Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (19 page)

“You’re welcome.  I’m sure you would have done the same.”  Alec made her right herself, knowing it was painful for her to bend over.

“That was a hell of a shot,” Mathias complimented him.  He probably didn’t even see the angle at which he took it.  “How’d you do that?”

“Luck.”  Alec’s face flushed.  “Utter luck.”

“Riley!” an unknown voice shouted.  “Riley, are you all right?”  The little plane had landed and the canopy opened, although the engine was still running.  A man in the plane was shouting toward the shore.

“Shawn!”  Riley raised her left arm high above her head to wave to the pilot.  “I’m okay!”  The smile on her face was broader and brighter than Misha thought it could ever be.  He wondered how she knew the man.

The plane headed for the same flattened stretch of sand that their own plane had used to get out of the water.  As Shawn got close to the shore, he cut the engine, plunging the forest into a painful silence.  Mathias, Tobias, and Misha all waded into the shallow water to pull the plane in.  It was an interesting plane.  Unlike the one they had come in, it didn’t have floats; its belly just sat on the water like the hull of a boat.  As Misha stepped up next to the passenger seat, he finally noticed the passenger in it.  It was a pure white Siberian husky with one blue eye and one green.  It barked at Misha as he approached.

“Sorry, she’s not too fond of strangers.”  Shawn leaned over and tapped the dog on the muzzle.  “Hush, Milly.  No bark.”

They got the plane to shore, where the others helped to pull it onto the soft sand.  After unstrapping, Shawn hopped out and helped pull, but Milly stayed seated, firmly buckled in by a harness.

“Riley!”  As soon as the business with the plane was done, Shawn rushed over to Riley and wrapped his arms around her.  Despite the clear discomfort, Riley gave him a bear hug back.

“Shawn, I’m so glad to see you.”  Riley’s eyes glittered with tears at the corners.  Misha felt weird seeing her like that.  Riley was normally the cold pillar of strength who ordered everybody else around.  He turned away from the two and began to unbuckle Milly.  She probably didn’t like being stuck in the plane.  As he did, he noticed that she was missing a leg.  Instead of having two front legs, she had just one; nothing came out of the second shoulder.  The husky hopped out and shook her fur.  Rifle and Shoes trotted over, and the three began to sniff each other all over.  For a Siberian, Milly was rather small.  Rifle all but towered over her, although she was still bigger than Shoes.

Misha figured the dogs were okay and looked back at the group.  They all seemed to be talking at once, telling their stories, and talking about the polar bear some more.  Shawn was clearly related to Riley; Misha could see it in the similarity of their face and their same shade of brown hair.  He was short like her too, not as short, but under average.  The two of them had the same lean, tanned, and muscled bodies that came from a lot of exercise and hard, outdoor work.  Riley may have worked as a doctor in an ER, but she was a survivalist first.  Just like the rest of her off-kilter-but-in-the-end-right family.

“Why don’t we move inside, or at least, up on the deck?” Misha spoke loudly to be heard above the rest.  “The big guy might not be the only one in the area, and his carcass might bring in more.”

The others stopped talking for a moment and looked at the big polar bear.  They agreed that Misha had a point about there being more and headed back toward the cabin.

Misha was afraid of the big bears, no doubt about that, but he was more afraid of zombies.  Despite what he knew of the terrain around here, and how far they were from the outbreak, he didn’t like standing in the open for too long.

“Milly!” Shawn called, patting his leg.  The pretty little husky trotted obediently to Shawn’s side, her missing leg not hindering her movements in the slightest.  Misha noted that the man hadn’t thanked him for letting his dog out.

“Hi, Milly!”  Riley stopped walking to kneel down and rub the dog’s face.  Her tail wagged furiously back and forth from the attention.  “What’s she doing here?  What happened to the others?”

“Let’s get up to the deck, and I’ll tell you everything.”  Shawn waved them all forward again, toward the steps.

