* * *
Like a well-oiled machine, we showered and dressed in fresh clothes. Tracy gave Emily a bath. I found fresh clothes for James and Martin from my stock and packed two pairs of jeans and shorts and two pairs of T-shirts for me, along with socks and a pair of Doc Martens. I also scrounged up some heavy winter clothing—three sets—in the event we wound up in the mountains during the winter months. Martin commented to me that this was a good idea (I hadn't told him about the cabin yet. He simply surmised it was good I was thinking ahead).
When Heather was in the shower I packed up all the ammunition and magazines and stowed them in the back of the SUV. I placed ammo and magazines beneath the front seats. Our rule for keeping control of the guns still stood between Tracy and I. I had a hunting knife I'd picked up somewhere and I attached it to my holster, making sure it was in the sheath it came in. We also packed up toiletries, batteries, candles, matches, flashlights, food and essential cooking utensils, and fresh water. Tracy packed clothes for herself and Emily. She also packed up our two baby photo albums of Eric and Emily, and I grabbed the CD ROMs of our photos to go along with my iBook (which also contained backup disks of all my work...not that I'd be doing anything with it, but old habits die hard).
All this stuff fit very neatly into the back of the SUV.
As we gathered the last of our things to stow into the SUV I felt a slight sting at the back of my throat. Everybody had finished showering and was in fresh clothing (I'd found two shirts that fit Martin and he was wearing the jeans he was wearing yesterday; I didn't have any that fit him). I had the keys, and Tracy had the Thomas Brothers Guide in hand. I was looking at the living room, ignoring the broken windows and the bloodstain on the floor, and I felt a sudden pang of loss. I took a breath and looked at Tracy. I think she was feeling the same thing because I saw a tear roll down her cheek. We were leaving our home, our sanctuary. We were leaving memories. We brought Emily home from the hospital as an infant to this house. We grew as a family here. I reached the height of my career in this home when I wrote the screenplay that went on to be a major box office hit two years ago and put a lot of money in our portfolio. Likewise, Tracy spread her wings in this house and left the corporate nine-to-five grind for the uncertainty of freelancing.
And now we were leaving it.
"Come on," I said. I grabbed Tracy's hand, gave it a squeeze. "Let's go."
Tracy stifled back a sob and allowed me to pull her away. Emily was standing by her side and I think the fact that we were leaving the only home she'd ever known was affecting her, too. She looked sad, reflective.
The others were gathered at the doorway to the garage. Martin nodded to me. "I checked the front. We're clear."
I closed the door that led into the house. We were huddled around the front of the SUV. "Okay," I said. "There's six adults, one child. Emily will sit in Tracy's lap in the front seat. I've placed the luggage and supplies on the rear seats and in the back compartment, so even though we're pretty full with luggage we should still be able to seat all four of you, but it'll be tight."
"No problem," Martin said.
We piled in the SUV. Previously, I'd handed the Kimber to Tracy, so she was armed with it and two extra magazines. I'd unloaded the rifle and placed it on the floor of the front seat. Fully loaded magazines were within easy reach. Even though I trusted Martin and Lori, who were sitting directly behind us in the back seat, I felt uneasy about letting them have a loaded rifle within easy reach of Heather. Tracy's paranoia over Heather was making me nervous about her.
"Here goes," I said. I opened the garage door with the remote.
The garage door whirred open. I put the SUV in reverse and backed out into our street.
The neighborhood was laden with smoke that was growing thicker. There were no signs of people or primitives anywhere. As I pulled the car down the street I passed my first body—it was my neighbor, Stan Ellwood, dressed in his suit. Something had been at him and torn his left arm from his body and gouged his eyeballs out of his head. His head was one raw mass of flesh and splintered bone. Something that looked like red, curdled cheese leaked out of his skull.
Tracy held Emily close to her, keeping her face averted from the body.
With a sinking sense of loss, we made our way out of our neighborhood.
* * *
We made it over the San Gabriel Mountains with no trouble at all. The main highway that wound its way through the rocky passes was mostly empty. A few vehicles had crashed into the sides of rock walls, their passengers either dead from the impact or scampered off...in what state, I don't know. The farther away we got from Los Angeles, the more the smoke began to thin out, but that took a good while. Los Angeles County is pretty goddamn big, and it took sixty miles and almost three hours to put us away from much of the smoke and smog that still enveloped the city like a blanket.
During the three-hour ride we didn't speak much. We also didn't see any living human beings.
But we saw plenty of primitives.
We saw our first one just as we reached the bottom of the San Gabriel Mountains, on the other side of the valley. A group of them were huddled around a crashed vehicle and as we sped by they yelled, waved their arms, and started chasing us. They gave up the pursuit after a short distance.
"There's gonna be more," Martin said from the back seat.
"Don't worry," I said, gripping the steering wheel. "We're not stopping for anything."
By one o'clock we were in Kern County heading north. This section of California is barren desert. Death Valley is close by, and in the summer the temperature can climb to one hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. We had our route well mapped, though. We'd skirt Bakersfield on the north, cut through Edwards Air Force base to the south and head north toward the Sierra Nevada mountain range. With any luck, we'd get to our cabin tomorrow.
