Ashes, Ashes

11 - Missing Persons

"Logan! Logan! Wake up!" 

Panicked whispering dragged me from sleep. I became aware, piecemeal, that someone was shaking me. I realized, too, that I was freezing cold, my muscles creaking in protest; they had seized up in the night and resisted being woken now. 

My head was pounding, a steady and miserable rhythm like something threatening to burst out of my skull near my right eye. 

"Logan!"

"All right, all right." I swatted blindly in the direction of the voice, one eyelid creeping open. My voice cracked. My throat burned and tasted like smoke and acid. 

I tried to piece together what had happened last night, how I had gotten from my chair to the bunk, what followed Richard and Parker's fight...but it was all a blank. I frowned. I hadn't been black-out drunk in years, so long I'd almost forgotten it was a possibility, but here I was confronted with the reality of it. 

I shivered and rolled into a tighter burrito in my sleeping bag. When had I unrolled a sleeping bag? 

"Logan it's important please get up." 

Dawn sounded scared. It took me a while to put that together, to recognize that she was trying to do more than just rouse me from sleep. I opened my eyes again. 

She was perched on the edge of the bunk, ducking to avoid the bed overhead; it caused her to bend over close to me, close enough for a seduction, and my first thought was: What does Parker think of this. 

But a glance around the room showed that Parker wasn't here. 

Abby and Richard were tangled together, confusingly, in a lower bunk. A mess of blankets on another bunk looked recently nested in. But there was no sign of Parker, and no sign of Liza. 

I blinked, trying to make sense of that, trying to think through the blinding pain in my head. "Where is everybody?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Dawn said, exasperated. "Parker is missing." 

Richard made a grunting noise, turning to bury his face into a pillow, but Abby was starting to rouse, sitting up wrapped into a blanket. "Christ, it's cold." 

The fire had gone out overnight, with no one tending it, and now the whole cabin felt like a walk-in freezer. 

"What do you mean, missing?" I asked, still trying to wrap my aching head around things. 

"I mean missing," Dawn said, and her voice cracked, loud and sharp in a way that drove a spoke through my aching head. "I woke up and he was gone." 

"Good riddance," Richard muttered sleepily. "Asshole." 

I rubbed my temple, grimacing. "Okay. Okay. Dawn, calm down, please, I just need...a minute." I buried my face in my hands, trying to get my thoughts in order. "I'm...gonna need you to get me up to speed here. What..." I cast around, trying to figure out what question needed to be answered first. 

"You don't remember?" Dawn's exasperation deepened to disgust, and she pulled away from my bed. "It's not important. Just get dressed and help me. The car is gone." 

"What?!" That got my attention. I stumbled out of bed, tripping over the sleeping bag. I was shirtless, somehow, I didn't remember taking it off but I must have at some point because my bare skin shrank against the blast of cold air as I exited the blankets, the skin along the crescent-shaped scars on either side of my chest puckering. 

I fumbled for something to wear and grabbed my jacket, pulling it over my bare torso and made it to the door. 

It was bright -- too bright -- outside, sunlight glinting off the ground. The snow had fallen long and deep overnight, piling up under trees and drifting against stones. The landscape looked alien, its features reshaped. 

The SUV was gone. And, judging by the snowed-in dents in the path, hours-old tire tracks, it had been gone for a while. 

"Shit." What had happened last night? had the fight gotten out of hand? Had Parker gotten pissed and left us here? But why leave his wife behind with the rest of us? And where the fuck was Liza? 

I ran through various plausible scenarios. The two of them had left together. But why? For what possible purpose? They hardly knew each other. Unless there had been some kind of emergency? But surely someone would have woken us up. Surely Parker wouldn't have left without Dawn. 

So maybe he hadn't gone far? Maybe he had just driven up to the mouth of the campground and parked there for...some reason. 

And had been gone long enough for the tracks to fill in. 

I rested my aching head against the door frame and felt a swirl of cold air rustle under my jacket, piercing through to freeze my skin. 

"Shut the door," Abby protested. She was pulling on extra layers of clothes and breathing into her hands. "What the fuck is going on." She gave Richard a hard shove. "And why the fuck are you in my bed." 

"Nothing happened!" He threw an arm over his face. He was also shirtless, I noticed. There was a shed undershirt lying in a heap on the floor near an overturned chair. There was a spot of blood on the collar. "I just. All the beds were taken. I couldn't...get into a top bunk." 

"We don't have time for this," Dawn said, and there was genuine hysteria in her voice, like she was one second away from screaming. 

"If you're so worried about where Captain Dickhead is," Richard said, sitting up now, wrapped in a blanket and bending over to look for his shoes in the puddle of clothes on the floor, "Why don't you just call him?"

"Oh, brilliant idea, genius. I never would have thought of that one on my own. Call him on what? All the fucking phones are gone." 

Sure enough: The basket Liza had made us all drop our phones into the night before was missing. We turned the cabin upside down looking for it -- digging through clothes and blankets and piles of beer bottles and plastic cups -- but no luck. 

The phones, like Parker and Liza, were gone. 

"Okay," I said, pressing a hand to my throbbing head. "There's got to be a simple, obvious answer to this. We've just got to keep calm and figure it out." 

"And try not to freeze to death in the meantime," Abby grumbled. 

"Right. Okay. Here's...here's the plan." It would have been so much easier to concentrate if my head would stop throbbing. "I'm going to go pee. You guys figure out how to get the fire going again so we can warm up a little. Then we'll figure out...what happened." 

I frowned. It didn't sound like a very impressive plan, but I didn't know what else to do, so I figured one step at a time. A part of me was convinced -- or at least very hopeful -- that everything would resolve itself in the time it took me to trudge to the bathroom and back. 

By the time I got to the bathroom, I was pretty well convinced that this whole thing was some kind of elaborate, stupid prank. Dawn was probably in on it. I had probably said something stupid last night, and this was their way of getting back at me, ha ha, very funny, we'd all have a good laugh about it -- 

Something crimson-brown caught my eye and I froze in place on my way out of the men's room. The snow had been packed down, slick and half-melted, on the path leading out from the women's room. And there, splattered across the white earth, was something that looked unmistakably like blood.