Survival Instinct (Book 5): Social Instinct

by Stittle, Kristal

  While thinking of dozing for another hour, a sharp inhalation of breath brought James to full alert. As the sound turned into a harsh sob, everyone awoke. Lamps and flashlights blazed all around, finally pinpointing the source of the distressed sound. It was coming from Marissa.

  “He’s dead,” she wailed as several people asked what was wrong. “Aaron is dead.”

  22: Onida

  Approximately 1 Year Ago

  If she hadn’t been constantly afraid of her people making an appearance, Onida would have quite enjoyed living with the Amish. She liked all the people she met during meals, and she didn’t mind doing what work she could find, which was usually helping a group of women preserve part of that year’s harvest. It was something she knew how to do, and was as good at it as someone could be. In return for her work, she was able to keep some of the preserves, as well as some of the fresh fruits and vegetables. Once, she helped bake bread. She wished she could talk more with the people she worked with, but she was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, or saying too much.

  Shawn never liked the people. Often he hunted, bringing back whatever he could. He kept most of the meat for himself, but some of it he traded in exchange for having his preserved in salt while he did other things. Whenever he wasn’t hunting, he was helping a work crew with construction. He spent more time working than Onida did, but she liked to think that was because she still needed to take care of the horses every day. Askuwheteau didn’t seem to get any better with the rest, but then Onida rarely saw him anymore. He had been deemed well enough for the Amish to keep him, and so he had been moved into one of the barns where they kept their own horses.

  A handful of times during their stay, someone came to find Onida in order to offer supplies in trade for what she and Shawn had put on display. Since Shawn was usually off hunting outside their fences, Onida had to manage all the trading herself. She thought that she was okay at it. She had sometimes spied on her elders when they were in trade negotiations with strangers. Of course, it helped that the Amish never seemed to try to swindle Onida. Their offerings always sounded reasonable, and Onida tended to accept them if she didn’t think she could squeeze out just a little bit more.

  While the food was always delicious, Onida thought she enjoyed the beds even more. Having a warm, soft place to lie down each night melted away the aches and pains she had developed during their travels. The guest lodge didn’t provide much privacy between Shawn and Onida and the messenger boys who were also staying there, but the beds were worth it. Because there were so few visitors and so many bunks, Onida could have slept on a different bed every night, but she chose not to make an extra mess of the sheets for the Amish. Mask loved the bunkhouse, climbing up and down the beds every morning and evening. Onida didn’t mind being woken up by the sound of his nails scratching against the wood as he went up or down, so long as it wasn’t the middle of the night. The boys were less appreciative, but they were passive aggressive in their complaints, merely sighing heavily or pulling their pillows over their heads.

  When Onida woke up after the third night, she was sad to know that they would be leaving that day. She was glad to be moving farther away from her former home, but wasn’t looking forward to hours of riding, followed by nights in sleeping bags, and food rationing at all times. At least the weather was nice for their departure.

  All morning, after breakfast in yet someone else’s home, Onida and Shawn prepared the horses. A few last minute trades were bartered, and some of the Amish even gave them gifts. The gifts were not much, but every little bit helped. Straw men were bound with string, and dressed in clothing the Amish didn’t want. Onida noticed that the clothing tended to be a very bright colouration, not the Amish way. Therefore it was still fairly decent quality. She wondered how much of it was donated by people who had decided to join the Amish, and how much was taken from stores in the nearest town, destined to become rags or other such things in time. The straw men were laid out along the ground, to be propped up on the horses when they left.

  Lunch was a big affair. Paul informed them that they had to stay for the meal, and neither Shawn nor Onida objected. It meant not dipping into their rations until dinner, and that they would get to fill their stomachs with hot, fresh food one last time. The weather was pleasant enough for the big tables to be set up outside, just the way it was when they had arrived. Shawn was still uncomfortable, but not as much as he had been the first time. Mask was even given a tall stool and his own little plate beside Shawn’s, although he didn’t use either much, preferring Shawn’s lap and plate. Onida ate as much food as she could, to the point where she was uncomfortably full.

  When the meal was done, several of the Amish said a personal goodbye to Onida and Shawn. They were the ones who had shared their homes for various meals, as well as several of the people who had worked with Onida. She got the impression that people were really saying goodbye to her, and included Shawn only to be polite. The horses were then lined up in their trains. One was missing at the end of Onida’s what with Askuwheteau being left behind. The two youths they were to accompany had their own horses.

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to lead some of your horses?” one of them asked. “Make the trains shorter?”

  “We’re sure,” Shawn grumbled. He wasn’t going to risk one of the boys taking off on them, and stealing some of their horses and supplies in the process.

  The straw men were all mounted up and strapped down. Onida thought they looked ridiculous. Even with the wide-brimmed hats casting shadows, she had no idea how anyone could mistake them for real people.

  As they rode to the gates, Jacob accompanied them on his beautiful mare. Onida thought that with rest and proper brushings, their horses no longer looked so shabby in comparison, but they still didn’t look as good. They couldn’t, not without their genetics being altered. Onida wondered if Askuwheteau would be bred with Jacob’s mare at some point.

