I’m still aiming to get A Warm Place 6 out before the end of the month. Honestly, I’m aiming to have it out before the week is through, but while I have a solid layout for what I need to write, how many words that can end up being tends to be a bit random. So it might bleed into next week.
Anyway, here’s the first chapter of the novel.
And if you’d like to look at the first two chapters, follow this link to my Patreon!
I’ll likely be doing a cover reveal near the end of the week.
“It doesn’t look bad, Chris.”
“What?” I asked, a little startled, dropping my hand back to my side instead of gently probing my wounded face.
“Your face.” Hannah fell silent for a few seconds as we walked among the trees, the freshly fallen snow crunching beneath our boots, wreathing everything in the forest in frigid silence. “I, um, saw you looking at it before we left. In the window’s reflection.”
I glanced briefly at her. She was looking straight ahead, ostensibly because she was trying to find a building among the trees, but she seemed nervous.
More so than usual.
Although I guess I’d say Hannah wasn’t usually nervous, more just…
Alert? Angry? Both? Was there even a word for that?
“How could you tell?” I replied finally, looking off to the right, away from her.
“The way you were looking into the window, and the angle you were holding your head at. It looked more like someone looking in a mirror than out a window,” she replied, her voice carefully neutral for some reason.
“Huh,” I replied. “Well thanks. I think it looks kinda bad.”
I still had a nasty black eye and a bruise on my cheek, as well as a split lip and cut eyebrow, from the fistfight I’d endured with Thomas from a little while back. Certainly they were all healing up, but they were still pretty noticeable.
Still was a little pissed that the bastard had brought a knife to a fist fight.
Not surprised, though.
“The others seem to like it,” Hannah said.
“Did they say that?” I asked, a little surprised.
“No. Lara implied, though. And I can just tell in the way they look at you.”
“What do you think?”
She shrugged noncommittally and I didn’t push it any further.
Hannah had been acting weird recently.
It had been three days since our big fight with the wolf pack up at the ranger’s station. Mostly I’d been laying low, trying to heal up and actually rest for once, but I was so easily rendered restless. The first day I’d made myself get up and go check on Alec and Kayla, bringing Susan and Jessica with me, because they were in such poor shape. Between his bad bite wounds and Kayla’s infection, I wasn’t sure they’d make it.
But when we had gotten up there, he seemed a bit better and Kayla was improving enough from the stronger antibiotics we’d found her that we actually got a chance to meet her. We talked for a little bit, but not too long because the two of them were down for the count and needing their rest. After dropping off a care package of spare food and some extra meds, we’d headed back and I had just shut myself up in the lodge the rest of that day and all of the following day. Yesterday my need to do shit had finally gotten to me.
I’d gone for a walk initially but that had turned into revisiting Lara’s and Susan’s old place, wanting to see if there was anything left behind I could grab. There wasn’t much, a few things, mostly books, but when I got home Lara was waiting for me. She’d talked me and Jessica into going back to that cabin in the woods where I’d first met Jessica, and where Lara and Jessica had gone to have their affair. Lara wanted a proper threesome in that cabin, as we’d never actually had the chance to return after that first meeting I’d had.
And we’d given it to her.
So that had been fun.
Hannah had been acting weird. The first day I’d put it down to shock. Facing down nine wolves in a tight area was terrifying no matter who you were, and she’d never dealt with anything that serious before. Or not often enough to be able to shake it off after. I’d talked to her a bit, but ultimately she’d just gone to see her mom and I figured Jessica could help more than I could. I didn’t see her the day after that, which again I didn’t think much of.
But when I hadn’t seen her at all for most of yesterday, it had started to stand out. I’d gone looking for her after getting back from my threesome with Lara and Jessica, and couldn’t find her for awhile. Apparently she’d gone out walking to the south and had discovered a building. Snow was coming and it was obvious enough that she’d turned back before being able to properly investigate the place.
That’s what we were doing right now.
It had stormed last night but died off sometime before sunrise, leaving today sunny and good for investigating, if a bit cold.
She’d come to tell me about the find when she got back home and I’d tried talking with her a little, but it was obvious she didn’t want to talk to me. I wasn’t sure what was up. With Hannah, it could be anything. Maybe she was pissed about something. Maybe she was mad at me over something I’d done or something she’d thought I’d done.
I had to say, I seemed to have a thing for running into angry, belligerent women.
Though between her, Megan, and Susan, Hannah was definitely the most aggressive.
Also the only one I wasn’t fucking. I had to admit, that was bugging me. Not like I was angry that I wasn’t having sex with her, if she didn’t want to, then she didn’t want to, but more like I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
About what she’d look like naked.
About what she’d look like riding my cock.
About what she’d sound like, panting and gasping and moaning.
She had a nice voice and I always found myself wondering about what women sounded like during sex.
