Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope Read online

  “I need your help, please…it’s Kris, they have her,” I said in a giant exhale of air.

  Winchester’s smile fell and his hand slid off Jacks thigh as he stood. “What do you mean? Who has her? Where?”

  “She’s upstairs, drugged up and being used as an incubator. I’ll explain on the way. Just…we need to get her. Win, bring that doctor bag of yours. Where’s Drake?”

  “He went looking for you downstairs,” Jacks said. “You take Win and I’ll get Drake.”

  “Meet us up in the medical unit. And bring Zoey.” Still out of breath, I spun around and tripped over Winchester, who was digging around the bags on the floor. A stack of his clothes was neatly piled by the dresser. He caught my raised eyebrow and blushed. “When did you move up here?” I asked. “Never mind. Tell me later. There’s no time…”

  “Wait, Riley. Here…” He straightened and handed me a scalpel. Not large, but it was sharp.

  Being careful to not cut myself, I tucked it into one of my back pockets. “Let’s go get Kris back.”

  * * *

  “She was here, right here! In that very bed!” The room, dark except for one overhead lamp, was empty. “They couldn’t have moved the girls so quickly. Not far. They have to be nearby.”

  “Are you sure it was this room?” Winchester picked up a clean urine tray, sniffed it, then set the pink plastic piece back down. “Smells clean in here.”

  “Right? Would it smell like antiseptic if they hadn’t used the room recently? I’m telling you, she was right there, with a bunch of other young girls.” My eyes darted from one side of the room to the other, inspecting each of the empty hospital beds, bare except for a thin blue mattress.

  Zoey found something on the floor to sniff. Drake moved up beside me, squatted down to his knees and picked up the cap from a needle. He handed it to me before standing. “Win, you know this place better than we do. So, where would they take that many girls?”

  Frustrated, he threw his hands up in the air. “I’ve never even been back here! They had me doing simple stuff, all in the main room. I didn’t know this room existed till now.”

  “Think, Winchester! She has to be somewhere!” I kicked the frame of the metal bed so hard that the banging sound hurt my ears.

  “We’ll split into pairs, check this place from top to bottom if we must. Starting with the main quarters above us. We’d have known if they came down the elevator. It would have taken more than ten minutes to move that many girls outside to another building,” Jacks said. Lily was strapped to his chest, going to town on her washcloth, gumming the poor fabric to death. “There’s only one level upstairs - the admins’ quarters, right? Let’s start there.”

  “No, wait,” I said, when Winchester and Jacks turned to leave. “We stay together. They have guns. We don’t. We can’t afford to split up.”

  Fern’s calm voice coming from a speaker box in the corner startled us all. “True, dears. We do have guns. Meet us in the lobby. We obviously need to have a little chat.” The box squealed loudly before going silent again. And each of us looked from one to the other, stuck in a sort of trance until Zoey huffed to get our attention.

  The others followed me back through the building toward the lobby, where we found each of the leaders waiting. When Fern saw us, she leaned into Amanda and whispered something in her ear.

  “Where’s Kris?” Jacks snapped. The rough edge of his voice caught Lily off guard and she began to whimper. He soothed her by bouncing softly up and down, without taking his eyes off the leaders.

  “Kris is perfectly safe, I assure you,” Fern said. “Riley, would you like to sit down and take a rest?”

  “Do I what…do I want to sit down? Have you lost what’s left of your mind? No! I don’t want to sit down. Take us to Kris. To the others.” I snapped my fingers for Zoey to come to my knee. She snorted at Fern, but looked up at me, confused.

  “Please, why don’t we all sit down and I can explain a few things.” Amanda gestured at the lobby seating, but none of us made a move.

  “Where’s the girl?” Drake’s shoulders were squared, his hands held stiffly at his sides. He kept his focus not on Amanda or Fern, but Dinnley, the more submissive of the leaders. His wide brown eyes couldn’t seem to focus on one thing for more than a second. He was nervous as hell; it was written all over his pale face. If any of them would break, it would be Dinnley.

