Adaptive Instinct (Survival Instinct) Page 6

  They flew around a particularly nasty turn and several people, Jon included, were thrown from their seats. A few of them screamed, but most of them, again Jon included, just hurried back up.

  “Sorry about that, folks.” The military driver spoke over the internal speakers. “I’ll try to warn you if another turn like that comes up again.”

  Lauren prayed to God that one wouldn’t. She wasn’t normally the praying type; she was one of those people who didn’t know if she believed in God or not. Abby believed most of the time and Lauren had learned quite a bit about the Christian religion from her. She picked the Christian God to pray to now. She prayed for her safety and for the safety of Claire, Jon, and everybody else on the bus. There wasn’t much else she could do.

  It was maybe ten minutes later when their driver spoke again.

  “Umm, there’s something I don’t recommend seeing coming up. I suggest the sensitive avert your eyes and cover the eyes of any children on the bus.” More people took the military man’s advice than Lauren expected. It wasn’t so much what he said that got them to look away, but the way in which he said it. He sounded like he didn’t want to see what was coming.

  Lauren couldn’t bring herself to look away.

  For the first time since the bus started moving, it slowed. Lauren watched as they passed by a large building with flames shooting up and out of the windows. Several people milled about in front of it, on fire. They didn’t even seem to notice the flames consuming them. This was naturally, what Lauren assumed the driver was talking about. It wasn’t.

  Out of nowhere, a swarm of people appeared and surrounded their bus, all of them in horrendous condition, broken, torn, and bleeding. They made all kinds of noises: shrieks, howls, moans, and groans. As soon as the bus was within reach, they started hammering on the sides, and clawing up at the windows. People in the bus shied away from them, even getting up and standing in the aisle. Claire had clamped her hands over her ears, and Jon placed his hands over hers. She started singing to herself, Open Ground by Gathers Moss. Jon joined in on the lyrics he knew.

  The bus rumbled as though it was driving over a bunch of speed bumps close together. Lauren couldn’t figure out why, but then it dawned on her that they were running over people. The people swarming the sides of the bus were also swarming around the front, but the bus didn’t stop moving. When Lauren spotted a small child in the crowd, she finally turned her head away. She joined Claire and Jon in singing Open Ground.

  When they were halfway through the song for the second time, the crowd around the bus suddenly moved off. Lauren glanced up and looked through the window behind her head. The crowd was still there; they were just swarming the vehicles behind them now. A green military Hummer pushed its way through the people and over them. Lauren turned to look forward again, feeling sick. Nothing made sense, nothing, none of it. It was all crazy. She was going insane; that was the only logical explanation.

  “Lauren?” Claire was looking up at her.

  “Yes, Claire?” Lauren did her best to keep her voice calm.

  “Will we be safe from the monsters where we’re going?”

  “I hope so.” Lauren pulled Claire tighter against her side. “I certainly hope so.”

  ***

  It was well over an hour before the school bus finally stopped. Both the front and the back doors were opened and everybody piled out on dead legs. A few people needed assistance getting off, including the woman of the elderly couple who had gotten on before Lauren and the kids.

  Lauren looked around and tried to figure out where they were. She knew they had headed south out of the city, toward Toronto, down highway 533. As she looked around, she realized they must have taken a turn-off somewhere when she hadn’t been paying attention. She didn’t think they were far from the highway, however, maybe only a mile or so. After travelling with the TV crew so many times, she had become fairly good at judging distances based on time. The bus was parked in the parking lot of a motel, which stood in the woods in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. A tall and cheesy-looking sign announced that it was the Pummel Motel. All of the other vehicles had discharged their passengers here, and more were coming in. After getting off the bus, they were quickly ordered out of the way. The bus was then moved and parked on the grassy divide between the parking lot and the road. Lauren noticed that most of the vehicles were being parked that way, making a makeshift barricade, while the others turned around and headed back toward the city.

