Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) (37 page)

“Sure, we’ll go.  I thought of some other places we might like to visit first, however.  What does she get in return?”

“The safety of the others.  We get to keep her, but the others get to leave in the truck.  And I can think of a place or two that I’d like to see before going as well.”  His mom’s house for one.

Hank nodded sagely, as if this made perfect sense to him.  Orson sensed Hank was keeping something from him, but what that was
, he couldn’t tell.  He suddenly saw Hank as less of a friend, and more of a weary ally.  Things were starting to go downhill.  Orson wasn’t going to let that happen.  He was going to make sure everything went perfectly, that everything went his way.

He ran over a zombie in a prostitute’s dress.

15:

Lauren Sanford – Day 15

Lauren Sanford could almost see, smell, and even taste the club around her.  The music pumped into her head, causing it to bob along involuntarily.  In this club, the lights were the kind that strobed, providing only brief glimpses of the dancing bodies around her.  Men and women, all of them moving to the music, dancing in their own little worlds.  Despite the dense crowd, not one of them touched Lauren.  She had her own little dancing bubble.  Boom, boom-boom, boom, went the bass.  Boom, boom-boom, boom.  Abby was in the club with Lauren, even though she hated clubs.  She was dancing in front of Lauren, totally carefree, blissfully happy, perfectly in time with the music.  Boom, boom-boom, boom.  Even between the strobes, when the club was dark, Lauren could see her pixie face.  Lauren wanted to reach out, to touch her, but she knew she could not.  She would have to be content with watching, an invisible wall between them.  Boom, boom-boom, boom. 
Then a hand fell on Lauren’s shoulder.

Lauren gasped, her eyes flying open, the club shattering.  It was replaced by the Pummel Motel’s parking lot, with its buses and trucks and cars.  She pulled the headphones off her ears and turned to look up at who had disturbed her.  It was Private Winchester.  It was always Private Winchester.

“It’s been half an hour,” he told her.

Lauren sighed and got up from her nook against the almost empty vending machine.  She picked up the iPod and turned it off.  It belonged to one of her charges, and she had borrowed it.  Most of the songs, an odd mix of country and metal, she didn’t like, but there were some dance songs she could get into.  Every now and
then, she just needed a moment to herself, a moment to forget about what was going on.  Then Private Winchester would show up and bring her back to reality.  He couldn’t be blamed though; Lauren had instructed him when to show up.  He also watched the kids for her while she was off.

“Thanks, Winchester.”  She headed for the stairs that would take her back up to her room.

“Any time, Ms. Sanford.”  He gave her a curt nod.

“And at any time you can start calling me Lauren.”  She turned back to him, exasperated.  For the past two
weeks, he had been calling her Ms. Sanford, and for the past two weeks, she had been telling him to call her Lauren.

Winchester just smiled, knowing he had annoyed her.  Lauren rolled her eyes at him and headed up the steps.

On the second floor, she held the railing as she walked down to rooms 28 and 29, looking out over the parking lot some more.  Everything was sodden and gleamed with a wet shine from the torrential downpour they had yesterday and most of last night.  All around the edges of the lot were the cars, buses, and trucks in which they had all arrived, as well as various scraps of everything else they could use to make a barricade: pieces of chicken wire, plywood, corrugated metal, spare tires, a downed tree, milk crates, empty vending machines, etc.  Soon, Lauren was going to lose her corner.  The vending machine would finally be emptied of its snacks and moved to become part of the wall, which spanned all three sides of the parking lot and continued around behind the motel, where it met up with the fence surrounding the pool back there.  The pool was never used for swimming.  They were drinking the pool water, using tablets and filters the soldiers had to filter out the chlorine and other stuff that had fallen into it.  They made the water taste strange.

Outside the barrier, zombies moaned and groaned.

