Defensive Instinct (Survival Instinct Book 4) (3 page)

“Just a little farther. Just a little farther,” Wycheck kept whispering to himself, half the time so quietly that nothing came out. He dragged his right leg painfully behind him. He had escaped the zombies, but at what cost? His weapons were gone, his supplies were gone, his ribs were in all probability broken, and his leg definitely was. Every step was agony, but to stay still was to die. He knew there were living people around here somewhere. Not only had he seen evidence of it, but the soft white smoke of a cook fire drifted lazily up in the distance. Someone had to be there; he just had to reach it.

It had been a stupid idea to come out here by himself, but he just had to get away on his own.  Jasmine had been harassing him again, insisting that they were meant for one another. Wycheck knew differently, seeing as how he couldn’t stand to be near her for more than a few minutes at a time. He hadn’t even told Evans where he was going, or even that he
was
going. Evans would have sent out a search party, or maybe he had the whole group looking. Wycheck just had to survive until they found him. Could be that the smoke was theirs. It wasn’t impossible.

“Just a little farther. Just a little farther.”

It felt like the smoke wasn’t getting any closer. Hauling his broken body forward a few inches at a time was getting him nowhere. There was no other option. He couldn’t call out for help: the zombies could be close. There was nothing he could see that could assist in transporting him, nothing with wheels that he could move on his own. Stumble-step, drag. Stumble-step, drag. It was the only way forward.

Sweat poured off his body, soaking his already blood-soaked clothing. He fought and struggled for every motion, every forward movement. He was going to survive this. After everything he had been through, all the death and pain, all the suffering, he was going to survive. Nothing was going to break him.

Wycheck didn’t get to hear the crack of the rifle or feel the sting of the bullet before it shut him down forever.

“Come on, Abby, it’s time to get up.”

Abby groaned and rolled over, burying herself deeper beneath the warm blankets of her bed.

“Up!”

The blankets were ripped away, leaving Abby exposed to a cool draft. She gasped, her eyes cracking open while her body reflexively curled tighter. Lauren stood at the end of the bed, a cheeky smile on her face as she held the bundle of blankets.

“Can’t I take the day off?” Abby sighed as she sat up.

“No can do, Poker-roo.” Lauren dropped the bedding and proceeded to pick out clothes for Abby to wear.

“You’re very chipper this morning.” Abby slid off the bed and began her morning stretching routine on the floor.

“Not all of us can wake up on the wrong side of the bed. I’ll start breakfast.” Lauren disappeared from the room.

Abby’s bladder became insistent before she was done with her workout. Taking a break, she gathered up her clothes and left their bedroom. After relieving herself and brushing her teeth, Abby finished her routine on the tiles, skipping only one exercise that required more space than the bathroom allowed. She then showered, towel dried her thin, sandy hair, and quickly got dressed.

“Claire and Peter already up?” Abby commented on their open doors as she carried her pyjamas back to her bedroom.

“I think Claire ended up spending the night with the farmers top side; her bed doesn’t look like it’s been slept in.”

“Again? Do you think it’s because she likes farming, or do you think a boy is involved?”

“I think she just likes farming and being outside,” Lauren answered with a shrug. “She hasn’t mentioned a boy to me, and she’s not acting like she’s in love or anything.”

“And Peter? Where’s he off to this morning?”

“He left a note about going to the computer lab, but it didn’t say why. Maybe we can ask him when we get there.” Lauren served up their breakfast, which had been made from the rations delivered to their door earlier. “What are we working on today?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Maybe this time pick a movie that I’ve seen. I’m more helpful with those.”

“Name one.”

While finishing their meal, Abby and Lauren listed off several movies to one another, picking a good one that they had both watched back before the Day. When the food was gone and the dishes were cleaned and put away, they left their apartment-like home. Walking across the blue floor, they held hands as they followed the dark grey arrows painted on the pale yellow walls of the underground building known as the Black Box. The arrows took them down a staircase and into the computer lab, which had originally been much bigger. The directions were formerly indicated by the gold arrows, but the computers weren’t as useful as they had been before and so were downgraded to a smaller space. Several terminals lined the walls of the room, with fewer than a handful of people seated at them. In a back corner sat Peter.

