Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Read online

  “I’m gonna run some names by you, and I want you to tell me what you know about them. Can you do that?”

  Donald nodded. “OK”

  “Bob the Builder.”

  Donald’s face lit up. “He hammers stuff.” Donald swung his arm up and down enthusiastically.

  “What about Thomas the Train?”

  “I know him, too. I watch him on TV, with my mom.”

  “So far, so good,” Thomson said. “How about Strawberry Shortcake?”

  The boy’s smile disappeared. “I don’t know that one.”

  “That’s a girl’s toy. See, I was testing you.”

  Brooks was behind them, trying to stifle a laugh. “Guess I’m not the only one that doesn’t get your sad jokes.”

  Thomson ignored him.

  “I have another name for you. Joseph Goebbels? Does that sound familiar?”

  Donald’s eyes suddenly looked glassy and vacant. “I don’t know that one either,” he said, sounding as though he were miles away.

  “What about Adolf Hitler? Ever heard that name before?”

  Donald’s eyes sank to the clay cannon in his hands, and he resumed rolling out that crude barrel shape.

  “Donald?” Thomson nudged him gently. “Do you know the last name I asked you?”

  No answer.

  “Maybe the kid doesn’t wanna play anymore, Thomson.”

  “Let’s draw a picture together, Donald,” Thomson said, trying his best to block Brooks’ voice out of his head.

  On his left was a bucket with more crayons and rolled up pieces of sketch paper. Thomson unfurled them and laid them flat across his lap. A number of them already contained images Donald had drawn.

  “Oh, what a fine artist you are,” Thomson said, hoping he didn’t sound fake or condescending. “Is this a picture you drew at Christmas?” he asked holding up what looked like a row of blockhouses and chimneys belching black smoke. Thomson held the picture in midair, rotating it, his head beginning to crane at an odd angle. No, this wasn’t a row of blockhouses at all. There was a gate, and spewing from the mouth of it was a crudely drawn pair of train tracks. The smoke stacks were also too high. And those powdery flakes tumbling to the ground wasn’t snow at all, was it?

  “Donald, what have you drawn here?” Thomson asked, although the question sounded more like a demand. “Look at me. Is this what I think it is?”

  Donald stopped rolling his clay cannon. Their eyes met, and suddenly the boy didn’t look so young anymore. There was depth in the boy’s inkblot eyes. “What does it look like to you, old man?” Donald snapped, and Thomson wasn’t sure anymore whom he was speaking to. Children weren’t supposed to talk like this.

  -6-

  “It looks like Auschwitz,” Thomson said, feeling Brooks move to his side, looking down at the pictures in his lap. Brooks snatched them up, leafing through them one by one. Thomson’s eyes rose and saw that Brooks’ face had suddenly turned the color of bleached bone.

  “What’s wrong?” Thomson asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  Brooks fumbled the phone out of his pocket and began clicking away. A second later, after he found what he was looking for, he thrust the phone out for Thomson to see. “Look!” Brooks said through cracking lips.

  Thomson took the phone.

  A sketch. Some kind of church or bell tower, and the image had a name: Ardoye in Flanders. Brooks clicked to the next page for him. Another image, this one a painting of a crumbling cathedral called Ruins of a Cloister in Messines. There were many others, and Thomson looked over each of them before asking:

  “What are these?”

  Brooks placed Donald’s drawings back in Thomson’s lap. “Now look at the kid’s pictures. They’re nearly identical.”

  Thomson compared them, flipping back and forth among the images on the phone and the pictures laid out before him. Donald’s images were rough and drawn with a child’s crayon, but the similarities were uncanny.

  “You gonna tell me what I’m looking at?” Thomson finally asked once he felt he’d seen enough.

  “Paintings ... ” Brooks replied, the ashen color of his face even more pronounced now. “Paintings done by Adolf Hitler when he was young. He’d tried to become a painter. I’m not sure if you knew that. Not many people do. He’d tried to become a painter, and when the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna rejected him for the second time, well, the rest is history.”

