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

  “OK, Josh, just relax, you’re hyperventilating.” Larry could feel his own pulse beginning to elevate with fear and frustration.

  “Don’t leave me here,” Josh said. “I’m begging you,” And the prick was already limping through to the emergency stairwell as he said it.

  Larry sighed, feeling an almost overpowering urge to pull his revolver and put one right in Josh’s head. Didn’t this putz realize the building could come down at any minute and here was Larry, stuck with a gimp? It was tantamount to a death sentence.

  Reluctantly, Larry hooked an arm around Josh and helped him one excruciatingly slow step at a time.

  Josh grimaced from the pain. “Thank you, Mr. Nowak, I really, really appreciate this.”

  “Yeah, less talking and more walking,” Larry said eyeing the walls as though they might come crashing down at any second.

  “Will do,” Josh said wincing. “I guess this foot’s a lot more painful than I let on.”

  They’d made it down nearly 10 floors when they saw the precipice, a section of the concrete stairwell that must have collapsed during the quake, leaving about a 15-foot drop to the section below.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Larry swore as he held onto the railing and leaned over for a better look.

  Josh, braced himself against the wall. “Oh crap. So what do we do now, turn back and look for another way?”

  “Don’t be a jackass, Josh. It won’t take much more than an aftershock to bring this whole building down, just like it did to those stairs.”

  “But I’ll never make a 15-foot jump,” Josh said and Larry could hear all the moisture had gone out of the kid’s mouth. “Unless we can find something to cushion the fall, both of us are just as likely to break our legs. We have to go back.”

  The two men were no more than two feet apart when the features of Larry’s face settled. He could feel Josh’s warm, sour breath tickling his nose, and the smell of it infuriated him. Gone was the crease of anxiety that had slowly been forming on Larry’s brow the minute he’d hooked up with Josh. The same crease that had become even more pronounced as they’d approached the gap in the stairs. The kid had made a great point when he’d argued for turning around and going back up. There wasn’t anything to cushion their fall, except up was no longer an option for Larry.

  The owner and CEO of Nutrilife swallowed hard. “I don’t think it’s nearly as far as you think Josh. I’ll bet it isn’t more than an 8-foot drop. Why don’t you have another look-see?”

  Josh held the wall and he glanced over. “No, way Mr. Nooooo ... ”

  And that’s when Larry jabbed his palm into Josh’s spine, thrusting the intern over the edge. The kid’s screams trailed away for maybe a full second before Larry heard the crunching sound. It was quiet after that. Larry had been worried the kid might survive the fall and try to crawl away. He’d been ready to use the .38 if it had come to that. But Josh had been right. Fifteen feet was a dangerous distance to jump. Larry needed something to break his fall. Now he had it.

  Finn

  4:30 p.m. (PST), July 4, 2017

  Nevada desert?

  It didn’t take Finn long to figure out he was heading in the right direction. All the people in the world might have either disappeared or gone batshit crazy, but the interstate signs had stayed behind, telling him that Las Vegas still lay another 150 miles ahead.

  The noticeable absence of people had slowly started to cause him concern. He hadn’t crossed paths with a single car on the highway since he’d left the power plant 45 minutes ago.

  But to call the 95 a highway wasn’t entirely accurate. It was a route; a two-lane job with a solid yellow line running down the middle. If cars were few and far between, sections where the road was torn up were plentiful, created, no doubt, when the Earth’s crust began shifting and churning beneath them. Most of the gaps weren’t anything he couldn’t simply drive over in the Land Rover, although one had gaped open like a grinning mouth full of stone teeth, forcing him to cut a wide swath around it, through the desert shrubs.

  Looking left or right, that was all a man could see out here: endless sagebrush, punctuated by barren mountain ranges.

  Finn glanced down at his fuel gage. He had enough in the tank for another 100 miles which meant he’d break down in the scalding desert heat, about 50 miles short of his objective.

  The radio hadn’t been much help either. Finn must have scanned every station on the AM and FM frequencies, and all he’d found was static.

  Up ahead, the shapes of approaching structures broke the monotony of the landscape. He accelerated, hoping to run into someone who might tell him what the hell was going on. A big blue sign came into view.

