Find Me Series (Book 4): Where Hope is Lost

by Dawson, Trish Marie

  He nodded. “We need babies, right? I mean, the world will die if we don’t have babies. Fern, she said that was priority one. After food, of course. Kris was my second, but she was different.” He paused and rubbed at his chin where the faintest glint of fresh stubble was visible. It probably took him three months to grow out a real beard. “We talked about it a lot, me and Kris. About starting over, having kids. She wanted that,” he whispered, looking up at me. “She did.”

  I knew she did. We’d talked about it, too. But what I also knew, is that Kris wouldn’t want to be hooked up to machines, and put into a medically induced coma while the Ark turned her into an incubation chamber. It was barbaric.

  “The first time we, you know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell Fern. It seemed so private,” he confided with a sad sigh.

  “You think,” I snapped.

  He continued as if I hadn’t interrupted, lost in his own memories. “But after that week, it’s like Fern just knew. I don’t know how.”

  I interrupted him, “You didn’t know they had a surveillance system inside the living quarters, did you?”

  He looked queasy as he shook his head, as if he might throw up in his bowl. He put a shaky hand on his mouth and then snatched it away. “She made me bring Kris to the medical wing. For medicine and stuff, you know, vitamins. To keep her safe. In case it worked. It was just to keep her safe for a little while.”

  “Not for a little while, Cole. There were women in the room with her that had to be in their third trimester. Do you know what that means, Cole? That’s almost full-term. Eight, nine months,” I argued.

  He shook his head. “That can’t be. It was just Gabby and Kris.”

  I stood up, and he flinched, but I didn’t walk toward him. I approached the window and leaned against the frame, watching the smoke from our valley neighbors as it drifted over the trees. “I know what I saw, Cole. There were several women there, none of them awake. I doubt they signed up to be guinea pigs.”

  Hugging himself, Cole began to rock in the chair. “But that’s not right. I mean it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Sure it does,” I whispered.

  “Huh?” he asked, his eyes wet again.

  The wind whistled around the cabin and Jin rose to look out the front door as I pressed my hand to the window, and avoided Cole’s eyes as I talked. “Of course it makes sense, Cole. You weren’t the first, you see. There must have been other boys, other young men that did what you did. When it didn’t produce results fast enough, or people began to miss all those young ladies, Fern turned the heat up and snatched the girls she wanted. Shit, she could’ve had them brought from the outside straight to the medical ward. You remember the bodies, right?”

  I turned away from the window and watched Cole’s eyes become so round it was almost painful. “No,” he panted. “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “To cover up their mess, and keep their secrets safe? Sure they would. People have done worse.” I turned away from him and stared back down the valley, wondering, not for the first time, exactly who Fern was before the virus wiped us out.

  “But…but…” Cole’s mental wheels were struggling to turn as he tried to piece together what I insinuated with what he already knew. “Why would they kill anyone? Why do that?” he whispered, crinkling the soft lines of his forehead as he spoke.

  “Why kill the women? Well, maybe Fern asked them to be surrogates and they refused. Or maybe they found the medical wing, like I did. Or maybe there really is a homicidal freak hiding at the Ark.”

  Cole shook his head, then jumped out of the chair. “I can’t go back there,” he blurted, his cheeks flushed. The floorboards softly creaked as he began to pace from the bookshelf that doubled as the kitchen counter, to his chair.

  “Then don’t return,” Jin stated.

  Cole balked at him. “I have to! They expect me back, with Kris! I’m already overdue. The storm’s a great excuse and all, but as soon as they can drive the roads, they’ll come looking for me. They’ll want my maps, and they’ll send me back there. I can’t go back without Kris, Riley.”

  “But you haven’t found her, have you? So, why would they send you back? Why do they even care that much?”

  He dragged a hand through his hair. “Because she’s pregnant!” He collapsed back into his chair and covered his face with both hands. He stayed that way for a long time, long enough that Jin had cleaned up the kitchen and put the discarded bowls of soup in a covered container for later.