  Donald had given up on the cannon and was touching up the picture Thomson thought looked an awful lot like Auschwitz.

  Thomson stood up and loosened his collar. “I think you better call Shrodder.”

  -7-

  Hanz Shrodder laid his briefcase down on the table and combed back a mess of graying hair that had the consistency of steel wool. Shrodder opened the briefcase, and what Thomson saw inside almost made him giggle. A bag of potato chips and a dustpan.

  “What is it we are dealing with here?” Shrodder asked.

  “If it’s all right, Dr. Shrodder, I’d prefer not to say,” Thomson replied.

  Shrodder’s left eyebrow went up in an almost perfect upside down V.

  “We have our suspicions,” Brooks cut in. “We just don’t wanna prejudice your findings.”

  “I see,” Shrodder said and laid a potato chip on his tongue like he was receiving communion. He must have seen the look of worry on Thomson’s face, because a second later he said, “The salt keeps me alert.”

  Thomson nodded. “As long as we get some results, I don’t care what you eat.”

  Shrodder crunched another chip and turned to Donald, who was still sitting at his kiddy table, drawing.

  “This is the subject, I presume?”

  Brooks nodded. “His name is Donald. We’ve checked his vitals, and they all appear to be normal. Environmental conditions are also standard. We’d like you to put him under and see if you can find out any details of a past life.”

  “Uh huh.” He turned to Donald. “Hello, young man,” Shrodder said, eyeing the burn across the boy’s face.

  “Hello.”

  “We’re going to put you under hypnosis and bring you back in time, would you like that?”

  “I guess so. Are you sure I’ll be able to come back?”

  Shrodder smiled. “You’re a sweet boy. Of course you will. Come here and lie down on your bed. That’s it. I want you to lie down and relax.”

  Thomson and Brooks stood by the equipment in the back of the bedroom, listening eagerly.

  Shrodder dropped another chip on his tongue and crunched it silently. “Now, lie back and take a deep breath for me. In and out. Very good. I want you to imagine you’re walking along a beach. Have you ever been to the beach, Donald?”

  “Just one time.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  Donald nodded.

  “The beach is lovely, isn’t it? I want you to feel the warm sand between your toes, the sun on your skin, see the waves lapping against the shore. This beach is a kind of time machine. Every step you take will bring you further and further into the past. I’ll be with you the entire time, Donald, so there’s nothing to worry about. I want you to keep walking until the scenery around you changes. On the count of three, I want you to tell me what you see. One ... two ... three ... ”

  “Blackness.”

  The sound of crunching as Shrodder popped another chip in his mouth. “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The boy sounded scared, and suddenly Thomson wasn’t so sure this was a good idea after all. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to know what they might find beyond the blackness.

  “It’s warm in here,” Donald said. His body tensed. “I hear voices.”

  “What kind of voices? What are they saying?”

  “A man and a woman. They’re fighting. It’s my mother.” And the next part Donald said so matter-of-factly that the hairs on Thomson’s arms stood on end.

  “I’m in her tummy.”

  “What are th
ey fighting about, Donald?”

  “Me. He doesn’t want me. My father says I was a mistake, and he’s angry. ‘You stupid bitch! What are we gonna do now? Get rid of it, I hope.’” The change in Donald’s voice was abrupt, and it made Brooks take an involuntary step backward. “They hadn’t really ever fought before I came.”

  “Move back, Donald. Way back. Before you were in your mother’s belly. What do you see?”

  “A small gray room,” the boy answered. “It’s so very cold. I have a jacket on, and I’m still freezing.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the Führerbunker you idiot, where else would I be?”

  Shrodder paused. “And your name?”

  “Hitler. Adolf Hitler.”

  A potato chip fell from Shrodder’s hand. He turned to Thomson and Brooks and for a moment, all three men stared at one another.

  -8-

  “What have you involved me in?” Shrodder asked, sounding like a man who wished he was back in the safe confines of his home, with the doors locked tight.

