Primitives

From New York Times bestselling author Erich Krauss comes Primitives, the story of two unlikely heroes thrust into a post-apocalyptic mission to restore humanity .

Thirty years after The Great Fatigue infected the globe—and the treatment regressed most of the human race to a primitive state—Seth Keller makes a gruesome discovery in his adoptive father’s makeshift lab. This revelation forces him to leave the safety of his desert home and the only other person left in the world . . . at least, as far as he knows.

Three thousand miles away in the jungles of Costa Rica, Sarah Peoples has made her own discovery—just as horrific, and just as life-changing. It will take her far from the fledgling colony of New Haven, yet never out of reach of its ruthless authoritarian leader.

On separate journeys a world apart, Seth and Sarah find themselves swept up in a deadly race to save humankind. Their fates will come crashing together in an epic struggle between good and evil, where the differences aren’t always clear. Among the grim realities of civilization’s demise, they discover that the remaining survivors may pose an even greater threat than the abominations they were taught to fear.

Primitives, the first book of this saga, is a tale of bravery and self-discovery found in the ruins of a dying world, where the darkest sides of human nature are revealed.

I turn away from the endless expanse of sand and sagebrush and shift my gaze skyward. Sixty feet above me at the top of the butte, a hand dangles off the side of a steel platform.

I grip the metal handle and start cranking. With each rotation, thick cables move, and the platform inches downward. Eventually, the winch stops with a clank, the grinding of its rusty gears replaced by a gentle crinkling in the arid breeze.

As usual, the figure strapped to the platform is double-wrapped in a translucent white sheet of industrial plastic—the Professor bought rolls and rolls of the stuff before the whole world went to hell. The plastic is stained crimson in multiple places. The first set of stains I was expecting—the ring of red around the crown of the head has become a hallmark of the Professor’s research. But the second set makes me shudder, even under the blazing afternoon sun.

Haphazard splotches adorn the lower abdomen. Stranger still, this figure is significantly smaller than most. I always release the younglings, so it must be a female. But I haven’t caught one in over a year, and his subjects tend to last three months at most.

Not for the first time, I wonder how it came to this. When I was a child, this platform carried my shivering body down at dawn to hunt and fish. Later in the day, I’d stand in the same spot I am now, shouting until the Professor’s smiling face appeared overhead, followed by the whirring of the electric motor.

It had been good, once—almost good enough to make me forget we were the last two people left. Then the Professor’s illness got worse, and his moods turned dark. Our lithium battery banks started to fade too, as if his disease were infecting all aspects of our lives. One by one, he began dismantling the devices from his former life to put their precious parts to better uses. The television, the stereo, even the winch’s motor, all gutted to keep equipment in his laboratory operational.

Each year we drifted further away from a world I never knew, and as my hand-me-down clothes became tattered, as my survival tools became more primitive, as I resorted to climbing the sheer cliff face to reach our home up on the butte, my life became strikingly similar to the lives of the creatures I hunt. But, looking back, losing our tethers to the old world wasn’t what forever altered our reality out here in the Utah desert. What changed everything was the nature of the Professor’s experiments.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I say to myself. A bad habit, one that tends to develop when the only ears around to hear you are your own.

The cables creak as I mount the platform and start unfastening the straps. As the last one comes loose, the body lets out a sickly belch. The gas burns my nostrils as it leaves the cadaver. A common occurrence at this time of year—one I never seem to get used to.

Staring at the bloody plastic, I can make out the vague outline of a face within. I deserve to know the truth. I fetch specimen after specimen, and for what? Just this once, I want to unwrap that sheet and find out for myself what the hell is going on. He’d never even have to know.

I stare out at the desert. Aside from a fresh sidewinder trail in the dirt, no signs of life disturb the landscape. If you don’t count the Andes, we really are alone out here—if I believe the Professor, we’re all alone in the entire world.