  The embers in the fire popped, and I crossed the room to the fireplace, placing another thin log inside to keep the fading flames going. Something shuffled near the door, and I stood to see Jin pulling on his coat. He nodded at me to join him, and together we stepped outside into the cold, leaving Cole in his chair, his hands still covering his face.

  When the door was closed, we stood beside each other near the wooden railing, looking down at the land below us. The wind screamed through the trees, bouncing off the trunks and changing direction every few seconds. With my eyes closed, the low wail reminded me of traffic, and I imagined standing in the middle of a busy intersection with trucks and cars whizzing by me, and when Jin’s hand touched my arm, I jerked, as if one of the imagined cars had struck me.

  “That boy’s story concerns me,” he admitted.

  I pulled my hood over my head, and nodded. “No shit.”

  He bounced up on his toes twice, trying to adjust to the cold air. “It’ll be night soon. He’ll have to stay again.”

  “Or…we could make him leave, and see how far he gets.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise,” he argued, tucking his hands under his armpits for warmth.

  “Fine, what do you think is wise? We stay here, watch our resources dwindle down to nothing, and wait for some Ark retrieval crew to find Cole’s camper? He said it’s not far from here, which means we can’t sit around and wait for them to show up, right?”

  He turned around and leaned against the railing, facing me. “You haven’t said much about your friends.”

  Despite the chill, my cheeks burned. “What do you want to hear, Jin?”

  We stared at each other until I broke our gaze to look out at the trees and their constantly shifting shadows, wondering if people from the Ark were already on their way. For a second, I thought I caught a glimpse of a man with stringy blond hair, like Jay’s, but a quick rub of my eyes erased the shadow from the trees.

  “They could be down in that valley,” Jin nodded. “Your friends, they could be close.”

  My hood fell back as I shook my head, and I laughed harshly. “Not possible. If what Cole says is true, and that’s a big if, one of them would have climbed up this mountain by now to investigate our smoke, assuming they can see ours like we see theirs.”

  “They most likely can,” he agreed.

  “Right. And they haven’t bothered. Not that anyone can do much hiking from out of that valley. They’re completely snowed in. But does it make sense to you, Jin? If it’s true that they left the Ark to find me, does it make sense to come out this far and then just stop looking?” I watched his face soften, hoping he would sugarcoat the answer for me, but he didn’t.

  “No, it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Great,” I grumbled.

  He shifted against the railing, and a tuft of snow slid off the narrow porch as he readjusted his feet. It landed silently below us in a drift. “Chances are low that the people below are your friends. They could be enemies.”

  I nodded. “See, that makes more sense to me. You already said there are resources there. A store, food. Power. Whoever is down there probably knows they’ll outlive us, so why bother with investigating, right?”

  He didn’t answer. We stood on the narrow overhang, freezing our asses off, wondering up scenarios that we couldn’t support with evidence. Just our imaginings, that’s all we had left. Dreams, or nightmares, however one chose to look at it, about what the world was like outside of our own looking gla
ss. It wasn’t a pretty world. It never had been, really, not since people came to exist. We thought we were screwed before, with climate change, poverty, and war. But I suppose Death decided to speed things up a bit and put humans out of their misery. Except, Death left some of us behind by accident, with no explanation.

  When I began to cough, Jin gestured for us to return inside, but something else had been bothering me. Something I had waited all day to ask him.

  “Jin, why did you keep my jar?”

  JIN

  The wind whipped at her hair, and as she struggled to tuck it back into her loose hood, he struggled to find an answer to her question that would sound plausible. He could lie, and tell Riley what she wanted to hear. Or, he could risk the truth, and watch what it did to her. She was growing impatient, staring between him and the door, daring him to open it so she could pull it shut. She wasn’t going to allow him to evade her.

