Survival Instinct (Book 5): Social Instinct

by Stittle, Kristal

  “You can lie on the cart again real soon,” Misha promised him.

  He scrutinized the buildings as they walked between them, fully expecting one of the dogs to react to some unseen stimulus. But none of them did, which brought a little relief mixed with a little disappointment. Misha still hoped that they weren’t being followed by anything, but at the same time, he’d feel better about himself if it turned out that they were.

  Angela was sitting bolt upright on the cart, hyper alert. She didn’t even relax when she saw Misha coming.

  “What’s the matter?” Misha wondered, immediately thinking she had seen or heard some phantom.

  “Are they all dead?”

  “Who? Crichton, Harry, and Ki-Nam? They’re fine.”

  “No, the assholes who stole the Black Box from us.”

  “Oh. We didn’t see any. Not even signs that they may have been there recently. Did you see something?”

  “No.” She sounded disappointed.

  “Come on. There’s not much to salvage, but there may be a few plants we can bring back with us.”

  Misha lifted Rifle up onto the driver’s bench before they headed out. The German shepherd promptly lay down with a satisfied huff.

  Back at the Black Box, which was now more of a crater than anything else, it took them a while to find a safe spot for the cart and horses to cross the fence. Plenty of ground outside of it was safe, but they thought it would be more prudent to have them inside should any zombies arrive. Travelling around beyond the fence, they came across a few of the undead that had been killed and left to rot. It was likely they had been enticed to the site by the explosion, and subsequently killed by the survivors. Eventually Crichton cut a hole in the fence with some wire cutters, allowing the cart to be driven into the most stable section of land. Angela immediately went back out to search for any more signs of the men and women who had taken her home from her, and where they might have gone.

  Misha explored a little more, making his way toward the barge dock. It was still covered in the zombie slop they had launched from the submarine. Arms, legs, heads, and unidentifiable innards had made for an excellent distraction. Misha had been part of one of the teams hauling on ropes to launch their makeshift trebuchets. It was interesting to see his work from the other side. They had made one hell of a mess, even before the explosives had gone off.

  On his way back up the hill, Misha came across the crane that had once been used as a lookout. Part of the ground beneath it had given way, so that the whole structure was now lying at a severe angle. The arm at the top had smashed into the ground, preventing the whole thing from falling flat. The angle where the two massive sets of struts met was still higher than anything else in the area. It could again be used as a lookout, provided it was secure. Misha decided to climb up to the apex, taking his time in case it proved to be unstable.

  Sitting on the highest section of the downed crane, Misha found himself over the edge of the lake that was closest to the river. From up there, he could see just about all of the devastation at once. Even better, he had a fairly clear view of the area that lay beyond the fences. There was no one sneaking around out there. The only movement he saw was Angela returning to help explore the interior.

  They spent all day crawling about the crater and its surrounding land. They discovered a few ripe crops that had been overlooked, and picked them clean. Those that weren’t yet ripe, were carefully dug up in order to be transplanted back at the container yard. Where they would transplant them, they didn’t know yet, for the container yard was mostly concrete, and Animal Island didn’t have room. Perhaps they could use Quarantine Island, since it had been a long time since they had needed to use it. Or they could just keep them in the piles of dirt they ended up filling most of their cart with.

  “Find anything interesting outside the fences?” Harry asked Angela when they had all gathered together for dinner. They had decided to spend the night in the area, figuring the fence, the dogs, and everyone taking a guard shift would be enough to protect them. They used a bit of rope to temporarily hold the hole they had cut in the fence for the cart, closed.

  “Mostly just dead zombies, but I did come across some graves,” Angela told them.

  “Graves?” Crichton raised his head from the water he had been boiling. He intended to top up their canisters with water from the lake, which Misha wasn’t too enthused about.

  “Yeah. I couldn’t tell how fresh. Best guess, some of those fuckers weren’t completely buried, or got so badly hurt that they didn’t survive. Those that did, buried them instead of burning them. The graves weren’t even that deep; they were pretty shallow.”

  “And how do you know how deep the graves were?” Crichton asked.

  Misha couldn’t picture Angela digging up graves, not even with her furious anger. Piss and spit, and maybe even shit on them, sure, but not dig them up.

  “Either one of them went zombie, or an animal dug it up,” Angela explained, not offended in the slightest at the suggestion that maybe she had disturbed the graves. “I didn’t see a body, just a divot where the grave should be, and a slightly bigger hole at one end. Hell, one of the bodies I assumed was a dead zombie, could have been the grave corpse for all I know. I’m just happy to see that some of them died.”

  “A whole lot of them died,” Harry muttered. “We’ve been moving around on top of them all day.”

  Misha looked at the ground. Because they were camped out on a spot that had remained level, untouched by the blast, they weren’t currently on top of the mass grave, but they were beside it. Misha had never believed in ghosts, but given his current state of mind, he became unsettled by the idea of so many buried corpses so close. For all he knew, there was someone still alive down there, trapped in a pocket that had gone untouched by either the explosion or the flooding. Misha shuddered, imagining what it would be like to be trapped in the dark, with little to no food and no hope of getting out. While he hated what those people had done, he didn’t wish that fate on anybody. If someone had become trapped, he hoped they had the means of killing themselves before it got too bad.

