Larry’s eyes rolled up in their sockets as he sank to his knees and fell dead.
Finn sprinted for the escape trunk and found Joanne holding the door, her eyes tearing when she saw him approach. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”
Zhou closed the hatch as Kulik opened the valve to equalize the pressure. Cold sea water rushed in, and Finn held Joanne tight.
“You smell like sulphur,” she said.
“I know. There was something else I had to take care of.”
When the escape hatch was nearly full, Zhou gave his final instructions. “Take a big breath and don’t stop kicking till you break the surface.”
Finn gave Joanne a final kiss. “See you topside.”
Epilogue
New Jamestown
Barely a month later, a strange-looking monument stood in the center of New Jamestown. A concrete pillar on top of which sat a large and pointy – albeit dented – object. An inscription below it read:
Here lies the remains of the nuclear warhead sent to destroy us. Fired by the USS Alabama and recovered from the Grand America Hotel, where it landed harmlessly.
Larry’s death proved nothing short of a rebirth for New Jamestown. So much had changed in the last four weeks. If All Father were alive, he would barely have recognized the place.
Dana Hatfield had been elected New Jamestown’s first governor and undone all of the draconian laws and practices Larry had enacted.
In her place as sherrif, the colonists had voted for Lou with Ethan and Tanner as his acting deputies. Once his back healed, Bud became Dana’s most trusted adviser, although in the eyes of many, sharing the same bed made that somewhat inevitable.
Shortly after, the cult was disbanded, along with the army fatigues Larry had made them wear.
Gone, too, was Tent City. Replaced now by rows of wooden dorms, each heated by its own wood-burning stove.
In time, Aiden, too, had recovered, along with his now encyclopaedic memory and a sudden knack for building technological gizmos. His latest project was a device designed to harness the awesome power they’d discovered up at Chief Mountain. A power that Alvarez, and later, Larry, had proven could be tapped by the human body itself.
Standing protectively by her brother’s side was Nikki, every day becoming the kind of woman Carole would have been proud of.
While searching through what remained of Timothy’s library, Dana had come across a book on ancient Greece and the evolution of the world’s earliest democracy. After reading through it a number of times, she began to enact measures in New Jamestown that strove to emulate a purer form of government by the people, for the people.
But while much had changed for the better, there were still certain realities that would remain for the foreseeable future. The walls and guard towers Larry pushed so hard to have built stayed, along with the armed men who manned them. Needless to say, even after Larry and Alvarez were long gone, the world would continue to be a dangerous place.
Less than a week after returning, Finn and Joanne would leave New Jamestown and set out with the aim of saving as many Wipers as they could. Reversing the pulse had left many of them disoriented and particularly vulnerable. A mission that also gave Finn an opportunity to reconcile his own new memories, many of which he preferred to leave forgotten. But there was a final element to Finn’s journey, one he, Dana, and Joanne had talked about long into the night before they left. The possibility of finding other colonies out there, in all that darkness, just like their own. An idea that they all agreed was both exhilarating and terrifying.
From the author:
What drew me to telling this story? This is the sort of thing only writers are normally interested in, but I thought it might be interesting to offer some of my own thoughts and insights about Primal Shift and why I felt it was a story worth telling.
At its core, post-apocalyptic fiction is the study of thin lines. The thin line between order and chaos, between the human spirit (however you define it) and the bloodthirsty savage lurking within each of us.
With Primal Shift, I wanted to take these themes one step further by asking a simple question: How does memory shape who we are? If one were to sandblast our upbringing away like graffiti off a tenement wall, would most of us still choose to do the right thing? Simple to ask, but not an easy question to answer. As we learned during Hurricane Katrina, when times are desperate and people are hungry, they’re capable of heinous acts of savagery. And yet, so, too, are they capable of unbelievable acts of selflessness and heroism. What is it within each of us that governs those responses?
These were some of the different sides of the human experience I wanted to examine in the novel. Many readers have written me letters describing how much they detested Larry, whom they viewed as a villain. But right up until the end of the story, I never viewed him as such. In fact, for me he represented the ultimate pragmatist. If he’s evil, he’s a necessary evil, and I really wanted to show both sides of that. For example, would Rainbowland have survived without a wall and some basic defenses?
Readers familiar with my work know I generally don’t like spoon feeding the audience characters who fall into tidy little packages. The good guys often have tortured, sometimes questionable pasts. Likewise, the darker characters do things that make sense in a perverse sort of way. The goal is always to leave you feeling uncertain and asking yourself things like: “I grew to like Finn, but how do I feel after learning he might have murdered innocent people?” As I see it, it’s my job to ask the tough moral or ethical questions, and yours to answer them for yourself.
Another theme I wanted to touch on in the novel was the use of force. Admittedly, a perfect society is one where murders and killings don’t occur. A philosophy embodied by the members of Rainbowland. These were essentially Buddhist monks (of sorts) attempting to live in harmony with the world around them. Harm no living thing. That was their primary belief and yet, faced with a world that stretched these beliefs to the breaking point, they were forced to adapt or be destroyed. So, too, were the survivors who arrived expecting a safe haven from the barbarity around them, only to find they were more at risk than before.
As always, the primary goal of the story was to entertain, so if it helped you forget about the snow on the front stoop that needed shovelling or the lawn in desperate need of a trim, then I consider it a success. Perhaps the best way to guarantee seeing more stories is to spread the word by leaving a review.
Sincerely,
Griffin Hayes
WHAT’S NEXT?
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Primal Shift: Volume 2 (A Post Apocalyptic Thriller) Page 32
