Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 16

  The crying continued as Dana worked to free her wrists. The odor down here wasn’t the usual mustiness that accompanied every basement in the country. At first the scent was soft and sweet, but then it was in your nostrils, and there was no mistaking it. Someone down here had died.

  It was too dark to tell who, but it didn’t matter. Her nose knew the truth.

  She was still struggling to untie her hands when the door at the top of the stairs swung open and a pair of heavy boots came trudging down the steps. They weren’t in a hurry or nervous. Their pace was careful and confident, and Dana knew, even before seeing his face, who it was.

  Jeffereys.

  He stopped before her.

  “Lost your blindfold?” His narrow, twitching lips were grinning down at her through the darkness.

  “What are all these people doing down here?”

  “Questions, questions, questions. Are you always this way?”

  “What way, pissed off that I’m being held against my will?”

  “You’re a feisty girl. I liked that about you the moment you stepped outta that house with a gun in your hand. I think every woman should have a gun.”

  Dana nodded. “I’d like one right now.”

  “Bet you would,” Jeffereys glanced over at the young girl huddled in the corner and then back at Dana. The sight didn’t seem to faze him one bit. “You hungry?”

  “I don’t want anything from you.”

  “How noble.” He reached down, cupped a hand under her elbow and helped her stand. “I’m not a monster.”

  Dana remained quiet.

  He untied her arms just long enough to free her from the pole. “Now don’t try anything stupid. I got two young bucks upstairs just waiting for a chance to shoot you dead.”

  He took her into a kitchen. Goatee and Head-banger were boiling pasta over a gas oven. On the element beside it was spaghetti sauce. The aroma made her mouth water. What a contrast from the foul air downstairs. Head-banger saw the hunger written all over her face and let out a cackle. He reached over and swiped a finger under her bottom lip.

  “She’s drooling, look at her.”

  Jeffereys slapped his hand away.

  “You two quit fucking around and finish making dinner.” He turned to Dana. “Don’t mind them,” he said apologetically as he led her into the living room. “You know how the saying goes: You can take the boy out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the boy.”

  Dana remained quiet. Her attention was focused on a dress that was laid out over the sofa. Pink, knee length with lots of frills around the edges. Looked like a prom dress from the ‘80s.

  “You like it?”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  Her reply made the smile on Jeffereys’ face disappear. The back of his hand struck Dana’s cheek with a stinging burst of pain. Blood dribbled from her lip into her mouth. Tasted like pennies.

  “Let’s try this again. Do you like the dress I bought you?” His eyes were cold and twinkling with the shards of moonlight.

  “It’s great,” she said without a hint of enthusiasm. She was thinking about her SIG and how much she’d love to get her hands on it.

  “That’s more like it. Didn’t your mama ever teach you to be polite when someone offers you a gift?”

  “What is it you want?” Dana asked.

  He paused. “Oh, what a naïve girl you are. Let’s start with dinner and see where it goes from there.”

  A few minutes later, Dana and Jeffereys were seated at opposite ends of the dining room table. Head-banger and Goatee were serving each of them soggy pasta and canned spaghetti sauce, both of them unable to keep from staring at the pink frilly dress she was now wearing – that she’d been forced to wear.

  “Look but don’t touch, Boys, just remember that.”

  Head-banger giggled.

  This kind of slop the boys were serving would normally have made her gag, but to the hunger pains ripping through her belly, the meal was Michelin-star quality. Dana dove in, shoveling the food into her mouth as fast as she could. Spaghetti sauce dotted her face and her pink dress. She stopped and looked up. The other two were gone, only Jeffereys remained, and he was staring at her with amusement.

  “Aren’t you gonna wait to say grace?” he asked.

  Dana laid her fork down on the plate with a gentle clank and then folded her hands together.

  “Dear Lord, bless this food and keep us strong in turbulent times, amen.” He brought his glass of red wine to his lips, emptied it, and poured himself another. “Things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better. I was damned positive when it all happened it’d be like the quake in ‘89. Sure knocked the hell out of us, no doubt about that, but we recouped real quick, didn’t we?”

