Primitive

by J. F. Gonzalez

  At some point, the events of the day took their toll on my body, and then my mind. I could feel myself growing tired as I went upstairs to check on my family again.

  Eventually, the fatigue spread. It was becoming harder to concentrate on the written word.

  I must have fallen asleep around ten-thirty, maybe eleven.

  I don't remember how long I was asleep. An hour at the most. Maybe two.

  What woke me up was the sound of Lori Smith screaming.

  * * *

  I sprang to my feet and dashed out of the room at the sound of Lori's ear-piercing scream from the living room. My heart pounded as I became immediately concerned for my family and their safety.

  As I reached the living room I saw Martin come in from outside. He was cradling an M4. I heard footsteps upstairs and a moment later Tracy emerged on the landing, looking worried and rattled. I felt a momentary sense of relief at seeing her there. Lori screamed again from the living room. "Oh damn, oh shit, no, this isn't happening!"

  "Stay there!" I shouted at Tracy. I went toward the living room, following Martin, and instantly regretted it; I didn't have a weapon.

  I heard Alex yell something as Martin and I entered the den, and then I heard what I first thought to be a third voice. This voice was guttural, almost animal-like in its nature. Martin stopped at the threshold to the living room, and as I looked into the darkened room my vision caught what was going on.

  Lori was standing away from the sofa looking terrified. Alex was sitting up, rocking back and forth again, saying "no, please, no please" over and over. Every once in awhile he would growl and that third voice would take over, that guttural animal-like tone that was reminiscent of the primitives.

  "He's turning," Lori said, her eyes panicked. "He's turning and I can't get him to stop! I can't—"

  "I'm fine, I'm fine!" Alex insisted, that growl now replaced by a tone of panic. When he looked at us I could see his terrified gaze swing from Lori to us. He was shaking his head. "Really, I'm okay, I just had a bad dream, I—"

  I heard a fourth set of footsteps behind me; Wesley. "What's going on?" he barked.

  "There's something wrong with Alex!" Lori said, her voice still carrying that edge of panic.

  "There's nothing wrong with me!" Alex insisted. He was leaning forward on the sofa now. He didn't look like he was turning to me.

  "Then why the fuck were you sounding like a goddamn wild animal a minute ago?"

  "I-I w-wasn't!" Alex stammered.

  "Bullshit! I heard it, I saw you!"

  Martin stepped forward, rifle cradled in his arms. "What did you see, Lori?"

  "She didn't see anything!" Alex implored Martin. It was obvious that Martin scared him to death; Martin not only cut an imposing figure, he was carrying that rifle.

  "Why don't you try to relax a little bit," I told Alex.

  "I'm okay!" Alex kept insisting. He was still rocking back and forth on the sofa, his frightened eyes darting around the room. "I'm okay, really, I am."

  "You're not okay, Alex!" Lori stated.

  "Why don't you just tell us what happened," Wesley said.

  "I was dozing on the floor and he just started growling." Lori had scampered to the coffee table, where she kept her distance from Alex. "I got up and he was sitting there like that, rocking back and forth. I thought he was having a bad dream, that he was thinking of Naomi because he kept saying 'no' over and over, and then—"

  "That's all it was, just a bad dream," Alex reiterated.

  "But you were changing!" Lori admonished. She was speaking directly to Alex now, some of her hardcore personality coming back through. "You looked at me and you made that sound again...that demon sound like you hear in horror movies and...when you looked at me...you weren't there!"

  "She's lying!" Alex said, still looking panicked.

  "I called your name three times and you didn't respond!"

  "That's not true!" As Alex said that, his voice changed—whether involuntarily or not, it was a notable change. The word true had that guttural, raspy tone as described by Lori.

  We all jumped at the sound of it. Alex began to growl again as he rocked and I saw something flit across his features.

  Lori was right.

  He was changing.

  "Oh Jesus," Lori said. She scrambled off the coffee table, almost falling on the floor in her haste to get away. Martin gripped the M4 in his hands, unsure of what to do.

