Survival Instinct (Book 5): Social Instinct

by Stittle, Kristal

  Shawn shrugged. “Mask likes you.”

  Could that really be all it was? Shawn wasn’t exactly all there in the head, so Onida couldn’t be certain. Maybe he himself didn’t know why he continued to bring Onida along.

  “You don’t need to tell me what you really did,” Shawn said, seemingly out of the blue. “We’re far enough south now that I don’t think it should be a problem. You can keep the details to yourself.”

  Onida was tempted to tell him anyway. The words trembled on her lips and tongue, but ultimately she kept her mouth shut. As he had said, there was no need to tell him anymore. He seemed to have a rough idea anyway. She was going to keep the particulars of her secrets, just as he kept his.

  When they mounted up once more, they headed south-east. Other than being more tired than usual, and checking over her shoulder more frequently, Onida passed the day as any other day before meeting the Amish. As the sun began to set, they searched for a place to stop for the night. Onida had a feeling that they were skirting around the edge of some city. The buildings remained relatively the same size and were evenly spaced. She wondered which one. Too many signs were rusted out or overgrown, making it difficult to read the words on them. She also didn’t pay that much attention to them, as she had never had to before.

  “Do you know if we’ve crossed the border?” Onida asked when they found a dilapidated factory to stop in for the night.

  “We have,” Shawn told her with absolute certainty.

  “I don’t remember passing a crossing.”

  “We had gone off road when we crossed.” During their weaving around to avoid the radiation, they had travelled overland plenty of times instead of following the roads.

  “Then how do you know when we crossed?”

  “I just do.” Shawn wasn’t interested in her questions and went back outside to look for food.

  The factory was large enough for all the horses to fit inside, so Onida let them wander about. There were large machines within the building, but they were all rusted and covered in cobwebs. Windows high up in the wall let in the fierce orange of a cloudy sunset, and filled the interior with sharp shadows. Onida used Shawn’s crank light several times as she worked, saving the candles they had gotten from the Amish for when they were needed more.

  It was a cold night in the factory. When Onida woke up the next morning, she could see her breath. Checking outside revealed a crisp layer of frost. After she mounted up, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

  “I had planned for us to keep heading south-east,” Shawn said as he got up on his horse, Mask snuggled within his carry pouch. “But with this cold, perhaps we should head straight south.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a faster route to warmer climates,” Onida told him.

  Shawn nodded and led them south, past more factories and warehouses. For some time now, the leaves had been changing colour. In the past, Onida saw it as beautiful, but this year, it was only a troublesome reminder of the coming winter. Having abandoned the messengers after promising to take care of them, Onida couldn’t see her and Shawn being welcome to stay anywhere through the winter.

  The morning was deceptively quiet. Usually there was a zombie or two not long after they headed out, drawn to the area by the sounds of the horses’ hooves the previous evening. That morning, they didn’t come across a single dead person. Onida shifted uneasily in her saddle. She didn’t like any disruptions to the established routine, especially not so soon after what they had done. She couldn’t help but think that some sort of retribution was coming.

  Past the warehouses and the factories, they headed along a highway through a forested area. Fallen leaves skittered across the pavement, pushed along by a strong wind. The leaves still clinging to the branches rattled and hissed. Onida futilely tried to take comfort from the relaxed attitude of her horse, and the constant, never changing level of alertness in Shawn. But his alertness did change.

  Up ahead, a man stepped out onto the road. He stood straight and tall and was clearly no zombie. In his hands, he carried a rather large assault rifle. Shawn came to a stop, his bow flashing into his hands, arrow nocked and drawn.

  “It’s all right,” the man said, his voice far too calm for the situation. There was an obvious arrogance in everything he did, especially in the relaxed way he stood with the rifle’s muzzle pointed toward the road. “You don’t want to go shooting anyone.” He moved one hand, flicking it to the side.