  Everyone bedded down around the cart. Misha, Angela, and Crichton all slept underneath it, while Ki-Nam chose to sleep on the driver’s bench. The horses had been hobbled, just in case, but otherwise were free to shuffle about the area. Harry had the first nightshift. Misha told him how to keep Spring awake and engaged, so that the little dog could take out any rats the sleeping dogs might not sense. The plan was for at least one dog to stay awake with whoever was on guard duty.

  That night, Misha fell asleep quite quickly. He was exhausted from his previous lack of sleep, and from the exertions that came with crawling around the blast site.

  It felt like no time at all before Angela was shaking him awake. It was his turn to guard, and she had nothing to report. She took Misha’s bedding just as Harry had taken hers when she went on shift. When Misha rotated off, he’d take over Crichton’s spot beneath the cart.

  Stock was the dog currently awake, but Misha got him to curl up and rest. He woke up Bullet to accompany him. Still half asleep, Misha walked around the area in order to become more alert. At times like this, he missed coffee. He checked on the horses first, both of which were content with where they were. Some damaged crops made for good fodder.

  It was when Misha decided to check on all of his dogs that he realized something was wrong. He found the lumps of their bodies sleeping in a variety of places, but there weren’t enough. He searched and searched, but one was missing.

  “Rifle,” he hissed in the night air. “Rifle, come here. Come here, bratishka.”

  Panic started to grip Misha’s throat, belly, and balls. Where was Rifle? Why wasn’t he here? He wasn’t the sort of dog to just go exploring on his own.

  What if he had walked off to die?

  Misha shoved the thought away the moment it had formed. No, Rifle was not dying. He had shown no signs of anything seriously wrong with him. And besides, he�
��d come to Misha. He wouldn’t go off alone; that wasn’t like him.

  “Bullet, where’s Rifle?” Misha turned to the Australian shepherd. “Where’s Rifle? Find him. Find him, boy. Find Rifle.”

  Bullet understood, as Misha had trained him more than any of the other dogs. He was especially good at finding Rifle, because Misha had used the German shepherd in training Bullet the find command.

  Almost instantly, Bullet was off. He would run a little way ahead, and then stop and look back to make sure Misha was following.

  When Bullet crawled through an opening in the fence, Misha’s heart dropped into his stomach.

  14: James

  6 Days After the Bombing

  James watched Marissa impale another zombie on her spear, and then deftly kick it off. As the forward scout, she was dealing with more of the things than the rest of the group were. While they had to put up with those staggering in from the sides, she met with anything already in their path.

  “Someone should join Marissa,” James decided. “Or we should rotate the position of forward scout, so that she won’t tire quicker than the rest of us.”

  “I’ll join her,” Lucy volunteered. She trotted forward until she was walking beside Marissa, blade in hand, prepared for the next zombie they met.

  James was uneasy about all of the undead. They weren’t killing all of them: that would take too much time and energy. Only the shuffling corpses that could reach them had their skulls bashed in or sharp objects driven into their brains. Those that they didn’t bother with, the ones that couldn’t catch them, were left behind to trail along in their wake. They would start to build up into a horde, and while the group could outpace the zombies during the day, they would eventually need to sleep. There was also the return trip to worry about. James didn’t want to run into a horde of his own creation on his way home, which could happen even if he planned a different route to avoid the lions. During that hard-to-imagine future, there was a good chance that it would just be him and Katrina, with the two horses.

  The group eventually reached farm country, and the end of where any scavenger teams had travelled before. Everyone grew nervous. Thinking of the lions, they were afraid of the long grass, and the long distances between structures in which they could shelter. Even the structures they did pass weren’t always comforting, as some of them had started to rot and decay even before their inhabitants had gone.

  “That’s some nice looking wood,” Samson commented on one of the dilapidated barns.

  “I ain’t going to help you haul any of it,” Skip promptly informed him.

  “I don’t plan to take any of it.” The eye roll was evident in Samson’s voice. “I was just commenting that I liked the look of that wood.”

  “Maybe when things become less dangerous, a team could take the trip back out here to gather some of it,” Belle suggested.

  “What would you do with it?” Jack was genuinely curious.

  “Might be nice to build a little house, instead of living in a container,” Samson told him. “Do you plan to live in a container the rest of your life?”

  “I never think about the future,” Lindsay informed the group. “Spend too much time thinking about the future and you’ll never live long enough to see it.”

  “That’s bleak,” Vin responded. “You have to think of the future at least a little bit. Or else what are you living for? What are your goals? What do you hope to do with the life you’re so preciously clinging on to?”

  “Shh,” James ordered, halting the philosophical discussion. Ahead, Marissa and Lucy had come to a stop. Lucy had also signalled that those trailing a safe distance behind the pair should stop as well.

