Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope

by Trish Marie Dawson

  Drake snapped at her, “Because Riley’s still out there somewhere.”

  A long and ragged sigh came from the back seat. Connor didn’t need to look to know it came from Ashlyn. He’d heard it many times before. “Fine. And what if we don’t find your girlfriend, then what?” she asked. “We have no supplies. Just our packs. We can’t live long on that.”

  Connor stiffened. Girlfriend. He willed his eyes to stay forward, but they darted to the side and glanced at Drake anyway. He didn’t like what he saw. Instead of arguing, Drake scratched at his short beard and just shook his head from side to side. Perhaps mulling over the title, himself. Girlfriend. Despite the implications of the word, or what would change if they did find Riley, they had to keep going. Connor had to hold her, had to explain to her what had happened to him since he saw her shot off that horse so many months ago.

  “We keep looking till we find her,” he said simply.

  And that was the end of the conversation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  O ne day in the trees had turned to two. Then two days somehow turned into four. Riley wasn’t sure how it happened, but she knew she hadn’t left the curved comfort of the papasan chair, other than to use the restroom and splash water on her face. The fever that had wiped out her energy lasted for almost forty-eight hours, and honestly, if Jin hadn’t been bringing her tea and forcing her to eat the soup broth and dried foods he had on hand, she wouldn’t have made it. The pipes froze over on the third day, and on the dawn of the fourth, Riley woke up to sun rays touching her cheek.

  She sat up and blinked at the window which was letting the morning into the cabin. Jin sat in a nearby chair, polishing his collection of knives. Some were for throwing, he’d said, and some were for carving. When he noticed that she was awake, he nodded at the daylight.

  “Blue skies,” he said.

  “Finally.”

  She rose slowly, and pulled the blanket snugly around her. From the window, she could see an infinite amount of snow which covered the trees that stretched down a mountainside and flanked a valley. She couldn’t believe the view. From below, it would be hard to spot the cabin in the trees, because it was nestled just behind the gap of two full grown pines. But from the window, she felt like she was on top of the world, looking down at it. The sky was a crystal blue, pure and untouched by clouds. But in the distance, she noticed a set of black streaks that ran parallel with the tree line. They were easy to see, contrasted against the white snow.

  “What are those? They can’t be telephone lines.” She pressed her nose to the glass but couldn’t identify the wires. In one place, she thought they were connected to a tall tower, but she couldn’t be sure because it was obscured from the angle of the trees.

  Jin stood from his chair and glanced out the window. “For the lift.”

  “Lift?”

  “Yes, for skiing.”

  She looked back out of the window and followed the lines as far as she could. “Where do they go?”

  Jin returned to his chair and pointed over his shoulder at the window behind them. “Look there,” he said, uninterested.

  Riley gathered up the bottom of the quilt so she wouldn’t trip over it, and moved from one side of the room to the other. The window there showed less of the trees and more of the valley below them.

  “Oh,” she said. The cables ran from somewhere at the top of the mountain, where she couldn’t see, down a steep slope, and ended on the far side of the valley. Though it was too far to make out much detail of the building nestled off to the side, by a grove of pines, she was sure it was some sort of lodge. It stood lifted from the ground, partially buried under the fresh snow.

  “It’s empty,” Jin said.

  “What is it?”

  “A place for the tourists,” he said.

  Riley found it strange that no one else had settled into the place. “I wonder why it’s empty,” she thought out loud.

  “It was not always.”

  Riley pushed away from the window and circled the large trunk in the center of the room to the small kitchen. From there, she looked out of another window to the view of the forest. She walked the entire cabin, save for the loft, taking in the view around them. It was striking. And they were a lot higher off the ground than she’d first thought.

  “What happened?” she asked Jin, worn out from her small walk around the room. She settled back into her makeshift bed in front of the fireplace and lazily wiped the clear snot leaking from her nose with the cuff of her long-sleeved shirt.

  “Death.”

