Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (26 page)

Robin looked around and saw that Splatter and Charcoal were awake, and getting that crazy look in their eyes.  Charlie’s energy was rubbing off on them.

“Yeah, I guess we should,” Robin decided.  She didn’t want to worry about them getting away and getting lost.  “We just won’t go far.  We won’t go into areas that we don’t know.”

“How about the grocery store we met in?” April offered.

“Sounds good.  Quin?”  Robin got the man’s attention.  He had drugged himself again and was bleary-eyed, but at least he was conscious, unlike River.  “We’re leaving the kittens here while we go out.  Can you keep an eye on them?”

Quin paused for a moment, probably needing to compute the words,
and then gave them an ‘okay’ sign with his hand.  It would have to be good enough.  Robin and April left the bed frame fort and went through the bureau again.  This time they headed straight for the first floor.

As they neared the bottom, Robin raised her hand to her eyes, expecting the blinding white sunlight that usually came through the glass doors at this time of day, but there was none.  It was still brighter outside than in, but it was a lot dimmer out there than usual.  Robin went to the doors and looked up, instantly finding out why.  Steel grey clouds loomed overhead while black monsters rolled in from the west.  Robin had
wanted rain, and here it was coming.  She wasn’t careful what she wished for, so now it was biting her in the ass.  April stepped through the doors, ignoring the ominous weather.  When both girls were outside, they pulled on a pair of masks with filters.  One day, the outside world had been blotted out by a white cloud.  Since then, there had been a chemical smell mixing with the other bad odours so they wore the respirators whenever they went out.  Who knew what could be in the air?  Luckily, they had managed to block off the broken window by hauling some solid-backed shelving units in front of it.  Although a little bit of the chemical smell had still seeped in, it could have been a lot worse.

They moved down the streets at a brisk pace.  Every car was still standing where it had been the last time they were outside.  The handful of zombie corpses they had killed were still lying where they had fallen, rotting,
and turning into a putrid, stinking mush.  The same windows were broken, the same signs toppled over, the same this, the same that.  On the plus side, having everything remain the same meant they knew the route perfectly, knew exactly where to hide.  Robin didn’t like it.  In a city, things were supposed to change.  Even though buildings and street layouts remained the same, cars were always moving, people walked the streets, stores put up and took down sale signs and window displays, taggers made graffiti art, lights in the buildings came on and went off throughout the day and night, roads were torn up and put back together by construction crews.  The streetlights were the worst, always off, never changing.  They were just three dead, black eyes staring out into the desert of metal and glass.

The girls finally reached the grocery store.  They stepped in quickly before a zombie rounding the corner ahead could spot them.  The key was not to be seen.  If one spotted you, it was likely to make some sort of sound that would alert the others.  A few were quiet mutes, but usually while you were distracted by them, a screamer would show up.  Once the call was sounded, they came from everywhere: from under cars, in cars, out of shops and alleys, smashing themselves through windows, from off roofs and out of open manholes.  They were literally everywhere, just waiting for something to alert them.  Over the past week, the sound level in the city had dropped drastically.  Maybe only once or twice a day
, they would hear a gunshot go off, and even then, they couldn’t tell how far it was.  Sound echoed between the buildings like canyons, distorting it.  Everything sounded closer than it really was, because they had gotten so used to filtering out the normal sounds of the city.  More often, they would hear a screamer in the distance.  Maybe it had noticed another survivor, but more often than not, it was a dog, or even a bird.  The zombies attacked everything, pigeons included.  The survivors had learned to be silent while outdoors, but because of the winged pests, seagulls also being part of that group, the zombies continued to hang around the city, wandering in search of prey.  At least the birds drew them away from their hideouts.

Once inside the grocery store, they felt safe enough to pull their masks down.  The smell of the store assaulted Robin’s nose like a punch in the face.  The meat had gone first, and now all the fruit and vegetables had gone bad as well.  That section of the store looked like a compost heap.  Both the girls pulled the collars of their shirts up over their nose, tired of wearing the restrictive masks they put on when outside.  Here, things had changed.  When Robin had met April, the store was still relatively
well stocked.  Now, it was clear several small groups, or one large one, had raided the place.  The pickings had become a lot slimmer, but there was still food for them.  Using camping lights strapped to their heads to see, Robin and April went row-by-row fitting whatever they could into their bags.  They didn’t dare grab a shopping cart again, but both girls had brand new hockey bags from the sports section that they wore like backpacks, the solar lamps hanging from them to get charged.  Trying to balance out the want to take everything, with the need to take only what they could reasonably carry, was always a hard decision.

As Robin put a case of water into her bag, the only one she’d be able to carry if she hoped to grab other stuff, something toward the back of the store
slithered
.  Robin froze, glancing at April.  She was as stiff as a board; she had heard it too.  The sound came again.  It was as if something was being dragged.  Something soft.  Robin managed to figure out what it was before it rounded the end of the aisle, but not
who
it was.

Phil, the bus driver, dragged himself around the corner. 
Both his legs were now missing, his face was sunken and completely pale, and all his skin hung off him like an extra baggy sweat suit, but it was Phil all right.

Robin wanted to scream.  She wanted to shriek and run and pull her greasy hair out by the roots, but she did none of these things.  She should raise her gun and fire, or better yet, grab April’s sword and cut his head off, or at the very least grab an empty rack, and pull it down to block his way, but she did none of these things either.  Robin could only stare in complete horror.  Some part of her, a sick and twisted part she thought, had gotten used to the sight of the zombies.  She was used to the sunken or bulging eyes that were sometimes red, black, or even yellow, the shredded and burned skin which hung in flaps and folds, the pale, ghostly look, the coating of blood, the hanging guts and the protruding bones, but this was not that.  They were zombies, that’s just how they looked.  But this, this was Phil.  Phil was not a
zombie; he was a friendly bus driver who was going to help Robin get to the train station.  Robin
knew
Phil.

