“You might not have killed the old man yourself,” Alvarez went on, “but you sure as hell wanted him dead, didn’t you?”
“Shut your lying mouth!” And this time Larry jabbed the pliers into Alvarez’ windpipe causing Al’s head to snap back and then forward. He started coughing and trying to catch his breath.
“That’s it, Larry,” Alvarez croaked. “Beat me just like your old man used to beat you every night.”
That’s when Larry saw red. Down went the pliers, skittering to the trailer floor. A split second later Larry’s hands were wrapped around Al’s throat, his thumbs pushing deep into Al’s windpipe with uncontrolled rage. Alvarez squirmed under him, gasping for the very air Larry was denying him.
“How does it feel you son of a bitch?” Larry chanted. “Not so smart now, are you?”
A couple of the men watching moved to stop Larry, but by then, it didn’t much matter. The deed was done. Larry stood, heaving, and turned on a pair of wobbly legs. His head was spinning, too. Behind him, Alvarez was dead. He wasn’t sure how exactly he knew, but he did. It was then that Larry collapsed, suddenly aware that something was terribly wrong.
PRIMAL SHIFT 10: Judgement Day
Dana
Dana had hoped that during Timothy’s interrogation he might shed some light on the location of Tevatron’s secret project, the pulse wave that was apparently being used to keep people’s memories suppressed. If she’d only had enough time to question him properly, perhaps she might have teased a few additional morsels out of him. But Larry and his henchmen clearly had other plans. Timothy’s last words had been to check Abigail’s notebook, and that’s exactly what she was doing now. Since finding it hidden in his room, Dana had held onto it as evidence, never entirely clear on how it would prove useful. But that was the funny thing about evidence. In the long run, sometimes the useless bits you collect become the most valuable.
Dana flipped through the frayed pages. To her eyes, many of the entries read like New Age mumbo jumbo. The kinda crystal-gazing stuff so popular throughout the ‘90s and relegated now to crackpot central.
It hadn’t been longer than 10 minutes before she found the first hints of what she was after. An entry Abigail had recorded many years ago that spoke of sacred sites of tremendous power situated around the world. The Bermuda Triangle, the Pyramids of Giza, Machu Picchu in Peru, and many more. When certain key points were laid out on a map, a distinct shape began to emerge. That of a giant circle. Dana began etching it by hand on a piece of scrap paper.
She was just about done when the trailer door burst in. Dana looked up, startled. It was Lou.
“Larry just killed Alvarez.”
•••
They headed first for the prison trailer where Alvarez was being held. But before she was even halfway across the gravel road that separated the two trailers, she caught the smell of something burning. Someone was having a late night barbecue. That was her first thought.
She and Lou arrived seconds later and found the jail empty. Even Simon, often on guard duty, was absent.
Next, they headed for the office Larry set up for himself in the compound basement. Dana pulled open the door and walked in to a cacophony of voices.
She turned the corner and found Larry, laid out on a sofa in his new office, a cult member in fatigues fanning him with a pillow. Another was dabbing a wet cloth against a wound on his cheek. Others were standing around, bickering among themselves over what to do.
“What the hell happened?” Dana barked.
The men around Larry turned at once.
“I don’t doubt for a second Alvarez deserved to die,” she said. “But I thought this guy was supposed to be our bargaining chip?”
Larry sat up, and right away Dana saw there was something different about him. First of all, his hand wasn’t trembling anymore, and there was a scar on his cheek, one that almost looked like a burn mark.
“He tried to attack me,” Larry said. “I had no choice.”
“Tried to attack you. Wasn’t he was strapped to a chair?” This wasn’t making any sense, and the strange look in Larry’s eyes wasn’t helping. “I’d like to examine the body,” she told him flatly.
“I’m afraid that’s quite impossible.”
Quite impossible?
That wasn’t the way Larry normally spoke, and something about that thought made goose flesh run up the length of her arms.
“I had Donavan take his body out behind the trailer and burn it.”
“You what?”
“He was quite dead, I assure you.”
“Yes, I’m sure you saw to that. And what now, Larry, when the Wipers come looking for revenge and we don’t have Alvarez to keep them at bay?”
Larry smiled, and the burn mark along his face wrinkled. “Don’t worry about the Wipers. I can handle them just fine.”
Finn
“I don’t know,” Dana was frantically telling Finn less than 10 minutes later. “I think Larry’s starting to lose his mind.”
The fear and panic in her voice when she said they needed to speak was enough to let him know she was deadly serious.
“I still don’t get how a man who’s tied to a chair posed any threat.” Finn said.
Dana was pacing back and forth. “He didn’t. Look, Alvarez was a murdering bastard. I should know, but I thought we captured him for a reason.”
“You think the assassination attempt rattled something loose inside Larry’s head?”
“My dad used to watch those black and white World War II documentaries on the Discovery Channel when he wasn’t plastered and glued to breaking news on CNN. I remember seeing one about how attempts on the lives of dictators always sent them into bouts of paranoia. Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein. He may be slick, but don’t let Larry fool you, he’s a dictator.”
