Survival Instinct (Book 3): Fighting Instinct Read online

  Hope was grumpy about having to wait again, but kept quiet. She was glad that they could walk through the middle of the ship instead of going outside.

  This time waiting wasn’t as boring. A number of women stopped in the bathroom on their way to the meeting. A few of them even knocked on the door, checking to see if the stall was empty. Dakota answered every time, and they always went away, but it frightened them all the same. Hope was certain that they were going to be caught, but they never were. Eventually, women stopped using the bathroom.

  “All clear,” Adam told them after looking under the stall door.

  “Come on, let’s go before the meeting ends and more women come to use the bathroom.” Hope unlocked the stall door and stepped out into the bathroom. She moved toward the door, but stopped when Adam went up to the sink.

  “What are you doing?” Becky asked him.

  “My mom tells me that I should wash my hands every time I’m leaving a bathroom. So I’m washing my hands.” Adam was just tall enough to reach the taps to turn on the water.

  “Maybe we should all wash our hands,” Dakota suggested. “You girls did touch the bathroom floor with your hands while you were sitting there.”

  Hope looked at her hands. They didn’t look dirty, but maybe Dakota had a point. She walked up to the sink next to Adam, and began to wash her hands.

  Once they had all washed up, the four kids grouped around the bathroom door with Milly. Dakota slowly opened it and stuck her head out.

  “Okay, there’s no one out there. Let’s go.”

  As they walked along, Becky took hold of Hope’s hand. She was looking at the dragon statues they were nearing. The statues weren’t really that scary, but the doorway beyond them was. It was always dark in there, and Hope knew that’s where they put the bad people on the ship.

  As they passed in front of the doorway, a monstrous sounding scream echoed out of the room beyond it. Becky squealed, turned away, and hid her face with her hands. Hope jumped back against Becky, and then wrapped her arms around the older girl. Adam ran forward, toward the room full of plants, while Dakota became very still, her eyes locked on the darkness. Milly whined, her ears pressed flat to her head, as she placed herself between the kids and the door.

  “Let’s go.” Hope grabbed Becky’s hand and pulled her forward. She also grabbed Dakota’s hand as they hurried by. Going into the brightly lit plant room, they found Adam huddling off to one side.

  “What was that?” Becky cried.

  “I don’t know,” Dakota shook her head. In fact, her whole body was shaking.

  “I don’t like it. We should go back to class,” Adam suggested.

  “No. We said we’d go see Peter, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Hope said to them all.

  “I agree with Adam. We should go back.” Dakota had taken off her cowboy hat and was fidgeting with it.

  “No!” Hope stomped her foot.

  “But it sounded like a zombie.” Dakota’s eyes were watery, as if she were about to cry.

  “It’s not a zombie.” Hope hadn’t thought of that, but the idea that it could be a zombie was frightening. She knew that zombie was the adult word for monster.

  “What do you know? You’ve never even seen a zombie except maybe on film,” Dakota yelled at her. She had started crying. “You’re not even old enough to learn about them yet.”

  “It’s not a zombie!” Hope yelled back. “My daddy wouldn’t let a zombie on the ship! I know he wouldn’t. It’s not a zombie.” Hope could feel tears in her eyes.

  “We’re closer to Peter than we are to school. Let’s just go see him, then hurry back,” Becky suggested.

  None of them spoke for a moment, the silence broken only by the clicking of Milly’s toenails on the floor as she circled around the children.

  “Okay,” Dakota eventually sighed, “let’s go find Peter, but we have to be quick.” They hurried through the plant room.

  At the other end, they reached the spiral staircase and Hope led them down. The smelly room was at the bottom and Hope realized that Milly might need to go.

  “What happened to doing this quickly?” Dakota sounded mad when Hope told her.

  “It won’t take long. I just have to let Milly go into the room,” Hope told her.

  “Fine,” Dakota crossed her arms, “but hurry up.”

