The two beside Larry pulled him back and into the vat of water, pushing him down until his shoulder blades touched the bottom. From underwater he watched their faces, distorted by the rippling water, hovering over him. He’d expected to be dunked quickly and be back on his feet before he knew what happened. But that wasn’t happening. The arms holding him down weren’t letting go, and Larry felt his lungs begin to contract. He was drowning; those bastards were drowning him, and when he tried to kick, more hands grabbed his legs and pinned them down. Now Larry’s lungs weren’t just hurting, they were on fire. His abdomen was contracting violently, and he knew that if he gave in and let his starved body pull water into his lungs that he would die. Black spots appeared before his eyes. The world was starting to swim away from him for good when he was finally yanked out.
He heard someone gasp, felt his compressed lungs fill with air and knew the voice had been his own. The two men were keeping him on his feet because Larry’s legs were little more than jelly. That breeze was back, but now it wasn’t only his balls that were freezing, his entire body was trembling.
The blurry image of All Father stood before him in his purple robe.
“He’s all right. I assure you,” He told the crowd. “We’ve done this many times.” Peter turned to Larry and slapped him on the shoulder with a wet plopping sound. “Consider this a friendly little warning. You don’t wanna fuck with me.”
“Wha ... ”
The murmurs from the crowd weren’t dying down, and Larry heard one woman distinctly say, “They nearly killed him.”
Drawing in deep gulps of air, Larry’s vision was starting to return, and he could see now the forceful look on Peter’s face.
“Do we understand each other?”
Larry nodded that he understood.
“Good.”
“So did I make it?” Larry asked.
The shrill scream that came in response didn’t seem to make any sense to Larry’s ears at first. His senses were still a bit jumbled, but he knew the sound of a frightened woman all the same. A jolt of fear tore through those assembled. Some stood rooted in place, gawking from one to another with puzzled expressions. A few dashed off to see what was wrong. That’s when word came back.
“We’re under attack!”
PRIMAL SHIFT 5: Revolution
Finn, Carole, Lou, Dale, Tanner
En route to Salt Lake City International Airport, UT
Lou was driving the battlewagon, both fists glued to the wheel. Beside him, Finn rode shotgun, glaring out the passenger window, watching for signs of an ambush. In the backseat sat Carole and beside her, Dale, sporting the same ratty cowboy hat he had worn during the town hall meeting. On the far end was Tanner, a blonde farm boy from Wyoming, who looked decidedly nervous.
“So before the shit hit the fan, what exactly did you do for a living, Lou?” Dale asked. It was a fairly transparent attempt to lighten the mood, but Finn was grateful for it since the drive to the airport so far had been too quiet and glum.
“I worked as a pit boss at The Mirage in Vegas,” Lou answered proudly.
“Shut up!” Dale shouted. “That must have been insane. You got stories?”
Lou laughed. “Oh, I got me plenty of those. We had a card counter once who got his ass tossed out once a week, and it was never long before he’d come crawling back, ‘cept he’d come in a full disguise. This one time, he came dressed up like an old lady. Not a word of a lie.” Lou took his hands off the wheel long enough to cup them under his chest. “The biggest saggy tits you’ve ever seen.”
Red spots bloomed on Tanner’s cheeks. Dale and Lou practically bust their guts. Finn turned and noticed Carole, looking out the window. He could almost feel the anxiety pouring out of her.
Truth be told, the timing of this little expedition couldn’t have been worse for Finn. Not five minutes before they left, Bob had come to introduce him to Johnson. All Finn had a chance to discover was that she’d also woken up in some facility, surrounded by pink snot.
More than anything, he’d wanted to sit her down and find out what she knew. Surely she would have pieces of the puzzle he didn’t. Then, as he’d been about to pepper her with questions, Finn caught that look on Carole’s face. The same sort of frantic look she had now, and he knew Johnson could wait. Finn had seen what these animals were capable of when they formed a pack. Worse than hyenas. And if anyone still had any doubt that man at his very core was an animal, then a trip to your local grocery store would provide all the proof you needed.
