Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (3 page)

When everybody was finished with breakfast, the dishes were gathered up and placed in the sink.

“Whose turn is it to wash?” Mathias asked the group.

“Yours,” Abby answered him
,  “and it’s my turn to dry.”

“Damn.”  Mathias picked up a large, red bucket from next to the sink.  The cabin didn’t have running water, so to wash dishes
, they would fill the bucket with lake water, haul it up to the sink, and dump the water into the sink along with soap.

“I’ll help dry,” Tobias offered.

Everybody dispersed to their tasks.

***

“And that’s how you skin and prepare a rabbit,” Riley finished.  The rabbit now lay in pieces on the tarp before her.  Technically, she still wasn’t done.  She still needed to tan and stretch the fur for use, but they didn’t need to learn that now.  She used to do this kind of thing in the dirt, but she didn’t feel comfortable down there, so she had spread out a tarp on the deck.

“Gross,” Cender commented without emotion.  Riley kept reminding herself to call him Josh
as everybody else did.  Josh, Josh, Joshua Cender.  She was determined to think of him with that name.  “I guess I now know why surgery wanted you so badly.  You’re a little too good with that knife.”

“What do you do with the guts?” Danny wondered.

“Well, we can use them as compost if Abby and Tobias have found more worms.”  Using her gloved hands, Riley scooped up the guts and put them into a bucket next to her.  She had other buckets for the bones and meat of the rabbit.

“Are you going to tan the hide?” Misha asked from a fair distance away.  Riley wasn’t even aware he was there.

“I am.  Did you watch?”  Riley glanced briefly at him before returning to putting things into the buckets.

“I did, but I didn’t need to,” Misha told her.  “When I lived back in Russia, my dad would take me hunting from time to time. 
I never shot anything—never wanted to—but my dad usually made me do the skinning and gutting.”

Misha always spoke with a slight Russian accent, and when he got stressed or was
half-asleep, like that morning, he would slip into full Russian.  He had come to Canada to go to school.

“That’s good,” Riley nodded
,  “one less person to teach.”

“I was wondering if I could use the phone.”  Misha revealed his real reason for hanging around.

“Wouldn’t it be, like, late at night over there?” Danny wondered.

“I like to try different times.  Maybe someone will pick up this time.  So, can I?”  Misha turned his gaze back to Riley.  Riley always felt slightly uncomfortable when he looked at her.  Misha’s eyes were such a pale blue
that they were almost white.  Combined with his black, shaggy hair, and ghostly pale skin, as well as his ability just to appear when you weren’t paying attention, made him a bit creepy.

“Sure, why not,” Riley gave in.  “Josh, I assume you’ll want to try as well?”

“Please,” he smiled.

“All right, let’s round everybody up.”  Riley snapped the lids onto the buckets and stood up.  “Anybody that wants to try today is going to try now.”

Misha wandered off toward the stairs, perhaps to get Mathias from the lake’s edge.  Riley and Danny helped Josh get up on his feet and get his crutches under him.  On the Day, he had broken his leg and would be wearing a clunky cast for at least another week.  The cast had actually been put on by Abby and the crazy woman, Jessica, neither of whom knew how to do it.  Although Josh had talked them through it, he had still been somewhat drugged from the surgery he had undergone.  Riley was fairly certain the cast wasn’t put on properly, and that when it came off, Joshua Cender would have a slight, barely noticeable bend to his leg that would make it weaker than the other one.

Once he was up, they all split up to gather everyone together.

***

“Who wants to make the first phone call?”  Riley held a satellite phone in her hands.  Everybody had gathered around her on the deck, where the phone got the best reception.  Riley often wondered how long the phone would last before even the satellites no longer worked.

“Misha should go first; it was his idea,” Alec suggested.

“All right.  Here you go.”  Riley handed the skinny boy the large phone.  “Make it quick.”

