Lee Harden Series (Book 3): Primal [The Remaining Universe]

by Molles, D. J.

  His mother was close to him in the blackness. He could smell her too.

  He leaned over in her direction. “I’m going,” he whispered, the words little more than a breeze.

  Taylor Sullivan did not respond.

  Benjamin felt a flash of irritation. He knew what her silence meant. She wanted them to find a different place—a safe place where they didn’t have to be in the dark all the time.

  Didn’t she know that he was trying his best?

  “I’ll try to find a place,” he said. And then, as a barbed afterthought: “I have been trying, you know.”

  After a moment’s silence, he felt compelled to say one more thing: “Sorry.”

  Taylor didn’t respond to her son’s apology.

  Benjamin imagined her face, the crease of disappointment that he might see if there were light in the room.

  He was, after all, the reason why they were trapped here in Fort Bragg.

  Everyone else had evacuated, and they’d been left here. Abandoned by Carl Gilliard, despite his promise of protection. And now Fort Bragg had been taken over. Not by President Briggs, as the Lincolnists had hoped, but by a colony of primals.

  It’s still your fault, a part of himself chided.

  He turned back to the door, wishing that his mother could see the disgust on his face.

  He took ahold of the latch and gently turned it.

  His darkness-sharpened ears heard every little metallic tink as the innards of the doorknob worked, slowly disengaging the latch.

  He pulled the door open. It did so silently. That was their one stroke of luck, Benjamin thought: They’d at least been sequestered in a building with well-oiled hinges.

  He stepped into the room, and immediately felt terrified. As he closed the door behind him, he felt almost like an infant, exiting the safety of a womb. Everything outside was terror and violence. Everything beyond that tiny microcosm of safety was survival of the fittest.

  Benjamin knew the way out of the building. He’d made the trek thirty-six times so far. Every day, around midday. It was the least likely time for the primals to be active.

  They were not nocturnal. Nor were they diurnal.

  They really followed no definite sleep and waking pattern.

  But it did seem to Benjamin that they hunted less during midday.

  They would become more active again in the afternoon and evening.

  So he had a few hours to sneak around Fort Bragg. To find food and water for him and his mother, so that they could buy themselves another day of survival. And hopefully, if Benjamin was very lucky, perhaps a different place to stay that better met their needs.

  What were their needs?

  Well. Sunlight would be nice.

  Locking doors were a must.

  It had to be away from the center of Fort Bragg, where it seemed like the colony of primals gathered most.

  It had to have easy access to cover and concealment, so that they could come and go without being seen.

  Second story would be good, too. With a window to escape out of. Being on the second floor would mean they would have more warning than being on the ground floor, but weren’t so high up that they couldn’t bail out of a window if necessary.

  Benjamin had a lot of requirements.

  Which was why they hadn’t made the move yet.

  He made his way down the long hall to the stairwell door on the left. Down two flights of stairs. To the main floor. Turn left. Here, the first glimmer of sun was a corner of the door to the outside that glowed with daylight beyond. Even on rainy days, that upper right-hand corner of the door always seemed to blaze after so much absolute darkness.

  It took him nearly ten minutes from the time he left the room with his mother, to the time that he reached the door to the outside world. He stopped often, listening, and smelling. His heart hammering. Terrified, as he felt his way along the walls. His imagination always playing for him a scene were his hand touched not wall, but the hard musculature of something waiting for him in the blackness.

  His mind obsessed over the concept of being eaten alive.

  You might think that he would have grown numb to it. But that wasn’t the case. His imagination ran away from him, multiple times every day, and it never got better.

  His chances of surviving another month—another week, even—were getting slimmer and slimmer. He knew this. And he knew that the end point—which could be today, or could be tomorrow, or could be a week from now—would be him, dragged to the ground with a primal’s jaws latched around his throat, feeling their claw-like fingers ripping into his stomach, feeling their teeth tearing away the meat of his legs…

  It’s still your fault.

  Yes. It was his fault.

  But that didn’t stop him from hating Angela Houston and Carl Gilliard for what they’d done. For locking him and his mother up. For forgetting them here. Or perhaps not even forgetting them—maybe they’d deliberately left Benjamin and Taylor. Maybe they’d thought to themselves, “Well, this solves a problem, at least.”

  At the door to the outside, he finally placed his hand upon the latch, and he eased it open. He paused with just an inch of daylight showing. He let one eye linger there in the crack, allowing it to adjust to the blazing daylight.

  It wasn’t actually blazing. As his sight began to clear, he saw that the day was thickly overcast. It had that dank, humid scent of coming rain. Outside in the gravel parking lot between buildings, he saw puddles of standing water. It must’ve rained during the night, and was about to rain again.

  He got his other eye acclimated to the daylight, and by then, he’d listened to the outside and scanned across the tops of all the weeds that grew between the gravel in the parking lot outside, and he was relatively sure there weren’t any primals in the vicinity.

  Or they were hiding well.

