The trees howled with the wind, and the heavy pounding on the ground at my back amplified, echoing through the brush on my left as I sprinted along the side of the liquor store. It was fast, whatever was coming, and all the warnings in my body told me not to look over my shoulder. That I wouldn’t want to see.
Before rounding the corner, and ignoring all common sense, I did just that. The shock of what I saw knocked my feet right out from under me and I slid downward hard enough to tear a hole in the knee of my jeans. A naked man, bloody and frantic with rage, charged in my direction. He should have collided directly with me, but his knees passed right through my face. It felt like I’d run into a massive cobweb, and I brushed at my skin to get the feeling off. I was aware that the shrill sound in the air was my screams, the dog was also barking, and a man was talking - shouting - I couldn’t tell.
“Get off!” I yelled, swatting at the air.
I scampered backwards and hit something soft. With my balled up fist, I pivoted and swung a right hook, but Drake blocked it.
“What the fuck, Riley!” he yelled. He attempted to grab my arms, but I was still trying to move away from the corner of the building.
“Where’d he go?!”
“Who? Where did who go?” Drake sprang to his feet and turned in circles, the alarm evident on his face.
“That bloody man! You didn’t see him?” I was panting. My heart raced. My skin was crawling. Every nerve shivered and thrummed inside me.
Zoey’s nails scraped at the window glass as she pawed at it, desperate to run to my side.
“Sorry…” I sputtered, letting Drake lean me against the brick wall. “I’m sorry…”
Once confident I wasn’t going to fall over, he pushed off the wall and spun around, looking closely in every direction. “Is someone out here? Which way did the fucker go?”
I began to shake my head, then laugh. He turned around and stared at me, a look of pure concern straightening the soft lines of his face.
Zoey still barked inside the truck, bouncing in her seat, trying desperately to get our attention so she could be released. “Let her out,” I said, in between snorts and gasps.
He backed away from me, then walked to the truck scratching his head. “It’s okay, girl,” he said at the window. Drake opened the door, and before he could grab her, the dog launched herself onto the ground and sprinted toward me. She stopped at my feet, turned away from the building and growled at the woods where the bloody man had materialized from.
“What’s in there?” Drake asked her, while coming up to my side again.
I continued to laugh. “Nothing pleasant.”
“So, no romantic walk in the woods on this stop?”
With a deep breath, I leaned forward and gripped my knees. It wasn’t the first time the dead had chased me; however, to be fair, it had been a while. I was obviously out of practice. Still, my heart raced like mad in my chest.
“Actually…where’s your bag?” I asked.
“In the truck. Why?”
Coming upright, I looked between Drake, the dog and the edge of the woods. “I need the lighter. And my can of spray paint. There’s work to be done here.”
* * *
Drake was quiet for the rest of the day. And not just because she was, too. Riley spray-painted half the town with messages - some that made no sense - till she ran out of blank wall space and paint. Mostly messages for Connor. Some for other survivors. Even some for the dead. Which was bat-shit crazy. As if the dead would read them. She rambled on about wanting to burn the town down, and had Drake not stopped her, she would have. Instead, she spent two hours scouring the woods till she found the badly decomposed body of a man, based on the remnants of the boots and jeans nearby, and then she torched it. Burned it to a crisp. Almost set the whole fucking forest on fire, too. Would have succeeded if Drake hadn’t wrenched the damn lighter from her hands.
He’d never been an expert at reading women. But with Riley, he didn’t have to be. Reading her was easy because everything she felt she showed on her face, whether she knew it or not, and Drake saw madness there. Something behind her normally soft gaze, running in the background like a computer virus, logging every stroke, slowly corrupting the system. She had the potential to snap at any moment, and Drake wondered if she actually had yet to do so since her kids had died. He’d seen her fight for her life, but that was different. When that Mariah girl threw herself off a cliff, he’d been there to see her cry, but that was different too, because through all of that, he hadn’t seen Riley herself actually change. She’d never truly lost her shit.
