Hold on dad, I’ll be there soon.
Carole Cartright
Salt Lake City Airport
A hand nudged Carole awake. She knew at once she’d been dreaming. The whole family had been packed into the family mini van. For once, Jim was in the passenger seat, but the car kept rolling back and forth no matter what she tried.
“Don’t worry darling,” Jim’s dream self said, smiling. “You’ve got a body under the front tire. Just gotta hit the gas real hard.” Then those masculine dimples in his cheeks disappeared as the skin on his face began to look like the bottom of an old frying pan. “Why didn’t you save me...”
Carole clutched at the form before her.
“Mom, keep it down.”
Aiden pressed an index finger against his lips. Alice was behind him, her mouth flapping open and closed as though she were having trouble breathing.
“Someone’s trying to get in,” Aiden said.
Carole glanced over his shoulder toward the doorway stacked with furniture.
The door rattled again.
They’d driven through the tangle of forms yesterday, some screaming, others cowering in terror. Finally, after becoming hopelessly lost in the maze of airport corridors, Nikki had spotted the security center; a counter with a window that looked more like a currency exchange booth than it did a safe haven. The glass door stood slightly ajar and they’d scrambled inside, quickly stacking the front window and entrance with anything they could find.
In the back of the security center, a narrow hallway led to a small lunch area and a series of rooms. One of those rooms was furnished with nothing but a table and a couple of chairs. Carole had seen enough cop shows in her day to recognize this was where they might have once held suspected terrorists; a group that, less than 24 hours ago, had represented the free world’s greatest threat. How quickly things changed.
The door handle rattled again and the sound startled her.
“Where’s your sister?”
“In one of the back rooms, why?”
Carole got up. The security office had the vague smell of new furniture, most of which was now piled against the door and window. She made her way to the room with the flashing light.
She stopped at the door. Nikki had a flashlight in one hand and was doing her best to pry open a cabinet with a broken metal chair leg.
She tried again. “What are you doing?” Carole asked.
“We nearly died last night.”
“Yes, I know,” Carole said, crossing her arms. “More than once.”
“Those people outside keep trying to get in. We can’t stay here.”
“I never said we would, but heading off in the dark yesterday didn’t seem like the wisest idea. You never answered my question. What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a weapon.”
“Weapon? Like what, a gun?” The look of surprise on Carole’s face only seemed to infuriate Nikki.
“Of course a gun. Even you can’t run them all over like you did last night.”
Nikki was always quick to strike back when she felt challenged. That had been one of Carole’s biggest pet peeves about her daughter and yet, in a weird way, Nikki’s little broadside brought her a small amount of comfort. The idea that some things hadn’t quite been erased was somehow comforting.
“Your father tried to take you hunting with him a few times and he eventually gave up. Cooked up a deer steak once and told you it was filet mignon. You ran to the bathroom and threw up.”
The lock on the cabinet jiggled as Nikki continued to pry.
“You don’t remember any of that, do you?”
Nikki stopped and shook her head. Her body spasmed ever so slightly and Carole laid a hand on her back.
“Don’t worry honey, it’ll come back to you.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on. What’s wrong with everyone? Have they gone insane?”
“I don’t think so,” Carole replied pensively. “But something has happened to their minds. They seem to have forgotten who they are, like you, but only worse.”
“But those men who attacked us?”
“You remember when we used to drop Aiden off at daycare before I took you to school?”
Nikki buried her face in her hands.
“No, of course you don’t, honey. I’m so sorry. Well I’ll tell you anyway and maybe the telling will stir something inside of you. First thing Aiden would do is run for a chubby kid named Patrick Yates.” Carole smiled. “Imagine a three year old built like a third grader. God love him, he wasn’t the brightest thing, but he was cute as a button. Anyway, Aiden never liked him, for a reason I could never understand, and always seemed to want whatever Patrick was playing with. Every morning like clockwork, he’d head straight for poor Patrick and smack him across the face. Didn’t matter that Patrick was more than twice his size. I was horrified, of course, and thankfully he eventually grew out of it, but here’s the point. Being civil to one another is a lesson children learn only after they cause enough pain. Kids can be lovely and sweet, but they can also be incredibly cruel. It looks like what happened yesterday just undid all of that.”
Carole looked over at Aiden, who was standing in the doorway, the tail end of a smile disappearing from his face. Alice was behind him. “Coast is clear, for now.”
With some effort, Carole brought herself to her feet. The muscles in her neck were bunched together like taught springs and the resulting headache that had begun as a low throb last night had worked itself into a real thumper. They were becoming dehydrated. She’d read somewhere that the body can last weeks without food, but only days without water. The taps were still working, in spite of the power outage, but it was the safety of the water Carole was worried about. Without purification, tap water might contain dangerous bacteria. Maybe even bits of fecal matter that the purification plants were no longer able to filter out. The growing danger made getting out of here all the more imperative.
“If we all work together,” Carole suggested, helping Nikki off the floor. “We might be able to pry this cabinet open.”
“You think there are machine guns inside?” Aiden asked. His eyes were practically glowing with excitement.
“If there’s anything of the kind, you certainly won’t be the one using them.”
