Survival Instinct (Book 5): Social Instinct

by Stittle, Kristal

  Angela’s jaw clenched. She hated the raiders most of all, and was very unhappy to discover that they were headed in the direction needed to reach the container yard.

  They didn’t get very far to the west before Crichton called them all to a stop.

  “We have to get inside,” he said, as he jogged up from the rear. “We have to find good shelter, now.” He spoke with an urgency that brokered no argument.

  The sky was getting darker by the second, and the wind was picking up as they searched for the best location. All the dogs stuck close to Misha, save Rifle who was on the cart with Ki-Nam. Every now and again, he heard one of his dogs issue a low whine.

  “There’s a bank!” Angela called out from down a side street.

  Misha ran over to investigate the interior with her. The dogs made short work of the place, spreading out quickly and checking each office with a fast once over. It was a large bank, old, made out of a lot of stone and not boasting many windows. They were able to get the horses and the cart through a set of grand double doors just as the rain descended upon them. They located the vault, which was open and empty, but didn’t go inside. No one liked the idea of somehow becoming trapped within it. Instead, they set up camp at the top of the stairs that led down to the basement in which the vault was housed. If they needed to escape, they could run back to the front doors, or one of the other fire exits. If the place started to collapse, then they would move what they could into the vault, which was even more solidly built than the stone building.

  The wind outside howled, as the rain lashed at everything. Sherlock was set loose, for there was nowhere for him to go, and they wanted to use all their ropes to secure the doors, which couldn’t be locked without a key. Outside, it had become as dark as night. Misha’s flashlight, when pressed to the glass, revealed that the street outside had already become a shallow river. Thankfully, the old style bank had the majority of its teller windows and offices up above street level. After finishing with the doors, Misha scrambled up the wide, marble steps. It had been a bitch to get the horses and the cart up, but they had persisted. Misha crossed the grand floor with its high ceiling, and returned to the camp tucked away in the hallway that was normally for employees only. Even hidden away inside all that stone, Misha could hear the storm. As he sat down, all of his dogs gathered to him. They were frightened, and Misha thought that they had good reason to be. The light cast from the group’s collection of flashlights and lanterns, revealed matching worried expressions on the faces of all the humans. Angela didn’t even seem to mind that she was sitting right beside Sherlock. They should have reduced their lights to just one, but no one was ready to cede ground to the dark yet.

  No one spoke, at least no words that could be heard above the wind and rain. Ki-Nam was standing with the horses, calming them, and while Misha could see his lips moving, he couldn’t hear anything of what was being said. He, too, was constantly leaning over and whispering soothing words to his dogs. Despite the ropes, the doors rattled. Somewhere inside there must have been a leak, since Misha could hear running water, but the sound-reflecting nature of the stone made it impossible to pin down which direction it was coming from. Hopefully the vast basement beneath the bank would hold any floodwaters. They had checked the stairs and found there was only one more floor above the one where they were crouched. It would be very difficult to get the horses up there, and impossible for the cart, because the stairwell was narrow and contained a sharp bend, so everyone hoped they wouldn’t have to move.

  And then Trigger whined. It was a different sound than usual. Misha pointed his light at the golden dog. She had gotten up and was sniffing around. She was looking for a place to nest.

  Not now, Misha groaned internally. Of all the times for the puppies to come, now was quite possibly the very worst.

  20: Dakota

  8 Days After the Bombing

  By the time she had climbed into the submarine, the wind had picked up and the sky had gone quite dark. While eager to check out the sub, Dakota was also a little scared. Storms always put her somewhat on edge, but this time was different. She was going to be riding this out in a different place, without all the people she knew. What if something happened to the submarine while she was on board? What if something happened to those left behind on shore?

  As Bronislav led her through the close confines, receiving word from the various stations that they were ready to get underway, Dakota looked at the others who had been brought on board to study different positions. Most of them were a lot older than she was, often their twenties. The only person she really knew was Peter, and though he was younger than her, it wasn’t surprising that he was there. The kid was a math whiz. There was certain to be some job on the sub that he would pick up faster than anybody.

  “Dakota?” Bronislav said, startling her. “Pay attention, please.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “You’ve never been on a submarine before, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir, that’s correct.”

  “I’ll show you everything in more detail later then. For now, we have to get moving.”

  The hatch within the conning tower was sealed. All the wires that had been run from the sub’s generator to the surface, for people outside to connect to the power supply, had been disconnected and coiled up out of the way. The engines rumbled to life, and Dakota tried to pay attention to what Bronislav was doing and saying, but she didn’t understand all of it. He used submariner jargon, even slipping into his native Russian at times, but he tended to repeat himself in English when he did that. The submarine was German, and so were several of the sailors on board. Dakota couldn’t read any of the labels. She wondered how Bronislav knew what everything was. Had his sub been that similar? Or had Captain Karsten taken him through it all sometime before he died? Was Dakota expected to learn everything? She couldn’t imagine doing it. There was no way anyone could learn it all during one outing, but she didn’t think she could learn it all even after a hundred outings. A thousand! It seemed an impossible task.