  He pulled the door open about a third of the way, then stopped. This door had a squeak in one of the hinges. Benjamin had been keeping an eye out for some sort of oil that he might use to lubricate it, but so far hadn’t come across anything he could use for that purpose.

  The squeak happened right about halfway. But Benjamin was a slim young man, so he squeezed out without opening the door all the way. Then, before easing the door shut behind him, he checked, and re-checked, and then triple-checked that the lock was in the unlock position.

  Otherwise he’d be trapped outside.

  Today, he decided to check the lock four times, and then, obsessively, once more, before easing the door shut.

  Still, when the door latched, he always had a little spurt of panic go through him. He tested the door knob. Found that it was unlocked. And he supposed that would have to be reassurance enough. He couldn’t hang out in the open all day, panicking about the lock.

  He needed to find food and water, and—if he was lucky—a place for them to move.

  Benjamin navigated Fort Bragg like a mouse.

  He stuck to corners as much as possible. He kept low. He stayed as quiet as he possibly could. And he sprinted across open spaces, and tried to leave himself exposed as little as possible. He avoided the woods whenever possible, preferring the cover of buildings, because buildings had places that you might hide. Buildings had doors that could be locked. It was easier to lose the primals if they chased you into a building.

  In the woods?

  Well, in the woods, you were cooked.

  There weren’t enough hiding places. Your scent was too easy to smell in the midst of nothing but trees, and you could forget about running fast enough. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

  There were small sections of pine that Benjamin had to get through—either that, or walk along the dirt road, which was suicidal, in his opinion—but he took his time scouting these to make sure that nothing lurked, and he sprinted through them like he did in the open spaces.

  Eventually, sweating and breathing hard through a wide-open mouth to mitigate the sound, Benjamin found himself looking at the edge of one of the
numerous neighborhoods that had been used, once upon a time, to house troops and their families. More recently, it had been used to house the citizens of the United Eastern States.

  This was the safest place for Benjamin to scavenge. The primals seemed to congregate near the larger buildings towards the center of Fort Bragg. And here in the neighborhoods, Benjamin had a theory that his scent was difficult to pick out amongst all the old houses with so many years of human scent built up in them.

  That was his theory anyways.

  So far, he hadn’t been found by the primals.

  He knew that bigger stores of food could be found nearer the center of Fort Bragg, near the hangars where they used to do the food distributions. But it was just too dangerous. So he was relegated to picking from what scraps he could find in people’s old homes.

  Luckily, part of the evacuation plan had not been for people to pack out all their food, and there was still some left that had not rotted. Produce was out of the question. But there were still some dried meats that were good, and the grain allotments would be good indefinitely.

  The neighborhoods didn’t look much different. One could almost imagine that they were still full of people. That at any moment, people would be walking along the sidewalk, heading to work, or coming home from a shift.

  Benjamin worked his way into the neighborhood to the last house that he’d scavenged. He’d been interrupted last time by a pack of primals that he’d heard calling to each other. They’d been close, but he’d never caught sight of them. And, as was common knowledge at this point, when they howled to each other, that meant they weren’t pursuing prey.

  The house had shown some promise, so he went back to it, picking up where he’d left off.

  He slid into the back door and closed and locked it behind him.

  From what he could tell, this had been one of the homes that had multiple families living in it. Which meant that they’d received multiple ration allotments. Which gave him a greater chance of finding something leftover.

  He went to the fridge first. After doing this so many times, he knew to hold his breath when he opened the fridge. The smell was usually putrid. In the dark, unpowered interior of the fridge, there was a cabbage that had turned black, swimming in a soup of its own dark juices. There was a cardboard box with a collection of what had once been produce but was now fairly unrecognizable. The bottom of the box was sopping wet and fuzzy with mold.

  Benjamin wrinkled his nose, despite the fact that he was still holding his breath.

  On the top shelf, luckily placed far above the seeping rot of the produce, there was a package of grits. This was one of the staples that he’d found in almost all of the houses, usually in a large tin, sometimes in a mason jar. They ground the grits from the corn they’d grown in the numerous fields out beyond Fort Bragg.

  This was in a tin, with an open top. Not ideal. It would have taken in some of the moisture from the rotting produce. Perhaps rotted a bit itself. He withdrew the tin and closed the fridge door, then retreated to the far side of the kitchen where he finally allowed himself to breathe again.

  The stink of the fridge had permeated the entire room. It smelled like a dumpster.

  Benjamin took a couple of breaths to clear himself and then smelled the grits.

  They had indeed taken on the rotted scent, but they didn’t look moldy. He stuck his fingers into the granules and felt that they were mostly dry. A bit of clumping at the top. But he thought they would be okay.

  He could let them sit in some water for a while and he and his mother would have a nice meal. Flavorless, but it would at least fill their bellies. Flavor was for people who didn’t need to worry about starving to death.

  He set the open tin of grits on the kitchen table and prepared to return to the fridge for anything else that showed any promise, when he heard it.

  A bark.

  Not from a dog.

  Benjamin knew the difference.

