Survival Instincts Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  About May Dawney

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  Dedicated to whoever has both the good sense and governmental power to prevent this work of fiction from becoming reality in the future.

  Chapter 1

  The first sign that New York City would be special was the zebra. It pushed through the shrubbery and onto the sun-flooded interstate no more than thirty feet from Lynn. Its hooves clicked on the cracked asphalt as it weaved its way leisurely through the thick throng of rusted car skeletons.

  Lynn stopped.

  Skeever, at her heels, did too.

  At least for now, the zebra didn’t notice them. It plucked at a tuft of grass with nimble lips.

  Lynn blinked consciously, wondering if the animal would go away if she did. It didn’t. If this animal was what she thought it was, she was staring at an Old-World relic. The striped horses had been kept in carefully constructed habitats in the hearts of cities. Lynn realized she should probably have felt awed by the experience, but her only thought was dinner. She quietly reached down to her belt and undid the leather strap that held her tomahawk in place.

  Skeever growled. His ears had turned back, and he bared his teeth.

  Shit. Lynn hurried to reach down and muzzle him, but it was too late.

  The zebra’s ears twitched. Its head shot up and swung toward the source of the sound. A shudder ran through its compact body as it spotted her.

  Lynn met its eyes.

  The zebra shied to the side. A single blade of grass dangled forgotten from between its lips. Keen animal intelligence underlay its gaze, sizing her up.

  Don’t you go anywhere, now. She reached for her weapon as quickly as she dared. Thirty feet away, wind from the side. She would have to get closer for a clean throw or risk only injuring it and tracking it until it succumbed to blood loss. She tensed and sped forward.

  Instantly, the zebra’s eyes widened, and it threw its head back. It rushed off, bleating in panic.

  At the very last moment, Lynn stopped her axe from leaving her hand. “Dammit.” She let her momentum fall away.

  Skeever excitedly caught up with her.

  Just as she reached down to pet him, a group of the striped animals broke through the vegetation onto the road and streamed around the car wrecks. Their hooves hitting asphalt and their bleating cries caused such a cacophony that she froze from the sheer unfamiliarity of it. Lynn spent her life being quiet, among people who spent their lives being quiet. This was glorious and frightening, and Lynn could only watch the procession pass.

  Skeever barked and ran after the unexpected newcomers. But when the last of them disappeared into the shrubbery, he retreated, tail between his hind legs. He pressed his bulk against her.

  “Wow.” Lynn took a deep, steadying breath. For a moment, she had forgotten that was dinner, running off. She regrettably tracked the herd’s departure by ear and considered her options. She could try to hunt them down, but the odds of catching up before nightfall were nil. Besides, they were going the wrong way.

  “Look behind you only to make sure there is nothing there that might kill you,” her father used to say. Lynn had adopted that creed, and it had kept her alive so far. Today was not the day to go against it.

  She glanced one more time at the wall of green into which the zebras had disappeared and shook her head. It’s a damn weird day. “Come on, Skeever. We’ll find something to eat in there.” With only a small pang of regret, Lynn walked away from the herd.

  Ahead, past the remnants of cars and a precarious-looking bridge, lay New York City. Lynn had puzzled its name together from the rusty signs overhead. It sounded vaguely familiar. Perhaps she’d heard about it from the odd traveler she’d met on her meandering journey, or perhaps her parents had told her stories before they had died. If someone had told her about the city, she’d forgotten the details. All she’d learned about it during the approach was that it was big. Really big.

  New York City was most likely the biggest Old-World city she had ever encountered. It stretched out for miles, bordered by water, and boasted a host of towering concrete giants. The massive towers gleamed in patches—glass and metal reflecting in the midafternoon sun—and Lynn could almost picture them in their full glory, standing proud as pinnacles of human ability. Now they were shadows of their former selves, crumbling and weighed down by history, just like the human race.

  It was a depressing thought for a beautiful late-summer afternoon, inspired by the failed hunt. They were running out of food, and Lynn worried. If she hadn’t been worried, she would never have taken on a city like New York straight on.

  Skeever trotted ahead with wagging tail, sniffing at the bones of drivers and passengers in the mess of cars. Some sat propped up against the faded interior like gristly puppets; others lay piled on seats and nearly rusted-through floors as heaps of bones and rags.

  She had asked her father once why they buried the bones of recently deceased strangers but not the bones of the pre-war people littering the world.

  “Lynn,” he had told her six-year-old self. “Everything that lives has a spark in them. It’s what makes us alive instead of dead. It’s in that sparrow over there and even in the grass we sit on. That’s why we always thank our kills for giving up their life so we can eat and stay strong. Do you understand?”

  She had understood. Things that moved, things that grew bigger, they were different from things that were dead. She had seen enough dead things—trees, hunted game, people—to understand the difference. “But why do we bury people and not bones?”