  Dana was eating again, trying not to cram it all in at once. She wanted to let him talk. Let him feel comfortable.

  “You gonna drink your wine?” He asked. “It’s a Château de Beaucastel. Eventually those savages out there will figure out how to open the quality stuff, and their uncouth tongues will guzzle it, with no ability to savor the beauty. This may be the last bottle we drink.”

  “The Army’s going to show up and fix ... ”

  Jeffereys cut in with a blast of raw and genuine laughter. “You know how I know you’re wrong, Missy? We rigged up a generator to search for those emergency broadcast channels they show on TV, then we scanned long and short wave radio. There’s no one out there.”

  You’re wrong, Asshole. She wanted to voice the thought, but bit her tongue. Back at Fort Baker, both she and Alvarez had heard the voice calling out coordinates to survivors. Some kind of camp or rendezvous point, a few miles north of Salt Lake City, maybe a full day’s drive. That was all. Jeffereys was wrong, but she didn’t have any intention of setting him straight on the matter.

  He downed another glass and smiled, his teeth beginning to stain red from the wine. “I’m sure somewhere a couple of dingbats stole themselves a Brinks truck and loaded it up with every nickel they could find, just waiting for the day when the world will come back online.”

  “It’s only been a day or two.”

  Jeffereys smacked the table. “Haven’t you been listening to a fucking word I’ve said? None of it’s coming back. As much as I’d like it to, the world we knew went puff.” He kissed his fingers and then spread them apart as though he’d released a balloon into the wind. He downed another glass. Dana sipped at hers, tilting the glass a little longer to make it seem like she was right there with him.

  “OK, OK, let’s just say that one day the Army comes rolling in, crying ‘We’re here to save you!’” Jeffereys said, filling his glass. “I already said it won’t happen, but let’s just say it does. I think they’ll understand perfectly well I had no choice.” He pointed a finger outside. “Those people are fucking crazy, if you haven’t already figured that out. They’re not gonna last the month without someone to wipe their asses. Little snot-nosed kids, that’s what they’ve turned into. Welfare nation. Every bullet I put into their brains is a small favor. The least I could do.”

  “I see,” Dana said. Her spaghetti was finished, but she continued to scrape her plate with the bottom of her fork. “And the women tied up downstairs, what are they for? More favors?”

  That twisted grin was back on Jeffereys’ face. “Smart as a whip, aren’t you? Well, here’s what you haven’t understood yet. Those idiots stealing Brinks trucks and emptying cash registers –the big score they’re after ain’t worth shit anymore. When God flipped that switch upstairs and turned most everyone into morons, he didn’t kill the economy. He only changed it. Where there’s death, new opportunities arise. Paper bills can’t buy jack shit now. But I figured out early on, there’s a new commodity in town, and I intend to take full advantage of it.”

  “And what’s that, people?”

  “Not just people. Slaves.”

  Jeffereys emptied another glass of wine, licked his purple lips, and rose unsteadily to his fe
et. He was glaring at her in the frilly pink dress he’d forced her to wear, looking like he couldn’t wait to get it off her. “Dinner was great,” he slurred. “But I’m about ready to have me some dessert.”

  Carole Cartright

  Salt Lake City International Airport, UT

  Carole and Nikki kept running until they reached the airport’s main entrance. They were being pursued, that much was clear from the movement Carole saw in the shadows, just beyond the security checkpoint. It was amazing how in only a few hours, the airport had gone from a mess of terrified people running in every direction, to something out of prehistory, when men lived in caves and behaved like animals toward one another. The soft and the weak were being killed in droves, leaving behind only those willing to commit the most vile acts to survive and stake their claim on a piece of a dying civilization.

  “Carole,” Nikki cried, wheezing as she tried to catch her breath. She pointed to a white object that had crashed into a rental car kiosk. “The cart.”