“You’re up early,” Abby commented as she and Lauren walked over to him.

“Woke up, couldn’t fall back asleep,” he answered, more absorbed in what was on the screen than in the women standing behind him.

“What are you up to?” Lauren asked.

“Studying.”

“Studying what?” Abby was looking at the screen but couldn’t figure it out. Several formulas were spread across it, and half the words between them confused her.

“Math,” Peter replied. He had never been one for talking. When Lauren had first taken charge of him, there had been concern because he was a baby who virtually never cried. Now, he was an eleven year old looking at complex formulas that Abby could barely recognize. And she had a near perfect memory and used to read science books.

“Dr. Guptar give you this?” Lauren asked.

Peter nodded.

“Well, we’re about to start our recording. We won’t bother you, will we?”

The gangly, wild-haired boy shook his head.

Abby and Lauren left him alone to go to their own computer across the room. They had in essence claimed ownership of one of the terminals by the mere fact of being down there just about every day. Lauren sat before the keyboard and booted up the system, while Abby took the seat beside her and hooked a microphone over her ear, adjusting it in front of her mouth.

“I’m glad Dr. Guptar is encouraging Peter,” Lauren spoke quietly before they began. Dr. Guptar was one of the computer scientists who already lived in the Black Box before they had arrived: a brilliant man who found himself more useless than not. Teaching Peter kept him occupied most days now. “Could you imagine if we were still trying to teach him math with the other kids?”

“He’d be teaching us at this point. And probably getting frustrated.”

“I sometimes wonder if he’ll be the next Einstein. Or Hawking.”

Abby lifted a shoulder. “Could be. Or he could get bored and move on to something else.”

“I like to dream that he’ll be the one to fix all of this. Make the Earth normal again.”

“You know as well as I do that that’s impossible.”

“Like I said, I dream. And I think we can get close to normal again. Our population is a hell of a lot lower than before, and we have to treat death differently, but we could get close.”

“We should get started,” Abby said, gesturing to the computer. Lauren was right that humanity could probably get really close to what it had been before, but Abby didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t believe it was something that could happen in her lifetime, and was resigned to accepting the world as it was.

“Okay, we’re recording. Go.”

Abby started to recite. Having grown up with something like an eidetic memory, she could remember every book she had ever read and every movie she had ever watched. Books and movies were being found all the time and added to the massive basement library, but inevitably some would be lost forever. Fires, nature, and destructive humans were whittling away their history. Abby, with Lauren’s help, had made it her personal mission to preserve what she could. Although unable to remember every word, Abby could recall all the scenes and some exact sentences from the books she had read; the same was true of TV shows and movies she had seen. While dialog was simple, Abby didn’t have the imagination nor the writing skills to transfer the images to page, so that’s where Lauren came in. She was more creative, better at describing things. While Abby recited, the computer recording her voice, Lauren would take notes. Afterward, they would work together to write a sort of script for the film or narrative for the book, and at the end, they would write facts about it and the people involved in its original creation. Before the Day, before the zombies came, both Lauren and Abby had worked on a television show and had a lot of experience with scripts so they were easier. The two of them felt it was the least they could do for those who were no longer around.

With her eyes closed, Abby spoke, diving deep into her memories of the movie, which allowed her to push back the memories of death.

***

“Have you heard the news yet?” Winchester plopped down into a nearby chair that rolled a few feet before stopping.

“What news?” Abby asked. She and Lauren had finished the initial recording and were now working on a proper script. The recording would be saved to a hard drive, but once the script was done, they would print it, bind it—often using something simple like string—and then store it in the library.

“I heard Riley will be coming to visit. She’s got some patients who need scanning or something.”

“Will Hope be coming with her?” Lauren asked.

Abby couldn’t help but notice Peter in the corner, tilting his head slightly in their direction.

“Don’t know, the message didn’t say.”