Fuck, he knew he had. Months before he ever met her. Beat a man to death with the butt of his gun, then drank for four days, most of which he couldn’t remember, before waking up naked on the roof of the house he first brought Riley back to. And had he not heard the gunshots that day she tried passing through, and decided it was worth checking out, he would never have found her. He would have never known Riley…not the real her.
Damn. As Drake looked over at her napping, safely buckled into the passenger seat of the truck, with her red paint-stained fingers resting limply in her lap, he wondered if what he’d seen today was her mind breaking free. And just as the thought nagged into a worry, she stirred and opened her eyes, reached over to take his hand in hers and brought it to her lips. The soft feel of her warm mouth on his rough skin pushed his worries aside and he smiled at her sleepy face.
“Pull over?” she asked him.
He obliged, carefully maneuvering the truck to the side of the road. He’d barely put the vehicle in park before she opened her door enough to let the dog out, and then she scrambled over the small space between them and straddled his lap. He let her kiss him. Deeply. Passionately. Let her pull his shirt off and unbutton the top of his jeans. He watched her carefully, every move, every blink. And he saw nothing there to cause alarm.
All he saw, when Riley’s mouth came down again to meet his, was something every man wanted from a lover…hungry desire.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Since our last run had brought back more than ample supplies - several armfuls - Ryder gave us three days off to relax at the Ark. But the time was spent far from taking it easy. Drake was either too distant, or too hands on, as if he himself was unsure of how to act around me. We didn’t talk about the last run, but I knew it bothered him. My desire to burn whatever bodies we came across, to set them free. To mark the buildings. To warn others. At the time it made sense, but as I wandered around the compound with absolutely nothing better to do but throw sticks for the dog, I began to question my own sanity. And why it seemed the dead appeared to me more than the others. It had been months since anyone from the group mentioned waking up to a dark shadow hovering over the corner of the bed, or screams that followed the wind. It was just me who kept seeing things.
I was kicking around a puddle of mud, shoving some of the dryer dirt into the mess, when Winchester approached us from behind. I squatted to rub off some of the grime from the toe of my boot, smiling in his direction as I did so. The dog ran to greet him, as she had so many times before, but her greeting was different. She halted at his feet, sat down and then stared up at him, almost expecting him to bring bad news. And judging from the expression on his face, I imagined her perception was correct.
Winchester stopped before the dog with a worried expression on his smooth face, as if both of us would be fined and thrown in jail for allowing the dog to run around unrestrained. I’d forgotten to bring her leash out with us, but this time, no one had stopped me to recite the rules.
“Win,” I said, doing my best to seem calm and normal. In case Drake had pulled Winchester, the most sensible one of our group, aside to confide in him about our previous excursion. “Good to see you out and about. You’ve been hiding inside lately.”
“Riley,” he said with a curt nod.
“You okay?”
He nodded again, pulled the front of his shirt down to smooth out any wrinkles, th
en did something incredibly uncharacteristic of Winchester. He began to cry.
I stood up so fast my head spun. When I reached out to grab his arm, it was more so to steady myself than to comfort him, but he took the gesture as an invitation for a hug, and gratefully threw his slender body against mine, wrapping me up in a bear hug.
For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. He was obviously not upset with me. But something was wrong. Win didn’t crave close body contact like most of us did. In fact, it made him uncomfortable, but he held onto me then as if he’d never been touched before. Like he never would be again. I patted at his back in a soothing motion, as I would after one of my children had fallen and scraped an elbow. It seemed to calm him down long enough to pull away and take a breath. The wind, which had been relatively still for most of the day, picked up enough to toss a section of his hair out of place. The fact that he didn’t immediately tuck it back beside the others concerned me just as much as his tears had.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, trying not to seem too alarmed by his strange demeanor.
“He’s back,” he said, still crying.
“What? Who? Who’s back?”