I look back to the wrapped figure, so efficiently removed from existence. I want to feel pity, but in the back of my mind, I picture a destroyed campsite with blood and bodies everywhere, and a tiny bundle shrieking beneath a juniper tree. I’ve only ever seen this scene in my imagination, but the Professor filled in all the gruesome details of how he found me. Knowing what I know, can I ever truly feel anything for them? They’d do the same or worse to me if they got the chance. My slaughtered parents are proof of that—and the Professor is the only reason I’m not in the ground beside them.

I dip to a knee and heft the bundled corpse onto one shoulder before trudging off through the brush. I reach a ring of stones with blackened remnants in the center and set her down just outside it. Using the seven-inch blade of my Ka-Bar utility knife—the first tool the Professor ever gave me—I strip and feather several large branches, then build a small pyre and begin stuffing kindling beneath.

The orange sky has dissolved into rich purple hues by the time I finish. I lift the body and place her on top. The wood shifts slightly, and she nearly tumbles off, but in the end, the structure holds. Not my best work, but it’ll do the job.

Sparks fly as flint strikes steel. After a few minutes of careful blowing, I stand back to watch the flames lick at the evening sky. I should get back to the butte and put this ugliness behind me. Andes have no love of fire, but I still feel exposed out here, standing next to this beacon in the growing dark. And yet I can’t take my eyes off the form lying on the pyre.

As the plastic melts and her skin burns, wrinkling and curling, fat dripping like wax, I wonder if she was old enough to have witnessed the world before. Had she been a little girl when everything came crashing down, or was she born what she is now, wandering the wilderness with no concept of the life she’d only just missed?

I can hear the Professor’s voice—Daydreaming serves no practical purpose! I head back through the deepening night, toward the butte, the Professor, and the only life I have ever known.

Shut your smug mouth, I think as I plunge through brambles and branches, sucking air that’s nearly as dense as the jungle itself.

The thorns are the worst. A million little daggers tearing at my skin. T-shirt and shorts weren’t a wise choice. Then again, neither was carving a path through the brush in the middle of the night. Two stupid decisions, but the night’s still young. I’m sure I’ll get to three.

I’d wanted to avoid our modest community’s well-lit streets. But if I’m spotted now, looking like I tussled with an ocelot, I won’t exactly come across as an ordinary twenty-something girl out for a midnight run.

I burst through the underbrush into the cool, drizzling rain of the cobblestone beach. It feels like being born. I scan the shore for silhouettes, but the night is utterly still. Just the sloshing waves, the gentle click-clack of the rocks tumbling, and the occasional nocturnal call from the jungle. Normally I find this melody soothing. Tonight it’s static.

I break into an awkward jog along the beach, muddy sneakers sliding on slick rocks. When I reach the spot where the cobbles meet the broad paving stones of Main Street, I crouch behind a cluster of bushes and peer up the road, which cuts a nearly straight line to the jungle gate a quarter mile to the north. Halfway there, lights twinkle in Center Square Park. I expected to see at least a handful of drunks staggering home after a late night at Vibes, but the only movement is a stray dog pattering across the grass.

It’s odd, seeing our town so quiet. In just a few hours, the thoroughfare will be crawling with people heading to work. Scientists and their research assistants will stroll toward the big lab just north of the Square, where they’ll sit on cushy stools all day, PICC lines hooked to their arms as they experiment with herbal extracts, trying to cure the Great Fatigue. The manual laborers will drift east of Main, toward grueling twelve-hour shifts in the meat processing plant, sewage treatment facility, and cluster of factories that churn out our clothing and other necessities. And hidden among the flow of bodies will be Caldwell’s town supervisors, keeping mostly to themselves, but eyeing the crowd for anyone committing an infraction.

I almost wish there was someone around tonight. It’d give me an excuse to give up this ridiculousness.

I look toward my target—the squat, windowless building with a dumpster pushed against the back wall. Dr. Caldwell’s private laboratory.

With my heart thudding in my ears, I dash across the street, climb onto the bin, then jump hard and grab the edge of the flat roof, my wet sneakers comically scrambling for purchase as I pull myself up and over. I roll onto my back, and bits of gravel join the debris already stuck to my clammy skin.