I thought about what we should do during our drive through the San Gabriels. We couldn't just dump Heather in Kern County, and we couldn't turn James, Martin, and Lori away from our cabin. It would be wrong. I was determined to talk to Tracy about this in private when we pulled over for a rest and a bite to eat. I was hoping she'd settled down on her feelings toward Heather. If not, I didn't know what we were going to do. The Heather problem hung over me, an unnecessary burden.
We passed plenty of primitives. Some were far off in barren fields and we heard them hoot and holler as we passed. Others were spotted at rest stops, near cars and buildings. There was no way they could catch us, and as we drove my hopes began to dwindle. If the primitives stayed close to where they'd been most familiar with when they were human, that would mean we'd come across quite a few of them on our trek to the mountains. I was hoping they would have scattered, sought more developed areas. Apparently that didn't seem to be the case as we passed pockets of primitives on our trek through Kern County. It was a little like driving through the San Diego Wild Animal Park, except the animals were human.
We stopped along a barren stretch of road to rest and grab a quick bite to eat and quench our thirst. We piled out of the SUV, hot and sweaty and alert for anything. The last primitives we'd passed were ten miles back. I kept my eyes peeled for anything weird as Lori got the rear of the SUV open. Tracy kept Emily close to her side as we all made our way to the back of the vehicle.
We sat on the side of the road and ate a quick lunch of fruit, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that Tracy and Heather made. We'd passed a rest area fifteen miles back that appeared deserted, which consisted of a pair of gas stations and a couple of fast food restaurants. Before that was farmland. There were no signs of dwellings or business establishments to be seen in the last fifty miles. I always wondered about rest stops like the one we'd passed. Where did they get the people who worked them? With no housing nearby, I found it hard to believe fast food workers would drive all that way to work a minimum wage job.
I was thinking about this little diversion that, in the old days, would have been the basis for a short stor
y. It would probably be something about alien pod people sprouting out of the ground at the crack of dawn to work at these gas stations and fast food facilities. I grew suddenly sad. There would be no more short stories. No more novels, no more essays or columns in magazines and web publications. No more screenplays. No more movies, for that matter. Civilization as we knew it was gone, and if it had been any other time I would have had a crying fit.
Instead what interrupted my little reverie was the howl.
I was up in a flash. The others stopped eating—most of us were already finished—and looked around. I looked north and saw two things: several people running toward us from about five hundred yards away to the north, and a vehicle heading down a secondary road in the same direction toward the highway we were parked on.
"Get in the car," I said.
Everybody scrambled. Food was picked up, supplies thrown in the back of the SUV, the door slammed shut. I nodded at Martin and he dashed toward the front of the SUV and grabbed the Ruger and magazines. I made my way toward the driver's side of the SUV and drew my handgun, keeping watch on the vehicle and the primitives. The vehicle reached the road we were on and started heading toward us.
I checked out the primitives. They were running fast. If we left now, did a U Turn and started heading in the direction we came from we could out-distance them easily.
But there was that other vehicle to consider.
How many people were in it? And were they friend or foe?
Everybody got into the SUV and I could hear Emily start to cry. My heart was racing as I caught Martin's gaze. His features were set in grim determination. He jacked a round in the chamber and I realized that the vehicle was coming at us too fast. It would be on us at any minute and I did the only thing I could do. I yelled at everybody in the SUV. "Get down!" Then I joined Martin at the front of the SUV, pulled my gun and waited.
The vehicle drew up across the road from us and I saw it was a Jeep. There was a man behind the wheel—he was white, that much I was sure of in the few seconds that followed.
As the Jeep pulled up the man shouted, "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! They're coming!"
I saw that the people running toward us were primitives and they were yelling in a mad war whoop, gaining rapidly. There were about half a dozen of them and were now about fifty yards away. I aimed, and squeezed off three shots.
More gunshots followed. I heard Martin shooting at them with the Ruger and I heard a third firearm that at first I could not immediately place. The primitives were shot and dropped. I looked toward the Jeep and saw the driver was cradling some kind of rifle. He'd opened fire through the open passenger side window at the primitives. He turned toward us, his rifle still aimed out the passenger side of his vehicle. "Are there any coming from the east?"
"No," Martin shouted.
I saw the man look down the road toward where we'd just come from. I heard Martin say, "Nothing coming from the north, either."
And that's how we met Wesley Smitts.
Six
The three of us met in the middle of the road, like dogs sniffing each other cautiously. Wesley exited his vehicle cradling a mean-looking military assault rifle, which I later found to be an M16. He held it muzzle pointed skyward as we introduced each other.
Wesley Smitts was a career military man. An Army Colonel, he was stationed out of Fort Bragg in North Carolina and was in California to assist in some military training at the Marine Base in Camp Pendleton. He'd actually been in the Malibu area when the epidemic—or whatever the hell it was—began reverting people to their primitive state. He was heading towards Edwards Air Force base when our paths crossed.
