Page 3 of Alokar (The Alliance Rescue #2)
Hannah
The screen door was hanging by one hinge—a hinge that screamed with rusty fury at being used when I pushed the weathered door open and sauntered inside.
The Mountain Man’s Drinking Hole wasn’t much to look at.
Just the main building of an abandoned homestead, logs darkened with age and neglect.
The front rooms of the two-story log cabin had been converted to hold a small bar with mismatched stools and a few scarred wooden tables, while the rear of the building was devoted to processing wild game, imparting a scent of beer, stale oil, and blood into the air.
Dim light filtered through grimy windows, casting shadows across the worn floorboards.
This was the kind of place that only locals knew and frequented—a refuge hidden away from the world.
Except perhaps for a group of archeology students now and then, bored with being at a dig site too long and desperate for cold beer and Rocky Mountain oysters.
Sawdust on the floor and the smell of stale cigarettes could look good to anybody after a while, I supposed.
Other than me, I counted five other people occupying the tables and booths—crowded for a Tuesday night.
I’d been coming here since I was ten years old, my legs barely reaching the floor from the barstool where I’d perch with a lukewarm root beer. I remembered sitting at my father’s side as he engaged in passionate debates over the existence of Bigfoot with anyone who’d take part.
Daddy .
My heart felt funny, a strange combination of hollowness and grief, with a healthy dose of fury clinging to the somehow still-beating organ.
I hadn’t cried at the funeral—not a single tear.
Other than the first day when I’d been sobbing so hard I could barely choke out the words to tell the sheriff what happened, I hadn’t cried much at all.
It had been a nice funeral—if one can say that about a funeral.
My father was well-liked. Dozens of flannel-clad mourners, fellow researchers, students, and old drinking buddies, filled the polished wooden pews of Every Nation Church in Seattle, save for one conspicuously empty seat.
I don’t know why I thought my mother might return to say goodbye.
Other than a generic card at birthdays and Christmas—always signed with just her first name in careful script—I’d barely heard from her in the last ten years.
When my dad became obsessed with Bigfoot, it embarrassed my mother.
It embarrassed her even more when I shared my dad’s beliefs.
She left one rainy Tuesday morning and now lived somewhere on the East Coast—Maine, I think—with her new husband and stepsiblings I’d probably never meet.
It didn’t matter. Dad had been enough of a parent that I hadn’t missed her presence.
I said that, and many other things about my father during the service, my voice steady as I stared down at the small metal jar that held his ashes.
The jar wasn't very full. When Sheriff Pettrie and a few others returned to the site, they’d only found a few scattered bones and his watch.
A watch I hadn’t taken off my wrist since the sheriff gave it to me, his usually steady voice cracking as he pressed it into my palm.
An old Timex, the face scratched but still readable.
The watch still kept perfect time, even though the brown leather band was worn soft and frayed at the edges from decades of wear.
The sheriff had cleaned it before giving it to me, but there were still small spots of dried blood embedded deep in the band’s stitching—dark reminders that no amount of scrubbing could erase.
“What are you doing here, girlie?” Hank’s gravelly voice cut through the musty air as he emerged from the shadows behind the bar, his weathered face creased into a perpetual scowl.
The owner, bartender, and cook—when anyone was brave enough to eat his questionable offerings—fixed me with a glare that could have curdled milk.
I didn’t take it personally. Hank scowled at everybody with the same intensity he reserved for burnt steaks and unpaid tabs.
He’d been one of my father’s best friends, and I’d heard his soft, broken sobbing echoing through Every Nation Church during the funeral service.
“Hello to you too,” I muttered, my boots clicking against the worn floorboards as I walked over to climb up onto a familiar barstool—my feet still dangling like a child’s, not quite reaching the ground even after all these years.
“I’m serious,” Hank grumbled, his thick fingers swiping the scarred surface of the bar in front of me with a towel that had seen better days. The fabric left more streaks than it cleaned. “Shouldn’t you be in college or something?”
“I should be,” I agreed, watching him work.