I take a few deep breaths, trying to calm my nerves. Not easy with an ominous glass eyeball glaring down at me. The broken searchlight dangles from a decaying wooden platform suspended high above the canopy—just one of many watchtowers that were installed around the periphery of the peninsula back when the world was falling. Now they’re little more than crumbling skeletons, unmanned for decades. Still, they remind me that as bad I think things are, the original hundred and seventy-nine settlers had it worse. They’d fought and struggled, and now here we are, thirty years later. The white coats huddled inside their fancy houses, grunt laborers like me stacked on top of one another in ramshackle apartments. All thirteen hundred or so people, snoring peacefully in their beds—all of them but me, New Haven’s very own black sheep, breaking their trust so I can burgle the lab of our leader, the same man who saved my parents all those years ago.

Before I can start guilt-tripping, I crawl to the closest of the three skylights. Slipping off my pack, I pull out a socket wrench and coiled length of rope, then get to work removing the bolts. As the final one spins loose, I drop the wrench and grab two corners of the thick glass. It lifts a half inch, maybe less, and when my straining arms give out, it sucks back down. Burglar tip number one—rubber seals turn to cement when left for three decades under the equatorial sun.

I glance around the rooftop, looking for anything to provide leverage, but quickly realize there’s not so much as a ventilation pipe up here, which means I also have nowhere to tie off the rope. Burglar tip number two—plan better than a toddler.

If I want to get this done tonight, the only option left is to kick in the front door. But damaging the lab was never part of the plan. While Dr. Caldwell might not miss a few scoops of L-tryptophan and niacin, a broken lock could pull at a thread that might unravel our fledgling colony. Meetings would be held, fingers pointed, and someone would be blamed—though it might not be me, it would surely be a fellow grunt.

Leaving the rope next to the skylight, I drop back down onto the dumpster, then hop to the ground. I’m about to start back toward Main—already dreaming of a shower—when a beam of light spills around the corner of the building. I freeze, breath stuck in my chest. Is this it? Has my burning desire to escape New Haven finally caught up with me?

While lying in bed plotting this caper, I told myself that exile was the worst they could do—a punishment that aligned perfectly with my goals. A convenient cover for the truth, but reality comes rushing back and slaps me hard across the face. I recall the prison cell at the back of our town’s repair shop. A cell no one ever talks about, as it’s rarely needed in our tight-knit community. Now I’m picturing myself trapped behind those iron bars. Meals served on a tin plate and counting cockroaches for entertainment. What little freedom I have, lost.

My panicked mind tells me to run, but the shroud of the jungle is twenty yards away. My distinctive blond ponytail and Forager’s pack would be easy to identify. I might as well pin my name and address to the wall. And so I do the only other thing I can think of—drop to one knee, yank at my shoelaces, and grab the loose ends with trembling fingers.

My muscles tighten as I shield my eyes. “Mind getting that light out of my face?”

“Oh, right,” he says, switching it off. “What the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

When the spots fade from my vision, Josh Vale, my Forager team supervisor, appears in the moonlight. As always, he’s wearing a shirt two sizes too small. His dirty blond hair is slicked back, accentuating sharp features that are twisted into a sleazy grin. While it’s unnerving to be confronted by a cocky pervert in the dark, he knows I go for daily jogs and often come down here to swim. Maybe I can still play this off.

“Oh, you know, just heading to a dinner party,” I say, glancing down at my soiled running clothes. Sarcasm has always been my coping mechanism for stress. “You get an invite too?”

“Sea turtles will be hatching soon,” he says. “The ladies at the community center were crying about them getting confused by our lights. Personally, I think they should get their asses down here and save the crawling stew meat themselves . . . but I guess I shouldn’t complain. It’s not every day I get to see you in shorts.” He stares at my legs. My stomach turns. “What’s up with the scratches?”

“That?” Think, damn it. “It’s me learning a lesson about running in the dark.”

His eyes pan up my legs, then shift to the shore, making sure we’re alone. My tension kicks up a notch.

“What about the Munchkin?” he asks. “He around here too? I can picture him trying to keep up with you on those little nubs he calls legs.”