After all the work it took to get Alec down the steps, they now had to get him back up.  At least Mathias helped this time.  He was clearly the strongest out of all of them, and the best suited to hauling Alec and his chair around.  Shawn helped out as well, complimenting Alec on both his rifle and his shot.  The man had seemed friendly enough so far, but Misha had instantly disliked him.  Something about the male Bishop made him feel uneasy.  Maybe it was the way he treated Milly, and how she was just a thing that was around, that Misha disliked.

Misha hadn’t been much of a dog person before the Day—he never gave them two thoughts—but now he much preferred their company over that of people.  The dogs had never tried to harm him, and he had only heard stories of them doing good, like the husky named Tugg that Danny told him about.  Tugg had saved the boy’s life, possibly even sacrificing his own in the process.  On the opposite hand, he was also told stories about people like Jessica.  She had killed two men, and had tried to kill more.  The first man she had killed was apparently named B, and he had shot at Tobias and had previously shot a police officer in the face.  Then there were the Keystone mercenaries, trying to kill Mathias, killing his friend East, dragging people out of their homes and shooting them if they didn’t co-operate.  Misha was nearly gunned down when he ran away from one of them.  He had gotten lucky and managed to hide, while his pursuer ran into a zombie and became lunch.  Other mercs had caught up with Misha later, and they weren’t very hospitable either.  He was grabbed in his sleep, beaten up, and handcuffed to the inside of a truck with the lights turned off.  Then, he was locked up in a cell in a prison.  If he hadn’t met Tobias, Joshua, and Abby when he did, he and Rifle would likely still be locked up.  Or dead.

Once everybody was up on the deck and accounted for, dogs included, Tobias turned the crank to raise the stairs.  Misha felt relieved once they were up.

The group headed to a corner of the deck where benches were built along the two sides.  Between them, an oil drum had been sealed into the deck with some cement.  Riley had explained earlier that it was a fire
pit, which they used for burning trash, or for late night fires under the stars.  Misha noticed the sigh of almost-pleasure escape from Riley as she sat down holding her ribs.  Mathias, Danny, and Joshua, sat on the bench with her, while Tobias, Abby, and Shawn, sat on the other.  Alec was fine sitting in his wheelchair, which meant that Misha was free to take that last spot on the bench.  He didn’t want to be next to Shawn however, and opted to sit on the deck boards with Shoes.  Milly wandered about the deck, sniffing this and that while Rifle followed her around.

“So,” Riley turned to her younger brother.  Although yet to be confirmed, it was clear who he was.  “Spill.”

“Well, there’s not much.  Most of it’s a haze really.”  Shawn seemed perfectly comfortable with everybody looking at him.  “When the outbreak happened, we were heading to Connor’s place.  I assume you know what happened there?”

Riley nodded curtly.  Everyone present knew what had happened there.  Connor, Riley’s older brother, had killed himself.  Mathias was the only one who had seen the body, but he said Connor had done it
in a quick way.  Painless, if there was such a thing.

“Because we heard the news report, Dad started driving up the back roads, and we didn’t get there until midnight.  Anyway, we were trying to decide what to do after that.  Mom was very distraught, coming apart at the seams, but Dad seemed okay.  He acted
as if Connor was a stranger, which was, I guess, his way of dealing with it.  I didn’t know what to think.  I don’t know what we would have done, but Cameron called then.  Do they know who Cameron is?”

“She’s our sister,” Riley told the group.  Her voice was holding firm, keeping back the emotions the others knew she felt for her family.

“Well, Cameron called.  Apparently, Sudbury got hit not long after Leighton.  Understandable really, they’re not that far apart and I know truckers are often shipping things between them.  She called and said she was trapped.  Got stuck in some guy’s barn loft with no weapons, just her cell phone.”

“Why was she in a barn?” Danny asked.

“Cameron’s a veterinarian,” Riley told him.  “She works mostly on house pets, but occasionally the large animal vets call her in to assist with things.  She could have been there for a lot of reasons.”

“Anyway, she gets through to Dad and begs him to come help.  Dad doesn’t hesitate to say yes, that we’ll be on our way.”

“He must have been more broken up about Connor than he seemed.”  A single tear welled up in Riley’s eye, but she quickly brushed it away.