  “There’s something you should see,” Fern said. She crossed the room and reached behind the lobby desk, producing a small tablet. “This is connected to the security system. A bit high-tech, if you ask me, but it comes in handy sometimes.”

  I stiffened, waiting for her to set off some sort of silent alarm and bring the Ark guards running in. Zoey sensed the change and began to whimper.

  “Ah, here it is. Take a look,” she said. She handed the tablet out to me, but I refused to touch it. Drake took it instead and glanced down at the screen before glowering back up at her. “What shit is this? A security feed?”

  “It is. From earlier this morning. Watch,” Fern said calmly.

  We glanced at the tablet and Drake turned it so that our entire group could look down at the screen. It was a recorded feed of me moving around the back of the building, apparently talking to myself. Another angle showed me walking through the lobby we all stood in, still talking, and the final clip was of me, standing just outside the hidden medical unit, again, talking to myself. But the boy was there. Mickey. He’d been there with me the entire time.

  “This…I can explain,” I turned and said over my shoulder. Winchester and Jacks both looked at me with a sorrowful expression. I put my hand up as a warning. “Don’t do that. You know I’m not crazy. There was a boy with me. Mickey. She killed him,” I snapped, jerking my finger in Fern’s direction.

  Drake looked down at the tablet and replayed the footage. “Where is he, this boy?”

  Angry, I snatched the small device from his hands and tossed it at Fern’s feet. “Nicely played. So you’re going to tell them, what? That I made all this up? That you didn’t have a room full of pregnant girls back there…that you didn’t tell me you killed the guy that built this place so you could run it yourself?”

  Amanda shook her head. “You’re troubled, Riley. We’ve tried to help you. Fern has told me that you see…people. Dead people. Is this true?”

  Without hesitating, I said, “We all have.”

  Heston, the tall and broody man with the greying temples and a thick 80’s mustache, spoke for the first time. “I haven’t.” The rest of the leaders repeated his statement.

  “Don’t be absurd!” I turned around to face Jacks and Winchester, to face Drake. “We’ve talked about this! You know I’m not crazy. Can’t you see what they’re doing?”

  “Maybe you should sit down, Riley,” Winchester urged. “Things have been stressful. Let’s just take a break and talk about this later. I’m sure Kris will turn up. She’s probably with that boy.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I gasped. With a hard yank, I pulled my arm away from his outstretched hand and backed up, away from everyone. “I’m not crazy. And I’m not lying.”

  “No one is calling you crazy, baby,” Jacks said.

  My head wouldn’t stop shaking from side to side. No. No. No. No. Fern. She was going to turn my own family against me. She hid the girls somewhere, stuffed them in a closet or something, but they were real. I knew what I saw. I knew that Mickey had been there, too. With all my strength, I lunged myself at Fern’s neck and dug into her flesh with my fingers. We fell to the ground in a heap of wails and screams. It took four of them to pull me off her and hold me down.

  “You’re gone, Riley!” Amanda was shouting, while trying to smooth her displaced bun and torn blouse. “You’re out of here, out of the Ark! Banished!”

  A sound quite like laughter started at the back of my throat and vibrated against my tongue. Despite Drake’s yells, I was hauled down the hall and tossed into a utility closet as the leaders tried
to calm down the rest of my group, who was shouting and yelling over themselves.

  “She’s not safe! You saw what she did to Fern!”

  “You can’t kick her out. Let us talk to her…”

  “Poor dear must be suffering some sort of mental break. I’m sure she didn’t mean to hurt me…”

  “Let me just talk to her, please…”

  “Pack her things. Once she’s calm, she’ll be escorted off the property.”

  “Keel, where’ve you been! Get that dog on a leash, or Heston’s going to take it out back and shoot it!”

  “Get off me! Get your hands off me, fucker!”

  The voices all blurred into one noisy screech, so I dropped to the floor and covered my ears with my hands and began to rock in place.

