Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 4

“Unless you’d like to start the week grounded, I suggest you start showing a little more respect.”

  Nikki glared back at her mom.

  “Nikki, why are you always such a bitch?” Aiden asked, clearly hating to be the one stuck in the middle.

  “Mom, did you hear what he called me?”

  Carole turned to her son. “Aiden, don’t call your sister a bitch.”

  “Well, that’s how she’s acting.”

  “I told you to turn that iPod off. Don’t make me bring your father into this.”

  “Fine, fine. Look, it’s off.” She held it up, wiggling it around in the air. “Happy now?”

  The threat of bringing Jim into the argument had become a tactic of last resort for Carole, but nine times out of 10 it had the intended effect. Not that Nikki was scared of her father; her real concern was disappointing him.

  Over the last few years, Nikki seemed to have come to the conclusion that everything her mother did and said was just flat wrong. A contrarian. That was perhaps the only way Carole could describe her daughter’s need to disagree with absolutely everything that came out of her mouth. The dark side of adolescence, she supposed. Although Nikki didn’t have a clue, she was really trying to break away from the nest and become her own person. But understanding that didn’t make running a household any easier, especially when one member refused to do as she was told.

  What probably frustrated Carole most was that Jim had proven time and again to be part of the problem and not part of the solution. Nikki was his little princess, and wrapping daddy around her tiny little finger had become something of a specialty for her. But part and parcel of that was the fear of losing daddy’s approval. Only Carole wasn’t sure how much longer the threat of even that would last.

  “Oh, come on, Hon, don’t be so hard on the girl,” Jim said from across the aisle.

  Carole adjusted her seat belt. “Yeah, why don’t you try getting Nikki ready for school on time when her door’s barricaded from the inside?”

  Jim smiled. “I know, Babe, but she’ll grow out of it soon enough. Just give her time.”

  Jim always had a way of putting things that made the problem shrivel up and disappear. Of course Nikki would grow out of it.

  Carole reached across the aisle and took Jim’s hand and kissed it. Even dressed casually in jeans and a navy golf shirt, he was a sight to behold, and Carole realized that she was more attracted to him now than she’d ever been. His dark hair was specked with flakes of gray, and it gave him the distinguished air of a congressman. Except Jim had the build of a laborer. His body was still as hard and tightly muscled as it had been when they met, nearly 20 years ago. A fact hardly surprising, given that he was a building contractor.

  They’d met at a party thrown by a mutual friend nearly 20 years ago. Jim had arrived wearing a pair of acid-washed Jordaches, and the sight of him had made her giggle.

  But even in acid-washed jeans, he was hot, and when he had approached her in the kitchen, his voice deep and sonorous, well, she had known further resistance would be futile.

  If Carole’s role in the family was the glue that held everything together, then Jim was the resident expert who helped to guide the way. She sometimes called him Google.jim because there was hardly a question you could throw at him that he didn’t know the answer to. She felt safe with Jim, no matter where they were or what was happening, which was why Carole was even more perplexed by the nervous energy she felt coiled in her limbs. Gooseflesh was running down each of her arms and up into her scalp, which had contracted into what felt like a hat many sizes too small. The feeling was almost primitive. The way animals could sense natural disasters before they happened.

  The flight attendants had just started the in-flight safety demonstration when Carole leaned over to Jim. “I think something’s wrong.”

  He lowered his magazine. “Wrong? D’you forget something at the house?”

  “No,” she paused. Jim wasn’t crazy about feelings that couldn’t be quantified or explained. She smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s nothing.”

  Jim went back to his Popular Mechanics magazine. “I think you watch too many of those plane crash reality shows. I told you they’d make you a nervous wreck.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” She hadn’t thought of that, but Jim might just have hit the nail on the head. She’d recently been captivated by a marathon of a show called Mayday, about air crash investigations. The kind of show that sent subtle but undeniable messages to your brain.

  PLANES CRASH, AND YOURS WILL, TOO.