  He decided to tell her the lie. It was the gentler option, but the truth stumbled out of his mouth faster than the breeze raced through the pine canopy. And, as he feared, the light behind her eyes darkened more with each word he spoke. Her mouth hardened like stone, and her body went rigid. Once he started talking, he couldn’t take it back, so he told her all he could before he lost what little nerve he had left.

  Jin had never been a praying man, not by nature. He made his own life, abided by the goodness of his parents, and found solace in the morals he was raised with. He supposed it was his optimism that had helped him survive what so many had not. But when Jin stopped talking, she began to cry, and he was afraid of what Riley was going to do next. In the pit of his stomach, when she fell back into the railing, he was certain that she would throw herself over it, metaphorically and literally. He began to pray then, a tangle of feelings that centered around one thought, and one thought only. Please don’t let her die.

  Chapter Nine

  CONNOR

  He waited at the door for two minutes hoping it would open, but Drake was being stubborn, as always. He thumped it once with his hand and went downstairs, where most of the others wandered around in an extended state of restlessness, trapped indoors with nothing to do but stare at each other, or toss another log on the fire. Jacks had put a blanket on the floor for Lily to rest on. Though Kris was playing with her, she watched Connor with interest as he paced across the room, checking each window, then double-checking. The snow went halfway up the south side of the lodge, and just a quarter of a way up the other side. Even if they were lucky enough to dodge another blizzard, it would take days, if not weeks, for this last snowfall to melt enough for safe travel. It was devastating, seeing so much of nothing outside.

  Kris gave him a tentative smile when he walked around the sofa and squatted down to say hello to her and the baby. “You girls doing okay?”

  She nodded with a scowl. “You look like shit.”

  He scoffed at her language, but it wasn’t the worst thing said in the house that morning. “Thanks.”

  She pushed herself upright and crossed her legs, facing him. “Was it worth it?” She gestured to his face, and almost reached out to touch the cut on his lip, but pulled back.

  “Worth it? Probably not. Look, Kris, about what happened…” he started, but then Jacks cursed in the kitchen. He stood up, then gently ruffled the top her head. “I’ll be back.”

  Jacks stood in the kitchen near the back door, poking holes with his feet into a snow drift that had covered the entire opening. “Well, that’s impressive,” Connor commented.

  “You think? How the shit are we getting through this?” Jacks grumbled.

  Connor walked up to the snow wall and pushed on it, assuming it would tumble onto the deck. All that tumbled was himself, as his hands sank into the snow and did nothing to dislodge the blockage. Jacks helped pull him out, and both the men stared at the mess, somewhat alarmed, and more than a little irritated.

  “What about the front? This side of the building took the brunt of the storm last night, so there might be less drifts up against the other side,” Connor speculated.

  Connor left Jacks in the kitchen, crossed through the sitting area and around the hall, and unlocked the door that connected to the front lobby. When he opened it, he was surprised to see that the makeshift walls they had put up were still standing, but the lobby was as cold as an icebox. Only one window hadn’t been busted when they arrived, and he didn’t have to approach it to see how deep the snow was, because it was level with the center of the glass panes.

  “Well, shit,” he mumbled.

  “Trying to run away?” Ashlyn asked from behind him.

  He jumped and spun around, nearly knocking a coffee mug out of her hand. “What? No,” he scoffed.

  She glared at him, and flipped a section of hair off her shoulder. “Well, you can’t get out that way.”

  After he glanced back at the window, he pulled the hall door shut. “Obviously.”

  When she stepped away, he snagged her elbow and pulled her toward him. He took the warm mug from her hand and set it down on a nearby end table so she wouldn’t throw it in his face. “Ash, we need to talk,” he whispered.

  “Why, so you can confuse me with her again?” she snapped.

  Though her eyes were cold and dangerous, she didn’t attempt to pull free from him, so he pivoted her, bringing their bodies closer together and out of view from the sitting area where there were more people present to eavesdrop than he liked.

  “What I said…I’m sorry. I was tired, Ash, really tired. It was wrong.” She didn’t interrupt, so he continued. “But we shouldn’t, I mean, I can’t…not now.”