  Jacob opened the gate for them and said a final farewell by wishing them luck, both with the bandits and whatever came afterward. Glancing back, Onida saw that he continued to sit astride his horse, watching as they headed out of sight.

  “So do we have any sort of plan as to what we’re going to do about these bandits?” Onida quietly asked Shawn. They were riding abreast of one another, with the boys currently ahead of them and the trains behind.

  “You have to tell me something first.” Shawn’s response was unexpected.

  “What?”

  “Was your grandfather really sick?”

  The question was so uncalled for that Onida bristled. But she also shivered.

  “See, what I don’t understand,” Shawn went on, “is why he would ask you to kill him despite knowing what would likely happen. You say he was in pain, but was he really in that much? And why use a knife? It would have been a lot safer for you to have smothered him with a pillow. With no marks left behind, people would assume the illness finally got him. So be honest with me: was your grandfather really sick? Was it even your grandfather that you killed?”

  Onida’s mouth pressed into a tight line. Her eyes prickled with tears she didn’t want to shed. She dug the fingernails of one hand into the back of the other in an attempt to prevent the moisture from leaving her eyes. Shawn saw all this and nodded. Apparently, it was enough of an answer for him.

  “I have two plans, which I’ll let you pick between. We can do what we were told to do, and accompany these messengers to where they’re going. We will most likely run into the bandits, and we’ll probably have to fight them. I’m confident I can get at least the three of us away, but I can’t guarantee that either the messengers or our horses will escape.” He was including Mask when he mentioned the three of them. “Or, before we get anywhere near where the bandits are supposedly camped, we ditch the messengers and go our own way.”

  “We made an agreement. The Amish gave us food and beds so that we’d accompany these boys.”

  “And there’s no reason we have
to honour that agreement. What can they possibly do about it now?”

  “They could send word to any communities ahead of us, tell them what we did and make it impossible for us to receive help again.”

  “To do that, they would have to be able to get their messengers through. These boys are trying to go somewhat south and a lot west. We simply have to go south and east instead. So what will it be?”

  Onida thought hard. The Amish had been so nice to her. But then Shawn was right; it wasn’t like she was ever going to see them again. She looked at the boys riding ahead. They wouldn’t be harmed if they just left them. The two messengers could just turn around and go back to the Amish, and wait for a better time.

  “If we were to ditch them,” Onida wasn’t going to sugar coat her words. Ditching them is what it would be. “Where and when will it happen?”

  “It’s three days travel to the town they’re trying to reach. It’s no coincidence we were offered three nights. On the first night, while they sleep, we’ll simply leave.”

  “What if they wake up?”

  “What if they wake up? What can they do?”

  “That one carries a rifle,” Onida pointed out.

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  But Onida did worry about that.

  “You have until tonight to decide.”

  Why is Shawn putting this decision on me? It didn’t seem fair to Onida. But then, what had happened in her village wasn’t fair. What had happened to Shawn’s home wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair, but despite knowing this, Onida continued to imagine how things should be.

  Onida wasn’t going to make this decision in haste. As they rode, she kept quiet and pondered the situation. It helped that she could no longer ride so close to Shawn. Shortly after their conversation, they learned that the horses in their trains sometimes attempted to eat the straw men sitting on their neighbours, and so had to be separated. When they stopped for the night, no matter what Onida decided, figuring out how to keep the horses from eating the decoys would be troublesome.

  The messengers usually rode ahead, but they had a tendency to wander. Sometimes they dropped behind, or rode on one side of a train or another. They didn’t talk to each other much, and they didn’t attempt any real conversation with either Shawn or Onida. It had been that way in the bunkhouse as well. Or at least it had become that way after their initial attempts on the first night hadn’t borne much fruit. One thing the boys commented on during the ride, was how Shawn and Onida never stopped, not even to relieve themselves. Each messenger had to hop off their horse a few times, piss on a tree, and then mount up again and trot to make up for the distance that they had fallen behind. Onida hadn’t realized it until they had said something, but thinking back, she discovered it was rare that she would have to empty her bladder while riding. Apparently her body had adapted to waiting until they stopped for their lunch break, or when they set up camp for the night.

  Night had kept coming earlier, and it did so once more. They rode a little distance through the dark, seeking a good building in which to take shelter. The messenger boys ended up choosing for them, when they came across a vehicle dealership that they had stayed in before. There was a lot more glass than Onida would have liked, knowing that there were bandits somewhere out there. At least the horses could easily fit through the door that was once used to move display cars in and out. They remained outside because of the lack of space inside, but if there was an incident like the one with the wolves, it was nice to know that they could all be brought indoors in a hurry.

  “What have you decided?” Shawn asked as, for once, he helped brush down the horses.

  Onida glanced over her shoulder at the car dealership. It was all that glass that made her decide.

  “We’re going to leave,” she told Shawn in the lowest whisper that he could hear. The messengers were nowhere nearby, but she still feared being overheard somehow.