“It’s not good. I mean, the Doc is worried. The burns - they’re just - we don’t have the right facility here, the right materials to treat them.”
I put my hands firmly on his upper arms. “Win, slow down. You aren’t making any sense. Did someone get hurt? Does someone need help?” He’d mentioned burns, but after a cursory glance around us, I noted that none of the buildings appeared to be damaged by fire. There was no smoke. I was still picking apart the grounds with my eyes when Winchester spoke one word in a giant gust of air, like he had to force it out before it killed him.
“Connor.”
My hands tightened into his flesh, then fell limply down to my sides. Connor. Connor was here?
“Where?” I gasped.
He shook his head, and it was his turn to grab at my arms. “He’s in the Tank, Riley. They won’t let you see him. Plus…” he stammered, struggling with how to continue. “Plus…I think…I don’t think you want to see him right now. I mean, had I known it was him…well, I’d have told you sooner. But I just found out. He’s…different.”
“What the hell does that mean?!” I shouted it so loud that two people came out of the closest building to find the source of the yelling. I waved them off with such fervor they nearly ran back into the compound.
“It’s bad. He’s hurt, Riley.”
He’s hurt. Those words rang through my ears over and over, and there it was again - the ground came rushing up to greet me face-first for the second time that week. My last thought before my forehead struck the dirt, was that I really had to stop sucking sand. It just wasn’t appealing to wake up with grit in my teeth.
* * *
I paced from one end of the lobby to the other, kicking at the thin carpet by the walls each time before I spun around and paced again. It was beginning to annoy even me, so I sat down with an irritable huff next to Kris and Jacks, who had, of course, a squirming Lily on his lap.
“I just can’t believe this,” Kris said. “I just can’t. I mean, how did this happen?”
“I heard Joe say that from the air it looked like most of Southern California was on fire, or had been burnt to a crisp. It could be weather related, or…” Jacks cleared his throat.
“Or what?” Kris asked.
He cleared his throat a second time. “Or…some pyro freak set it.”
Kris looked at him, appalled. “Who would do that?”
Well, I thought. Who would do that? I jumped from my seat and began pacing again. Drake sat in a lone chair next to the only desk in the room, and up till Jacks made his comment about the fire, Drake had been shaking his foot against his knee at a steady pace. Drake sitting absolutely still was more of a distraction than his bouncing leg. A muscle twitched in his neck, and I knew that he was struggling to keep from making eye contact with me. He knew the answer to Kris’s question, just like I did.
We hadn’t talked about Lost Angeles with the others much. It just didn’t feel right - going through what we did and then losing Mariah at the last moment, when all had finally seemed worth it. Returning to discover that Connor was gone. There had been more pressing things to discuss than the fact that I set every other major structure on fire across all of San Diego county. I was burning the bodies, I’d told myself. Burning the dead so they could be set free. It’s what they wanted. It’s what they told me to do.
But never once had I considered that I could have been hurting the living. Other survivors like my group. Like Connor - out there alone, searching. Searching for me. Had I done this to him? Had it been my fire that had driven him out of California and left him injured? I didn’t want to think about it. So I paced. My shoes squeaked on the thin carpet when I spun around. But I kept pacing. And it felt like forever until Winchester came back down the hall with one of the Ark leaders in tow.
He shook his head sadly at me, and the pacing stopped along with my heart. They couldn’t keep me from seeing Connor. They’d have to tie me down to keep me away from that bunker.
The man with Winchester, lanky and on the tall side, with a pointed chin and cheekbones sharp enough to cut the air, looked around the room before his eyes settled on me.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a flat and monotone voice. “Visitors are not allowed to enter the bunker.” He put his hand up to stop me from interrupting. “I understand your concerns, but we can’t risk our entire community for a…reunion. Once the allotted time has passed, those in the bunker will be allowed to mingle with us here, assuming all goes well. Those are the rules.” His eyes were dark and serious, slightly hooded, and reflected little emotion. My insides began to churn, and for a moment longer than was healthy, I imagined how I could overpower the taller man, and put him in a choke-hold until he passed out. Perhaps Drake would even help. But that didn’t get me closer to opening the locked bunker doors. A different approach would be needed.
