Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (43 page)

He looked up after a moment and saw she still looked down at him now, her face unchanged, her interest not diverted.

“You know,” she said, “my father used to say that the best liars were men who say very little. He obviously never met you.”

“Paige made me pancakes,” Jonathan said. He smiled at his own blatant attempt to change the subject.

She put her hand on the handle bars and bent down to look at his eyes.

“Just promise me you’re not a terrorist,” Leah said and let a smile touch one side of her lips.

“I promise,” he said.

You need to stop this
, he thought.

He didn’t need to introspect to know what was really happening. Yes, he was a terrible liar, but was that really an excuse? Was it reason to let suspicion gain any ground in Leah’s thoughts? In his head, he had a responsibility to keep his secrets, because he didn’t know what danger the things he knew posed to innocent bystanders, especially to his friends. He could only imagine how comforting it would be to have someone he could confide it all in. Leah was right there, so perceptive, so unjudging.

He’d already slipped in front of her, wanting to let go, when he’d betrayed his fear in the garage. He had to rein it in, his emotions weren’t going to care for his responsibilities. They weren’t being subtle; they were trying to trick him even now. They tried to tell him that if she somehow put the pieces together without him telling her the truth outright, then he hadn’t really betrayed himself, or Heyer, or the world.

He almost laughed at himself then, realizing how ridiculous it all really was. Even if he blatantly explained it to her, she might not understand, he wasn’t even sure he understood. It’s why his roommates had seen nothing in Grant’s accusations; the idea that the man was insane was so much more believable than the truth could ever be.

This is why the alien keeps me in the dark,
Jonathan thought.
This is what he means by trust.

It was one advantage, he realized, that he had over a surveillance team. He never had to fight in front of a world that could remember. No one could ever begin to piece together the reality from what they might observe watching him. The only way to know the truth would be if someone explained it. If Jonathan was interrogated, even tortured, he didn’t know enough to compromise the alien.

CHAPTER THIRTY

SUNDAY | AUGUST 14, 2005 | 12:00 PM

“TIBBS
, did you get laid or something?” Lincoln asked.

He’d brought his attention back to Jonathan after looking out the window trying to fathom why his client would have purchased the beat up motorcycle parked in front of the gym. His expression said he hadn’t come to any conclusions before losing interest.

“What. Do you. Mean?” Jonathan replied between pull ups.

“Well, you just seem, I don’t know, happier today,” Lincoln said. “If you were a girl, I’d ask if you were pregnant.”

“Nope. Not pregnant,” Jonathan said, starting to struggle to finish the reps.

“The black eye?” he said. “That have anything to do with all this training?”

“No,” Jonathan said, dropping from the bar, “I stepped on a rake.”

Lincoln smirked.

“The rake deserve it?” he asked

“That rake got exactly what was coming to it,” Jonathan said.

“Ahhh, well there ya go. Nothing quite as nice as being the person to give a rake what it had coming,” Lincoln said.

Jonathan, despite feeling the drag from drinking the night before and having an unmistakable mark over his eye that told everyone who saw him that he’d been punched in the face, had been in a good mood all day. It had snuck up on him, after his concerns for his friends had been put to rest.

What was funny was that after a decade’s worth of grammar school teachers telling him violence was never the answer, he was less afraid, more confident than he’d been in years. Even the ache over his eye lid gave him a sense of pride. He could see it was sad, considering where the feeling came from, but it didn’t change it from being true.

Jonathan hadn’t been in a real fist fight since the sixth grade. There hadn’t ever been an instance where it sounded like a good idea, where he could have justified the action to himself. More,
the
would be Jonathans
of the world putting
the Grants
in their place only happened in the movies Collin and Hayden had him watching.

“You ever watch the Rocky movies?” Jonathan asked Lincoln, changing the subject.

“Sure,” Lincoln replied, “I’m a personal trainer after all.”

“Well, I think the montage scenes in action hero movies are complete crap,” Jonathan said.

“I’m listening.”

“Well, they never show the guy pull a muscle, get stuck under the weight he can’t lift and need a spotter to pull it off him, or get shin splints,” Jonathan said.

Lincoln nodded. “Yeah, they still make me want to work out though.”

There was a pause as they looked at one another.

“Yeah,” Jonathan agreed.

“Technically,
Rocky
isn’t really a hero movie,” Lincoln said.

Jonathan looked up at him and frowned.

“It’s a sports movie,” Lincoln explained, “again, technically.”

The trainer was right. Really, a lot of the movies his roommates had had him watching were sports movies if he thought about it. Life and death consequences seemed to be the fine line that divided Rocky from Rambo. That neither Collin nor Hayden had made the distinction yet seemed to hint at something, but Jonathan couldn’t put his finger on it.

“You have a favorite?” Jonathan asked. “Sports movie I mean.”

“Yeah, I got the wrestling bug after I watched this crap movie from the 80’s called
Vision Quest
,” Lincoln said.

“Never heard of it,” Jonathan said.

“I have a copy,” Lincoln replied. “Let me know if you ever want to borrow it.”