  Now’s she’s calling me Carole, like some neighbor she knows from the end of her street.

  They quickly ran to it, and Carole saw the dried blood splashed along the back bumper. “This was ours,” she said, recognizing the point where Hawaiian Shirt and Mechanic’s Overalls had been crushed against the wall.

  The figures in the distance were drawing closer, and Carole knew full well that this time they had nothing to fend them off with.

  “Do you think they made it out?” Nikki asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  The answer wasn’t a simple one. There was no way in hell she could spend another second in this airport, with the smell of dead bodies and corridors filled with homicidal maniacs. The proof was as clear as it got. The golf cart had been abandoned right next to the airport exit. No sign of Aiden and Alice anywhere around; they had escaped. ‘Course, it wasn’t conclusive the way she would have liked it to be, but since that plane skidded off the runway, nothing had been. Nor will it ever be again.

  Nikki grabbed her arm. “Come on, they’re almost here.”

  The two of them had reached the turnstile door and were about to push through when Carole noticed the wind outside. A white sign with the picture of a plane that read Airport Passenger Terminals in bold black letters, flew past the entrance and buried itself in the windshield of a car. They looked like hurricane-force winds, and Carole had never seen anything like it before. It was as though Hurricane Sandy had made landfall in Salt Lake City. She glanced behind her and gasped at the sight of the dirty faces glaring back at them. Carole pushed through the revolving door and ran for the parking lot across the street, Nikki right beside her. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to realize that no one had followed them outside. They were too scared to give chase. Maybe it was the wind, or plain old fear of the unknown. Either way, she thought as they hurried through the rows of cars that filled the parking garage, it wouldn’t be long before they killed each other off.

  Soon, another realization began to settle in her mind as the wind moaned and whistled through the concrete structure: They didn’t have a car. Jim did all the driving, and logically he was the one who normally kept the keys.

  Overhead, signs with black arrows reading Terminal flapped back and forth violently in the wind. Nikki clutched her mother’s arm and wouldn’t let go.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  A loose sign flew past them and collided with a concrete pillar, making a deafening sound. Nikki started to cry.

  The tornado that had touched down in Salt Lake City in ‘99 was still fresh in Carole’s memory. The way the sky had turned black and threatening. How the wind had picked up. But somehow this was different; this was almost like a mini-hurricane.

  If only Jim were there to help them. If only she’d pulled the right person out of the wreckage.

  A body lying over by an SUV caught her eye at once. Part of the garage sprinkler system had come down on top of him, probably during the earthquake. Next to the body was a suitcase. That meant he’d either just arrived or was heading home when he was killed. A horrible turn of events for him, but under the circumstances a fortuitous one for her. With renewed hope, she and Nikki fought through the wind to the body. Once there, they rolled it over and saw that he was a businessman in his mid-40s, trim and healthy looking, except for the blow he’d taken on the top of his head. His clothes were wet, which meant that water had continued to flow onto him from the broken sprinkler main after it collapsed. But it was the fact that the water had stopped that made Carole even more worried. Did that mean that water everywhere in the city was off?

  She dug through the man’s pockets and quickly found a set of keys. Now the trick was finding which car belonged to him. She braced herself against the SUV, held her hand in the air and depressed the red button that engaged the car’s locking system.

  “You hear anything?” she asked Nikki, who listened and then shook her head in response.

  “What am I listening for?”

  “A car horn. If we can find the car these keys belong to, then we might just have a chance of getting out of here.”

  Nikki pointed beyond the edge of the parking garage to a line of trees being battered by the violent gusts. “And into that?”

  Carole moved a few feet over and hit the button again. The faint blast of a horn made her head perk up.

  She turned to Nikki. “You ready to get the heck out of here?”

  The driver’s seat in the Ford SUV was higher than the position Carole was used to in the family minivan. A feeling that, on the one hand, made her feel safer, but it also raised its own set of problems. How would the car’s high profile react to the surging wind? The thought of being tossed off the expressway wasn’t exactly making her feel warm and fuzzy inside. Nikki wasn’t doing any better.

