Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (13 page)

“Go play with the others,” Robin whispered in case April wasn’t up yet.

Splatter, instead, bounded to the end of the mattress and attacked the tag sticking up there.  Good enough.  When Robin looked over, she noticed two things.  The first was that April was gone; she must have already gotten up.  The second was that her shotgun was also gone.  Panic fluttered through Robin like the wings of her namesake, her thought being that April had surely stolen her shotgun and left.  However, all the other supplies were still present, and considering how much effort April had put into getting them, it seemed unlikely that she would just leave them behind.  She must be somewhere else in the store, carrying the shotgun for protection.  Although why she couldn’t at least have left her sword behind for Robin was a mystery.

Peering over the edge of the bed frame fortress, Robin couldn’t see April anywhere.  That didn’t mean much, because the large furniture and a big, central pillar that housed the escalators blocked most of the view.  Robin thought that if she
were going to be staying here for a while, she would want to find a way to move some of the furniture around.  Although what was awhile?  How long did she plan to stay here?  How long could a zombie outbreak reasonably be expected to last anyhow?  She still had to get to her brother in Toronto. That was still on the agenda.  She didn’t know
how
she would get there, but she would.

Robin stepped out of the nest, closing the gap with a wheeled desk that had a solid frame all the way to floor.  She didn’t want the kittens wandering off through the store where she would never be able to find them again.  As she looked for April, she moved slowly.  There was no way of knowing where danger was lurking.  Even with the sun shining full force, the department store was uncomfortably dark and silent.  The top floor was made up of desks, chairs, sofas, beds, futons, bunk beds, fridges, washers and dryers, exercise equipment, and stacks of TVs in the corner.  They created alleys every which way, dark shadows in which something could be lurking.  Knocked-over desk chairs and stools were constantly being mistaken for a crouched form, ready to pounce. 
Finally, Robin spotted a proper human form, April standing not far from the escalators.  Even at a distance, her expression was unmistakable: fear.

“Zombies!” she suddenly screamed.  April raised the large shotgun and fired a deafening blast.  The kickback was hard enough, and surprising enough, to knock the black girl right off her feet.  The next sound Robin heard was an unmistakable cry of pain from a male set of vocal cords.  Zombies couldn’t feel pain; they didn’t cry out like that.

Robin ran as fast as she could, no longer paying attention to the shadows.  Who the hell had April just shot?  She rounded the corner just as April was struggling to get back up on her feet; the end of her sword had wedged itself into a wire rack holding boxes of blenders.  Three men were on the ground, the one in the middle clearly wounded and holding his leg.  He howled in pain.

“What the fuck?” one of the men yelled at April.  His words were slurred and it came out sounding more like
wahf the ffuc
.  The stench of booze was heavy upon them.

Robin didn’t know what to do.  Check to see if April was all right, and help her up, or check on the injured man?

“You shot me,” the injured man stopped wailing long enough to spit out.  “Guys, she fucking shot me.”

April finally got to her feet on her own.  She looked horrified.

“I’m so sorry,” tears spilled down her cheeks.  “I thought you were one of them.  I thought you were a zombie.”

“We do look a little like zombies,” the tall lanky man on the right laughed.  “Especially because we’re soooo wasted.”

“I’ve been shot!” the one in the middle yelled at his friend.

Robin stepped closer to get a better look at the man.  He had taken the shot in his left leg.  It looked like
birdshot; small bloody holes bloomed all over.  Anything more powerful might have taken his leg clear off.  Why a police gun had birdshot shells, Robin had no idea; over-zealous cowboy types were likely involved.

“Maybe… maybe we should tourniquet it?” the darkly dressed one on the left spoke.

Something about these three looked familiar to Robin, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.  Two of the men were making odd, drunken, impossible-to-understand jokes, while their friend was whimpering and wailing.  April kept crying and saying over and over again how sorry she was.  There was so much noise, so much commotion that Robin couldn’t think straight.  How was she supposed to figure out what to do?  No one was letting her think.

