Snowbound Nomad

  Snowbound Nomad

  Cassie Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Romantic Musings

  Copyright 2017

  Chapter one- Merry

  Merry came very close to slamming her brakes all the way to the floor when she saw the first deer on the road. It was a lovely tan and white color, with little tuffs of hair near its ears. Not that she’d never seen a deer before. Even thinking that made her smile, if slightly grimly. Going to college in the relative wilds of upstate New York had given her more than a little bit of practice that way, thankfully. She knew how to watch out for suicidal animals in the road, trying to ruin her vehicle.

  Even if they didn’t know to look out for her.

  The strip of dark pavement was really well cared for given how isolated the stretch of road she was on felt. In that someone had actually bothered to do enough road work in the area that the going was smooth and not bumpy with divots and potholes. There was a combination of tree types on both sides, mainly pine but some cedar and a few ash, with lower bushes underneath. What those were she had no real clue, and at the moment couldn’t care. They were a blur of green that only an insane fool would focus on, given the possible land mines nature was providing that day.

  Her heart was racing too much for concern about botany, as not just one, but four hapless does’ walked across the two-lane street. Like they owned it or something. Given how far out from the city she was, they pretty much did, she knew. Scampering behind them were two babies, each looking adorable. Also like they’d fit nicely under her little car, if they weren’t careful. At least if she wasn’t. When the group finally realized she was there, went wide eyed, and ran away with impressive quickness. Not trusting that they were all gone, since herd animals tended to string out a bit when it was inconvenient for others, she drove more slowly after that. Thirty miles per hour on a stretch of road that claimed it was safe to go fifty.

  It really wasn’t.

  Not a quarter mile away several more deer ran across in front of her. This time her reaction to them was a bit less intense. Part of that was simply how her mind was attuned to the possibility of things leaping out at her now. Part of her job, her life, was set up to expect that kind of thing. The new and unexpected. That meant a few harmless animals weren’t going to get her going for all that long.

  Not really. A bit perhaps. Just enough that her palms were a little moist as they gripped the wheel, even in the cool car.

  She glanced in the review mirror, to see if anyone was behind her as she slowly covered the ground that her GPS was claiming she needed to get past in order to reach her destination. There was no one there, which was a bit surprising. Even in remote areas, there was almost always someone around when you were driving like a paranoid granny. Otherwise you didn’t have roads at all. They didn’t get put in places that no one went, after all.

  Even if it really did seem a bit like that had actually happened in the near past where she was at the moment. It honestly didn’t seem really needed to have a road there. There was no traffic, other than her and hadn’t been for over an hour. It was eerie. True that was in a way which reminded her to be afraid of bears, rather than psycho-killers, but it was still there, at the back of her mind.

  Merry’s black hair had a thin, delicate wisp that was on her forehead instead of being pulled back, like it would have been, if it could be bothered to behave. Most days she did better with it, but when she was traveling, especially alone, it was easier to just go with a single ponytail and call it good. That was the most efficient use of her time if no one was going to see her anyway.

  Most people looking at her tended to think that she was part native American, or possibly Asian. Her skin was lighter than that, but her eyes were a deep brown, and that hair of hers seemed like it should be perfectly straight and thick. Like horse hair. That wasn’t totally wrong, since it was heavy, but it still managed to tangle in every direction possible, even without having anything close to natural curl to it. At best, it was wavy. That was just a code word for unruly and ill behaved, as far as she could tell.

  Her skin was pale, but her eyes had a bit of a strange cast to them. It was the lack of an epicanthal fold, she knew. The look was just a bit off, given her coloration. Merry also had nice, very high and strong cheekbones. Really, it made her look like one of the Sami people. The Laplanders of northern Europe. It had been strange the first time she’d seen pictures of them, since it was like looking at pictures from the family reunion that she’d never had.

  What she really was, well that was a thing that she’d never truly known. Her mother had talked about her father a few times, a man that she’d dated briefly about twenty-nine years before. Only in passing, however. It was a hidden thing, though Merry kind of thought that it was more about her mom just not knowing much about it, rather than a dark secret. The man, Bradley, had apparently looked a lot like Merry did. Light skinned, with exotic eyes. Other than the idea that he was really sweet, considerate, and gone about a month before her mother had realized she was pregnant, there didn’t seem to be a lot to tell on the subject. Apparently, he’d moved away for work so had broken up with his current love of the time. They’d only been dating for about three months, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, really.

  Except when she came along, after the guy was long gone and unreachable. Vanished from the world, as far as she knew.

  Pumping her breaks, she slowed again, this time for a rather cute squirrel. Glancing up she saw the gray and white clouds overhead again and understood why she was all alone on the strip of rather scenic road. Given how cold it was, there very nearly had to be snow coming. That probably wasn’t all that out of the ordinary, given how close to the Canadian border she was at the moment. In late November, too.