Lauren went into room 28 and found all of its occupants sitting there with all of the occupants from room 29 next door.  More children had been brought in over the past two weeks, and all of those without parents came to Lauren.  She had no idea how it happened, but she had become the caretaker of all orphans.  The second room was given to them when an RV full of day-care children was found in the woods.  Apparently, another woman had taken them there from the day-care, but then had gotten sick.  Knowing what would happen, she had left the children.  Thankfully, the soldiers found them while out looking for rations.  Lauren slept in room 28 with all the youngest children, while Jon, her most helpful of helpers, stayed in room 29 with the older kids.  Right now, however, they were all crammed into one room.  Out of the mass ran Claire, who wrapped her arms around Lauren’s waist.  All of the kids had bonded with her to some degree, but Claire had certainly become the most attached.

“I thought you weren’t going to make it,” she said into Lauren’s shirt.

“You know I’m always here for this.”  Lauren detached Claire and made her way over to Peter’s makeshift crib.  The little boy, still the youngest of all the kids, was taking a nap.  Lauren gently picked him up, and carried him to the middle of the room, returning the iPod to its owner as she passed by her.  As Lauren sat down, all the kids took their positions.  Jon closed the door and sat in front of it, placing his hands over his ears.  All the kids did the same.  Some of the youngest had been given earmuffs that had been found, which they now put on.  The ear covering wasn’t necessary, but it helped the kids keep slightly calmer.  Lauren carefully put Peter on her lap and gently placed her hands over his ears; she didn’t need to cover her own.

Looking at her watch, Lauren counted down.  When she hit one, a wailing siren started up in the distance.  Many kids scrunched their eyes shut, clamping their hands down harder, not wanting to hear.  It wasn’t very close, so it wasn’t that loud, but knowing what it meant frightened them all.  Zombies had a tendency to gather outside the barricade, threatening to smash it down.  The only solution they had was to send some soldiers far away each day to crank a hand siren.  They would run the thing for an hour or more, drawing all the zombies in the area toward them.  It was incredibly dangerous, and every now and then, one of them wouldn’t come back.

Some of the kids cried, but they did so silently.  That was the most important part: for everyone in the motel to be silent.  Although the siren basically drowned out any noise they made, they wanted to make sure there was absolutely no reason for the zombies to stay.  Even after the siren stopped, they had to remain silent for a while, to make sure none of the slow ones was still around.  Lauren always feared that one day the siren would be cut short; that those who were out there, risking their lives for the others, would be overcome by the wave of dead flesh.

Lauren looked around the room while she waited.  She had become very good at waiting.  In a place like this, patience was a must-have.  Jon looked calm as he sat by the door, his mouth moving as he counted the seconds.  Claire was at her side, one ear pressed against Lauren’s upper arm so that she had a free hand to hold onto her.  Peter continued to sleep in her lap, but he would probably wake up before it was over.  Lauren wasn’t concerned about that; he never cried.  That probably meant that something was wrong, but the doctors in the motel couldn’t find anything.  Leelo sat in a cluster of older kids, near Jon.  She looked like she could fall asleep at any moment.  Jason was tapping his foot, probably listening to music in his head as he stared at the ceiling.  Lauren had learned other kids’ names as well, like Mike,
Lisa, and Dakota.  She hadn’t learned them all, not yet, but she was getting there.  Abby should have been there with her.  She would have learned all the kids’ names by now as well as their likes and dislikes, interests and hobbies.  Abby had always been a lot better with kids than Lauren had.

She glanced into the corner where Mary sat.  The woman had begun to come out of her stupor, but
she was still in a fog most of the time.  She had her hands placed lightly over her ears, one of them still holding the bear’s arm.  Mouthing the words to a nursery rhyme she sometimes repeated over and over, she rocked gently back and forth.  Back and forth.  Next to her was Dakota, one of the kids who had come in the day-care RV.  She was memorable because of the big cowboy hat she always wore.  Apparently, it had belonged to the man who owned the RV.  He had given the motor home to the day-care woman so that she could drive them to safety, and given Dakota the hat in the process.  All the kids seemed to admire both him and the day-care woman, saying they were superheroes.  Lauren figured they were, in a way.  Dakota was one of the few who didn’t cover her ears.  One of her small hands rested on Mary’s knee while she looked up at the broken woman.  Her other hand absently stroked the hair of the little girl next to her.  Dakota had the maturity of someone much older than herself.

