Taming the Alpha

by Mandy M. Roth

  It wasn’t random.

  He had been the target.

  He’d brought death to their door.

  And that was the weight of a lost life, that knowledge.

  That guilt.

  Thanks to the police investigation, they’d been able to backtrack along the route the perps had taken. CSIs had worked out the pattern of events, and their order, right the way back to the cinema parking lot where the gangbangers had picked up Michael and his family and followed them to the gas station. How they had identified Goodfellow as one of the members of the team that had conducted the raid, never mind that he and his family were out at the movies that night, no one knew. Michael had his own suspicions. A dirty cop. Someone on the Crimson Kings payroll. It didn’t take much to leak a little seemingly harmless information, a few words casually dropped in conversation. Cause and effect. His suspicions solidified when he was robbed of justices, the killers both slain in a prison fight only hours after agreeing to turn state’s evidence in the hopes of avoiding the death penalty.

  Goodfellow resigned less than a week after that, the thought that one of the men or women that he considered to be family had helped slaughter his wife and daughter was too much to bear.

  He couldn’t stand to be around them. He couldn’t stand to look at them. He couldn’t stand being suspicious of every single one of them. He couldn’t stand knowing that in one case he was right…

  He toweled his face dry and glanced at the clock.

  4:03 a.m.

  He’d had the nightmare enough times to know that there was no returning to sleep after it, so he opened the drawer next to the sink and removed the deck of cards waiting there.

  Taking a seat at the table, he dealt himself a hand of Solitaire with the ease of long familiarity and began waiting for the sun to come.

  The first card that he turned over was the ace of spades.

  The death card.

  “If only,” Michael Goodfellow said to the empty room.

  ***

  From its vantage point up in the boughs of a tree that overlooked the house, the fox watched him turn the cards one after another, laying them out on the table in front of him. She had shared the nightmare – at least from a distance – and had seen him thrashing about on the bed in the throes of whatever memory assailed him. Her heart ached for the sorrow that he was so obviously enduring. It colored the world around him, it was that strong. Instinctively, she knew that if he let it go on unchecked it would eventually consume him. The past would burn him up from the inside out like a raging inferno, and like every intense fire, would leave nothing in its wake but blackened cinders that could never be called a life.

  If ever there was a man that needed saving, he was that man.

  But still she hesitated.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t find him worth saving. He was certainly attractive; not that looks could ever be the measure of a man. His rugged build and long, lean limbs were just the kind of physique that caught her eye in mortal form, and after having watched him for several days she suspected that any sort of coming together would be both energetic and enjoyable. It was his color. The darkness that she saw at the heart of him. She wasn’t certain if it was something inherent to his nature or the result of whatever had happened in the past to break him, but it clung to him, as thick as tar and as black as midnight. Love, life, hope, fear, hate, rage, despair, every strong emotion, every light of life, had its own unique radiance, its own halo of light that came with it, feeding the world with its energy. Some were move vibrant than others, their resonances sending subtle tremors out into the world around the soul, like a tuning fork that had been set to chime. Those colors bled into the world, changing the way the soul saw it. And there were so many shades, thousands upon thousands with obscure names that no one knew that were so important to the way the world turned, like sarcoline, coquelicot, fulvus and falu. Some had been common four hundred years ago, forgotten now in favor of more generic names, like glaucus, the powdery blue-grey hue of dust on grapes that was also the color of sadness in the hours leading up to a soul leaving the world, an irreplaceable color in the grand scheme of things, but not a joyous one. There were even some, emotional vampires, who fed off the light of life, always bringing the worst out of the suffering soul because they needed it to survive. They would leech onto a soul like a cancer and draw all of that vibrancy out until it had nothing left to give and withered and shriveled up in a husk.

  The man in there was in trouble.

  It was obvious to her – just as it would have been obvious to anyone with eyes to see – but it wasn’t going to be an easy fix. She couldn’t just wave a magic wand and be done with it. Her time was running out and there was still so much to do…

  But she couldn’t turn her back on him, no matter how broken he was, because she had eyes to see, she knew the colors bleeding off him for what they were, and she couldn’t walk away, no matter how tempting it was to disappear into the forest and be gone.

  She glanced through the window again, letting her gaze roam over his bare torso, at the map of muscles rippling beneath his skin, and felt the same stirrings of heat she’d experienced when she’d spotted him for the first time five days ago.

  There was a visceral connection between them that was hard to resist.

  The reminder of that connection was the final impetus she needed to make up her mind.

  She would take the risk.

  She would go to him. Help him. Be who he needed her to be.