Finn couldn’t agree more. Fact, he’d been waiting to hear those very words come out of Dana’s mouth, but hearing them only made him all the more concerned. “The more reason you should be careful, Dana.”
She stopped pacing and bit the end of her thumbnail. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone was eavesdropping on the stuff I was saying.”
Finn’s eyebrows went up. Not entirely sure if she meant what she’d just said. Either way, it didn’t matter.
“I’m not sure what’s going on, but you saw how easily he executed Timothy, that poor guard, Charlie, and now Alvarez. No one’s safe, Dana, especially if he finds you poking your nose in places he doesn’t want you to.”
She laughed. “Coming from the guy who’s made it his business to poke his nose in dangerous places.”
Finn was over by Dana’s desk when he spotted the notebook. “What’s this?”
“I spoke to Timothy about Tevatron before he was killed, and he told me to read through Abigail’s channeling. So far, I’m not sure what to think.”
Finn flipped through the pages when out popped the drawing Dana had made. He held the sheet up, staring at it in amazement. He was glaring at what looked like a wagon wheel with spokes that came together at a central point. This was the same picture Aiden had sketched all over his body. He looked at her, and the surprise on his face must have been apparent.
•••
“We didn’t know who else we could ask,” Finn explained to Simon. He and Dana were standing at the door to the jailer’s bedroom. Simon was wearing pajamas and looked like he’d been in the middle of a wild dream when they’d pounded on his door.
“Come in, come in,” he said.
Dana closed the door behind them, and Finn handed Simon the piece of paper with the image of the wheel.
“Where did you get this?” He asked.
“It’s a long story,” Dana said. “Do you know what it is?”
“‘Course, I know it. It’s the planetary power grid. Ancient people sensed something of the power contained at certain spots and built important temples and structures to worship them. Aletheia spoke about these points often. Said at the center of th
e wheel was a source of unlimited free energy for anyone capable of tapping into it.”
“Well, we think someone’s already tapped in,” Finn said. He pointed to where all the lines converged. “We need to know where it is.”
Simon began rummaging through a box under his bed. “After my father died,” Simon said and then stopped himself. “After Timothy murdered him, I should say, Larry’s first order of business was to trash all my father’s papers. Dumped them into a container to be burned. ‘Course, what son wouldn’t want to salvage at least a handful of mementos?”
Simon came out with a wrinkled map of North America, filled with lines drawn in red ink. “This map hung on his wall for years.”
The deep-crimson lines came in from all sides, like the contrail from dozens of nuclear missile strikes, and each of them converged at a point north of here.
“Montana,” Dana said in amazement.
Simon nodded and poked his finger at a spot on the map. “Chief Mountain, Montana, more specifically. That was where us Rainbowites – back when there was such a thing – set up camp every year to celebrate the summer solstice.
Larry
Larry was sure that voice he heard babbling inside his head, the one that sounded an awful lot like Alvarez, was the first sign of guilt over killing the man in cold blood. No doubt about it, that voice was pushing the buttons of a man who’d been through a lot lately. The attack on the compound, Timothy’s attempts to raise a rebellion within New Jamestown, and then a failed assassination attempt. More than enough to rattle anyone, wasn’t it? For Larry, wrapping his hands around Alvarez’ neck and squeezing the life out of him had been the result of surrendering to an impulse he’d been powerless to resist. It wasn’t going too far to say he’d almost felt himself a spectator in a hazy dream, a kind of marionette with strings that rose up through the jail cell walls and settled in the hands of some malevolent force.
And now that Larry thought about it, hadn’t Alvarez’ voice been whispering in his ear from the moment he began his interrogation? Soft and subtle. Then when the real man began to speak, Larry could hear two voices, as though he were standing in an echo chamber. Each voice was saying something different. Strapped to that chair, Alvarez’ real voice had pecked at Larry’s nerves with the sharpened precision of a bird’s beak. But Alvarez’ other voice, the one no one else could hear, was saying something completely different. It was egging him on.
Are you gonna let him talk to you like that?
That’s it, Larry, show him who’s boss. Show him who’s the fucking boss around here!
He’d strangled Alvarez, in part, to silence the voices – both of them – but the act of killing the man had only made them grow louder. Now there was a veritable brouhaha going on within the narrow confines of Larry’s skull.
It hadn’t taken long for Larry to realize the continued presence of that voice wasn’t a sign of insanity, nor was it guilt – a word that wasn’t in Larry’s everyday vocabulary. When bad shit happened to the people around him, it was usually because they either got stupid or tried to cross him, sometimes both.
Since the strangling, Alvarez’ voice became loudest when the others around him were looking for direction. There was a kind of tug-of-war going on inside his head, and daresay his soul, a battle Larry feared he was losing.
Donavan entered the office. “It’s done,” he said. He was referring to Larry’s request he bury Alvarez’ remains.
Larry steepled his fingers. “Good.”
“If I may,” Donavan added. “There’s one thing I don’t quite understand.”
Larry’s eyebrow perked up. “Is there?” He could feel Alvarez pulling those invisible strings again. Tweaked eyebrows and steepled fingers wasn’t Larry Nowak, and Donavan seemed to notice the change, although he certainly would never have guessed the reason for it.