  Hope went through the door with Milly. She pulled her shirt up over her nose, just like she did every time she came in here with either her mommy or daddy. Opening the second door, Hope let Milly go inside the extra gross room by herself. She waited alone until Milly scratched at the door to be let out. Exiting the poop room, Hope couldn’t see where her friends had gone.

  “Guys?” she called out.

  “Over here,” Adam replied. They were in the photo place.

  Hope walked over to them and looked at what they were looking at.

  “Hey, that’s Uncle Alec,” Hope pointed out a picture of the man. She learned that Alec wasn’t her uncle like Danny was her uncle when they studied families at school, but he was always called her uncle. Like Uncle Misha, and Uncle Tobias. Ms. Abby was even called her Aunt Abby sometimes, even though she wasn’t related either. Hope thought that maybe they were called that because her parents were best friends with them.

  “There’s a picture of Shoes here, too.” Becky was standing at a different shelf nearby.

  “We just stopped here to wait for Hope to come back with Milly, so let’s get going.” Dakota was walking back and forth along a row of pictures.

  Becky took the picture of Shoes and put it in her pocket. The four kids, plus Milly, then left the photo place. As they neared the spiral staircase again, they heard voices coming down from above.

  “Hide, hide, hide.” Dakota quickly turned them all around, and they ran back into the photo place to hide amongst the shelves.

  Peering around a corner, Hope spotted three men walking down the stairs. They all had dark hair and were talking not-English. They sounded the same as the guys in the library, the ones Mr. Winchester was interested in. Still talking, they walked across the little bridge that led between the elevators and towards the food place.

  “Shouldn’t they be at the meeting?” Adam whispered.

  “Yeah,” Dakota nodded, “I wonder why they’re not?”

  “Maybe they’re guard people,” Hope offered. “My daddy sometimes doesn’t go to the meetings because he has to guard the ship.”

  “I don’t think they were guarding stuff,” Becky shook her head.

  “Aren’t those the same guys Private Winchester was interested in? The ones he was asking us about?” Dakota crept forward, checking to see if they were gone.

  “I think so.” Hope followed closely behind her.

  “Do you think we should tell Mr. Winchester?” Adam asked.

  “We have to find Peter first,” Hope insisted.

  “Okay. We’ll find Peter, then go find Winchester and tell him,” Dakota decided, “and then we’ll go back to class. Okay?”

  “Okay,” the other three agreed.

  While crossing the little bridge, they moved slowly, just in case the men were still on the other side. Hope looked over the railing, down to where the elevators disappeared. They were close to the first deck now.

  The men they had seen were gone, so the kids hurried past the entrance to the food place, and headed down the stairs. It didn’t take long before they were on the lowest deck, just outside the medical centre. Hope could hear voices coming from inside the centre.

  “There are doctors here,” she whispered to the others. “My mommy might be here.” Like her daddy, Hope’s mommy sometimes didn’t go to the big meetings, but instead, took care of sick people.

  “The tender boat is gone,” Dakota pointed out, “which means Peter isn’t here.” She sounded angry. “We should go back upstairs.”

  “Too late.” Becky pushed them all forward. “There are people up there.”

  “This way.” Adam gr
abbed Becky and Hope’s hands and pulled them toward the center of the ship, and the medical centre.

  “Where are we going?” Hope wondered, pulling her hand out of Adam’s but continuing to follow him. “My mommy will see us.”

  “My dad works on the engines. He’s taken me in here sometimes.” Adam led them past the medical centre and opened a door Hope had never gone through before. A sign on the door said ‘Crew Only’.

  Milly trotted straight into the medical centre, instead of following the kids to the side.

  “Milly? What are you doing here?” Hope recognized her mommy’s voice.

  “She’s going to come look,” Hope warned the others, quickly going through the door to which Adam had led them.

  “We shouldn’t be in here,” Dakota said as she followed Hope. “We should have gone to the other stairs. We should be looking for Private Winchester. We said that after we found Peter, we’d go find Private Winchester. Well, Peter isn’t where we thought he was, because the funeral boat is gone. It’s not safe here.”