  The submarine pulled away from the dock and they got underway. They could have gone up river—it was deep enough—but Bronislav felt safer in more open waters, given that they didn’t know the exact severity of the storm. This meant that they were actually heading toward it, and Dakota had to trust that the captain knew what he was doing. She also had to trust that they had left soon enough to reach the open sea before the worst part of the hurricane hit them.

  The submarine rode the waves, and Dakota could hear the water sloshing against them, all around.

  “Have you ever gotten motion sickness? Sea sick?” Bronislav asked her as he hovered near the men who, Dakota assumed, were doing the actual driving. How did they know where they were going without being able to see outside?

  “No,” she answered him.

  “If you start to feel queazy at all, let me know. You won’t be able to get out of the sub, and there’s not much we can do for you besides give you a place to lie down and a bucket to throw up in, but don’t try to look tough. We don’t want vomit on any of the instruments.”

  “I’ll be okay.” Dakota had no idea if she’d be okay. She had no idea if anyone would be okay by the time this storm went through.

  “Do you have any questions right now?” Bronislav asked her.

  “Yeah, how come you don’t use the periscope?” She didn’t even know what part of the bridge was the periscope. There was so much stuff lining the walls and ceiling, and even down by the floor. Pipes and wires and consoles and people. All of it labelled in German.

  “We don’t need to,” Bronislav told her. “Our instruments tell us all we need to know in this situation. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to see much. The sky is getting steadily darker, and the chop is also increasing.”

  “Chop?”

  “Waves. We move with the waves, periscope included, which means anything stationary, such as the land, could be difficult to make out.” He patted a large vertical pip
e, which Dakota took to be the periscope. Low down on it, she could see handles folded up and an eyepiece. She figured that they lifted higher when the periscope was raised.

  Bronislav had no more time for questions, as he and the other sailors began tossing more jargon back and forth. There was even a phone to speak with people in other parts of the submarine. Dakota did her best to keep out of the way. She was lucky the brim of her hat occasionally warned her just before she was about to bash her head into something low.

  The submarine rose and fell with the large waves. Even after Bronislav ordered the men to dive, causing a brief alarm to sound to warn everyone, the motion didn’t cease all together.

  “We’re underwater, so why does it feel like we’re not?”

  “Waves are like icebergs: they’re not just on the surface,” Bronislav gave her the quick explanation for he was apparently still quite busy. Dakota wanted to go find out what Peter was doing, but she didn’t dare leave Bronislav’s side. The deal had been for her to shadow him. She also didn’t completely trust her balance if she were to walk somewhere. She eventually found a place to stand where she didn’t appear to be in anyone’s way, and where there was a bar she could safely hold onto should the chop get any worse.

  What’s happening at the container yard? Dakota wondered. Were they being hammered? Was everyone safely inside? She found herself worrying the most for Cameron, Brunt, Hope, Riley, and Elijah. Had Elijah ever been through a storm like this one? If he had never seen the sea, then it seemed unlikely. Of course, he may have dealt with a tornado in his past, or a massive snowstorm in the mountains. If she remembered, and if everyone survived, perhaps Dakota would ask him next time she saw him. The thought of actually having something to talk about made her stomach flutter. Or was that just the motion of the submarine?

  Dakota had no idea where they were in relation to anything else. She had never learned how fast the submarine could move, and didn’t really know the distance between the container yard and the open sea. Every few minutes, Bronislav ordered them a little bit deeper. How deep could the submarine go? Deep enough that they stopped rolling with the chop altogether, apparently. Dakota could still feel some movement, however. Maybe it was the pull of the currents or the deep thrum of the engines. She didn’t know what the currents were like here, or how the engines worked. Subs were supposed to be silent, right? Or was that some misinformation she was remembering from a long time ago?

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, we can go no deeper without putting ourselves at an unnecessary risk,” Bronislav eventually announced. “We’ll wait out the storm here, and hope it’s not driving a massive tsunami before it.”

  Dakota knew what tsunamis were. She had learned about them back aboard the Diana. If one did come that was deep enough to reach the submarine, what would happen? She imagined the sub being rolled by the forces, getting swept along until it was dashed upon the bottom somewhere. Or maybe it would get sucked up to the surface somehow, and thrown onto land. That would be interesting, if the submarine became landlocked on, say, Quarantine Island. Of course, a wave that could do that, would wipe out the container yard.

  “Would you like a tour of the submarine now?” Bronislav asked her.

  “Okay.”

  “Are you feeling alright?”

  Dakota shrugged. “Sure. Just nervous.”

  “About what?”

  “Lots of things.”

  Bronislav nodded, not needing to ask any follow-up questions to understand. He was likely worried about the container yard, too.

  “How deep can this thing go?” Dakota asked as a way of turning her mind to something else.

  Bronislav told her what the sub was rated for, but she didn’t have a great grasp of distances, and couldn’t picture the answer in relation to anything.

  “What happens if we try to go deeper than that?”

  “The deeper you go, the greater the water pressure outside. If those pressures exceed what our hull was built to withstand, we get crushed like a tin can beneath a boot. The pressure would kill you before you could drown.”

  Dakota shivered as she thought about it. Not the best topic to redirect her mind toward.

