“How long?” Finn asked again, his voice rising this time.
“A month. Maybe more.”
Finn fell back onto his pillow. “You’re kidding me. What about Johnson? Did she make it?”
“I’m sorry.”
Suddenly, Bud’s face was all Finn could see. That and his fingers closing around Bud’s throat.
“A lot’s happened since you’ve been out,” Nikki told him.
“What’d you mean a lot’s happened?” Nikki stood and grabbed a pair of crutches resting at the foot of his cot. “Better that you see for yourself.”
With Nikki’s help, Finn rose on a pair of wobbly legs, a sensation strangely reminiscent of climbing to his feet after being ejected from that vat of goo. But he hadn’t been unconscious the entire time, had he? There were snippets of memory in there. Dark figures wiping the sweat from his brow, peeling away his bandages to check on the state of his wounds. All things he had assumed were dreams. The way he’d dreamed of Thomson and the tattoo artist, Johnny. The way he’d dreamed of those dead women’s faces staring back at him ... That last part really made him uneasy. It had been those very images that the old Finn had been trying to expel from his memory. And mixed in there somewhere was the suggestion that maybe he didn’t do the horrible things he’d been accused of. But then again, didn’t convicts always claim innocence?
Finn was on the crutches now, Nikki helping him past the tent flap and into a Rainbowland that was vastly different from the one he’d left. Spanning the length of the bridge, a mishmash of steel siding had been shaped into an imposing gate. Sturdy for sure, but ugly as hell. Although it made perfect sense to Finn. When the whole world was out to kill you, practicality trumped beauty every time.
But that wasn’t the only thing that had changed. A palisade 15 to 20 feet high ringed nearly the entire compound. Every 30 yards stood a guard tower. It must have been a gargantuan job, and it still wasn’t complete.
There had to be dozens of people working on one project or another. Seemed like nearly everyone in Rainbowland was doing something. Gangs of men and women dragged in logs stripped of their branches. Others sharpened the ends into deadly points. Even a makeshift pulley system had been set up to move the timbers into place. Perhaps the biggest shock of all for Finn was seeing the men who were manning those watch towers. Their hair was pulled back in long pony tails, and they were dressed in army fatigues, but it was what they were carrying that startled him the most.
“A cult member with a rifle in his hands?”
“I told you, a lot has changed. Probably in more ways than you think. And one more thing: It isn’t called Rainbowland anymore. Larry changed the name to New Jamestown.”
Finn let out a dry, sardonic little laugh. “I guess Larryland didn’t have quite the same ring to it.”
They stood quietly for a moment as Finn tried to soak in the different world he’d awoken to. After a while, he turned to Nikki. “I want you to know we didn’t just run off to that facility in the desert without searching for your mother first.”
“I know.”
“When you see her,” Finn said. “Will you send her over to say hi?”
Nikki’s face crumpled with sadness. “She never came back.”
An invisible fist took hold of Finn’s guts and squeezed. Anguish for sure, but also guilt that he hadn’t stayed to search longer. His need to unravel the mystery of his own past had been too strong to deny, and it was beginning to look like the price he’d paid had been a heavy one indeed.
