May Dawney - Survival Instincts

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.