Call of the Alpha - Part 1(5)

He answered her without a word, simply rising to his feet. He reached out for her arm and steadied himself. When his knees stopped wobbling and his back was standing straight, he took a step forward. Jessica tested his weight against her and found it solid. She tossed the blanket around his shoulders and he grabbed its ends, curling it around his chest. It sagged down to his knees, covering most of him. For a moment, it looked like a robe on some rugged traveler.

He was rather heavy but she could tell right away that it was all muscle. He managed to stay on his feet as they moved slowly, but it was still quite the physical feat for Jessica to bear his weight. It was burdensome to help him out of the ditch but she managed.

The climb up the embankment was another thing, though. She slipped twice and they both nearly went back into the ditch. But by the time they got on fairly solid ground, they had come to a groove of sorts and were able to work together smoothly.

“I have to get you to a hospital,” she said. “You want the front seat or the back?”

He thought about this for a moment, those hazy eyes seeming to scan the forest around them. As he did, Jessica saw that whatever strength he had summoned to crawl out of the ditch and up the embankment was gone. He was exhausted now, tired and seemingly dehydrated as well.

“No,” he said finally. “No hospitals.”

“You have to see a—” she said, but he interrupted her before she could finish.

“Please. No. No hospitals.” He was insistent, but also afraid. But she knew it was not a fear that came from doctors or needles. No, there was something else going on here…something that made Jessica remember the fear she’d experienced the moment her car had clipped the shape of this man.


But I didn’t think it was a man, then, she thought. It looked more like a dog or some other animal.

Then, for the second time in less than five minutes, she pushed aside her training and learned instincts. She worked by a gut reaction and made the decision to follow it now, even if it made no sense to her.

“Fine,” she said. “No hospital yet. But I’m taking you to my house and I’ll look you over there. Once you’re stable, then we’ll call the hospital.”

He nodded slowly, looking at her skeptically. She looked right back, realizing how odd it was to be standing the middle of this back road with a naked man. The mud on his body looked like abstract blood in the red blinking flashes of her emergency lights. She studied his form for a moment and realized another thing that made her want to just leave him right there in the middle of the road, get home, lock her doors, and call the police.

He’s wiped out right now, she said. And I hit him. There’s no way he should have been able to climb that embankment, even if I did half of his share of the work. There’s just no way. He’s not dangerous, not right now.

“Come on,” she said, reaching out and placing a hand on his shoulder. He leaned into her and she thought he might collapse. But they managed to make it the few feet to her car before the strength went out of his legs. He collapsed against the side of her car and practically fell inside when she opened the door for him.

Jessica reached inside and repositioned his body so that both of his legs were bent slightly, allowing his full body to lie down in the back seat. As she did this, he mumbled something that was incoherent. There was a word in there somewhere and even though Jessica had no idea what he was saying, it sent chills down her spine all the same. Why was her gut screaming at her over this man?

She went back around the car and took her place in the driver’s seat. She cranked the car to life and started driving again. She checked her cellphone once more but still found that there was no signal.

In the back, the naked man that was streaked in mud seemed to be in some sort of loose sleep.

“No hospitals,” he’d said.

It made no sense. Thinking of that, Jessica sped a bit faster towards her home, as anxious as ever to get to her phone to make a call to the hospital before the man in the back seat woke up.





Chapter 3




As she got home, Jessica discovered making the call to the hospital wasn’t going to be that easy. The moment she parked her car in her driveway, the man in the back stirred and slowly sat up. Noticing this, Jessica left the car running, the headlights pointed to the small cabin she had been living in for the last three years.

Hers was the only house within a half mile radius and there was nothing beyond her five-and-a-half acres of yard other than the thick forests. In the darkness of night, even when illuminated by her headlights, those forests seemed thicker than ever. If this man in her back seat was mentally ill in any way, Jessica was all alone out here. It made her desire to get to her phone more pertinent than ever. He seemed lucid to her, but she did, after all, find him running naked down a country lane.

She glanced to her cell phone and saw that she had two bars now, as she always did on her property. But she didn’t want to risk making the call with him near her. While she did feel that he was hurt in some way and maybe even afraid of something he had not yet told her about, she couldn’t shake the sense of danger and unpredictability she had felt around him. She thought it would be best to pretend to do as he asked for as long as she could. She’d place a call to the hospital as soon as she could, but she’d have to do it without him knowing it. Either that, or she’d have to convince him that a trip to the hospital would be the best thing for him.