Misha flipped up the aerial and dialled the number.  Everyone had at least one person they wanted to get into contact with, and so they had all learned to use the phone.  So far, Misha and Tobias had been the only ones to get through, probably because they were calling people the farthest away from the outbreak.  Misha though, had yet to connect with his family.  No one ever seemed to pick up the home phone, and twice now, he had called government agencies to try to help him.  They, of course, just told him they had bigger problems to deal with and hung up.  Today seemed to be no different.  Misha gave up and handed the phone back to Riley.  His face carried no expression.

Tobias took the phone next.  His family lived in Vancouver, and he had been able to get through to them the first time he tried.  They had seen the news and were so relieved to hear his voice.  Tobias convinced them to head to his aunt and uncle’s house situated in the Rockies; they would be safer there than in the city.  He hadn’t been able to get through since; the phone lines were probably jammed or even down.

All the others had been trying to contact people much closer.  Alec had a brother-in-law whom he lived with in Leighton and hadn’t seen since the morning of the Day.  Alec had gone out to run errands while his brother-in-law went to work in the mechanic’s shop that he owned.  The two of them lived and worked together most days, and so they were very close.  Alec’s sister had died during childbirth, the child as well, and so the two men had grown even closer.

Abby was also trying to contact someone in Leighton: her girlfriend.  Lauren had been at some makeup effects conference, and Abby hadn’t had time to try to reach her.  Abby also had family out in the prairies, but bad things had happened between them.  She called them once, and when one of her brothers picked up, she couldn’t bring herself to speak and disconnected the call.  She hadn’t tried again.

Josh had parents and a little sister living in Toronto.  Because Toronto was roughly only six hours by car south of Leighton, they got hit pretty hard, not long after Leighton had been.  The phone lines in Toronto, were as dead and as jammed as Leighton’s were.

Danny used the phone less than everyone
else did.  He tried a few numbers in Leighton, hoping to reach the foster family he had lived with, but he didn’t have high hopes.  He knew at least two of them had died and expected the worst for the others.  He wished he could call his online friends, the ones who lived in the United States, but he couldn’t remember any of their numbers.

Riley never tried the phone the way the others did.  Instead, she carried it around between noon and 1 p.m.  Her family knew the number and
they would reach her if they could.  It was part of their planning that, if they got separated, they would keep their phones on during that one hour of the day.  Riley was afraid to call them, just in case they were in some tense situation; she didn’t want the ringer distracting them or drawing zombies to them.

Mathias always made the most interesting calls.  After determining that Riley’s phone was untraceable, he began calling Keystone numbers.  He was trying to get information.  When they had been heading north after the Day, everyone in the group had been rounded up by Keystone security and brought to a prison.  They were told it was to keep them safe.  Well, they had learned that there was a split faction within Keystone, a group of people working against them.  The faction was small, but they had done two important things that the group knew of.  The first was committed by a woman named Chant
, who had warned the population via a radio broadcast about the zombies.  She had told everybody everything she knew, and warned them to get out of the city.  She had been killed for her efforts.  The second thing came from a man named James Brenner.  He had actually been the one to round up Riley, Mathias, Alec, and Danny, but he also tried to help them.  Well, in a small way he did.  He warned them that Keystone wanted Mathias dead.  They weren’t sure of the details, but it was probably because Mathias wanted to openly defect.  James also told them about the tiny rebel faction and about tracker bugs in Mathias’s Keystone weapons.  As far as they knew, James was still at the prison, trying to find a way to get everyone else in there, out.  Supposedly, Marble Keystone had released the zombie virus to create a new world order.  They were gathering up all the survivors they could find and moving them into places like the prison, and when things calmed down, those poor people would become the working slave force of this new world.  So far, Mathias had no luck finding this small faction.  The few times he had gotten through, he hung up quickly as they began to grill him, trying to find out who and where he was.

Mathias was trying one last number for the day.  The secretary who usually picked up had been the most accommodating and friendly so far.  They hoped to get more phone numbers out of her.  As he dialled, Riley heard a sound that didn’t belong.  She quickly placed a hand over Mathias’s, stopping him from completing the number.

