The Secret & Hunting Virgins: Two Short Stories

By Wayne Hawk

The Secret

A young man with a high calling from God, his mother a very religious woman, his father a highly decorated man working in the hierarchy of the CIA while he hides behind a semi-successful career and a wall of drugs and shame.

An urgent call from his mother, “Your father has a brain tumor and very little time left. Because of national security reasons, we can only visit him one last time before he dies.”

During the visit, the young man is told an unbelievable secret that must be told to the masses but is arrested and incarcerated in solitary confinement. Known from childhood as one not to trust with a secret, will he fail and tell his capturers, resulting in sure death, or will he somehow get this message to the world? Find out in this nail-biting story, The Secret.

Hunting Virgins

Five men known as the “wild bunch” all working for Hawkeye Tree Service were considered by many the best hazardous tree-removal experts in the world.

Then after years of heavy drug abuse and alcoholism, the boss has a spiritual awakening and moves across the country to start a church.

Ten years later, he has started working for World Exploration Unlimited. Discovering a thousand-acre patch of timber in far remote northern Siberia, the gang regroups to fell the largest trees on the planet. Will this trip be a huge success or a horrible tragedy…or both? You decide. Take a trip around the world with five tough-as-nails men and one sweet angel (the boss’s young daughter) in a story you won’t soon forget, Hunting Virgins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662415395

Book preview

Chapter 1

Secrets…we all have them. I, however, had to be the worst at keeping them. Yes, I was a well-known secret loser. I would never call myself a snitch or a narc, I never told on anyone in an attempt to get anyone in trouble. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I never told on anyone in an attempt to keep myself out of trouble.

With my lack of abilities to properly tame my own tongue, if you will, I had been called both of those horrible names more than once. You see, for a forty-five-year-old meth addict, that was something no one wanted to be called. For snitches got stiches, in the darkly lit world, I had to put myself into so many years ago. Even my religious mother considered me one on occasion. Of course, she used the nicer, more politically correct term tattletale. Either way, it was a shameful title in my eyes. Everybody in the drug circles knew that this term was the lowest of the low. A notch below cops and DEA agents, a snitch ranked down there with child molesters, not a title an addict wanted on their proverbial resume.

I believed the name-calling originated back when I was only five. Yes, that was my age when my mother told me a secret I was ordered to keep.

It was almost Christmas; my best friend was my cousin, Jeremy. Although he was a year older than me, we were both in kindergarten.

I was glad that they held him back. Although after completing a half a year, I wondered how you could fail kindergarten. From what I could tell, it was as simple as playing with toys, listening to a story, and taking a nap on our personal mat-style blankets we had been given.

Anyway, not to get too far off track, that was the year my mother told me the secret of all secrets. The one that pegged me as a tattletale for the rest of my life. Jeremy and I had seen it numerous times on commercials, normally during Saturday cartoons but occasionally during regular programs. Yes, the amazing and highly coveted stretch arm strong.

I wanted one not because I wanted one so much as because my best friend and kindergarten idol wanted one more perhaps than a hungover Las Vegas bride wanting an annulment. Every time the commercial appeared, Jeremy jumped to his feet and begged his parents for one. This behavior hadn’t changed since the first commercial showed up months ago.

Now that I think of it, if it wasn’t for my mother’s loose lips, I never would have known to tell. Why wasn’t she branded a tattletale?

Chapter 2

My father, now that was a completely different story, was a master at keeping secrets. He rarely talked, and when he did, it was never gossip.

I couldn’t think of anyone who would fit in better among his colleagues at the CIA than my dad. Growing up, I always fantasized about my father being a spy. Whether or not he actually was one, I guess I will never know. You see, in his forty years of service, he never told me, or my mother I presume, any more than that he worked for the CIA. I took comfort in the idea that nobody knew, easing my mind that it wasn’t for my secret-losing abilities that I never found out exactly what it was he did.

There were two main reasons I always presumed that he was a spy, besides his tight-lipped demeanor. He was gone sometimes for months at a time. Then there was the fact that just as Jeremy was my childhood hero, his was James Bond. Every time a new Bond movie came out, I smiled inside, remembering how growing up it meant that I was going to the theater. We never missed one. Even now I rented every new Bond DVD the minute it hit the shelf. Probably would have gone to the theaters, but anyone in my position knew that you would never waste the money to go to the theater when there were drugs to buy.

My mother sometimes protested that we shouldn’t watch such worldly movies, but this was one subject that my used-to-winning mother lost to every year without fail. The year Octopussy came to theaters; us going actually began the biggest fight between my parents that I ever recall.

I didn’t know if it was a by-product of my mother’s drama or the amazing high-tech action that caused this movie to be my all-time favorite action movie. Maybe it was remembering the tiny jet that emerged from behind a mechanical horse’s ass and took to the skies. Whatever it was, I loved that movie.

Chapter 3

Uurrnntt. The god-awful noise I had learned to love and hate. I hated the ear-piercing noise, but I loved what it usually declared. Mealtime. No one should have to endure years heaped endlessly upon years of no fonder memories than two sandwiches, a small milk, and once a day a cookie for dinner, only if I had been a good boy.

It was dinner, and my excitement was as high as it could be in this hell I have come to call home. If it wasn’t for my mother’s persistent preaching and the Bible that I had read, I probably would have convinced myself that I had died that day and this was hell.

That day. Was it five, ten, twenty years ago? I honestly didn’t know. All I knew was it was dinner; my only way of knowing this was because a few hours from now, the lights would dim, for what I would guess was eight hours, but this was a mystery. Solitary confinement with access to nothing but food three times a day, a King James Bible I had read cover to cover thirty-nine times now, toilet paper, and water. This was my existence in a nutshell; I wouldn’t lie by saying that it was my life. It would be a much greater truth to say that