan of pain leaked from his mouth, and it was matched by one from above. He recognized the voice that had made it, but for one moment, because of the hammering between his own ears, he couldn’t put a name to it. But it was a sound that hacked at his heart as much as the headache hacked at his head.

Gritting his teeth and the handrail as hard as he could, Josh hauled himself up the last few rungs, and then, finding that the effort seemed to have shorn the muscles in his legs of all their power, he pitched forward and slithered like a freshly landed fish out into the open.

For a moment, the smell of the varnished wood close to his nostrils reminded him of college basketball courts or musty museums. Memories burst into bright light in his mind intermingled with the loosened iron ore rolling around his brain like it was a ball made from nails and blades.

Dad… Dad…

Josh felt a hand take his and squeeze its own panic into his bones. He managed to open eyelids that had been stapled shut with pain and look along the planks where he lay. Tally Standing, his daughter, her blonde hair flapping and fluttering in the breeze, was prone on the varnished planking, her face twisted into a mask of agony. Behind her, he could see other bodies slumped over or collapsed, hands on temples, knees drawn up into fetal agonies, some of the boys rolling and crashing into each other as if they were trying to escape their own bodies.

Above him, as Josh twisted his eyes up, he could see the sails and the rigging lit by the deck lights, and he could feel the roll of the Sea-Hawk as it rode the swells of the Atlantic. Up, between the spars and the ropes, between the ladders and the sheets of the clipper’s rigging, the smudge of the Barnard Star explosion now festered in the sky.

It was no longer beautiful.

The glitter and majesty of its spilled jewels had changed completely. It showed a tinge of red, a trace of black, and the sickness of unwholesome green.

Now the exploding stellar object that had awed every eye on the planet was a festering sore between the stars, dripping its infection onto the Earth.

2

Maxine Standing paced the hotel room as Storm spoke to Josh, her arms folded across her body as if she were freezing cold even though the room was a comfortably warm temperature. She was dying for a cigarette—despite the fact that she hadn’t smoked for fifteen years, and not earnestly for another five before that.

Storm, his wispy hair and mostly bald head covered by a beanie, was on the edge of the bed, a smile on his face as he spoke to Josh. His father was somewhere out in the Atlantic, on a vacation with a bunch of kids who didn’t have the discipline or the self-control to stay out of trouble. Storm had discipline and the self-control of a saint. So, what was Josh doing out there with those worthless….

Stop-it!

Maxine paused her pacing and hugged herself tighter.

She knew she didn’t really believe the thoughts running away with her focus. She wasn’t some ‘hang ‘em high’ or ‘flog ‘em ‘til they scream’ numbskull. She was a nurse, for crying out loud. Her job revolved around healing wounds, not inflicting new ones, but that’s what it had come down to with Josh. Big, beautiful, impossible Josh, the love of her life, and yet now he was the man who on some days she couldn’t bear to even breathe the same oxygen as. Josh, who had been her constant companion for over half her time on Earth, and the man who’d lifted her up from the lowest point of her life and helped her to find the key to unlock love again after it had almost been jailed inside of her forever.

The man who had been her partner in raising two wonderful children who were just now finding their own way in the world.

The man who seemed to have given all that up, and grown cold and indifferent. In whose arms she’d once found the greatest peace and safety, but who now made her flinch if she found him rolling over and putting an arm across her in the night. She would lay there stiff. Waiting for him to move, or, if he settled, she’d slip out from under his heavily muscled arm and go to the guest room without a look back into the bedroom that had become a freezer where their love was now on ice, unable to thaw.

Maxine looked out of the hotel window, over the sparkling lights of west Boston. They were five stories up in a hotel just two blocks from the Travis Institute where Storm had had his last session of chemo that day. Maxine knew it would take a few hours for the poison to take full effect on her boy, and that his ability to joke on his phone with Josh about Halley and popcorn wouldn’t be something he’d be able or willing to do tomorrow. Admittedly, the treatment wasn’t as harsh on the twenty-one-year-old’s body now as it had been back at the start of the treatment, when he’d been laid low for two weeks at a time—unable to leave his bed, hair coming out by the fistful, and surrounded by aromas Maxine would usually associate with a hospital ward at Morehead Mercy when there was a bout of Norovirus sweeping through.

