Portal Read online

  Portal

  Fred Alvrez

  Icon Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 by Fred Alvrez

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-473-46832-3

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Fred Alvrez

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek of Driven

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  One Last Thing

  Also by Fred Alvrez

  Driven

  Coming, March 2019: Claimed

  Chapter One

  Casey’s cell phone alarm called out for all the single ladies to put a ring on it. After smacking the snooze button on her phone, she rolled back to the middle of the bed. Warm and comforting—just what she needed.

  And who needed a cheating boyfriend to keep the bed warm?

  Not me.

  She rolled back to check the time.

  Five more minutes.

  With one eye open a little, she spied a photo on the dresser of her and Conner at a local bar—obviously one she forgot to remove, burn to a crisp, and then stomp on.

  “Bastard.”

  Casey rose out of bed, grabbed her phone, and turned the photo face down. That would do for now. Later she might take to it with some scissors, starting in a particularly sensitive area. Maybe she could work some voodoo magic on that area at the same time.

  She wandered to her kitchen, put the kettle on for her morning coffee, and got the cat biscuits from the pantry.

  “Charlie, breakfast!”

  Shaking the cat biscuits brought no response—no pattering of paws, no usual meowing of desperate, life-threatening hunger. She walked over to the bed he had on the windowsill, in case he was totally crashed out.

  No Charlie.

  Weird. Not like he ever missed breakfast.

  Casey looked over at the cat door that lead outside. She was sure she had locked it last night. She checked it—locked. She was sure he was in last night…or was he?

  The kettle clicked off, and Casey made her coffee. She stuck some bread in the toaster, turned it on, and opened her diary app on her phone.

  “Right, what’s on for today? Unblock the toilet up on Clematis Drive, then replace the shower mixer at Mrs. Cameron’s house, then start installing the pipes in the new house on Kowhai Road.”

  Casey checked for any missed calls. Nothing. As the area’s only twenty-hour-hour on-call plumber, there were always messages left overnight for some plumbing emergency.

  No calls, no messages.

  Should be an easy Monday.

  She grabbed some butter and strawberry jam, and prepared her toast. As was her usual morning ritual, she had her toast and coffee and grabbed her iPad to check out the local newspaper’s website, The Levin Times. She scrolled down the web page looking for anything worth reading.

  “Come on, Levin. Something interesting must have happened yesterday.”

  Coffee drunk, toast eaten, and headlines read, Casey headed toward the shower.

  “Charlie? Come on, boy!” Still no response. “Stoopid cat.” He’d have to wait until she got home.

  Showered and dressed in her work clothes, she headed out to her brand-new work truck.

  She took her phone out and sent herself a reminder email to call the sign writer. She was missing out on free advertising if she didn’t get her ‘Casey’s 24/7 Plumbing’ signs on the new truck soon.

  Casey stopped in her tracks. Something wasn’t quite right. Looking up and down the suburban street, she saw nothing. No people in cars headed to work, no kids going to school. No dogs that normally roamed the street, even though they weren’t supposed to.

  Far out. She was getting paranoid these days.

  She got into her truck and drove toward Clematis Drive, not really minding that it was to clear a blocked toilet. All part of a plumber’s life, as far as she was concerned. As she drove, again she noticed no traffic. She glanced left and right as she drove through the middle of town and stopped by the main square. She turned her engine off and got out of her truck.

  There was no one anywhere. Casey did a 360, looking for any sign of life.

  Is there an event on I don’t know about? What is going on here? It’s freaking Monday.

  She resumed her drive. Town might be deserted—and every road she’d driven on so far, but she was pushing that from her brain—but a blocked toilet wasn’t going anywhere.

  On the way to the job, she spotted a taxi crashed up against the curb, and no sign of the driver or police.

  In the client’s driveway, she killed the engine, got out, and gathered her tools.

  Casey knocked on the door and waited. And waited. She tried knocking again.

  “Mrs. Atkinson? It’s Casey here, the plumber!”

  She walked around to the backyard to see if Mrs. Atkinson was working in the garden out the back already. She stopped at the gate. All tradesmen—and tradeswomen, as Casey always corrected herself internally—knew about the Atkinsons’ German shepherd. Great pet, and an even better guard dog. No way was Casey getting bitten today, not after her weekend with that other dog, Conner.

  “Mrs. Atkinson! It’s Casey, the plumber!”

