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

by Dawson, Trish Marie

  The three were still chuckling as they set off with Drake in the lead, Kris and Zoey second, and Connor bringing up the rear. It wasn’t because he was slower than the others, but for a reason he couldn’t explain, he wanted to cover their backs. With every step away from the lodge that they took, Connor felt as if they were being watched closely, like they were the target on the other side of a sniper’s scope. What he couldn’t figure out was where they were being watched from.

  DRAKE

  Thirty minutes into the trip, Drake realized it could take hours to climb to the top. The uneven snow was soft in parts and crunchy in others, and none of them could remember exactly what the land looked like below them, so they made a path straight up the middle, below the lines of the ski lift. One third of the way up, they took their first real break, but the dog was so eager to go on, they only sat for a handful of minutes. Once they caught their breath, they took off again, up and through, pushing their bodies to the max, even though none of them were in top physical condition to be out there.

  “Wait,” he suddenly said, stopping to listen to the southern side of the trees. His face hurt, despite the cover the scarf gave him. The split on his lip felt frozen over, and he’d licked at it so many times the skin was chapped.

  “What?” Connor said between short pants. “God, this elevation is killing me.”

  “I thought I heard something,” Drake said, staring into the trees and seeing nothing but every shade of green and brown imaginable, surrounded by shadows and nothing more.

  Zoey whined, and pulled on her leash to keep them moving, but Drake could tell by the way she glanced at the woods, she’d heard something too.

  “There, there it is again,” he said, with one hand up to keep the others silent. A howl, low and long, echoed down the mountain toward them.

  “What was that?” Kris whispered.

  “Not a person,” Drake mumbled.

  “Wolves?” Connor asked, scanning the woods.

  “Maybe.”

  They waited a few more minutes, frozen in place, listening for another howl so they could pinpoint the direction it came from, but the woods had fallen into an eerily silence.

  “You have a gun?” Connor asked him.

  He looked at the man, unrecognizable in his snow coat, and tilted his head to the side. “You really need me to answer that?”

  “Just checking,” Connor snapped. “Let’s go, then. Whatever’s out there isn’t close.”

  “Not yet,” Drake mumbled.

  “Huh?” Kris said.

  He shook his head. “Nothing, let’s go.”

  Drake took the lead again, listening to the sounds of their feet crunching through the snow, the curses when someone lost their footing or tripped on a rock, and the dog jumping like a reindeer through their tracks. She was the only one of them who didn’t seem tired, but energized, like she somehow knew at the top of the mountain a dog treat was waiting for her. He didn’t have her stamina, and had slowed down to almost a crawl by the time they reached the halfway point. The t-shirt under his sweater was damp with sweat, and his legs were wet from the knee down.

  The only thing Drake could appreciate was the crystal-clear air. It smelled of fresh pine and oak, and tasted like heaven. But it hurt to breathe. His lungs didn’t appreciate the hike at all, and he was forced to stop twice from coughing fits. His ribs throbbed, the joints in his hands and ankles ached, and his head felt like it weighed one hundred pounds. He wasn’t dizzy, and not once did he have to pause to throw up. The concussion left a dull pain spiraling around inside his skull, but wasn’t impairing his ability to function anymore. Small favors.

  When Zoey yelped, he turned around so quickly that he forgot they were going uphill and gravity pulled him onto his knees. He slid down the slope in the muddy tracks he’d just made, and if Kris hadn’t put a hand out to stop him, he’d have landed in the muck face-first.

  “Jesus!” he grumbled, struggling to stand. “Thanks.”

  “Sure,” Kris said, pulling hard with her free hand against Zoey’s leash.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked the dog, dropping a hand on her head. With a yelp, she darted away from him and bounded into the snow, pulling Kris with her. The leash was wrapped around her wrist, and the teen was yanked forward off her feet, landing with a plop on her stomach. When she came up on all fours, her mouth was full of snow, and Drake nearly pissed himself from laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” she grumbled, spitting until her mouth was empty. Though she was smiling, and Connor was swearing at Drake, it only made him laugh harder.