  A patch of asphalt kicked up slightly ahead of Onida and Shawn’s horses, the crack of the high powered rifle that fired the bullet reaching them a second later.

  “It wouldn’t be good for you,” the man in the road continued.

  Shawn loosened his bowstring, but he didn’t return either arrow or bow to their places on his pack.

  “Just remember that while we talk,” the man went on, pointing to the bullet hole.

  “What are we going to talk about?” Onida asked, doing her best to keep her voice from wavering.

  The man grinned at her. “Road taxes.”

  “You’re the bandits we had hoped to avoid,” Shawn grumbled.

  “Now who told you that we were bandits?” He put on a tone of false offence.

  “The Amish,” Shawn told him truthfully. “They wanted us to help them get a pair of messengers back to their own village.”

  The man leaned sideways and looked down the lines of horses. “I don’t see no messengers.”

  “We reneged on the deal, with the intent of going around you.”

  This seemed to delight the man. “So you basically stole from the Amish in order to avoid us, and yet we bumped into one another anyway. Which, incidentally, means the road for those messengers is clear at the moment. I guess we should have left someone back there as well. But here we are.”

  “What do you want?” Shawn asked him.

  “What do you got?” The man’s voice dropped the humour in its tone, at last becoming completely serious.

  “We have what we need to get south,” Onida told him, trying to sound capable and sure of herself.

  “What’s south?” the man wondered.

  “Hopefully a place to live,” she told him.

  “You don’t even know where you’re going?” The man sounded happy again. “Well ain’t that a kicker. We don’t yet know where we’re going either.”

  “And yet, you tax the roads,” Shawn pointed out.

  “Wherever we are, we own it,” the man informed him. “And whoever’s there, we own them too, along with whatever they’re carrying.”

  Shawn didn’t raise his bow again, but he did pull back on the string. “No one owns me. Onida, watch our rear.”

  Onida slid around in her saddle to face backward and watch over their train of horses. She also placed her hand down by her waist, pretending she had a pistol there that didn’t exist. Maybe the bandits would be fooled into thinking they were better armed than they actually were.

  “You know you’d be dead before you could fire that little stick of yours,” said the man whom Onida could no longer see.

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’m very fast. I may die, but so would you.”

  There was a silence, and Onida wished she could see more than just the faces of horses.

  “You said you don’t know where you’re going,” Onida finally spoke up to fill the void that had previously only been filled with tension. “Why don’t you travel south before winter hits? We can all travel together. An exchange of supplies for added protection.”

  “Why should we trust you?” the bandit spoke to the back of her head. “You didn’t follow through on your deal with the Amish.”

  “And we have no reason to trust you,” Shawn retorted. “No reason to believe you won’t try to kill us and steal our stuff the moment we let our guard down.” His words were sharp, and partly aimed at Onida. He did not like her suggestion.

  “I wanna go south.” A new voice had spoken up, one that was distinctly feminine.

  “Godda
mnit, get back beyond the tree line, you daft woman,” the first bandit shouted.

  “I like the girl’s suggestion,” the woman went on. “They have enough horses for all of us. And I don’t want to spend another winter starving and half-frozen. We should go south with them.”

  Another silence made it impossible for Onida to resist twisting at the waist and taking a look forward. The woman was just as well armed as the man. The two of them were staring each other down, a silent conversation happening between their eyes.

  “We can’t trust them,” the man eventually insisted again.

  “You didn’t trust me when we first met. Or Mikey, for that matter. None of us really trusted one another until after we had all stuck together for a while and played by one another’s rules.”

  “And if these two fuck us?”

  “Then we’re no poorer than we are right now, only maybe we’ll be a little farther south.”

  Onida had to face backward again, worried about them using the distraction to pilfer their packs.

  “We still don’t have a reason to trust you,” Shawn said.

  “That’s fair enough, we are bandits after all,” the woman replied. “I suggest a set of rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “During the day, we get to ride your horses, untethered from the others, and you get to carry our firearms on yours.”

