Primal Shift: Episode 2 (7 page)

“What’s the matter?” Larry asked, thinking how nice it would be to be driving that Escalade rather than hoofing it on this bike. If Larry still had his gun, the car would already be his.

They were still shaking hands and Larry finally pulled away.

“I know it’ll sound crazy,” the stranger with the blonde hair told Larry. “But I don’t know my name.”

Larry nodded. “There’s quite a bit of that going around. Listen, I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but it really isn’t safe to hang around and shoot the shit. I’m sure you’ve already figured it out, but half the city’s lost their minds.”

“Where you heading?”

“I’m trying to get my ass out of the city.” Larry said, not sure if he should say more.

“Well, I’m heading to a shelter, if you wanna tag along. It ain’t nearby though.”

“Anywhere but here,” Larry said smiling, pulling up short when the pain from his swollen eye made holding the expression got to be too much. 

They loaded his bike into the back, laying it on top of a host of essential supplies. Cases of bottle water, granola bars, cans of beans similar to the ones tossed at his head right before he went through the tunnel and other boxes he didn’t recognize. There was enough in the back to keep a small family going for a week, and as Larry eased his sore ass onto the Escalade’s soft leather seats, he was sure he was floating on a cloud.

He tilted his chair back and turned to look as the pasty man got in and slid the car into gear.

“So where’s this FEMA camp you’re talking about?” Larry asked, watching empty streets flicker by.

“I never said it was FEMA.” The man pointed up to the sky and the strange lights dancing through thick clouds of black smoke. “Whatever hit us, seems to have taken out the whole country, maybe more.”

Larry sat up. “No shit.” He couldn’t say he was terribly surprised, but there was something disturbing about hearing the other man say it nevertheless.

The man shook his head. “No shit is right. Found a broadcast on short wave radio that said there’s a place for survivors in Utah. That was the only signal I could find. I’m sure with time others will pop up here and there.”

“Utah!”

“I know it’s far, but I can drop you somewhere along the way, if you’d like.”

Larry eased back into his seat. Utah was a hell of a far ways off. Did it make sense to travel half way around the country? He pictured himself alone at Kenny’s cottage, fending off scavengers stumbling onto his land looking to take what little he had. That was no way to live. Safety in numbers. That would be the mantra in this new world, he was certain of it. They’d make bumper stickers. He glanced up at the sky. Nor did this seem like the kind of thing that would just blow over. Deadly as it had been, Katrina was starting to look like an annoyance compared to what happened yesterday.

Larry sighed. “All right, I’ll stick with you for now.”

The man smiled. “We’ll need to look at that eye later. Don’t want it to get infected.”

“I’ll be fine,” Larry said, not wishing to relive what had caused the wound. “So what do I call you then?” He asked, trying to change the subject.

“Not sure,” the man replied, weaving between a station wagon and a mini van. “I did find some initials stitched into my boxer briefs. B. Hud.”

“How about Bud then?”

The man seemed to weigh the idea. “Bud sounds fine to me. At least until things start coming back to me.”

“Hit your head?”

Bud laughed, his Adam’s apple jumping up and down. “Nah, most of the head bumping happened after I woke up.”

There was a thin mark on Bud’s neck right below his right ear and even from where he was sitting, Larry thought it was too precise and carefully made to be anything but the incision from a scalpel. 

“So, you a doctor?” Larry asked.

“Don’t think so, not that I can be sure, but I got this off a guy who was,” Bud said, indicating the oversized lab coat he was wearing.

Bud made a right hand turn and that’s when Larry noticed the tattoo on his wrist, just beneath his left palm. A series of eight numbers. Looked more like something out of Auschwitz than it did the kind of thing kids carved into their flesh nowadays. Larry wondered about the strange tattoo quite a bit as they made their way into the countryside, never bothering to ask, for the simple reason that Bud probably didn’t know what it was either.