  “Because I’m driven to succeed. This isn’t about me being an idiot that should know better. Nope. Not that one at all. Go team me.” She spoke the words out loud, talking over the country station that was playing softly in the background. It was the only thing that would come in at the moment being so far from any cities. Her vehicle was her own car, not a rental. It was sturdy enough and fairly new, but had been selected more for its good gas mileage than for any amazing snow handling capabilities.

  A two-wheel drive, with a very tiny profile, all in bright yellow. A modern bug, which was only a few years old. Most of the time, even when she traveled, that was more than enough for her. She could sleep in the back in a pinch. Not comfortably, but it was possible. Today she was feeling a tiny bit worried about how well it would hold up, if the world went white and treacherous on her. The situation outside was cold enough that she had the heater on already and had for hours, which had lulled her into forgetting how bitter it was beyond her little protected bubble.

  Thinking about it all, she nodded, and pushed the speed back up a little.

  Driving in the back woods of Washington State, at this time of year, meant that snow was far more likely than she’d considered at first. It was the danger of coming from Portland, Oregon. There in November, it rained. That was pretty close to all it did, too. Snow was a rare and wonderful thing there, so no one really prepared for it. You didn’t need to, when it wasn’t going to happen more than one or two days every few years. Not that she couldn’t drive in the snow, but she had to doubt that this desolate stretch of the world would be the first thing plowed if things got white out.

  That she was there because she was so maniacally driven really was just the case. The whole team was following behind her, supposedly, but were a day out, since they’d been needed to work on editing and setting up some of the equipment. Plus, pampering themselves, since they were in-part the team’s delicate talent that actually did the on screen portion of things. It was her
job to scout the locations, and tell them if they needed to bring anything special with them. Cameras were normal, as were night vision equipment, electromagnetic monitors and a whole host of other “out there” sounding things. In this particular case they might want some other things as well.

  Like warm blankets, emergency heaters, and just possibly, some guns. Just to keep the hill folk from playing their banjos too loud at night.

  That thought got her to smile. The show she was working for was being produced by Del Set Productions, which had three pretty incredible things going for it. The guy that owned it was rich. As in one of the top few hundred wealthy people on the planet. He was also wonderfully open minded and they didn’t really need to find anything for him to be happy. For some reason that she’d never gotten, personally. They made the whole thing into a show, but Meredith had been assured when she took the gig that it was really just a cover for Danson Meeres to investigate the supernatural without outing himself as a nut bar.

  Not that he wasn’t one. As far as her investigations into him had gone, the guy was so far out there that the Moon had to peek behind it to see what he was getting up to.

  The man was, as far as anyone knew, a Howard Hughes like recluse. If he didn’t keep his own urine in jars it was probably just because getting the glassware would mean leaving his Colorado mansion.

  In fact, in the six years that he’d been doing the show, the crew had only encountered a small handful of odd things, all small. Strange images on cameras, mainly. Proof, if things weren’t being faked up, that objects might move on their own… At times. Some strange noises caught on tape when no one was there. That kind of thing.

  Merry didn’t buy it. Not even for a moment. Then, she’d only been on the team for a year, herself. In that time, they’d found five incidents of static on recordings that sounded a tiny bit like a person saying a word. That was all. She would have quit, in frustration… Except that she didn’t really believe there was a lot to most of the supernatural garbage anyway and had just taken the job for the money. Like everyone else, really.

  This one was slightly different though. Danson Meeres had ordered them into a remote location for a shoot and investigation, because there had been sightings of werewolves, of all things. Though even that description had varied incredibly, with two of the people claiming that it was Bigfoot, and another describing what had to be a giant tree sloth. In short, instead of going after haunts, this time they were supposed to be hunting monsters.

  Not that they were ready for that kind of thing. Then, no one really was, as far as she knew.

  Merry grinned at the idea, but stopped as a large, fairly dry looking, snowflake hit her windshield. It seemed fluffy, but was large for its type of creature. The dry ones that came in the deepest cold tended to be little and like sand. That earned a hard wince, especially when the white, and rather lovely, bit of fluff was joined by more of his brethren. A whole lot of them. It was a virtual klan family reunion of snow.

  “Fudge. No. No. Snow, snow, go away…” This was done in a low mutter, her shoulders tensing as bits of white fell on her bright and happy little car.

  So, she jumped when the female voice spoke to her suddenly.

  “Make a left turn in… One half mile.” Her GPS didn’t even apologize for scaring her.

  It was, she decided, a real flaw in the product. That kind of thing was rude and it just went on as if it didn’t care about her at all. Smiling though, she let her head nod, and kept her speed up. Visibility was still all right, in that she could tell where the road was, and she was nearly there. The vans that the others would come in were a lot bigger and were more like sturdy SUVs, having four-wheel drive and all that. They might not have a real show, but they got all the best toys, thanks to their wacky benefactor. Now, for what was only the third time since she’d gotten the job with the half fake program, “Uncanny Things” Merry kind of wished that she hadn’t insisted on playing forward scout.