  “I’m not crazy.” I said it once. “I’m. Not. Crazy.” I began to yell it. Over and over. “I’m not crazy, you bitch! I’m not crazy! I’m not!” When the door opened again, a hand brought something down on my shoulder and zapped me into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  In my dream I was drowning. The riptide was pulling me farther and farther out to sea. My legs kicked through the water and my arms thrashed about, but it did nothing to bring me back to the shore. And the waves…the waves were twenty feet high, angry and dangerous. Eager to swallow me. Below the surface I would go, choking down the taste of salt and sand with each gulp. Down I would be pulled and nearly drowned, then just before I died, the sea would mercifully spit me back up for air, only to start the fight again. It went on for hours. Days. Weeks. Years. At first, I wanted desperately to just float long enough to get a deep breath. But eventually, I desired only to give in and sink to the bottom. Away from the currents and waves. Away from the battle. Away from it all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The road was so open and inviting, just like the endless land that stretched out beyond the snowdrift-covered highway. As if a giant hand had picked up the globe and given it a good shake, displacing the occupants and their possessions, allowing them to fall into place elsewhere. Nothing was in its right place, and yet, everything seemed to fit perfectly where it fell. Cars that had been pushed off the roads had settled quite nicely into ditches. Buildings that had burst at the seams from tank fire littered the sidewalks and side-streets, but they were already partially hidden by the unrelenting power of nature. Grasses grew through busted-out window frames and naked trees stretched through rooms that had once been inhabited by families, reaching above the missing ceiling tops to the sky for sunlight. The globe had been shaken alright, and somehow I had been thrown up high in the air, and landed hard on both feet. I didn’t understand it. Not really. All I did know was that life had an expiration date. A date I had every intention of meeting face-first, on my own.

  * * *

  I’d woken up on my back under a pine tree, in a coat I didn’t remember putting on, let alone zipping and buttoning to my chin, with the dog resting wearily with her head on my full backpack. The snow around me had molded around the shape of my body, and a thin layer of fresh snow covered the tips of my boots, where they stuck out from under the cover of the lowest tree branch. I’d been dumped, somewhere off the compound property, with the dog leashed and tied tightly to my right wrist.

  “Bastards,” I coughed.

  The day was ending, and a quick look through my pack showed two days of essential supplies, a thin wool blanket and a plastic container of dog food.

  “They dumped me,” I said to Zoey, who rose as I did, stretched on the wet ground and then leaned into my knee. “They dumped us, kicked us out…”

  I thought of Kris, of what they were doing to her, and how I could possibly save her from hell. But then I remembered the look on the faces of those closest to me, that last moment we were together. Each one, even Drake, watched the video Fern played and saw nothing more than a disturbed woman. And then they stood by and let the leaders kick me out. How could they do that? After everything we’d seen and gone through in the Laguna Mountains? After Los Angeles? How could they let me be thrown away?

  Cursing the lot of them, I walked for at least two miles before coming up to a row of cars that had been pushed off the road. Most of them were dead, like the grass beneath the snow at my feet, but one, an older model that surprised me by turning over on the third try, became my lifeline in the cold. Zoey sat in the front seat, watching out the window, her eyes hooded and heavy with fear or concern. Or both. We drove in silence for hours in the direction of the sun - the only direction I knew to be opposite of the Ark.

  As the elevation rose, the temperature dropped, and the heater in the car did nothing more than wheeze. Shortly before nightfall, the sedan rocked forward with a lurch twice before an odd clicking vibrated through the engine and it stalled. Fortunately, I was barely driving the older model over 25mph, so drifting off to the edge of the mountain road was easy enough to do.

  “Now what?” I asked the open air after climbing out of the driver’s seat to inspect the engine. Some patches of snow had melted in dirty puddles on the asphalt, but the drifts were clearly deep between the road and the tree line. Nothing under the hood made me feel optimistic. I let the heavy metal mouth fall back down and glowered at the dead car. With a heavy sigh, I zipped up my coat and pulled my gloves out of my pocket, securing them on my hands before hefting my backpack off the passenger floorboard and swinging it around my shoulders.