  Her head cocked to the side and he glanced down at the curve of her exposed neck before finding her eyes again. She made a tsk-tsk sound at him, and then leaned against the wall, loosely crossing her arms.

  “You mean you can’t be with me while you’re searching for her, because if she’s still alive, that’s who you want.”

  He blinked at her, certain there was no answer he could give that wouldn’t cost a kick in the balls.

  “Am I right?” she pressed.

  He remained silent.

  “So, I am.”

  She pushed off the wall and grabbed at his face with one hand, roughly pulling him down by his hair. Expecting a slap or a punch, he resisted little. When her mouth pressed hungrily against his, it shocked the hell out of him. Unsure of what to do, he froze, and not till her other hand grabbed at his groin and began to massage him through his jeans, did he lamely attempt to push her off. Somehow, she pinned him to the wall with her weight, and grinded her hips against his. With his lips held tightly together, he realized at the same time as she that his body was responding to her, and he grabbed her by the shoulders, shoving her off, and hitting the back of his head on the wall in the process.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he hissed, tugging at the tight crotch of his jeans, and silently cursing his junk for betraying him, again.

  “I’m just reminding you that I’m here, Connor,” she answered, retrieving her coffee from the table with a satisfied smile on her face. “She’s probably a corpse, you know. How long are you going to wait for a dead girl to show up? Because I won’t be here forever.”

  He couldn’t breathe. Ashlyn winked and then left him in the hall, shaking from the inside out. Because despite the sick game she was playing with him, she was probably right.

  ASHLYN

  She waited until she was back in her room with the door closed before she let out the cry that had been brewing all morning. Men were stupid. Men were assholes. Men were stupid assholes. She curled up on her bed and pulled the covers over her head and listened to her own ragged breathing and sniveling for over an hour. By then her throat was sore and her nose raw from rubbing. She finally pushed the covers off but then pulled them back up to her neck, her room was unpleasantly cold.

  No one liked her, she knew this. For whatever reason, all anyone cared about was finding Riley and bringing her back to life. The b
itch was dead, Ashlyn believed this. And even if she wasn’t, they weren’t going to find her. There were a dozen different directions Riley could have gone once she was dumped by the Ark. Plus, Ashlyn thought, if her friends were so important to her, why didn’t she go back for them?

  “Because she doesn’t care,” Ashlyn whispered into her empty room. “Because she doesn’t love Connor like I do.”

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped the blanket tightly around her body. Connor did care about her, she felt it. He was just confused, she thought. Confused and worried. And likely hurt. She shouldn’t have done that to him downstairs, teasing him that way. He’d come back to her, eventually. Men always did. She just had to be patient. With a sigh, she absentmindedly twisted a section of hair between her fingers and stared out her bedroom window at the snow-draped valley, and wondered if any of the many hills in her view hid the decaying remains of Riley’s body on them. In a twisted way the thought calmed her, and she turned it into a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Not that mountaintop, or that batch of pines. Not that hill, or that crest. She did this until the light shifted, and shadows began to fill the corners of her room, and her stomach rumbled softly from being ignored for too long.

  Tired, but too hungry to think about sleep, she climbed off the bed and then carefully remade it. She smoothed down the front of her long-sleeve top, and tugged on her undershirt, tucking it back into her jeans. After she smoothed her hair into a presentable style, she cleared her throat and prepared to surround herself with the people she hated. Except for Connor. Everything she did was for him. And she would wait for as long as it took to see him look at her the way he used to.

  But she didn’t have to wait, because just before she opened her door, he did it for her. He entered quickly and quietly, closing the door behind him and latching the lock. Without saying anything, he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her hard against him, crushing his mouth against hers. He yanked her clothing until it was free from her body, and then pushed her face-down onto the bed, holding one of her arms up over her head as his tongue trailed along the inside curve of her throat and over her shoulder, suckling, tasting.