  As everyone huddled together, two policemen and a man with no uniform went through the group and gave out orders. One of the uniformed officers came over to Lauren.

  “How many in your group?” he asked, looking Lauren over.

  “Just me and the two kids here,” Lauren answered, holding Jon and Claire tightly around the shoulders.

  “Were any of you bitten by anyone in the last few days?” He asked this question very nervously.

  “No.” Lauren looked to Claire and Jon who both shook their heads.

  “Good. Umm,” the officer looked around, “we have three other kids who seem to have been separated from their parents. Would you be willing to take them in? Just temporarily of course. We just need someone to keep an eye on them while we get better organized.”

  “Sure,” Lauren replied without hesitation. The thought of more abandoned kids alone in this mess made her heart break.

  “Great, thank you.” The officer sounded so relieved that Lauren suspected he had gotten several rejections already. “I’ll take you to the kids, and then you can all go to room 28.” The officer led them toward the motel’s office while he continued speaking. “There should be a Private Winchester there or maybe an Officer White. There’s also another woman already in there. Nobody knows her name yet. We think she had a breakdown of some sort. We don’t think she’s dangerous in any way, just closed off. In either case, an officer or a soldier should be in or near the room at all times.”

  None of what the officer said made Lauren feel much better. She couldn’t understand why they would put kids in the same room as a mentally unstable person. She didn’t know why they had a mentally unstable person on the premises at all.

  They all entered the motel office, and a little bell over the door dinged. On a couch near the door sat three children. One was a black boy who looked to be between the ages of Jon and Claire, another was a petite Hawaiian-looking girl who was probably a little younger than Claire was, and the third was the smallest: a little Caucasian, blond, baby boy who couldn’t be older than a year and a half. He was drinking from a sippy cup.

  “Hi kids.” The officer tried to sound as friendly as possible. “This nice woman here…” The officer realized he didn’t know her name.

  “Lauren,” she told him.

  “This nice woman, Lauren, is going to take you to one of the motel rooms, okay? She’s going to look after you for a little while.”

  “Okay,” the boy nodded and got to his feet. “I’m Jason.” He held out his hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Jason.” Lauren shook it.

  “That’s Leelo,” the boy gestured to the girl. “The baby doesn’t seem to know his name, so we don’t know what it is.”

  “That’s all right.” Lauren walked over to Leelo. “Hi Leelo. Are you ready to move to one of the motel rooms?”

  “No,” Leelo scowled. “I want my mom.”

  “We’re looking for her, sweetheart,” the officer told her. He then turned to Lauren. “You got things from here? I have to go help out outside.”

  “Sure,” Lauren gave him a smile and let him leave. He probably just had no idea how to handle children and wanted to get the hell out of there.

  “They’re not going to find her,” Leelo burst into tears. “She’s dead. My dad attacked her, I saw it.”

  Lauren had no idea how to respond to that.

  “It’s okay.” Claire walked up to Leelo and put her hand on hers. “My mom’s dead too. She was killed by the doorman, Mr. Fargus.
He also killed my sisters and friends.”

  Lauren felt her heart hit the floor. She looked to Jon who nodded. He had heard the story in more detail.

  Leelo looked at Claire, then got up and held her hand. Lauren picked up the baby, who seemed totally content with his sippy cup, and left the office, the other kids in tow.

  Room 28 was on the second floor, which happened to be the top floor as well. She found the door already opened and a man in fatigues standing by it.

  “Are you Private Winchester?” Lauren asked him.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he nodded with a smile. “You been assigned to this room?”

  “Yes, my name is Lauren Sanford. This is Claire, Jon, Leelo, and Jason.” Lauren introduced them as they trooped past her and into the room.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Sanford. And the little one?”

  “Miss, actually. And please, call me Lauren. We don’t know this guy’s name yet.” Lauren shifted the boy to her other arm. He was just looking around, taking everything in with his big brown eyes. Totally content.