“Oh, come on, that’s bullshit.”
Carole gave him ‘the look’: a glassy death stare which usually put Aiden in his place.
His fingers fiddled nervously. “Sorry Mom, it’s just that with everything going on outside we need some serious firepower.”
“No we don’t,” she refuted. “Don’t forget those are people out there, Aiden, and most of them aren’t trying to kill anyone, they’re frightened and want nothing more than to get away. Only, they don’t know how to get there. Now come over here and give your mother a hand.”
They slid the metal chair leg between the cabinet and the thin metal chain and collectively pushed down. Nikki was straining so hard her bottom teeth were showing and Aiden’s features bunched up as though a massive weight had just been plopped onto his shoulders. The sound of the chain snapping made them erupt into cheers.
They swung open the doors, Nikki flicking the light around.
“Aww man,” Aiden said, distraught at the lack of heavy weaponry, “that was a real waste of time.”
Alice came in between them all. Her rosy cheeks glowing, even in the low light of the room. “I’m not so sure about that.”
As far as Carole was concerned, Aiden was right. All she saw was what looked like a cable TV box with a bunch of wires sticking out. “Does it play tapes or 8-tracks, I can’t tell?” she asked.
Alice laughed. “Neither. It’s a ham radio. My husband Sal owned one for years. Tried desperately to get me involved but you know I couldn’t fake any interest in it.”
“Bet you wish you could take that back,” Nikki said.
Nodding, Alice said: “There are a lot of things I wish I could take back.”
“I’m sure he’s at home worried to death over you.”
“Oh, I doubt that. Sal left me last year.”
“Alice, I’m so sorry,” Carole said. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you? No, it was my fault. I suppose fidelity was never my strong suit.” She laughed sardonically. “He was one of those preppers. Gearing up for apocalypse. Maybe if he’d spent more time with me rather than stocking our garage with gas masks and water filtration systems, things might have been different.”
Carole laid a land on her shoulder. “All the prepping in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if suddenly everything you knew was wiped clean away.”
There was a layer of dust on the ham radio and Alice brushed it clean with a kind of reverence and it made Carole wonder if it had something to do with the machine’s connection to Sal. “It’s just too bad the power’s out,” Alice said, “cause this little baby might have come in handy.”
A red button on the top left read power and Aiden reached over and pushed it.
Carole tried to swat his hand away, but was too late. She had a rule about grasping hands. No doubt about it, if there was a button, Aiden had to push it. He’d been that way his whole life.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the orange colored LCD screen came to life, displaying a bunch of numbers and letter that looked to Carole like nothing more than a bunch of gobbledegook.
“Must be solar powered,” Alice said astounded. “Can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. See that 12 volt car battery on the bottom shelf and those wires going up through the ceiling? They must have a solar panel on the roof.”
“Great, so can we call the police or the army or something?” Nikki asked.
Alice suddenly didn’t look so sure. “I think so. The real question is, will anyone answer?”
She moved the tuning knob to the right. “First thing I’m gonna do is roll through the frequencies and see if I can pick anything up.”
After over thirty minutes of static, the receiver began picking up a faint signal.
“... 111...93 minutes 0 seconds...”
Aiden lifted his head from Carole’s shoulder, suddenly alert.
Beside them, Nikki opened her eyes and stared intently. “What is it?” she asked.
Alice played with the knob, trying to hone in on the signal. “I’m not sure.”
Larry Nowak
Manhattan, NY
Going back to his swanky apartment in uptown Manhattan wasn’t an option for Larry Nowak. The streets were clogged with abandoned cars and chunks of rubble. A number of fires had broken out during the earthquake and with no firefighters to battle the blazes, thick columns of smoke now chocked the horizon. Even the twinkling pastel lights in the sky, which couldn’t possibly be a sign of anything good, were temporarily lost in the haze. Last night he had found a BMW X5 sitting under the lip of a high rise apartment complex on Pine street, inviting him in with an open driver’s side door and he decided it would make as good and safe a bed as any.
But sleep hadn’t come easy for Larry. Gunshots and screams had played out through most of the night. If there had been any vestige of order yesterday, they soon disappeared when the sun went down. The survivors were growing hungry and yet with restaurants and variety stores on every corner, Larry continued to witness events that surprised and disgusted even him. A man in an adjacent alley feasting on what looked like a poodle. At one point, a man and a woman staggered along the street. A slab of concrete fell from above, crushing the man into the pavement. The woman, stumbled back a few feet, looking indifferent as she continued walking. The sight reminded Larry of the one story Larry’s father liked to tell about his ‘good for nothing’ son. Apparently, at the age of three, Larry had wiggled from his father’s grasp after a trip to the barber and run right off the sidewalk into traffic.
“Little Larry’s got a death wish, I shit you not.”
The room would erupt into gales of laughter and even young Larry would put on a sly little smile. He would never give the old man the pleasure of knowing the story pissed him off. And it proved to be an important lesson for Larry. No matter what the bastards say, make sure you’re always smiling.