“Why burn Alvarez’ body, rather than hang him from the bridge as a warning, the way you did with Timothy?”
The question was a perfectly valid one, and up until that point, Larry hadn’t given his order a second thought. Now that it was put before him, the answer suddenly became clear. He’d sooner hang himself from the bridge than desecrate Alvarez’ body. The feeling had been strong, and in an eerie way that he didn’t quite understand, the two men were now one.
“I didn’t want to anger those pesky Wipers,” Larry lied.
Donavan’s eyes fell to his boots and the mud left there from the burial. “That makes sense.”
“Of course, it does. Stick with me long enough, and you’ll learn a thing or two about dealing with these savages.”
Larry leaned back in his chair, and the loud squeak that escaped made his face scrunch up. “This chair, I hate it.”
“It isn’t comfortable?” Donavan asked. “I can have someone search each room in the compound for a better one. I’m sure someone would be willing to hand over whatever you’d like.”
“No, I don’t want a chair already flattened by someone else’s ass. I want something larger and regal.”
Donavan seemed to be repeating the words in his head, going through a mental rolodex for anything that might fit that description. “You mean like a throne.”
The smile on Larry’s face slowly took form. “Not like, Donavan. A throne exactly.”
“We can do that.”
“You never cease to amaze me, you know that? Oh, and one other thing.”
Donavan nodded. “Name it, Boss.”
“Unconditional loyalty is so very important to me. I’m sure you already know that. Soon, I’ll be asking you to run an errand for me that will seem foolish, even dangerous, but I need to know you’ll carry it out in complete secrecy, no questions asked.”
“Will anyone get hurt?”
“They sure will.”
Now it was Donavan’s turn to smile. “I can’t wait.”
Nikki
She and Aiden were in the sheriff’s trailer with Dana, Finn, and Joanne. They were discussing the conversation they’d had with Simon and the map he’d shown them with the ley lines.
“So, the cult has known about this place all along?” Aiden asked.
“Known its power,” Finn told him, “which was why they made a pilgrimage to the spot every year, but if you’re asking did they have any idea Tevatron had an underground laboratory in the area, I’d say no.”
“What do we do now?” Nikki asked.
Dana opened the drawer to her desk and removed a silver briefcase. She opened it, revealing what looked like two slabs of Plasticine with a single timer.
Nikki’s eyes went wide. “You wanna blow it up?”
“We believe shutting off that low-frequency pulse,” Dana told her, “will allow people’s memories to start rising to the surface again.”
“A process that could take weeks,” Finn added. “That is, if we can trust what was on the warden's hard drive.”
A thought occurred to Nikki just then. “If Tevatron found a way to tap into this incredible power, isn’t that something we could use? I can’t imagine just blowing it to bits. I mean, think of how much good it could do. Free energy for everyone.”
The others were quietly mulling over what she’d said. New Jamestown’s windmill and the battery bank it recharged was enough to pump water up from the river as well as run most of their modest electrical needs, but they still needed to be careful. Imagine what the juice from the ley lines could do.
“She may have a point,” Finn said.
Dana nodded, although it was clear she wasn’t entirely convinced. “If there’s a bright, blinking off switch, then great. Otherwise, I’m gonna make it a crater and free those Wipers once and for all.”
Finn looked pensive, and Joanne put a hand on his shoulder. “What is it?”
He looked directly in her eyes, and even Nikki saw the fear he was trying to hide. “I’m scared things might not be as straightforward as we think they’ll be.”
“What do you mean?” Joanne asked.
“Fo
r one,” Finn said, “I’m not so sure I want all those old memories back. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been digging through my past in search of the truth more than anyone, but mostly to make sure I wasn’t the sort of douche bag who deserved to have died during The Shift.” He turned to Aiden and Nikki and apologized for cursing. “I’ve started to find peace with who I am now, but the old me, the one before the world went insane. I don’t know that man, and I’m not entirely sure I’ll like him.”
“I did,” Joanne said. “Least, I must have.”
A sad twinkle lit Finn’s eyes. “What if gaining back what I lost means losing everything and everyone I’ve met since The Shift? No one really knows how it’s gonna work. We might turn that pulse machine off and I forget everything after July the Fourth. If I gotta choose between the two, if those are my options, I’m not sure which one I’d take. You’d asked me that question two months ago, and the answer would have been simple, but so much has happened since then.” He looked at Dana, Nikki, and Aiden. “All of you would be strangers to me.”
There was a knock at the door just then. Joanne was the closest and she opened up. A cult member in army fatigues with a rifle straightened his shoulders. “Larry would like to see Nikki and Aiden.”
•••
Nikki and Aiden were led through the door and into the compound’s basement. Less than 10 feet down the hallway, two guards stood at attention outside Larry’s office.
The minute they walked in, Nikki could hear the eerie sound of music. Sounded like someone was playing a stringed instrument and quite well at that. It continued until the cult member led the two into the office where they found Larry playing a beautiful antique instrument.
Primal Shift: Volume 2 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 25