  “What?” the man practically shouted, clearly disliking the idea.

  “We try to take your horses and whatever supplies are on them, well then you just got yourself a stash of guns. You try to take off on us, well then we got horses and foodstuffs.”

  “What about at night?”

  “We sleep in different camps. You and your horses in one place, us in another. We don’t tell each other where those places are, we only set up a time and place to meet the next morning. You’re too small in number to try finding and attacking us in the night, and we really don’t want to hurt those horses none, which would be a huge risk if we came at you in the dark. Either party doesn’t show up to the meeting place in the morning, then it means we decided not to go on together, and we’re all right where we are now, just farther south.”

  Onida could see some holes in this plan. What was to stop their sniper from picking them off as they headed to the morning meeting spot? But then, what was stopping him from killing them right now? Maybe the bandits weren’t actually all that ruthless, and just threatened harm to get what they wanted.

  “I like this idea,” Onida leaned over to whisper to Shawn. “Better climate probably means we’re going to run into more people and more dead, and having better protection than just your bow would come in handy.”

  Shawn sat as still as a stone, mulling it over.

  “We wouldn’t have to worry about wolves,” Onida added. It was a bit of a dirty trick to use his fear like that, but it got him thinking the way she wanted him to.

  “Bring all your people out here,” Shawn told the pair in the road. “I need to see them before I decide anything.”

  When the man blew a sharp whistle by placing two fingers between his lips, Onida glanced over her shoulder at him. He augmented the whistle with an arm gesture, which Onida bet was for the sniper’s benefit. Considering the time delay between the bullet strike and the crack of the rifle, that person was a fair distance off.

  As three men and one woman came out from the forest, two on either side of the train, Onida knew that Shawn had been right to have her turn around. She watched those people walk toward the others in the road, and turned back around in her saddle in order to face them all. Two other women came from ahead of them, so that there was a total of eight people, equally balanced between the genders and ranging in age from late twenties to early fifties. A mangy dog stood with them; a tattered rope acted as a collar and leash. The sniper was still likely making his or her way to them, and would bring the number up to nine. They waited for that to happen. Onida was surprised to discover that the sniper was around her age, maybe a little older: a pimply boy who was practically as thin as the massive rifle he carried, and nearly as short.

  “So this is us,” the man who first spoke made a gesture to encompass his band of bandits. “What do you think?”

  Shawn took his time scrutinizing them. He studied every face, the posture in which they held themselves, and, most definitely, the weapons they carried. There were assault rifles, repeater rifles, semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, and, of course, the sniper rifle. Every one of them carried a gun, and a few had multiples.

  Onida leaned over to Shawn in order to whisper to him. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her opinion or not, but she gave it to him. “If they don’t have any packs hidden away somewhere, they don’t have much in the way of supplies. I don’t even see a tent among them. Going south before this weather gets worse is very much in their interest. They need our horses.”

  Shawn continued to think for another minute after Onida returned to an upright position on her horse.

  “We can’t untether the horses,” he finally said. “We don’t have reins or saddles for the ones we’re not riding. We’ll still hold onto your guns, but this means that neither of us can run off from the other.”

  “That sounds all right to me,” the woman spoke.

  The man grunted and drew his people into a huddle. They had a long conversation between them. The horses were beginning to get annoyed with this unscheduled stop.

  “All right,” the man finally turned back around. “We have come to an arrangement. But one of you is going to have to help us mount those horses. We’re not all experienced riders.”

  Onida ended up doing that job, as well as performing the task of gathering up their guns and finding room for them on her and Shawn’s steeds. She led each bandit to a horse based on what they said their experience was, which was never much, if any, and helped them climb up onto the horses’ backs amongst the packs. She told each bandit what his or her horse was named, and explained all the best ways to hold on. The dog would have to walk on his own, too large to be carried like Mask. Once done, Onida returned to her horse and swung her leg up and over the saddle.