  Thomson stammered. “We weren’t sure ourselves. I mean, Mrs. Kesler had her suspicions, but frankly neither of us believed it was possible.”

  “I did,” Brooks said.

  Thomson rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course you did. There isn’t much you don’t believe in.”

  Shrodder stood on wobbly legs and for a moment, Thomson wasn’t sure the old man was going to remain standing. He reached a hand out to steady him. Behind Shrodder, Donald lay on the bed, his eyes closed tightly.

  Shrodder crossed the room and was reaching for his briefcase when Brooks spoke.

  “Doc, please say you’re not leaving.”

  The old man looked back, horrified at the mere suggestion that he should stay. “Are you mad? Damn right I am.”

  “And miss out on this kind of opportunity?” Brooks cut in. “How many regressions have you performed in your career?”

  Shrodder swung his briefcase into his other hand and rubbed his oily fingers along his pant leg. “Well over a thousand.”

  “And in all that time, have you ever met anyone who wasn’t some no-name Ukrainian farmer from the 1800s?”

  “I’ve not come across any Robert E. Lees or Elvis Presleys if that’s what you’re asking, but you don’t understand. My parents and my brothers and sisters all died in the war, killed by that madman.” Shrodder rolled up his sleeve to reveal a series of faded blue numbers, distorted by skin that had shriveled with age. “I spent five years in Buchenwald, where I watched them fade away until the camp commandant had no more use for them, simply because they’d lost the ability to work. And you’re asking me to speak to the monster who did this? I’m not leaving because I want to protect myself. I’m leaving because if I stay, I might discover if I’m capable of murder myself.”

  Shrodder flung open the bedroom door.

  “But the kid’s still under,” Thomson protested.

  “He’ll come out of it eventually. Just let him sleep it off, and hopefully he won’t remember any of this.”

  When Thomson turned, he found Brooks already starting to pack up.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s something seriously wrong with that kid,” Brooks replied, wrapping a series of wires together. “And I think Shrodder has the right idea. Besides, without him, what more can we do? And I suggest we don’t breathe a word to Mrs. Kesler. She’s too sweet a woman to torture her with this.”

  “Spineless chicken shit,” Thomson mumbled as he sat down on the bed next to Donald. “Do you know that, Brooks, you’re a spineless piece of shit? You finally find an opportunity to study the real thing, and what do you do? You run for the fucking hills.”

  Brooks stopped at the door, gripping one of the portable oscilloscopes, looking like a child clinging to a worn-out teddy bear. “You coming?” he squeaked.

  The sap was itching to get out of here. But Thomson hadn’t ever cut and run, no matter how weird a job had become.

  “Just because you and Heinz 57 there are too freaked out to continue doesn’t mean I have to give up.” Thomson turned back to the boy.

  “Suit yourself,” Brooks spat and closed the door as he left. Thomson listened to Brooks’ footsteps as they faded away.

  Thomson took a moment to collect himself, then: “Donal – I mean, Adolf,” Thomson stammered. “Are you still there?”

  A deep crease formed in Donald’s brow. “Who let you in here? I better not hear Linge put you up to this.”

  Thomson went over to the back table and pulled out his laptop from the remaining equipment. He had a portable flash drive, and he plugged it in, entering a search for the name Linge. “Linge was Hitler’s personal secretary,” he mumbled. Thomson returned to the boy.

  “I want you to go back further now, much further. What do you see?”

  “A drawing room. A young boy is playing the piano.”

  “How old are you, Adolf?”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking to. Who is Adolf?”

  “What do they call you?”

  “I am Ivan Vasilyevich.”

  Thomson heard a loud sigh and realized it had come from his own lips. The laptop was on the kiddy table beside him and he typed in the new name.

  “Holy shit! Ivan Vasilyevich was Ivan the Terrible.”

  An hour later, the armpits of Thomson’s shirt were soaked with sweat. He had run Donald through a parade of history’s nastiest tyrants. Nero, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, and many others. Some even he didn’t recognize, and eventually Thomson could go no further.

