Primal Shift: Episode 2 (3 page)

“Great, so can we call the police or the army or something?” Nikki asked.

Alice suddenly didn’t look so sure. “I think so. The real question is, will anyone answer?”

She moved the tuning knob to the right. “First thing I’m gonna do is roll through the frequencies and see if I can pick anything up.”

After over thirty minutes of static, the receiver began picking up a faint signal.

“... 111...93 minutes 0 seconds...”

Aiden lifted his head from Carole’s shoulder, suddenly alert.

Beside them, Nikki opened her eyes and stared intently. “What is it?” she asked.

Alice played with the knob, trying to hone in on the signal. “I’m not sure.”

Larry Nowak

Manhattan, NY

Going back to his swanky apartment in uptown Manhattan wasn’t an option for Larry Nowak. The streets were clogged with abandoned cars and chunks of rubble. A number of fires had broken out during the earthquake and with no firefighters to battle the blazes, thick columns of smoke now chocked the horizon. Even the twinkling pastel lights in the sky, which couldn’t possibly be a sign of anything good, were temporarily lost in the haze. Last night he had found a BMW X5 sitting under the lip of a high rise apartment complex on Pine street, inviting him in with an open driver’s side door and he decided it would make as good and safe a bed as any.

But sleep hadn’t come easy for Larry. Gunshots and screams had played out through most of  the night. If there had been any vestige of order yesterday, they soon disappeared when the sun went down. The survivors were growing hungry and yet with restaurants and variety stores on every corner, Larry continued to witness events that surprised and disgusted even him. A man in an adjacent alley feasting on what looked like a poodle. At one point, a man and a woman staggered along the street. A slab of concrete fell from above, crushing the man into the pavement. The woman, stumbled back a few feet, looking indifferent as she continued walking. The sight reminded Larry of the one story Larry’s father liked to tell about his ‘good for nothing’ son. Apparently, at the age of three, Larry had wiggled from his father’s grasp after a trip to the barber and run right off the sidewalk into traffic.

“Little Larry’s got a death wish, I shit you not.”

The room would erupt into gales of laughter and even young Larry would put on a sly little smile. He would never give the old man the pleasure of knowing the story pissed him off. And it proved to be an important lesson for Larry. No matter what the bastards say, make sure you’re always smiling.

Looking at it last night, however, that memory of his father sipping warm beer from a can, surrounded by fat relatives squeezed into cheap plastic folding chairs on the back lawn, had started to take on a different light. In a way, the image of that woman who’d stared indifferently at the crushed body of the man who’d been walking next to her a second before kinda reminded Larry of that story his sonofabitch of a father loved to tell all the time. Kids are oblivious to death. They only know pleasure and pain in the simplest forms. But empathy, feeling the pain of others, is a learned behavior. The epiphany was an important one and something Larry would tuck away, perhaps for later use. Maybe these folks running around like idiots weren’t cavemen as much as they were children. Slates wiped clean in a single cataclysmic event. But why not him? Why had he, of all people, been spared?

Morning arrived and the streets appeared to be largely empty, except for a lone figure or two in the distance, wandering around aimlessly.

Larry left the X5. His suit was torn in three places and caked with concrete dust from when the cop had tried to make him his bitch. The bruises on his outer thigh and back where the cop’s baton had connected were still smarting, but if those were the worst of his injuries, then he considered himself a lucky man indeed. With both the Glock and the .38 in the front pockets of his suit, he wouldn’t quite feel at the mercy of the next New York City psycho who tried to mess with him.

Larry staggered on stiff legs toward the corner of Pine and Broadway. Cabs, SUVs, compacts. Most of them were open and many of the engines were still running with the driver’s door open, as though he’d summoned a valet to pull the car around. He had his veritable pick of the litter, true, but none of them would do. To make it through the clogged streets and off the island, he’d need a frikin tank. One of the few friends Larry had, a man by the name of Kenny Eton, lived beside a lake just south of Bethlehem, NY. No more than an hour’s drive east and definitely not a bad place to ride out the storm. Besides, if Kenny had lost his marbles, then at least Larry could put him out of his misery and not let the place go to waste.

