The Hidden: Jack's Resolve: The Hidden, #3

The Hidden

By

Andrew Michael Schwarz

Episode Three

Jack’s Resolve

Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Michael Schwarz

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

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First Printing, 2015

Vorpal Blade Publishing

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Renton, WA 98057

www.vorpalbladepublishing.com

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19

Nikki Marie Luther didn’t get visitors. Ever. No Jehovah’s Witnesses, no Mormons, no vacuum cleaner salesmen or newspaper peddlers; in short, no human beings came to her cabin in the woods, which was just fine by her because that was precisely why she’d moved there. Nikki didn’t want to have anything to do with the human race anymore. She’d been there, done that and specifically not gotten the mother fucking T-shirt.

Because Nikki hated people.

At least as of eleven months, five days and seventeen hours ago.

She loved animals though, and if she could, she would keep company with squirrels and little furry critters the rest of natural born life. That wasn’t very practical, she knew that, because one had to at least exchange glances with human beings on occasion to buy things from them. She tried to limit that occasion as much as she could.

She’d been hurt too many times by humans, that was her big thing, the crux of her protest. She could go back through each phase of her life, year by year, and find at least three people close to her, who had let her down in big and small ways. Hence, her cabin in the woods.

To be fair, over the years, she’d had some good friends, of course, but those engagements had been short lived, because sooner or later, each in turn had failed her. Cheating, double crossing, playing favorites, pretending nothing was wrong when it was, pretending something was wrong when it wasn’t, jealousy, and on and on down the long list of human foibles and idiosyncrasies, to say nothing of political corruption and planetary devastation in the name of profit, made her sick to death of the whole shooting match.

Humans, she thought, what a waste.

She was writing poetry when she heard the noise outside her door, a long moaning wail that seemed to trail off as if someone were overacting a bad death scene in a cheaply written stage play. At first she thought it was the wind, naturally, for tonight was the first big storm of the winter. The snow was not so much falling, as it was pelting down at forty five degree angles. But, when she heard the moan again, even she had to concede that wind did not sound like a man.

Her second thought was: who the fuck would be out in this weather? And her third thought was for her shotgun, which she kept loaded under the bed.

She was not afraid that her gun was going to go off by itself. Lord knows, it takes a person to shoot a gun. And if she had ever gotten so depressed that she were to take it out and shoot her head off, then so be it. Que sera, sera, who gives a fuck? and goodbye cruel world.

But if the truth were to be told, she was exuberant. Here, finally, was someone she might be able to shoot. She had half a mind to wait for the attacker to break in. That way she would be justified when the human authorities began nosing around and asking questions about the dead human body.

But she didn’t think an attacker would moan like that.

She opened her cabin door, nervous, though she would never admit it, perhaps because she felt vulnerable to an attack, or, perhaps, because she felt vulnerable to the desire to actually help someone. The last sentiment didn’t sit well with the other. It is rather difficult to denounce your race in perpetuity and never once look back. Consequently, some part of her still cared about humanity.

What the hell? she said of the gust of wind that assaulted her the moment she opened her door.

The snow was falling so thickly and with such velocity that any living thing unfortunate enough to stop moving tonight was immediately buried.

Speaking of buried, was that a human man lying on her front yard under an inch of freshly fallen snow? If so, he was too scrawny to be healthy.

He’s…starving to death.

Oh please, she groaned. If you came to my house to fall over dead, I am going to burn your carcass and deny you a proper burial.

She stepped out of her cabin and approached cautiously. She had every intent to ensure this was not some trick practiced by a very unorthodox serial killer. Oh, there were such killers, to be sure. Wasn’t that the infamous Ted Bundy’s favorite MO? Pretend to be crippled, attract the unsuspecting female and then, whamo, crack that bitch over the head with a tire iron and load her into the green station wagon. Wasn’t he even rumored to have waved at a cop who’d pulled up beside him at the stop light while he’d had a hog-tied college girl in the trunk?

Nikki had crept close enough to confirm it was a man, because it was too long to be a woman. It was an assumption, but safe enough to bank on.

She studied him lying there, face down and unmoving in a heap of oversized clothes, dusted with a layer of thick snow. His clothes are not oversized, she thought, he’s undersized. His legs seemed to hide inside wide tubes of denim, the base of his thin neck got lost inside the wool lined collar of his suede leather cowboy jacket. Not much of a winter coat, she thought, noticing the slender layer of fur lining inside the leather shell. She hoped, for his sake, that that fur was actually wool and not some cheap synthetic. A red and green stocking cap with a ball tassel was still half on his head.