April, oblivious to what was going on in Robin’s head, calmly stepped over to Phil and drove the tip of her sword straight through his skull.  Robin responded to this by bending over and spewing her lunch.  The other girl ignored this, and went back to collecting food, allowing Robin to pull herself together.

“Are you okay?”  April asked in a voice barely above a whisper once Robin had begun gathering food again.

Robin nodded.  “I knew him.  He was the bus driver on that bus I mentioned.  I watched him get attacked, and I knew he became one of them, but…  I knew him.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll pass.  Seeing someone you know is the worst.  I didn’t say anything earlier, but four days ago, I spotted a friend of mine that had gone to the concert with me.  She was eating a live seagull.”  April was totally calm as she whispered this.

Robin looked at her, incredulously.  She had imagined what it would be like to see a friend or a relative like that, but never thought it would actually happen.  Everyone she knew was in the suburbs, or another city.  Robin had forgotten that April lived in the city, and hadn’t even thought about the people she must have been with at the concert.

“Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”  Robin decided that she had enough in her bag.

“You’re all right to move outside?”

“Yeah.”  Although Robin actually still felt kind of weak-kneed.

As the girls stepped outside, masks back over their faces, the first few drops of rain began to fall.  Robin looked up to check on the black clouds.  They were much closer, and thunder could be heard booming through the streets. 
What would the zombies make of that?
she briefly wondered.  Then she spotted the other black clouds, the unnatural ones.  They were coming up from the city, rising over the buildings.  Something was on fire and not very far off.  Robin had the urge to puke again, but held it down as she had that morning with Greg.  The two girls hurried quickly through the streets.

All around them the shrieks, groans, moans, and screams of zombies could be heard.  They were confused by the flashes of lightning and the crashing of the thunder.  Robin could imagine they were thinking bombs were going off, and they wanted to eat the people making the bombs.  It was working to their advantage though.  The zombies were coming out of their holes, but they were disoriented and barely noticed as April and Robin hurried past.

A bolt of lightning ripped apart the air overhead, striking the aerial of the tall building next to them.  Robin was sure she let out a short scream, but it was dwarfed by the explosion of thunder from overhead.  Then the rain came.  It poured down in buckets, a veritable wall of water.  The girls were instantly soaked right down to the bone.

“Come on!” April actually had to pull down her mask and shout to be heard over the pounding of the rain.  It didn’t matter how loud they were now, they could barely hear each other standing shoulder to shoulder.  They both took their masks off, figuring the water would be washing away any chemicals left in the air.

The streets were awash with rainwater.  Small rivers were forming along the street gutters, picking up the trash and sweeping it away.  What made it worse were the dead bodies getting carried by the torrents to the storm drains.  Several were lodging themselves there, blocking off the deluge’s only means of escape.  Zombies were wandering everywhere but they were of little to no threat.  They couldn’t hear and could barely see.  Many of the weaker and more uncoordinated of the corpses were getting knocked to the ground by the torrential downpour.

The girls pressed on, nearly as disoriented as the zombies.  A few
times, they had to stop and get their bearings, even turn around a few times.  For one scary minute, they had gotten separated, but managed to find one another again.

“We need to get to shelter!”  Robin yelled over the dim.  The rain wasn’t exactly cold, but it wasn’t exactly warm either.

“No!”  April yelled back.  “We’re almost there!”

Robin huffed.  She wanted to shake the water off herself, but it wouldn’t do any good; it would only be replaced instantly.  April moved on, forcing Robin to keep up or be left behind and risk another separation.

Robin suddenly heard something that wasn’t rain.  It was melodious.  Soon she picked out that it was a voice.

“Stop!”  Robin placed her hand on April’s back.  “Listen!”

Both girls cupped their hands over the tops of their ears, trying to keep the water from sluicing over them.  Robin began to pick out the words to a familiar song.

“My little brown birdie,

is hopping through the spring!

My little brown birdie,

Is gonna take wing!

Oh, my little brown birdie,

My sweet little birdie,

Why must this be only a fling?

Come back,

Come back,

Come back, my little birdie, come back!

Oh, come back!

Come back!

Come back little bird, come back!”

“This way.”  Robin grabbed April’s hand and led her toward the singing voice.  The song was
Come Back Birdie
, a lesser known song by Gathers Moss.  Her mother used to sing it to Robin when she was a little girl having nightmares.  This voice was unmistakably that of the song’s original singer, Quin Beharry.  The girls rounded a corner and nearly ran smack dab into the rockers who were huddling under an awning.

“Robin Paige!  My little birdie!  You came back!”  Quin threw his arms around her, lifted her off her feet, bag and all, and twirled her around once before setting her down again.  “And you brought the spring!”  He did the same to April.

“Why are you out here?”  Robin demanded.  They were supposed to stay inside when she and April went out to scavenge, unless they were coming to scavenge with them.

“Because of the fire.”  River pointed across the street.

Robin had forgotten about the smoke she saw earlier.  Squinting her eyes, she finally managed to focus beyond the sheets of rain.  The department store was ablaze.  Huge pillars of smoke rose up from the roof and windows, while orange licks of flame battled the rainwaters.

“How did this happen?” April shrieked.

Quin and River both just shrugged.  Robin turned to River and saw that he had something cradled in his arms; surely, it was the kittens.  Robin went to him and saw Splatter was all alone, soaking and curled in the crook of River’s elbow.