  “It’s fine. My dad took me down here before. As long as we don’t touch anything we’re safe.” Adam led them down a short, narrow hallway lined with pipes.

  “I don’t like it here,” Dakota continued. “We should go back.”

  “My mommy will see us if we do,” Hope told her.

  “She might not even leave the medical centre,” Dakota replied.

  Adam led them into a room full of giant machines that were making loud whooshing sounds. He walked around the side of one and suddenly stopped, causing Becky to bump into him. Hope came up behind them and also stopped suddenly. Right in front of them were the men they had seen coming down the spiral stairs.

  One of the men started yelling in Russian, and pointed at the kids. Fear shocked through Hope, and she turned to run back to the doctor place. Before she got more than five steps, an arm wrapped around her waist, and she was hauled up off the floor. She tried to scream, but a large hand was quickly clamped over her mouth.

  “Let me go!” Adam was yelling at another man who had grabbed his arm. The man’s other hand was holding the back of Dakota’s neck. Becky stood next to Dakota, unmoving, with both her thumbs in her mouth.

  The men were all yelling at each other in that language that Hope didn’t understand. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but they sounded really angry.

  The man holding Adam suddenly cried out as the six-year-old kicked him hard in the shin. He let go of Dakota to hold Adam with both hands. Hope continued to struggle against the man who held her, but he was much bigger and stronger than she was.

  Dakota ran for it. The third man ran after her, pushing his way through the other two men and knocking over Becky. Becky started to cry really loudly. She had hit her head on a metal bar and blood was running down the side of her face. Hope had never seen so much blood before.

  She bit the man’s hand. He cried out and pulled his hand away from her mouth. Hope continued to kick her feet until she hit the man between his legs. The man suddenly dropped her.

  Once Hope hit the floor, she started running. She didn’t run the same way Dakota had, because she could hear Dakota screaming. The third man had grabbed her and was dragging her back. Hope ran farther amongst the machines. There was a small space between two of them, so she squeezed herself into it. The man had been right behind her. His arm reached through the gap after her, but he was too big. Hope had already gotten far enough that he couldn’t grab her.

  Reaching the end of the gap, Hope turned a corner so that she was behind the machine. She didn’t know what the machine did, and didn’t care; she just wanted to hide from the man. She could hear him yelling. He was very angry.

  Suddenly, the man stopped yelling. Hope couldn’t hear anything above the sound of the whooshing machines. She didn’t dare look around the side of the machine in case he was still there.

  Hope was crying. She wanted her daddy, or her mommy, or even Milly. She wished Milly hadn’t run off. Milly would’ve bitten the men.

  “Rouff, rouff.”

  Hope peered around the corner when she heard a dog barking. Milly was standing at the end of the gap, looking in at Hope.

  “Milly!” Hope cried out, delighted to see her dog. She squeezed her way out, getting her hands and clothes even dirtier. She hadn’t realized how dirty it was between and behind the machines when she had first entered the space.

  “Hope!” Hope’s mommy appeared behind Milly, with Becky in her arms.

  “Mommy!” Hope ran to Mommy, so happy to see her that she was crying. “Mommy, I’m sorry!”

  Mommy knelt down when Hope reached her, and hugged her with one arm while the other continued to hold Becky.

  “I’m sorry, Mommy!” Hope cried. “I’m sorry I left school! I just wanted to make Peter not sad! I shouldn’t have left! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! We should have listened to Mr. Winchester! I’m sorry! Dakota knew we shouldn’t have come in here!”

  “Hope, it’s okay. Shh, it’s okay.” Mommy stroked her hair and back. “You’re all right now. You’re all right. You’re okay.” With a grunt, she picked Hope up with her free arm. “God, you girls are getting heavy.”

  Carrying Becky and Hope, Mommy headed back toward the door through which they had come. Adam and Dakota were waiting there with some other doctor people. The three men were also there, standing to one side with grumpy faces.

  “Take her,” Mommy said to another doctor and handed Becky over. “Looks like a head laceration, but nothing too severe. Get her to the medical centre. Take the other kids with you.”