Shawn nodded.  “Yeah.  After that, we wrote you the note and headed back out.  Getting to Cameron was the easy part.  We had to drive all night, after what was already a long ride, but by switching drivers every few hours so we could all get some sleep, and being quick when we stopped for gas, we made it.  We reached the barn, blasted the fuck out of the zombies, and got Cameron down.  Problem was
that the sound of the gunfire drew more of the zombie bastards.  We got cut off from the car, so Cameron saddled up some of the horses that had survived in the barn, and we took off through the fields.  We figured we should be safe heading through fields and off road and such.  We were sort of right, but in the end, wrong.  The problem was we didn’t know what was between us and where we wanted to go.  We ended up in a mine quarry.  Looked empty enough, but it wasn’t.  The sound of the horses’ damned hooves drew them all straight to us.  As we tried to escape, Dad… Dad he…” for the first time Shawn’s composure broke slightly.  “He slowed them down for us so that we could get away.”

“You mean…?”  Riley didn’t need to finish her question because everybody knew the answer; Riley’s dad was dead.

Shawn nodded and pulled himself together again.  “As we were getting out of the quarry, this weird, white truck showed up.”

Misha felt a chill run down his spine.

“Front end look like a Hummer?” Riley asked the whole question this time, even though she probably knew the answer to it too.

“Yup.  I guess we were closer to Leighton than I thought we were, probably somewhere not far north of North Bay, because the guys driving the beast were mercenaries from Marble Keystone.  If you know what the truck looked like, then I guess you ran into them and already knew that.  Anyway, they told us to get into the truck, and we said hell no.  Then they demanded we get into the truck.  One of them snuck up on Cameron and pulled her down off her horse.  Mom was flipping out.  She had seen Connor’s body not twenty-four hours ago, and Dad had just died.  She was screaming, telling them to let go of her baby.  They tried to talk to her, but I don’t think Mom was listening.  She open fired on them, which caused them to fire back.”

“Oh God…”  Riley put a hand over her mouth.

“I don’t actually know what happened.  My horse was already spooked because of the attack in the quarry, and it bolted with me still on its back.  I tried to get it turned around, but not before it ran under a low branch.  Next thing I knew, I was waking up in the middle of the woods, alone, my head throbbing, and it was later in the day.  The horse was gone
, so I walked back to where I last saw Mom and Cameron.”

“Considering how close you must have been to the quarry, I’m surprised you weren’t eaten while you were unconscious,” Mathias commented.  Misha wondered if it was an innocent comment, or if maybe he wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Shawn.

“So am I.  When I got back to where the truck had been, they were gone.  Mom’s horse was there, shot dead.  There was no blood trail and no body, so I figure Mom was still alive, and that they took her and Cameron.  I’m almost certain Cameron’s okay.  When the firing started, she had already been dragged behind most of the mercenaries.”

Riley didn’t say anything.  She looked at the fireless fire pit, thinking.  Misha couldn’t comprehend what she might be thinking about, or how she was feeling.

“After that,” Shawn continued, “I tried to get back home.  I don’t know why I didn’t head for Connor’s first.  I guess I just really wanted to be back home.  I got lucky and happened across Cameron’s horse.  It had run off down the road and was eating some grass at the edges.  I rode until the thing was exhausted, then took all its gear off and set it loose.  I hot wired a car next and drove the rest of the way.  I can’t even remember where I stopped for gas or how I survived getting it, and sleeping in the car.  When I finally got home is when I picked up Milly.”

Milly looked over at the sound of her name,
and then went back to sniffing around the deck.

“What about the rest of the dogs?” Riley asked.

“I think Joseph came and took them, the swine,” Shawn glowered.

“Who’s Joseph?” Alec asked for those not in the know.

“He lived not too far from my parents,” Riley explained.  “I don’t know if you remember me telling you guys, but my parents have owned and bred sled dogs for the last eight years or so.  Joseph was a competing sled dog breeder, who wasn’t doing nearly as well.  He was always offering to buy some of my parents’ dogs but they said no.  They didn’t like the way he treated the ones he had.”