Dana Hatfield

Bernal Heights

Dana didn’t need to go far to find a chink in their armor. A few streets over, several cars were parked bumper to bumper, blocking the road, but no one was manning the checkpoint. Wasn’t a surprise either; because Bernal Heights was mostly laid out in a grid, almost all of it built after the great fire of 1906, securing every street that led into the neighborhood would require an army. Dana left the Nissan around the corner and got out on foot. The family house was a quaint light blue deal on the corner of Bocana and Holy Park. The sound of gunfire in the distance made her jump. She thought again about what the two at the checkpoint had said.

Jeffereys is going house to house as we speak.

Dana quickened her step, turning the corner and found the front door to the family home ajar. Her pulse quickened. She unholstered the SIG and used it to nudge the door open.

“Dad, you here?”

No answer.

The house was a two floor job, with an old leather sofa set in the living room and a brown carpet, a frayed path worn between the couch and the kitchen. Since Mom had passed, her father spent most of his time watching 24 hour cable news channels and occasionally taking walks in the park across the street.

She made her way toward the bedrooms. Three in total, one on either side of the hall and the third at the end.

“Holler if you’re here, Dad,” she called out again, but the only response was gloomy silence.

She reached the master bedroom. Things looked normal. Dad had a habit of using the floor as a hamper. She’d tried in vain to get him to pick up after himself. “I’m not your maid,” she’d say, but the old bugger was used to Mom cleaning up his mess. Dana was about to leave when she spotted the blood on the floor. Her heart fluttered like a snare drum. Blood wasn’t more than few drops. But part of it was smeared, as though Dad had taken a knock to the head and fallen down.

If those assholes hurt him...

She stormed from the bedroom and gave the other rooms a cursory glance, without finding any other sign of him.

A new plan was forming in her head. Find Jeffereys and make him tell her what happened to her father. No more than a second later, a paralysing fear gripped her. She hadn’t looked everywhere.

They had a small fish pond out back. Dad had built it after Mom passed. Took his mind of being all alone, he told her. Fish might die here and there, but not all at once. They’d never all leave him alone. The pond itself wasn’t much larger than two bathtubs laid out side by side and buried in the soft earth. It was visible from the kitchen window and that’s exactly where Dana went, a heaviness to her step, as though her body didn’t want her to see what was there.

She glanced out and the feeling in her belly was like free falling in one of those amusement rides. Her stomach rose up into her throat the minute she saw the body floating face down. Perhaps he’d been sprinkling food to the fish when the lights in the sky had come and wiped out every last bit of common sense. Wouldn’t have taken more than a slip to send him reeling into the pond. The fish were still alive, swimming around just like any other day.

Or had Jeffereys done this? Had he found her father in the backyard, babbling incoherently and thrown him into the water? The thought of giving him a proper burial somehow seemed less important than finding Jeffereys, looking into his eyes and finding the truth. She’d done the same to Alvarez and a single word had come back in blinding white colors.

Murderer.

The tears and the proper burial would come after.

Dana was out the front door a second later and that’s when she realized that finding Jeffereys’ wasn’t going to be necessary after all. He’d already found her.

“Drop the piece, missy, less you want us to shred you on your own doorstep.”

Jeffereys’ narrow, pock marked face and slicked back hair made him look like an inmate of Folsom prison. Flanking him were Goatee and the Headbanger Kid. All three had automatic rifles at the ready.

Dana laid the SIG at her feet.

“I told you she’d go around,” Headbanger told Goatee. “Now pay up you cheap bastard.”

Goatee sighed and pulled out a wade of bills, slapping them into the kid’s hand, as though paper money was still worth something.

Jeffereys’ eyes were scanning her up and down as though he’d just won himself a shiny new trophy. The black leather outfit he wore squeaked whenever he shifted. “Now give that pistol a nice kick in our direction.”

She complied and Headbanger scurried forward to scoop up her weapon.

“Did you kill him?” she asked and the edge in her voice only made the men laugh.

The grin on Jeffereys’ face stretched from ear to ear. “Sweet darling, what do you take me for, some kind of murderer?”

Carole Cartright

Salt Lake City Airport?

The sound of thumping was rhythmic and constant.

Boom... boom... boom...