  You don’t have the luxury to stop and bite your nails. Get moving, Girl.

  She pulled the car out of the garage and straight into the buffeting wind, which rocked them from side to side. Carole touched Nikki’s knee in the seat next to her, before having to swing it back onto the steering wheel. “Get your seatbelt on and hold tight, Sweetie.”

  Quickly approaching was the parking lot barrier. Carole was fastidious about always being honest and paying her debts. This, however, was one fee that would never be paid. A loud thud sounded as she plowed through the arm of the barrier which snapped and skittered into the wind.

  “First stop, home, where I’m sure we’ll find Aiden and Alice, waiting for us.” Carole spoke the words with confidence, though inside all she could do was hope she was right.

  “Home,” her daughter said, the tail end of the word rising up so that it sounded like a question. “I don’t remember what it looks like.”

  “You will, Honey. You will.”

  Larry Nowak

  Chicago suburbs, IL

  The wipers on the Escalade were dancing a merry jig back and forth, and still the windshield kept filling with snow. He and Bud had just reached the suburbs of Chicago, intending to skirt around the city, when the first flakes had started falling. Now those tiny flakes had become a hissing whiteout that kept trying to lure their SUV off the highway.

  “You believe this shit?” Larry said from the passenger seat as he lowered his window to knock the accumulation off the side mirror.

  An abandoned car came out of the swirl, and Bud swerved right at the last moment.

  “It’s July, for Christ’s sake,” Larry said, holding on. “We should be sitting by a pool somewhere, drinking Mai Tais and gawking at babes in string bikinis, not cutting through this. If I wasn’t convinced before that hell had frozen over, I’m sure positive now.”

  Had Bud shown up in a sedan instead of an Escalade, they’d be in a world of hurt right now.

  A minute later they passed a car, and Larry caught the bluish face of a corpse staring back at him from inside. Anyone who didn’t have the smarts to find shelter and
keep warm wasn’t going to live through this. Considering the types he’d already run into, Larry expected that a huge chunk of the immediate population was already dead or dying.

  Earthquakes, skies changing color, freak snowstorms in the middle of summer. What was next? A swarm of locusts, maybe? If there really was a big man upstairs, and Larry sure hoped there wasn’t, what the hell was he trying to say?

  “Hold on!” Bud shouted and pumped the brake.

  The Escalade fishtailed to avoid a white Civic, barely visible underneath all that snow. It was astounding that Bud couldn’t recall his own name, but you put him behind the wheel of a car in winter weather and he knew exactly what to do.

  “I’ll tell you this, Bud. Wherever you’re from, it’s cold there.”

  Bud laughed, gripping the steering wheel like it meant to fly away. “Maybe I’m from Canada?”

  “Could be, eh? Down for some cross-border shopping, when all hell broke loose.”

  They crawled through the storm for another hour as the blowing snow lashed their car with a fury. Gradually, the heavy white globs became lighter, and the further they drove, the more the wind seemed to die down. Soon, they were able to see the road again and decided to pull over and rest. Bud’s nerves were surely strained.

  “You want me to take over after?” Larry offered.

  “Once we eat and then refill the tank, that’d be great.”

  Larry sank his hand into a paper grocery bag and came out with two cans of beans and an opener.

  “Maybe not the smartest thing for two grown men stuck in a car together to be eating.”

  Bud giggled. “You’re the one I feel bad for. Even I can’t stand my own farts.”

  Something about the way the faint light from the overhead hit Bud’s face reminded him of Josh, the gimp he’d tossed down the stairs in order to save his own life. Larry tried to push it from his mind.

  “What’s wrong?” Bud asked. “Not hungry?”

  Larry was swirling his plastic spoon in the can. “Yeah, guess I’m just getting a little tired of beans. I got used to eating things that probably don’t exist anymore. Fois gras and caviar.”