The semester started three days ago. The same day I’d loaded the last of our belongings from the Seattle apartment into cardboard boxes bound for Goodwill and handed the keys to our landlord.
Anything that mattered, anything that held memories worth keeping, I’d carefully packed into the rusted bed of my 1985 Ford F150 and hauled up the winding mountain road to the cabin.
“Then why ain’t you?” Hank groused, his calloused hands already reaching for a familiar bottle, and he set a cold beer in front of me without being asked. There was no need to order here. He carried only a few kinds of beer, and after all these years, knew everyone’s preferences.
“Because I’m going to track and kill the grizzly that killed my dad.
” Saying the word grizzly felt bitter on my tongue, each syllable a betrayal of what I’d actually witnessed.
I knew damn well it wasn’t a griz. The intelligent, almost human smile the Bigfoot had given me before clamping its teeth into my father’s neck haunted my dreams. But the sheriff had officially designated my dad’s death as a grizzly attack, and that’s what everyone claimed to believe—whether or not they truly believed it.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hank snorted, his weathered palm slapping against the counter with enough force to make my beer bottle jump.
The sound echoed through the empty bar like a gunshot.
“You’ll go out there and get yourself killed, just like.
...” He stopped himself, but we both knew how that sentence ended.
I took a deliberate swig of beer, the cold liquid doing nothing to cool the fire building in my chest as I licked the foam from my lip and squared my shoulders with determination.
“My grandfather was Arapaho, a member of the council of elders for the Wind River Reservation. He kept the old ways and taught my dad everything he knew about the wilderness... and my dad taught me.” My voice grew stronger with each word.
“I know how to track—and hunt.” And kill, but I kept that darker promise locked away for now.
“I know you do, honey,” Hank sighed heavily, his grumpy facade cracking and morphing into something infinitely softer—the expression of a man who’d watched a little girl grow up and now saw her standing on the precipice of something stupid and dangerous.
“Your dad was the best friend I ever had, and I can promise you he wouldn’t want this.
He’d want you to move on with your life.
Go to school, get that degree, and do not waste time on revenge. ”
“Revenge isn’t a waste,” I insisted fiercely, even though somewhere in the rational corner of my mind, I knew Hank was right.
With his last breath, my dad had saved me.
He wouldn’t want me to forgo school, wouldn’t want me to spend my days traipsing through the mountains hunting the monster that had torn him away from me.
But logic had nothing to do with the burning need that consumed me. It was what I wanted, what I needed.
“I know there have been increased Bigfoot sightings in the last couple of weeks,” I told him, my fingers tracing the condensation on my beer bottle as I spoke.
I’d stopped in and seen Stella, who ran the visitors center, earlier.
Normally, she was a treasure trove of news and gossip, but all she’d wanted to talk about was some handsome lumberjack she’d met.
I’d had to go to my second-best source. “Roger Hoffman at the rental car place told me that the new archeological dig at Skadulgwas Peak was completely destroyed by Bigfoot, some believe.”
“Oh shit,” Hank scoffed, his hands never pausing in the endless polishing motion. “If anything tore that campsite up, it was those college kids. They were in here drinking like fish that same night, stumbling around and knocking over chairs.”
I rolled my eyes and took another deliberate swig of my beer, the bitter liquid sliding down my throat.
Hank was every bit as big a believer in Bigfoot as my dad had been, his eyes lighting up whenever someone mentioned a sighting.
Yet I knew he’d never own up to anything—especially if he thought it would egg me on toward something dangerous.
Hank went back to wiping a bar top that would never truly be clean, the scarred wood bearing decades of spilled drinks and carved initials.
I swung my gaze around the dimly lit room, taking inventory of the familiar faces.
Old Seb and Chip, two elderly brothers with matching flannel shirts and white hair, hunched over a chessboard at their usual table in the corner, gnarled fingers moving pieces across a pockmarked board.
A couple of middle-aged tourists sat at another table.
I knew they were tourists because they didn’t know any better than to order food from Hank’s kitchen.
And him.