“What-” Mathias stopped talking when Riley held a finger to her lips.  Everybody stood perfectly still and listened.

A mechanical buzz was getting louder and louder.  It wasn’t coming from the greenhouse either, which was the only thing using electrical power for miles around.  It dawned on Alec first what it was and he looked to the sky.  Soon, everybody was looking up, trying to spot the plane.

“There!”  Danny saw it first and pointed it out.

The plane, which was small, was coming toward them.  It buzzed by, fairly low, and began to bank toward the lake.  Riley recognized the plane as being a two-seater Osprey, which was a plane with water landing capabilities.

“It’s landing on the lake!” Riley cried out.  Only her family and close friends of the family knew of this cabin’s existence, and someone would only be out here if they were coming to it.

Riley dashed off the deck and took off running toward the lake.  If the plane
were truly landing, it would have to be someone she knew.  Someone else had survived.

She skidded to a halt on the sand and searched the sky again.  There it was, coming in low over the trees.  It was definitely landing.  Riley couldn’t keep the smile off her face.  Soon she would find out who the pilot was, and it looked like there may be a passenger as well.

“Riley?” Mathias called out from the tree line.  “RILEY!”

Still smiling, Riley turned to find out what the panic in his voice was for.  Then she saw the massive polar bear barrelling toward her.

2:

They had been sitting in the blasted bus for a week now.  River Webster was fucking sick of it.  Mind you, he had spent far more time than that on buses in the past, but he had been young then.  Damned young.  Now he was old.  Too old to be spending a week on a bus.  At least that was what he kept grumbling to himself.  Really, he just wanted another bump and they didn’t have anything left.  He and Quin had snorted it all.  River had quit the shit, had been clean for the last decade, but when all hell broke out at that fucking concert, he said “fuck it”
, and asked Quin to share his stash.  Being sober in this nightmare was too much.  There was still a bit of booze in the bus, but not a lot.  And the way Greg was hammering it back, that would be gone by the end of the day.

Greg hadn’t been as keen as River and Quin to do the concert.  He had said he saw a bunch of crows sitting on the balcony railing of their hotel room, which was a bad omen, and that they should back out.  Quin had told him he was a fucking idiot and River concurred.  Looks like those shit-eating crows had a point.

River Webster was the lead guitarist of a band called Gathers Moss.  His band mates were Gregory Ireland, the drummer extraordinaire, lead singer, Quincy Beharry, better known as Quin, and rhythm guitarist, Zachary Matson, son of the late and great Mitchell Matson.  Mitch had gotten a tumour next to his spine about ten years ago, which was when River quit drugs, booze, cigarettes, and random women in one terrible go.  The cigarette habit returned less than a year later, his estranged wife still wasn’t coming back, and he would accept a night cap if offered, but he stayed off the drugs for as long as he could.  Anyway, the band stopped playing when Mitch got sick; he was too weak to play.  They still got together to jam on his better days and spent the holidays together, but it wasn’t the same.  It could never be the same, not without half a million fans screaming for them.  Just before Mitch finally bit the bullet about a year back, he told the guys he wanted them to play again.  He wanted them to get back on the stage with his son, Zack, playing in his place.  Zack was good.  He grew up playing his dad’s guitar, his dad’s notes.  He could probably play them in his sleep.  After some test sessions, and talking to some managerial people, they decided to do at least one concert.  They would see how it went and would take it from there.

In honour of Mitch, the concert they had decided upon
, was Keystone’s charity concert for spinal research.  Not only was it a charity directly related to what had happened to Mitch, but all the guys had lived and met in Leighton, so it would be nice for their comeback to be there.  They had also arranged for it to be a secret, which was a massive challenge.  A handful of homegrown, up-and-coming bands would start things off, and then a few big bands would get things really going.  During the last song, Gathers Moss would sneak up on stage, and as soon as the song finished, they would launch into one of their own.  They were going to play only three, maybe four songs, and then leave in a hurry.