Defensive Instinct (Survival Instinct Book 4)

by Kristal Stittle

  In a clearing, a fairly large group of people had stopped to rest. Without much sleep the night before, the long walk was wearing on them. A few sat around in their pyjamas, captives who hadn’t had a chance to dress properly, but more were stripping off extra layers they had put on in order to get more clothing out. Riley’s stretcher was briefly put down again, as another set of volunteers took over.

  “Riley!”

  She twisted her head around to find the source of the familiar voice, and spotted Brunt jogging toward her just as the new volunteers begin pressing onward. Riley didn’t even need to reach out, as Brunt quickly scooped up her hand as soon as he had fallen in beside her. She was pretty sure he was checking her pulse.

  “Good to see you got out okay,” he said, grinning.

  “Hope?”

  “She’s up ahead with Cameron and the others. I’ve been searching the line for you. Want me to go get her?”

  “Yes.” Riley felt confined on the stretcher. She wanted to get up and find Hope herself, but the moment she tried to rise, her head began to swim again and Josh gently pushed her back down.

  “All right, I’ll be back.” Brunt took off running up the line, dodging around people and plants alike.

  “What’s wrong?” Riley frowned up at Josh whose concerned look put a damper on her good mood. “Is it something about the container yard?”

  “I’m thinking about what Winchester said and wondering why Abby isn’t with Lauren.”

  Riley hadn’t realized how odd that was until he said it. Abby should have been with Lauren and the others, so why wasn’t she? Was she okay?

  “And yes, I’m thinking about the container yard as well. We didn’t want to tell you before your surgery, but there was word that a group was heading there to attack them as well. The yard was forewarned and prepared, unlike us, but we have no idea if the two groups are somehow related. And that rumble… I have no idea what caused that, but it could have been from that direction, and if it was, that means there’s still a battle going on.”

  “Is that why we’re heading the wrong way?” Riley wanted to get angry for not being told, but she knew she would have done the same thing if she and her sister had changed places.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know if anyone has heard from the container yard since the attack over there was supposed to happen. I don’t know anything, it seems.”

  Riley fidgeted and picked at her nails as she absorbed the information.

  “Mom!”

  Riley did her best to look around, raising her head as high as she could and turning it to look forward, both Josh and pain preventing her from twisting her torso.

  “Mom?” Hope called, moving down the line alone, running ahead of the others, searching through faces.

  “Hope! I’m here, sweet pea!” Riley called back, doing her best to wave her arm, but she couldn’t rotate at the shoulder very much.

  “Hope, over here,” Josh added.

  The girl came dashing up to them, a large smile of relief on her face. Riley wanted nothing more than to hug her daughter, but her limited range of motion, and the bandages and drainage tubes around her chest prevented it. Instead, she merely squeezed Hope’s shoulders with her hands, grateful that her stretcher-bearers had stopped for the moment. Hope clasped her smaller hands around one of Riley’s elbows and squeezed back as hard as she could.

  “Look, I got my slingshot out,” Hope proudly told Riley, pulling it out of the pocket of her pants once they started moving again. “Me, Peter, and Dakota have been finding rocks and things we can use in it. Dakota has hers too.”

  “That’s good. That’s very good.”

  As the rest of the group showed up, Riley was told the story of how they had started to leave, but got stopped before reaching the stairwell. Abby was separated from them at that point, and no one knew what happened to her. Once they had reached the suite of rooms, they barricaded the door behind them. Cameron, Brunt, and Lauren stayed out in the living room, while Claire took Hope, Peter, and Dakota into Peter’s room, where they moved his bunk bed to block that door. The kids were given orders not to open the door unless one of the adults gave a special knock.

  “I’m going to go look for Abby,” Brunt said as soon as the group had settled into the pace of the stretcher-bearers.

  “Can you search for Anne as well?” Josh asked him.

  “Of course.”

  Riley didn’t know if Brunt had ever met Anne, but he must have at least known what she looked like because he didn’t ask.

  “Thank you,” Riley told Cameron and Lauren for what they had done for Hope. The two women brushed her thanks aside, as a lot of people in the march would have done the same thing. Riley thanked them again anyway.

  A little farther along, Riley spotted a corpse among some tree roots. Its head was caved in, but the impact had happened long ago based on the dryness of the blood and brains. Riley wondered who had been the one to kill it, whether it was someone from the Black Box or not, and again wondered where they were going.

  ***

  Brunt returned with both Abby and Anne, eliciting a happy response at the reunion. Neither of them knew where they were going either, and both told the group what had happened to them. Anne had been barricaded in one of the hydroponics labs, having gotten outside and witnessed the fire fight the sentries were in before being turned around. The hydroponics lab she ended up in had several tools she and others were able to use to secure the door. Other labs hadn’t been so lucky, as the invaders were able to break their way in. Several people around Anne had been able to smuggle out seeds and a few clippings, but she had been searched, her pockets turned out and emptied, a woman even checking her bra. Unlike the medical centre, there was nothing like tape or bandages to secure the supplies in unusual places.