The siren went on and on and on.  It was the worst sound that Lauren had ever heard, but she willed it to continue.  Not enough time had passed yet for it to stop.  Wailing and wailing it went, drawing the hordes toward it.  Lauren had dreams about that sound.  She dreamt that she was the one cranking the handle, and the zombies were coming for her.  When there were too many, she stopped cranking, but the sound continued, and more and more zombies poured forward.  They built up under the platform she stood upon, surrounding it, rising higher.  And when Lauren looked down at the faces of the zombies, they were all faces she knew.  They
were people she worked with, or people she saw walking through her apartment building.  Often it was her parents, her friends, the children she now supervised, and others from the motel.  And Abby.  Always, Abby was there.  It was always her, rising up the fastest, gripping Lauren’s leg and pulling her down into the swarm.  Lauren always awoke from these dreams crying.

On and on the siren wailed.

***

Lauren managed to find the last child she needed to gather behind the motel.  She was playing jacks with some other girls.  The siren had stopped hours ago, and life had returned to as normal as it got at the Pummel Motel.  For some kids, that meant doctor’s appointments.  None of the kids liked the frequency with which they had to see the doctors here, but it was a necessary precaution.  Everyone had to visit the doctors every few days.  Lauren had already had three check-ups during the past two weeks.  The huddle of seven children that Lauren had gathered groaned and moaned the whole way there.  If people didn’t know better, they might have thought the kids were zombies.  The shuffling feet didn’t help.

Claire had disappeared the moment the doctors were mentioned.  She hated them more than any of the other kids.  It turned out that Claire had been in a pool while her family and friends were torn apart around her.  The doctors were very concerned about her carrying the infection, considering her a high risk.  She had spent three days in quarantine, being poked and prodded.  Lauren and Jon tried to visit as often as they could, talking to her through the door, but it did little to make her feel better about the doctors.  Those first few days had been the worst.  A few times, a gunshot would ring out from within the barrier, because someone who was brought in happened to be infected and turned.  They finally learned how to identify infected blood under a microscope they found, and that’s why everyone needed to get blood drawn all the time.  It was terrible when someone was found with the contagion, because they had to be thrown out of the motel, usually kicking, screaming, and condemning them all to hell.  Luckily, none of the kids had been infected so far, including Claire, which truly was amazing once Lauren heard the whole story.

The doctors had been set up in five rooms: one for them to sleep in, and four others as treatment rooms.  Because the motel survivors consisted mostly of refugees from the hospital, there were quite a few doctors.  They were needed as well.  People were getting injured all the time, getting sick, eating things they shouldn’t, having panic attacks and stress-related breakdowns.  There were also those who had been at the hospital in the first place for various injuries and illnesses.

Lauren ushered the group of kids into the examination room.  They had used duct tape to attach bed sheets to the ceiling and make two small private sections in the back half of the room.  With the bathroom, that made three private examination rooms and one larger main room.  The main room was used for waiting and drawing blood.  The three other motel rooms the doctors had control over were used for patients who needed more constant care, supervision, or even quarantining.  This happened more than Lauren expected it to.  The doctors had so few pieces of equipment and tools to work with; they couldn’t always tell what was wrong with someone and erred on the side of caution.  So far, no surgeries had been performed, and everyone kept their fingers and toes crossed that one wouldn’t be needed for a long time.  The kids sat in an odd collection of chairs and waited for a doctor to become free.  Today it was Haily Guiles.  Lauren was glad, because the kids liked her more than the other doctors.  They said her needles hurt less.  Lauren hadn’t personally had her yet, so she couldn’t say one way or the other.