  “More than one word at a time, please,” she urged. Jin wasn’t one for small talk.

  The blades on the table clattered together and Jin rose once more, circled around Riley and set another log onto the fire. Then he wandered around for a bit, seeming to pick out a suitable place to sit while answering her question.

  Finally situated in one of the large reading chairs, he began to drum his fingers on the arm of the covered chair and took a deep breath. “There were people there, before I came to these mountains. When I spotted the lodge, I hiked down to it. Found the entrance wide open, damaged from the elements. Nature has been unkind here. Men, women, children. Twenty or so people. Gunned down. Bodies were left and most supplies taken.” He paused to look at Riley, then blinked and stared beyond her into the fire. “A boy, young, he did not die quickly. He had crawled across the main room, leaving a blood trail. I found his body in a closet. I think he hid there.”

  “Damn.”

  Jin nodded his head. His shiny hair bounced. “Yes. They were damned.”

  “No survivors?”

  “I do not know. The bodies were not fresh.”

  “Oh.”

  Jin flicked at an itch on the end of his nose and continued. “I took only what I could carry, came back up the mountain. I’ve not returned.”

  We watched the colors of the fire meld into each other for a few minutes, thinking. Or trying not to think. The sun was fully in the room by that point, invading the shadows with its warmth, pushing the darkness back under the furniture and into the corners. It was deceiving, the sun. Because outside it was still cold enough to redden one’s nose almost instantly.

  “Are there clothes down there, in a store, maybe?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Wasn’t looking for clothes. But there was a shop, maybe two.”

  “So there’s probably winter stuff. Snow pants, that sort of thing.”

  Jin waggled a narrow finger in my direction. “You are not strong enough for that journey. Your lungs need rest.”

  “I know.” My cough was drying up. And with the fever gone, I was on my way to recovery, but I still felt as if I’d been run over by a train and dropped off a cliff into a freezing lake. “But soon,” I said, as an afterthought. I needed clothes. I needed to prepare for moving on, and that meant supplies.

  “Where are you going next, Jin?”

  “With the wind.”

  It was what he said every time I asked. He had no intention of staying on the mountain, or in Arizona for that matter, longer than it took for the snow to melt. But I wondered where he would go and if there was a destination he moved toward, or if he truly had embraced the nomadic lifestyle the few of us left would be forced into. Moving around the weather, depending on the seasons. Surviving on what was left of the land, and defending our territory when needed.

  “Maybe I’ll go with you,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You have people.”

  “No,” I sighed, while finding a loose string to fidget with on the edge of my blanket. “I told you. They let me go. It’s time for me to let go, too.”

  “The heart does not work that way,” Jin countered. He rose from his chair, stretched till his neck popped and then crossed the room to make more tea. There was plenty of snow outside to melt for water and for sponge bathing. But it took time.

  “What’s in that tea, anyway?” I asked, eager to change the direction the conversation had moved i
nto.

  “Herbs.”

  I rolled my eyes. Herbs. He wouldn’t tell me what was in the large flour sack that he made the tea with, but it worked. And worked well. With nothing else in my life to do, I rolled onto my side, coughed lightly into the crook of my arm and closed my eyes, with the hope that while I slept, my dreams would show mercy on me.

  No such luck.

  * * *

  “Wake,” Jin said. “Wake up.”

  I bolted upright, pulled away from a nightmare, to find Jin squatting near my face. “What? What is it?”

  “Company.”

  “What? Here?” I was up and on my feet, but Jin was faster and blocked me from rushing toward the front door.

  “No. Below. Come see,” he said.

  I followed him to the window I’d spent gazing out of earlier that morning and peered through the glass. It was mid-day and the sun hung heavy above the center of the sky. It caused a dizzying reflection off the sparkling snow, and I had to blink several times to look beyond the shine.

  There was smoke in the distance. It rose straight up in a perfect spire from the center of the ski lodge. The dark smudge looked strange against the blue of the clean sky, like a giant thumb had smeared their pencil drawing against a clean canvas.