A stabbing pain in her head accompanied each beat and as her eyes began to open, the source of the thumping soon became clear. It was the blood vessels around her brain, a liquid vice grip squeezing her tighter and tighter with every excruciating beat of her heart.

Carole looked about her. She was in a darkened airport gift shop, hanging from the ceiling, luggage straps attached to each arm, cutting into her wrists. Holding her legs were more straps which had been tied to aisles that once contained books and candy, but had since been stripped bare. Her shirt had been ripped open, exposing her breasts. She didn’t remember anything that had happened after she blacked out. But the pilot with the girl on the leash undoubtedly wasn’t too keen on having his balls crushed. She had expected a level of retribution, she had maybe even expected death. If she was lucky it would be quick. With this group, however, it would more than likely be slow and incredibly painful. She could live with that, no pun intended. What she couldn’t have lived with was knowing she’d left Nikki behind to be tortured, raped and who knows what else. Carole had found Nikki’s attempts to hunt through the security office for a gun amusing, but right about now she wished more than anything they had found one. If they had, she’d have dropped the pilot right out of the gate and maybe then they’d all be safe.

From the other room came sounds that made Carole struggle against her constraints. The muffled cry of a girl calling out for help. Sounded like Nikki’s voice, but she couldn’t be sure because of the other sounds she was also hearing coming from that same room, grunts and groans and the prospect of what they were doing to her sickened Carole. But more importantly it enraged her.

The power was still off, making it hard to see further than a few feet in front of her. The knots in the luggage straps were crudely made, as though the person who’d tied her up was doing it for the first time. Crude or not, they weren’t nearly as tight as they should have been and Carole could only assume they must have thought she was nearly dead. Which wasn’t terribly far off.

The back of her head was wet with blood. Must have happened when she was knocked unconscious.

The girl’s voice came again, this time accompanied by a nerve shattering shriek; Carole began to rotate her wrists, trying to work her hand free, kissing her thumb and pinkie finger together as she did. The strap was moving, bit by bit she could feel her wrist slipping out from the knot. A shadow emerged out of the darkness. Wearing a ripped suit shirt and pants, he entered the store, hardly noticing her. He was rummaging through the shelves for food. The man’s hands fumbled onto a bag of potato chips and he tore it open, cramming the contents into his mouth. Next to the now empty chip rack was a showcase for caste iron replicas of The Salt Lake Temple; the Mormon’s holiest of holies. Then Carole’s eyes flit upon the t-shirt rack beside it and an idea suddenly formed inside her head. She wouldn’t need a gun. Not if she could get free.

Her right hand nearly slipped out before she could grab hold of the loop with the edges of her fingers. Her body was being held by two opposing straps, connected from the ceiling and to lose one would mean her body would start swinging to the left and maybe crash into something. That would alert Chip Eater to her presence, which was the last thing she wanted to do. The shop was dark and he hadn’t seen her yet, his face smeared with crumbs, and that was how Carole wanted to keep things.

Chip Eater tossed away the empty bag and continued hunting for any scrap that hadn’t already been devoured. It hadn’t been more than maybe 24 hours since the disaster, but there were still hundreds of people in the airport and many of them had probably been hunting for food since then.

Satisfied there was nothing left to pillage, Chip Eater moved on, picking at the crumbs around his face and shoving them into his mouth.

Carole had used that time to work her left hand free and it was as she dropped to the floor as quietly as she could that she heard the girl in the other room begging the man to stop and knew then for sure that it was Nikki.

It was dark near the ground and Carole swore as she struggled to untie the straps from her legs. Free within moments, she plucked a white “I Heart Salt Lake City” off the hanger along with one of the bronze statues of the Mormon Temple.

Keeping to the inside wall, she made her way through debris left over from the earthquake and subsequent looting and toward the sounds of the young girl’s voice. She wrapped the t-shirt around the heavy statue and cupped the ends in a tight fist. The resulting weapon would act as a mace and would surely crush the skull of anyone stupid enough to get in its way.

The grunting was coming from behind the door facing her and she pushed it open and right away felt something inside her break.