Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (6 page)

Hayden and Collin’s voices had grown louder. He’d been aware of hands on his exposed skin. There was a stinging jolt to his face. Were they slapping him? The feeling in his chest wasn’t fading. It was moving, spreading down his abdomen, up into his shoulders and around his back. As he noticed it, pain surfaced as well. His shoulder hurt, the right side of his neck as well.

My neck,
it seemed important. The memories began rushing in, gripping Jonathan in panic.

There was someone in the house. He’d had something in his hand.

He didn’t recall bolting up, just that the drowsiness holding him had vanished and been replaced with a tidal wave of adrenaline. Remembering the needle in his neck and the liquid forced into his vein had triggered an onset of fear that overpowered the drugs still keeping him sedated. He’d darted up gasping for breath, panting as though he’d surfaced from a pool after being held under for too long.

The light stung his eyes and he was forced to shut them. Collin and Hayden were kneeling on either side of him. As he fought to see against the brightness he saw their expressions. The intensity of the concern in their eyes had driven him deeper into panic.

Time had seemed broken, it moved in fits and starts that he didn’t understand. Sounds and sights were dulled and myopic. Within the MRI machine, trying to recall it, the memories didn’t seem to belong to him. He thought he must have lost his sanity, and it wasn’t clear when he’d regained it; if he’d regained it.

He’d seen the blood, but hadn’t at first believed it could be his. His hands were red and wet with it, shaking in front of him. He couldn’t make them stop. The trembling wasn’t coming from his hands. They were like tree limbs swaying in the wake of an earthquake, a symptom of the tremors in his core. He looked to Collin and Hayden for help. They stared back at him wide eyed, the helplessness clear on their faces. No one knew what to do and it was terrifying.

Suddenly, he’d grown sick and faint. He turned over on his hands and knees vomiting. His eyes had pinched shut as he wretched. When the contractions in his stomach stopped long enough, he opened his eyes again. The red was everywhere, the linoleum covered with it. He tried to look away but there was nowhere to look. Even Collin and Hayden were tainted with it; their jeans soaked to their calves and their hands turned a shiny crimson.

His mind had seemed to do the math for him. There was too much of it. It couldn’t be his; he’d be dead.

“Where are you cut?” Collin’s voice, so dull and slow; Jonathan realized then that he’d asked him the question more than once, but it hadn’t registered through the madness.

“Hospital.”

He didn’t remember if he’d actually said the word. It had begun repeating over and over in his head but he didn’t know if it was coming from his lips.

“We called, Jonathan. They’re on their way,” Hayden had said.

Panic took hold of him again as the image of the man in the hallway resurfaced. His eyes shot around the room nervously, a sudden instinctual need to press himself into a confined space overwhelmed the faculties he had left. Collin and Hayden had jumped back startled as he’d suddenly scrambled on his hands and knees through the blood and wedged himself into the corner between two cabinets. He remembered feeling trapped there, lost, for what felt like an eternity of frantically searching the room for signs that the man was still in the house; still coming for him.

He didn’t remember being pulled out of the corner and he hardly remembered the ambulance or getting to the hospital. He recalled speaking, or trying to, grasping for a nurse and begging.

“My chest; he did something,” he’d cried. “Please, it doesn’t feel right.”

They had given him something to calm him down.

Now, within the MRI, his mind rebelled, fleeing from his attempts to reason it out. He succumbed to it, instead just listening to the dull whirring of the machine. He wished he’d stayed asleep.

CHAPTER SIX

SUNDAY | JUNE 19, 2005 | 09:30 AM

PAIGE
had difficulty resolving what she’d seen in the kitchen with the person lying in the hospital bed. The room they had placed him in for observation was nothing special. There was a typical tile floor, white walls, handrails, machines used to monitor body activity. There was a curtain that would normally be used to divide the room, but the bed next to him was empty. Paige was glad he didn’t have to share the room with a stranger. Yet it looked so lonely to her. It was cold, isolated.

She hadn’t spoken yet. Jonathan didn’t know she was there or that Grant was standing behind her. Lying there, his expression looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth but was too lost in thought to bother doing anything about it.

Collin had warned her, told her not to go home at all. She’d underestimated his concern, but nothing he could have said would have prepared her for the disturbing reality. She’d been able to see every hand print in the blood, every place the roommates had touched after they’d sank into the puddle to help him. She’d smelled the iron in the air, the vomit. She’d almost been sick herself.

Collin had also warned her that the kitchen made Jonathan’s condition appear far worse than he was, but she couldn’t accept it until she saw him now.

That so much could happen while they had been separated by a handful of hours seemed surreal. She’d had an unremarkable evening with Grant. Meanwhile, Jonathan had had the most traumatic experience of his life. She had no idea what to expect, no idea what he was feeling. He might not even want to see her yet.

Collin and Hayden had summarized their version of what Jonathan had told the police for her. It had taken a long time for him to pull himself together enough to speak coherently. Hayden had said it reminded him of someone trying to explain a nightmare. Like the details had seemed to make some sense to Jonathan, but when he tried to explain it out loud they had lost continuity. He’d paused a lot as he tried to sort it out.

The police hadn’t been able to do much with the story. His memory was obviously sketchy, which was to be expected given the nature of the trauma he’d experienced. Though they were skeptical of the details, there was consistency with other information. They had no witness to confirm the assailant had been in the house, but the roommates and the bartender were able to confirm that a man fitting the description of the attacker had been at the bar. Specifically, they’d all noted the height of the man in the fedora. Unfortunately, the suspect had paid his tab in cash and wasn’t traceable through any type of credit card. The bartender had been unsuccessful in recalling the man’s name from his ID. The police had no similar cases reported in the area.