Maxine had been happy to care for him at these times, and felt it was her area of expertise. Josh had been scared, and that fear had come out in anger at Sudhindra’s team, or anyone else who’d gotten in the way. But that was the kind of outburst Maxine could understand in Josh. It was partly why they’d made such a good team. She had easily settled into the role of nurturing caregiver while Josh had been the slayer of all things that went bump in the night.

In the seven years since he’d give up being a cop, and taken his social science degree with him into the Morehead Probation Service after what had happened with Cody Zem, Josh had slowly changed from the fun-loving, intimate, and caring man she’d thought she knew into someone who, on some days, she didn’t think she knew at all. Yes, he was still a stand-up guy who did his chores around the house to help out—two people working full-time these days, if they wanted to keep on top of things, had to be sharers of burdens rather than the kind of people who put burdens on their partners. And Maxine worked just as hard, if not harder than Josh. Her hours were certainly longer, and the stresses of her work dealt with post-surgical infections, and healing around compound fractures and, of course, gunshot wounds, while Josh spent his working days helping the kinds of people who made gunshot wounds…

Stop-it. C’mon, Maxine, stop-it.

And at a fundamental level, Maxine could understand the change in Josh, but God… there was only so much understanding to go around when your son might die from cancer and your family needed to be at its strongest, and one of the cornerstones of that family was trying to balance three balls on his nose at the same time. It just wasn’t viable.

Storm’s cancer diagnosis hadn’t, of course, been the cause of that distancing between Maxine and Josh, but it had thrown into sharp relief that which had changed between them.

When Tally was away at college, and when Storm was over this huge bump in his road, Maxine didn’t know how much more of Josh’s distance and ambivalence she could accept.

This could be the Standings’ last stand.

Huh?

Maxine’s eyes flicked up. Storm was looking at the satellite phone Josh had made sure they had so that they could contact him at any time on the Sea-Hawk. The rubberized line to the handset was still draped through the window to the small base station on the balcony, pointed up to the TelSat. Storm had taken the handset away from his ear and was staring at it as if it had just turned into a snake.

What’s the matter?

Line just went dead. Storm shook the handset, thumbed a few buttons, and put it back against his ear. Nothing.

Maxine shrugged. He’s in the middle of the Atlantic, maybe something went down at his end?

Storm gave the phone another shake as if to force a re-connection with his father. I know, Mom. I’m the one who told him to go, remember?

Maxine nodded. I know. I just…

But before Maxine could finish, Storm’s face contorted. His eyes bulged out and he fell face-first onto the carpet with a groan.

Maxine would have dropped to the floor to check his vitals and see what had happened, but suddenly a bolt of pain shot through her head at pin-ball speed and racked up a zillion crazy points in the sparking lights before she could even stagger a step forward.

Maxine was dumped unceremoniously onto her backside by the debilitating pain in her head. Her eyes were fuzzy, as if someone was pinching her optic nerves from the inside of her skull and stopping ninety percent of the nerve signals that converted light from her eyes to her brain. Her heart trip-hammered in her chest.

Mom… Storm groaned from the floor; his voice thin but full of breath.

At least he’s breathing, Maxine thought, trying to recover enough to check on her son.

Some other noises were coming in through the open hotel window. The screeching of brakes. The metallic crunching of vehicles hitting each other on the road.

Women screaming.

Men screaming.

An explosion.

Glass breaking. A siren coming on and then cutting off almost immediately. The lights in the room flicked off and the sudden darkness gripped at Maxine’s innards. Leaning forward and rolling onto her knees, trying to force herself to move while her head felt like it was collapsing under its own weight, she inched her fingers across the carpet and found Storm’s shoulder. His hand reached up, gripping her wrist and telling her that, alongside the steady breathing, he was conscious and aware.

