“You’ll probably kick me out of your kooky ass religion after this, but frankly I couldn’t give a shit. There are over a hundred scared and pissed-off people downstairs who aren’t interested in waiting around to be clubbed to death or sold into slavery. Your own principles state harm no living thing, by act or omission. But failing to build proper defenses is one hell of an omission, Peter. You’ve got blood on your hands, my friend, and plenty of it.”
“I’ve heard just about enough.”
“Oh, you haven’t heard a damned thing. Now sit your ass down.”
All Father glared at Larry with boiling hatred.
“I know more about you than you probably know about yourself.” Larry said. “Let me be perfectly clear, since I wouldn’t want any misunderstanding between us. I know you had your daughter killed when that imaginary ghost she thought was whispering in her ear suddenly didn’t think you were such a nice guy anymore. I know that after she died, you hid the notebook away so no one would ever question your authority. I know about your little radio broadcast, luring people up here and how you had Lou’s wife strapped to that chair in the basement while you fucking brainwashed her.”
The look on All Father’s face wasn’t exactly the kind of terror Larry had been hoping for. Truth be told, he looked more confused than anything. Either the bastard was a great actor, or the man had a split personality.
All Father lowered himself into his seat. “Is that what this is about?” The old man’s fingers were tapping the desk again. “You’ve leveled some pretty serious charges against me, Brother Larry. Serious charges indeed, and if I’m going to be frank with you, I haven’t a clue where you got most of them. There is no radio, nor is there a woman being held against her will. Both of those acts are categorically against our teachings. I would also never have harmed a hair on my daughter’s head. I loved her more than you could ever imagine.” All Father’s eyes rose to the ceiling as though he were looking into the spirit world itself. “She was a vessel, perfectly attuned to transmit wisdom from the non-physical realm. I will admit that after her passing, I did hide her notebooks away. I didn’t want the few passages she recorded about the evil you speak of to become the focal point of our belief system. Is that so wrong? I’m not nearly as naïve as you think I am, Brother Larry. I know the way men can twist any faith into a grotesque instrument of fear. Nor do I think that my daughter’s warning that the cult would be lead astray was a warning against me.”
“Who then?”
All Father’s gaze grew cold. “Maybe it was warning us against you, Brother Larry.”
Larry let out a nervous jittery little laugh. “You may not be naïve,” Larry replied. “I’ll give you that, but I can promise you don’t know a thing about politics, about playing the game. You see, to the people of Rainbowland, perception is reality. This isn’t a courtroom. I don’t need to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In the courtroom of public opinion, I only need to fling the mud and guess what?” Larry said standing up, his hands planted palm down on All Father’s desk. “It’ll stick. You know why? Because mud always sticks. You must know I only want what’s best for Rainbowland and the poor souls living here. There’s no reason for you and I to be enemies. Set aside all that crap about the evils of technology and love thy neighbor and start defending this place. ‘Cause if you don’t, then I will.”
Dana Hatfield
Green River, UT
Standing along the bank of the Green River, Dana, as the new sheriff of Rainbowland, was supervising two male cult members as they dragged the lifeless body of a woman from the water. There wasn’t much hope of keeping something like this secret for long, especially in a community suddenly wracked with large amounts of paranoia and fear. Less than an hour ago, a young refugee girl had come running up to find Dana. She and her friend were fetching water from the river when they spotted the body. It had washed up in a nearby bend in the river.
The two men hauled the woman’s body up the small embankment by her arms and rolled her over.
“What do you think happened?” one of them asked. “She doesn’t look like anyone I’ve seen before.”
Dana dropped to one knee and studied the woman’s nose. There weren’t any bubbles. “Give me a hand here,” she said, signaling the men over. The three of them tilted the body on its side, so the dead woman’s lips were practically touching the grass. Dana straddled one leg on either side and slid her hands under her sternum. Her hands clasped into a ball, she rotated the ball of her fist into the woman’s abdomen.