  There was certainly something sad and fatalistic about Mayday. You met the captain and got to know the passengers, and the whole time you darn well knew the plane was gonna crash and there wouldn’t be any survivors. Like that Titanic movie with Leonardo DiCaprio that Carole must have watched over 30 times. The boat was gonna sink, dammit, no two ways about it, and somehow that made what happened on board all the more tragic.

  The Boeing 737 was on the runway now, ready for takeoff. Beads of sweat were rolling down her forehead and into her eyes. This was a normal biological reaction whenever she became nervous, she called it “sweating like a pig,” but normal or not, perspiring like a truck driver was embarrassing. She patted her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse, and it came away dotted with sweat.

  The engines roared to life, and Carole felt herself being pushed back in her seat. The plane swayed from side to side ever so slightly, and she glanced over at Jim, who was still immersed in a world of torque and zero to 60 in five seconds. He must have felt her watching him because he turned and smiled at her, his lips mouthing the words: “We’ll be fine.”

  Beside her, Aiden was tapping her arm. “Whoa, Mom, look outside.”

  Carole glanced out the tiny plane window. The sky was filled with dazzling green-and-blue lights. A pulse nearly blinded her, and Carole knew right away she hadn’t been overreacting. Something was dreadfully wrong, and they were all about to die.

  The plane continued to barrel down the runway.

  Carole glanced to her left and saw a panic-stricken Jim fumbling with his seat belt, as though he hadn’t a clue how to work it.

  “Honey, stay in your seat,” she yelled out.

  He didn’t respond. His eyes darted around, brimming with fear.

  She put a land on his shoulder, and Jim shrugged her off as though she were a stranger. A second later, Jim was out of his seat along with a handful of other passengers, and they were running for the front of the plane.

  “Honey, what the heck are you doing?”

  Jim was acting like a crazy person. None of this was making any sense. But when she looked around, it seemed like everyone on board the plane had lost their minds. To Carole’s left, an elderly woman began to shriek. The man sitting next to her covered his ears, and when the woman didn’t stop, he brought his fist down on top of her head. Her voice wavered, and he hit her again until she slumped back into her chair.

  Jim wasn’t anywhere in sight, and Carole was hit by another terrifying realization. Terrorists must have snuck on board and taken over the plane. Maybe even gassed people so they’d lost their minds. There was no other explanation for why everyone around her was acting crazy. It also explained why Jim had raced to the front. Was he charging the cockpit? Had he seen something she had missed? They were running out of runway fast, and she hadn’t felt the nose of the plane lift into the air yet. If it didn’t take off soon, they’d go off the end and into certain disaster. But that was where Carole was wrong. The 130,000-pound Boeing didn’t go skidding off the end of the runway as she’d feared. Instead, it veered sharply to the left at nearly 200 mph and clipped one of the yellow runway signs. The sound of twisting metal as the landing gear tore off was deafening. The plane shook as the fuselage hit the ground, shearing away both engines. Carole grabbed the back of Aiden’s head and pushed it down between his legs. Nikki did the same. Bags from the overhead compartments were raining all around them. Smoke began to fill the cabin.
Outside their small window, all Carole could see were flames. The plane skidded on its belly, and the sound of screaming passengers and the aluminum fuselage peeling back like a tin can filled her ears as the aircraft tore into two pieces. Wires and cables spilled out from the breach like intestines.

  Soon, it all came to a grinding halt, and Carole could swear she heard a rumbling, even over the moans from the wounded and dying all around her. It was only when the plane continued shaking that another dim realization struck her.

  We’re having an earthquake?

  Could that have caused the funny lights in the sky and forced their 737 to go skidding off the runway?

  The heat was becoming more intense. All around Carole, passengers writhed in their seats, many struggling with their seat belts. She didn’t have the time to save them. The flames around them were growing, threatening to kill them in any number of horrible ways. Carole couldn’t even waste a second worrying about Jim, who had taken off toward the plane’s now detached forward section. For all the help she could offer him right now, he might as well have been on Mars. Carole’s first priority was getting her children to safety. Everything else would have to wait.