Whatever was happening to them wasn’t anything to do with his course of chemotherapy. No… whatever was happening to them now was being replicated at least in the street outside, and if the echoing crunches of car wrecks at ever-increasing distances, floating up through the hotel window, told her anything, it was that this was happening across a whole chunk of the city. Maybe even further out than that.

Maxine shook her head in an attempt to clear it, and suddenly, like a cloud moving in front of the sun and cutting off its heat and pain, the agony in her head subsided enough that her vision snapped back to normal as the ceiling lights came back on.

Storm looked up. One side of his face had been grazed along the cheek from rubbing against the carpet. There were a couple of small dots of blood, but his eyes were clear and his skin was holding its color.

What the hell happened?

I have no idea, Maxine said, helping her son shakily to his feet to sit again on the bed. The satellite handset had skittered away and lay against the base of the room’s desk. Getting back in touch with Josh could wait, though; first, Maxine had to find out what had happened.

Storm made to rise, but Maxine held up her hand.

Don’t move. Stay right there, she told him. Maxine reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a small pack of tissues wrapped in cellophane, and put them in Storm’s hand. Just put one against your cheek. It’s bleeding.

Storm nodded and began pulling the crackling cellophane off the tissues. From her belt, Maxine took an alcohol gel spray, carrying it was a habit of her profession, and gave that to him also. It’ll sting, but just in case, put it on your cheek, too.

Storm made a face, but nodded.

Maxine took a good few seconds to take in what she saw through the hotel window. It was as if the building had been picked up from Boston, flown off, and then dumped down into the middle of a Hollywood disaster movie set.

The street outside displayed a carnage of vehicles and pedestrians. One white SUV had totaled itself into a crosswalk pole and the airbags inside had deployed. Two blue cars had crashed head-on, as if they’d been attracted to each other by having the same color. One had a window out, and a man who’d obviously not been wearing his seat belt had been flung through the windshield to land bloodily on the hood.

A storefront had collapsed around a green Volkswagen Beetle, and the rider of a Honda motorcycle was sitting next to the still-spinning front wheel of his bike trying to make sense of a leg that seemed to have snapped at its knee and twisted the foot around a hundred and eighty degrees.

Beyond that, street smoke was rising in several places, and intermittent sirens were blaring and then falling silent, and then blaring again before falling silent once more—like the emergency had turned into a monster, and this was it breathing.

Voices were coming from the room next door, too; someone was shouting, and another person was screaming.

Maxine turned back to Storm to see that he’d applied the gel to the side of his face and was now wiping drops of blood from his chin with a couple of tissues.

I want you to wait here, okay?

Storm’s eyes blazed at her. What? Where are you going?

Maxine’s nursing instinct was kicking in. She could feel it smoothing out her fear and getting her head straight. There’s been an accident down there. People are hurt. Badly. I need to go down and see if I can help.

I’m coming with you…

You’re not strong enough. Stay here.

Any reply died on Storm’s dry, cracked lips as, from the next room, loud sobbing became a scream, and there was a rattle and then a thud as if someone had torn a TV off the wall. Then, a male roared, and a window shattered as if something big and hefty had just been thrown through it.

Storm looked at Maxine.

Maxine looked at Storm.

Maxine had no idea what was happening, here in the hotel or down on the street. But the noise of the room being wrecked next door meant that leaving Storm here while she went downstairs to see what she could do was no longer an option.

Okay, she said, feeling wholly forced into a decision she hadn’t wanted to make. Come with me.

Luckily, they reached the lobby just before the next headache hit and sent them to their knees. People were milling about when they got there, panicked and fearful. Some were holding their heads while others were wandering around in a daze, blood smearing their clothes. Before the pain hit and Maxine went down, they saw that a police car had careened into the lobby and landed upside-down, its trip having ripped the sirens and lights from the roof as it came through the huge, plate-glass windows at the front of the hotel and demolished the check-in desk. People had been crushed beneath it. A cop, his body torn and shattered, was half in and half out of the vehicle. Although he had wounds that no emergency room could save him from, his face was contorted and moving, his arm waving listlessly and his fingers spasming.

But even the proximity of death could not save the cop from the brute force of the pain being visited on everyone in the lobby.