  “I don’t know what her problem is,” Kris complained, handing the leash over to Drake. “You take her. I don’t want to eat shit again.”

  He remembered then about her delicate state and stopped laughing. “She’s probably just restless,” he said, grabbing Kris in a half hug. “Once we get to the top, she’ll mellow.”

  Another howl ripped through the trees south of them, followed by two replies. The dog began barking wildly, and tugged on her leash. He secured it around his wrist and started walking again. Drake was obliged to let her lead them, and slowly they cut across the slopes, toward the northern side of the woods. Hopefully, he thought, away from danger and not directly into it.

  CONNOR

  Just as they reached the dark canopy under the trees, he pictured a hungry wolf bringing him down, tearing open his throat and drinking his blood while the others watched in a horrified state of shock. He could almost taste the iron in his mouth, and it physically hurt to look over his shoulder, because he was positive the wolves would be there, pursuing them across the slopes. When he saw nothing but their own messy tracks, he doubled over from relief. Why he’d volunteered to take up the rear, he didn’t know. But damned if he was going to be the first eaten. He’d seen, and starred in, too many movies to know how things ended for the last one in line.

  “Let me take her,” he wheezed, grabbing for Zoey’s leash. He nodded for Drake to take his place, despite his very colorful objections, and kept a close eye on Kris in the middle.

  The dog yanked them uphill, weaving around tree trunks and tripping over shrubs, until she stopped to pee. It seemed she marked at least two dozen trunks, leaving their snowy bases yellow, and whimpering the closer they got to the top.

  “We have to stop soon,” he said, pulling the dog into a reluctant sitting position.

  “Are we close?” Kris panted, plopping down in the snow. She fell backwards as if to make a snow angel, but didn’t move. “Please say yes. I can’t go any more.”

  Drake nudged her leg with his foot. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, just…let me breathe for a minute.”

  They were silent, listening to the sounds of nature, however quiet the woods were trying to be, wondering exactly how close they were to the source of the smoke they’d been watching for a month, which had oddly gone absent that day. They couldn’t be far, Connor thought. From the slopes, only two more towers were visible before they crested over the mountaintop and vanished into the trees.

  “Let’s take a break, wait it out a bit,” Drake proposed, sitting with a grunt next to Kris. He pulled a handful of energy bars out of his pocket and handed each of them one. To the dog, he said, “Sorry, girl, none for you. Has chocolate in it.”

  Zoey sneezed at him, and then stood at attention, despite panting loudly. The underside of her coat was full of snow, balled up in chunks that were going to be a pain in the ass to remove when they returned to the lodge. She would need a warm bath, Connor thought. Zoey hated baths.

  He stretched out beside the dog, loosening the leash so he could flex his wrist. With his gloves still on, he fumbled with the handle and accidentally dropped it in the snow. The instant the leash went slack, the dog bolted, and vanished into the trees within seconds. The three of them scrambled up to their feet and called after her, and when she didn’t return or respond, Kris began to panic.

  “We can’t lose her,” she
cried, running after the dog. “We can’t lose her, too!”

  “Damn it!” Drake yelled at him, chasing after the girl. “Kris, wait! Stop!”

  Connor, once more bringing up the rear, pursued the others as if his feet were on fire, because he could feel they weren’t alone. Something, or someone, was close.

  Chapter Fourteen

  COLE

  When Cole saw them round the bend and return down the road toward him, he began to cry. He’d been doing that a lot lately, crying. He wasn’t tough, and he knew it. He was lucky to be alive, and that wasn’t through much effort of his own. He simply didn’t get sick and die. Nothing he’d done or not done had changed his immunity to the plague. When his family died, he didn’t cry. It didn’t feel right at the time. Like something inside him was broken, blocking him from feelings. He stumbled into another person almost immediately, and when they found the Ark, it was a gift, he thought. A second chance to do things right, they told him. Cole had been fucking up since. And every damn thing that had happened after they kicked Riley out and Kris left had made him cry like a preschooler. He hated it.