  “Then he fits right in, in this room. I assume you were told about the other guest?”

  “I was, yes. You’re sure she’s safe?”

  “Sure as I can be. Once you see her, you’ll realize she’s harmless. I don’t even think she knows where she is or who’s around her.”

  Lauren gave him a smile and entered the room, not really sure if she could believe that. Once she saw the woman, however, she did.

  The woman in question was sitting on the floor near the bathroom. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t acknowledge anyone as they walked in. She just stared at a fixed point on the blank wall beside her. In her lap sat a stuffed bear, and the woman’s only movements were to stroke its head ceaselessly. This woman was clearly far away. Lauren hoped that when, or even if, she came back, she stayed that peaceful.

  “All right, let’s get you settled,” Lauren spoke to the kids. They organized who was to sleep where and with whom. They started to call the one-year old Peter, and the woman Mary. They figured she would tell them her real name when she was ready. Once they were organized, they waited for further instructions.

  And they waited.

  And they waited.

  4:

  Orson King – Days Past to Day 7

  When Orson King was just four years old, he moved with his mom to Leighton. She had enough of Orson’s father, and so she left. Orson thought it was something he had done, either because he left his tricycle behind the car, and his mom ran into it, or because he wouldn’t eat his vegetables and didn’t like to wash his hands before supper. Maybe it was because he knocked a bird’s nest out of a tree and stomped on the eggs inside. All Orson knew, was that his father was somewhere else, and his mother had taken to drinking.

  The Kings were not a rich family, despite their name. Mrs. King could get a job only as a waitress in a bar and was rarely home, leaving Orson alone a lot. Even at school, he had no friends. The kids at school began calling him the King of the Orphans. They beat him up sometimes.

  Orson wasn’t dumb though. As he got older, he got cleverer. He first learned to defend himself by acting. He would pretend that one of the bullies had hit him during class, so that the bully had to stay inside during recess. He even went so far as to hit his own arm with a ruler in the bathroom and blame it on other kids.

  Midway through grade three, when that stopped working, Orson started to carry a knife from the kitchen drawer. As he expected, the bullies showed up one day while he was walking home from school. After calling him names, one of the bullies stepped close, probably to push him. Orson pulled the knife out in a flash; he had practised the move in his room. Without hesitating, he slashed open the front of the bully’s T-shirt and left him with a large bloody cut on his chest. All the bullies backed off after that.

  The teachers and parents must have been told a lie about the boy’s wound, because Orson never got into trouble for it. All the kids knew though. They all knew that the King of the Orphans carried a knife and had slashed open the biggest bully in their grade. Suddenly, Orson was very popular. He even got a girlfriend with whom he held hands and kissed a few times.

  During that time, Orson’s mom had started hanging out with weird people. Sometimes, she made comments to them about Orson when Orson could hear. They weren’t nice comments, so he stopped telling his mom about what he got up to during the day.

  The girlfriend’s name was Saria, and she and Orson had sex ed classes in grade six. Saria expressed a great curiosity about sex, so one day, in Orson’s backyard he showed her his penis. When Saria mentioned the thing the people did in the video, Orson asked her if she wanted to try it, but she said she didn’t want to get pregnant. She wanted to touch it though, and Orson let her. When Saria giggled, however, Orson got offended. She tried to explain to him that she wasn’t laughing at him, and that she didn’t know why she had laughed. She asked if she could make it up to him. Orson said she had to touch his penis again without laughing. She did, and it got hard. Orson then told her to kiss it, and she did. He really liked that, and so he told her to kiss it again. Saria sucked his dick, and he liked it. He liked it a whole lot.

  Orson and Saria hung out a lot more after that, and she gave him oral sex more and more frequently. Orson’s friends were so jealous.