Peter’s head resumed its studious position. Abby felt a bit bad. All of Peter’s closest friends had moved to the container yard, and he hadn’t really been able to make new ones. They came to visit from time to time, or Lauren and Abby would take him there, but it wasn’t the same as getting to play with them every day like he used to. Despite his obviously superior mind when it came to math, the kids at the container yard still treated him the same: as one of them. Some days Abby felt it was her fault for separating Peter from his friends, that she should have moved to the container yard with the others. But she couldn’t. So much had happened, and she felt safe inside the Black Box even if others didn’t. Lauren had been willing to go along with whatever Abby wanted, but there was also Claire to think about. She was very adamant about staying at the Black Box. In the end, staying put won out, even if Abby’s own group of friends—family really—got split up in the process.

“Do you know when she’s expected to arrive?” Abby asked.

“No idea,” Winchester shrugged. “Sometime later today is all I know. There’s a very likely chance she’ll be spending the night.”

“She can share with us,” Abby immediately offered. It wasn’t unusual for Riley to sleep on their couch and Hope to take the top bunk in Peter’s bedroom whenever they visited.

“Any other reason for you coming down here?” Lauren wondered.

“Other than trying to see what you two are working on, not really.” Winchester leaned forward, attempting to read what was written on the screen.

Lauren quickly blocked his view with both hands. “Don’t you have other things to do?”

“Probably. Do you want to help me with it?”

“What is it?” Lauren raised her eyebrow sceptically. She was much better friends with Winchester than Abby was. The two of them had survived the first few weeks together, holed up in a motel crammed with people where Lauren had somehow been put in charge of all the orphaned children. There had been quite a few, Peter among them. Since then, they had been taken in by other adults, some who were new couples willing to take on the responsibility, others were individuals who had lost their own, and still more were families that had managed to stay together through it all and were willing to expand. Lauren and Abby had kept Peter, Claire, and Jon with them, although Jon was now twenty-seven and off living at the container yard when he wasn’t out scavenging.

“We’ve picked a new area to sow, which means clearing out the crap that’s already there. Want to come do some hard slugging work? Volunteers make the workload lighter.” Winchester grinned like a used car salesman.

“We should probably—” Lauren started but Abby cut her off.

“Sure!”

“Sure?” Abby’s partner looked at her with suspicious eyes.

“I’m tired of sitting down here all day. I’d like to go outside and do some manual labour.”

“All right, I guess. Why not?”

“Excellent.” Winchester got to his feet, the movement propelling his chair to clatter away into a desk. He looked at the other six people in the lab, all hunched over their desks and working on who knew what. “How about you folks? Any of you want to help clear our next field?”

Half the people ignored Winchester; the other half shook their heads.

“All right, just us then.”

Abby walked over to Peter. “You going to stay down here all day?”

Peter nodded.

“Want me to come get you if Hope shows up?”

He nodded again.

“All right. Try not to fry your brain with this.” Abby kissed the back of Peter’s head, breathing in the scent of his hair, then made her way to the door where Winchester and Lauren were already waiting. Abby had never imagined herself as a mother until Lauren had shown up with Claire, Peter, and Jon under her wings. Now, she couldn’t imagine her life without them.

“Will Claire be joining us?” Lauren asked as they made their way toward the stairs. Even though the Black Box had a working elevator, unlike the Diana, Abby always made them take the stairs. Not only was it healthier for them, but Abby’s experiences insisted that the stairs were safer.

“She up top?” So Winchester hadn’t seen her up there yet. It wasn’t unusual: there were always quite a number of people on the surface and a lot of fairly large fields to be tended. There was no way to tell where Claire was unless you happened to spot her or started asking around.

They exited the underground lab-turned-hideaway beside an old set of train tracks that had a forest of weeds growing up between them. The train cars were secured in place, often used as homes or a place to sleep outside in safety for those who didn’t want to go below for the night. Beyond them was an old facility, presumably a chemical plant of some sort, although Abby never bothered to confirm that. Over the years, the place had been thoroughly cleared out and stripped of virtually everything. They took apart all that they could—including metal wall panels—to use as fencing material around the growing fields. Winchester led them first to the road and then down toward the barge dock. Abby squinted up at a massive crane as they walked below its overhanging arm. The distance and the sun prevented her from seeing who was up there, but she could make out at least three people, their legs dangling into nothingness. Old plastic chairs had been brought up there a long time ago and bolted at various locations along the frame. With the addition of belts and harness restraints, they made relatively safe lookout points, the only danger coming from moving to and from those seats. Abby shuddered, never having dared go up there herself.