I Hope You Find Me by Trish Marie Dawson

short as somewhere in the distance a dog
barked loudly. He stood still, holding his breath, listening. The
barking stopped as abruptly as it started, so he couldn’t pin-point
its location. The streets seemed hollow, and sounds bounced off the
buildings, making it nearly impossible to find the source.
    He stepped off the curb, still moving in the
direction he thought was west when he heard a yell. It sounded just
as far away as the dog, and again, he stopped to listen. He turned
in circles, as the echoes vibrated down the streets and felt
confident it wasn’t coming from behind him. He broke into a run,
still moving west, and after passing through one city block the
yelling stopped. It sounded like a child or a woman, calling for
someone. He wasn’t sure, but he did know one thing, he wasn’t alone
after all.
    He waited for more yells to come, even
whistled a few times, hoping to hear the dog, but all was quiet
once again, so he continued to jog down the streets, his pack
slapping against his back with each stride, but he ignored it. He
stopped only in the intersections to look down each street and
listen. He ran nearly four blocks when he saw the first glints of
the bay ahead of him. Though he was still almost a mile away from
the shore, far off in the distance he thought he saw a tiny figure
blotting out the sun for a second, before it passed behind a
building and was gone. He began to run again, this time at full
speed. He wanted to find whoever it was before they
disappeared.
    A handful of minutes later and the street he
was running on merged into Harbor Drive. The bay lay before him,
old ships docked to his left, and larger, private and commercial
vessels intertwined with small floating piers to his right. He
looked down the street to the south, where the figure had
disappeared, and glanced up North Harbor Drive before noticing the
smoke in the sky. The airport had to be on fire.
    “ Fuck.” He said quietly.
    Out of breath, he stood frozen in place, not
sure where to go next, when to his left he heard a woman’s voice in
the distance. After crossing the street, he jogged half a block,
peering into buildings and around the boats. And then he saw her.
Down the street, and across a parking lot, at the end of one of the
piers he saw a girl jump into the water, and what looked like a
black dog jumping in after her. He crossed the road and ran along
the sidewalk, looking for a way down to the docks. By the time he
made it to the parking lot, he couldn’t see her anymore, and wasn’t
sure which pier she was near, so he paced the shore line, hopping
along the rocks that lined the bay, hoping to catch sight of her.
He could hear barking, but couldn’t see them, anywhere.
    Frustrated, he retraced his steps through
the parking lot and jogged to the end, where a large commercial
pier stood jetted out behind a seafood restaurant. At the end, he
saw them swimming back to the pier.
    “ Hey!” He shouted, and waved his arms…but
the woman didn’t respond.
    He ran back down the pier and returned to
the smaller docks, until he found the one she was closest to. He
dropped his pack at the gate, and jogged by the boat slips, the
breeze above the water was cold, easily biting through his clothing
and chilling his skin. There were so many places in between the
boats that she could be, that it took him a full minute to reach
the end and in the middle was a bag next to a pile of clothing.
    After looking down the side of the dock for
any sign of life, he saw the dog first, paddling around in circles.
He stepped to the edge and noticed pale white fingers holding onto
the edge of the pier, he looked down, and there they were, treading
water, several feet below him. An attractive long-haired woman with
dark blue eyes was holding on for dear life, wearing not much of
anything, and the dog splashed around her feet, clearly not sure of
what to do. After fishing them both out of the water he knew then
there was hope. Hope that others were