  Wesley stepped forward, almost fearless in his approach. "Alex, you've got to fight it!"

  Alex growled at Wesley. They locked eyes. I could see Alex's true human nature in there, swimming in his baby blues, pleading for help as something came to the surface and tried to take over.

  "Fight it!" Wesley roared.

  The thing trying to take over winked out and Alex was back. "What's happening?" he said, his voice breaking down.

  Wesley turned to me. "Get the rope out of the kitchen. Now!"

  I scrambled out of the living room and went to the kitchen, keeping my ears peeled to what was going on in the living room. I could hear Alex crying, pleading for help, and Wesley's stronger, more authorative voice telling him to fight it, just fight it goddammit! I flipped on the light, saw the adjoining mudroom and stumbled inside. A coil of rope lay on the unused washing machine. I grabbed it and headed back to the living room.

  When I got back to the living room Lori was standing by Martin, who had the M4 pointed at Alex. Wesley was guardedly approaching him, talking to him. "Fight it, Alex, fight it!"

  "Aaaaarrrrruuuuggghhhhh!" Alex roared. He titled his head back, eyes closed. Even with his eyes closed I could see the transformation take shape. It wasn't like a CGI special effect; it was more like a kind of essence that was struggling to take hold.

  I handed the coil of rope to Wesley who immediately began wrapping it around Alex's arms and torso. "Help me tie him up," he said as I leaped forward to do just that.

  As we tied him up I could feel the primitive nature take hold of Alex. It was like handling a live wire, knowing it was going to explode and throw sparks at any moment. With it came that spiritual sense I described earlier; that sense that something wicked, something unnatural but all knowing, was in the air.

  "Fight it, Alex, fight it!" Wesley said as he worked the rope around his body, tying his arms to his sides.

  Alex came out of it once as we were tying him up. That guttural, demonic voice broke up, became the sobbing falsetto of Alex, who looked at us and started crying again. "Oh God, what's happening, what's happening to me!" only to be cut off by the primitive life force that came back with a new found strength. I had just gotten his feet and ankles bound together and was fumbling for a way to tie the bonds off, when the primitive took over completely. It opened Alex's eyes, snarled, and tried to leap off the sofa at us. I yelled, dropped the rope, and fell on my ass.

  "Aaaarrrrgghhh!" Alex leaped at Wesley, trying to take a bite out of him.

  Wesley punched Alex in the face. The blow had no effect. Alex lunged at him again.

  "Get him down, get him down!" Wesley yelled.

  Alex howled. The sound of that howl evoked our trek to his house yesterday afternoon and what it had brought with it.

  And then Martin stepped in and shoved the stock of the M4 down on Alex's head in a hearty thump that knocked him completely out and cut the howl off in mid-stream.

  "Oh Jesus," Lori said again, visibly shaken.

  Alex slumped forward and fell off the sofa.

  Wesley glanced up at Martin, panting heavily from the exertion of his struggle. "Thanks, Martin." He quickly took Alex's pulse. "He's alive. Help me tie these ropes off and gag him."

  Feeling a little safer now that Alex was unconscious, I helped Wesley tie Alex's bonds, and Martin handed over a discarded towel from the kitchen, which we used as a gag. We laid him down on the sofa. Despite being unconscious, we could all notice the huge change in him. Aside from the heavy presence of the primitive, there was a smell that seemed
to permeate him. It was a smell of corruption. Of rot.

  Of evil.

  If evil had a smell, this one was it. A mixture of dampness, of sweat, of bodily fluids and rotting corpses. Of body odor. Prior to this, I chalked that up to the primitive's lack of hygiene. To have it manifest itself on Alex so quickly told me it was a spiritual essence, part of its makeup. It's what marked them.

  "Do you guys smell that?" I asked.

  They nodded. Lori was still standing by the threshold. "That's an evil smell," she said.