  Riley stomped up to him with an ugly look stuck on her rosy face. “You got lucky,” she grumbled, leaning forward to cut him free from the tree he was tied to. “It won’t happen a second time.”

  His arms had gone numb after sitting in the cold for two hours, so he stayed on the wet forest carpet and rubbed the life back into them. When Jin got close, he used the tree to help him stand up, and Jin nodded in Riley’s direction. “We’re going back the way we came.”

  “What about me?” Cole asked, hoping they didn’t untie him just to send him into the woods alone.

  “What about you?” Jin asked. When he turned to follow Riley, who was already so far ahead of them that she was out of earshot, Cole jogged through the snow slush to be at his side.

  “Can I come with you, please?”

  With a shrug, and pulling his hood tight, Jin tossed the second backpack at Cole and they quickly closed some of the space between themselves and Riley. “Watch your step, kid. I have more rope.”

  “Are you ever going to trust me?” he asked, slinging the pack over his shoulder.

  Riley looked over her shoulder at him. “Trust is earned in this world, Cole, not handed out like candy. When you save my life, or Jin’s, maybe then I’ll trust you.”

  He smiled at the back of her head when she turned around, and then just before her arm snagged on a tree branch, he yelled, “Hey, lookout!”

  She didn’t find it funny at all, but she did dodge the branch. Baby steps, Cole thought. Baby steps.

  RILEY

  I regretted my words the instant I said them, because then Cole wouldn’t shut the hell up. He talked so much that the trees around us fell silent. The birds flew away. The small things that ran through the forest floor hid. And the more Cole talked, the more I swore I heard howling and barking in the distance, but it was so brief, I was unable to track it. Assuming it was the wind, or my own mind playing tricks on me, I didn’t mention it to the others, and continued walking. We took a different trail, the one that Jin said led into the valley, and even though we were going downhill, we still struggled in parts where the snow was deep. We avoided the shadows, and kept to the open trees, where the warm sun filtered down and melted some of the path.

  Cole talked about the Ark. He talked about the last Science test he took before the schools closed. He talked about the hot chocolate he missed from his stolen camper. He talked about how he was never allowed to have a pet growing up. He talked, and talked, and talked. I quickly became distracted and frustrated, and if not for the obvious downhill angle we tripped, slipped and heaved our way along, even Jin would have been lost.

  “Cole, shut up,” I begged.

  He stopped talking for five minutes, then began to hum. The humming turned into singing and I spun around, ready to deck him in the face. That’s when I truly heard it. Barking. A rapid succession of excited yelps and woofs. My heart flipped over and dropped out of my chest, landing in the pit of my stomach. It stayed there for a solid minute, and I must have held my breath for nearly as long, because dark spots flowered across the sky. Just before I blacked out, Jin grabbed my shoulder.

  “Where?” I stammered, searching the trees, telling myself I couldn’t possibly be hearing her. She was dead. My Zoey was gone.

  Cole’s eyes grew to the size of golf balls, and he clutched at the arm I had just been preparing to assault him with, and only released me after I hit him in the chest.

  “What was that?” he whispered, listening to the distant sounds bounce around the trees. “Is it the wolves again?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jin said.

  “It’s a dog,” I stated, certain.

  “No,” Cole argued, shaking his head. “A dog would die out here, wouldn’t it?”

  When the sounds stopped after an abrupt yelp, the three of us froze, searching the trees for movement, straining to hear something other than the whistle of the winds through the boughs. There was something there, something else that was just beyond the reach of my ears. It wasn’t a sound really, more like a tickle. Like the touch of a feather against one’s skin. There, but with little substance.

  “We aren’t alone,” Jin snapped, grabbing at my arm and pulling me up the trail.

  “No, wait,” I said, still straining, still trying to hear. “It was a dog,” I told him. “I know it was.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Either way, we aren’t alone. We need shelter.”