  Shawn nodded, and the decision was made. He left the horses to her to go off hunting again. It was difficult to manage the horses by herself when they kept wanting to eat each other’s straw men, but Onida managed. She used the bumpers of several vehicles as hitching posts. They were lower than she would have liked, given all the flat tires sinking into the pavement. She chose vehicles that were in the middle of the lot, where a decorative island of greenery had overgrown and would provide the horses with fodder. In twos, she brought the horses over to a water-filled ditch so that they could drink, her ears sharply attuned to the darkness for any sign of danger. At no point did either boy offer to help, which made Onida feel better, more justified, in her decision.

  Waiting was difficult. After she had settled the horses, Onida kept busy setting up her and Shawn’s bedding, assembling a smokeless fire, and putting together their dinner. After all that was complete, however, and the plans had been carefully made, she had nothing with which to distract herself. She had to pretend to be asleep while waiting for the messengers to nod off. They were too far away for her to be able to determine that on her own, and therefore had to rely on Shawn, who was on watch duty, to tell her. She had to wait.

  Several hours slipped by. Onida’s arm hurt from the way she was lying on it. The pain was on purpose: it kept her awake. But she desperately wanted to roll over onto her other side. She was about to give in, to allow herself to be comfortable, when Shawn appeared in the weak moonlight and touched her shoulder. Onida needed no more than that to get up and go outside. Shawn could move a lot more silently than she could, and so he was going to pack up their bedding while she made ready the horses.

  “What about them?” Shawn asked after placing their gear on the horses. He had pointed to the messengers’ steeds.

  “What about them?” Onida replied.

  “We should take them.”

  “No.” That had never been discussed as part of the plan.

  “Why not?”

  “They will need them to get back.”

  “They have legs. They can walk.”

  “We’re not taking them,” Onida insisted. “If you need an excuse, they might not get along with our horses. They might not take to being in trains.”

  “It’s a waste,” Shawn said as he mounted up.

  Onida didn’t bother to respond as she climbed up onto her own horse. She didn’t bother to tell Shawn, but she didn’t really want any more horses. She liked the herd they had, and while she missed Askuwheteau, she was glad to have one less horse to manage. Adding two strangers was not appealing to her.

  They kept to a walk as they left the vehicle dealership, trying to guide their horses over patches of weeds and piles of leaves to keep the sound down. Once they were far enough away, Shawn wanted to trot, but Onida told him that they shouldn’t. A walk was a fast enough pace, and the horses had rarely trotted while in their trains and so wouldn’t be used to it. Besides, that seemed like a great way to lose their straw men.

  Shawn seemed to sulk in the dark as they rode, but he didn’t suggest they go faster a second time. Mask was more energetic than usual. Normally he slept during the day, either with Shawn or in a pouch on horseback. Travelling at night was strange, and the raccoon let them know it by grunting and moving around a lot. He had learned to safely move back and forth along a horse, but whenever he wanted to move from Shawn’s horse to the one behind it and vice-versa, Onida had to ride up beside them to help. That night, she helped Mask several times. Onida didn’t mind, because paying attention to his needs kept her distracted from the buildings all around them. She was used to the woods, and the foreign nature of the town they had entered put her on edge.

  “We need to find a place to stop and rest. Somewhere the horses can fit inside,” Shawn told her after they had ridden through the dark for several hours.

  “We wouldn’t be hard to track,” Onida pointed out. They were undoubtedly leaving quite the trail of horse shit behind them.

  “Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem had we taken their horses. But I don’t want to r
ide any longer. Look for a place.”

  So Onida scanned the structures in the dark, seeking a building that felt safe. All of them were far too small. She could tell that Shawn was becoming increasingly impatient the longer it took, and Onida guessed that he was about to lower his standards when they finally came across an adequate structure.

  The horses fit easily through the office building’s double doors, and there was plenty of room for them to spread out in the empty lobby. No longer needing the straw men, Onida and Shawn dismantled them, letting the horses nibble some of the straw. The clothing was then packed up with the rest into bags. Onida went to sleep on a cracked, faux leather couch in a sort of waiting area near a security counter. It was more comfortable than her bedding, but not as nice as the Amish beds had been.

  ***

  They rode east after a couple of hours of sleep. By the time the messengers found where they had spent the night, they would be long gone. That’s if the boys even bothered to look.

  Another bridge burned, Onida thought. Once word spread, she would never be able to return north again. She’d never see the lands where she grew up, the place that had been her home for all sixteen years of her life. Good. She had no interest in going back there, and closing the way off behind her meant she could never be tempted later.

  “Why do you continue to ride with me?” Onida asked Shawn when they made their short stop for a late lunch in the parking lot of a Walmart.

  Shawn acted like he hadn’t heard her.

  “Because when I showed up, your house burned down,” she went on. “You could have given me up to either my people or the Amish for a decent amount of supplies, and then rebuilt or even gone ahead on your own. I want to know why you’re willing to stay with me.”