“I did you a favor when I let you out of the brig,” Keiths cut in. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Alvarez bit his lip. He’d been put away for assault with a deadly weapon, when poker night had ended in a brawl. Alvarez thought the new guy was cheating and stuck a pen in his chest, collapsing a lung and sending the kid to the intensive care unit. He’d been stripped of his rank and tossed in the brig. Was scheduled for transfer to the San Francisco County jail two days from then, where he would face criminal charges.
Dana wasn’t sure why Keiths had let him out in the first place. It could only mean they were seriously short on manpower.
Keiths turned to Dana. “You OK, Sailor?”
Dana nodded and straightened. “Yes, Sir. Tip top.”
“At ease, save your energy, you’re going to need it.”
“Any idea what’s going on, Sir?”
Keiths brushed his palms together to knock the dust away. “By the looks of things the city’s been hit by an earthquake.”
“Earthquake my ass,” Alvarez shouted. “Everyone’s turned into a fucking Cro-Magnon man.”
Alvarez was a pathological liar, no doubt about it; but even Dana had to admit he was speaking the truth. People were acting weird. Almost animalistic. “Hodge was growling at me and took off when I got close,” she offered.
Keiths seemed to consider this. “And your crewmates, what happened to them, Hatfield?”
Dana’s eyes swept the floor in shame. “Stratton and Stokes didn’t make it. Coons is still on the MLB, rocking back and forth like he got hit on the head with a hammer. I rushed back to see if I could help, and that’s when I found Hodge.”
Alvarez spat on the floor. “What do you mean, Stratton and Stokes didn’t make it?”
“They were fighting and fell overboard.”
“Over what?” Alvarez was making this feel like an inquisition.
“I have no idea. I got knocked over myself and by the time I got to them, they ... ” Dana paused. “Went straight down. Never seen anything like it.”
Al’s arms flew in the air like the lowlife drama queen he was. “And you didn’t dive in after them?”
“How could I? By the time they hit the water ... ” she felt the tears welling up and struggled to keep them at bay. “People started jumping, and one of them hit the MLB.”
“From the Golden Gate?” It was Keiths now, and Dana was happy he was asking the questions.
She nodded. “Dozens of them, maybe more, hitting the water all around us. I’ve never seen anything like it. I didn’t have a choice.”
“No, you did the right thing.” He laid a hand on her shoulder, and somehow the touch helped to calm her down.
“I still think you’re a chicken shit, Hatfield,” Alvarez said with a scowl. “You never leave a sailor behind. Never.”
Keiths looked more than annoyed. “Give it a rest, will you?” The CO turned to leave.
“So what now?” Dana asked.
Keiths stopped. “We put out those fires and look for casualties, that’s what.”
“Shouldn’t we radio for help?” Dana asked.
“Help? Good one, Hatfield.” It was Alvarez again, and his voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard. “We already checked. There’s no one out there. It’s just us.”
Carole Cartright
4:35 p.m. (MST), July 4th, 2017
Salt Lake City International Airport, UT
“Nikki,” Carole shouted a second time.
Her daughter glanced over at her in a daze. She was in shock, and Carole wasn’t sure what to do. Slap her across the face? Shake her by the shoulders? It worked in the movies, but this was less like a movie and more like a living nightmare.
Thick black smoke billowed through the mangled cabin. If they moved now they could make it to the rear door, trigger the inflatable slide, and make it a safe distance before the rest of the plane went up in flames. But before any of that could happen, Nikki had to move.
“Honey, are you hurt?”
Her daughter’s eyes rose to meet her. “My leg hurts, but I think it’s just banged up.”
Carole’s insides were churning with fear and anxiety. The plane might blow sky high at any second. “Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go then.”
Nikki rose and limped into what was left of the aisle.
Aiden was behind Carole, clinging to her belt as though they were walking through a violent wind.
The dead body of an elderly woman lay across the aisle, her head twisted all the way around.