  Not a sound came from the backyard from dog or human. Casey returned to the front door and tried the handle in case it was open. Locked. She got her cell phone out and dialed the number from the job sheet, trying the home number first. No response. She tried both Mr. and Mrs. Atkinson’s cell phone numbers, but again no answer. After getting a business card from her truck, she put it in the crack of the front door. At least she could prove she had been there.

  Bugger. That’s one job gone for the day already. Oh well, off to the next one.

  A bad hunch came over her. Casey put her tools back in the truck then looked at the job sheet for her next stop at Mrs. Cameron’s house. She tried calling her. No answer at home, and no cell phone number listed. So she tried the numbers for the new house she was installing the pipes for—both owners, the house building company, and the project manager. No answer.

  What the…

  Casey rang her main supplier, two of her girlfriends, and her mother. She only got voice mail or no answer at all.

  Must be something wrong with the cellular network, surely.

  Looking through her contacts, she saw her dad’s old number. She hadn’t spoken to him in two years, since he went ‘off the grid,’ as he called it—no phone, and no way to get a hold of him.
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  A mental image of Cheating Conner—as she was now calling him—popped into her head, with those immortal words she delivered to him on Saturday night: “It’s over.”

  And today that felt more true than ever.

  With the engine running, Casey sat in her truck. She might have been a successful, independent, and self-employed 23-year-old, but she had no idea what to do or where to go next.

  Absentmindedly, she drove toward home, ignoring that there were still no people, cars, or animals around.

  While she was driving, she tried some radio stations. Nothing. Not even static. Just nothing. She even tried one of the stations she totally hated, but got the same result.

  She felt like the last person left in the world. What would that person do? A light bulb went off in her brain. Casey did a U-turn and headed to the police station. Surely someone would be there and know what was going on.

  On the drive to the police station she saw two more crashes, one a bread delivery truck that had crashed into the front of a shop, and another taxi in the middle of a park. She could see the tracks from the tires went straight from the road and into the park. It looked like it was only a pine tree that had stopped the taxi. Why didn’t the driver brake?

  He must have fallen asleep.

  Pulling up at the police station didn’t give her any new hope. There were no signs of life at all outside or anywhere she looked. Still, she had to try. She got out of her truck and tried the front door, but it was locked. From the night before? She was still trying to piece together some sort of timeline.

  Casey, the successful, independent, and self-employed 20-something, sat on the steps of the police station and let the tears flow.

  Ten minutes of crying was enough. Imagine if Cheating Conner could see her now—he’d feel so smug. Time to pull up her big girl panties and think straight.

  She needed her mum—that was the pull in her gut, and Whanganui was only an hour away. Even if her mum didn’t answer the phone, she should be there anyway. Monday was her day for playing bridge at lunchtime with some friends, so it was more than likely she would be home.

  Casey got back into her truck, started it, and accelerated away from the police station, Levin, and whatever crazy stuff was going on there.

  As she drove, she kept trying radio stations with no luck. Using the car’s Bluetooth, she called almost everyone in her contacts list. No one answered, or she got voice mail. Her gut might have told her to go to her mum’s place, but it was also full of knots and butterflies. It was like mixing beer and wine, and too much of both.

  Seeing no other cars or trucks on the highway, nausea came over her in waves.

  Once she got to State Highway 1 and turned left, she saw more carnage, mostly trucks. She managed to drive around the ones she needed to, but most had seemed to just go straight on a bend and crash.

  This is crazy.

  She needed to stop and see if she could help.

  After pulling over at the next smash, she turned her truck off. Same scenario—a corner that a truck and its trailer hadn’t even seemed to attempt to turn. She walked through a fence the truck had flattened, and another fifty yards to get to the wreckage. While the trailer had stayed upright, the truck pulling it had flipped onto its side.

  “Is anyone here? Do you need any help?” No answer.

  She climbed up and onto the driver’s door, which was horizontal. No sign of a driver, no sign of blood. No sign of rescue either, but someone must have gotten the driver out of there. Weirdly, she saw a pair of jeans with a brown leather belt still looped through them lying against the passenger’s window.

  Walking back to her truck, she mulled over possible scenarios.

  One: Armageddon, and I’m the only one left here.

  Two: There is no two.

  Casey’s stomach knots doubled over. This was not going to end well, no matter what had happened.

  The drive to Whanganui was uneventful, aside from having to drive carefully around some more crashes. At one point, a truck and trailer had blocked off the entire road, but she managed to get past in the long grass on the shoulder. Thankful she’d bought a four-wheel drive, she couldn’t imagine getting stuck with no one around to tow her out.

  Whanganui was totally empty, quiet, desolate, lonely. Coming up with new adjectives every minute didn’t help her state of mind.