Maxine lay on the floor as the headache spiked downward, and she held onto Storm’s hand. The boy had dropped to his knees. With his other hand, he was rubbing furiously at his temple, trying to erase the pain beneath the skin.

Maxine pulled herself up onto one knee as the attack in her head began to subside. She estimated that it had lasted no more than twenty seconds, and although she couldn’t be immediately sure, that seemed a lot shorter than the first attack had been. It didn’t really mean a lot to her now, how long it had lasted, but she was trying to focus on something other than the blood and chaos around her.

Storm also got to his feet. What should I do?

Maxine looked around. She wanted Storm where she could see him, and close at hand. A young girl without any obvious signs of injury lay against a wall by the elevators. She appeared unconscious. Go check her out, she directed her son. Remember your ABCs.

Maxine had drummed first responder knowledge into both her children over the years, and they’d soaked it up like sponges. Tally’s hobbies included parkour and many other urban sports, and although she’d been relatively unscathed, there had been a succession of nasty fractures around her. Storm, a track athlete in the making before the cancer had hit, also volunteered as a steward at Morehead City sporting occasions, and there were often minor or not so minor injuries to deal with.

Maxine considered Storm as he fixed his gaze on her. There was worry and concern in his eyes. She knew that, pretty soon now, Storm’s adrenaline wouldn’t be able to compete with the chemotherapy he’d had that day. Though the worst effects of it wouldn’t hit him for maybe twenty-four hours, checking over the girl would at least mean he could do something now. Before he was no longer able to. If the ABCs are alright, just check the limbs and head for injury and get her into the recover position, okay?

Storm nodded, and with that he walked over to the girl and knelt beside her.

Maxine turned to the lobby at large, trying to maintain the focus she’d managed to find in the last minute. There was a dull throbbing in her head, but it was nothing like what she’d experienced already.

Other people were getting to their feet, some of them collapsing onto sofas while holding their heads. The cop who lay half in and half out of his car had stopped moving.

Priorities.

A young man in a cheap suit with a plastic lanyard around his neck was trapped beneath the wood and metal of the check-in desk. The impact of the police car had torn it away from its moorings, upended it, and sent it crashing into him. He was beneath slabs of wood and steel tubing, and surrounded by smashed glass. His face was cut, and there was a stud of crystal almost in the center of his forehead—surrounded by blood, but looking for all the world like it had been placed there deliberately.

Focus.

Maxine strode across the lobby. In ten paces, she was kneeling by the young man. His lanyard had a laminated photograph of his face on it, smiling, and without the glass in his forehead. His name was Ben Grange, and he worked for the hotel as a ‘Reception Operative.’

Hey Ben, I’m Maxine. I’m a nurse. How are you doing there?

Ben’s eyes moved around, but they focused on her. That was a good sign. He’d taken quite a hit when the cop car had made its unscheduled reservation in the lobby, but apart from the piece of glass from the top of the check-in desk sticking out of his forehead, his brain was working okay.

I… can’t… can’t… move my legs. The police car… it hit the… desk… I was behind it… I don’t know what… happened to Mr. Crane… was checking in…

Another plus. He may be trapped, but he was aware of his situation. I’m just going to check you over; is that okay? I’m a nurse, she repeated.

Ben managed to nod.

Maxine got as far as feeling down Ben’s arms for breaks before a roar of desperate anger and unalloyed hatred ripped through the air, almost as if it was directly behind her. Maxine was so shocked by the sound that she flinched, and her hands contracted on Ben’s arms.

Ben’s eyes widened, but not because she’d hurt him as she’d flinched and squeezed; he’d reacted to what he was looking at directly over her shoulder. Oh my god… he breathed out, and he shook off Maxine’s hand so he could raise a finger.

Maxine swung her head. It took a second to register what she was seeing. A suited man with a shock of red hair, and a face almost as red, was pulling a length of steel frame from the guts of a destroyed lobby sofa. He gripped it and hefted it up with all the determination of a top-order baseball player, and stalked towards where Storm was kneeling next to the girl. Leave her alone, you goddamn pervert! Leave her alone! I’m gonna kill ya! I’m gonna kill ya!