  Larry Nowak

  5:58 p.m.(EST), July 4th, 2017

  Nutrilife head office

  Manhattan, N.Y.

  Larry was pacing back and forth in his office, wondering how he had let things get so fucked up.

  He stopped in front of a large window that looked down onto the call center, buzzing below him. Rows of cubicles manned by drones, all of whom had a single purpose: to make him money. The haters called it telemarketing. Larry called it a frickin’ gold mine. Telemarketing was a nasty way of putting it. He much preferred the newer, less innocuous term: direct sales. Sort of had a professional ring to it, too. It didn’t really matter that the product his company sold didn’t do a damned thing. Crushed herbs and dried leaves, ground into a fine powder and imbued with healing properties. Yeah, crock of shit. Anyone with half a brain could see that. Except for those New Age health nut types. If Larry had learned one thing in his 50 years, it was that people were gullible. They wanted to believe in magic, the way kids wanted to believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. And why? The reason was obvious. Greed. Free chocolate eggs, money under your pillow, and fat men crawling down chimneys with bags of presents. Those were the children who would grow up to become his customers.

  Larry chewed on the toothpick in his mouth. Feeling the wood splinter between his grinding teeth somehow relaxed him.

  Sales calls to suckers, however, was only a drop in the bucket for Nutrilife. In private, Larry wouldn’t deny he was a scammer, but one thing he didn’t do was mince words. Nutrilife was a pyramid scheme, plain and simple. His phone agents were paid to pitch the product to potential “distributors,” who then bought loads of the useless crap to sell at a hopped-up price. For their part, the distributers would then recruit friends and family who would buy more of the useless powdery shit. But here was the real magic: Each distributor received a cut from the person below them. Like any pyramid scheme, the money always flowed uphill, and the losers at the bottom got exactly what they deserved. A big, fat fucking zero.

  Larry’d grown Nutrilife from the ground up almost 20 years ago, and now, within a matter of days, thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the whole goddamned thing was about to come crashing down around him.

  A melodic voice called out over the speakerphone on his desk.

  “Mr. Huff from Legal is here to see you, Mr. Nowak.”

  Larry didn’t react right away. He was still eyeballing the sales floor. Independence Day was always a pain since he’d been forced to pay his direct marketers time and a half. But that wouldn’t matter, not since his company’s lead lawyer, Sam Huff, had discovered plenty of creative ways of evening things out.

  Each and every second that his employees were late signing back in from lunch or break was deducted from their pay checks. The policy had an almost criminal edge to it, and that was exactly why Larry loved it. If his employees only knew how much dough they were docked every year, most of ‘em would shit themselves.

  The secretary’s voice again.

  “Mr. Nowak, are you there?”

  Larry cleared his throat. “Yeah, Diane, show Mr. Huff in.”

  Sam opened the door right away, looking like an overgrown kid who’d just spent time at the principal’s office. His gray suit looked creased, and that wasn’t at all surprising. He’d just spent the entire day in a chair being grilled by those SEC bastards.

  “They’re shutting us down, Larry,” he said, skipping the pleasantries.

  Larry removed the toothpick from his mouth. “When?”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe the day after. It’s the holidays, so there’s no saying for certain.”

  “Is that it?”

  Sam combed nervous fingers through a set of thick white hair. “They’re talking about laying charges, Larry. Fraud. We could go to jail.”

  Beads of sweat were collecting on Larry’s brow, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. He had a small bathroom connected to his office, and he swung open the door and turned on the tap, splashing cold water on his face, as if that might wash away the sinking feeling that was creeping up from his gut.

  Larry kept a .38 snub nose revolver in his desk. He knew his way around guns well enough. Not that he was one of those know-it-alls who would rattle off specs the way computer techies creamed themselves over motherboards. Point and pull the trigger. What else was there to know? He’d had reason to carry a gun back in the early days, running numbers for bookies and later when he owned that strip club; now the SEC was closing them down, well, drastic times called for drastic measures, didn’t they? Larry knew right as rain he wasn’t like those other Wall Street suits he saw prancing around Manhattan, flaunting their degrees from Princeton and Yale. He’d grown up in one of the shittiest neighborhoods in Chicago and he knew perfectly well the law of the streets: Kill or be killed.