“Oh my God,” Aiden shrieked.
“Don’t look down, Kids. Keep your eyes up and focused on that door just ahead.”
Carole could hear Nikki whimpering with fear.
“We’re almost there.”
The ground shook violently, throwing the three from side to side.
Was the plane about to roll over? Carol wondered. Had there been another earthquake?
Slowly, they clawed their way to the rear exit. At the top was a sign that read:
PULL EMERGENCY USE ONLY
Right above that was a slit into which Carole inserted her hand and tore off the panel to expose a handle.
“Mom, hurry!” Aiden cried, the terror in his voice thick and palpable.
Carole used the handle to pop open the rear door. A slide at their feet rolled out and inflated at once. For a moment, Carole stood, unable to stop staring at the strange colors in the sky: pink, blue, green, and yellow, dancing around. A frightening thought suddenly occurred to her.
This is the Rapture. The end of the world.
Aiden was the first to jump, followed by Nikki. Carole was last and took a final look inside what remained of the cabin.
It looked like a bomb had gone off. Then movement on her left. A middle-aged man with a receding hairline was struggling to remove his seatbelt. Blood trickled down his forehead, covering his face. Carole went to him and reached down to help undo his restraints. He grabbed hold of her arm with crushing strength.
“Are you mad?” she screamed. “I’m trying to help you.”
He was grunting and swung his free hand at her face, striking her on the side of head.
Her vision filled with starbursts.
A second blow knocked her backward onto a dead body. The smoke, coupled with the fist to the side of her head, was making Carole’s vision swim in and out of focus. She struggled to keep from passing out, unable to fathom what had just happened. She’d risked her own life to help this man, and he’d tried to attack her. She stumbled back to the slide and jumped.
Fifty yards away, Aiden and Nikki sat huddled together.
Aiden ran to meet Carole once she’d reached the ground and took her firmly by the shoulders. “We can’t leave Dad,” he said pointing to the plane’s detached forward section. “He’s still in there somewhere.”
Nikki watched them both with a disconnected look on her face.
Through the haze of flames, Carole could see a tiny yellow slide in the distance. Someone else had escaped the front of the plane and jumped down, just like them.
Was it Jim?
They ran to the forward section, Nikki limping not far behind, doing her best to keep up. A silver-haired woman lay on the ground, her face upturned to the sky.
Carole dropped down on one knee next to her.
“Where are you hurt?”
The woman turned to Carole and began to sob.
“Take care of her will you,” she told Nikki, as she limped over. “I’m going to look for your father.”
“I’m coming with you,” Aiden said at once.
“I need you to take care of your sister. Please.”
Aiden’s lips drew into a thin line, and Carole could see he was fearful he’d never see her again.
She reached the slide and realized rather quickly that climbing up there wasn’t going to be easy; this thing was meant for one-way travel. She remembered her childhood, climbing
up the wrong end of a slide at the park and how tough it had been.
Smoke was pouring out from cracks in the fuselage and broken windows.
If she didn’t make it out, who would look after the kids? That was her main concern, but the truth of the matter was, none of this had ever been up for debate. Jim would have done it for her in a heartbeat. She at least owed him that much.
Carole took a running start and then jumped at the last minute, clinging to the slide’s inflated edge. She wedged her foot in the crease and used it to push herself up.
Since the plane had landed on its belly, the angle wasn’t nearly as steep as she’d feared. A minute later, she was up and into the darkness.
Moans of pain from the wounded assaulted her ears from every direction. Parts of the ceiling had either collapsed completely or split open during impact, creating a strange window to the world outside. The lights dancing in the sky above cast their strange glow through the cabin, giving the place an almost psychedelic feeling. It reminded her of old summer nights when she and Jim would lay on the hood of his car, smoking weed to Pink Floyd and giggling up at the stars.
