Survival Instinct (Book 5): Social Instinct

by Stittle, Kristal

  Claire listened to Rose and Bryce talk about the food, with her eyes closed as she was about to drift off.

  Thump.

  Claire’s eyes flew back open. Had she dreamed that? She looked over at the others. The conversation had stopped and all eyes were directed toward the ceiling. They had heard it too; Claire hadn’t fallen asleep.

  “Maybe a window up there has been left open,” Larson suggested in a whisper, “and the wind finally managed to knock something over.”

  “That sounded like a fairly large something,” Danny told him.

  “Hence why it took so long,” Larson retorted, sounding not at all confident about it.

  They all continued to stare silently at the ceiling for another few seconds, but no other sounds were forthcoming.

  Rose sighed. “We’re goin’ to go check it out, ain’t we?”

  Jon nodded. “We should. We know it’s possible that someone else is running around in here, and I, for one, would really like to know if that’s the case.” He got up and headed for the door.

  “One of us should stay here,” Danny spoke up before Jon got very far. “The food is too important to leave unguarded.”

  “You volunteering?” Bryce had also gotten to his feet. “Want me to stay with you?”

  “I’ll be fine on my own,” Danny told him. “I can lock the door behind you guys.” They had chosen this apartment because they hadn’t needed to break the lock in order to get inside. “You’re welcome to stay if you want to, though.”

  Claire didn’t want to stay. She wanted to see for herself what had caused that noise, just in case it was something Jon would be tempted to lie to her about later. It seemed that everyone but Danny also wanted to investigate first hand, since they all got up onto their feet and headed for the door.

  “Check the peephole,” Larson suggested before Jon could open the door.

  Jon glanced through it, but shook his head. “It’s pitch black out in the hallway. I can’t see anything.” He grabbed the handle and pulled open the door.

  Jon had very fast and aggressive reflexes. His sword was out and slashing forward, before Claire even had time to register that there was a figure standing just outside the door. The blade didn’t cut into any flesh, however, just plastic that clattered to the carpet.

  In the light of Bryce’s lantern, Claire could see Jon’s face turn a furious red. He didn’t even scream or curse at the mannequin this time, which she realized she would have preferred.

  “It’s the same one you guys brought up from the parkin’ garage,” Rose reported as she dragged the various pieces inside. “Someone put it back together.” Now it had a rather large gash along its torso and painted face.

  “Well, we can now be certain that someone else is in the building with us,” Bryce commented.

  “Let’s go.” Jon spoke through gritted teeth as he stepped out into the hallway.

  Claire looked over her shoulder at Danny, who had followed the group in order to lock the door behind them. He understood her unspoken question and nodded that he would be fine on his own.

  “We should split up,” Jon instructed once they were out of the apartment. “Bryce, Larson, you take the far stairs. Rose, Claire, and I will take these.” He pointed to the stairwell at the end of the hallway.

  Bryce and Larson agreed, turning to disappear around the bend, between the stacks of stuff. Jon led the way to the closer stairwell, rage still pouring off him. Claire wondered whether the storm outside was stronger or weaker than the one broiling inside Jon.

  When they entered the stairwell, Claire couldn’t help but go to the railing and look down. Her flashlight illuminated the water below. Would it keep rising? Would it manage to reach the second floor? Would it somehow just keep coming, forcing them higher and higher up the building until there was nowhere left to go? Was God washing the world clean as she had apparently done before, leaving only an ark to continue on?

  “See anyone?” Jon asked her.

  “No.” Claire didn’t admit that she hadn’t been looking for people. If there had been someone down that way, though, she figured she would have seen them. The water was dark and full of trash.

  “Come on.” Jon forged ahead up the stairs.

  Claire followed after him and Rose, wondering again about the apartment building’s foundations. How much water and debris could it withstand? It was silly, the building was solid, and yet Claire couldn’t help but worry.

  On the fourth floor, they didn’t find much. Bryce and Larson shook their heads when asked if they had seen anything. The apartment above the one they were staying in was unlocked, but empty. A fair-sized bust made out of a solid chunk of wood lay on an ornate carpet in the weirdly rich apartment, so they guessed that that was what had made the thump. But there was nothing they could find that would suggest why it had fallen off its table, other than by human intervention.

  “I don’t think he meant to knock it over,” Rose said, poking the bust with her toe. “I think he left in a hurry, which is why the door wasn’t locked behind him.”

  “Could be a chick,” Bryce said.

  “It could be more than one person,” Jon added. “None of us have actually seen anyone. We only know someone’s around because of the damned mannequins.”

  “What if it’s ghosts?” Larson’s question was wholly unexpected, especially given the serious tone in which he asked it.

  “Ghosts don’t exist,” Bryce said in an off-handed manner. It gave Claire the impression that this was something that had come up between the two of them before.

  “There used to be a time when zombies didn’t exist either,” Larson retorted.

  “And just how far do you think ghosts can travel?” Jon chimed in, his tone biting and annoyed. “We’ve been dealing with mannequins since before we reached this area. You think a ghost just decided that it was bored because there were no people around, and thought to take its plastic people and go find someone to haunt? Ghosts don’t exist, and even if they did, this wouldn’t be their work.”