But I could keep a lid on it, keep things purely professional between us. Or I guess closer to friendly. There was a word for it…
Platonic.
I could keep it platonic between us, but not if she was going to cut me out. We’d spoken over breakfast about going out to investigate the building she’d seen. She had seemed conflicted, but then suddenly had agreed to it, and I still didn’t know what that meant. That thing about my face was the first thing she’d said to me after telling me the rough direction the building was in and we’d started walking. We had headed south, away from the lodge, into the woods there. I had to admit, I didn’t really know how to handle this.
Words were not a strength of mine. Same with comforting people. I mean apparently my hugs helped, but I had the impression Hannah wouldn’t want a hug right now. Or, at the very least, not from me. I still wasn’t sure if she was mad at me or not. Although after that last exchange, I now was not sure if she was sure if she was mad at me or not.
“Hey, there it is,” she said, breaking my train of thought.
Probably for the best. I kept getting distracted by her and it would probably be a pretty bad idea to actually pursue anything with her.
I focused on the structure through the trees ahead of us. It was a simple, low, rectangular structure, a building of wood and glass sheathed in ice and a fresh layer of snow that blew away in contrails from the winds that gusted through the forest.
We slowed to a halt about five yards back from the edge of the clearing the structure was built into.
“So, what’s first?” I asked quietly.
“You’re asking me?” Hannah replied.
“Yes. I’m asking you, Hannah.”
That seemed to get her to focus. She was very sharp, but it was obvious that her attention had to be focused for that sharpness to really come into play most of the time. She hadn’t yet had enough practice to cast a wide net of awareness, to be constantly paying attention to everything around her. For whatever reason, she was focused on me, and that had to stop.
“Okay,” she murmured, staring at the building. “First. Check for danger.”
“What kind of danger?”
“People. Wildlife.”
“And?” She struggled silently for a few seconds, then sighed, the frustration plain on her pretty features. “Traps,” I said.
“Oh. Right...what do they look like?”
“Usually they don’t. You just have to be paranoid. In my experience, traps are rare. But at this point ‘better safe than sorry’ is a way of life now. Because if you’re sorry instead of safe, you don’t tend to actually live to be either of them again. So, you look for signs that people have been around. See any footprints in the snow?”
She stared hard at the building, then carefully pulled out her rifle and put the scope to her eye. She studied silently for a few moments.
“No,” she murmured finally.
“But?”
“But...it snowed last night. Someone could’ve come in last night, laid a trap, and the new snow covered everything.”
“Exactly. And you have to be aware of the general wind. On a windy day, the snow can cover the tracks just as effectively as actual snowfall. Keep looking, tell me if you see anything.”
She kept looking. Personally, I didn’t feel any warning signs. But I’d been wrong in the past, and I wanted to see if she came up with anything.
I was sharp, but I had the idea that, given time, practice, and experience, Hannah could end up sharper than me.
“I don’t see anything,” she said finally. “Am I missing something?”
“No, not that I can see.” I expected her to get mad at me, but she said nothing. “I was wondering if you’d see something I missed,” I added finally, vaguely uncomfortable. I almost laughed. I wondered if my time around women like Megan and Susan had reprogrammed me to just expect anger and get uncomfortable when it didn’t happen.
“Okay,” she said. “So we go?”
“Yes. But what’s next?”
“Secure the outside and beware of the inside,” she replied.
“Good. You break left, I’ll break right. We make a complete circle, meet back at the front door,” I said.
“Got it.”
We moved forward and did our little security ritual. I’d known a couple people who’d gotten annoyed with me that I was this level of paranoid. It’s why I tended to travel alone. One of them had actually triggered a trap someone had left behind and broken a leg. It wasn’t fun dealing with that extra bullshit hitch in the plan, but I did. I was out hunting awhile back with a few others as part of the job I’d taken on to stay in some little settlement. We’d found a big warehouse type building out in the middle of nowhere and they wanted to search it.
I honestly should have walked on past that settlement. I almost did, bad vibes coming from it as I found a place to get in for the night. I’d just decided to walk on the next morning after doing some trading when a thick redhead had caught my eye and given me a pretty overtly suggestive look…
I came around to the back of the building and met Hannah there, unable to keep from checking her out just a little as we passed.
Redheads were always a massive weakness of mine.
I didn’t think this place was trapped or occupied. It was a curious building. Didn’t look like it was there for the civilian population, nor commercial reasons either. But it also didn’t look like a ranger’s station or their bunkhouse. It had the air of something official, something government funded, but I guess I lacked imagination in that department because I wasn’t sure what it could be. I guess I’d find out inside.
Looks in through the windows didn’t reveal much as I passed along the other side of the building, heading back up towards the front. A barren kitchen area. A vacant office. A long-abandoned lounge. No people, no signs of people.