While I never enjoy hearing Josh belittle my best friend, tonight it’s music to my ears. It means everything is business as usual. Once this uncomfortable conversation is over, I’ll be free to head back to my tiny one-bedroom apartment instead of getting tossed onto the grease-stained floor of the repair shop’s cell.

“Sadly, James couldn’t make it tonight.” I look toward Main, hinting that it’s time to go our separate ways.

He points at my feet with the butt of the flashlight. “Um, I think those laces are good and tied by now.”

I stand up and take a step toward the street, but he quickly moves in front of me.

“Since I’ve got you here,” he says, “I’ve been tasked with putting together a small team for a special project. The big lab is running short on supplies. All the old shops on the mainland have already been pilfered, so we’re going south. Thought you might like to come along.”

I’m not sure what to say. I’d heard about these scavenging assignments, but I’d never been invited. No one I know ever has been either.

I need to shift gears from freaking the hell out to making a rational decision. After all, this is everything I want. To finally see the world beyond our fence. But the timing is absolute crap. Why now, so close to my grand departure?

“A month. Maybe more. It’ll probably be dangerous. No one really knows how many Draggers are out there. But it’s guaranteed to be an adventure.”

“We’ll be crossing the Darian gap. It’s all untouched jungle. If you come, I’m sure the scientists will give you a long list of plants to collect. It’ll be a Forager’s wet dream.”

I’d love to say yes. I have no clue what’s out there, and it would be wise to start out with a group. They’ll have plenty of gear—machetes and sleeping bags and rations galore. All the things I’ve been saving up for years to buy. Hell, those items are the reason I’m breaking into this lab. Once I have the lay of the land, I could take some of that gear and slink off on my own.

And there it is. I want to call him on his bullshit and grill him on the details of this “official mission,” but it doesn’t seem like a wise choice, considering the circumstances.

“If you’re looking for another man,” I say, testing him, “I’m sure James would jump at the chance.”

“Damn it, Sarah. I’m trying to give you an opportunity. This is my assignment, and I’m not bringing that little twerp along.”

His assignment. Unless he’s been cozying up to Caldwell, there’s no way he would be placed in charge of a rare voyage to the outside world. Operations like these are almost exclusively run by Caldwell’s personal security team. I’m not sure what Josh is trying to pull, but I can use my imagination.

“I’d love to go,” I say, “but I’d probably slow you down too. I twisted my ankle when I took that spill. I’ll be okay for work if I take it slow, but all that hiking would do me in. Maybe next time.”

“If you turn this down,” he says slowly, “there might not be a next time.”

Despite it sounding like a threat, I shrug my shoulders. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of stories to tell when you get back.”

In the dim light, his expression morphs into one of indifference. In the seven years I’ve been working under him, strange behavior has been the norm, but his actions tonight suggest he’s a brazen liar. I’d bet all the money I’ve saved that this official outing isn’t real. Maybe he’s drunk, or tripping on Ayahuasca, and come morning he won’t even remember this conversation.

I step past him and out onto Main. I break into a brisk walk, making sure to add a subtle limp. When I’m a good twenty yards up the road, I can’t resist glancing back. Josh is standing right where I left him, watching me, wearing a disturbing, thin-lipped smile as he slaps the head of his flashlight into the palm of one hand.

I give a little wave and keep moving. Is he going to make work difficult because I turned him down? Doesn’t matter. There’s no future for me here. Tomorrow night I’ll come back with James and get this job done. Then my days in New Haven are numbered.

A gust of dry desert air—somehow worse than the heat from our woodburning stove—washes over my face when the front door swings open. The Professor stalks into the living room as my trout sizzles on the pan. He hasn’t bothered to change his button-down shirt, which is flecked with dried blood, and his shock of white hair is even more unruly than normal, telling me it’s been another frustrating night in his lab.

With his shoulders slumped, he shuffles to the couch, tosses a sheaf of papers onto the coffee table, and flops down on his back. A pill bottle rattles as he opens it and tosses a handful of tablets into his mouth.

He grumbles something indiscernible, then, clear as a canyon stream, “Are you planning to check the pit today?”

I know better than to ask, but I can’t help myself. As expected, he gives me his patented You’re not a scientist look. “Just bring me a female.”