  Of course that all made sense, but now that ghosts had been brought up, Claire found the little hairs on the back of her neck were standing up. The all-consuming darkness and constant lashing of rain at the windows didn’t help.

  “Let’s get back to Danny,” Jon told everyone, turning back toward the main hallway.

  “Should we split up again?” Bryce asked once they were out of the lavishly furnished apartment.

  “Yes.” Jon headed back toward the stairs they had climbed, leaving the others to either follow or go the other way. They broke up into the same groups as before, with Rose and Claire keeping a few paces behind Jon until they entered the stairwell.

  Before they could descend, all three of them heard two loud, banging doors, one following shortly after the other. Claire jumped in place, the sound unexpected, and it came from both above and below them.

  “There’s more than one,” Jon grumbled. “You two go check upstairs. I’ll go make sure that Danny is okay.”

  Rose immediately began to climb higher, following the glow of the camping light strapped around her forehead. Claire’s legs were wiped, but the injection of adrenaline had her sticking close to Rose’s back. She had the tire iron grasped tightly in both hands. Below, Jon’s light disappeared onto the third floor as they reached the fifth.

  Rose turned to Claire, holding up her hammer and her stump. She was silently asking the other girl to open the door. Claire swallowed the lump in her throat and took the lead position. She breathed deeply, grabbed the handle, and yanked the door open.

  Rose was ready with the hammer poised over her head. The hallway beyond was empty.

  “Look,” Claire whispered, pointing to the base of the door. There was some sort of contraption there involving an egg timer and a padded stick with a spring on one end. Rose knelt down and pulled back the stick with the claw end of her hammer. When she let go, the spring pushed it back against the door. The resulting bang made Claire j
ump.

  “Why would someone make this?” Rose whispered up to Claire.

  Claire shook her head. How could she possibly know? This was likely the work of a person who left painted mannequins for them to find in startling places. She wanted to assume it was the work of the totally insane, but the device seemed almost too clever for that.

  “Hey, turn off your light for a second,” Rose said after standing up. She turned off her own light.

  “What? Why?” Claire didn’t like the idea of being in total darkness, not with some loony running around.

  “Just do it,” Rose insisted.

  Claire grudgingly obliged. She expected to see nothing at all when the light went out, but she was wrong. Down the hall, there appeared to be a little point of faint, yellowy-orange light. Claire shifted in place, moving her head to make sure it wasn’t an illusion, some trick her mind was playing on her. That didn’t seem to be the case, because the tiny light stayed put. She turned her flashlight back on after only a few seconds, despite the discovery.

  “Come on.” Rose led the way toward where they had seen the light, flicking on her headlamp in the process.

  Claire thought that they should probably go back down, to find Jon and make sure everything was okay, but she couldn’t leave Rose alone, and Rose seemed determined to investigate. The light was a peephole within one of the apartment doors. Something was shining through the tiny bubble of glass. Rose gestured with her stump for Claire to try the door. She shook her head for she didn’t want to. Rose frowned, and gestured more angrily this time. When Claire still refused, Rose pushed down on the handle with her stump, hunching awkwardly with her hammer at the ready.

  The door wasn’t locked and pushed open too easily. The hydraulics had been removed. When the door swung all the way open, it crashed into the wall. Rose had used more force to open it than was necessary. Both Rose and Claire winced at the sound.

  Inside the apartment, an oil lantern was burning on a table that must have been moved from somewhere else, for its placement didn’t make much sense. Before Claire could suggest that they leave, that the lamp could have been set up to deliberately shine through the peephole and lure them in, Rose was off, stalking toward the bedrooms, hammer at the ready. Claire followed, wondering what she could say to stop her friend.

  As Rose reached one bedroom with its door opened a crack, she gestured for Claire to go check out the wide open door beside it. Claire knew then that she couldn’t convince Rose not to investigate, she could only help get it over with more quickly.

  When Claire reached the entrance to the bedroom, she jumped inside her skin. Her flashlight landed on a figure standing across the room. Its bald head and lack of ears informed her that it was another mannequin. Claire would rather not go near it, but she knew she had to. She had to determine if it was one of the ones with carved numbers.

  Halfway across the bedroom, the door behind Claire slammed shut. She screamed and whirled around, the tire iron held high as her flashlight clattered to the floor. She fully expected someone to be standing behind the door. But in the flashes of her dropping, and rolling flashlight, she saw no one. As she snatched the light back up off the floor, Rose burst into the room, with eyes wild and nostrils flared as she prepared for a fight.

  “Where is he?” she screamed, her headlamp swinging this way and that as she checked the corners. Once she was all the way through the door, it slid off her shoulder and slammed behind her. Claire screamed again at the sound, although softer this time and Rose’s voice joined hers.

  With both their lights pointed at the door, they saw that some sort of spring-loaded hinge was attached to it. A pin lay on the floor nearby, attached to some fishing line that formed a tripwire Claire had activated as she crossed the room.

  “This guy is sick,” Rose gritted through her teeth. “He’s tryin’ to scare us on purpose.”