  ***

  By the time the commuters in Bern and across the border in Torino were just beginning their daily drive into the office the next morning, Michael Goodfellow had already been hard at work for several hours. There was escape in the backbreaking work. First he cut the logs he’d piled the day before down to size, splitting them and splitting them again until the pieces were small enough to fit into the fireplace inside the cabin. He’d been worried when he’d first left the service that it would be hard to maintain his conditioning, but living alone in the middle of nowhere brought daily challenges that worked his body in ways life back in the subdivisions of the USA never would. This morning he was especially thankful for the grueling labor, for the rhythm of swinging the axe that allowed him to banish the demons of last night and forget, even if only for a little while, the things that had forced him to leave the world behind in the first place.

  When he was finished chopping the wood he stacked it, which was another equally mindless but necessary task. The trees he’d taken down had given him about three-quarters of a cord of firewood. That was roughly enough to get him through the first month of winter, no more. He knew from experience that he was going to need at least three, maybe four times that to get through to spring, but that was work for another day.

  It was time to turn his attention to other matters.

  In this case, other matters happened to be the installation of two new solar panels on the roof of the cabin. While the electricity the current set of panels generated was more than adequate for his needs, adding two more small panels to the existing array would generate more than 20% additional power, and that would give him the kind of backup he needed. And with no way of knowing just how bad a winter he faced in that remote territory on the edge of the Alps, safe was better than sorry.

  The work itself wasn’t all that difficult. In reality it wouldn’t take more than an afternoon, but he’d been lazy up to this point. He’d actually ordered a couple boxes of photovoltaic panels back in the early spring and they’d just been sitting in his storage shed for the last few months waiting for him to find the time to install them. With winter coming on, he was fast running out of time to get them up, and figured he couldn’t put it off any longer. The main reason he wanted the panels was to power the new space heaters he’d picked up the last time he’d been into town, which would make all the difference when the snows came.

  Some parts of the region thrived in winter; San Moritz and its skiing, all of those winte
r sports towns along the line of the Alps right across the south of the county. They only came alive when it snowed. For them it meant money, for him, it meant testing his survival skills to the limit so anything that helped him go from cave man back towards civilization was a good thing as long as it didn’t mean he had to interact with people.

  He spent about an hour putting the frame together and wiring it up so that he could join it to the existing configuration without too much difficulty. It was almost like assembling blocks of Lego. Then he brought the frame and the boxes of the individual solar cells around to the back of the house where he’d rigged up a kind of rope-powered cargo winch to help raise the materials up to the roof that were too heavy or awkward for him to manage on the ladder.

  The winch was a rope and pulley system attached to a large wicker basket. The materials he needed to get topside – in this case the solar cells, extra wire, and tools he needed to complete the job – went into the basket. Grabbing the rope, he hoisted the full basket skyward, until it could go no further, and then tied the rope off to the anchor set into the ground for just that purpose, locking it in place. After that it was a simple matter to sling the frame for the solar cells over one shoulder and use the ladder to climb up to the roof himself.

  Once “upstairs,” as he liked to think of it, he sat on the edge of the roof and reached a few inches below into the basket to retrieve the first of the materials he needed. It was a simple yet efficient system and it worked like a charm.

  For the next two hours he was focused solely on installing the frame for the new solar panels, securing the frame to the roof so that it wouldn’t come loose in the high winds that swept down into the valley during the fall and winter months, and making sure it was firm enough to withstand the eventual snow. Then he had to wire the frame into the existing array so that they would all work together on the same circuit. Finally, he began the delicate work of installing each of the photovoltaic panels into the framework. The last piece of the puzzle, but without it there’d be nothing to collect the energy the panels had been designed to catch.

  He had installed the first panel and was turning to grab the second from the basket beside him when saw the fox. It was down there, by the water’s edge, sitting on its haunches, staring up at him.

  It’s watching you, he thought.

  The notion came out of nowhere and Goodfellow laughed aloud at the thought.

  Of course it isn’t watching me, he thought to himself. It’s just a fox for heaven’s sake!

  Ignoring it, he set about securing the panel into the frame. By the time he’d finished the red-tailed critter hadn’t moved. It was still in the exact same position, still looking up in his direction.

  He craned his neck, trying to look up into the air behind him, thinking perhaps the creature had spotted an owl or a hawk circling above him and was keeping an eye on the predator, but there wasn’t anything there; the sky above him was cold crystal blue, and it was empty.

  He turned back.

  Frowned.

  Shouted, “Hey!”

  The fox cocked its head to the side, just like the family dog he’d had as a boy used to do, as though listening, and continued to gaze up at him.

  Sonofabitch!

  Michael Goodfellow studied it for a few minutes, just watching the watcher and wondering if it was the same animal he’d seen in the meadow, not that he was an expert when it came to those fleet-footed foragers. But, it looked to be about the right size, had the right sort of coloring as best he could recall, which was about as close to a scientific conclusion as England was to China. Even with signs around their necks he wouldn’t know one red fox from another.

  Still, it did feel oddly familiar.

  You’ve been out here too long, Goodfellow, he thought to himself. If you don’t watch yourself you’re going to start acting all Grizzly Adams meets Doctor Doolittle, trying to make friends with all the animals instead of eating them. What would you eat then, wise guy?

