Welcome to the Webpage of Author Derek Wachter

                     Hidebehind  
(Release Plan for Summer 2024)

It’s an exciting time in the life of Parker Cunningham. Having just graduated from college with an undergraduate degree in forestry, Parker is excited to get a career started in the United States Forest Service and serve the community in his home state of California. Unfortunately for Parker though, there currently are no forestry job opportunities in Northern California where he wants to live without moving out of state and away from his family. Except for one summer job that no one has applied for in the area. To work as a fire watchman in a fire tower out deep in the Shasta National Forest of Northern California. Reluctant to spend the next four months in isolation, Parker takes the job so he can stay close to family and to get his foot in the door for future career opportunities with the forest service in Northern California.

However, deep in these woods exists a creature of folklore that hunts humans for prey with a ravenous and insatiable hunger as told by generation after generation of loggers in the area. With no prior knowledge of this creature, Parker feels confident enough knowing Northern California after having camped there many times growing up as a young boy with his father. He accepts the job and begins his work in the watchtower, only to be constantly stalked by the beast as it terrorizes him on a nightly basis until the creature is ready to attack. Parker now needs to make the biggest choice of his young life: his future and everything he ever worked for, or stay and become the next victim of the monster known as the Hidebehind.

         Sons of the Promised Land
(Release Plan for Winter 2024)
The year 1882 has been a struggle for the poor folks living in the small mining town of Montrose, Colorado. Promised a better life to live west of the Mississippi river, the town is more used for shipping supplies for the mining community through the Denver and Rio Grande Railroads, serving the mineral-rich San Juan Mountain ranges in the south. Life is difficult, as the small number of citizens continue to struggle living in the area.

John Ashberger is one of those men who dreamed of a better life for his family. Moving out west, he looks to escape the war-torn confederate southern states and for better opportunity of frontier life to start over. John purchases newly acquired government land just after it was taken from the Native American Ute tribes by violent force. Planting Red Delicious fruit trees across eighty acres of open farmland, John began to plant the seeds of a better and prosperous life for himself, as he slowly grows his empire in the agriculture sector of the west.

Meanwhile, Ute tribal leader Antero Black Hawk, whose family and tribe were violently forced from the lands John now owns, looks on the town of Montrose and the invaders now living there with nothing but sheer hatred. The lands that belonged to his family and lineage stolen. The graves of his ancestors, uprooted and discarded like wild animals. The buffalo that once roamed freely there, hunted and killed off by the men who took the lands merely for sport. Antero looks to any means to take back what was stolen from him. The rich, prosperous land of the Montrose Valley.

Meanwhile, James Hackenberry and Charles Sanderlin currently own Hackenberry and Sanderlin Real Estate in Baltimore, Maryland. Through fraudulent corporate land grabbing, Charles hears about the government selling land cheap out in the western state of Colorado, around the small town of Montrose. Charles and James meet with two crooked government officials who sell them forty acres of land and pocket the money for themselves near the apple farm belonging to John in Montrose. Surrounded by the photogenic mountain ranges of the Uncompahgre Plateau to the west and snow-capped San Juan mountains to the south. Their plan is to create a resort there, for the wealthy and privileged and build their mogul business empire in Colorado.

The conflict and brutal violence that ensues when John, the crooked realtors, and Antero clash with one another is the most grotesque any of the citizens living there have ever seen in their lives. Dead bodies begin to turn up on the lands around the town, killed in violent ways. All three groups, envious to control the land, gain their wealth, and take what they feel rightfully belongs to them at the expense of all others.

By any means necessary….