Carole Cartright
Navigating through the maze of boilers and water pipes underneath the Grand America Hotel had taken some getting used to for Carole. Her trial by fire had come that first day when Russell – a thickset man with thinning hair and a grumpy disposition – had saved her from a group of rather determined Wipers. She’d seen him squeeze through a hole in the concrete wall and followed suit, the Wipers tearing through the store. One of them reaching in to snatch her when Russell released a lever and dropped 50 pounds of steel door on the Wiper’s hand from above, severing it at the elbow. The sight of the arm on the ground beneath her, the index finger twitching, was a sight she couldn’t erase from memory even though it had occurred more than a month before. Since that time, she’d lived mostly underground with Russell and a dozen others he managed to save, perhaps in ways not unlike how he’d saved Carole. It wasn’t that she wanted to go back. Returning to Rainbowland without Nikki wasn’t an option, but Carole didn’t survive this long by allowing her emotions to make the most important decisions. Right now, a trip back to Rainbowland was simply too dangerous. Without the proper weapons and transportation, it would be little more than a suicide mission. In large part because the Wipers were all over the city. Some on foot, others in trucks. Russell had built himself quite a network here underneath the city, which included a number of spy holes they could use to assess the danger level outside. And these Wipers didn’t appear to be hunting victims. They were collecting food. Canned goods as well as anything that hadn’t already gone bad. All day and sometimes even at night the trucks roared overhead, emptying stores and houses of anything salvageable. And with every passing day, the Wipers were becoming more organized. It wasn’t until Russell told Carole about a man named Alvarez – or was it Gomez? – that she began to understand that someone was leading them. But more than that. She learned there was something different about this man. The way the Wipers feared and obeyed him. The way he’d rallied the memoriless from miles around to his banner. Like Celtic warriors, Wipers followed their own archaic sets of rules. Each was an individual, and they weren’t great at taking orders. Heck, most of them didn’t speak English. Although according to Russell, once this Alvarez had showed up, all that had started to change. Which explained in part the heavy traffic outside that was keeping them hidden underground like a den of mole rats.
Shortly after her own salvation, Holly and Tamara had showed up. Plucked topside by Russell and brought down into the guts of this new city with ceilings and walls lined with pipes and water mains.
Holly was a young mother with dirty-blonde hair, when it was clean, and a pretty face with deep-blue eyes. Her 12-year-old daughter, Tamara, a brunette, shared her mother’s sparkling eyes. The biggest difference between them was Tamara never spoke, not anymore, not after seeing her father killed before her, slaughtered by Wipers in the opening hours of the hell on Earth that was now their new reality. Not that staying behind was any safer. Not in the long run. That was why people had banded together in groups. Communities hiding behind strong walls were surely popping up all over the country as survivors returned to lessons learned in ages past. As for Tamara, since her own traumatic event, she communicated by writing on a tiny chalk board, holding up a powdery white message whenever she had something to say.
In the days that followed, Carole had quickly become something of a friend to Holly and a surrogate mother to Tamara. She saw something of herself in the woman. Husbandless and thrust out into a savage world, shackled not only with her own survival, but that of her daughter. Of course, Tamara and Nikki weren’t the same age. Nikki was going to be sixteen soon, but each of them had folded in on themselves after The Shift, as though the pain of facing this new world was too great.
Regardless, a single truth remained, one Carole knew full well. If it weren’t for Russell, none of them would be alive. He was a mechanical room engineer for the Grand America Hotel. A man doused in steam and sweat who’d spent close to 16 years maintaining the comfort of thousands of guests who never even knew he existed. Spending that much time in the basement had a funny way of eroding a man’s manners, and Russell was no exception. He swore like a sailor and never hesitated to give you a firm piece of his mind, but somehow you always knew that deep down, under all that crusty exterior was a soft, gooey marshmallow of a man. The way he told the story, The Shift and the resulting earthquake had knocked things around plenty down here. His inability to raise anyone over the walkie-talkie had s
ent him topside to find out what the hell had happened. Opening the door, he said, was like looking into hell itself. People screaming, attacking one another. One of them even charging his way with a lust for blood Russell said he’d never seen before. He slammed the door to the boiler room and kept it barricaded until he was able to bring his welding torch up to make sure it wouldn’t ever be opened again. Wasn’t long before Russell realized the people on top, crazy as they were, had an edge over him.
They had access to food.
Russell didn’t have more than his lunch pale and a thermos full of cold milk. What he had going for him was knowledge. He knew every corner of this basement about as well as he knew the deep lines along the back of his hands. Knew that nestled up against the far wall, past all the heavy machinery, was a row of stores. The wall there wasn’t nearly as thick at that end, and if he could carve out a hole, he’d be able to move about right under their noses. Using improvised tools to hack away at the concrete, the work had been gruelling, but eventually he made it into a Victoria’s Secret. From there, the gyprock wall that led into the convenience store was like cutting through butter. Although Russell hadn’t said butter when he recounted the story. He’d said it was like margarine, since that’s what he preferred and part of what he was after on the day he broke through into the 7-Eleven.
