Lou ran to her, and she nearly collapsed into his arms.
“Timothy,” she rasped.
Larry drew closer. “What about him?”
“Did you eat any of the food?” she asked them, fishing into the singed pillowcase and coming out with a bottle of Sodium Cyanide. “He meant to poison you.”
This time, her eyes were fixed solely on Larry, and he felt the fingers of a cold, clammy hand seize his heart.
“The bomb waiting in your office was to make sure.”
The blood drained from Larry’s face.
“But there’s more,” Dana added. “Much more.” And Larry listened as she struggled to explain what she had found in Timothy’s room.
“But how did he get the C4 off the bridge?” Larry asked.
“I’m still working on that,” Dana replied.
A woman’s scream echoed just then from inside the compound. A second later, a cult member emerged with a girl in her arms. She’d been killed in the explosion. That was Larry’s first thought, but soon it was clear he was wrong. The girl’s skin wasn’t cut or smeared with soot. No, this was Sister Margaret, the one he’d seen eating the food Timothy had personally laid out for him.
“Donavan,” Larry barked. “Arrest Timothy at once and take all the food that was served and have it thrown out. There’s no telling how much of it was poisoned.”
Dana tried standing on her own before Lou helped her find a place to sit.
The initial streak of terror Larry had felt was beginning to fade. It its place now was searing-hot rage and the sudden thirst for revenge. This would be the first and last time anyone ever tried to fuck with Larry Nowak.
Finn
It was nearing dusk when Finn and Joanne spotted the gates of New Jamestown. From Ely State Prison, they’d opted to take Interstate 80, assuming the fleeing Wipers limping back to Salt Lake City would have instead opted for Route 50. Finn assumed his hunch was correct since they’d made it all the way back without any sign of them.
But now, approaching New Jamestown, Finn caught movement in the guard towers by the wall. The crack from a rifle broke the silence, the bullet bouncing off the dirt road less than a dozen feet before their car.
Finn slammed the breaks.
“Did they just shoot at us?” Joanne asked, the fear in her voice palpable. She hadn’t been shy on the drive home about how much she’d been looking forward to leaving that stinky prison behind. Neither of them was expecting welcome home signs, but they certainly didn’t think they’d be shot at.
Finn popped the driver-side door and stepped out to identify himself.
A call rang out from the tower to the people manning the gate, and slowly it began to open. No sooner were they inside than it was clear they’d arrived on the tail end of something bad. Colonist and cultists with rifles were rushing about. That’s when Joanne pointed to the compound and the gaping hole in the second story.
“Oh my God, there’s been a fire.”
“Or a rocket attack,” Finn amended. Once they parked, Finn went to find out what was going on. Simon was rushing past when Finn grabbed his arm.
“What happened?”
Simon told him about the attempt on Larry’s life.
“Oh, crap. Is he all right?”
“Larry’s fine,” Simon said. “But I can’t say the same for Timothy.”
Simon tore free from Finn’s grasp and broke into a run.
“Where’s Dana?” he called after him, but didn’t get an answer.
A moment later, Joanne was by his side, hand covering her mouth in disbelief. “This is horrible.”
“The colony’s seen its fair share of tragedy,” Finn told her. “But never from the inside.”
The two entered the main compound and found Dana on the top floor where Larry’s office used to be. She and Donavan were peering in at the blackened, still-smouldering mess.
Dana saw Finn approach and came over, pulling them both into a hug.
“I heard someone tried to take Larry out,” Finn told her. “I only hope no one was hurt.”
Dana shook her head. “Two people were killed. One was a little girl.”
Joanne gripped Finn’s arm. “Oh, goodness.”
“And now Larry’s got himself barricaded in the basement surrounded by his trigger-happy goons.”
“I believe it,” Finn said. “They nearly turned our car into Swiss cheese as we pulled up.”
“Everyone’s seriously on edge right now. Might be best to go to the police trailer and lie low till everyone’s nerves settle down. Itchy trigger fingers and paranoia don’t make great bedfellows.”
