Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct)

by Stittle, Kristal

  With the name River, it finally clicked with Robin who these guys were. They were Gathers Moss! She grew up listening to these guys. They were one of her father’s favourite bands. The quality of their music was one of the few things Robin and her dad had ever agreed on. When she was little, her dad had taken her to the last concert they held in Leighton. It was one of a handful of good memories involving the man. Now, here she was with Greg, the drummer, shot up and maybe dying, while Quin tried to sober up, and River made jokes.

  “I’m too helping!” River yelled at Quin. “That’s my belt wrapped around his leg thank ye very much.”

  “I have the kits!” April finally came running back. Her dark skin blanched when she spotted Greg lying on his back.

  “He’s still alive,” Robin quickly assured her. Although for how long she couldn’t say. “Bring the kits over here. River, shove aside.”

  River frowned and slipped into a slur so bad that Robin couldn’t make it out, but he crawled around Greg’s feet to sit with Quin on the other side of his body. April took his place, dumping all the kits on the floor next to Robin. She looked at the tourniquet.

  “Aren’t you supposed to stick something through that and twist it to make sure it’s as tight as possible?” April wondered.

  “Uh, sure.” Again, Robin didn’t really know. She was basing everything on one CPR/ Heimlich manoeuvre class, and on what she had seen in various forms of media. “You can do that, right?”

  “Yeah.” April ran off again, presumably to grab something along the lines of a stick.

  Robin opened up one of the first aid kits and was relieved to find a handy book inside. She skimmed through the pages to the lacerations section; there was no section for birdshot. Although the book advised calling 911, Robin had to make do with the meagre steps after that. While River and Quin watched with interest, Robin plucked a pair of scissors out of the kit and started cutting off Greg’s canvas pants below the tourniquet. April returned, panting from climbing the escalators, with a long-handled wooden spoon and proceeded to tuck it under the belt and twist. Greg cried out in pain again.

  “Hey, hey, hey. There’s ah, morphine in there.” Quin gestured to the first aid kits. “There should be little things of morphine shouldn’t there? At least one per kit or something?”

  “Umm,” Robin flipped through the kit she had open. “No morphine, but there’s something in this one called lidocaine.”

  “That’ll do.” Quin held out his hands for it. “Give ’em here, I can administer them to Greg so he don’t feel the pain.”

  “That’s the stuff the dentists use, right? The stuff that makes yer face go all numb and blaaahhh.” River imitated a person with a numb face, nearly drooling and everything. Robin could easily see how April mistook them for zombies. As for the lidocaine, she didn’t have any other choice but to trust Quin. She passed the first aid kits to him, and he began picking out the little full needles. Not all of them had some, only the bigger kits. Some kits had codeine, which Quin also took out. Robin finished cutting away the pant leg.

  After looking through the book, Robin decided to treat this like glass. She was going to pluck out all the birdshot in Greg’s leg with a pair of tweezers. While she put on a pair of gloves from the kit, Quin injected the lidocaine into various parts around Greg’s wounds and got him to take some of the codeine.

  “How’s that feel buddy!” Quin laughed.

  “Feels pretty fuuuuucking gooooood.” Greg grinned lopsidedly.

  Robin began pulling out the small metal balls. She started with the ones nearest the surface, but as she had to dig deeper and deeper for more, Greg began to moan, and even try to squirm a little.

  “Greg, I know it hurts, but I need you to stay still,” Robin huffed. The little balls were slicked with blood and hard to grab with the tweezers.

  “I got him.” River finally became helpful. He grabbed Greg’s foot and held his leg still.

  “Quin, can you hold his body down?” Robin asked, looking up at the man.

  Quin giggled and flopped himself over Greg’s chest. “Greg,” he whispered loudly to him. “Greg, you’re shot. You’re shot! But I gave you the good stuff, right? It’s good. It’s real fucking ggggoooood.”