The booby traps had come next, and each of the holes Russell dug needed to be outfitted with one in case Wipers managed to find a way inside. Spring-loaded metal plates that would drop down and seal the tiny entrance with the pull of a string. Carole had seen what those plates were capable of, recalling with stark horror the way that Wiper’s arm had been lopped off as he tried to grab a hold of her.
There were 12 of them hiding underground now, including Russell, Holly, and Tamara. Twelve lives saved from almost certain death. Most important, they would be leaving this place for good as soon as they could. Once, that was, the Wipers were done hoarding all the food they could get their grimy hands on. Carole hoped the streets would be quieter then, safer.
Every day, they would go topside in groups of twos and threes, peeking out from narrow slits in the walls that looked out onto the street. And that was exactly what Carole was getting ready to do now. Russell and Holly would come with her this time. A part of her enjoyed these reconnaissance missions, maybe even needed them. Apart from providing a much needed change of scenery, they’d become a secret opportunity to search for Nikki. Although it wasn’t long after Carole had arrived that Russell had cleared the silly notion from her head that trading her life for her daughter’s was a good idea.
“They’ll just rape and then kill the both of you,” he told her, shadows cutting deep grooves into his already weathered features. “Or worse.”
Slowly, quietly, the three made their way from the boiler room and into the basement storehouse of the Victoria’s Secret. From there, they headed up a flight of creaky steps and into the main storefront. Tables with dusty clothes. Some of them folded, although much of it was a shambles. Rows of sexy, half-dressed mannequins. One of them was missing an arm. Carole never breathed a word of it to anyone, but she’d found one of those mannequins in a storage closet downstairs once. The thing was dressed in a silk negligee, and Carole knew straightaway this was the girlfriend Russell was always on about.
But plastic girlfriends aside, the Victoria’s Secret was also where they came to get the padding for their beds and clothes to keep them warm. It wasn’t all just sexy underwear anymore, and Carole couldn’t be more thankful. The storefront itself had been closed on the day the of The Shift, so there hadn’t been a need to do much more than wrap a steel cable around the handles in case someone tried to kick their way inside. The point wasn’t to stop intruders altogether as much as it was designed to buy the survivors time to retreat behind Russell’s steel traps. They were living like rats in a hole, Carole thought, catching sight of herself in a full-length mirror and hardly recognizing the person looking back. She’d lost a lot of weight, and her face was covered over by a layer of dirt.
She, Russell, and Holly squeezed through an opening at the back of dressing room 3 and into the 7-Eleven stockroom. Once inside, the standard procedure was for two of them to gather supplies, while the third monitored the traffic outside. Most of the shelves were pretty bare by now. The majority of the convenience store’s food was already safely underground, but even those reserves were quickly dwindling, and they were reduced to eating from jars of peanut butter and bags of stale potato chips.
Thankfully, Russell had the foresight early on to grab the perishables first. Once the power went off rendering the fridges and freezers inoperable, much of the food being kept cold would have started to decay at once. Eat what you can and throw the rest before it goes bad. If he’d started in on the canned goods first, the 7-Eleven woulda been swarming with insects. In short, their salvation would have become their undoing.
Carole was peering out the front window, while Russell and Holly picked over what little remained on the shelves. She glanced up to catch sight of the sun, that warm glowing ball of fire she rarely laid eyes on anymore. After a minute, she realized it was directly overhead and out of sight, which meant it was around noon. Right now, the streets were empty of cars and more importantly, devoid of Wipers. She was about to give the all clear when the rumbling came. A large pickup roared into view and slammed on the brakes. A group of men in the back dismounted in a hurry. They were heading for the 7-Eleven.