  Abby told her story about being captured and the interrogation. Before the Day, she might have glossed over some of those details with the kids present, but now they needed to know that stuff like that happened. Josh checked over her wounds as best he could and decided that there was nothing serious.

  A little while later, Brunt and Josh relieved Riley’s stretcher-bearers. Cameron and Lauren offered to assist them, badgering the men by saying that having four people carrying would be easier than just two until they relented. Hope stayed by Riley’s side, holding her hand the whole time.

  “I think we’re heading toward the ocean,” Anne declared after many footfalls of silence.

  “My sense of direction is terrible, but I think she’s right,” Abby agreed. “I believe we’re angling toward it.”

  “But we’re on the wrong side of the Black Box,” Josh commented.

  “Maybe we’re circling around,” Claire offered. “You know, so they can’t follow us to the container yard?”

  “Then why head toward the sea? Why not head straight east before hooking north?” Cameron wondered.

  “Maybe it’s easier to walk along the coast.” Brunt shrugged with the arm not carrying Riley. “Or maybe there’s another cache of gear and supplies out there.”

  They had passed a small group of people digging another hole. The majority of the unburied weapons went to the front of the column where they might stumble into a horde, while a large chunk of the remainder was held onto for the back, because a gathering was likely to come from behind them, drawn by the sounds of the march. Still, their little group had been given a baseball bat, which Anne was carrying, and Robin wasn’t far away with her shotgun. If a big group of the dead showed up, their best option was to run, but a handful they could probably deal with.

  “People are clumping up ahead of us,” Dakota called out from where she was picking her own trail through the trees to their right, scrambling up and over some large rocks. “I think they’re stopping past the trees. Maybe it’s the ocean?”

  “We’ll see when we get there,” Cameron told her, the nervousness in her voice obvious to Riley even if it wasn’t to the others.


  Riley wanted to twist around, to try to peer through the trees herself and see what was ahead, but she couldn’t. She had only enough energy to keep awake, listen to the nearby conversations, and on the rare occasion add to them.

  It was still a couple of minutes before they were in direct sunlight, the trees falling away behind them. Dakota had been right: people were clumping up and stopping, while the ocean crashed close by.

  “Oh wow,” Lauren was the first to say something.

  “What? What is it?” Riley wanted to know, able to see only people’s backsides.

  Instead of answering, Lauren and Brunt guided their little group around and through the gathering of people, making for the water. Once they were in the clear, Riley saw it. Although everyone had been told that it was destroyed, the German submarine was floating in the water, secured to the docks of what might have been a factory at one time. People were making their way down the shore toward the docks, where they were being loaded onto it one at a time.

  “They didn’t scuttle it,” Abby breathed, as amazed to see it as Riley was.

  “That’s one hell of a secret to keep,” Josh barked, half-annoyed and half-excited.

  “I’m sure they had their reasons,” Anne insisted.

  “I’m guessing she still runs if they’re loading us aboard,” Brunt commented. “We’ll be able to get to the yard much faster now. Come on, we should get Riley there before all the bunks get filled up. We don’t want to have to balance her on the hull outside.”

  With the stretcher between them, people were willing to part for the little group, although some grudgingly. For once, people were looking directly at Riley, either trying to decide if her wounds were bad enough to need the stretcher, or enviously wondering if they should wish the same injury upon themselves in order to get ahead of the line.

  Bronislav himself stood at the end of the dock, keeping everyone orderly as they boarded the submarine. A few people stood around, delaying boarding as they looked for certain people, but most formed a ragged line and got on when they were told.

  “You son of a bitch,” Josh called to Bronislav with a huge grin on his face.

  Bronislav merely shrugged in response and continued to move the line slowly forward and onto the sub.

  “Are we going to go under the sea?” Hope whispered to Riley, the girl’s grip tightening around her mother’s hand.

  “No, sweet pea,” Riley assured her. “We won’t be diving under; there are too many people to fit inside. Some are going to be sitting on top.”

  “Good.”

  Riley wondered what she was thinking about, but there was no time to ask. She and her daughter had to be split up while they hoisted Riley aboard. As she was raised above the heads of the crowd, she spotted Max’s stretcher not far behind them and was oddly glad for it. She also saw a group of people with bladed weapons holding back a large but spaced-out horde of zombies that was staggering out of the nearby cluster of buildings. Hopefully, it never got worse than it currently looked.

  After strapping her to the stretcher via her waist, arms, and legs, Riley was finally made vertical so that she could be lowered through the opening at the top of the conning tower. There were still so many people waiting to get aboard, she worried that they wouldn’t all be able to fit, even when clustering up on the hull. She quickly put that out of her mind though. Hope was right behind her while the rest of the small group she cared for was making their way on board. As Riley sank into the belly of the sub, she hoped she’d be able to get some more sleep before arriving at the container yard. If there was to be another battle, she wanted to be on her feet for it.

  31

  Nessie’s Wired

  On the container farthest from the battle, Nessie switched her thin sword from her right hand to the other. Her hands were sweaty, her fingers slick on the handle. She wiped them off on her shirt and then returned the blade back to her dominant hand, plucking her sheath of a cane from where it stuck out of the side of her rubber boot. She liked to hold the body of the cane in her other hand as it would make a good bludgeoning tool should she need it.