I will—always do. Up here on the butte, which towers above the desert floor, we can move freely. But the pit is part of the world below, and that belongs to the Andes.

I eat half the fish at the kitchen counter, then bring the other half to the Professor, but he’s already snoring on the couch, large nostrils vacuuming up motes of stuffing from a tear in the plaid fabric. I know he’s been rationing what little remains of his supplements—nicotinamide riboside, a precursor vitamin for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+. It’s just about all that keeps him going anymore, but he still sleeps fifteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. I lay the plate on the coffee table, knowing the food will likely remain untouched when I return this evening.

In my room, I scoot around the bed frame before reaching underneath the sagging twin mattress and pulling out my “stink box,” a sealed cube containing a pair of green cargo pants, a tan T-shirt, my dead father’s belt, and several bundles of sage. In the decade I’ve spent traversing the desert, never once have I washed these clothes, which has let my body odor saturate the fabric and blend in with the Andes’ thick musk. But the Professor is repulsed by the smell. Hence the box and the sage.

As I pull on my pants and T-shirt, the tight fit reminds me both will soon need yet another round of tailoring. Like all my clothes, they’re the Professor’s hand-me-downs. With my last growth spurt having abruptly halted three years ago, I’ll probably always remain three inches shy of his six-foot-one, but my body wasn’t built at a desk like his. It’s still being built by the desert, whenever I dig a pit or climb a cliff or carry a corpse to the pyre.

I grab the jar of mica-dominated clay I collected from streambeds and slather a thick layer onto my face, neck, and forearms. In addition to keeping the sun off my skin, it makes me look more like the creatures I hunt. Lastly, I rub a handful into my hair, which at nearly an inch is longer than I like to keep it. But my electric razor got packed away on the same day the Professor became our friendly neighborhood barber, back when he restricted our energy usage to LED lights and the pump to our well. Unfortunately, he seldom has the inclination these days to go to work on my head with the straight razor.

Back in the living room, I strap on my boots, slip my knife into its sheath on my belt, then grab my pack and short bow off the floor and head outside. It’s only half past ten and it’s already blistering. The Professor told me that ever since Andes became the torchbearers for human DNA, global warming became a thing of the past. I disagree. It’s the hottest June I can remember, but then everything seems to rub me wrong these days. The horseflies, the mosquitos, the stickers that always seem to gravitate toward my socks, reminding me with every footfall that I’ll never leave the endless expanse that surrounds our home.

I walk to the edge of the butte, stopping beside the winch system and its empty steel platform. I look out over the gray and red maze of canyons, washes, and mesas. I’ll need all my wits to make the climb down, so I begin my box breathing—four-second inhale, four-second hold, four-second exhale—trying to clear the old man from my thoughts. Or, more specifically, trying to clear the nagging questions about his new secret experiments, which have sent me on twice as many hunting expeditions in the past year as any previous season. The more I try to calm myself, however, the more I wish I could go back to simpler times, when the desert was my playground. While I still respect the life it provides—the bulrush, cattails, edible insects, and game—I can’t help but feel stifled by its vast emptiness. More and more regularly, my thoughts veer toward the world beyond and all its mysteries.

Placing my bow and backpack on the slab, I begin turning the crank. When the platform touches down sixty feet below, I find myself hoping I’ll have an Ande to load onto it later this afternoon, despite all the work that will entail. It might help brighten the Professor’s mood, even if it won’t lift mine. After being marooned here for all these years, I have no idea what will. But it certainly isn’t catching Andes.

Without another glance back at my home, I start descending the vertical cliff face.

Three miles from the butte, I cautiously approach the edge of the drop-off. It’s one of the smaller canyons in the area, just thirty feet deep and perhaps seventy across, but the sheer walls prevent someone at the bottom from reaching the top, which suits my purposes.

I stop ten feet from the ledge and listen. Hearing nothing but the breeze rustling the junipers, I pick up a rock and toss it over. It plunks into the creek below, followed by the signature grunts of a handful of Andes. Homo sapien grunts, sure, but not a sound I could reproduce if I tried. Short, guttural barks, clearly some type of rudimentary language.