No water came out.
“What are you doing?” one of them asked.
Already Dana saw a crowd approaching. This wasn’t going to be anything like the old days where the police could throw up some tape to cordon off a crime scene. This would be far more like the Wild West.
“There isn’t any water in her lungs,” Dana said. “She was already dead when she hit the water.”
There wasn’t any obvious damage to the body that she could see, besides some slight discoloration of the skin. Postmortem stuff wasn’t Dana’s specialty, though. She’d been trained to fish suicide victims out of San Francisco Bay, not play detective. Her role in the Coast Guard had been relatively simple in the following way: Jane Doe was either dead or alive. Wasn’t much mystery about how the corpse ended up in the Bay. This, however, was different.
“We need to get this woman inside so I can take a closer look,” Dana said. She was watching the crowd drawing closer, thinking about the Wild West again. If this woman had been murdered, there was little doubt her loved ones would be searching for some good old-fashioned vigilante justice.
Strange as it sounded, Dana hoped she’d simply tripped on a rock and hit her head before falling in somewhere downriver. Dana was still entertaining the idea when she heard the cry rise up from the crowd. A large-bellied man with a baseball cap she vaguely knew as Lou was running toward her, and suddenly everything clicked into place. He dropped down and cradled the dead woman in his arms, sobbing. Finn came up and laid a hand on his friends back, doing his damndest to console the inconsolable.
That’s when Dana remembered the scene Lou had caused during the town hall meeting the other day. How he had been in a panic looking for his missing wife. But that was days ago. And dozens of them, herself included, had searched the river without finding any sign of her. Which begged a single question that kept ringing in Dana’s head: Where had she been all this time? And what would Lou do about it when he found out?
Carole Cartright
Beck Street, Salt Lake City, UT
The discovery of the woman floating in the river had given Carole just the opportunity she needed. As the multitudes of frightened onlookers followed the two cult members carrying the body back to the main compound, Carole had jumped into the Ford Escape she’d driven from the airport and left before anyone had a chance to stop her. The plan itself was silly, almost suicidal, but sitting by and waiting for Nikki to show up on her own didn’t make a lick of sense. Most of Carole’s life had been spent raising Aiden and Nikki to be kind, loving human beings. And not surprisingly, the family’s sense of security had always come from Jim. Although warm-hearted, her husband’s demeanor could flip at a moment’s notice if he thought his family was threatened. But when Jim died, all of that responsibility settled soundly on Carole’s tiny shoulders. Caregiver. Protector. And she had failed in every way possible, hadn’t she? First Alice, then Aiden, and now Nikki. The three people who had looked to her for direction and guidance and she’d failed them all miserably.
Which brought her back to the plan.
She would head to the Grand America Hotel and trade her life for Nikki’s. ‘Course that little voice that always tried to pull her back from the edge of a bad idea was whispering into her ear, telling her what a terrible idea it was, that the slavers would only throw her into bondage, or worse. But without her kids, what did she have to live for? In a very real way, Carole was spinning the barrel of a six-shoot
er loaded with five bullets and hoping to hear a click.
Shoulda brought some heavy weapons and blasted your way in.
Yeah, right. She reached down under her seat and made sure the black Walther PPK was still there. Any way you measured it, a good-sized pistol, considering her small hands, although it hardly constituted serious firepower.
Before long, Carole was heading south on Beck Street. On her right was a giant oil refinery. On her left, the foothills of the Wasatch Range.
Like everywhere else in the city, abandoned cars clogged the streets. Two 18-wheelers snaked out from the refinery, locked forever in the act of merging onto Beck Street. One had its driver-side door open. The other didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter, there were a thousand reasons both drivers were probably dead. The real question was whether they’d done it to themselves, the way Carole had seen people in the airport jump over railings to their deaths, or whether they’d been attacked by any number of nuts no longer able to tell the difference between right and wrong.