  Zoey sat dutifully by the driver’s side door, wagging her tail in the wet snow. She huffed softly when I slapped my leg. “Just you and me again, girl. How about we go for a walk?”

  * * *

  Night had long since fallen by the time we found shelter. The dog was cold. I was cold. But thankfully during the hike, the clouds held onto whatever dark madness brewed inside them. The first building we came up to was a blown-in gas station with only two standing walls; not enough coverage to block the wind. So, we walked another two miles until we came across a series of empty structures. One might have once been a market, but even the shelves inside had been ripped out. It seemed too open, so with Zoey alert and keeping her keen eyes on our surroundings, we moved next door to a small chapel. Anything worth burning was gone, but there were several pews left, which meant the dog and I could tuck ourselves behind one for a few hours of rest.

  Sitting on a bench, I stared up at the dusty and web-encrusted cross that hung slightly askew above the podium. Faith. Did I have any left? Something with wings fluttered from one corner of the room to another, but I kept my eyes on that cross, begging for guidance. Begging for…anything.

  The corners, thick with shadows, remained as still as when I’d entered. No help would be coming. No souls remained there.

  “How ironic,” I laughed. “A church with no restless souls lingering inside…” There would be no saving for me. No rescue from a higher power. The church had become an empty shell. Like my heart.

  I had just laid out our bed roll and given Zoey her dinner when headlights flashed slowly along the walls. The dog, no longer interested in her mushy food, stiffened and turned her head toward the door. The night was calm, other than the subtle hum of an engine. Yet still, her hackles stood up on end, giving her back an almost cat-like arch shape.

  Crouching behind a well-worn wooden pew, I rested a hand on her back. “What is it, girl? We have company?” Her muscles felt tense and tight, as if preparing for a fight I couldn’t even see yet.

  My answer came with the shattering of glass as bullets ripped through the windows of the front door and lodged themselves into the wall behind the massive cross, half-blinding me with the muzzle flash. I screamed, and flattened myself to the musty floor, grabbing for the dog, but my fingers missed her by an inch and Zoey charged forward, all snarls and bared teeth.

  The last I saw of her was a majestic flurry of dark fur flying over the bench, and then there was the sickening thud of something heavy falling to the floor after another short burst of shots. I was knocked back at the same time a fire-hot bur
n radiated out from my upper chest, and despite the manic desire to get up and run, my body betrayed me, and I slumped forward, face-first onto the dirty floor. When a worn set of boots approached, my vision was tunneling into darkness so quickly that I hardly felt the first few kicks.

  * * *

  Music. Loud, blaring music. The screeching and screaming sound of heavy metal boomed around me and vibrated through each nerve and muscle. God, did it hurt. It wasn’t until I attempted to bring my hands to my head to block out some of the sound, that I realized I couldn’t. Both of my wrists were attached to something that weighed them down, and for several seconds, with my eyes still pinched shut, I couldn’t comprehend what the heaviness was from. Then I twitched an arm, and the jangle of chain links followed.

  My eyes, drowsy and puffy, flew open. The room I was in was dark and at first didn’t make sense to me. An oddly shaped skylight protruded out of the ceiling above my midsection, and it was easy to note it was night. The walls, what little of them I could see, were covered in a retro type of brown paneling. Curtains only two feet long surrounded the sides and back of my head. Windows. For what, I didn’t understand at first. The full-sized bed, raised above the floor, was unmade and only my lower half was covered. That was when I realized I was flat on my back, with my arms chained to the walls, and my naked breasts exposed.

  I began to scream over the music that came from nearby. There had to be people. There had to be. The scream turned into shouting, hollering for help, pleading for a savior. But the music was determined to drown out my calls with heavy electric guitar and slamming drums.

  The chains were loose enough to allow me to pull upward into a sitting position, and as the ragged blanket draped across my lap shifted, I glanced down to find my lower half naked as well. Blood had dried in streaks down my inner thighs. All around me the odor of urine and dried semen was overwhelming. A mouthful of vomit followed the low moan that came from my stomach, and with a quick turn to the side, I purged onto the mattress, my face already wet with hot tears.