  I let him pull me several feet up the path we had created moments before through the calf-deep snow, when a low howl pierced through the silence, alarmingly close. It received a long and threatening reply. It was a hungry kind of call that any animal within miles would feel deep in their souls.

  “Shit,” Cole hissed. “I told you! I told you it was a wolf!”

  Confused, I didn’t fight Jin when he pulled me up the path behind him. “I’m losing my mind,” I gasped, tears stinging my eyes. “I’m hearing things.”

  “We all heard it,” Jin reassured me. “They could be hunting…maybe already downed something.”

  “No, I swear I heard…” My voice trailed off, not ready to say her name out loud. As we struggled back up the slushy path, I tried to clear my head. She died right in front of me, I’d seen it. Either Jay or Lee had shot her down before they dragged me back to their camper. Zoey was not in these mountains. My mind wasn’t right, it wasn’t.

  A gunshot blasted through the trees and Cole stumbled and fell, and I tripped over his feet landing on top of him. We scrambled away from each other and listened as another shot boomed, then a third. The shooter was close.

  “Stay down,” Jin warned.

  Two more shots. That was five total. From all fours, I searched the shadows for answers. They played with my eyes, twisting and morphing into shapes that weren’t real. We couldn’t crawl back to the cabin, but I couldn’t stand either. A shift was happening in my brain, reality and fantasy became dance partners, mingling and moving in tandem. Every shadow of the forest turned into someone I knew. Matt leered at me from behind a tree, with Bobby and Alan shimmering into shape beside him. My head spun. Skip stepped out from behind the skeletal remains of a bush, a smile on his broad face. Fin was there too, talking from across the woods. He waved for me to come to him, to follow him down the trail. At his back, two children, my children, darted from one tree to another, laughing. Fin kept talking, his mouth moving with urgency, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything.

  “What’s he saying,” I asked. “I can’t hear…” Someone tugged on my arm as Fin turned away from us, fading into the trail like mist. “Wait,” I called. “Wait for me!”

  Both my arms were lifted and my heels brushed against the ground as I was dragged away. I felt it coming, another break that would take me out of this world and into another, but then the scenery changed and I was set down hard on my ass. My cheek exploded from pain. Jin ha
d slapped me across the face. While a tear ran out of my left eye from the sting, I stared up at him, shocked.

  “Are you here?” he demanded, his voice thick with concern. “Are you here with me?”

  I nodded, trembling in every joint, unsure of what was real and what wasn’t. “I’m here,” I said. “I’m here.”

  He bent forward and yanked me upright. With his face an inch from mine, he hissed, “Then run!”

  JIN

  It was the worst possible time for Riley to lose her shit, when they had wolves and gunslingers hot on their trail. He dragged, pulled, and pushed her up the path, desperate to get back to the treehouse where they at least had a minimal chance to defend themselves. At one point they had to carry her, but even a woman with her small stature was heavy when non-responsive. There was no time. He backhanded her cheek, hoping the stun would return some light into her eyes. He’d seen this look on Riley before. The faraway, dead stare. It was how he found her, on a trail just like the one they were close to dying on.

  She came back to him, not entirely, but enough to use her own body. He held her hand and sprinted, as much as one can in snow, between the trees and around the rocks until he recognized the pines that snuggled closely about the cabin. They were almost there, so close he could count the steps, but then she jerked away from him.

  “Riley,” he whispered, skidding to a halt in the muddy snow. “Don’t stop,” he begged.

  “What’s wrong with her,” Cole heaved, having run by them. Shaking and pale, he waited next to a tree, hiding behind it.

  “Riley…” Jin started, but she brought her hands up to her ears to block him out, and stared down the trail, as if waiting for something.

  “We have to keep moving,” he urged, grabbing for her. “They’re coming!”

  She turned around and smiled at him, a dark glint of manic surrender in her eyes. “They’re already here,” she whispered.