You would have learned very quickly that communications were jammed, that police and fire units were stretched thinly, that hospitals were on lockdown.
Maybe you snapped out of your numbness when the television station you were watching went out.
That didn't happen to me. I watched twenty minutes of TV, still trying to make sense of what was going on, trying to logically find order out of the chaos and hoping that someone, somewhere, would come on and offer a rational explanation as to what was happening. That never happened. What broke the reverie for me was the sound of sirens outside.
I got up from the sofa and went to the kitchen window. The shades were drawn, and as I peered through I saw that my neighborhood looked deserted. Most people in my neighborhood worked outside of the home, but there was always the occasional stay-at-home mom, or somebody home sick, or on vacation, or whatever. I saw nobody had ventured outside to see what was going on. Maybe they were glued to their own televisions. The sirens were coming from the streets below, and from the TV I heard the local commentator say that the Mayor of Los Angeles had called for Martial Law.
That's when survival mode began to kick in for me.
I went to my office, which I had chiseled out of a large corner of the family room. When Tracy and I moved into this house we gave the kids their own bedrooms and Tracy claimed the fourth as her office. Since I did most of my work in the dead of night, it made sense to carve out office space in the family room where I could work uninterrupted during the day when the kids were at daycare, or at night when they were asleep. I went to my large desk, unlocked one of the side drawers and pulled out my Sig Sauer P226 9mm handgun. It was loaded. If she were in her right mind, Tracy would have hollered blue murder about keeping a loaded gun in the house. She knew about the guns, of course (in addition to the Sig, I had a Kimber 1911 .45 handgun and a Ruger .22 rifle my dad gave me for my eighteenth birthday—a genuine hunting rifle that I never used for hunting, but I could certainly tear up a paper target with it). She wasn't happy with them, especially with kids in the house. I'd placated her by disassembling them when she and Eric moved in with me and showed her that, yes, they'll be disassembled at all times and stored in hard-to-reach places so Eric won't run across them and blow his brains out. Right. Two weeks later, while Eric was with his therapist and Tracy was meeting with a client, I reassembled the pistols and locked them in my upper desk drawer. It never made sense to me to have a disassembled weapon while living in a city known for its high crime rate. Instead, it just made more sense to me to be a responsible gun owner.
I'd purchased a holster for the handguns at one point, and as I pulled the slide back on the Sig and ejected the magazine to do a brief inspection of the weapon, I realized I'd have to don it if I wanted to be mobile. I snapped the magazine back in, made sure the safety was engaged, and headed downstairs to the bedroom Tracy and I shared and quickly found the holster in one of my bottom drawers. I could hear her sobbing in her office. Emily came out of her room and stood in the threshold of the master bedroom as I quickly changed into a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, fresh socks and tennis shoes. I put the holster on my waist and slipped the Sig into the right holster. I would put the Kimber in the holster that was positioned at the small of my back a little later. Not once did I feel like some clichéd old west hero.
I pulled the T-shirt over the holster, concealing the weapon, and turned to Emily. "You okay, hon?"
Emily nodded. She still looked frightened. "Is Eric all right?"
I knelt down in front of her. "Everything's going to be fine. I have to go talk to Mommy real quick. I need you to go back to your room and sit on the bed for me. Don't go near the windows, okay?" Emily's bedroom window overlooked the neighborhood below us and my paranoid mind was already at work. If crazy people started roaming into our neighborhood, I didn't want them to see us.
Emily nodded. "Okay."
I made sure she got to her room, and then I went into Tracy's office.
I knew I'd have to wing it, knew I'd have to take charge, to be a man and lead the effort to keep us safe. I knew that would mean making some hard choices. I knelt in front of Tracy, who was finally gaining control of her emotions. Her eyes were red, her face moist with tears. "What did the police say?" she asked.
"The police want us to stay inside," I said, once again the lie slipping out effortlessly. "There's something going on outside and it's all over the news. They want—"
That perked her up. She whirled in her cushy office chair back to her workstation and reached for her mouse. The screen saver was deactivated and she opened a web browser. When she tried to reach a news website, she got a 503 screen: service unavailable.
"Internet traffic is probably really heavy," I said, remembering what it was like on 9/11. "TV is on."
She got up and brushed past me toward the stairs. I followed her up and noticed Emily had come out of her room. She was watching us from the bottom of the stairs.
Tracy stood in the center of the living room, riveted to CNN. Her look of shock was genuine, her fear was real and primal. "My God...what's happening?"
"I don't know."
A male newscaster was broadcasting. It was hard to tell where in the building he was. It looked like a supply room, maybe even a conference room. He looked frightened. "The situation is getting worse by the minute. As you saw a few minutes ago, the chaos made its way into the CNN News Center here in Atlanta."
Cut to a previously recorded news feed from not too long ago; the newscaster was reporting on the topic at hand when suddenly somebody hunched over the computer monitors in the background, let out a primal scream, and leaped over the desk. His target was somebody off camera, who gave a panicked yell. The newscaster stopped what he was doing and somebody else in the background made another noise—it sounded like a growl—and turned on a co-worker. There was a brief glimpse of the newscaster's panicked face and then the picture went black.