  James strained his ears. He figured they must have heard something that he had missed over the sounds of voices and hooves. They weren’t near any hills, bends in the road, or large obstructions that would allow the women to see anything that James couldn’t from his position astride Soot. He scanned the area anyway. There was a barn a little way ahead and back from the road a bit, but not much else. Mostly there was just grass, weeds, and wildflowers. There might be some crops that managed to grow back each year hidden among the greenery, and a few shrubs and young trees attempting to claim a space, but these were all things they had walked past before.

  A wave of wind washed over the land, rustling all the plant life. It came off the field to their right, and gusted past the group. On that wind, Soot and Spark both caught the scent of something they didn’t like. With a toss of his head, Soot shied away from the field. Spark danced in place. The fact that neither of them whinnied was especially disconcerting.

  Lucy had been watching the group, and saw the horses’ reactions. She and Marissa turned to come back, to increase their numbers and talk about what was going on.

  “Do you think it’s lions?” James asked in a whisper once they had returned.

  “Worse,” Marissa whispered back.

  “What could be worse than lions?” Aaron’s voice rose a little louder than James would have liked.

  Lucy answered him. “I think we’ve got a pig problem.”

  James swallowed hard as a prolonged silence enveloped the group. Pigs were worse than lions. They reacted to the virus the same way that humans did: total zombification. Finding uninfected pigs in the wild these days was incredibly rare. The shipping container community bred their own from pigs that had been found near the start of the outbreak. They assumed the handful of non-infected pigs the scavengers had snared over the years, had been bred by people who had kept them safely in captivity and that they had merely escaped. While coming across a healthy pig was a major boon, coming across an infected pig was the complete opposite. Zombie pigs were different from zombie humans in that they retained the ability to run far more often. And they could run fast.

  “Group together, same way as we did with the lions,” James ordered. “We don’t yet have confirmation that it’s pigs. You didn’t see anything, right?” James asked Marissa and Lucy.

  Both women shook their heads and Marissa said, “I’m fairly certain I heard a squeal.”

  Because zombie pigs were so dangerous, even the slightest possibility that they could be in the area meant the group had to take every precaution.

  “Based on the way the horses reacted, we know there’s at least something on the right,” James continued. “But that doesn’t mean there might not be something on the left as well. You all know what to do, so let’s get moving.”

  Back in their defensive circle once more, they followed the road that would one day disappear. Weeds had found plenty of places to grab hold along the cracked pavement. Some of them were tall enough to brush along Soot’s belly. James would have felt better if the road had remained intact. Not a lot better, but it would have been nice to have at least somewhat of a clear space in which to operate, like they had had in the suburbs.

  From his elevated position, James spotted some rustling a distance off to the right. He brought the group to a halt. While both were dangerous, the main difference between lions and zombified pigs, was that if the pigs knew you were there, they would definitely attack. Even if shelter were within easy reach, if the pigs saw them go inside, they would wait forever for the humans to come back out. There was a slim chance that they could sneak past the pigs, but standing their ground and fighting them off was likely to be their only option.

  When there was no follow-up movement, James had them start walking forward again. Of course, there was the possibility that there were no pigs there, that Marissa had been mistaken about hearing a squeal.

  But she hadn’t been mistaken. This time they all heard it, as the high-pitched sound cut through the air. In its wake, all the insects fell momentarily silent, as though they too had something to fear. And that sound had definitely not come from a healthy pig. There was a tearing, shrieking quality to it, that James had never heard himself, but had had described to him many times, back when they had lived aboard the Diana, and he had organized the s
cavenger teams. He had heard all the reports of when those teams had come across infected boars on the islands. Being told what they sounded like, and hearing the death squealing for himself, were completely different experiences.

  Another rustling, this time to the left and closer to their position. James brought them to another halt. The worst thing about zombie pigs is that they are rarely ever alone.

  A bird, some sort of grouse, burst up from the grass in a flurry of feathers and beating wings. The whole group startled, a squeak escaping one of them. Soot snorted loudly.

  And then, when their focus had been drawn to the left, a pig came charging at them from the right.

  Jack screamed as it lunged straight at him. He panicked and tried to back up into the middle of the circle, only to crash into Spark’s flank. Jack had only a knife, and no real experience with pigs. He slashed ineffectually at its rotting snout, and then it had him. Jack’s scream jumped an octave as the teeth of the pig latched onto his knee.

  Spark was frightened, pushing over Katrina and Skip as he bullied his way out from the center of the quickly collapsing ring. Katrina curled up into a tight ball around her rifle, as afraid of the hooves passing over her as she was of the pig so close by. Skip was less fortunate: his left hand got caught and crunched beneath Spark’s rear hoof. The weight of the horse instantly snapped his bones, drawing out Skip’s screams to harmonize with Jack’s.

  A second pig came at them from the right. Samson was ready for it, bracing himself with his spear and allowing the animal to impale itself.

  Under James, Soot was terrified and nearly bolted. By the time James got him back under a modicum of control and turned him around, it was too late for Jack. The first pig had got him on the ground and had moved from his knee to his balls. Even if he didn’t bleed out, his system was being flooded with active infection.