Cabin Fever - Roe Horvat Page 0,2

safe at all. It had only gotten worse. Yesterday, I’d been shot at in our family’s best-safeguarded residence. The bullet shattered the windowpane in my bedroom, and grazed my upper arm, leaving a burning scratch.

I had one of the best personal security experts in the country telling me not even the FBI could protect me. It was real. I was usually very good at not thinking about it. But now I felt the panic rise, the walls closing in around me.

Go pack, Michael. Just breathe and pack a bag. Think about the hunk you’re going to hide with. Breathe and pack a bag.

Life flickered at the end of this dark, terrifying tunnel. My uncle trusted Vincent Nowak would get me through it. No, I had no choice. I went to pack one bag.

Vincent had said I should take a few books because I’d be bored. I knew all about boredom. I’d been locked up for months in this madness. I needed my sketchbook and drawing supplies. I doubted I could take a trailer with paints and canvases, though. One sketchbook and a set of pencils would have to do. The electric pencil sharpener came with me, because I liked it. Nothing beat a surgically sharp tip for detailing.

The holdall with a jumbo-sized sealed bottle of lube and my favorite dildo went between my socks and underwear. I suspected that spending time with Vincent would require some nightly activities to keep my libido satiated.

It took nine fucking hours, with just two-minute breaks to piss on the roadside. I fell asleep a couple of times, so in the end, I had really no idea where we were. Somewhere nine hours north of New Haven. With the way Vincent drove, we could’ve been in the north of Canada. My neck ached, and my ass was sore from sitting in the car for the whole day. The plain sandwich Vincent had made me eat, felt like a stone in my belly, and gave me heartburn.

The last half hour, we drove on a narrow road through a thick, darkening forest. Cabins were scattered along the road, far apart and hidden in the woods, just a few lights glowing between the trees. For the last fifteen minutes, there was nothing but wilderness.

Finally, the forest opened, and we arrived at a small lake. The sky was dark blue, and I could discern a pier and a log cabin.

Awesome. A cabin in the woods. How quaint. Suddenly, I was a character in a B horror movie. The familiar anxiety squeezed my throat. Yep, sleep was going to be shit again tonight. Fuck.

Vincent parked in the carport, exited the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out his bag. I climbed out as well and followed him to the back, my one bag in hand. I felt marginally better that among the groceries and boxes with supplies were three six-packs of light beer. Thank heaven. Alcohol didn’t erase the nightmares, but sometimes a beer helped me to at least fall asleep before two at night.

I looked around into the darkening forest. Was this the final location, or were we only stopping for the night?

“This is it?”

“Yes.” Vincent stomped toward the cabin.

Fuck me.

Him

Vincent

Michael Bourgeon. Age twenty-four. Green eyes, dark-brown hair, five feet, eight and a half inches tall, 155 pounds. Shoe size nine. Black gauges in both ears, extensive black-and-white tattoos on both forearms, described in the file as “abstract and intricate mandala-like patterns.” Education: Bachelor of Liberal Arts. Occupation: artist. Reputation: abysmal.

His mother died in 2010 from an opioid overdose; his father passed in 2015 of pancreatic cancer. Michael Bourgeon was a textbook case of an affluent child syndrome—spoiled by an abundance of money, neglected by absentee parents, with a history of substance abuse and extreme behavior that suggested mental health issues during his teenage years. His file comprised shoplifting in a fucking Versace salon, a sex tape where you couldn’t see his face nor his tattoos, but everybody on social media said it must be him, jail time for DUI, fines for public indecency, and Twitter going crazy about seducing “straight” married men every other week. He’d shaved his head in support of Britney Spears’ comeback—that one had made me chuckle. And allegedly, he was behind several sex parties with prominent gay porn stars in his luxury two-story apartment in Manhattan. Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Why would anyone want to kill this nice boy? I’d bet there was a whole phone book of people who would