A few days later, Jonathan sat at his desk looking over a map of Seattle. He’d cut out a roughly fifteen by fifteen mile square with his home in the center. The alien had said he could expect to see the Ferox show up within a ten mile radius of the house, so he’d placed markers in roughly half mile intervals throughout the map. He didn’t have the time, money, or resources to setup elaborate traps, but he could at least know what locations might give him an advantage, or if not an advantage, at least a plan.

He’d never looked at a map this way before. It was encouraging to find out how much of the terrain was covered by water. Maybe if he was lucky, the damn thing would appear right over Lake Washington and drown. It was a pleasant thought, but if this alien technology could bring a Ferox to earth from a different dimension of space and time, it would likely be sophisticated enough to land its passenger in a safe location. After all, it would be even better if the monster plummeted to the Earth from ten miles above him in the stratosphere and he could just side step it as it crashed into the pavement; not likely though.

He hadn’t seen Heyer again, not since they had sparred in the garage.

Jonathan stood, reaching for the duffel bag under his desk. Steel toed boots, Kevlar armored motorcycle jacket, gloves, hair clippers, an empty 1 gallon gas can, and some road flares. The gas can and road flares were recent additions. Most of the items were protective gear. He didn’t know how resilient his skin would be once the device was activated. It didn’t seem like these precautions could hurt.

He spent more time than he would’ve liked trying to find the jacket. It had fit perfectly, not hindering his mobility with the staff. He’d practiced training with it and the gloves on just to get used to it. The thickness of the materials between his skin and the bar made it so that he needed to learn to trust the movements without necessarily being able to feel the staff, and he didn’t want to drop the weapon just because he hadn’t been prepared for the increased difficulty. Also, the jacket had to remain snug. If it was loose, it was just an easy way to get ahold of him and would hinder more than it would help.

Jonathan didn’t know if the beast could be intimidated by his size given how much bigger the Ferox was, but the coat made him appear larger as well. Jonathan backed down from large dogs even though he might outweigh them, but he didn’t know if the same psychology would work on a Ferox. Still, given the choice, he’d rather look like an angry Doberman than a barking Pomeranian.

Like the jacket, his hair couldn’t be an easy way to grab him. He needed to cut it short, hence the clippers.

As he looked over the gear, it occurred to him that he hadn’t actually bought anything to carry it in; a duffel bag wasn’t going to work if he needed to move quickly. In the corner of the room he saw his backpack, the one he’d used to carry his books to school. It had been sitting in that corner since the night Sickens the Fever had attacked, months now.

He reached over and placed it on the bed, dumping out its contents. Most of what poured out was textbooks, but there was also the folder with his half-finished paper. The same marked up draft that Paige had brought him in the hospital.

It still reminded him of a murder scene. There was no reason to keep it, he knew that. The quarter had ended and he hadn’t turned it in. He wasn’t prone to sentimentality. He should have just put it in the trash bin, but it tugged at him. He remembered thinking in the hospital that the draft had been so unrepairable. The wording was vague; the research did a poor job of supporting his theory. There were a few paragraphs here and there that were solid, but the rest read like he was attempting to trick a teacher’s assistant into giving him a passing grade.

Now he wondered why he’d even bothered writing it if it was so poorly thought out. He’d have been better off starting over, picking a different topic. He put the textbooks onto his bookcase, he found himself trying to summon regret as he did so, but it felt disingenuous. He couldn’t turn this into a heartfelt Hallmark movie moment for his lost dreams because it simply wasn’t.

What came to mind was something his mother had told him once, when he was a teenager, just having had his heart broken for the first time. She’d found him in his room staring up at the ceiling, struggling to come to terms with the rejection. The future he’d imagined with the girl whisked away.

“At first you’ll want the hurt to go away, to find some way to cut the feelings out of yourself. Then, as time passes, you’ll find yourself clinging to that pain. Somehow, your heart believes that to stop feeling hurt is a betrayal. That it calls into question your own faith in your commitment to the passion you had.

“Life is clever, Jonathan. One day you wake up and realize it doesn’t hurt, yet there was never any betrayal. It’s not that your emotions changed, but that you’re no longer the person who felt those things in the first place. That person is in the past, and his feelings were real, but you are no longer him.

“That person will have become a story you tell yourself to remember who you thought you were.”

She’d been right, of course, and now here he was again, unable to connect to the things he’d placed so much importance in months earlier, barely able to recognize that person who had been a student. He hardly even knew that Jonathan’s thoughts or motives any longer, like a stranger who had worn his face in another time.

He folded up the map he’d completed and fitted it into the front pocket of the jacket.

Maybe it wasn’t who he planned to be, and maybe no one would ever see anything other than a guy who threw his life away when he was young. That was how he was going to look to the world after all, a man constantly readying himself to be a warrior with no war to fight. Of course, he really was getting ahead of himself, chances were he’d only be this person for another fifteen days, give or take. Even if he survived the Ferox, how could he possibly survive the onslaught? That poorly written paper was a reflection in the mirror. He, like it, had needed to be replaced.