Back to the present and the undisclosed location. The newscaster's rumpled, frightened appearance was now accounted for. "If I hadn't been on my toes my cameraman and I might not be here. The speed of whatever it is that's happening—call it mass chaos—is astonishing. As you saw, one minute things were normal or as normal as any newsroom is in a situation like this, and the next we had utter...utter...chaos."
Tracy and I stood in the living room and watched. Emily crept upstairs and stood between us. She watched, too. And for the next ten minutes, the newscaster summed everything up very neatly:
For some unknown reason people were going absolutely bugfuck.
In fact, that was the term he used. Yes, he actually said "bugfuck" on live TV.
Considering the rapid state in which everything was falling down around us, I didn't blame him.
I doubt the FCC was keeping tabs, either.
People were going bugfuck. One minute they were fine, in the next they were reduced to primitive, mindless hordes. They were attacking each other, and those who somehow managed to avoid being reduced to a mindless primitive, were either being killed or seriously wounded. Primitive was the only word I could think of to describe them. My first thought, of course, since I was an occasional writer of horror novels, was that they were turning into zombies. But these weren't Romero-like zombies who lumbered about and chomped on human flesh. They weren't even those new zombies that moved fast or bore some semblance of intelligence like those popularized by the film 28 Days Later or the Brian Keene novel The Rising. Those that were assaulted and killed by these primitives didn't rise from the dead in a similar state. Those poor suckers stayed dead. Instead, it was almost as if some invisible button had been pushed by God to reduce people from civilized thinking human beings to these animal-like creatures.
That's what the newscaster said in a nutshell. Whatever was causing this was widespread. Reports were coming in from all over the world. Nobody knew where it started, and the newscaster told us with grim certainty that his partner, so far unaffected, was currently barricaded in
his office trying to research the story further. "This had to have started from somewhere," he said, his features grim. "I find it impossible to believe that all of a sudden people just started reverting to this state."
And then, in that instant, my mind flashed back on an incident I'd almost forgotten.
I was driving home from a meeting and was near the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, when I saw a weird homeless guy. He was crouched behind a parked car, and he was looking around at passersby as if he were deeply afraid. Something about him made me think he was a cave-man at first. He was dirty, his long hair disheveled, his eyes wild-looking. I wouldn't have noticed him if my attention hadn't happened on a weird drawing on the wall of a building, about thirty feet away from him. It was a drawing which I'll get to later in this narrative. Needless to say, it in no way resembled the gang scrawls you see spray-painted on walls, nor did it resemble the colorful artwork graffiti-artists painted. This thing looked crude, and appeared to be some sort of flying thing with horns. That's the best way I can describe it.
I mentioned the incident to Tracy that evening just before dinner during a rehash of our respective days. And as we talked I didn't even connect it with the other events that were making headlines. It wasn't until that moment when it all came together for me.
Seemingly unrelated incidents at first glance, and I'm sure you'll probably remember how things started out in your neck of the woods. I wasn't even aware of the beginning, of the news coming out of the Middle East that an unknown airborne virus was affecting the human nervous system, that various government agencies both here and abroad were trying to keep a lid on it. That the virus, whatever it was, spread like wildfire throughout Asia and Europe within the space of two weeks. Blame that on my hectic schedule. I suppose I became concerned one night a week before when I sat down to watch the news one evening. The news footage showed scenes of a riot in France, and the reporter made vague references to some virus that was believed to have gotten the rioters in a frenzy. I remember telling Tracy, who was sitting up late with me that evening, that this was the first I'd heard of it and she said, "I've been hearing stuff about this off and on over the past few days...where have you been?" I knew where I'd been, all right. I'd been deep inside my head, working on an overdue novel for my publisher.
There were other things, too. A series of unprovoked assaults in Malibu, a trucker mowing down pedestrians in San Bernardino, an APB was out on a lab worker who killed a bunch of co-workers and stole a bunch of stuff from some laboratory in Massachusetts, some crazy fucker in New Jersey was running around foaming at the mouth and attacking people—biting them in most cases. And then there was the usual shit going on around the world: more news of genocide in Rwanda, more bombings in Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. Soccer fans in Brazil went on a rampage during a big game resulting in a riot, and the U.S. managed to deter a possible nuclear confrontation with those crazy fuckers in Iran.
It was at this point that Tracy's eyes darted around the living room, from the windows to the front door, then to me. "We've got to get Eric," she said. She bolted for the front door.
My reflexes were quick and I intercepted her. "No!" I said firmly. I grabbed her shoulders, forcing her away from the front door. "We can't go out there, it isn't safe."
"I have to get my son!" Tracy shrieked and suddenly she was crying again.
"The police are taking care of it," I said, lying once again. "You saw what's happening on the news! We don't know what—"
"I don't care what's going on out there! I'm going to get my son!"