  Last Service Station Before Las Vegas.

  Finn rolled toward an intersection with a gas station on either side. The AC wasn’t an optional kind of luxury while driving through the desert, and unsurprisingly, it had guzzled through a good chunk of his gas. Gone, too, were the bottles of water and all of the sandwiches he’d brought with him from the plant cafeteria. He still had what was left inside the five-gallon jug; he could hear it sloshing around behind him. But out in the desert, you didn’t want to gamble with your life.

  Finn pulled the Land Rover into the service station on the left. In part because it had a Nevada Joe’s convenience store connected to it and also on account of the number of cars there compared to the handful he saw scattered across the street. Without electricity, the pumps weren’t going to do much more than dribble out a few drops of precious gas, and he needed to be ready for Plan B. That’s why he’d brought the screw driver.

  The Land Rover inched through the parking lot, while Finn surveyed the area. Most of the cars he saw weren’t so much parked as they were abandoned. The driver-side window on a Ford pickup truck was busted out. Blood ran along the serrated edges as well as a thick glob of gore that trickled down the side of the truck. On the asphalt beneath the driver’s door sat a small mound of safety glass. Looked from here like someone had kicked the window to bits in order to get out. But why not just open the door?

  That’s when Finn remembered the man in the lab coat digging at the concrete with a set of mangled fingers. This looked like so much more than just a case of people in shock after a natural disaster. Slowly but surely, it was taking on the strange and disturbing shades of mass insanity.

  But the blood running down side of the truck really wasn’t setting well with Finn. He wanted, no he needed, to stop and get some fuel and a few supplies, but the thought had occurred to him that this could be some sort of ambush.

  The metal pipe he’d taken from the plant was on the back seat. Finn parked the car and grabbed it, along with the screw driver.

  He exited the SUV, greeted by an oppressive heat that seemed to weigh on his chest and cut off his air.

  He wanted to think he’d never felt anything like it, but how could he? For all he knew of his past, the Nevada desert may very well have been his home.

  Finn hit the button on the keychain to lock the car. But only once. A second time would have sounded the horn and he didn’t want anyone lurking in the vicinity to know he was here yet.

  With the pipe in his hand and the screwdriver in the pocket of his coveralls, Finn approached the gas pumps. On the other side sat a Dodge Charger. The driver’s door was ajar. He came up from behind and peered inside.

  Empty.

  Next, he stepped over to the pump and removed one of the nozzles, pulling the trigger. A few drops of gas trickled to the hot pavement, but that was it.

  Quake must have knocked the power out.

  He would use the screw driver to gas up first, before he investigated the convenience store, just in case whoever had smeared that blood along the pickup truck was somewhere inside, waiting for him.

  On a rack between pumps, Finn spotted bottles of windshield washer fluid. He removed 10 of them, spun off the caps, and poured them onto the ground. He then lay on his back and slid under the Charger’s trunk. There he h
eld the screw driver to the gas tank and punched a hole by hammering it as quietly as he could with the metal pipe. Gasoline gurgled out at once, and Finn slid the first empty windshield washer bottle underneath to catch it. He did that with all 10 bottles, afterward pouring them into the Land Rover’s thirsty tank.

  He repeated the process twice more, running back and forth between the two cars before he was satisfied and more than a little tired. That, along with the hundred miles of gas the Land Rover still had, should get him to Vegas. There he would hopefully find himself a gas can large enough to make the enterprise even more efficient, although he was still hopeful that as he made his way into the city, he would find that things there were back to normal.

  Once the gas issue was resolved, Finn crept toward Nevada Joe's. The scorching sun was beating down on Joe's front window, making it difficult to tell if anyone was inside. A dark blur moving inside gave him his answer a second later.

  People were probably camped inside, scared out of their minds. Finn pulled the door open, heard the tiny bell overhead announce his presence, and knew right away that something terrible had happened here.

  On the right was the convenience store section. On the left was the diner, and that was where the shit had gone down.