Jonathan had told the officers that the man overpowered him. He’d mentioned that the man’s eyes were unnaturally blue, but he had trouble defining what he meant by ‘unnatural.’ He said he had hit the man dead on in the forearm with a baseball bat, but the doctors and police all seemed reluctant to accept that he’d successfully connected with the man. It was unlikely a person could take such an attack, as Jonathan described, without injury. They assumed he had missed, probably hitting a wall or door frame, and mistook what happened due to the state of panic he’d been in, although the police had failed to find any apparent damage in the hallway. There were no holes in the dry wall or gouges in a door frame. However, the bat was found precisely where Jonathan had said it would be.

The police had asked the standard questions, but Jonathan was largely useless. He didn’t have any enemies, he didn’t owe anyone money. He didn’t have any questionable prior romantic relationships nor did anyone have anything to gain by assaulting him. On top of that, nothing in the house had been stolen.

The blood work from the kitchen confirmed it belonged to Jonathan. This had been a relief to the police, but only in that it confirmed the blood didn’t belong to another victim. The doctors reported that Jonathan’s body didn’t show much trauma outside of his psychological state on arrival. Ketamine and various other sleep and paralyzing agents had been found in Jonathan’s bloodstream. With no witness to the administration the doctors assumed that the initial syringe forced on Jonathan had been predominately anesthesia and that the assailant may have followed up with additional shots once he’d been unconscious.

A sonogram, chest X-rays, and the MRI had turned up nothing out of place within Jonathan’s torso. Both Hayden and Collin had said that Jonathan had been hysterical about the sensation he was experiencing in his chest, but he’d admitted that a few hours after waking he no longer felt it. The doctors suggested that a numbing agent may have been applied to his chest and that this may account for what he described; if not that, then possibly something to do with the mixture of drugs that he’d had in his system.

The best possible motive that the police could come up with was that the assailant had been there to harvest organs. They guessed that the man had been spooked by the timely return home of Hayden and Collin and fled. Paige understood why the police came to the conclusion. Jonathan had reported the assailant used his name during the assault.

The attacker must have observed the roommates long enough to find an opportune moment to strike when Jonathan was alone. This detail of the story had given Paige a disturbing chill. If true, how long had some stranger been standing in the shadows around them, watching them through their windows, following them? She realized it might not be safe to be near Jonathan if it were the case. The moment she’d had the thought she’d felt terrible.

You don’t abandon family, Paige,
she’d reprimanded herself.
I can’t believe you’re even thinking so selfishly with a friend in danger.

She didn’t know much about the organ black market and had to assume that the police knew their business, yet it seemed they were ignoring what couldn’t be easily explained. All of that blood had to come from somewhere. Why hadn’t the attacker moved Jonathan to a different location once he’d had him incapacitated? The cop’s theory, riddled with holes, was still the only one.

She knew the police hadn’t trusted Jonathan’s story. They hadn’t implied he was lying, only that they believed that
Jonathan believed
he was telling it how it happened. She was all too familiar with cops saying something like that and knew how humiliating it was, how hurtful to be dismissed as such after being victimized. She knew Jonathan, and he wasn’t the type to go looking for attention. She couldn’t imagine any reason he would lie. She wasn’t going to let him think, even for a moment, that she doubted him. He didn’t need that.

She felt a draft and noticed a fan was on in the corner. Grant nudged her from behind, and she stopped stalling in the doorway. When she entered the room, she turned off the fan. Jonathan seemed annoyed at first, his eyes leaving the window when the sound ceased. The look faded when he saw her.

Grant’s cell phone vibrated as they entered. When he looked at the caller ID he excused himself from the room.

There was awkwardness at first, the uncomfortable knowing that there was nothing in particular to say, just the desire to be present, to visit, to be a friend. While she sat with him, she fumbled in her purse, and remembered she’d been carrying around an essay she’d reviewed for him.

“I forgot to give you this,” Paige said, pulling the folded paper from her purse. “I proof read it a bit, I thought, I don’t know, that you might want to work on it.”

She held in her hand the essay Jonathan had been meaning to finish this weekend. They often worked together on such things, their majors being so similar. He’d asked her to take a look a few days earlier. She felt silly offering it now, but maybe later he’d appreciate the distraction.

The paper looked like it was bleeding to death, covered in red marks everywhere she had found a mistake or made a note. He looked at the paper now like he didn’t recognize it, like school was something so far from his thoughts that he must have written the essay in some other life. She recognized that look. She’d had it before herself, and she didn’t take it personally. She placed the paper on the table. It was pretty marked up; he might not be able to salvage it without a complete rewrite.

Grant returned, looking like he was in a hurry. He said that he’d been called to base and had to leave immediately. At first Paige thought he might be lying, making up an excuse to leave because he didn’t want to be here, but she noticed that he himself appeared uncertain about being summoned so abruptly. Either way, she couldn’t blame him for leaving. Jonathan certainly wasn’t going to gain anything from his presence. She smiled at him, thanked him for bringing her, and told him to call.

Grant nodded and left.

Jonathan seemed more at ease once he was gone again.

“How are you really feeling?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” he said, “I don’t even think I need to be here.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean physically,” she said.

Jonathan looked at her for a moment, like he was trying to decide what to say; be honest or put up a facade of normalcy? Had it been Collin or Hayden he might have chosen the facade.

“I’m worried,” he said quite simply.

“Worried, ehh? That seems like the understatement of the year,” she said sympathetically.

“I think the doctors and police must be right,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I think, with the drinking, and whatever I was dosed with, that I can’t be remembering things right.”