Dana’s eyes traced over the cuts on Finn’s face from when the Camaro’s back window blew out. Or more accurately, when the Wipers attacking the prison’s reception center tried to stop him from running them over.
“I never thought I’d say this, but Finn, you look like shit.”
He smiled, believing her. “Listen, I know you’re busy right now, but we need to talk.”
Dana sighed. “Head to the police trailer and wait for me there.”
•••
Finn and Joanne made their way out from the compound and across the dirt road that divided New Jamestown in two. Already, the number of people running around had diminished as armed cultists ordered people inside. They found Tanner standing guard by the trailer next to Dana’s office. Directly across from them, two more guards stood by the door to the colony’s prison.
Tanner waved at them and smiled.
“What are you doing?” Finn asked.
“Guarding a prisoner.”
They were halfway in the police trailer when they stopped. “What prisoner?”
“Timothy.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Joanne was the one to say it, but she practically took the words right out of Finn’s mouth. They’d only been gone for a handful of days. How could everything have been turned on its head so quickly?
Inside, they found Lou, hunched over his desk.
Finn went to him right away. “Lou, you all right?”
Lou glanced up, in a daze, as though he wasn’t sure who was speaking to him.
“Finn, you’re OK.” He snapped and grabbed him in a bear hug.
“I will be so long as you don’t break my ribs.”
Lou set him down and at once, the light seemed to fade from his eyes.
“Did you know the people killed in the explosion?” Joanne asked.
“Huh? Oh that, no ma’am. Well, that’s not quite true. I did know Sister Margaret, sweet little thing. So much has happened since you two been gone.” Lou took a deep breath and proceeded to fill them in on the sad news of Carole’s death, the successful attack on the Wiper base at the Grand America, on finding Aiden, and how he’d shot Ethan. Then Lou told them how Alvarez was now their prisoner, and that it appeared Timothy was behind the attempt on Larry’s life.
The news struck Finn like a blow to the gut. He fell hard into the chair behind him.
Foremost on his mind was the loss of Carole. Her abandoned car near the Grand America had left all of them with doubts that she was still alive, but hearing the news surprised and saddened him nevertheless.
Dana came in then, followed by Bud.
Finn stood at once and crossed over menacingly. “What’s he doing here?”
Standing in his way, Dana put her arms up to block him. “It’s all right, Finn. He’s on our side now.”
“Yeah, says who? Have you already forgotten what he did?”
Dana glanced over at Joanne. “Of course, we haven’t, but Bud was being blackmailed.”
Bud stuck his hand out. “No hard feelings?”
Finn smacked his hand away with a loud clack.
Dana looked around the room. “You all mind giving Finn and me a minute?”
Standing by Finn’s side, Joanne squeezed his arm as if to say, “I’m staying right here beside you.”
“It’s OK,” Finn told her. “Maybe I need
a minute.”
The others shuffled out, leaving Dana and Finn alone. The trailer grew quiet. Across the way, the sound of the windmill, damaged in the blast, but working again, squeaked along in a dull wind.
“You look like you’ve been through hell, Finn. Maybe you oughta rest a while.”
“When we got to the prison, we found people there.”
Dana walked around her desk, removed her gun belt, and sank into her chair. “That so.”
“Not your run-of-the-mill survivors either. These guys were Navy men.”
Her eyebrow rose.
“Thought that would get your attention.” He knew she’d been Coast Guard. “Had been crewing a nuclear submarine in the Pacific when The Shift went down.”
There was a pregnant pause.
“The USS Alabama,” Dana said, almost to herself.
Now it was Finn’s turn to be surprised. “How’d you know?”
She told him about Callahan.
“That makes sense. Commander Zhou mentioned he’d sent men to scout the Salt Lake City area and never heard back from them.”
“Only one made it. The other joined the assault against the Grand America. So did Bud.”