  The body of a man lay sprawled face up across a table, not three feet from where Finn was standing. His arms and legs were splayed, making him look like a human starfish. At least one blast from a scattergun at close range had opened a hole in his chest the size of a baby’s head. The dead man's right hand was curled into a fist around the handle of a fork, spokes down, as though he'd been using it as a makeshift weapon. The man's eyes were open, blank and staring, and the ghastly sight nearly made Finn sick to his stomach.

  Seeing the dead man's body had sent waves of anxiety shooting through his nervous system. Whoever had killed that man and turned this place upside down might still be here. Finn would try the gas station across the street, he decided, and turned to leave and do just that.

  Finn was turning the door handle when he heard the shotgun rack behind him.

  "Drop that head beater in yer hand, turn the fuck around, and don't even bat an eyelash or you'll end up just like your friend Billy."

  The man with the shotgun stepped out from the batwing style doors that closed off the kitchen, his weapon leveled at Finn’s chest. He looked like he got by mostly on a diet of candy bars and soda. The tail of his Nevada Joe’s uniform was untucked, but the expression on his face showed he meant business.

  Finn motioned to the body on the table. “I don’t know this guy.”

  “The hell you don’t. Yer dressed like twins, so stop yer bullshitting and drop the head beater.”

  Finn did as he was told. The table he laid the pipe on was wobbly, and the pipe rolled off smacking the ground with a loud clang. The shotgun snapped to attention.

  “Take it easy,” Finn said, his hands stretched out before him. And that’s when he noticed what the dead man was wearing. A pair of blue coveralls identical to his own except the name on his chest read Billy and not JP. On the opposite breast was the company name, Tevatron, and above that, the symbol of a circle with a splash of light at the top. Almost looked like a wedding ring with a bead of sunlight blinking off the edge.

  “You ready to start telling the truth?” the man asked.

  This wasn’t looking good, and Finn thought of bolting. He knew he could outrun the fat man, but not the shotgun he was holding. “I came to at the solar plant. Everything was busted open from the quake, and I made my way outside to find the sky lit up like it is now. I can’t remember a damned thing about who I am or how I got there, but I still know what’s normal and what’s not, and a sky like that can’t be good.”

  The man’s gun sagged. “If you’d spoken gibberish I would have blown yer head off, you know that?”

  “Gibberish?”

  The man offered his hand. “Name’s Jackson. You just leave that head beater where it is for now until we’re completely square.” He pointed the end of the boomstick to the dead man. “Billy here was something of a regular, although I never did know his full name or where he’d come from originally. Vegas’d be my best guess. That’s where most of ‘em come from, looking for work at the plant.”

  Finn pointed to a seat at an empty booth littered with broken dishes and half-eaten food.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  The hamburger had three solid bites taken out of it and was ice cold, but it sure hit the spot, and Finn knew he needed the nourishment. The way his stomach was kicking up a racket, you’d think he hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe he hadn’t before today.

  “What’d Billy do to get himself shot?” Finn asked through a mouthful of fries.

  “That’s the strangest part. Betsey, one of the waitresses, came running back to say there were weird lights in the sky, and I figured she was having a go at my expense. More of that Roswell crap. You know, since Area 51 ain’t too far off from here. Then I saw, like, a flash fill light up the whole rest stop, and suddenly Betsey wasn’t talking English no more. It was like someone had turned off her brain, and she looked at me all strange. I was flippin’ burgers at the time and had a metal spatula in my hand, and it seemed like she thought I was gonna come after her with it. Anyway, she ran off making all kinds of weird noises. I chased out after her, and that’s when I seen a handful of people fighting. Billy here was going after a woman with that fork in his hand. Turned on me when I yelled at him to stop, so I did what I needed to do. But none of them were speaking anything but gobbledygook, and if you’d done the same, I’m sorry to say, I probably woulda dropped you, too.”

  Mouth full, Finn pointed at the phone on the wall.

  “Dead or I woulda called the cops already.”

  Finn wiped his lips on the sleeve of his coveralls, remembering how the man he’d seen back at the plant had scurried away from him like a wild animal. “Don’t hold your breath on the cops showing up anytime soon. Whatever sent these people over the edge probably did the same to the local sheriff and his men.” Finn shifted in his seat. “I noticed the cars outside are all empty. You see anyone drive off?”

