The Five Dollar Mail Book 3: The Road Home

3: Within A Dark Woods

Cover painting by Angela Taratuta. Chapter artwork of Jesse by Angela Taratuta. All graphics by me.

Book 1: The Green, Book 2: Lynch's Boys, Book 3: The Road Home, and the Riders & Kickers Anthology are available on Amazon under the name Regina Shelley. So if you hate waiting for chapter posts and/or want a more polished read, the finished product is available now.

Jesse felt like he was burning up. It was dark and his teeth were chattering and he wondered if he was back in the overwhelming darkness of the cave. He tried to move, to lift his head or even just open his eyes, but either he was too weak or he was buried under something. He wondered if the cave had collapsed. Some heavy, blanketing weight was holding him down, heat surrounding and immobilizing him. Didn't I...didn't I get out of the cave? Did he drag me back in? He let out a shaking moan, fighting to understand the strange, unknowable words teasing the edge of his consciousness. Lily...is that you? Is it really this dark, or are my eyes closed? He suspected they were. His eyelids felt leaden and he lacked the strength to force them open. The only part of him that was apparently able to move was his jaw, and the uncontrollable chattering it was doing was driving him crazy. The heat was nearly unbearable. Am I in Hell? Did I die? Is that... "Lily..?" What is she saying?

Something feathered across his face, smoothing gently over his brow and he gasped. Lily's hand was on fire, scorching him where she touched his skin. His mind went back to when he was a teenager, back when he and Lily were alone, when they were fighting to keep each other alive. She's sick...she's still fevered...I gotta take care of her. "Lily..."

She was talking to him, her voice deep and calm. He had no idea what she was saying, but her words were soothing. He mustered what meager strength he possessed and used every bit of it to power his eyes open.

Firelight, hazy and dim, threw shifting shadows around the warm blackness. He couldn't tell where he was. A hand slid under head and a cup was passed to his lips. He drank, groaning with relief as something warm and bitter and blessedly liquid filled his parched mouth and throat. It was terrible. He didn't care. Lily was... surely that's Lily, isn't it? Her hands are so hot... a dark shadow in the flickering orange light kneeling beside him. Are we home? Are we in Uncle Chet's cabin? He smelled leather and bear grease and burning pinyon and the walls receded away into darkness, out of his sight. His mind stumbled through a confused haze of sounds he didn't recognize and shimmering images he couldn't make sense of. Lily was wearing a strange dress with jagged teeth sewn across the bodice in neat rows. Her hair was unbound, and he wondered why it was so short and black. He hadn't remembered her eyes being so dark, so different without her glasses. She was staring into his face, into his eyes, searching for something.

His far-too-heavy eyelids dropped closed as she gently eased his head back again, saying words he could not make out. He tried to speak again, and soft fingers touched his lips, silencing him.

Didn't I go over a waterfall? Did I dream that? Isn't Galloway...isn't he...

Hazy, surreal images shuttered through his struggling,staggering consciousness. The awful darkness and emptiness of the cavern, the dizzying fall through space and splashing water. The dead man in the river, sodden and cold and waterlogged like a muddy wad of half-rotten leaves, his white skull gleaming through the bloodless, gaping hole in what was left of his scalp. No...no...not...

He gasped, his body jerking beneath the weight that covered him, his eyes flying open in a disoriented spasm of panic. They found me.

The woman's face looking back at him was broad and dark, the dark eyes bright in the flickering firelight. Her black hair was unbound and untidily hacked off at the shoulder. She knelt beside him as he lay inside a great, circular tent, and the smoke from the fire twisted and curled upwards, escaping past the crossed lodge poles at the peak, through the open smoke flap, and into the starlit sky.

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