  “Trying?” Claire panted, her heart still racing in her throat. “I would say that he’s succeeding.”

  Rose nodded, admitting that, she too, was frightened. She then went over to the mannequin and checked its head.

  “Number nine,” she informed Claire.

  “I suggest we take it, and the oil lantern, and get the hell out of here,” Claire advised. “This guy is playing games with us. Deliberately splitting us up and luring us out of the apartment where we have the food. I’m worried about Danny.”

  “Yeah,” Rose nodded again, turning away from the mannequin. “Let’s get back down there. And fuck the mannequin, we’ll leave it here. He’s probably got a bunch in this place anyway.”

  Back near the door, Claire exchanged her flashlight for the oil lantern. There wasn’t much oil in it, but it would be more than enough to get back downstairs. Rose took a quick look in the kitchen, just in case there was any food left behind, but reported nothing.

  Back out in the hallway, they walked quickly toward the stairwell, noting that the banging device was still attached to it. One right after the other, they scurried down the steps to the third floor where they came across Bryce and Larson.

  “Hey, are you two okay?” Bryce asked, his posture and voice tense.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Rose told him as she ushered the boys back toward the apartment. “What about Jon and Danny?”

  “Freaked out, but okay. Whoever this person is, they’ve booby trapped some of the rooms.”

  “Yeah, we found that out for ourselves,” Claire told him, raising the oil lantern for emphasis.

  As they made their way between the gathered items in the hallway, Claire found herself tense and wary of the piles. Was it all the same as they had left it? Had anything been moved? Could someone have carefully rearranged a few items and was now hiding right alongside them?

  They reached the apartment without issue, and Jon let them inside. With the door safely locked behind them, they all swapped stories. Jon hadn’t found any noise makers, so he had probably been chasing down the actual perpetrator, but he had seen no one. Bryce and Larson had a similar experience to Claire and Rose on their side of the building. They had been lured to a certain apartment by a sound and a light, but when they opened that apartment door, a mannequin had come swinging down from the ceiling, striking Larson as he went through.

  “Seems we weren’t the only ones busy today,” Danny commented after Claire and Rose had explained what they had seen.

  “All right, no one leaves this apartment again until it’s time to go. Are we agreed? Unless there’s a fire, we stay put until it’s safe enough to go outside, then we head straight home. There’s no point in searching anywhere else, as it’s all going to be damaged by the flooding anyway.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” Bryce agreed.

  Everyone else nodded.

  “We’ll keep a guard posted overnight, just in case the stranger tries to get in here,” Danny said.

  “You checked that all the windows are locked, right?” Claire asked, trying to sound less frightened than she was.

  Danny nodded. “We did when we first decided to stay here. We searched the whole place, top to bottom, and it’s empty and secure.”

  “I kinda hope the bastard tries to get in from outside,” Rose commented. “Maybe he’ll get swept away by the storm then.”

  “I’ll take first shift,” Jon volunteered. “The rest of you should try to get some sleep.”

  As Claire lay down on her sleeping mat, her mind and body were still humming. Sleep was such a foreign concept these days.

  24: Evans

  9 Days After the Bombing

  “Evans, how nice to see you again,” said Frannie as she took his hand into her warm ones. Evans had forgotten that about her, that her hands were always exceptionally warm.

  “Hello Frannie, thanks for seeing us.” Evans silently added, and not shooting us.

  Walking into town, they had startled a great number of people. Lots of weapons were suddenly pointed in their direction, held in nervous hands.

  “Wel
l, you always bring such interesting things,” Frannie joked, with a gesture to the people, camels, and horse that were assembled behind him. They had been confined in a large alley that had been turned into a pen of sorts. There was an entrance at either end, one which led into town and the other into the zombie corral.

  “Now that you know it’s me, can we talk inside somewhere? I’d rather not be out here when this storm breaks over our heads.” The wind had picked up considerably. Most of the town’s folk had retreated indoors by then. The booth-like shops Evans remembered seeing lining the main street last time he was here were all folded up and missing. In the corral behind him, no zombies were pressed up against the fence. They had all been brought to some indoor holding facility for safety. The idea of such a room for such a reason repulsed Evans.

  “I suppose you’ll want somewhere for all of them and the animals to stay as well,” Frannie commented.

  “Please.”

  “All right. Come along then.” Frannie unlocked the gate.

  Evans gestured for everyone to follow him out. Gerald led Moe and the silent ones urged their camels along. The animals were all very skittish, making sounds of displeasure as they remained outside in the wind. They knew the storm was about to hit them, and wanted to be indoors just as badly as the people did.

  Frannie took them to a building that was familiar to Evans. It was the same tiny mall he had stayed in the last time he had visited the place. There wasn’t much to it. It had an entrance on either end of a wide hallway, with four small shops lining one side, and one big store dominating the other. The big store served as their visitors’ quarters, with bunks, and cots, and tents for privacy. Along its back wall, makeshift pens had been erected for either animals or the rare visiting zombie, which was apparently a thing here. Candles were all over the place. None were lit for there were no other visitors at the moment. Evans was glad to see that.