Looking at it last night, however, that memory of his father sipping warm beer from a can, surrounded by fat relatives squeezed into cheap plastic folding chairs on the back lawn, had started to take on a different light. In a way, the image of that woman who’d stared indifferently at the crushed body of the man who’d been walking next to her a second before kinda reminded Larry of that story his sonofabitch of a father loved to tell all the time. Kids are oblivious to death. They only know pleasure and pain in the simplest forms. But empathy, feeling the pain of others, is a learned behavior. The epiphany was an important one and something Larry would tuck away, perhaps for later use. Maybe these folks running around like idiots weren’t cavemen as much as they were children. Slates wiped clean in a single cataclysmic event. But why not him? Why had he, of all people, been spared?
Morning arrived and the streets appeared to be largely empty, except for a lone figure or two in the distance, wandering around aimlessly.
Larry left the X5. His suit was torn in three places and caked with concrete dust from when the cop had tried to make him his bitch. The bruises on his outer thigh and back where the cop’s baton had connected were still smarting, but if those were the worst of his injuries, then he considered himself a lucky man indeed. With both the Glock and the .38 in the front pockets of his suit, he wouldn’t quite feel at the mercy of the next New York City psycho who tried to mess with him.
Larry staggered on stiff legs toward the corner of Pine and Broadway. Cabs, SUVs, compacts. Most of them were open and many of the engines were still running with the driver’s door open, as though he’d summoned a valet to pull the car around. He had his veritable pick of the litter, true, but none of them would do. To make it through the clogged streets and off the island, he’d need a frikin tank. One of the few friends Larry had, a man by the name of Kenny Eton, lived beside a lake just south of Bethlehem, NY. No more than an hour’s drive east and definitely not a bad place to ride out the storm. Besides, if Kenny had lost his marbles, then at least Larry could put him out of his misery and not let the place go to waste.
Larry brought his hand to his mouth and coughed. The smoke from fires was starting to burn his eyes. Through the twists of black smog, Larry spotted something that surprised him. Hard to tell from there if they were male of female, but the person was riding a bike. The half-wits he’d watched stumbling around from the relative safety of the BMW for most of the night hadn’t ridden a thing besides each other, when a half naked couple had started banging like a pair of animals in the middle of the street. But that was one hell of an idea. Bikes were all around, weren’t they? Of course those city rent-a-bikes wouldn’t do. Those were locked up tight and besides, they looked like they weighed a thousand pounds. He would need something light and with a basket, so he could carry some necessities.
Didn’t take him more than five minutes to find one. Dark blue and lying in a heap on the ground, it certainly wasn’t a $10,000 Madone like the one Larry had back at his apartment on Fifth Avenue. The bike also didn’t have a basket, but it did have one of those racks above the rear wheel. He rolled it up onto the sidewalk and leaned it against a street light. Beside him was a fruit market. The baskets out front were mostly empty. Larry removed the gun from his pocket and walked inside.
“Anyone in here?”
No answer.
The darkness seemed to swallow the light from outside. Narrow aisles of canned goods, most of them on the floor. Someone had definitely been in here and perhaps they hadn’t left. He only needed a few bottles of water, some bread and maybe some bananas for the potassium. A bang from the back of the store made him flinch. It sounded like someone had kicked a can in the dark and now he watched it come skidding down the aisle. It stopped at his feet.
Larry reached behind the counter for some plastic
bags. He would take them all.
A bottle of pickles sailed passed his head and connected with the shop’s front window, bringing it down in a deafening torrent of shattering glass. Splinters pierced Larry’s right cheek. He brought the hand with the gun to his face and dabbed the wound with his knuckles. This asshole had drawn blood and now Larry was going to kill him. A can of beans came out of the gloom and hit him square in the chest.
Larry doubled over.
His brain was telling him to retreat, but his body needed another minute so he could catch his breath. Larry raised the Glock and fired off three rounds, one for each darkened aisle. A can of tomato paste was next and it missed his head by less than an inch. Gun or no gun, Larry had had enough. He ducked out with a plastic bag filled with bottled water and a loaf of white bread and made a bee line for his new bike.
Screw the bananas.
When he was a safe distance away, he used the bungee cord to secure his things to the bike and began heading for the Holland Tunnel. There were only two more things he’d need to find before descending into the inky darkness. A flashlight and bigger pair of balls.
Finn
Las Vegas, NV
Finn was heading down Rancho Drive when he geared down the Ninja, slowing it to a crawl. Planting his feet on the hot asphalt, he scanned ahead. The engines of a few of the abandoned cars that littered the road continued to purr. The street had two lanes and on either side were large chain stores, punctuated by small neighborhoods with houses that might have looked new yesterday, but after the quake were now leaning to one side or the other. Many of the roofs were missing tiles. Sad and frightened figures sat huddled under the occasional palm tree. Others were scavenging among the scattered cars. It was hard to tell from there whether they had all their memories intact, if they were suffering from a total mind wipe or if they were somewhere in between.
When Finn had transferred from the Land Rover to the bike, a decision that hadn’t been an easy one, he took everything he could carry. There were parts of the road, even on one this wide, that were impassable to any vehicle larger than a motorcycle. He was trading security for maneuverability.
Primal Shift: Episode 2 Page 2