  Adam and Dakota followed the doctor carrying Becky out through the door.

  “As for you,” Mommy turned to the three men. She was very angry. “What the hell were you doing?”

  “We are sorry, ma’am,” one of the men spoke. His English sounded funny, and he spoke slowly. “We were down here to turn off the washing machines in preparation for the voyage. We had heard the announcement about the missing children, and assumed it must be them. We were only trying to keep them from running away again. We did not mean to hurt any of the little ones.”

  “Well you did!” Mommy shouted. “You’re going to come with me right now, and we’re going to have the ship defenders deal with you.”

  The three men turned to exit the machine room.

  Hope wrapped her arms even tighter around Mommy’s neck. She was very glad to have her mommy.

  11

  Hanna’s On The Run

  Hanna had watched the conflict between the Russians and the children from her own hiding spot amongst the laundry machines. Even though they had explained themselves to the doctors who had shown up, it looked to Hanna like they had overreacted. The Russians always overreacted though. They always seemed to be hiding something, and a lot of people had learned to ignore that. Maybe it was because of the bomb. Surely, there were people blaming them for what Hanna had done.

  As soon as Hanna had been sure everyone was at the large meeting, she had made a beeline from the linen closet all the way to the laundry room. She knew the laundry room well, and knew virtually all of its hiding spaces.

  For over an hour now, Hanna had been struggling. She felt like she couldn’t control her own body. It felt as though she didn’t fit in her own skin anymore. The cause was stress, and no matter what she did, it wasn’t going away. Most of the time she was struggling to breathe, as her chest was tight and her throat half-closed. Occasionally, she would cry out high pitched whines, low guttural growls, or long, airy gasps. While in her hiding place, she would sometimes flail uncontrollably, her limbs banging off the nearby machines. She would claw at her skin, dig her nails into her flesh, or even punch her legs. The pain helped. The pain made everything go briefly away, it gave her something else to focus on. Then her mind would wander and the cycle would start all over again.

  When the Russians had shown up, Hanna had clamped her hands over her mouth. Her gasping was unlikely to be heard over the
machinery, but she wasn’t taking any chances. Now that the Russians were gone again, she threw her head into the machine beside her. She hit it hard enough to leave a dent, and daze herself.

  What am I doing, she thought.

  Lying down flat on her back, Hanna took several deep breaths. She let the tears come, feeling their heat upon her face.

  I should turn myself in.

  The thought caused her breathing to start hitching.

  I’m a monster.

  Her heart was beating terribly fast, and she could only breathe in short little gasps. Turning herself in was the last thing she wanted to do, but what were her other options? Hanna tried to think of the future, but saw only sadness, pain, and death. They would execute her for this. They wouldn’t care about the remorse she felt. They wouldn’t care that Alec had been the best thing in her life, and for reasons she didn’t understand, she had blown him up.

  Why had she planted the bomb? Why had she set the timer for then? Had she wanted to kill Alec? Had she wanted to hurt people?

  Hanna had never been a happy girl. She wasn’t terribly smart, good looking, or funny. She wasn’t popular in school, but she hadn’t been bullied either. She was invisible. No one paid any attention to the girl in the corner.

  So why had she put the bomb in the room of the one person who had truly seen her? The one man who actually seemed to notice her?

  Maybe Hanna thought that if she set off a bomb, she’d somehow become important. Men like Lenny and Benny would want to talk to her, to learn about her and her thoughts on things. Sure, they were talking to her now, but it was only because they felt that they had to.

  Planting the bomb hadn’t made her stronger, it had made her weaker.

  Taking a deep breath and lightly clamping her tongue between her teeth, Hanna tried to get her thoughts back on track. Basically, it came down to one thing: she thought she should turn herself in, but she didn’t want to turn herself in. So what did she want?

  Hanna thought hard on the question. She wanted to turn back time, and never plant the bomb. And never have the zombies show up. And never have followed Allan to that place where extremists had taught her how to make explosives. These were pointless wishes, as they were never going to come true. What did she want that didn’t involve changing the past?