  “Come along.” Bronislav headed in the direction of the sub’s nose, walking with an easy confidence. He told another man, one of the Germans, that he had the helm while they were gone.

  Dakota got to see everything on the ship. The torpedo tubes, empty missile silos, radar station, crew bunks, captain’s quarters, kitchen, engines, all of it. Only the reactor was off limits, and that was because the radiation within would kill everyone on board should there be a mishap. It was monitored at all times.

  “Why do we have so many supplies on board?” Dakota asked when she had seen the storerooms.

  “It was decided that the submarine was the safest place for them,” Bronislav told her. “There are other caches all about the container yard. We didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, as the saying goes, but this is the largest. If everything gets wiped out, but the people survive, we’ll still be able to feed them all for a couple of days.”

  A couple of days. That was not a lot. Those who had journeyed away from the container yard needed to make contact with a friendly group soon. They needed food. What would people start doing when they ran out? Nothing good, that was for sure. They might even need to abandon the container yard, which made Dakota’s insides twist themselves up. In spite of the many deaths recently, she still saw the place as being far safer than anywhere else.

  “Do you have any questions?” Bronislav asked after they had seen everything.

  Dakota shook her head. She had too many. She was trying to mentally digest everything she had learned during the tour, to store it in her memory.

  It was so quiet in the submarine. The engines had gone still, Dakota thought. No one spoke much, and when they did, it was in a whisper. There was no need to whisper, but in the silence, it came naturally. The metal around her sometimes popped and pinged, due to the pressure of the depths and the temperature changes in the water all around them. When the phone rang, a shrill jangle, Dakota thought she might jump out of her skin, it startled her so badly.

  “Captain Bronislav,” he answered, picking up the receiver with a casual speed and grace. Dakota had a memory, a very faint one, of her real mom answering the phone in the same manner. She couldn’t make out the details of her mother’s face, only that quick ease of doing something she had done many times before. Dakota could almost remember her voice, but couldn’t be certain that it wasn’t just her mind making something up to fill in that gap.

  Bronislav said a few curt words in response to whoever was on the other end, then thanked the person and hung up.

  “Come. I want you to hear something.”

  Hear something? Dakota’s curiosity was piqued. What was there to hear that she couldn’t hear already?

  Bronislav brought her back to where the sonar technician was huddled away in his own little nook, wearing a huge pair of earphones on his head. Peter was there, and he had a wide smile on his face, which was something not often seen. Now Dakota was super curious.

  “Here, sit down,” the sonar man said, his voice thick with a Russian accent.

  Dakota sat in the chair he had abandoned, and the headphones were placed over her ears. With those things on, it seemed like even her breathing became muffled.

  “They’re far off,” the sonar man told her, his voice sounding quiet and flat. “You have to listen closely.”

  Dakota couldn’t hear anything through the headphones except for her own pulse in her ears. She closed her eyes and focused. It took several seconds, but she thought she heard something. Her eyes scrunched even more tightly together as she listened. It was a rather haunting sound she was picking up. And it wasn’t alone.

  “Whales!” she suddenly cried out, realizing what the sound must be. When she looked to Bronislav, he smiled and nodded, confirming her thoughts. She listened for a while longer
, their song travelling through the sea to her ears. She understood why Peter was smiling so much. There was a somewhat sad and eerie quality to the sound, but there was something magical about it as well.

  After listening for another minute, Dakota pulled off the headphones and held them out to Peter.

  “Do you want to listen some more?” she asked him.

  “I have extra headsets,” the sonar man told them. “You can both listen.”

  The headsets were brought down from an overhead storage. The sonar man took his seat back, but he gave Peter and Dakota a headset each and told them in what corner they could stand.

  “Stay here,” Bronislav ordered Dakota before her new headset could be plugged in. “I’ll know where to find you if I need to.”

  Dakota gave him a thumbs up, which he seemed to find amusing. She and Peter stood huddled together, listening to the far away whales singing to one another.

  ***

  Dakota thought she knew when the storm surge swept over them. The submarine floor seemed to rise slowly beneath her feet, and then drop away again. One of the twenty-something-year-olds said it felt the same as an earthquake. Dakota had to assume he was right, as she had never felt one herself.

  Nothing else of interest really happened on the submarine. The whales had moved off, and the sub was rather stable, with a very gentle and continuous rocking. Dakota tried not to picture the fury that must be going on above them, but she did anyway.

  “You should go to bed,” Bronislav told her.

  “I’m not tired,” Dakota lied to him.

  “I can see that you are. And it is very late. You’ve had a very long and busy day. Go to bed.”

  “I’m supposed to shadow you. I’m not going to sleep until you do,” she challenged him.

  Bronislav grinned. “Then it’s a good thing that that is soon. I’m just waiting for the shift change to be completed.”

  Some of the submariners had gone straight to the bunks when they boarded. They would be monitoring the vital systems throughout the night. Dakota’s body knew that it was very late, but she didn’t actually know what time it was. Bronislav wore a watch, but he hadn’t read out the time to anyone lately. When the shift officially changed, and he decided to get some sleep, Dakota learned that it was just shy of four in the morning. No wonder she was so beat!