  "Yeah," I said, taking a step away from Alex. "And I gotta get away from this thing. I just—"

  I was feeling my gorge rise. I turned and stumbled out of the living room and made it to the kitchen just in time to throw up in the kitchen sink.

  Twenty

  Alex woke up thirty minutes later completely bound and gagged.

  And completely primitive.

  He growled through his gag. His eyes narrowed into slits as he gazed at us in animal fury. His arms bulged as he tried to force his way out of the heavy rope that bound his arms to his sides, his legs and ankles lashed together.

  The five of us were standing around him in the living room waiting for him to regain consciousness. Tracy had come downstairs and she was pale, trembling with anxiety.

  It was dark and quiet outside. Martin had checked the perimeter of the cabin shortly after knocking Alex out and pronounced the area safe. But for how long? I think there was an unspoken acknowledgement between the five of us that our window of opportunity was slipping away, that soon this area would be visited by hordes of primitives, a greater mass than we'd ever seen. Wesley even said at one point that we should pack up and leave before the sun rose. Strike for farther points north, head into Canada. But nobody countered his suggestion with an alternative. I think we were all too stunned by the recent turn of events.

  Alex tried to howl through his gag. A vein pulsed in his forehead from the exertion he was putting himself through in breaking out of his bonds. His head whipped back and forth in fury, his long blonde hair tangled and sweaty.

  "How could this happen?" Lori whispered. She was standing near Tracy and me; Tracy's arms were around her. I was thinking the same thing. If it could happen to Alex and Naomi, it could happen to any of us. It could happen to my daughter. That was my worst nightmare.

  "We can't just leave him like this," I said.

  "Well, we can't study him either," Martin said. "Much as a part of me would like to put him in a cage and observe him, learn more about these things, that isn't feasible right now."

  "We can't just kill him!" Lori said. The expression in her face was identical, to some degree, with what all five of us were feeling. We had to put an end to Alex to protect us, but we still needed to learn more about the primitives.

  Wesley glanced at me. "Did you learn anything from those books?"

  "Yes and no," I said, my thoughts a jumbled mass.

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means that I'm more confused now than I was when this shit started."

  "Cut to the chase, David."

  I sighed. Alex continued to howl through his gag. As muffled as his howling was, the tone of his voice was starting to get to me again. "The closest I could find was a few cave paintings of the God of the New World...the figure itself wasn't even identified as a deity in the footnotes. I thought I was seeing things."

  "But it was there, right?" Wesley looked anxious for me to provide them all with the CliffsNotes version of what I'd learned. "Maybe the anthropologists who studied this shit just didn't pick up on it. Maybe they didn't recognize it."

  "Yeah, that's what I'm thinking." I nodded toward Alex. "And it was there, definitely. Seeing those photos made me think of something Alex told us earlier. Remember what he related about his wife? What she told him before she turned primitive?"

  "Her religious mania was growing," Martin said.

  "Yeah. And she was convinced we were in the end times, that the primitives weren't really people...but demons."

  "Yeah, and?" Wesley said.

  I looked at Lori, made eye contact with her. She'd made a similar statement just a short time ago. When I turned to Wesley and Martin, I gestured toward Alex's writhing form on the sofa. "The God of the New World looks suspiciously like sculptures and drawings of an ancient Assyrian demon called Pazuzu." I gave them a brief anthropological lesson on Pazuzu and his appearances in folklore and literature. "It's said his father is Hanbi, Lord of all demons. Not much is known of Hanbi; there's no drawings of him, not much of anything, really, but in many religious sects Hanbi is another name for Satan."

  Lori drew in a breath of shock. I felt Tracy stiffen by my side.