Those mindless Rainbow drones made a good show about souls and All That Is, which was really just another fancy way of saying God, but they were basing that on civilized man. It was easy to see God when you weren’t hungry enough to eat the liver from a corpse lying dead in the street.
The two men were still laughing at Lou’s boob story when Finn suddenly tensed.
“Steady,” he called out to Lou.
On the road ahead of them was a shabby-looking roadblock, made up of newspaper stands, street side trash cans, and debris from nearby buildings collapsed during the quake. The fires had mostly burned themselves out by now, though the smell of charred wood still hung heavy in the air.
Lou slowed the car just as the men rushed out from broken storefronts on either side of the road, hurling bricks and wielding heavy clubs spiked with nails.
“Burn right through it!” Finn shouted, referring to the roadblock.
A brick hit the metal grating on the passenger side and made a loud clanging sound. The three in the back weren’t laughing anymore. Tanner, with his bronzed skin and fair hair, looked like he might have dropped a load in his shorts.
“Hang on tight,” Lou said from between clenched teeth.
The truck was about to burst through the roadblock when a man in a shredded pair of jeans and no shirt grabbed onto the metal cage protecting Lou’s truck. He was trying to reach through to punch out the side window when they hit the man-made roadblock. The metal overhang from the newsstand sliced into the man’s neck and took his head clean off.
“Oh my God!” Carole screamed.
In a matter of moments, Tanner’s face had gone from blood red to bed sheet white.
In the rear view mirror, Finn could see the man’s headless body rolling lifelessly on the ground. A group of people with sticks continued to chase the car until Lou turned and they sped out of sight.
Streaks of blood were smeared across the passenger window, and Tanner was staring at them with a terrified expression.
Finn wondered if the expedition had been such a good idea.
“Whatever you just saw,” he said, “will be nothing compared to what you’re about to see.” He was referencing his own experiences at the Buy Low, something Lou could attest to.
“Finn’s right,” Carole agreed, and it was the first time she’d said anything more than ‘Oh my God’ during the entire trip. “I was out there for two whole days,” she said, “and some of the things I saw could only be described as hell on Earth.”
“Except we brought guns,” Dale said, motioning to Lou’s arsenal in the back seat.
Lou glanced up at Dale in the rear view. “Dale, I took you for a trucker during that meeting we had earlier, but now I’m not so sure.”
Dale laughed. “It’s the hat and my size. I get it all the time. I ran an accounting firm in Kansas City.”
“No shit,” Finn said, hardly believing it. “I took you for a bull rider.”
“Funny,” Dale shot back. “I take it you and Lou came together?”
Finn fiddled with the leather seat he was sitting in. “To Rainbowland? Yeah, Lou, his son, Ethan ... and his ... wife ... ”
The expression on Lou’s face didn’t last long, but the pain Finn saw there was clear enough.
Oblivious, Dale kept playing the comedian. “We know Tanner milked his dad’s cows for a living, but what about you Finn?” Dale asked.
Finn was watching out the window again. Didn’t really feel like ans
wering that one.
“He doesn’t remember,” Carole said quietly.
“It’ll come back eventually.”
Dale held up a finger with a silver wedding ring. “Some things I wish I could forget. You might be the lucky one.”
That might be true, but Finn didn’t think so.
They hit the turnoff for the airport and arrived a few minutes later. Abandoned cars clogged the pickup/drop-off area. The large glass entrance on their right didn’t do much to ease their minds. It was an overcast day, and the pockets of shadow in the airport were deep and threatening. Who knew what the hell was lurking inside, waiting for someone – anyone – to walk through those doors? Gnawing hunger would have struck soon after the few who managed to survive emptied the restaurants and snack bars of every bit of food they could find. Not long after, they would have started on the dead, then on the living.
The truck pulled to a stop, and they all did a final check to make sure the coast was clear before opening the doors. Lou swung around back and raised the truck’s hatch.