  “We bury people because that way, we give back what we took to stay alive. When we bury people, their bodies feed the grass and the bushes and the trees so they can grow bigger. The animals eat the grass and fruit and vegetables. We eat the animals and the fruit and vegetables as well. This way, nothing is lost, and everyone gets to eat. We don’t bury the bones, because they don’t have anything to give back anymore.”

  She had carefully pondered the difference between a person who had just died and a person who had died during the war. It had sparked another question. “Why don’t we bury the bad people?”

  He had paused then. Her father never spoke without thinking about it carefully first. It had made her impatient as a child, but as an adult she admired it. As much as Lynn would have liked to be as thoughtful as her father, she was too impulsive to do his spirit justice.

  “Some people do things that we don’t want others to ever do again. We don’t want their spark to live on, so we leave them for the predators we’ll never eat ourselves. That way their evil disappears, and the world becomes a little better.”

  This discussion was one of her
most vivid memories of her father. He’d put it so black-and-white that the distinction between honorable and dishonorable had made sense to her young mind. She had discovered that nothing in this world—except for zebras—was ever black-and-white, especially not when it came to honor.

  Lynn frowned. Her mind had wandered. She stopped to check her surroundings for danger.

  Skeever looked up at her questioningly. He whined and took a step forward, urging her on. He obviously didn’t think there was anything to worry about.

  His behavior settled Lynn, but it had still been stupid to let her mind wander in the Wilds. She smiled wryly when she pictured how her father would have reacted to her lapse in attention. “Distracted, then dead,” he used to say. It was hard to argue with that.

  “Sorry, boy.” She started to walk again. An exit came up just after the surprisingly sturdy bridge, and she went down it, crawling over cars to do so.

  Skeever planned his own route. Once down, he darted ahead, although he checked on her every few seconds.

  They were quickly swallowed by New York City’s maze of buildings. They surrounded her, intact, crumbled, and everywhere in between. A brick building towered over her to the left. Tree branches emerged from its shattered windows. The row of houses to her right was in ruins and completely overgrown by an assortment of tall grasses, low bushes, and large oak trees.

  A group of small monkeys with big brown eyes regarded her from the canopy of the oaks and yipped. They tilted their little heads to the side as she passed and shook a branch here and there, but monkeys this size weren’t dangerous. They were also hard to turn into food. Monkeys were another remnant of the ancient zoos, but unlike zebras, Lynn had seen them before. She had discovered they were too quick to kill with a throwing axe, so she let them be.

  A glance at the sky told her she wasn’t going to be making any more miles today. Already, the sun lowered toward New York City’s crumbled skyline. Braving the night without shelter would be suicide-by-predator. “I think it’s time we find a place to hole up for the night, whatcha say, boy?” It would be a hungry night, but at least there would be another day to search for food afterward.

  Skeever’s head lifted at the sound of her voice. He wagged his tail.

  She smiled. I can’t believe I almost left you behind. How could it be that only three days had passed since she’d found him? It felt as if he’d been with her forever. She scratched the underside of his jaw with her free hand. The nametag on his collar jiggled. “What did you do before you met me, hm? Who was the man you were with? Who named you Skeever?”

  Skeever tilted his head to the side and gave her better access to the underside of his muzzle.

  “Too bad you can’t talk. Maybe then you’d have some answers for me.” She considered that. “Well, maybe it’s for the best. You already make enough noise as it is.” She patted his flank, then straightened up again. Yeah, it was good not to be alone. She’d been alone for so long, she had forgotten how good it felt to have someone to talk to, to rely on—even if it was a dog.

  Looking about, she wondered what the wisest course of action was. There were undoubtedly familiar and unfamiliar animals in the city that used the buildings around her for shelter. At least a portion of those would happily make a meal out of her. She needed a place she could secure—someplace with a heavy door and not too many holes in the walls. There was no place like that around here; the area had been too heavily bombed during the war. She would have to keep moving.

  The second she stepped forward, a loud noise echoed through the streets. Instinctively, she dropped into a battle stance. For a split second, she thought her foot had activated some kind of trap, but then the sound rose again. What the hell is that? Adrenaline-induced sweat made her fumble as she grabbed for her tomahawk.

  Skeever yelped and turned to the source of the sound—somewhere ahead, to the right. Ears flat, he growled and tensed to the point where he seemed to vibrate.

  It sounded again.

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Animal. It has to be an animal. Dread settled coldly in her gut. “Shit, I’m going to have to check.” If she didn’t, she would never be able to sleep tonight. She reached down with her free hand to stroke Skeever’s rough-haired back. “You be quiet, understood?”

  Skeever looked up.

  Lynn took a deep, steadying breath. “Yeah, I know. This sucks.” Staying low, she moved toward the sound. “I don’t like it either.”

  He caught up after a few steps, then passed her and sniffed the ground ahead.