  Larry was still splashing the water on his face and pulling it through his thinning hair when something strange happened. Sam was over by Larry’s desk, cussing out the lead SEC investigator, the same way the prick had practically threatened Sam’s family with jail time, when the lights flickered and went out. Larry had his head buried in the sink and didn’t quite notice at first, but he did see the brilliant flash that seemed to shoot a blazing trail right through his closed eyelids, burning his cornea. He straightened and reached for a hand towel. The room started to shake violently. Pictures on the wall crashed to the floor, the glass shattering on impact.

  Larry blinked as his desk shuffled across the room and then lurched forward, slamming into the plate glass window. Huge razor-sharp slabs fell two dozen feet to the sales floor below, and Larry was sure he heard the garbled screams from injured employees. But it wasn’t just the earthquake and the resulting damage, rare occurrences in New York, that were freaking him out. The sudden blank expression that had crept over Sam’s face was doing that just fine.

  “Sam, get over here before something falls on your head,” Larry shouted.

  Sam looked over without an ounce of recognition. The bastard was either having himself a brain freeze or a heart attack. Larry lurched under the bathroom door frame; he’d once read that was the safest place to be during an earthquake and the first rule of Larryland was: always look out for numero uno.

  Another surge struck, shaking the room even more violently. The sounds of fear, pain, and confusion carried through the hole where the window had been, Larry could hear them more clearly now. But there was something about those voices that sounded strange, even from here. Strange in a way that Larry couldn’t quite put his finger on. Then, as his fingers clung to the door frame for dear life, it hit him. No one was saying anything. No calls for God or some other imaginary being to swoop down and save their sorry asses. No shouts of “run!” Just grunts and groans and guttural noises, not a single word. They all seemed to
be tongue tied, too, like Sam, who was crouched now on the floor, hugging his knees, looking like a caveman who’d found himself beamed on board the star ship Enterprise.

  Larry heard the cracking nearly a full second before it happened. A support beam followed by a pile of rubble, smashed through the ceiling and crushed Sam, mashing his quivering body into the floor. One second he was there, and the next, Sam was somewhere under a pile of rubble. The rumbling stopped shortly after, and Larry used the towel to wipe the dust and dirt off his face.

  Sam was dead, no doubt about it. No one could have withstood the impact of a metal beam smacking them on the noggin and live to tell the tale. Which made searching through the rubble that was now piled in the middle of his office a definite no-no. Who could say if the ceiling might open up again, squashing him, too?

  He had to get out of the building before the whole thing collapsed. He was about to rush out but stopped, remembering the newscasts back in 2005 when hurricane Katrina had turned New Orleans into a Wild West shoot out. It had taken FEMA almost a week to get food and water to some people, and Larry sure as hell didn’t expect them to do any better this time around.

  The problem was that Larry’s gun was in his desk, and his desk was hanging half way out the window that overlooked the sales floor. If another aftershock hit at the wrong time, it might all go tumbling down. And that would mean going to the sales floor below and climbing over the dead and wounded. Not that he would mind doing that, he just wasn’t sure how the newspaper headlines would read once this was all cleaned up.

  Nutrilife CEO Steps on Dead and Dying to Get Gun

  Just what he needed.

  Larry reached for the desk drawer, careful not to look at the squirming shapes of the wounded below. Even through peripheral vision he caught sight of a handful of bodies and forced himself to focus. Pulling open the drawer, he spotted the .38 and the box of ammo he kept beside it. He didn’t think he was going to need it, but there wasn’t any point putting on your swim trunks if you weren’t planning on getting wet. Deal with the reality at hand. That’s how Larry had fought his way out of one of the worst neighborhoods in the country to become the CEO of a publicly traded company.