  Robin was horrified to realize that Quin had injected some of the numbing agent into himself, and likely downed some codeine. He had been sobering up, until that point. Now it seemed like River was the more sober of them. She put it out of her head and resumed her work. She tried not to think of it as pulling pellets out of a human leg, but rather, picking bones out of an exceptionally tough fish. When Robin glanced at April, she saw that her friend couldn’t even look, but she held onto the wooden spoon, cutting off the blood flow as best she could. As Robin got to the deepest of the pellets, Greg bucked and howled. It took everything they had to keep him still long enough for Robin to pluck the stubborn thing out, but she got it. She hoped she got them all, it was impossible to tell.

  With River’s help—Quin was too out of it now—Robin numbed up Greg’s leg again. The next thing she had to do was to stitch up the holes. Although Greg babbled incoherently, this didn’t seem to hurt him as much. His eyes kept rolling wildly and Robin feared the worst. When she finished stitching up the leg according to the book’s instructions, her stitches looking much worse than the illustrations, she wrapped the leg in gauze and bandages. Once everything looked good, Robin got up and walked away from the small group. She had to get away from them, at least for a moment.

  Robin found a corner between some sofas and cried. She cried and cried for the last few days. So much horror, destruction, and fear. She was just a sixteen-year-old girl. She shouldn’t be stitching up a rock star’s leg because he had been shot by another sixteen-year-old. Another sixteen-year-old who had every reason to be shooting people no less. She was supposed to be in Toronto, with her brother, interviewing for part-time jobs and preparing to start a new year at a new school. Phil the bus driver should still have both legs attached, and he should be driving his route. Victoria should be helping little old ladies with their savings, and saving her own money for a bigger apartment or home. Robin cried for her ‘suppose-tos’ and ‘could-bes.’ She cried for those who had died, but mostly, she cried for her own lost life. Robin wasn’t dead, but she had lost her life sure enough.

  “Mew.”

  Robin looked up and saw Charlie perched on the sofa’s armrest. April must not have closed the barrier when she grabbed the first aid kits, and he had escaped.

  “What are you doing up there?” Robin tried to put on a friendly voice and wiped at her eyes. Why she didn’t want a kitten to see her upset was beyond her.

  “Mew,” was Charlie’s reply. He swiped at Robin’s head, which was just out of reach. He off-balanced himself, and almost tumbled off the armrest.

  Robin stood, scooping Charlie into her arms as she did. Charlie squirmed until Robin let him climb up onto her shoulder. He sat there like an odd parrot while Robin walked back to the others.

  April had gotten River to take off his other two belts and now had them holding the wooden spoon in place. She was also ordering Quin and River around, telling them to get pillows, blankets, and water for Greg. Robin walked up next to her.

  “Do you think he’ll be okay?” April’s voice broke, tears threatening her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Robin spoke honestly. “Whatever happens though, don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known, right? You were just trying to protect yourself. To protect both of us.”

  “Really? You’re not mad at me?” She looked at Robin.

  “No, I’m not mad at you.”

  April looked back at Greg. They stood in silence for a moment, the only sounds coming from Quin and River’s drunken calls to each other.

  “What happens now?” April finally asked.

  Robin shrugged. “I guess we wait and see.”

  6:

  Bryce Christopherson – Days –7 to +7

  Two weeks ago
, Bryce Christopherson and his family had moved. When his mom told him they were moving, he had protested. He threw fits, cried, whined, and did everything his nine-year-old mind could think of doing to get what he wanted. His mom tried to calm him down, saying that everything was fine, that they weren’t even leaving the city. Bryce asked if he had to change schools, and when she told him yes, he erupted into tears again. In a barely understandable blubbering, he said his mom was mean and asked why she would do this to him. His mom then asked what the biggest problem about moving was, and he told her that he would miss his friends. This turned out not to be an issue; apparently several of his friends were moving too, including Larson Taggart, Bryce’s best friend and cousin. In fact, they were all going to move into the same building and could see each other all the time. Bryce sniffled, looking up at his mom. She promised him that they could even have sleepovers every night if they wanted. This brought a smile to the boy’s face. He liked having sleepovers with Larson. He was then sent to wash up, which he did with gusto. He couldn’t let his dad see that he had been crying; boys weren’t supposed to cry. At least, they weren’t supposed to let anybody know that they had been crying. Except for moms of course, that was a given. Moms were the only people in front of whom boys were allowed to cry.