  "In many cultures it's said that Satan can raise the dead, that demons can occupy the bodies of the living and the dead." I was looking at Alex as I spoke, my mind turning over the possibilities. "In the Bible and other religious texts, Satan is said to be The Wanderer. This God of the New World has been described to us as wandering the earth, gathering its followers, in some cases possessing those of the dead that were sacrificed to it." I glanced at my gathered clan, gaining strength from them. "We've felt its presence. We've heard about the influence it has on the primitives from Stuart, and we've just seen how it's taken over the body of a man who was one of us just a short while ago." All eyes fell on Alex again, who growled through the gag in his mouth and glared at us with eyes that were as fiery as the pits of hell. "We can no longer deny it," I whispered. "Satan has come to represent all kinds of things, from evil incarnate, to chaos, to rebellion, to accuser. He's also been linked to represent our animal side, our pure unadulterated lust and carnal desire, everything Abrahamic religions have taught us is sinful. And what better way to summon an ancient demon than through the collective belief systems of the most primitive of us?"

  "I don't think I follow you," Martin said.

  "You've all heard stories of demonic possession, right? The Exorcist was loosely based on a real case that happened back in the 1940's. The film The Exorcism of Emily Rose was also supposedly based on a true case that happened in Germany in the mid 70's. I remember hearing about other cases, mostly from my Aunt, who was very involved in the Catholic Church. I didn't know how much of that to believe, but now..." My voice trailed off.

  "What you're insinuating, David," Martin said, his voice trembling. "It's impossible."

  "Why is it impossible?" Lori asked.

  "I'm an atheist. If I don't believe there's a God, I surely don't believe there's a devil."

  Alex continued to growl through his gag. The fresh scent of excrement invaded my nostrils. Alex had just shit himself.

  "Then what the hell you call that?" Lori stated. She pointed an accusing finger at Alex, who continued to writhe and growl on the sofa.

  "This is all too much," Martin said. He was clearly at a loss to confront what was happening, what I was suggesting was happening.

  "I understand what you're going through, Martin," I said quickly. "Believe me, I do. But all other attempts to explain what's happened in the last month when it comes to dealing with the God of the New World, and the primitives' collective belief in it...and especially everything we heard from Stuart...what Wesley and I saw today at Alex's home." I gestured at Alex. "And Alex himself."

  "It can't be that simple," Martin said.

  "I'm not saying it is. I can't even begin to claim that I've identified the God of the New World as Hanbi. There's so much we don't know about prehistoric man and his beliefs. But what if..." I was on a roll, my thoughts tumbling into my head and rushing out of my mouth in a torrent. "...what if something existed with prehistoric man. Something that was real and possessed some kind of psychic power. Something that primitive man worshipped. And what if it came back when that chemical compound did its thing."

  "Shit," Martin whispered. I think he was getting the message.

  "So what—" Lori began, then stopped in mid-sentence.

  I felt
the presence then at that point too. So did the others.

  First, the sounds. They were moaning, gibberish sounds, from outside.

  Then, the footsteps. Some slow and stealthy, others plodding and clumsy.

  The scent of carrion wasn't too far behind.

  Wesley glanced out the window. "Everybody take your positions!" His voice had a nervous, shaky edge to it and I don't blame him. This was all coming at us too fast.

  Shortly after we arrived at the cabin a month ago, we'd come up with an emergency plan should our homestead face any kind of physical threat, whether from hostile humans or an invading horde of primitives. We'd long ago moved the large entertainment center that flanked the west wall of the living room out into the storage shed and replaced it with several very large gun cabinets we procured from our first trip into town. That's where we stored the weapons and ammunition. All the firearms were fully loaded, with the right size magazines and ammo within easy reach for fast procurement. At the sound of "take your positions," everybody was to grab a weapon and as many clips and ammo as possible and then disperse to their pre-assigned positions around the property: I was to take the front perimeter which faced north, Wesley the east, Lori the south and Martin the west. Tracy would handle the interior of the house, the idea being that we had no idea of knowing when such a scenario would take place, and it was possible she would have to whisk Emily upstairs to safety. Being that Emily was already upstairs and knew not to come downstairs if she heard gunfire, eliminated that mad dash to whisk our daughter to safety. All Tracy had to do was grab a weapon and hold down the interior of the house.