The thought of Bud made him think of Tevatron and the discovery he’d made on the warden’s computer. The very reason he’d wanted to talk to her so badly. “There may be a way to fix this,” he told her.
She glanced around the room, unsure what needed fixing first. “Can you be more specific?”
“Tevatron’s got a secret facility emitting a low-frequency pulse that’s keeping people’s memories from coming back.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s a long story. You’re just gonna need to trust me. ‘Course, there’s a lot we still don’t know. Like where it is and how it’s being powered.”
Dana scratched her head. “So, you think finding it and knocking it out would help?”
“Maybe not right away, but slowly, as Wipers start remembering they were once accountants from Topeka or the manager at Burger King, they may begin to rethink the rape and pillaging routine.”
Dana smiled, then her eyes lit up. “Timothy worked for Tevatron.”
The news made Finn shake his head in disbelief.
“I know, that was my reaction. Maybe he knows something about this facility.”
Finn’s eyes fell. He was still floored by how out of hand things had gotten since he’d been gone. “It’s not easy to come back here and not know where you stand anymore. It’s almost like I’ve woken up from another coma.”
She winced and rubbed her hand along the desk. “You’re not the only one. At some point, I’m gonna need to go next door and extract a confession from our friend Timothy. Find out why the crazy bastard thought it was a good idea to plant a bomb in Larry’s office.” Her gaze settled on Finn. “But playing catchup isn’t why I wanted to speak with you.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a heavy set of keys, and unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk. Inside was a small steel briefcase. She removed it and set it down.
“This look familiar?”
Finn studied it. “Looks like the briefcase Bud brought to the Tevatron Lab when he tried to blow me sky high.”
She tapped her finger on the metal case. The sound was hollow and menacing. “Looks the same, but it isn’t. When Bud woke up at the lab in Long Island, a case filled with C4 and a DVD were waiting for him there. The DVD had instructions from a man named Thomson about destroying the lab in Nevada.”
“OK,” Finn said, utterly confused.
“I found this case at the lab in Nevada. It was in the room where we found Joanne’s cryo chamber. I didn’t say anything at the time and you were too out of it to notice. But on the DVD is a picture of you and instructions for Joanne to terminate your life.”
“What are you saying here?” Finn demanded, feeling his voice rising a few notches higher. “That Thomson or Alvarez or whatever the hell he calls himself wanted Joanne to kill me?”
“Looks that way.”
“And you let the two of us wander off into the desert together.”
“Relax. Nothing woulda happened unless she’d come to on her own and watched the DVD. The message on there woulda been clear enough.”
Dana opened the case, almost to show him she wasn’t lying and then paused.
“What is it?” he asked.
She spun the case around. Some of the C4 and one of the detonators was missing. Now she knew what Timothy had used for the bomb.
Jeffereys
As he approached the Grand America Hotel, it was becoming clearer to Jeffereys with every step that something wasn’t right. The quiet and stillness. That’s what set off the first row of alarm bells in his head. The sun had set not long ago, and he listened for the common nightly sounds he’d become accustomed to. Brutes bickering in a strange guttural language he didn’t quite understand, the ruckus from crowds that liked to gather around the pit and relish in watching a battle to the death, the random pop of gunfire and screams of agony. None of that was here. Only silence, and accompanying it was a cold and clammy hand of fear.
By the time Jeffereys reached the entrance, the feeling only grew stronger. Bodies lay scattered around the lobby. Half a dozen leading up toward Alvarez’ suite and three or four times that many scattered like bread crumbs. All of them pointed toward the ballroom.
The attack on the prison had been a dismal failure. At least 40 percent of his army didn’t make it home and hardly any of those who did were unscathed.
Some of them were running past Jeffereys now, into the ballroom. Others toward Alvarez’ suite. But already he knew full well what they would find. More dead bodies.