“I ain’t got enough for everyone,” Lou said. He handed Dale and Tanner bolt action hunting rifles and a handful of .30-06. cartridges.
“Don’t you have something automatic?” Dale asked. “Like an AK?”
Lou shook his head. “How about a bazooka? You been playing too many videogames, Son. For starters, full autos are illegal.”
“Not anymore, they aren’t,” said Tanner, wearing a Cheshire Cat grin.
“OK, smart guys, how’s about you two stick to the guns we have.”
Lou handed Finn a shotgun with a horizontal handle on top.
“Mossberg Chainsaw,” Lou said. “I was gonna keep it for myself, but I didn’t want to have all the fun.”
Lou dug out a pink AR-15 sprinkled with pictures of small white cartoon characters.
Dale nearly dropped his gun. “Is that a Hello Kitty assault rifle?”
Lou shot him a look. “It belonged to my wife. On second thought, maybe I will take the chainsaw.” He reached for Finn’s shotgun, but Finn pulled it away just in the nick of time.
“Fat chance,” he said, stifling a snicker.
Carole didn’t look happy. “Do I need to remind you we aren’t duck hunting? My son might be in that airport somewhere, so I don’t want anyone getting trigger happy.”
“Tell that to Hello Kitty,” Dale said, slapping Lou on the back.
Red-faced, Lou was about to close the trunk.
“What am I, chopped liver?” Carole asked, clearly hurt.
Lou had the guilty look of a man who hadn’t offered pie to all of his guests. “I thought you wouldn’t want one.” He began fishing around in the trunk again and then stopped. “You can have the pink AR.”
“Keep it,” Carole said. “It suits you,”
Finally, Lou handed her a black Walther PPK handgun. “Safety’s here on the side.”
Lou closed the hatch for good, and the mood started to change. The Mossberg Chainsaw felt heavy in Finn’s hands. Not so much because of the weight, but more because of the implication. He hadn’t relished killing those men in the Buy Low, and he certainly wasn’t going to enjoy drawing on anyone stupid enough to get too close.
Dale was the first into the giant revolving door. The others followed suit. White shades were drawn half way down the length of the massive front windows, strangling the light from outside. The pungent smell of rotting meat and human waste stabbed Finn in the belly. The airport looked like the scene of a battle. Seats were knocked over, and decomposing bodies were strewn about like discarded trash, some perhaps too foul to eat, even for the cannibals who called this hell hole home.
Carole stepped over an abandoned suitcase and gasped. “The cart is gone.” She was pointing to a money exchange kiosk.
Finn wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“That’s where we found the cart Aiden and Alice had used to escape. But now it’s gone.” It looked like she was going to say something else.
“What is it?” Lou asked, removing his cap and wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Anyone affected by The Shift shouldn’t remember how to drive.”
Carole was staring intently at the kiosk as though the cart might magically appear. “Most of them couldn’t undo a seatbelt.”
Tanner was scanning through the murkiness. “I saw one guy in my home town kick out his car window ‘cause he forgot how to open the door.”
Finn was still processing the implication of Carole’s comment. “You don’t think one of those Wipers figured out how to drive, do you?”
“Wipers,” Tanner said. “I like that.”
Carole shook her head. “No, I don’t. I guess I’m hoping it was Aiden.”
Lou rested his Hello Kitty rifle in the crook of his arm and dug the tips of his fingers into his crotch. Carole turned away. “Sorry you had to see that, Ma’am” he told her, “but it couldn’t be helped. Here’s what I don’t understand: Why would he bother when all he needed to do was run outside?”
“Lou’s got a point,” and Finn hated agreeing, especially since he knew perfectly well Carole didn’t want to believe it herself. She was clinging to every shred of hope she could find.
They left the kiosk and carried on deeper into the airport, past the check-in counters, until they reached the security check point.
The smell of death was growing worse, and Dale brought his shirt up to cover his nose. “Jeeeesus, that’ll choke a donkey, I swear to God. Tell me, Tanner, I’ll bet you’d give anything to be back home milking cows.”