She determined this guy couldn’t possibly be a threat to her. If he gets out of line I’ll just snap his neck. She lowered her gun and knelt down. All right, she said, squatting in her pajama pants, Ugg boots and Michael Kors trench coat from another life, let’s see what you’re all about. With her rifle tucked under her arm, barrel away from the man on the ground, she rolled the waif over. None too easy in the freezing snow with an icy wind bitch-slapping you. She did it very carefully and slowly, nearly hugging him, so as to not injure or further exacerbate an injury he might already have. His body pulled heavier than she had expected, causing her to overcompensate and pitch forward. She nearly ate a mouthful of snow in the process. When she got him flat, she gasped.

My God. What happened to you?

He wasn’t just emaciated, but beaten. He had a scraggly, unkempt beard, soiled with food. Ugly bruises ringed his skinny neck and his eyes were as sunken as the Titanic. She quickly felt for his pulse, half hoping she wouldn’t find one, but no such luck. It thrummed steadily and strong beneath his skin.

Oh Jesus, she said. Do I really need this shit?

Of course the answer was no, because who would?

She considered leaving him there and why not? He’d die, probably quickly out here, and that really didn’t have anything to do with her. Because she could call the authorities in the morning and…she glanced back behind her.

Damn it, she swore into the frozen air. Her footprints gave her away. She wondered if cops—or anyone—would consider it murder to allow a man to freeze to death in one’s own front yard.

Of course, the snow would cover those same footprints up, so didn’t that solve the problem? He could have just starved to death on his own, and her, being inside on a cold and snowy night, would be none-the-mother-fucking-wiser until morning, after it was too late, so sad.

Of course, one could argue that he did not die of starvation in her yard, because he had walked there.

Yes, but that was her point: what if he was already dead by the time she got to him? As in, he could have been lying there for quite some time before she found him, and, once again, she’d be off the hook.

Yeah, she said. "But don’t they have ways to tell when a person died?"

Yes, they did, but then again, freezing surely delays the processes of decay. She considered walking backwards in the same foot prints she had made walking forwards to mitigate her involvement.

Oh fuck it. She stood up, fished out a cigarette, fumbled with her lighter and lit up. The wind wanted to take the flame, but she shielded the cigarette with her left hand, and sucked in vigorously, stealing the fire back. Standing in the snow and cold, she smoked, deliberating her next move, now acutely aware of how fucking numb her fingers were.

She had a weakness, which was too bad for her because it meant that she really couldn’t be the hard bitten bitch that she tried so hard to be. It meant that, deep down, she might still give a crap.

She blew smoke and watched it quickly dissipate into the frigid wind. Smoke didn’t billow in the cold, it just disappeared. The cigarette tasted like shit this way too, but she wanted nicotine right now because she figured she had an important decision to make.

Damn it! She swore and exhaled furiously. She flicked her cigarette into the snow and stared down at the heap in front of her. Fuck you, asshole.

She trudged back to the front door so that she could set her gun down against the wall. Then walked right back to the half dead dude and slunk her hands under his arms and began pulling, and swearing.

It was really too bad that she had this weakness, because it prevented her from denying the whole human race in earnest. She could even muster up a goodly amount of self pity over it.

He wasn’t too heavy, and that was just as fucked up as it was a good thing. She was kind of small, but also feisty and bitchy and totally not someone you would want to piss off behind the wheel. In other words, she was stronger than she looked. This was partly due to her genetics, short muscled with lean body fat, but also because of her attitude of stubborn independence.

She gauged the stranger weighed-in at somewhere between 100 to 120 pounds, she guessed, and that was just all wrong. He was at least six feet. She figured if he wasn’t weighing in, minimally, at around 150-160, he was in serious trouble of the life threatening sort.

You’re a skeleton, she told him as one of his boots slipped off and stood upright in a gathering snow drift. She didn’t intend to go back for it. She dragged him inside and laid him out on the kitchen floor, her back already beginning to ache.

The cabin seemed to positively throb with heat compared to the deep freeze outside. Immediately the snow that had collected and froze on the stranger’s clothes, eyebrows and beard began to melt so that he was soon covered in a light dew. She had no idea how long he had been wandering out there, or how quickly a layer of snow might settle on him, though pretty fast tonight. She guessed that the moan she had heard, had occurred at the same moment as he had fallen down, or perhaps, lain down, because the features of his clothes had still very much been visible to her. She had taken about five minutes to put on her coat and boots, grab her gun and decide to go out to investigate.

Therefore, she estimated that while he had not been lying outside her door for very long, he had been walking around for quite awhile. This would explain both his exhaustion as well as the fact that he was not frozen solid yet.

Hey buddy, she said. Can you hear me? She got no response.

She inspected him carefully, worrying about the possibility of frostbite. His fingers were icy cold, but turning red as the