We met back by the front doors, which were closed.
“Now what?” Hannah murmured.
“Now we go inside and do the same thing, nice and easy. I’ll go first, you watch my back,” I replied.
She nodded and I tried the knob. It wasn’t locked.
I opened the door, my pistol in hand by now, and peered cautiously inside. A mostly empty lobby waited for us. I stepped inside.
“Wait in the doorway,” I said. “Close the door behind you, lock it if you can. Keep watch.”
“On it,” she replied, doing as I said.
I started my check of the area. Hannah had asked me to teach her. Apparently I’d impressed her enough with my abilities as a hunter that she wanted to know things, practical things. Like how to survive. Something her father had kept from her out of annoyance and I’m sure some vague notion that, even in the face of Armageddon, there were some things that women didn’t do. An opinion I’d personally not only never shared, but never understood. It was stupid enough before the snow, but now? Such an enforcement of an opinion seemed ludicrous.
I’d agreed to teach her how to hunt and gut, how to clean a weapon. She already knew a lot of the stuff, in the sense of what she had to do, she just hadn’t actually done any of it.
And even if I was dubious about whether or not I’d be a good teacher, or my knowledge was all that great, I wanted to teach her more. What was more impressive was that she was willing to listen. Either she was getting to trust me more, or she was too distracted to get angry. I was hoping it was the first one, because distraction was a problem out here.
I was tempted to have her stand guard while I searched the building, but that didn’t seem fair to her. She had to know how to do this and a line that had to be crossed to reach that knowledge was actually doing it in real life.
“Come on, watch my back, we’ll secure this place,” I said.
“Okay,” Hannah replied, joining me.
We walked through the structure, passing through a door at the back and coming into a hallway that cut the building in half. The door directly across led to an open area with several desks and chairs and a lot of papers scattered around. The other doors led to a small dining area, a bathroom, another office, and the kitchen area I’d seen earlier. We also found what once had been a storage room, another office, and a completely empty room.
All of them were clear.
“So that’s it? We’re good?” Hannah murmured as we came to the empty room, the very last room, and checked it out.
“Yeah, although you can’t let your guard down completely,” I replied.
“Right,” she murmured.
“Now, we’re gonna split up and search this place over. See what you can find. Yell if you find anything dangerous or interesting.”
“Okay.”
I left her in the empty room and went back to the lobby. As I began my search, I briefly considered how best to approach whatever problem Hannah was having. I didn’t think it was like a general problem, because she seemed to be able to talk with everyone else. But after just a few minutes, I turned away from it, because I thought it was best just to leave it alone. I didn’t want to. Honestly, I just wanted to deal with it how I dealt with all my problems: confront it head on. But that wasn’t always the best solution.
Instead, I thought about Pine Lake. And Megan, Delilah, and Elizabeth. Lisa, Melanie, and Lindsay. It was time to go back. Theoretically I could stay out for probably a bit longer given the timeline I’d promised, but I no longer wanted to. At all. I had no reason to stay out here any longer, and I had every reason to go home.
Home.
There was a word I’d never thought I’d be able to say again and actually mean it. For the longest time, home was wherever I was. As much as I liked that nomadic mentality, as much as it appealed to me...apparently, having a fixed home with people I cared very much about was far more appealing. I wanted to go home and see them.
And I wanted to bring the others home and get through the potential problems that might arise from the fact that my ‘harem’, as Lara and now Jessica and Susan were so fond of calling it, had fucking doubled in size while I was out here. I didn’t see Delilah having a problem with it. Elizabeth and Megan, on the other hand, were wildcards. Megan more than Elizabeth. I know Delilah wasn’t actually ‘dating’ me, she was dating Lindsay, but the more I thought about it the more I thought she practically considered herself in a relationship with me and Lindsay, she just didn’t say so. Why? No idea.
Maybe it would concern Lindsay, but Lindsay seemed really laid back.
But the real reason I was thinking about it so much was the reason I was still here and hadn’t decided to leave quite yet.
I wanted to bring something home.
Something practical and very useful. Something big. Something you couldn’t just find anywhere. I wasn’t sure what that was yet, and if I didn’t find it either today or tomorrow, then I’d just move on regardless and hope to find it on the way, but I wanted it.
Why?
I guess if you cut right down to the core of it, I intended it to be an apology.
I felt bad about leaving in the first place. I had to do it, I saw now. It had had the intended effect: I now appreciated Pine Lake and the concept of a fixed home. And certainly I appreciated the fact that I had met Lara, Susan, Jessica, and Hannah. But I still felt bad about it, and I wanted to have something practical and extremely useful in hand when I returned.
My own personal revelation didn’t feel all that important stacked up against the needs of a township, and it was clear that while they didn’t need me to live…
I definitely made it easier.
With a soft sigh, I kept searching.