  In the days leading up to the move, there was a lot of packing going on. Bryce had been given boxes, and it was up to him to pack up his own toys. He had a lot of toys, and some of them were too big to fit inside the boxes. These toys he put aside and told Tony, his bodyguard, to deal with them. Tony was always around, and rarely was he helpful, but he helped find ways to pack the big toys. Many times, Bryce got so distracted playing with his toys that he forgot he was supposed to be putting them into boxes. Until his mom or dad or one of the help would walk by and remind him, that is.

  His mom seemed to be in a constant panic. She flew about the house, this way and that way, fretting and worrying about being packed on time. Bryce didn’t know what the big rush was. It’s not as if they needed to catch a plane if they weren’t leaving the city. His dad was busily packing up as well. It was odd for Bryce to see him around so much during the daytime. Usually his dad went to work all day, and Bryce saw him only at night. If he even came home at night, that is. Sometimes he had to work all night, or other times he flew off to other countries for days. When his dad went on his trips during the summer vacation, Bryce and his mom and his little sister got to go with him and play tourist while he worked. That’s what his mom called it: playing tourist. Bryce liked riding in the airplanes and seeing all the neat places. A lot of his favourite toys had come from places outside of Leighton.

  When he woke up on moving day, he was disoriented. His room was completely barren, save for his dresser, empty bookshelves, and bed. Even his pale blue walls were lacking their usual collage of pictures and posters. He never realized just how big his room actually was until there wasn’t anything in it anymore. Not long after Bryce got up and got dressed, his bed was taken apart and packed away. His dresser and shelves were hauled away by big burly men and placed in one of the three large trucks outside. Despite the large trucks, Bryce noticed that not everything was being taken with them. The grand piano, for instance, just had a big dust cloth pulled over it and was left standing in the middle of the room like a ship lost at sea. Bryce’s mom had to explain then that the place they were moving to was smaller than their large house. Although all of Bryce’s stuff got to come, some of the larger furniture in the rest of the house had to stay. Bryce frowned at this. He hadn’t thought anything was being left behind, and now that he knew, it was too late to do anything about it. With everything covered in dust cloths, his house looked as if a bunch of ghosts had exploded all over it. By the time they were ready to go, Bryce was glad to be leaving. His house didn’t look warm and inviting anymore; it looked haunted. Even his room, with its large windows letting in the sunlight, looked hollow and creepy. He would have preferred never to have seen his home this way.

  They drove to the new place in Bryce’s mom’s car. They would have taken his dad’s, but it didn’t have a car seat installed in it for baby Rebecca, Bryce’s little two-year-old sister. Bryce and his mom called her Becky, baby Becky. When she was born, Bryce wasn’t sure he would like her, but now he loved her to pieces. And she adored him back. On some fussy nights, Bryce was the only one who could get her to sleep. Bryce didn’t mind either, especially because his mom would let him stay home from school the next day to sleep, and would call in the tutors for the afternoon. One of Becky’s first words was By, which was what she called Bryce. In the car, they had a DVD player and watched My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It was such a girl’s show, but Bryce found he actually kind of liked it. He would never tell Larson that. They watched things like the Justice League, X-men, and Ben Ten together, super hero stuff. In the car with Becky though, it was okay to watch girl stuff. Becky liked the girl stuff; it made her happy. And it was a lot better than some of the other baby shows their mom would put on for her were. When they entered the woods, Bryce looked away from the TV.

  “I thought we weren’t leaving the city?” Bryce frowned. His mom usually didn’t lie. Usually.

  “Don’t worry, honey, we’re going to be just outside the city. Right nearby. You won’t even notice the difference.” His mom had turned around in her seat to tell him.