“I’d give everything I own,” he replied, without missing a beat.
“Everything you own doesn’t add up to jack shit right now,” Lou snapped. “None of us owns a hell of a lot more than the shirts on our backs.”
“We have our lives,” Finn said philosophically, to which the group responded with stony silence. It was getting harder to see in the gloom. “We’ve got all kinds of guns, but what I wouldn’t give for a flashlight.”
“You got a tactical light on the end of your shotgun,” Lou told him.
Finn flipped the gun up and studied the barrel and flicked it on. The room suddenly came to life. Metal detectors dwarfed by the body scanner and beside that, the X-ray machine where they ran your bags through on a conveyor belt. Carole covered her mouth when the light speared a pair of legs protruding from the X-ray machine. Someone had either tried to hide inside and got stuck or had been killed and shoved in, headfirst.
“This place is gonna give me nightmares for a month,” Dale said, without the usual boastfulness they’d become accustomed to.
Carole’s first panicked thought was that it was Aiden, but the corpse was far too large. Aiden was a thin 14-year-old who hadn’t made the high school basketball team because of his height. No, that wasn’t him. They were about to move on when Carole noticed the corpse’s feet. They were wearing white nurses’ shoes, the same kind Alice wore. In fact, those slacks and the size of the legs also looked like they belonged to Alice.
Carole stopped. “We need to check that body.”
“Which one?” Finn asked, probing the darkness ahead of them with his light.
“The one in the X-ray machine.”
“I had a feeling you were gonna say that,” Tanner said.
It was Lou and Dale who did the deed, each man grabbing hold of a leg and pulling. The body came out easily enough, and Carole let out a squeal when they turned it over.
Finn pulled her to his chest. “Is that Alice?” he asked. She didn’t say a word, but the way her body trembled with shock made the words unnecessary.
Alice hadn’t suffocated after crawling into the machine to hide either. Someone had hit her in the back of the head, perhaps as she drove past in the cart, which would explain the blood Carole said she’d found on the seat.
“He might have made it,” Finn said, trying his best to console her. “He’s small and fast. I’m sure he was able to get away and hide somewher
e. All we gotta do is find him.”
The others looked on with expressions that required little interpretation. The kid was dead. Their thoughts might as well have been tattooed across their foreheads the way those numbers were tattooed along the inside of Finn’s wrist.
“I hate to just leave her here,” Carole said.
Tanner nodded agreement. “She’s got a point. I mean, it just isn’t right.”
“I hate to be the selfish one here,” Dale said. “But the woman’s dead. Your son might still be alive. This may be the only shot you have at finding him. Do you really wanna waste it burying Alice?”
Finn tried not to look at the dead woman’s bloated face. “It sounds cold as all hell, but Dale’s got a point.”
“Maybe on the way back,” Carole said, trying to sound hopeful. “Once we find Aiden.”
The others agreed, and they carried on through the security check point and into Concourse B. But the deeper they went, the more unrecognizable the airport became. It had only been a few days, but the earthquake, along with the slaughter and mayhem that had gone down within these walls, was showing through loud and clear.
They were approaching Gate B6 when they reached Popeyes Chicken. It wasn’t much more than a counter, but there were at least six bodies piled on top of it, one atop another. Some had limbs hacked off. A noise from behind the counter drew their attention. Silently, Finn pointed. Without a word, they headed in that direction, weapons raised, and as they drew closer they became more acutely aware of the flies and the rank odor.
Finn saw Tanner fighting to keep the little that was in his stomach from coming up all over the place. Dale leaned over the counter, clutching his hunting rifle. He swung back just as fast.
“Holy shit, I’ve never seen so many rats.”
“Watch out, Dale,” Finn shouted, spotting a rat the size of a house cat appear from behind the cash register. The sight of it made Dale jerk back in fear, and as he did, the rifle in his hands went off with a deafening roar.
Carole cupped her hands over her ears.
Dale stood there, staring at the empty hand where his rifle had been.
Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 28