  “People,” I whispered.

  Jin pushed back from the sill, a stern look stuck on his angular face. “Not our problem,” he said.

  A pang of fear spread through my chest, followed quickly by a dull ache in my lower gut. Whoever was down in the valley would eventually notice our fireplace smoke. It was only a matter of time before a trail opened up and they decided to trudge up the mountain and possibly take what they wanted from Jin. From Riley. She had nothing left to give, but the fight was still hot inside her.

  “Fuck ‘em. I hope they freeze down there.” The severity of her tone made even the mild-mannered Jin raise his eyebrows in surprise. He narrowed his almond-shaped eyes at her, but said nothing.

  She wasn’t ready to meet anyone else. Riley would have been happy to die on her own under the snowy canopy of the forest, with ice crystals weighing down her closed eyelids, but fate had intervened by crossing her path with Jin’s. He brought her back from death, but he didn’t save her. No one could save Riley. She was a broken and angry woman, truly alone in her heart and soul.

  But they weren’t alone in the woods anymore. Riley was willing to protect what little was hers from this invader. Which meant, she was surprised to discover, that she was beginning to see the house in the trees as her home. As she looked out of the window and down over the miles of steep mountain and open valley, she felt a hatred bloom inside her for the person or people down below. And even a little sympathy.

  She dared them to find her.

  * * *

  They’d spent days on the go, stopping at every possible structure, checking down every road, searching on foot, and still there was no sign of Riley. The food they had managed to stumble upon was running out. Even though Kris was awake, responsive and appeared to be relatively healthy, losing Winchester had been a blow. And being told of Cole’s role in her…predicament seemed to devastate her already fragile state of being. She spoke little. So little that Connor couldn’t remember the last time she’d said more than a simple yes or no to him. Much like Jacks. He was clearly gutted. Connor knew something had happened between the distraught man and Winchester, he was certain of it, but what it was, he would probably never know.

  At night they would find somewhere to park the vehicle, and if they couldn’t start a fire, they would huddle together in the truck, shivering and cursing the winter weather. When the snow and rain finally let up, they decided to try the deeper mountain roads.

  “What about here? We skipped this one,” Connor pointed on the map.

  Drake hovered over the paper that was spread out on the hood of the truck. He tapped the mountain range above Connor’s finger. “The 180 highway. You said to wait till the snow stopped.”

  “Yeah, visibility was shite. But we can see now. It stopped yesterday. What are we looking at…how far is this ski resort place from the main road?”

  Drake squinted down at the creased map. “Thirty miles. At least.”

  With a heavy thump on the hood that startled Ashlyn, who had been leaning against the front bumper, Connor announced, “Well, ain’t that bloody marvelous. Let’s stop fannying around and get on with it. We’re wasting time just standing here.”

  After gathering everyone back into the truck, they began the trek farther to the west, to search the tourist side of the mountain. Riley wouldn’t be there, he didn’t think. But unless her body was underneath five feet of snow in a drift off the side of the road, she had to be holed up somewhere.

  By the time they finally found the resort, and saw its condition, he knew she wasn’t there. Standing next to the truck and looking inside the battered entrance of the main building, they could all see that something horrible had happened long before they arrived. As they moved around the lower level of the resort, stumbling upon up to twenty bodies, he wondered where the hell she was. It was decided quickly that they would stay at least one or two nights there to gather up supplies, rest and plan out their next search zone. But it was Kris who shocked them all by dragging the first body out to the back of the property. She returned to retrieve a second, then a third body. When she went inside for the fourth, Connor followed her, and helped carry the badly decomposed body to the small pile Kris had made in the snow.

  “We need to burn them,” she said, panting from the activity. “We need to burn them. Set them free. Then we can stay here. They’ll leave us alone if we let them go.”

  “Kris?”