  One summer night, when Orson was fourteen, his mom went out of town. He invited everyone to his place, and they drank his mom’s booze. Although Orson was still seeing Saria, there was another girl there, Kelly, who had matured faster than Saria and had huge tits. When she got drunk, Kelly let Orson play with them. Later that night, Orson caught Saria giving some other guy a blowjob, which made him mad and so he pushed her. She cried and said it was because she really wanted to give one, and that Orson was too busy with Kelly’s tits to notice her. Orson took Saria upstairs to his room. It was the first time he had let anyone in there. He ordered Saria to take off her shirt so that he could see her tits. Then he pulled her pants and panties down and made her walk around the room in just her socks. Sitting on his bed, he watched and got hard. After a few minutes, he threw Saria onto the bed and made her have sex with him. She cried silently the whole time.

  After that night, Saria broke up with Orson and started hanging out with new people. Not as if Orson cared, Kelly was all over him now.

  In high school, Orson’s life started to fall apart as he began to drink a lot more and began stealing. The police had caught him on several occasions. The courts threatened to separate him from his mom and send him to a juvenile detention centre. That’s when Orson knew things were bad. His mom had started to be around more often though. She had gotten a better job, a day job, and she was attending AA meetings. She found a new man, Mr. Norton, and she had dumped all her old friends. Mr. Norton was okay; he didn’t butt into Orson’s life, didn’t try to be his dad, and he was helping his mom. Not long after the thing with the courts, the Kings moved in with Mr. Norton, across town, where Orson had to change schools. He left all his friends behind and didn’t bother making new ones. He joined an art program that he attended every day after school and for most of the day on weekends. He loved it.

  Art became a real passion for Orson, and his art teachers began telling him he had real talent and a real imagination to go with it. He once painted an image of a ferocious cat-beast he had designed himself and was complimented profusely on the realism. Orson just politely thanked everybody. He didn’t tell anyone that he had killed, skinned, and dissected the neighbour’s cat to learn all about feline musculature and structure.

  On graduation night, Orson was alone in the house. Both Mrs. King and Mr. Norton were out for their bi-weekly date night. As Orson sat down to watch a movie, the doorbell rang. It was three of his old friends from across town. Somehow, they had managed to find out where he lived and were clearly drunk or stoned, probably both. Orson took them to his room where they got into an argument. One of them spilled beer on his sketchbook, and another smashe
d his fist through the painting of the big cat. One made a comment that the reason Saria dumped him was because she found out his mom was giving him better blowjobs than she could. Orson went over to his bed and pulled out a long, serrated blade from under the mattress. He had upgraded from the kitchen knife some time ago. His former friends fled. Later that night, Orson crossed town and snuck into the house of the one who had made the comment. He found the boy asleep in the bathtub, all alone in the house. Leaving no trace of himself, Orson used a razor from the medicine cabinet to slit the boy’s wrists, making it look like suicide. He was never caught.

  That same night, Mr. Norton proposed to Mrs. King and she said yes.

  Orson loved university. He loved the teachers, he loved the work, and he loved the new friends he made. He was the top student. The second student was a female named Cassidy, and she was friends with Orson. Orson loved Cassidy’s work; it had a certain flair that appealed to him. One day, Cassidy invited Orson to her place for lunch, a usual thing they did. She flirted with Orson, which was also not that unusual. This time though, she really flirted with him, coming onto to him, admitting to wanting to have sex with him. Rough sex. She wanted him to put the same kind of energy into her as he did into his art. He finally obliged, and they made a mess of the place.

  As Orson was nearing the end on her living room floor, she began to say no and bat at his chest. It was just part of the act. Orson just wasn’t aware of how much of an act it was. He was too into it to hear the keys in the lock. Cassidy really started to protest then, and to shove, confusing Orson. Her boyfriend, whom Orson didn’t even know existed, walked in and what he saw, Orson could imagine. He knew that it looked like he was raping Cassidy, and that’s exactly how Cassidy wanted it to be seen. She had even made sure it had been rough so that she would be bruised up. The lies she told, and the acting she put on, far exceeded what Orson could do when he was little. She had set him up completely.