  “I don’t like how close they’re getting,” old Willard grumbled beside her, just loudly enough to be heard over the gunfire, screams, shouts, and moans.

  “I can’t see them,” Nessie admitted, the containers and people on them blocking her view of the zombies once they were over the high wall.

  Willard shifted his grip on the big revolver he held. “Neither can I, but you can see the people easily enough. I don’t like how much they’ve backed toward us, how many of them have been forced to crowd together over there.”

  Nessie immediately understood what he meant. She hadn’t noticed it herself, but now that Willard pointed it out, it was easy to tell how far the zombies had pressed into their ranks by looking at where the greatest number of people were gathered. She turned and looked at the community centre, where the strangers and former enemies picked off anything that came around that side. Again, Nessie stuck her sheath into her boot so that she could hold her sword with her off-hand while wiping the sweat from the other.

  “So, why’d you stay?” Nessie asked Willard to have something else to think about. He was definitely old enough and frail enough to have been allowed to cross the bridge with the others. The hand holding the revolver shook half the time, and Nessie often wondered if he’d be able to lift and fire it.

  “Because I’m old,” Willard answered. “They should have put me at the front. Let me die instead of the young kids. You?”

  “I’m still too fit to send away,” Nessie told him, although she would have stayed even if she weren’t. There was a lot of grey hair and many teens not yet fully grown along the back line. She hoped they weren’t going to be needed, especially the young ones. She felt ashamed to have been put in the farthest corner, but that’s where she had been assigned, so that’s where she stayed. The only people farther from the action were those put on top of the outhouses, as least as far as she could tell. If any zombies got past the far side of the community centre, however, then Nessie would be the farthest.

  A wordless cry went up from somewhere near the middle of the pack, but whether it was a good cry or not, Nessie couldn’t tell. Taking her whetstone out of her pocket, she sharpened her blade again, although it certainly didn’t need it. She wished she had her knitting needles to keep her hands occupied. Maybe if she had taken the metal ones, she could have sharpened them into deadly points, so that way they were also useful as weapons. If they survived this encounter, sharpening them might not be a terrible idea.

  A louder cry went up, and this one was definitely cheerful.

  “What’s going on?” Nessie asked Willard while squinting at the backs of the front lines.

  “I can’t tell,” Willard answered, his worse eyes squinting even more.

  Thankfully it didn’t take long for word to travel to them. Apparently, one of the zombie piles had stopped sending new corpses over the wall. Now there were only two or three, one of which they thought might be petering off. Nessie hooted when she heard the news and couldn’t help but dance a little in her boots. Finally, some news other than the front line being pushed back. Maybe they could do it; maybe they could hold off this horde.

  Nessie looked around to see all the other hopeful faces. As her eyes swept past the shoreline, she spotted something that stopped her cold. A tiny figure was crawling around on the rocks. The size and co-ordination were definitely that of a toddler. Had he or she been forgotten somehow, or fallen in the water off Animal Island and gotten lucky with the current? Either way, the tot was not in a safe place.

  “Help me with the ladder,” Nessie turned to Willard.

  “What? Why? Did someone fall off the container?” He grabbed hold of the metal with her and helped swing it over the side.

  “There’s a kid,” she pointed with her sword.

  “You sure that’s a living kid?” Willard squinted again as he helped lever the ladder
upright.

  “No, but I’m not going to do nothing, because there’s a chance it is.”

  “Be careful.”

  Nessie sheathed her sword to climb down. “You’re welcome to come.”

  Willard shook his head. “I’ll guard the ladder for your return.”

  The moment Nessie’s boots hit the pavement, she questioned her decision. From down there, she couldn’t see the toddler who had been down the slope of rocks near the water. Remembering when her niece had been that age, and then how Nessie hadn’t been able to protect her on the Day, she stepped away from the ladder. Drawing her sword, Nessie moved toward the rocks.

  When she reached the top of the jumble of stones, the boy—for that’s what the haircut suggested—had nearly crawled his way high enough to meet her.

  “Child, are you all right?” Nessie asked, remaining on the pavement as she never trusted her footing among the boulders and pebbles.

  The boy looked up with an unfamiliar face, his skin pale and his eyes yellow. Nessie sighed.

  “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she told the small thing as it rose to its feet and stumbled toward her with outstretched hands and a yawning mouth. The moment the zombie child came close enough, Nessie thrust the tip of her sword between its eyes, being as gentle as she could while still penetrating the skull. When she withdrew the blade, the boy fell backward onto the rocks.

  Shouting from behind drew Nessie’s attention. Several of her too old and too young companions had gathered along the backs of the containers and were pointing, while Willard was making gestures for her to hurry back. Nessie looked toward the water and saw that the zombie boy was not alone. A dozen or more sopping wet corpses were staggering out of the water, tripping and crawling up the rocks.

  For the first time in a long while, Nessie ran. Her boots slapped against the pavement, as a stitch formed in her side. Reaching the ladder, she nearly collapsed, out of breath, and narrowly avoided cutting herself with her sword as she sheathed it again.