As she made her way down the row strewn with wreckage, Carole noticed flames on her left, slowly licking up the cabin wall. Next to them, on the floor, a figure lay face down, wearing blue jeans and what looked like a navy-blue shirt.
“Jim!” she shouted.
A hand from a nearby seat reached out and grabbed her ankle. Carole looked down and gasped. A young man was wedged under the middle row of seats. Both of his legs had been severed.
The cabin shook again, and Carole went flying into an armrest. At the last minute she raised her hands to block a blow that surely would have knocked her unconscious. It pained her to leave the legless man, but there was nothing she could do for him.
She reached Jim a minute later and struggled to turn him onto his back. All of his hair had been singed off, along with the first few layers of skin on his face. He was almost unrecognizable. Carole grabbed him by his feet and dragged him toward the emergency slide, stopping every few feet to catch her breath. Now thick pockets of black smoke hovered over the ceiling, stretching lower and lower every minute. She coughed and did her best to hold her breath.
By the time she reached the exit, her body felt as though the final burst of adrenaline had all but been used up. She nudged Jim over the edge and watched his limp body roll down the slide and onto the grass.
An explosion from inside the cabin knocked her down the slide and careening onto the hard ground. She rose to her feet in a daze, a new pain in the shoulder that hit the ground first. Nikki, Aiden, and the silver-haired woman were flat on the ground. The plane was now completely engulfed in flames.
“We need to get away from the wreckage,” she heard herself say from what seemed like miles away. She had found Jim and pulled him to safety. Her family was alive. The euphoria was overwhelming.
They stopped a few hundred yards from the crash site. Jim was unconscious, but breathing in short gasps of air.
Aiden was pacing around them. “Where the hell are the all the rescue people? I mean, can’t they tell a plane just cra–”
Carole noticed Aiden stop short, and she glanced over to see him pointing. The smoke from the burning plane had initially obscured the view of their surroundings, but now things were much clearer. With a look of disbelief, Aiden pointed to a half dozen other trails of smoke billowing into the sky.
It was clear that something terrible had happened and their Boeing 737 skidding off the runway had only been part of some larger disaster.
“W-what the hell is going on here, Mom?” Aiden muttered under his breath.
“They’ll come help us, Honey, don’t worry. They have to. Until then, we need to keep it together and do what we can to help your father.”
Nikki was examining the burns on Jim’s left hand. She turned to look up at Carole. “Thank you for saving my life,” she said.
“Honey, you’re my flesh and blood, I could never leave you behind.”
“Flesh and blood?” Nikki said.
“I would never dream of leaving my little girl behind.”
“We’re related?” the way Nikki’s question came out sent a shiver of unease down Carole’s spine. She sat down next to her. Nikki was still holding Jim’s hand.
“Nikki, you’re in shock or maybe you hit your head ... ”
“You keep calling me Nikki.”
Carole tried not to show her alarm. She put her hands on Nikki’s head to feel for an injury, wondering if she had concussion from the accident.
Nikki shrugged her off. “My head’s fine.”
“She might have a concussion,” Carole told Aiden, who moved in and put an arm around his sister.
“You’ll be fine, Sis. Just lie back and rest.”
Nikki did as she was told, which indicated to Carole straight away that something was very wrong. Nikki never listened to anyone.
Carole spotted Jim’s hand, the one Nikki had been holding. His wedding ring was missing. There wasn’t even an indentation.
She studied Jim’s other hand and shook her head. Not there either.
Carole’s brow creased as she grabbed hold of the belt loop on Jim’s jeans and rolled him over, removing the wallet from his back pocket. She flipped it open and all the blood suddenly drained from her face. Fire danced across her pallid features as she looked up at the plane that had became a roaring inferno.
Carole let the wallet tumble from her hand, hardly able to contain the scream pounding against the back of her lips before she was finally able to choke out the words.
“I saved the wrong man.”
Larry Nowak
6:40 p.m. (EST), July 4th, 2017
Manhattan, N.Y.