Larry brought his hand to his mouth and coughed. The smoke from fires was starting to burn his eyes. Through the twists of black smog, Larry spotted something that surprised him. Hard to tell from there if they were male of female, but the person was riding a bike. The half-wits he’d watched stumbling around from the relative safety of the BMW for most of the night hadn’t ridden a thing besides each other, when a half naked couple had started banging like a pair of animals in the middle of the street. But that was one hell of an idea. Bikes were all around, weren’t they? Of course those city rent-a-bikes wouldn’t do. Those were locked up tight and besides, they looked like they weighed a thousand pounds. He would need something light and with a basket, so he could carry some necessities.

Didn’t take him more than five minutes to find one. Dark blue and lying in a heap on the ground, it certainly wasn’t a $10,000 Madone like the one Larry had back at his apartment on Fifth Avenue. The bike also didn’t have a basket, but it did have one of those racks above the rear wheel. He rolled it up onto the sidewalk and leaned it against a street light. Beside him was a fruit market. The baskets out front were mostly empty. Larry removed the gun from his pocket and walked inside.

“Anyone in here?”

No answer.

The darkness seemed to swallow the light from outside. Narrow aisles of canned goods, most of them on the floor. Someone had definitely been in here and perhaps they hadn’t left. He only needed a few bottles of water, some bread and maybe some bananas for the potassium. A bang from the back of the store made him flinch. It sounded like someone had kicked a can in the dark and now he watched it come skidding down the aisle. It stopped at his feet.

Larry reached behind the counter for some plastic bags. He would take them all.

A bottle of pickles sailed passed his head and connected with the shop’s front window, bringing it down in a deafening torrent of shattering glass. Splinters pierced Larry’s right cheek. He brought the hand with the gun to his face and dabbed the wound with his knuckles. This asshole had drawn blood and now Larry was going to kill him. A can of beans came out of the gloom and hit him square in the chest.

Larry doubled over.

His brain was telling him to retreat, but his body needed another minute so he could catch his breath. Larry raised the Glock and fired off three rounds, one for each darkened aisle. A can of tomato paste was next and it missed his head by less than an inch. Gun or no gun, Larry had had enough. He ducked out with a plastic bag filled with bottled water and a loaf of white bread and made a bee line for his new bike.

Screw the bananas.

When he was a safe distance away, he used the bungee cord to secure his things to the bike and began heading for the Holland Tunnel. There were only two more things he’d need to find before descending into the inky darkness. A flashlight and bigger pair of balls.

Finn

Las Vegas, NV

Finn was heading down Rancho Drive when he geared down the Ninja, slowing it to a crawl. Planting his feet on the hot asphalt, he scanned ahead. The engines of a few of the abandoned cars that littered the road continued to purr. The street had two lanes and on either side were large chain stores, punctuated by small neighborhoods with houses that might have looked new yesterday, but after the quake were now leaning to one side or the other. Many of the roofs were missing tiles. Sad and frightened figures sat huddled under the occasional palm tree. Others were scavenging among the scattered cars. It was hard to tell from there whether they had all their memories intact, if they were suffering from a total mind wipe or if they were somewhere in between.

When Finn had transferred from the Land Rover to the bike, a decision that hadn’t been an easy one, he took everything he could carry. There were parts of the road, even on one this wide, that were impassable to any vehicle larger than a motorcycle. He was trading security for maneuverability.

A Home Depot on his right was in the process of burning to the ground and there wasn’t a single cop or firemen in sight.

Shouldn’t be in the city, Finn. It’s far too dangerous.

That little voice again. He knew it was probably right and he couldn’t deny that part of him wished he’d ended up like everyone else. Wiped from the neck up. Sure, denied the basic common sense people learned in childhood, they probably wouldn’t last more than a few days, but at least they didn’t know any better. He removed the letterhead with the address to Tevatron’s regional office that he’d snatched from the power plant.

950 Owens Avenue, Las Vegas, NV

And then studied the map.