“All of you shut up!” Robin screamed out of seemingly nowhere.  The suddenness of it got them to be quiet more than her words did.  Even the injured man fell silent for a moment.  “April, give me the shotgun and then go get one of the kittens for the sniff test.”

April responded by shoving the large gun at her, as if it would bite, and ran off toward the bed frame fort.

“Sniff test?” the darkly dressed one asked the lanky one.  He then made a gesture like snorting coke off the side of his hand.  The two laughed, while the injured one looked back and forth in confusion.  Considering he wasn’t wailing anymore, just whimpering, Robin worried he was going into shock.

Shortly enough, April returned with Charcoal held out before her.  She dropped the cat unceremoniously next to the three men.

“Aww, what a cute little kitty,” the lanky man scooped him up and began stroking him.  Charcoal clearly wanted to be put down, but he wasn’t meowing or anything so Robin took that as a good sign.

“All right, good job, April.  Now go find the first aid kit.  I thought I saw one in the bags we brought up yesterday.”

“Yeah, I grabbed a few from the store actually.  Should I grab all of them?”

“Yes.”  Robin didn’t really know; she was just playing this by ear.

“Hear that, Greg?  First aid kits!  You’re going to be all right,” the darkly dressed man took Charcoal from the lanky man and put the kitten on the ground.

“So your name is Greg?”  Robin was glad to have at least one of their names.

“Sure is.”  The injured man, Greg, nodded, then looked queasy and sank down lower on his elbows.

“Lie down, Greg.”  Robin made her way over to the men and knelt down near Greg’s head.  She shooed the others farther away, figuring that giving him space was good.  Wasn’t that what they always did in the movies and TV shows?  Gave them space?  The two men knelt nearby, watching Robin and Greg closely.

“I’m Quin.”  The darkly dressed man held out his hand.  Robin didn’t shake it.

“Of course you’re Quin!” the lanky man crowed.  “Who else would ya be?”  His drunken slur got worse, blending most of his words together.

“All right, Quin, you had a good idea about
putting a tourniquet on his leg.  Give me your belt.”

“I don’t got a belt.”  He unnecessarily lifted his shirt to show this.  He had a very fit body despite how old his face looked.

“I got several.”  The lanky man looked down and thrust his hips forward to show that he was indeed wearing at least three belts.  “Which one you want?”

“
Either one I guess.  That one.”  Robin pointed to the mid-sized belt.

“Okay.”  The man began to unbuckle his belt.  “Normally I make my women try a little harder before I take my belt off for ’em.”  He laughed, a harsh and grating sound.

Robin didn’t think the joke was funny.  She took the belt from him and looped it around Greg’s leg.  He moaned in pain when she jostled him.

“Easy on the goods,” Greg muttered as Robin began to tighten the belt.  She had to wrap it almost up at his hip to get above all the holes.  When she pulled the belt as tightly as she could, Greg cried out.

“Hey, you’re hurting him.”  Quin fretted between pushing Robin away and letting her do what she was doing.  He seemed to become less drunk as his injured friend’s condition worsened.

“He’s taken harder shots than that,” the lanky one waved it off.

“Shush up, River.  You ain’t helping,” Quin chastised his friend.

With the name River, it finally clicked with Robin who these guys were.  They were Gathers Moss!  She grew up listening to these guys.  They were one of her father’s favourite bands.  The quality of their music was one of the few things Robin and her dad had ever agreed
on.  When she was little, her dad had taken her to the last concert they held in Leighton.  It was one of a handful of good memories involving the man.  Now, here she was with Greg, the drummer, shot up and maybe dying, while Quin tried to sober up, and River made jokes.

“I’m too helping!” River yelled at Quin. “That’s my belt wrapped around his leg thank ye very much.”

“I have the kits!”  April finally came running back.  Her dark skin blanched when she spotted Greg lying on his back.

“He’s still alive,” Robin quickly assured her.  Although for how long she couldn’t say.  “Bring the kits over here.  River, shove aside.”

River frowned and slipped into a slur so bad that Robin couldn’t make it out, but he crawled around Greg’s feet to sit with Quin on the other side of his body.  April took his place, dumping all the kits on the floor next to Robin.  She looked at the tourniquet.

