Many thanks to Over_Red for his invaluable input on this part of the story! Hope you enjoy it!
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Jack Watts was startled awake by a noise in the bushes. He looked over and blinked his eyes repeatedly to clear his vision. A deer was grazing nearby and it stalked off as soon as it saw him looking at it. Jack sat up and propped himself up with one arm behind his back. He looked all around. He was in a clearing that had bare dirt, without any grass. A small, wooden cabin, more of a shack really, stood in the lee of some trees not ten yards to his left. A small footpath was worn into the forest floor between the clearing he was in and the front door of the cabin.
The trees swayed gently in the breeze and the late afternoon Sun was starting to turn the horizon pink. As he looked down at his backpack next to him, it all came back to him. Mia and her flunkies had kidnapped him and stuffed him in the trunk of a car. They had driven him here and he had managed to read their minds and find out their greatest fears. When they had stopped, he had managed to utilize all of his fear to take over their minds and make them believe their worst fears had come to life.
Unfortunately, exerting his power like that had left him as incapacitated as if he had suffered a stroke and they had probably left him for dead. He stood up and stretched with a groan. He cast his gaze all around again, but found no sign of the guys, Mia, or any cars. He shouldered his backpack and walked over to the cabin. The windows were covered with a sheen of dust and the door was locked. Seeing no sign of a key, Jack lifted his foot to kick the door open. The door refused cooperation at first, but by the third kick, Jack convinced it to let him in.
Jack searched the cabin for anything that could be of any help. There was nothing but some shoddy furniture and a wood-burning stove. There were some basic tools on a table and a thick layer of dust was over everything. There were no supplies and no phone.
He sighed and left, slamming the door shut behind himself. The cabin belonged to one of the guys that wanted to do him harm, for no other reason than to please Mia, and Jack didn't care if it burned to the ground. He checked himself for his phone and even looked into his backpack. He didn't have it. Mia probably did. "The bitch," he swore. He looked up at the sky and judged that he had, at most, two hours of daylight left. There was only one road, consisting of two parallel wheel tracks, leading to and from the clearing. He hurried down the road, eager to exit the woods before he ran out of light.
In about fifteen minutes, he found himself at the spot where the cabin access road met with the main forest road. He stood at the intersection and huffed in frustration. He had no idea which direction they had been going when they drove him there. He closed his eyes and strove to remember what the turn off had felt like. He remembered that he had been pushed towards his feet when they took the turn. He lay down on the dirt road, on his side like he had been lying inside the trunk, and tried to figure out how he would be jostled if the car was coming from either direction.
He figured out that the car had made a left turn to get onto the cabin access road so he took a right turn onto the main road and walked on. He also mentally worked out that he needed to take a left when he got back to the paved road. The Sun had just about touched the horizon when he exited the trees and got within sight of the road.
A car was driving down the road, going in the direction away from town. Jack didn't care. He jumped up and waved his arms overhead, yelling for attention. The road and the car were too far away for him to be noticed, so the car drove past. A truck was coming in the opposite direction and it, too, missed Jack. Jack huffed in anger as he ran towards the road, but he soon eased up on the frustration.
This much traffic means that someone else will come along soon
, he told himself. When he got to the road and looked down it in either direction, he could see cars coming. He smiled hopefully, crossed to the other side of the road and stuck his thumb out.
The fifth car that passed him stopped a short distance away and he hitched a ride with an elderly couple that asked him a million questions during the ten minute ride back into town. They were traveling from afar and didn't know the town, so he had them just drop him off in the center of town. He thanked them several times for the ride and the couple insisted they exchange phone numbers before parting ways. He gave them his home phone number and then walked towards the school and his car.
When he finally got home, it was well after nine o'clock. He unlocked the door and tossed his backpack on the floor next to it. He sat down on the floor and groaned in relief as he took off his shoes. He was used to walking a lot with his dogs, but not in the dress shoes that he had been wearing that day. "Shit," he softly swore and went outside to tend to the dogs.
When he came back in with Spot, his mother came out of the living room. "If you wanted dinner, you should have called."
"Lost my phone," he said.
She gave him a look. "Are you alright?"
"Peachy," he said. He walked up the stairs to take off his dirt-covered clothes. He took a long shower before heading off to bed. Now that he was safe at home, he considered calling the cops and reporting Mia and her three flunkies. He already knew their names, from his online search of the flagpole photos, but Jack found the whole thing a bit too impersonal for his liking. He wanted to be the one that punished Mia. Especially as he realized he had inadvertently saved her from getting gang raped in the woods.
He decided to keep the cops out of things, for the time being.
When he came to school the next morning, he nearly laughed out loud at the irony that greeted him. Standing alongside the vice principal was a sheriff's deputy holding the leash of a German shepherd. "Mister Watts," the vice principal said, "we need you to open your locker, please!"
Jack couldn't help but smile at the request. It became instantly obvious to him that Mia, or her flunkies, had managed to break into his locker and plant something to get him into trouble and thus discredit his claims of kidnapping. He could only hope it was drugs as he looked at the dog. He hadn't been the one to train the sheriff's dogs, he only trained dogs for Alpha, but he also trained scent dogs for them and he knew how it was done.
The three men and one dog walked over to his locker, while half the school watched and whispered. Dog Boy seemed to be in trouble. Jack smoothly slid into the pooch's mind and instilled it with the overwhelming thought that she was supposed to indicate the presence of drugs by being docile and quiet. He opened his locker and the dog sat still on the ground.
Shit
, Jack thought.
There
are