First, I get down on my knees, unshoulder my bow, and place it off to my right, along with my nine remaining arrows. I’m a damn good shot, with skills honed hunting rabbits and birds, but this particular objective doesn’t call for killing. Instead, I remove my pack and slide out my trumpet. Despite the dents and spots of rust, it’s the most valuable weapon in my arsenal. Clutching it in one hand, I flatten myself onto my stomach and crawl forward. Just before I peek over the edge, a mantra from my early years works its way into my thoughts.

Their bodies are human, but their brains are not. One wrong step, and you’ll be the one caught.

Four of them. All sitting on their haunches around the edge of the fifteen-foot-deep pit I dug over the course of a month when I was fourteen, their naked bodies blistered cherry red by the sun. Two adult females and two younglings—a boy, shifting his weight as though nature is calling, and a girl, tossing chunks of raw rabbit meat into the pit. All of them staring down into the hole, where one of their members is undoubtedly trapped.

They seem advanced for Andes, with several hollowed-out gourds sitting in a pile near one of the adults’ feet. I’ve seen their kind use clubs before, but creating makeshift canteens is a first. While it’s not as complex as building a figure-four snare, it does require a sharp rock and considerable patience, which reinforces my theory that they’re evolving, even though the Professor says it’s foolish to make assumptions without proof. He claims that, ever since Advitalon ravaged their minds, certain groups probably have been latching onto ancient, instinctive knowledge buried in their genetic code. I’m not sure what I believe, but whatever’s happening to them, they still can’t recognize a trap to save their lives.

The creature stuck in the pit won’t stop wailing. It must be an alpha male. Most bands have one, and they’re usually the first to investigate something curious, such as the glass prism I use to bait the false floor of juniper branches and sand. The piles of small bones scattered about suggest they’ve been here for a couple of days. If it were anything other than an alpha, the band would have moved on already. I know the Professor wants a female—he’ll just have to make do.

As the two adult females hover around the lip of the pit, struggling to find a way to free their captured packmate, the older of the two tosses her dreadlocked hair over one shoulder, a strangely human gesture. My imagination washes off the caked mud and puts her in a dress—and I see a woman. Then she brings her head the rest of the way around, gazing at nothing with vacant eyes. As she scratches her mangy hair to get at the bugs nesting inside, her jaw goes slack, revealing broken brown teeth.

After glancing up and down the canyon to make sure no other Andes are lurking among the sage and early afternoon shadows, I take a deep breath and bring the trumpet’s mouthpiece to my lips. The Professor gave me lessons when I was young, and he swears I got fairly good, but playing melodically is no longer my goal. When I blow, I hammer all three valves with one hand while extending and compressing the main tuning slide with the other, creating a noise so unbearable a flock of magpies takes flight a quarter mile away.

All four Andes leap to their calloused feet and scatter. They kick up sand as they run this way and that, searching for the source of the danger as their damaged brains try to decide whether to fight or flee. But the trumpet’s racket bounces off the canyon walls, coming at them from all directions—which is the main reason I chose this spot, aside from the obvious height advantage. Before long, they begin a desperate retreat. The boy shits himself as they flee.

Following them along the ridgeline, I occasionally blast my terrible tuneless screech. Eventually, I’ll need to climb down to haul up the alpha, but for now, I have to make sure this band doesn’t get a few hundred yards away only to turn around when they realize the truth—that without their pack leader, they will most likely die out here.

I shadow them for a half mile, until the mouth of the canyon spits them out into open desert. I wait for them to become specks on the horizon before I climb down and start hiking back toward the Professor’s prize.

Copyright © 2022 by Erich Krauss. Excerpted from Primitives by Erich Krauss. Published by permission of the author and Briar Road Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

Erich Krauss is uniquely qualified to write this story of the world’s worst natural disaster. He has a degree in geomorphology with a specialization in natural disasters and is the author of Wall of Flame, a nonfiction account of the 2003 California wildfires. He resides in Thailand and San Diego, California.

EXCERPT: Primitives (Briar Road Books)

Erich Krauss | 5710 words