With a deep breath, I straightened my shoulders and kept my gaze strong on the leader’s eyes, refusing to break our connection even when he scowled at me. “Then let me in and I’ll stay during the duration of their lock down.”
Drake rose from his chair, but kept silent. I refused to look in his direction.
“Riley,” Jacks said. “Think about this for a minute. He’s getting care. Win said there’s nothing we can do but wait.”
“Wait for what? Wait for him to die in there…alone? When we’re right outside? Are you shitting me?”
“He’s not alone, Riley.” The leader took one step forward, affirming his position of authority, yet I didn’t back away. “Your friend is far from being alone. He’s with six others, some of who are also injured. They are being tended to. Properly. But they must go through the decontamination period. We have to ensure no one is sick. Or a danger to our populace. Once those bunker doors close, they don’t open again until we know for sure it’s safe to do so. That is part of the arrangement. You know how it works.”
“I don’t need an escort. I’ll go in by myself.” The blood pumping through my heart was rushing at such a speed it threatened to burst through my chest. I began to smell iron in my nose in preparation for my own self-inflicted explosion.
“That’s simply not an option. What if you open the door, and those inside have changed their minds, and they want out? What if they rush the grounds, killing as they go?” He was beginning to lose the cool demeanor of his voice, which pleased me.
“That wouldn’t happen,” I argued at his stupidity.
“But it could.”
“You don’t understand - I need to get into that bunker.” It was a warning, not a request.
He took another step forward, as did Drake from my side. “If you, or anyone in your group, attempts to enter the Tank without consent, you’ll be removed from the premises. Each and every one of you.” To emphasize he meant us all, he looked around the room and let
his gaze settle on Lily.
“I see,” I said.
“Well, that’s good then.” For the first time, he smiled. But it was just as forced and tight as the skin across his cheekbones.
“Riley, I’m sorry,” Winchester said in almost a whimper.
There was nothing more to say. As calmly as I could, I turned away from them and left the lobby, snatching up Zoey’s leash from the ground where she waited, and stormed back to our sleeping quarters. Once inside the room, I locked the door and threw myself on the mattress. They couldn’t keep me away from Connor, not for a damn month! I’d figure out a way in. Once my nerves weren’t fried and my mind was less wild - I’d find my way into that bunker. I was sure of it.
* * *
It took Drake ten minutes to pick the lock to the room. Even with all the jiggling of the knob, Riley appeared to be passed out in her bunk, feet dangling over the edge, still in shoes, a pillow pulled over her blond head.
When he sat down, the dog came over to him for an ear scratching that soon turned into a neck massage and eventually a full belly rub. He liked the dog. But he’d probably never admit it out loud. He wasn’t good with words, and didn’t see that changing much now that there were even less people alive to talk to.
“Riley, you awake?” he asked, though he knew the answer. He could tell she was asleep by the steady and soft rhythm of her breathing.
He pushed himself off his bunk with a grunt and kneeled beside her bed. With a few gentle tugs, he untied her boots, then pulled them off her feet. He was in the process of removing the sock from her left foot when she stirred. Drake froze with his hand loosely gripping her ankle, but she didn’t remove the pillow from her head. Slowly, he pulled the fabric over her heel and dropped it on the ground next to the first discarded sock. One of her pant legs had hitched up her calf in the process, and even in the dim lighting, he could see a faded scar on her skin. An inch or two long, and it looked like it had been deep. He didn’t remember seeing it when he dressed her wounds in L.A. But he wasn’t really checking her over for old injuries at the time, only the bloody ones. And, he realized with embarrassment, he hadn’t noticed it while making love.
Find Me Series (Book 3): Finding Hope Page 15