  “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” she whispered to Shawn after a glance over her shoulder.

  Shawn’s jaw clenched and unclenched, but otherwise he didn’t answer. He knew only as much as Onida did.

  And so they walked on. They continued south, no longer just the two of them, but now in a party of eleven people, fourteen horses, one dog, and one raccoon. Onida couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder.

  23: Claire

  8 Days After the Bombing

  There wasn’t much time to worry about the mannequin with the grotesque smile. When they brought their supplies up from the parking garage, they dragged it with them to show the others, but also to ensure it wouldn’t pop up someplace else. Rose noted that it had the number twelve carved into it, so it had come from the batch in front of the store. They then wanted to search the building for an intruder, but there was no time. The storm hit harder than they had expected, and if the mystery mannequin person were in the building, they would be trapped in there too.

  “We gotta get this stuff above ground,” Jon insisted as the roads outside became rivers.

  They all agreed and began hauling. Everything they had gathered was dragged up the stairs to the third floor in order of priority. And not a moment too soon, for the parking garage began to fill with water rather quickly, as the nearby river flooded its banks, adding to the rain washed streets.

  Once the ground floor, storage room, and parking garage had been cleared, they started on the apartments of the second storey. No one stayed to guard their stash; everyone scrambled to save what they could. If the intruder stole anything, they couldn’t get far. Besides, the six of them staggered their runs up to that floor, so that nothing was left alone for very long.

  Getting into the apartments wasn’t easy. They used pry bars and the like to smash open the handle locks, but wh
enever a deadbolt was thrown, they had to stop and pick the damned thing. Claire was assigned the fourth apartment they got open to search on her own.

  Following Jon’s instructions, she went to every door in the apartment, closets included, and threw them open. She held her tire iron at the ready each time, in case a zombie came stumbling out at her. The rain lashing at the windows made it difficult to first check by listening. Claire also checked behind, under, and inside any furniture where a child could fit. Jon hadn’t specifically told her to do this—he had only mentioned looking under beds—but Claire wanted to be thorough. There was no one dead in the apartment, zombie or otherwise. Claire worked as fast as she could, searching for the most important stuff first. She developed a rough idea of what was in there and where, and then proceeded to haul what she could up to the third floor. It was hard work climbing the stairs. She thought three floors up was overdoing it, that the second floor should have been adequate.

  She couldn’t remember ever having seen so much rain before. They had experienced a number of storms since moving back to land, as well as a handful that had almost capsized the Diana while out at sea, but this rain was relentless. Normally a downpour like this wouldn’t last very long, a couple of minutes at most before becoming something lighter. But the water wasn’t stopping. Even when she finished retrieving the most useful items from that first apartment and was ready to move onto the next, it just kept splashing down in great sheets. It wasn’t easy to see anything out of the windows, to see beyond the storm. Claire realized she couldn’t even see the road anymore. It was buried beneath a deep layer of water. As a burnt out car was slowly nudged down the street like a dead beetle, Claire thought that maybe being prudent by going up to the third floor wasn’t such a bad idea.

  It was dark in the hallways. It was pretty dark in the apartments too, but at least some of the grey storm light came in through the windows. In the hallways, and in the stairwell, there was nothing. With her hands full, Claire couldn’t always hold her flashlight in the most optimal position, and so had to move carefully, using her feet to confirm where walls, doors, and steps were. Her flashlight could be recharged by shaking it, so she turned it off and did that whenever she could. The supplies were lit by a pair of solar charged lanterns, one by the stairwell door and one at the bend—the apartment building had a forty-five degree kink in the middle. Claire put down the bundle of blankets she was carrying and flicked off her light. Something caught her eye before she could start shaking it though, some movement. Turning back toward the bend, she flicked her flashlight back on. Maybe it was just one of the others, using the other stairwell? But then maybe it wasn’t.