  Casey dialed her mother again in case she was home. No answer again. A few minutes later, she pulled into her mum’s driveway and killed the engine. In the driveway was her mother’s little yellow Honda hatchback, that she called Sunshine.

  She’s got to be home.

  Casey got the house key from the center console and walked over to the front door. This was the home she grew up in, so she didn’t bother knocking; she simply unlocked the door and walked in.

  “Mum! It’s Casey. Where are you?”

  Walking through the single-storey house, she searched each room. Her mum had never redecorated the house, so every room was a throw-back to the 1980s. Paisley wallpaper patterns along with colours from a past era assaulted her eyeballs. The garish red and yellow carpet almost shouted as her as she kept looking.

  “Mum?!”

  The house wasn’t so big that she needed to shout, but she did anyway.

  Only one room left: the bathroom. A terrible feeling came over her. What if her mother was lying on the floor with a broken hip—or worse?

  Casey felt her fear rising in her like a physical thing.

  Get it together, girl!

  She could do this. It was her mum, after all.

  The door to the bathroom was locked. She knew her mother would be in there—she lived alone and yet always locked the bathroom door when she went to the toilet. Casey had joked about this with her in the past.

  Fear was married with terror inside her.

  “Mum? Are you okay in there? If you don’t answer, I’m going to break the door to get in.”

  No answer.

  Looking down at the lock, she saw it was one of those simple ones that you could unlock with a screwdriver or the point of a blade. She went to the kitchen and got a dinner knife.

  The lock turned easily with the cutlery. Casey put it down on the side table by the toilet door. She had no doubt her mother was about to get a massive fright, and carrying a knife seemed like a bad idea.

  Fear and terror had children now and they were having a party in her stomach.

  Turning the handle with a shaking hand, she opened the door.

  “Mum?”

  Her mother was not to be seen, yet she knew she would have to have been there—why else would the door be locked? She looked down at the base of the toilet.

  There in a pile was her mother’s nightdress.

  Casey fainted and fell to the floor.

  Chapter Two

  Nathan checked his Facebook post: Help! My mum is walking our suburb’s streets naked. Please tell me if you see her.

  He clicked on the ‘Post’ button.

  There was no way this was going to end well.

  He walked past his bedroom and went into hers again, then checked her wardrobe. Maybe she’d developed dementia real bad overnight and had decided to sleep in the wardrobe.

  Could happen.

  As if.

  The wardrobe revealed no Mum, only boxes of old Mills and Boon novels.

  Nathan returned to her bed and pulled the covers back. His mother’s nightie was still there, as if she had simply disappeared in the night, and the nightie had stayed perfectly in line with where her body should be.

  “Shit.”

  Nathan ran to the kitchen, grabbed the cordless phone, and dialed the emergency services number.

  While he stayed waiting on the line for them to answer, Nathan took the opportunity to sum things up. Twenty-five years old, living at home with his mother, and she was walking the streets naked. The internet slang FML described his current living situation perfectly.

  After two minutes of ringing, Nathan
hung up the phone. That bad feeling notched up to a whole new level. He checked his watch: 8.00am.

  Since when do emergency services not answer their phone?

  He went back to her bedroom and checked her bed again. Yup, he wasn’t imagining it—there was the nightie he’d seen her wearing last night, the Star Wars one he gave her for Christmas. He lifted the nightie up, and out fell her underwear.

  “Oh. So. Gross.” This day was just getting better and better.

  Nathan dumped the nightie and decided to go outside to see if he could spot her down their long, straight street. Maybe she hadn’t gone far.

  He grabbed his house keys and cell phone and wandered outside into the street. No cars, no bikes, no people. “No Mum either,” he joked, nerves making his voice stammer.

  With no sign of his mum up or down the street, Nathan thought about heading for the ocean. If there was one way she would go, it’d be toward the sea. He headed off, noticing there weren’t even the usual noisy birds in the pohutukawa trees this morning. A slightly chilly autumn breeze made his face cold as he walked. Maybe there had been a tsunami warning and he hadn’t heard it? Totally possible, but then surely his mum would have woken him up.

  Nothing was making sense today.

  One thing was for certain: he wasn’t going to go to work until he found her. This suited Nathan—he hated his boring IT job anyway.

  He had almost walked the five hundred yards down the tree-lined street to the ocean when he realized it was pointless—she wouldn’t walk this far, even if Oprah herself was at the beach. Nathan turned and headed home. He glanced left and right as he walked, noting that he couldn’t see any movement anywhere—no cats, no dogs, no people.