“Aren’t you supposed to stick something through that and twist it to make sure it’s as tight as possible?” April wondered.

“Uh, sure.”  Again, Robin didn’t really know.  She was basing everything on one CPR/ Heimlich manoeuvre class, and on what she had seen in various forms of media.  “You can do that, right?”

“Yeah.”  April ran off again, presumably to grab something along the lines of a stick.

Robin opened up one of the first aid kits and was relieved to find a handy book inside.  She skimmed through the pages to the lacerations section; there was no section for birdshot.  Although the book advised calling 911, Robin had to make do with the meagre steps after that.  While River and Quin watched with interest, Robin plucked a pair of scissors out of the kit and started cutting off Greg’s canvas pants below the tourniquet.  April returned, panting from climbing the escalators, with a long-handled wooden spoon and proceeded to tuck it under the belt and twist.  Greg cried out in pain again.

“Hey, hey, hey.  There’s ah, morphine in there.”  Quin gestured to the first aid kits.  “There should be little things of morphine shouldn’t there?  At least one per kit or something?”

“Umm,” Robin flipped through the kit she had open.  “No morphine, but there’s something in this one called lidocaine.”

“That’ll do.”  Quin held out his hands for it.  “Give ’em here, I can administer them to Greg so he don’t feel the pain.”

“That’s the stuff the dentists use, right?  The stuff that makes yer face go all numb and blaaahhh.”  River imitated a person with a numb face, nearly drooling and everything.  Robin could easily see how April mistook them for zombies.  As for the lidocaine, she didn’t have any other choice but to trust Quin.  She passed the first aid kits to him, and he began picking out the little full needles.  Not all of them had some, only the bigger kits.  Some kits had codeine, which Quin also took out.  Robin finished cutting away the pant leg.

After looking through the book, Robin decided to treat this like glass.  She was going to pluck out all the birdshot in Greg’s leg with a pair of tweezers.  While she put on a pair of gloves from the kit, Quin injected the lidocaine into various parts around Greg’s wounds and got him to take some of the codeine.

“How’s that feel buddy!”  Quin laughed.

“Feels pretty fuuuuucking gooooood.”  Greg grinned lopsidedly.

Robin began pulling out the small metal balls.  She started with the ones nearest the surface, but as she had to dig deeper and deeper for more, Greg began to moan, and even try to squirm a little.

“Greg, I know it hurts, but I need you to stay still,
” Robin huffed.  The little balls were slicked with blood and hard to grab with the tweezers.

“I got him.”  River finally became helpful.  He grabbed Greg’s foot and held his leg still.

“Quin, can you hold his body down?” Robin asked, looking up at the man.

Quin giggled and flopped himself over Greg’s chest.  “Greg,” he whispered loudly to him.  “Greg, you’re shot.  You’re shot!  But I gave you the good stuff, right?  It’s good.  It’s real fucking ggggoooood.”

Robin was horrified to realize that Quin had injected some of the numbing agent into himself, and likely downed some codeine.  He had been sobering up, until that point.  Now it seemed like River was the more sober of them.  She put it out of her head and resumed her work.  She tried not to think of it as pulling pellets out of a human leg, but rather, picking bones out of an exceptionally tough fish.  When Robin glanced at April, she saw that her friend couldn’t even look, but she held onto the wooden spoon, cutting off the blood flow as best she could.  As Robin got to the deepest of the pellets, Greg bucked and howled.  It took everything they had to keep him still long enough for Robin to pluck the stubborn thing out, but she got it.  She hoped she got them all, it was impossible to tell.

With River’s help—Quin was too out of it now—Robin numbed up Greg’s leg again.  The next thing she had to do was to stitch up the holes.  Although Greg babbled incoherently, this didn’t seem to hurt him as much.  His eyes kept rolling wildly and Robin feared the worst.  When she finished stitching up the leg according to the book’s instructions, her stitches looking much worse than the illustrations, she wrapped the leg in gauze and bandages.  Once everything looked good, Robin got up and walked away from the small group.  She had to get away from them, at least for a moment.