Carole pulled away from the door. “Wipers,” she called out, finding cover behind a nearby shelf with jars of honey and chocolate spread. Russell and Holly retreated toward the stockroom. Russell was waving Carole over, and she was about to make a break for it when the door shook violently. Someone was trying to get inside, and when she peeked around the containers of chocolate spread, she saw their faces pressed up against the glass, searching inside.
The long scar down the side of the man’s face removed any doubt they were Wipers.
He backed away and kicked the door. It rattled loudly. Another kick brought the sound of crashing glass. Just to her right was the Slurpee dispenser and below that, a cupboard where the store owner kept the Big Gulps. She swung the cupboard open, scooped out the remaining plastic cups and flung them away from her in the hopes it wouldn’t be obvious that someone was hiding inside. She was barely able to squeeze herself in when the door shattered completely and swung open. In they came, crunching over the broken glass, speaking to one another in a strange guttural language that sounded like pig Latin.
Where they speaking English? she wondered. Or at least some strange perversion they’d taught themselves.
It was Carole’s legs that were preventing the door from closing completely. She could see them clearly now through the slit in the cupboard door. The one with the scar on his face opened a bottle of honey and began pouring it down his throat. He stopped and motioned for one of his men to come to him. More crunching glass. When a young Wiper arrived, Scarface held the jar of honey out to him, moving it emphatically when the other didn’t take it right away. Finally, the young Wiper relented, and when he turned to pour the warm sticky liquid down his throat, Carole saw at once she’d been completely wrong about this one. Not only was he not a man, he wasn’t a wiper at all. Sure, his face was dirty and the hand holding the honey jar nicked with a half dozen scrapes, his fingernails caked in dirt. But through all of that, she recognized him immediately, and as she did her heart leapt. She’d found Aiden.
Larry Nowak
The office where Larry and All Father had squared off – where Larry had flung mud in the old man’s face, promising it would stick – now belonged to him. The desk was all he’d kept. The day following All Father’s death and Larry’s decision to accept Timothy’s offer to run Rainbowland, his first order of business had been to have the office whitewashed. Gone were the pastel colors and the outline of meditating monks. Gone too, was the book case filled with volumes of New Age psychobabble. Soon, even the name Rainb
owland became little more than a memory.
A knock at the door.
“Enter,” Larry said. He was scanning a list of the compound’s remaining food reserves.
A cult member entered, his hair tied back in a tail and an AR-15 slung over his shoulder. The drab-blue pants and gray shirts had also been replaced by green camo. If All Father were still around, the sight would surely have horrified him. But knowing how Larry had pulled it off woulda done a lot more. The trick itself had been simple enough. He’d given a long speech in the gymnasium and read out what he said were All Father’s dying wishes. “Do whatever it takes to protect the colony,” Larry told them that solemn day. “That’s what All Father whispered into my ear.” Didn’t matter in the least that Peter was already dead when Larry arrived. These people were grieving the loss of their beloved leader. They were directionless and vulnerable, and Larry gave them exactly what they needed. Reassurance. Sure, things would change, but only for the better and more importantly, in a way that woulda made All Father proud.
A cult member named Charlie Smith saluted. “Brother Timothy’s here to see you.”
“Very well, let him in.”
Cult members acting like Marines wasn’t the only change at the compound. Over the last few weeks, so too, had Timothy’s face. The pudgy cheeks that spoke of his love of rich foods had largely melted away. The Timothy before him looked much younger, if not a tad bit sickly.
“I take it you know why I’m here, Larry.”
Larry waved his hand, and the guard stepped outside, closing the door behind him.
“So, you can tell me for the umpteenth time that we’re low on food.”
“We aren’t low, the pantry shelves are practically bare. You’ve spent too much manpower building these walls and foraging for weapons and ammunition. What good’ll they be if we starve to death?”
Primal Shift: Volume 2 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 2