3

The breeze was stiffening across the deck. He’d finally managed to get to his feet, though, and Tally was using him like a fire escape to climb back to hers.

She put a hand to her temple.

What was that? I just… I can’t…

Josh shook his head. I don’t know… but man, it hurt like hell.

The Sea-Hawk’s sails were full-bellied in the wind, and he could hear the prow of the ship scything through the waves at a steady lick. The weather had been kind to them on the first five days of the trip and hadn’t once hit them with more than a kiss on the cheeks of the rigging, but Josh could feel the ship moving a little faster than normal, and there was a definite rise and fall to the deck—one that was just outside his experience.

Bodies still littered the deck, a mixture of the eleven crew and ten probationers who had traveled with Josh from the Morehead City port. They were an assortment of shapes, sizes, sexes, and ethnicities, with ripe nicknames and attitudes to match—Puck, Banger, Lemming, Dotty-B, Scally, Lash, and KK to name just seven—and some, like Ten-Foot, Goober, and Marshal, had been released after serving time in the pen while others had come into the probation system directly from the courts, for supervision in the community. Their crimes ranged from internet fraud through aggravated burglary, drug trafficking, and robbery equipped with knives or other non-ballistic weaponry. None had been convicted or arrested for firearms offenses, but several of the six boys and four girls would be heading in that direction if their lifeline of a gang affiliation hadn’t been interrupted by the courts—and the probation officers like Josh. None of the probationers were over eighteen, and so they’d not been deemed too far gone into their criminal careers to be unable to be brought back from the brink.

The trip on the Sea-Hawk, a built from scratch Baltimore Clipper constructed as a piece of living history, provided team building exercises, not to mention adventurous experiences away from the city and the peer pressures therein. Each probationer knew that if they didn’t keep their noses clean, their freedom could be revoked at any time—and the hefty prison sentence, held off by their compliance with Josh’s program—could be brought back into force at any time.

The kids—and Josh couldn’t get out of the habit of calling them that, because their ages were so close to those of his own children—were also recovering in the same way that he and Tally were.

Devon ‘Banger’ Nash, a broad-shouldered street crook, was rubbing his eyes, and Lash Rochelle was holding her stomach like she’d been kicked. Kimberly ‘KK’ Kyle hadn’t yet tried to sit up, but was drumming her fingers on the deck.

The deck lights, which had been dimmed to their lowest so there’d be no light pollution to interrupt the view of the Barnard cloud, were suddenly turned back on to their fullest, and the stars in the sky were effectively turned off.

Everyone back below decks. Back to your bunks! Captain Rollins, a man built tall and thick as the main mast of the clipper was getting up off his knees, putting his cap back on with one hand as he flicked the deck lights on with the other. I reckon we might have hit a bank of gas or something like it. A submarine shift in the geology, or maybe a vent from a gas container ship. Everyone, get off the deck and below…

Tally looked at Josh. But you were below decks already… did the same thing happen to you?

Josh nodded and waved to Rollins thirty feet away as he began walking unsteadily towards him, Tally hung onto him. I don’t think it’s gas, Captain. I—

Rollins waved his hand dismissively as Josh got closer. He was in no mood to argue. There’s only one captain here, Mr. Standing, and if I say to get everyone below decks, I’ll thank you to follow my lead. Get your probationers below. Now!

Other crew members were coming to their senses. The crew were, like Rollins, dressed in period garb. Voluminous white shirts below sheepskin jerkins, polka dot neckerchiefs, and seafarers’ caps. They were rubbing their heads, and when they realized their skulls were still connected to their bodies, some of them began trying to round up the probationers; others checked ropes and sheets while still another staggered back to the exposed wheel at the stern of the Sea-Hawk, but as if he’d been on the rum and was more than a little worse for wear.

Mr. Mate! Rollins hollered at his second in command, Petersen. Get on the radio! Put out a mayday—we don’t know as yet what caused this. See what’s what in the area. We might need to warn other shipping.