  “Can’t say that I did. I seen just about everyone run outside after I laid Billy out on the table, and I expected them to jump in their cars and peel away, but most of them scattered into the desert. Poor saps won’t last a day out there.”

  “Betsey run off as well?”

  “No, Sir, she stayed cowered in a corner. I got her in a back room now, but she ain’t said a word since it happened.”

  “Let’s go talk to Betsey.”

  “I sure hope you’re not gonna try something silly.”

  Finn stood up. “Listen, Jackson, if Betsey has even the slightest idea what the hell just happened, then we need to hear what she has to say.”

  “Well, good luck. You’re gonna need it.”

  Jackson led Finn through the kitchen. Ahead of them was a small office. Soft light trickled out from under a closed door. Jackson switched the shotgun over to his left hand and opened it up. Inside, a woman sat on a couch, wrapped in a blanket. She glanced up at them with wild eyes, and the blast of fear Finn saw on her face was startling.

  They stepped inside, and both men noticed the strong smell of ammonia at once. The crotch of Betsey’s pants was wet.

  “Ah shit, Betsey pissed herself again and all over my favorite couch.”

  Jackson’s favorite couch looked to Finn like a Salvation Army reject. “She do that often?”

  “Only after everything went whacky. First time it happened I figured she’d just wet herself with fear. Now I’m starting to think she forgot how to use the bathroom.” Jackson turned to the woman on the couch. “Bestey, you mind if this man asks you a question or two?”

  Betsey seemed to watch Jackson’s lips move as though he’d just rattled off a sentence in Mandarin.

  “Betsey, can you hear what I’m saying?”

  “She hears you just fine,” Finn said. �
�She doesn’t understand is all.”

  “You don’t think she’s just in shock, do you?”

  “Not sure. But people in shock appear dazed and disoriented. Betsey almost looks strung out. She do drugs?”

  “Hell no, she’s a grandmother, taking care of her entire family.” Jackson saw the puzzled look on Finn’s face. “You said yourself you don’t remember a thing. Amnesia is the technical term. Saw it on a TV show once. You think Betsey here has the same you got, only worse? Like one of them total resets on the computer?”

  Finn nodded. “Looks that way.” His eyes fell to the desk, and a piece of paper with a drawing made in pen. Finn snatched it up, studied the image, and then turned to Jackson. “You do this?”

  Jackson took the paper and held it about two feet out, squinting. “No, Sir, must have been Betsey. She’s always doodling when things with her granddaughter aren’t going well. Poor child has cystic fibrosis, and the doctors’ bills been piling up all summer. Guess it’s something of a stress reliever for her.”

  Finn took the picture back and studied every angle. The quality was rough, but even from here it was clear what he was looking at: a meadow with tall, flowing grass up to a man’s chest and a sun, bright in the sky.

  But it was the next thing that Finn said that made Jackson’s face drop. “I know this place.”

  Dana Hatfield

  4:45 p.m. (PST), July 4th, 2017

  Coast Guard Station Golden Gate, Fort Baker, CA

  The barracks at Fort Baker were filled with late afternoon shadow as Dana swung the flashlight from side to side, searching through the wreckage for any more survivors. They’d found nearly a dozen already, and each of them seemed to be exhibiting the same bizarre symptoms. Inability to communicate. Paranoia. They found Hodge in the mess hall, trying to break into the kitchen and had rounded him up without too much trouble. A few of the others, like Rogers and Nash, had become violent when approached. That was why her CO, Keiths, had suggested she carry a sidearm. With only three of them unscathed – Alvarez, Keiths and herself – they didn’t have the luxury of sticking together. Each of them took a task. Keiths hit the comms and tried to get hold of the Department of Homeland Security headquarters. The Coast Guard had merged with DHS back in 2003, and now whenever the shit really hit the fan, they were who they called. If anyone had any idea what was going on or how they were going to get out of it, headquarters would. Even though the power had gone out, the walkie talkies still had a charge left, which meant the three of them could keep in touch on site. Keiths had diverted the generators to powering the comms equipment, but from the reports he was making every 10 minutes, it didn’t sound like he was having much luck getting anything other than static.