She tried to move past me and I grabbed her again.
"Let me go!" She shoved me, headed for the door again.
I grabbed her from behind, my forearm hooking around her throat and drawing her back towards me.
"Let me go, you bastard!" She drove her left elbow into my stomach just as I sensed that would be the move she would make. Tracy had taken a martial arts course a few years ago and I was well versed in some of her moves thanks to dinnertime discussion. Still, I couldn't deflect the blow fully and I grunted as her elbow connected firmly with my side. I countered by applying my index finger to a pressure point on her right shoulder near her collarbone. She dropped like a stone.
From behind me: "Mommy!"
Emily came running up and I felt like shit now for our daughter having seen this. I dropped to my knees beside Tracy, trying to placate Emily at the same time. "She's okay, Emily, she's fine!"
Emily ignored me and continued to call out for her mother, who lay unconscious on the entry hall floor.
I picked up Emily, who collapsed in my arms, and carried her back downstairs to her room.
I put her on her bed, told her to stay put and that Mommy was fine but that I had to keep her inside the house. Some bad things might be happening outside and I didn't want Mommy going outside to get hurt. Whether she understood or not, I don't know.
When I went back upstairs Tracy was regaining consciousness. She was sitting up on the floor, crying. "You bastard!" she said when she saw me.
"I'm sorry," I said, trying not to sound like the bastard she said I was and probably failing miserably. "But you gave me no choice. You're staying here!"
"What about Eric!" Tracy shrieked.
"He's fine," I said. "The police will escort us to the hospital when everything outside is under control."
"He isn't fine, he's dead you fucking asshole, he's dead, he's dead!"
I felt the first stirrings of loss in the back of my throat. Eric was her firstborn and she was experiencing the extreme trauma of having been told he was brutally murdered. Do I blame her for losing her mind like that? No way.
"I know honey," I managed to say. I think my voice trembled when I said this. I do remember feeling the first signs of wanting to cry myself, but somehow I held it back. "And when this is all over—"
"When this is all over, what? You gonna make it better? Is that what you were gonna say?"
"Tracy—"
"You never loved Eric the way I did. You're probably glad he's dead because of his..." She started sobbing uncontrollably again. "...of his...autism!"
I felt sucker-punched. Of course Tracy was under extreme duress. She didn't know what she was saying. "Tracy, don't say that, it isn't true."
"Bullshit! It's true and you know it!"
"Why would you think something so—"
"Because you won't get off your ass and help me go out and get him, that's why! If you loved him the way I do, you'd do anything to get to him! Anything!"
I didn't know how to react to that. I stood there, dumbfounded, as Tracy sat on the floor in front of our front door and lost her mind.
I realized with a sense of shame that this was true.
If it were Emily I'd probably be behaving the same way. I'd be throwing all sense of caution and rationality to the wind in my effort to get to her, even knowing on an intellectual level that she was dead.
But was I glad that Eric was dead?
No. Of course not.
Tracy cried, her body slumped against the wall. I wanted to try to comfort her, but I knew I would be met with resistance. Even though Eric wasn't my biological son—Tracy and I got together when he was an infant, six months after she divorced her first husband—I treated him as my own child. Yes, his mental handicap was something that was hard for me to get used to. Yes, I tried to work with it, to understand it. And yes, when Emily was born I doted on her probably more fiercely than I did with Eric. But it wasn't out of some sense of entitlement. It was out of a sense of an instinctual love I felt toward her.
I could hear Emily crying behind me as she shuffled into the living room. I could sense she wanted to go to her mother. I was just about to try breaking the ice when there was a loud thump against the front door and then a volley of fists began raining on it.
Two
Tracy reacted instinctively. She jumped away from the door and scuttled to Emily, engulfing her in her arms. I took a step back, my heart lod
ged in my throat as the volley of blows on the door continued. "Don't say anything," I said.
There was a grunt from outside, more thuds against the door. I drew the Sig Sauer from its holster, thumbed the safety off, and approached the door slowly.
I looked out the peephole.
The fisheye lens gave me a view of our front porch and the walkway leading up to it. Leaning into the door was a person. I couldn't tell who it was, or what sex they were. All I could see was the top of their head, which had thick black hair, and that they were wearing dark-colored clothing. The person was sort of hunched over, leaning his or her shoulder into the door trying to push it open. The deadbolt and the regular lock were engaged, but I knew that even an incredibly strong person could probably break both and gain entry. Judging by the person's behavior, he or she must be a primitive. Why else would they act like that?
"I want you both to go downstairs," I said.
"Who is it?" Tracy asked, her voice a high-pitched, frightened whisper.
"I don't know! Just go downstairs!"
As if sensing that things weren't right, that perhaps what was being depicted and reported on in the news was perhaps now on our front doorstep, Tracy picked up Emily and carried her downstairs.
I turned toward the front door, my mind racing. The sounds continued, accompanied by an unintelligible babbling. It was a man, of that I was certain, but who was he?
Primitive Page 2