  Bryce scowled at the trees going by. He didn’t like the woods. There were prickle bushes, poison ivy, and bugs that bite in the woods. Plus, bad stuff always happened there in stories. Monsters lived in the woods. He liked the city better, with its lights, people, and sounds, not to mention its completely paved roads. The woods were just too quiet.

  He turned back to watching more of the show, but the longer he watched, the deeper into the woods they got, and the more uncomfortable he became. Bryce was going to complain again, more boisterously this time and especially about the decaying road conditions, when he looked forward between the seats and saw a massive rock looming in the road ahead. He couldn’t see any way around the rock, and his dad wasn’t slowing down; did he not see the boulder? How could he not see the boulder? Just as he was about to cry out, his mom took out an odd-looking device that reminded him of a garage door opener, but more advanced. There were several buttons on it, some of which she began pressing in a complex sequence. She then pressed her thumb against the back of the device, and it emitted a bright blue light. Bryce realized that this must be a fingerprint scanner. They had a hand scanner in addition to regular house keys to get inside their home. Or they used to; it wasn’t really their home anymore. Up ahead, the big boulder slid silently to one side, off into the woods, as if it weighed no more than a cheese wheel. Why Bryce thought of a cheese wheel, he wasn’t sure, but that was the first thing to pop into his head. Maybe he was just hungry. His dad finally slowed the car as they approached a relatively steep incline that the boulder had uncovered. They drove down into a massive, winding hole that was perfectly paved. Bryce noted that the moving trucks, which were following not far behind them, were going to have no trouble at all fitting down this tunnel.

  When they reached the bottom of what Bryce had mentally started to call the Forever Tunnel, his dad parked the car in a parking space. There were lots of parking spaces down here, filled with lots of different cars. Some were shiny and new looking, like Bryce’s parents’ cars, while others looked beat-up and dingy. These weren’t of interest to Bryce; he was interested in the weird cars. The weird trucks to be more precise. The parking lot was massive, and parked as a large fleet in the middle of it, were big, white, truck-like vehicles. The front ends of them were boxy, like Hummers, but the back ends were different. They were attached by an accordion section to something that Bryce thought was similar to the Bat-mobile in Batman Begins, but not the same. They were like heavily armoured boxes with six wheels under them. The Hummer section had four wheels, giving the long vehicle a total of ten wheels. That was a lot of wheels. There were more of these contraptions th
an any other vehicle type in the whole parking lot. Bryce couldn’t even count how many there were. He wondered what they were for and why they needed so many. And who they were; who owned them? Was this where they were going to live?

  His parents answered his last question without it even being asked. When the engine was turned off, they got out and began taking out what bags they had packed in the car. Bryce hopped out, the smells of gas, exhaust, and concrete flooding his nostrils. The moving trucks rumbled past and stopped near a large cage. Due to its massive size, it took Bryce a minute to realize that it was an elevator. The thing was big enough to hold at least four tanks.

  “Come on Bryce, help us out,” his mom drew his attention back to their car.

  Bryce put on his backpack, and grabbed his and his mom’s wheelie bags. His mom slung another of her bags over her shoulder and put Becky in a papoose carrier hanging off her front. Becky was making weird faces, probably from the smells. With his dad grabbing the rest of the bags, they were able to take everything from the car in one trip. Bryce’s dad led them over to a set of normal elevator doors and pressed the call button. While they waited for the elevator, Bryce watched Tony and the rest of his family’s bodyguards unload their things from the trucks and put them in the big elevator. As their own, smaller elevator dinged and opened, another car pulled into the huge underground parking lot, followed by its own moving truck. Bryce recognized the car as his grandma and grandpa’s, but before he could tell his parents, his mom ushered him into the elevator, and the doors closed. The elevator began to move, but to Bryce’s surprise, it went down instead of up. He had assumed they would be heading to some sort of house on the surface, not deeper underground.

  “Where are we going?” he finally asked.

  “To our new home,” his dad said in a flat voice. He had always been a very rigid and proper man. Bryce respected his dad greatly. He was also a little bit scared of him but he would never admit that to anybody, not even himself.