"Why Edwards?" Martin asked. I could tell Martin was playing dumb, since that was the direction we were heading.
"There might be people there," Wesley explained. He looked to be around my age, with brown hair and a stocky build. "And if there aren't, there should be plenty of weapons available for the taking."
"And if there are people?" Martin asked.
"I don't know," Wesley said. He looked back at the field where the dead primitives lay. "I mean...part of me feels that if there's any order left in this world it'll be found at some military installation." He regarded us calmly and there was something in his look, in the subtle shift in his eyes that told me he knew more than he was letting on. I didn't get a bad feeling from him. It wasn't that, just that he might know about what happened but wasn't prepared to talk about it yet.
Two can play at that game.
I pretended I didn't notice that subtle shift in his eyes. "Part of me feels that way, too," I said. "Which way is Edwards Air Force base?"
Wesley motioned east. "Five miles that way."
"And if there aren't any people left?" Martin asked.
Wesley shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. I figure if there aren't, I can grab some weapons, head into Northern Nevada or something. Get the hell away from major metropolitan areas."
"That's what we're aiming to do," Martin said.
Wesley looked toward the SUV. "How many of you are there?"
I told him and he nodded. Again, I felt no threat from him, although that old part of me raised its ugly head and began talking to me. Don't trust him! I ignored it.
"Would you mind if we tagged along with you to Edwards?" Martin asked.
"Of course not," Wesley said, and that made me feel better.
We led him back to the SUV and everybody got back out. Introductions were made, and when Tracy was introduced to him she was polite but I could tell she was cautious. I introduced Wesley to Emily, our daughter, and he smiled. "I have a little boy named Billy that's about your age back in North Carolina," he said. Then, as if realizing he'd just stumbled over an emotional trip mine, his face suddenly went red. He turned away quickly. "Shit." He looked at me, his eyes turning red. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracking.
"It's okay," I said.
It was awkward being around Wesley Smitts as he fought to control his emotions. And I suppose this sounds pretty shitty, but I was glad he lost it. If he hadn't displayed that deep sense of grief, if he hadn't almost started bawling right there in front of complete strangers over the probable loss of his son and whatever family he might have had I would have felt uneasy about him. Any man who can display that kind of affection was the kind of person I wanted on our side. It meant he had feelings, that he had somebody he loved who he missed greatly and was grieving for them. And if he could grieve, then he could empathize with others. He might find a way to empathize with us.
Wesley got himself together and turned back to us. "My apologies. It's been...a tough forty-eight hours."
"I know," Tracy murmured.
"You're the first people I've come across that weren't like that back there," he jerked a thumb back at the primitives we'd just killed. He quickly explained that he'd been attending a military conference at a hotel in Malibu when the world changed so suddenly. He was outside in the parking lot, at his jeep, when it happened and he'd gotten the hell out. He'd made it back to the local armory where things weren't much better. "I was able to get in and grab this," he said, holding up the rifle. "I got a handful of ammo and took off. It was...madness!"
I told the group that Wesley was planning to check out Edwards Air Force Base. Lori looked doubtful. "You really think anybody will still be there?"
"If there is, ma'am, I have the credentials to get in," he said.
We talked about strategy. Wesley agreed to lead the way in his jeep and if the area were still in lock-down as it probably was when the shit started hitting the fan, he would attempt to gain entry. If he were successful, he would verify our identities and non-primitive status. "It's possible they'll be hostile to you," he explained. "They might even order you off the perimeter. If that happens we should meet back here and I'll come back in two hours. Hopefully with more weapons and information."
"And if you aren't back in two hours?" I asked.
"Then you need to assume the worst."
"Maybe we should just forget Edwards," Tracy said. She looked nervous. "I mean, if there's anybody left that's not affected...do you really think they're going to still follow whatever orders they may have received? Suppose law and order has broken down in there?"
"She's right," James added. He was wearing one of my T-shirts, a crew shirt from one of the films I'd worked on. "The kind of social disorder we've just experienced could have altered things forever. It could be total anarchy in there."
I silently agreed. I've read enough apocalyptic fiction—have even written a smidgeon of it—to know enough about basic human nature. And in this type of scenario, with a total breakdown of order and law and the codes of civilization that bring us together and keep us from being the animals we really are, it's easy to imagine order reverting to chaos.
"We won't know until that's verified," Wesley said.
Martin and I glanced at each other. We'd become the unofficial leaders of our little clan and we quietly acknowledged that Wesley was right. Despite my private misgivings, we had to check it out. We had to have hope. "Let's do it," I said.
Tracy protested as we piled back into our respective vehicles. Wesley made a U-turn, headed north, and I followed. "This is insane," she said. "We have more than enough supplies to last us until we get to our cabin and we can get more at the local sport shop in town."
"You have a cabin?" Heather asked.
"Yes," I said. The cat's out of the bag now. To Tracy, I said, "I'm not going to put us in any danger. First sign of anything fucked up, I'm hanging back."
Martin had retained control of the Ruger when he got into the back seat. Okay by me. I felt better now with him in control of it.
Primitive Page 8