Not much further now.

He arrived only a few minutes later. Three dead bodies lay in the middle of the road, their heads split open, red mush spilled all over the asphalt. Most of the blood had already been boiled away by the sun, leaving a dark red crust in its place. Torn shopping bags and jars of baby food were scattered around them.

Tevatron’s regional headquarters was in a kind of strip mall, wedged between a lawyer’s office and a health clinic. Across the street was a Buy Low Grocery store; Finn would swing by for some supplies as soon as he found what he could at Tevatron.

He brought the Ninja right up to the office door and killed the engine. The building itself was small and industrial. Aluminum roofing ran the length of the structure with a small overhang so people could hide from the scorching sun. The bars on the windows and doors told him he might be out of luck.

He pulled on the office door and to his surprise, it swung open easily. Inside, the air was hot and stale. The AC had been off since yesterday and Finn found himself sweating in his coverall. In his right hand was the pipe he’d carried since waking up underground with no memory of who the hell he was or how he’d gotten there. Thin strips of light bled in through the front entrance, just enough to make out a desk against the far wall and a bookcase that had fallen over during the quake. Other rooms or offices branched off on his right and left, but this was where he would start his search. First, he needed to find out if anyone here still had their wits about them.

He called out, his voice returning to him sounding dull in the dead air.

He glanced down at the eight numbers tattooed along his left forearm. 92574301.

The answer to that little riddle was in here somewhere, he was certain of it.

On the desk was a computer and behind that a four drawer file cabinet. Of course, the power was off so the computer wouldn’t be any good to him, which was a shame since that was where most of the good stuff was probably stored.

A back window lit the papers scattered across the desk and Finn began to search through them. Purchase orders for solar panels and heat exchangers, disciplinary action on employees who had missed three days’ work this month, the need for more panels to keep up with the growing power demand. The irony wasn’t lost on Finn that the office for a company that made their livelihood building solar plants hadn’t thought to install panels on the roof.

All seemed rather run of the mill. Nothing too different from the crap he’d found in the trailer before leaving the plant.

He went to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer. More work and purchase orders. Toner for the fax machine, reams of paper for the printer and then...

A memo, dated July 1st, 2017.

To:   All departments

From:   Dr. Harry Thomson

Subject:     Release form submittal

Please be advised that all release forms procured from test subjects have yet to be remanded to my office. The deadline is no later than the end of the month.

Subjects:

Blackwood, Joanne   (received)

Inn, Francis   (received)

Johnson, Silvia   (still outstanding)

Signed,

Dr. Harry Thomson

Head of Research and Development

Tevatron Industries

Finn read the paper over twice and each time his eyes caught on the second name.

Francis Inn.

He unzipped his coverall and looked at the tag on his underwear.

F.INN

Francis. My name is Francis.

No sooner had the thought formed in his mind than he realized how much he hated the name.
Francis. Sounds like someone with a speech impediment who wears loafers. No, I’ll stick to Finn, thank you very much.

With one problem solved, he turned to another. The consent forms. The memo said his had been received which told him two things. First, at some point he must have signed a paper allowing him to participate in whatever landed him in the vat full of K-Y jelly. Two, his consent form probably wasn’t here anymore. Nevertheless, Finn took the next few minutes to leaf through the file cabinet for anything else which may prove useful, but came up empty. The Head of Research and Development for Tevatron. Harry Thomson. This was the guy he needed to talk to.

A noise from the other room made Finn’s head snap in that direction. It was coming from an office on his right and he picked up the pipe and headed slowly in that direction. There was no way someone in here hadn’t heard him riffling through the company’s file cabinets.

Finn nudged open the door where the noise had come from and stopped dead. Standing before him was a woman with long stringy hair, dirty and slicked forward, covering her face. He could see her chest heaving with fear. She was wearing a skirt and blouse, both torn and marked with dark stains that might have been blood. She didn’t look like someone who had wandered in off the street. Finn guessed right away she must have worked here, but the way she was breathing and that hair, well she looked scared shitless.