Larry Nowak was 49 floors up, looking for the stairway with nothing but emergency lights to guide him, and all he could think about was 7 World Trade Center. It had also been 49 floors high, and that son of a bitch had come down like a house of cards, even though it barely had a scratch on it. If the government had something to do with it, and Larry wasn’t entirely convinced one way or another, they’d done one hell of a job. Seemed to him that the tremors that had just destroyed his office and pile driven Sam into mush before his very eyes were far closer to a good old-fashioned earthquake than they were to an act of terrorism.
Larry used the walls to guide himself along the corridor in the dim pools of light.
If those terrorist bastards ever found some way to fuck with the Earth’s crust, then you could kiss to the whole enchilada goodbye, couldn’t you?
Damned exit had to be around here somewhere.
A man in an Armani suit bolted past him, breathing heavily and making noises that didn’t quite sound normal.
“Watch it, asshole!” Larry shouted through the darkness after him.
Whoever that guy was, when this was all over, his ass was as good as fired.
He was the fourth person Larry had seen since escaping from his office and each of them had either been running around randomly, like chickens with their heads cut off, or wedged under desks, cowering and covering their faces.
Like children, was how they were acting. Little children in a goddamned daycare center.
New Yorkers were supposed to be tough sonsabitches. Even though he’d grown up on Chicago’s West Side, he’d always respected the generous size of their cojones. More so after 9/11, when the whole city had come together to show Osama its middle finger.
You can hit us, you can even knock us down, but you’ll never beat us.
Was enough to bring a fucking tear every time. But the jerks he’d seen running around were a different story altogether. Those pricks were starting to make Larry reconsider his earlier appraisal.
To see the expressions on their faces once they found out who they were pushing aside in the dark.
Oh, Mr. Nowak, I didn’t know it was you.
And that’s when a scary thought crept into Larry stream of consciousn
ess.
After a disaster, when it was every man for himself, nobody gives a shit how much money you have or what kind of car you drive. This was the only time when everyone truly was equal.
The idea sent a jolt of fear through his aging bones. He was 50 on the nose, but that didn’t make him any more willing to lay down and die. Hell, inside he felt about 30, and it was only when he gazed in the mirror and saw the way his skin had started wrinkling up around his eyes that the grim reality tended to settle back in.
But Larry had one thing over these young punks. He’d hit rock bottom at least twice in his life, had rubbed shoulders with the lowest of the low. If nothing else, those experiences had taught him how to survive. Throw enough rats in a hole, and sooner or later you’ll only have two left. Larry was that second rat. Not because he was smarter or stronger than the others, but because he’d do whatever it took to stay alive.
The exit sign loomed out of the darkness, and Larry suddenly felt a sense of joy lift his spirits.
“Mr. Nowak, I’m so glad you’re alive.”
The voice startled him. He hadn’t noticed the figure limping toward the exit from the other direction. It was too dark, but as the man came into view, so, too, did his right foot. It was twisted grotesquely inward, making the guy walk like something out of a Romero zombie movie.
Glancing behind him, Larry realized there wasn’t anyone he could pawn the gimp off to.
“Tom, from Marketing?” Larry asked, pulling at the door, trying not to appear as if he were in a hurry.
“No, it’s Josh,” the other man replied, “The intern. We need to get out of here right away.”
“I hear ya, Josh, but that foot of yours looks pretty mangled. There’s no way you’ll be able to make it down 49 flights of stairs. Why don’t you wait right here, and I’ll send for help?”
Even in the dim light, Larry could see the reluctance forming on Josh’s face.
“Mr. Nowak, you’re the only one I’ve come across who hasn’t completely lost his mind. It isn’t safe here, I’m telling you. I just saw Bob Morgan from Accounting crush another man’s skull with a fax machine. Sandra from HR is trying to eat her leather briefcase. People have lost their fucking minds.”
Primal Shift: Volume 1 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 6