  “How is it possible that one soul could have been so many badass sonsabitches?” Thomson wondered out loud.

  The deep-throated laughter that came out of Donald then made Thomson’s scalp tighten; he stood up and backed away, knocking over the tiny chair he’d been sitting in, and he didn’t stop until his legs hit the table behind him. Donald was still laughing in a voice that didn’t quite sound human.

  -9-

  “Who are you?” Thomson demanded.

  The laughter grew louder.

  “Who are you Goddammit!”

  The laughter stopped suddenly. “Poor, silly human. Of all of man’s creations, the existence of God has been your greatest achievement.”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “I am known by many names, and I have taken many shapes. At this time, I am known as Donald.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I am a catalyst.”

  “A catalyst? For what?”

  “For change. What else? Creation cannot occur without destruction. That is the only universal truth we know of. From supernova to the changing of your seasons, the scale may vary, but the truth is unwavering.”

  Thomson’s eyes widened. “You’re a harbinger. A grim reaper.”

  “We have been known in your mythology as such.”

  “And now you’ve come back as Donald to murder more innocent people, haven’t you? Don’t you think we’ve already been through enough already?”

  “We till the soil to prepare for new crops. Death is only one of many consequences.”

  “So what’s on the menu this time? Natural disasters? Ethnic cleansing? Nuclear holocaust?”

  “A tiny spark of evil exists within each of you. We do nothing more than nurture what is already there. The fate of billions has already been decided. There is nothing you can do.”

  Tears streamed down Thomson’s face. He hadn’t been a believer before, but seeing now with his own eyes for the first time ...

  A knock at the door. “Mr. Thomson, are you nearly done?” It was Mrs. Kesler. Thomson turned back to Donald’s prone form and spoke to the boy in a hushed voice.

  “Now you listen to me, asshole. You’re talking about killing my family and everyone I’ve ever loved. Hell, you might even be talking about stamping out the entire human race. I can’t let that happen.”

  Thomson heard the door knob starting to turn.

 
; “I’m afraid the course has already been set,” the boy said in a deep, gravelly voice. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Yeah, try me, motherfucker!” Thomson shouted as he stood and wrapped his thick fingers around the boy’s tiny neck. Behind him, he could just make out the sound of Mrs. Kesler screaming.

  “What on Earth are you doing? Oh my God, get away from him. You monster, get away.”

  There was a cracking sound as Mrs. Kesler brought Thomson’s laptop down on the top of his head. Thomson’s eyesight began to waver. Donald’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets, and the boy’s face looked like a red balloon, a second away from busting. Just a little longer. That’s all he needed.

  Another crack, and this time Mrs. Kesler shattered the laptop over Thomson’s head, bits of plastic casing and circuit-board components raining down all around them. That’s when Thomson’s world went black.

  -10-

  He awoke in the hospital. His hands were cuffed to the metal bed rail, and his head hurt like a son of a bitch. Brooks was dozing off in a chair next to him. At the door was a policeman with his back to them, guarding the entrance.

  “What the hell happened after I left?”

  It took Thomson a minute to regain his senses. “That boy, he wasn’t human.” Thomson leaned in as far as his cuffs would allow, and he was whispering now. “He was the devil.”

  The change in Brooks’ expression was immediate. “But Harry, he was just a kid.”

  “He was not just a kid, Brooks, open your eyes for once, would you? You weren’t there at the end. You don’t know what he was planning.”

  Brooks shook his head.

  Thomson felt the bandages wrapped around the crack in his skull. “That old lady got me good, didn’t she?” He was smiling, but Brooks didn’t reciprocate.

  “Do you even remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “You strangled the boy.”

  “He’s dead?” The look on Thomson’s face was far from horror. He was happy, and it showed. A strange sense of peace came over him.

  “Do you remember strangling Mrs. Kesler?”

  “What?”

  “You killed both of them, Thomson. They found you in the driveway, sitting cross-legged.”