The important thing was that the refinery hadn’t exploded. Perhaps the emergency systems had kicked in when all else had failed. Carole knew well enough that wasn’t going to be the case everywhere. She’d seen a program on nuclear power plants the month before and how without a steady stream of water to cool the fuel rods, a meltdown was inevitable. A catastrophe that would only take a matter of days to develop. With dozens of nuclear power plants around the country, it was a frightening thought indeed. It might not be long before large swaths of the country and perhaps the world would become uninhabitable. Utah was an exception, but the winds would bring the radiation eventually.
Carole made her way to South West Temple and then took a right on Main Street. It was only when she came to the intersection of Main and 400 S that the Grand America emerged into full view. White and majestic.
Even from a distance, the hotel seemed to be watching her, seemed to know she was coming. A silly thought, of course, because it was only a building, made of glass and concrete and wood. It couldn’t possibly know a thing, and yet that prickly feeling, like insects scurrying up the flesh of her arms, wouldn’t go away. The same kind of feeling Carole had experienced right before their plane had gone veering off the runway.
She had just about convinced herself her mind was playing tricks on her when there was a bang, and the steering wheel jerked in her hands. Had she blown a tire? She hoped to God she hadn’t.
Pulling to a stop, Carole got out to survey the damage. Sure enough the front left tire was flat. But it wasn’t long before she realized the same was true for all four tires. What on earth had she driven over?
A hundred feet behind her, Carole got her answer. A spike strip had been pulled across the road and camouflaged by rubble from the surrounding structures. She hadn’t driven over a box of nails, someone had booby-trapped the road.
Driving to the airport earlier with Finn, Lou, Tanner, and Dale, she had seen the way the Wipers had come barreling out of nowhere to attack their truck. Surely, pockets of them were skulking around. Could they have been the ones to set the trap? Carole doubted it. It seemed far too sophisticated for the equivalent of cavemen, even if some of them had taught themselves how to drive. More likely than not, whoever had laid that spike strip was no Wiper at all. In fact, all the signs pointed in a single direction: the slavers who had holed up in the Grand America Hotel. And if that were true and the slavers were there, then so, too, was Nikki.
Carole returned to the car and fetched the Walther out from under the front seat. She had a single magazine and grand total of eight shots. The real problem, however, was how Nikki would get home if by some miracle Carole’s plan happened to work. As she’d visualized it unfolding in her mind’s eye, she’d pictured a battered Nikki riding back to Rainbowland in the Escape. But with four flat tires, that wasn’t an option anymore.
Carole started for the hotel, which was still visible in the distance, glimmering white against a multicolored sky. She wasn’t more than a few dozen feet into what she knew would be a long, terrifying walk, when she caught the sound of feet crunching over broken concrete.
Her neck turned, and all at once her heart plummeted into the heels of her shoes. A large group in dark, tattered clothing emerged from the guts of a crumbling hardware store. It wasn’t the primitive weapons that scared her as much as the squeal of tires in the distance. Almost at once the squealing vehicles came into view. Two men in rags were on motorcycles, and they were coming right for her.
Dana Hatfield
Compound basement, Rainbowland, UT
The dead woman was named Patty Mae, and her body was laid out on a kind of massage table in a tiny room in the compound’s basement. The room itself had reeked of human waste and burned flesh even before two cult members had carried her body in. Although the real pain in the ass was the lack of light, since these hippies were Luddites and didn’t believe in using modern conveniences. Heck, even the stove in the kitchen upstairs was a cast-iron wood burner.
Dana swung the beam of her flashlight over Patty Mae’s head, where she noticed small puncture marks near her left temple. A nearly identical hole was on the other side. What on Earth could have done that? But the holes weren’t what disturbed Dana the most. It was the bruising around the woman’s throat and her bloodshot eyes. Dana certainly wasn’t going to pretend to be a medical examiner now that she’d been made sheriff. She knew her own limitations perfectly well. You didn’t need a degree, however, to see that Patty Mae had been strangled. But by whom? Had she wandered off from the compound and bumped into the wrong person? Could she have been killed during the attack? Dana didn’t think so, since Lou had already reported her missing.