  Everything inside him suddenly drew taut.

  His adrenaline glands dumped everything they had into his body, and he stood stock still for a moment, forcing himself to take large, measured breaths of the stinking air.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  They were here. Again.

  Maybe there was something about this house.

  Fuck this house. He’d never come back here again. Maybe coming back a second time had been a mistake. Maybe the primals had a den nearby.

  The bark was answered by another, and then another.

  They were close. Maybe a few houses away.

  Benjamin sank down onto his haunches, then scrambled his way from the kitchen into the living room. There were windows here, the shades hanging half open. He crept up to them on all fours and slowly lifted his head above the sill.

  Outside, the neighborhood streets stood, still and silent.

  Should he run? Or would it be wiser to sit and stay?

  Last time, they hadn’t been so close, and he’d had ample time to get out of the area. This time they sounded like they were right on top of him.

  All they would need to do was catch a whiff of him, and they would come into this house. Locked doors or not. They would batter the doors down or come in through the windows.

  Suddenly, his theory about his scent being obscured by all the old scents of humanity sounded dumb.

  Across the street, between two of the identical houses, a shape seeped out of the shadows of the pine forest beyond.

  Long arms. Thickly muscled shoulders and neck. Hunched, predatory posture.

  Its eyes scoured the street. Its mouth hung open, tongue protruding, its sinewy chest heaving like it’d been running.

  All of these details appeared to Benjamin like his vision had suddenly developed binocular capabilities.

  With a quiet mewl of fear, Benjamin backed away from the window, just as the thing’s eyes coursed over him.

  Did it see me? Did it see me?

  Benjamin stared at blank, white-painted wall. It smelled of dust. And people.

  His heart slammed so hard it made his vision twitch.

  From outside, there was no sound.

  No barks.

  No howls.

  That means they’ve found you.

  A new level of panic bloomed like a dark flower in Benjamin’s brain, and it crowded out all reason and thought. He was just an animal. He was just prey. And his brain told him to run.

  Run!

  He scrambled away from the window, still on all fours, the sense now overpowering that the creatures outside were going to burst in the door at any moment. He found his hands and feet slapping their way up the staircase of the split-level residence. He was going high, because he didn’t have the courage to leave out the back door where they would chase him down and rip him to shreds and feed on him while he was still awake and screaming.

  The attic, a flash of clarity went across his mind like a bolt of lightning in a black storm.

  Some little vestigial section of reason-capable brain knew that this was an all-in bet.

  Because once you were in the attic, you couldn’t get out of the attic.

  And so you’d better hope that your hiding place fooled the creatures that were after you, because if they figured out where you were, if they sniffed you out, then you had no place else to go. You’d trapped yourself.

  But this was a dim argument in the face of complete panic.

  Benjamin at least had an idea, and that was about the best he could hope for in this circumstance. The other alternative was to simply go blank in the mind, curl up in a ball, and start praying.

  To the top of the stairs.

  Here he finally came up to his feet again, his breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. The only thing that he could actually see was a little dot of reality directly in front of his face, and everything else was a mélange of dark colors. Like looking through a drinking straw.

  He stood in the center of a landing, around which there were several bedroom doors an
d a bathroom. If the attic would be anywhere, it was here.

  It took his eyes five agonizing passes over the ceiling to finally fixate on the attic door.

  A simple square in the ceiling.

  Not a pull down.

  Shit!

  Down on the ground level of the house, something rattled a door.

  Front door? Back door?

  It didn’t matter.

  They knew he was in here. They were coming for him.

  Benjamin found himself whimpering: “Oh-please-oh-please-oh-please…”

  He jumped for the attic access but it was a stupid idea to begin with. His fingertips hit the bottom and jarred the square piece of plywood, but it didn’t open.

  He needed something to stand on.

  Did he have time for that?

  On the ground level, he heard something like the snarling of a dog. And then a loud impact. The sound of a body hitting the door, and it seemed to rattle the whole house.

  “Oh-please-oh-please…”

  His tunnel vision scoured around him for something—anything—that would give him just a few feet of height.

  There. In one of the bedrooms.

  A nightstand.

  A cheap piece of pine furniture.

  It might not even hold his weight, but it was all he had.

  He rushed to it, his feet and hands clumsy like they’d turned to rubber. He grabbed the thing and felt his heart drop at how light it was. The chances of it holding his weight were slim. He glanced around for something else that he could use, but another reverberating impact from downstairs struck all further thought from his brain.

  Dragging the nightstand, he stumbled back into the landing area, underneath the attic access. He jammed the nightstand down and clambered up. It creaked and swayed treacherously. His legs wobbled underneath him. But he was two feet higher.

  Another impact, and this time it didn’t shake the walls as hard, because this time it ended in a terrifying crash, and Benjamin knew that they’d battered the door open.

  He heard the scramble of their claws on the linoleum entryway.

  He couldn’t even speak anymore. All that came out of his mouth was a whine.

  Chuffing, barking, snarling.

  They’re coming they’re coming they’re coming