When Jeffereys reached the ballroom and saw that most of the food they’d stockpiled was gone, he knew who was probably behind this. Certainly wasn’t those submarine assholes. Those pricks were left licking their own wounds. Which only left one other group. Those annoying shit heads over at New Jamestown.
On more than one occasion Jeffereys had pleaded and begged Alvarez to hit them again.
“I have a plan,” Alvarez had told him back then, “and it’s going swimmingly.”
Sure, it had taken time to train his men how to use weapons and drive cars. Then more time had been wasted hoarding all the food they could get their hands on. Jeffereys could understand how long-term strength depended on both of those things, but sitting back and hearing his spies report on the wall the colonists were building and the guns they were arming themselves with. He knew the dream of a lightning assault was gone the minute that group of pacifists had been outted. Knew they weren’t going to be easy pickings. Not anymore. And that’s when Alvarez had told him to relax, that he had a plan.
And what a plan that turned out to be.
Now the hotel was little more than a mausoleum. Those colonists hadn’t managed to take all the food, which was some comfort. A single pallet remained, a few weeks’ worth, month tops. Then they would be in the same predicament those hippies had been in.
But there was another problem. These wild men Alvarez had somehow been able to summon to the hotel were violent and unpredictable. If Al was dead – a conclusion that seemed to Jeffereys almost inevitable given the present situation – how would he be able to keep them from running wild? The big man had ruled them the way Kim Jong-Il once ruled North Korea. They revered him as a god, a deity who held in his very hands the power of life and death. And on more than one occasion, Jeffereys had witnessed the use of Alvarez’ strange power. The display had been spectacular and disturbing, but the end result had been to keep the natives in check. It was a superstitious fear they had, and now that Bigdaddy was gone – might be gone – how long before they turned on him?
A well-muscled slaver named Tank approached, carrying a flashlight.
“Get that fucking light outta my face, will you?”
“Sorry, Sir.”
“Did you find Alvarez?”
Tank’s eyes fell to the
grimy ballroom carpet at their feet. “Not yet. But we found Anita.”
The muscle head didn’t need to add that she was dead for Jeffereys to understand. He followed Tank back to Al’s suite. Anita was up against the wall, her eyes open and staring. Someone had taken her out with a shotgun. The blood splatter on the wall told Jeffereys it was done at point blank range.
“She must have attacked one of them,” Jeffereys said. “Hope she tore his balls off.” A handful of slavers and other brutes was milling about, looking under the bed with flashlights, others were pulling back the shower curtain in the bathroom.
“You’re not gonna find him. Al wouldn’t have hid like a pussy.”
Tank seemed to agree. “If they killed him, we haven’t found his body yet.”
“If they killed him ... if they could kill him ... they woulda hung his remains from the goddamned overhang as a warning to the rest of us. If he’s not here, then those pricks are keeping him hostage.” Jeffereys looked around. The others had stopped searching. “All of you, get the fuck out. I need a moment to think.” One by one, the men started filing out of Al’s suite. Jeffereys snapped his fingers, and Tank tossed him the light. “I want six men guarding what food we have left. No one goes near it unless I say. Got it?”
Tank nodded. “Got it, Boss.”
The bed was unmade, and Jeffereys sat on the edge, wondering what to do next. Alvarez kept cigars in the nightstand beside his bed, and Jeffereys was sure puffin’ on one of those beauts while sipping on a glass of brandy would do wonders for his stress levels right about now. Part of him was thankful Alvarez wasn’t here when he returned from the botched attack on the prison. His orders were to return with as many members of the submarine crew as he could capture. And now that Alvarez was a prisoner himself, it removed the danger of being turned to dust for failing in his mission. Danger or not, Jeffereys also knew that he was Al’s trusted right-hand man. It had taken a while for Jeffereys to submit to Alvarez’ authority, since in the beginning, he and his men weren’t exactly free to leave, but as the image of what Al was trying to create came into sharp focus, Jeffereys knew this was where he belonged.
Primal Shift: Volume 2 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 22