  “We can stay here, Connor. At least for the rest of winter. There are cabins here, just like at home. Sure, there’s only a handful, and they’re simple wooden boxes with none of the fancy trimmings, but they each have those little wood-burning stoves, and toilets that flush. That’s all we really need, right? Until we can get it cleaned up in here. Then maybe we can move into the main building. Rebuild the doors, or something.”

  “Kris,” Connor reached out and gently took hold of her arm. “We aren’t staying here. This is just, what do you call it…a pit-stop. Then we’re back on the road.”

  “Looking for Riley?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know she’s probably dead, right?” Kris blinked at him, bent forward and grabbed another body by the ankles, and pulled the woman’s remains out the front doorway before she vanished from sight.

  “She wants to stay?” Ashlyn asked him.

  Connor turned around to see her standing nearby, a crate in her arms full of miscellaneous supplies, mostly dented cans of food. A bottle of something dark was tightly wedged in one corner, wrapped with a dish cloth. Wine, maybe.

  “That’s what she said,” he sighed.

  “And what do you want to do?” Ashlyn adjusted the crate in her arms.

  “What’s right.”

  She nodded. “For yourself, or everyone else?”

  When he looked at her face, her doe brown eyes were watery. Close to spilling over with tears. “Ash, look. We haven’t had a chance to talk in private since…since all this went down.”

  With a shrug of her shoulder, she dismissed the offer. “Not now. Things are what they are.”

  “And what are they?”

  She laughed. The sound filled the hollowed-out lobby with warmth. “How the hell do I know? I’m just trying to stay alive. Like everyone else.” With a weak smile, she walked by him with the crate and carried it out to the truck bed. He watched her dig around inside it, and then wipe at her cheek.

  The smell of something burning began to fill the air, and Connor moved outside and around the building to where the others had gathered to watch the human bonfire burn. Arms, legs, heads. Just decomposed body parts and nothing more. No names. No graves. No words to say over the lost souls. The smoke turned black and rolled up into the cool air in a rush to touch the
sky. Hopefully taking the spirits of the dead off with it.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the mountains that surrounded them, and noted how beautiful the trees were, adorned in their white cloaks and top hats. He looked back at his group. Jacks, sullen and simply going through the motions, held onto Lily, who was furiously sucking at her tiny fist. Kris squatted in the snow, with the flaming torch still in her hands, watching the bodies burn with a blank look on her face. Ashlyn stood off to the side, her arms tucked tightly around herself in a hug. Zoey waited off in the distance, aware that the current in their group was alive like a wire, something dangerous to touch. And Drake, like Connor, stood staring out at the trees, lost in thought. They may have all been freezing in their disheveled clothes and well-worn boots, but they were alive.

  He could feel Riley out there. In his soul, he sensed that she was alive, too, not floating in the breeze with every other restless soul looking for release. And though it was more than a little absurd, he fantasized that she was somewhere in the trees, looking down the mountain at him, warm and safe and dry.

  Connor knew she was close. Waiting for him. And hoping to be found.

  END of BOOK THREE

  TO BE CONTINUED . . .

  With his blood still wet on my face, I smoothed back my messy hair and peered down at the raised bump of earth underneath which the carefully wrapped body would spend the rest of eternity. However long that ended up being.

  "Riley, I'm sorry," Drake said. His voice was gravelly, like the road beside the green slope we stood on.

  "It's not your fault," I whispered. The breeze took my voice and carried it over the grasses and weeds before bouncing off the nearby pine trees and disappearing into the early morning. Gone forever. Like Connor.

  Slowly and with deliberate care, I reached my hand up to my neck and wiped the blood off my skin. His blood. My palm came back a rusty-red color.

  Kris had refused to come to the burial. She stayed curled up in a ball in her bed. Inconsolable. Angry. She would never forgive us for what we did. For ending his life the way we had. Maybe when she was older, she would understand that we saved him from the same suffering we'd watched our loved ones endure just two years before.