  The first two involved near muggings. It had been enough to make her carry a gun with her. Almost. She was trying not to be paranoid about things like that, so hadn’t brought anything with her to the forest. It was probably a mistake, since she might have to scare off a moose, given the part of the world she was in.

  After all, it probably wasn’t needed in this case, and she was a scientist, not a forest ranger.

  This really was a forest, too. As in the cabin they were going to stay in was on sixty acres that Mr. Meeres had purchased to get them into the right area. The nearest neighbor was at least two miles away, and the rest of the area was owned by the U.S. Government, except for little privately owned things that belonged to people who loved being alone. Endless tracts of forest land.

  That probably meant whatever was going on had to do with some secret experiment from an official direction. The government. Some new kind of camouflage suit or something that used fiber optics to distort the look of a person in the wild. That was a thing, she thought, that they already had. Not that it was her area of expertise in particular. She’d trained to be an engineer, so knew physics, but that didn’t translate to hunting or military tech instantly.

  Still, it was the kind of thing to keep in mind where she was at the moment. There had been a lot of sightings out there, being seven of them inside three weeks. In an area that was less than a ten-mile circle. That probably meant there really was at least a reason for it in the first place. If it had been just one person seeing things, well, they wouldn’t have reported it, most likely. You didn’t in cases like that, because most people saw weird things all the time. Or thought they did. Even she had, in the past. Glimpses of things that weren’t there, or voices calling her name when she was alone at night.

  Everyone did, though some tried to hide it from themselves. It wasn’t spooky however. That kind of thing was just an artifact of how the human brain processed the world around them. If something sounded kind of like a voice, consciousness had to try and figure out what was being said, for instance. It was why most people that listened to fans, or other white noise producing objects, would hear words, or singing, going on. The mind tried to make sense of things, even if it was really just random.

  People did that with what they saw, too. Bigfoot was pretty much like that, she didn’t doubt. A person in an unfamiliar environment would see a tree, bit of moss and some leaves in the distance, then turn it into something like a man. Given the scale of trees, that often wouldn’t fit, so they made up giants to fill the void in their heads. Perhaps a few other people would try to be funny, or trick others to prove they were smarter than the average beer drinking moron and leave some faked up footprints for others to find.

  Then, add a bit of stupid and voila, you had a rash of sightings.

  Not that she cared.

  The snow was important, and so was making sure that the place her team was going was livable. Survivable at any rate. In a few cases they’d been sent in to houses that were supposed to be haunted, but were actually just falling down wrecks. One hadn’t even had a real floor and Barry, their sound technician, had broken his leg, stepping in the wrong place. Not that they wouldn’t go in at times even if things weren’t in great shape, since it was the job, but darned if she was letting her people go into that kind of thing blind. Not again. That was part of why she went in first now, every time.

  “Turn coming up on the left, in… One hundred feet.”

  “Got it.” Not that she could see it yet. That wasn’t due to the snow, which was getting a little heavier, but wasn’t that bad yet. She wasn’t driving blind, in fear of her life.

  No, it was just that the “driveway”, was nothing more than a slightly overgrown dirt track when she got there. Pulling in she heard things scraping angrily along the bottom of her car. That didn’t make her happy, but she kept going. She made enough to buy a new vehicle if she had to, so quitting now, when she was almost in place wasn’t an option.

  “Because, I am insane.” Not that she really was. Driven, th
at was fair to claim, but not crazy.

  The road, if calling a track that looked to have been abandoned years before counted as that, caused her to bounce as it turned into a rather steep hill. It wasn’t hard to move up it, but she lurched and bounced as she did. Hard enough that her breasts, which weren’t exactly tiny, moved on their own. Not that they hit her in the face or anything, thankfully. She was happy with what God had given her that way.

  Enough to be attractive, not so much that her only career option had been stripping.

  Though her weight probably would have made that one hard. Merry kept herself fit, but she’d never managed to be smaller than a size six. All the eating right and hitting the gym in the world didn’t get her weight to budge under about one-forty. She carried it well, so most people thought she was smaller than that, but it hadn’t really been the case since high school. In her more delusional moments she told herself it was that she was big boned. That kind of worked, given her facial structure.

  It might even be true, she knew.

  Still, there was enough padding that she looked right, so she’d kind of stopped worrying about it nearly four years before. No one had ever complained about it after all. Not to her face. Even the tiny girls on the team, Tiffany, who was the on-screen talent, and Lynn, their intern, didn’t look at her funny that way. Probably due to an honest fear that if they did she could crush them.

  The pathway, and calling it even a driveway was being too generous, went on for a lot longer than she would have figured. Really, she was wondering if it was the right place at all, when the thing finally opened up, and turned into a circle to reveal a rather attractive log cabin.

  There were evergreen trees all around it, at a distance and the property hadn’t been cared for in a while, but the roof looked solid. It was metal, which didn’t go with the logs that made up the sides. There was no snow on the ground, though it would be a little hard to tell for a bit, since the world was sort of covered in most places by low vegetation.