  “We just have to know.” She gripped her tomahawk tighter. Time to discover what monsters the streets of New York City housed.

  Lynn ducked low and parted the grass in front of her. Another deafening cry came from the bottom of the hill. An enormous gray animal lashed its elongated snout at a group of eight or nine hunters.

  An elephant! Surely it couldn’t be anything else.

  It threw its trunk up and trumpeted its despair as another spear pierced its weathered gray skin. The weapon stuck to it until the monstrous animal threw itself against a building that promptly lost its façade. The spear snapped like a twig, and the man who had thrown it sprang away just in time to avoid both the elephant’s stomping feet and falling debris.

  “Cody!” a red-haired woman screamed. She tried to get to him, but the age-worn tusks blocked her way, so she jumped back.

  Another woman waved a machete in the air the front of the animal to draw its ire. “Look over here, you! Dammit, Dani! Kill this thing!”

  The elephant turned away from the redhead and focused its lashing tusks and trunk on the machete-wielder.

  “Keep it busy!” Another hunter rushed up to the animal’s now-exposed side, her long hair trailing behind her as she fearlessly hurled her spear. The weapon hit its target.

  The elephant threw back its head and lifted its trunk. It trumpeted the sound that had drawn Lynn here.

  Skeever barked and tried to pull free from the hold Lynn had on his collar.

  She yanked on the thick leather. “Shut up!”

  A shot rang out.

  Lynn gasped. This was only the second time in her life she’d heard a gunshot.

  Skeever struggled and whined.

  She lifted her head higher to locate the gun that had been fired—and its wielder.

  A black man knelt down just outside the flurry of activity to fiddle with a pistol, either to repair or reload it; Lynn couldn’t tell.

  The elephant whined and drew Lynn’s attention. Another streak ran down its hide, adding to the look of morbid camouflage in an increasingly reddening area of battle.

  Lynn could taste the blood in the air.

  Cody had gotten up and shouted for the animal’s attention. He waved his empty hands and feigned forward with another loud cry.

  The frenzied animal stepped back and threw up its trunk skittishly. Its small brain seemed too overloaded with sensations and emotions to choose a course of action.

  Something gleaming caught the light before it lodged deeply into the animal’s neck.

  The elephant trumpeted again, then stumbled.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, the machete-wielder emerged at its rear and slashed across the back of a leg.

  Blood gushed.

  The elephant let out a chilling cry of pain and sagged through the leg. Its flanks heaved with each breath.

  Skeever squirmed in his position half under her body, fighting the hand around his collar.

  The swarm of people descended on the elephant like a chaotic but hell-bent swarm of lethal locusts. More spears pierced its sides; blades slashed.

  Death by a thousand cuts. The words bubbled up from the depth of her mind without a solid memory attached to it.

  Skeever contorted.

  She flattened him to the ground more, wrestling him down.
>
  The elephant fell with a dull thud that was not celebrated.

  Was it dead? Eager to confirm the group’s victory, Lynn pushed up to see over the tall grass.

  The second her attention drifted away from him, Skeever yanked away and raced across the street, barking like mad before fastening his teeth to the elephant’s waving trunk.

  The group was thrown into chaos, caught between surprise and the last vestiges of the hunt.

  “Skeever!” She forgot about the danger and gripped her tomahawk as she jumped up and sprinted forward, toward the circle of people and the animal in the last throes of its death struggle.

  One of the hunters either did not see or did not pay attention to Skeever as she jumped atop the fallen animal and sank a spear deep into its neck. The machete-wielder, however, stopped dead in her tracks. The man named Cody managed to yank her back just in time to avoid a lashing of the animal’s trunk as it flew past, lifting Skeever off his legs.

  The dog growled and bit down harder on the trunk, refusing to be dislodged.

  Lynn shouldered past a slender man and struck at the elephant’s head once as she dodged past its wicked-looking tusks. The blow connected and scraped across strong bone before cutting deep into the cheek.

  The elephant thrashed and threw off the hunter, who then disappeared behind its back, out of Lynn’s view.

  Lynn wrapped her arm around Skeever’s writhing bulk and pulled. “Let go!”

  To her great surprise, he did.

  Lynn fell, but her backpack cushioned most of the impact. Something crunched to bits inside. She scrambled, arm still locked around Skeever, and got out of the way just before a tusk landed heavily on the spot she’d occupied a second earlier. She rolled out of the way and curled into a ball around the twisting dog, gaze on the elephant and its attackers.

  The hunter the machete-wielder had called Dani clambered up the animal’s back. She was young, covered in blood. Her face was stilled in concentration, and she didn’t look Lynn’s way even once. She gripped and leveraged one of the spears stuck in the elephant’s back, and the animal shuddered once; then a crack loud enough to reach Lynn’s ears indicated that either the spear or the animal’s vertebrae had given way.