  A bit unnerved both by the strange familiarity of the animal and by his line of thought, Michael decided that the best thing he could do was to chase the thing away. He rose to his feet and walked over to the edge of the roof, facing the water. He figured his larger size alone would send the thing scurrying back into the brush.

  It didn’t.

  The fox sat there, still looking at him.

  Goodfellow took a deep breath and then began shouting, waving his arms and stamping his feet on the shingle in the process.

  “Hey! Hey! Go on, get out of here! Go back where you came from!” He felt stupid yelling beat it at a dumb animal, especially as the fox stayed where it was, watching him.

  After a moment, it yawned.

  Michael couldn’t believe it.

  Yawn at me, will you, you furry little bastard...

  He turned around and marched back to the pile of debris he’d cleaned out from around the other solar panels when he’d started earlier that afternoon. He grabbed a pine branch out of the pile and broke off a section about six inches long. Taking that with him, he returned to the edge of the roof.

  The fox looked up at him.

  He drew back his arm and threw the stick right at the arrogant little beast.

  The fox waited until the last second and then trotted to the side. The stick hit the spot where it had been sitting and then bounced away towards the water harmlessly.

  Man and fox stared at each other.

  Just when Goodfellow was getting ready to stomp his feet and shout some more, the fox haughtily turned its tail and walked away into the brush.

  Michael Goodfellow would have sworn the thing was laughing at him.

  ***

  The curious incident with the fox reminded him that he hadn’t checked his snares in the last forty-eight hours, so late that afternoon he grabbed his pack and headed out to make the rounds. Not that he expected to find anything.

  The majority of his diet consisted of fish and game that he caught himself, either through fishing, trapping, or hunting. When he’d first come up here he hadn’t been very good at the first two, but over time his skills had grown sufficiently that he knew he could survive totally on his own without any supplies from Pontresina if the need arose. Not that he was going all survivalist and digging in for Armageddon or anything, but it was good to know that he could get by if he needed to.

  He regularly set a series of snare traps of various sizes in the woods in the vicinity of the cabin and made a habit of checking them at least once every other day, sometimes more often because there was no telling what might have wandered into them. Small game was his usual prey – rabbits, squirrels, and the occasional possum or raccoon. Nothing larger, usually, though once he’d come upon a deer thrashing in one of his snares and the animal had been so beside itself that he’d simply cut the line from behind the safety of the tree and watched it race off into the woods rather than finish it. All of that fear would have spoiled the meat anyway.

  He made the rounds, checking each trap, replacing the bait with fresh material where necessary. Since there was no way to know what to expect, he’d learned long ago not to rely on the traps too heavily. If he caught something, great. If not, he just reset the trap and moved on.

  Today the pickings were slim. Only two of the traps held anything.

  The first had snagged a scrawny rabbit, barely large enough to make a decent meal, certainly not for two, but as a man dining alone he didn’t need to worry about dinner dates.

  The second snare was one of his larger traps; placed in the hopes of catching one of the wild pigs he’d seen roaming the forest and hillsides around the cabin lately. It had done its job, admirably in fact, but the prey it caught was far from what he’d expected.

  Goodfellow stood there, staring in disbelief at the young woman caught in his trap.

  The snare had yanked her off her feet, leaving her with her head and shoulders on the ground, her bare legs stretched above her head, several feet off the ground.

&nbs
p; She wasn’t moving, which meant she was either dead or unconscious.

  Don’t be dead, he thought desperately, rushing over to free her from his trap.

  What the hell is a woman doing out here anyway? In this weather? Dressed like it’s the middle of summer?

  He wrapped an arm under the woman’s knees, holding them together and bracing them upright, as he slashed through the rope with his knife. It took a couple of cuts to release her from the snare. When she was free he lowered her feet to the ground so that she was stretched out flat on her back.

  She didn’t move.

  Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, he willed.

  He knelt beside her and put two fingers to her throat, praying he’d find a pulse.

  It was there, weak and thready, but that didn’t matter, it was there.

  Thank God.

  He put her age somewhere in her late twenties, though he was never any good at guessing that kind of thing. She could have been older. She could have been younger and just looked more mature for her years. He really couldn’t tell. She had hair the color of roasted chestnuts, which was why he didn’t notice the blood until he put his hand to the side of her face and brushed a few locks of hair away as he straightened her head. His hand came away wet. He parted her hair and found a laceration running across the back of her skull. It wasn’t deep, but its position meant she’d probably smacked her head when the snared had pulled her off her feet.

  That explained her unconsciousness.

  He hoped it also didn’t signify anything worse. A laceration he could deal with. A concussion or fractured skull? That was another issue entirely. And there was nowhere between here and the nearest ski resort that could deal with either.

  He quickly checked the rest of her over, looking for any other obvious injuries. Aside from some swelling around the ankle where the snare had dangled her aloft, he didn’t find anything.