“Find anything interesting?” a man’s voice asked from the doorway.
Dana swiveled the light to find Larry.
“Lou’s wife was killed,” Dana replied. “That much is clear. The only thing I can’t tell yet is who did it. If it turns out she was murdered by a Wiper who wandered too close, that’s one thing. But if she was killed by someone in camp ... ”
Larry’s eyes dropped to the floor, and all at once Dana felt a chill roll up her spine.
Could it have been Larry?
Larry laughed. “I wish you could see that look on your face,” he said. “Since The Shift I’ve killed people, I won’t lie about that. I think we all have.”
Now it was Dana’s turn to avert her eyes.
“But I can see what you’re thinking.” Larry pointed at the body. “I can assure you, it wasn’t me who did this. Though I know who did.”
Dana tried to remain stoic, despite the curiosity gnawing at her insides.
“A few minutes before my induction into the cult, I stumbled into this very room and found a woman tied to a chair. Looked like a scene out of A Clockwork Orange. There was some kind of head gear screwed into her skull, and it kept her eyes propped open. Whoever had done it had put her in front of a movie screen while a projector played the creepiest hippy shit I’ve ever seen.”
The stoicism wasn’t holding, and Dana felt all the muscles in her face dropping with shock.
“That wasn’t all. In the corner was a ham radio, probably sending the same signal that drew in just about everyone here.”
“I heard it, too,” Dana said, nearly tripping over her words. “At Fort Baker, and I was sure Alvarez had heard it, too.”
“Alvarez?” Larry asked.
“Long story ... Did you untie her?” Dana asked, looking up at him. She was thinking of the women she’d seen shackled in Jeffereys’ basement and the pressing guilt over not being able to save them.
“I wish I had,” Larry said, and Dana sensed the deception immediately, but the warning was too hard to believe. No one could be that callous.
“Frankly, I wasn’t sure who she was or what was going on. She wasn’t bleeding, if anything it looked like they were trying to ... re-educate her.”
Dana barely had a moment to digest what Larry had said when
Timothy burst into the room, tears streaming down his face.
“Brother Larry, come quick,” he said. “All Father is dead.”
Carole Cartright
South Main Street, Salt Lake City, UT
Get off the road, Carole! a voice was shouting in her head. The motorcycles were bearing down on her at full throttle and it would only be another few seconds before they ran her down. On her left, a half-destroyed Victoria’s Secret store offered at least some hope of cover. She bolted in that direction, hoping to God her feet would carry her there before it was too late. She had come all this way to negotiate with the men who had stolen Nikki, not to be butchered by mindless cannibals.
But they’re not mindless, are they? Not when they can teach themselves to drive golf carts and operate motorcycles.
The mob with the homemade spears and swords was running after her with savage determination.
Heart hammering in the chest, her lungs burning from the exertion, Carole reached an alcove, hoping it would lead inside the totaled store, but instead she found herself at a dead end. She was about to charge out again when one of the motorcycles zoomed past the entrance and nearly knocked her on her rear end. The group of men behind them weren’t far now, another 10 seconds, and they’d have her. Carole removed the Walther from her back pocket, removed the safety, pulled back the slide the way Lou had showed her, and began to pray. Please God, let the blaring sound of the first shot scare them away.
She almost wished she had a torch to complete the feeling that she was up in the Alaskan bush, fending off wolves.
“Hey, Lady!”
Carole looked up. God was speaking to her ... and He called her ...
“Lady, over here.”
She turned, surprised to see a grease-stained face peering back at her from a door that, for all intents and purposes, seemed to appear out of nowhere. “You coming or what?” the man snapped.
Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 34