Aye-aye, Captain. Peterson, a middle-aged Scandinavian seaman with, as he’d told Josh, a million years of service in the Merchant Marines, took his thin beanpole of a body past Josh and Tally towards the ladder down to the communications room where Josh had been speaking to Storm.

Josh, with Tally in tow, stopped by Rollins, who was looking up at the three masts towering one hundred feet above them. The breeze was still increasing, and the sails strained at the spars, ropes thrumming. Rollins licked at his lips, his fingers twisting together in front of him and belying the anxiety he was trying to keep locked down. Josh had seen similar behaviors from people attempting to keep a handle on their fears and worries. They might talk the talk, but flicking fingers, a trembling knee, and dry lips being swept with a tongue would give the game away every time. Rollins was a man who didn’t feel as in control as he might like to portray.

I think he’s dead, Captain.

Rollins blinked, his eyes flicking from side to side.

Josh looked beyond Rollins to where another of the crew, Spackman—a wry Jamaican in his early thirties with a wispy goatee and quick eyes—was closing the lids on the face of a broken corpse. It was the body of one of the crew. Kip Daniels had been twenty-eight, and he’d taken a shine to Tally from day one. Tally had enjoyed the distraction, Josh knew, but Kip had been far too dreamy and flighty to really amuse or engage her. And now he was dead, laying in a spreading pool of blood, head at an unnatural angle. He’d fallen from the mast and smashed into the deck.

Tally gasped. Kip… he’d been up there showing off, calling down to me. The headache… it must have…

She buried her face in Josh’s shoulder as Spackman pulled a small length of sail from the repair box and covered the body.

Man… that’s gotta smart, said Ten-Foot.

Dolan ‘Ten-Foot’ Snare.

Of course, it was Ten-Foot.

Ten-Foot was the eldest and biggest of the probationers. He’d been a handsome African-American before serious scars had been visited upon his cheeks by rival gang members. Now, his head was shaved—purposefully, Josh had considered, so that you had no choice but to focus on the scars. And now Ten-Foot’s lopsided mouth moved like a flapping scar amongst the other gouges on his face, his dark brown eyes shifting fast from the shrouded dead crewman to Tally.

Looks like your boyfriend’s really fallen for ya.

Josh felt Tally stiffen. Suddenly, he remembered what Rollins had asked them to do, and fixed his eyes directly on Ten-Foot. Shut up. Get below decks.

There’s only one captain here. Ten-Foot winked, doing a fair approximation of Rollins’ voice. He was one of those boys who, if you didn’t know his past, didn’t know what he’d been doing or what he was capable of, you could really like.

And I’m telling you to get below, mister, or you’ll be ‘Five-Foot’ by the time I’ve finished with you! Rollins was pointing at Ten-Foot, his finger trembling, his eyes wild. Spittle flying from the corners of his mouth.

Since the start of the voyage, Josh had found Rollins to be a hard but fair man, with a twinkle in his eye and a fair sense of humor; but above all, Rollins was a calm man, a man who knew how to maintain discipline among his crew and the probationers. They’d all, Josh thought, come to respect the man greatly as the probationers had settled down, losing the distraction of their cell phones as the coast of North Carolina had drifted off beyond the horizon and the Sea-Hawk had sent her two-hundred-foot hull speeding into the wide Atlantic. Yes, Rollins might be angered and shaken by the unnecessary death of his crewman, but there was something wild about his eyes that didn’t ring right to Josh. He disentangled himself from Tally’s arms and stepped forward.

Captain Rollins, let me deal with the probationers please. They are my responsibility. I’ll see that Mr. Snare…

Ten-Foot, spat Dolan ‘Ten-Foot’ Snare.

Josh plowed on, ignoring the shaven-headed probationer, I’ll see to it that we get below and, once we have discussed the situation, I’m sure he’ll happily come and apologize…

The punch came out of nowhere and snapped Josh’s head back—he fell to the decking as Tally yelled her rage towards the perpetrator. Josh was seeing stars, and not the ones high above in the night sky. He got up on his elbow and looked directly at Ten-Foot. Hitting Josh would send him back to prison without a second thought, and he knew Ten-Foot knew that. He’d thought he was smarter than that, but the kid was clearly upset. Josh would have to defuse the situation as quickly as possible, keep a lid on Ten-Foot until they finished the trip, and perhaps find some way to help him make reparations before Josh made his final report.

All these thoughts had flown through Josh’s mind before he realized with a thud of shock that Ten-Foot had not been close enough to punch him.

It had been Rollins. While Josh had concentrated on Ten-Foot, de’d delivered a thumping blow to the side of Josh’s head.

Rollins, who was now stepping forward to straddle Josh, arms curved like an ape’s with his fists ready to strike. You will do as I order! There will be no mutiny on my ship!

Tally came forward to try to protect her father, arms raised, while Ten-Foot took two steps back. Rollins bore down on Josh, his fist almost whistling like a cartoon as Josh tried to raise his arms and kick out with his feet.

The blow never landed.

Captain! Spackman was holding Rollins’ arm back, the fist just inches from Josh. Josh rolled away and leapt to his feet.

Calm down, Captain, please! Spackman’s face was full of shock and fear. He seemed as surprised at Rollins’ actions as Josh had been. Tally, bless her, moved between Rollins and Josh, fists raised and her legs in a fighting stance. Along with parkour, climbing, and other urban sports, kickboxing was another of her hobbies.

Rollins’ face offered a map of the route to the Land of Rage. He stared incredulously from Spackman’s hand on his arm up to Spackman’s wide-eyed face. And then Rollins swung his free hand at the crewman. Spackman dodged the blow easily as he released his captain and stepped back.

Captain Rollins! Josh had regained some of his composure, and joined Tally by her side. You may be in charge here, but something is happening that neither I nor you understand. You think it might be gas or something of that nature, but I’m not so sure. The one thing I do know is that we all need to calm down, and you need to stop hitting people, or I will make sure you’re arrested for assault by Morehead City PD the second we make it back to port. I brought these probationers here on this trip to show them there are other ways to look at life, beyond violence; I didn’t expect them to be right back in the gutter.

And with those words, Josh checked himself.

He had no idea where the anger in that speech had come from. As an ex-cop, conflict resolution had been one of his major skills back in the police department days. Helping everyone to stay calm under pressure and deescalating a bad situation was never achieved by shouting or making threats, as he had done there. That was Situation Control 101.

What the hell was going on? It was like twenty years of his professional law enforcement smarts had been thrown over the side of the ship in one fell swoop.

And what was Tally doing getting into a fighting stance like that? Yes, she was brave as a lion and fearless as a hungry wolf, but like Josh, she was firmly of the speak first, fight last school.

Rollins’ fists were still bunched, his face flushed with rage. His eyes darted from Spackman to Ten-Foot to Josh in a never-ending motion that seemed to telegraph the fact that he was confused as to who to strike first.

The recovering crew and the probationers were on the periphery of this, too, all looking fearful and confused. Not only had they all been struck down by the crushing headaches, but now the situation was being layered over with near insanity.

Josh took a breath, and began in his head to count to ten to calm himself as best he could before he attempted to take charge of the situation.

He only got to count to six.

There’s no signal, Captain! The satellite set is kaput! Petersen, blond hair fluttering in the breeze, was making his way back across the deck.

Rollins blinked. For a moment, he wore the face of someone baffled to find themselves where they were, as if being forced to wake up from a deep sleep and still wrapped in the tatters of dreams.

Then, Rollins grasped a nearby rope and sagged. He sighed and wiped a hand across his mouth. The moment stretched out and caused a vacuum that someone needed to fill.

Okay, Ten-Foot and the others, get below. Let’s let the crew do their jobs. Josh clapped his hands together like a shepherd with his sheep. C’mon, let’s do this.

The probationers began to move awkwardly towards the hatch that led down into the innards of the Sea-Hawk, their faces still unsure, but showing they knew their freedom might depend on what Josh reported when they got back to shore.

All of them, of course, except Ten-Foot.

Ten-Foot stood his ground, even folding his arms across his chest to make his point. "I don’t