Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3) (14 page)

“What happened?” Aaron asked, patting the back of his head. “How did I get here?”

Selby showed off the aquamarines in his hand. “It’s a long story. There’s something I need you to tell me.”

Maura held out her arms and welcomed her son into a hug. “My baby boy,” she said, gushing pride. “How did we get here? Did we survive the shooting?”

Rhapsody and I watched the exchange between the Selbys. While Maura and Selby hugged, Aaron tried making sense of his resurrected status. “Explanation, Michael.”

Challenged by his father, Selby stuttered at first when he responded. “S-ssure. Someone shot both of you in the back of the head, cut you open, and took your heart.”

On hearing the gruesomeness of the details, Maura placed her hands on her breast to check her heartbeat. “My God.” She fingered the back of her head, feeling for the entry wound.

I wondered if King had used their hearts to try to generate the protein in our blood. The brutality of the act detailed for me a difference between him and the rest of the Collective. Murder was an
option
for their plans. For him, it was a
necessity
.

Selby showed his parents a metal wristband with seven prisms – all of the colors. Like my necklace, his had two aquamarine stones. “There was a solar storm a long time ago. Its radiation gave these crystals the power to bring you back, so I did. And watch this…”

He sped in circles around his parents, kicking up enough dust and pollen to make me sneeze. Luckily for me, Rhapsody had been smart enough to ghost so it wouldn’t bother my allergies. Maura and Aaron stared at him, like he was the dead person come back to life and not them. Aaron cursed in surprise, and Maura’s face froze with shock.

“I can run fast, Dad, faster than you ever trained me to do. The NFL isn’t even on my freaking radar right now. I’ve got
real power.
You can’t imagine the kinds of things I can do.”

“Like what, Michael?” Aaron put his hands on his hips. “Find our killer, turn around and kill him? I wouldn’t tell you his identity if I could.”

“Why not?” Selby acted genuinely offended.

“Whatever ‘real power’ you think you have, it means nothing without sound decision making. The professionals will handle it. Talk to Stu Spivey.”

“Professionals,
Dad? It’s been months. Spivey can’t catch him, he’s dead.”

I gulped. Sasha’s journey into his mind had turned him into a vegetable and his family members had pulled the plug on him.

Selby laughed, I thought, to keep from crying himself stupid. I might have done the same thing in his position. Rhapsody leaned at my back. She thought the same thing I did – Selby was about to blow his top. Her tense fingers digging into my shoulders meant she thought I should do something. My main objective was retrieving the aquamarines – not preventing two insane people from destroying one another.

All they were doing so far was having a conversation. So far.

Selby seethed, keeping his voice just below a shouting level. “Your killer is loose, probably slaying other people, finding pleasure in it.”

“You’re getting all pissy for no reason.” Aaron’s disgust with his son’s complaining showed more in the way he spoke. And I thought Ray was a crappy father. “Those sadistic types get messy. They slip up and get caught. Real crime isn’t like these dime-a-dozen TV shows where all the criminals are caught in an hour.”

Selby fidgeted a lot.
He still wants their approval
. If he was anyone else, I would’ve felt bad for him. He kicked dirt back and forth between his boots and flapped his hands, like he had a nervous condition. I ventured into his mind, but his brain was all over the place and hard to read. Something wasn’t right, though. That much I knew.

Aaron didn’t let up on his verbal assault. “Let’s go home.”

That piece of news seemed to stoke Selby’s fire more. “
Home is where the heart is
, isn’t that how it goes? Where’s home for you? The killer stole your heart.”

Maura felt over her husband’s chest. She yanked her hand away. “He’s heartless? But we have heartbeats? What
are we,
Michael?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” he said with a devilish smile. “Something like zombies.”

That wasn’t true. My mom wasn’t a zombie. Whatever she was, she wasn’t that.

Rhapsody hadn’t moved from behind me. This family reunion was getting worse in a hurry.

Aaron laid his stiff arm around his mortified wife. She shuddered and cursed him. He then turned his focus to Selby. “Help us, Son.”

“Help you?” Selby’s laughter flirted with being maniacal. “Sure, Dad. I’ll whip the skin off your back. I’ll kick you down the basement stairs and laugh as you cry yourself to sleep.”

“Michael…I,” Maura tried to defend her husband, but Selby cut her off.

“You
what?
I should help
you?
Like you helped me by calling for help? No, you’re just afraid of him and what he’ll do to you. I used to be afraid. But I’m not. Not anymore.”

Aaron confronted his son, standing close to him with clenched fists. “Stand down.”

Selby poked out his chin. “Tell you what. Free shot. Hit me, Dad. Land a punch on me and I’ll admit being the slow, stupid, fat, talentless bag of crap you always say I am.”

Rhapsody pinched my arm, though all I felt was the pressure from her touch. She didn’t care if they heard a disembodied voice. “Do something. He’s going to kill them.”

“They’re already dead.” I said louder than I intended. “We need the aquamarines not them.”

With Selby’s powers at his disposal, Aaron was fast. His swinging fists cut the air and made whistling sounds. He punched wildly at his son wherever he moved, but he was always a step behind. After a minute and hundreds of punches later, Aaron leaned against his own headstone.

“Is that it?” he said. “Teach the old man a lesson? You’re pathetic and sorry.”

Selby observed his defeated father, out of breath and cursing up a storm. Selby’s smile had a wicked edge of immense satisfaction. He’d humiliated his tormentor, like I’d done to him in the cafeteria. Not his sole reason for raising them from the dead, but a bonus. Maura knelt by her husband’s side and patted his back. Aaron bristled at her touch. How did they ever manage to like one another long enough to even make Selby?

“That’s what you wanted, too?” Aaron said, still panting. “Rub our faces in it?”

Selby reached into the inside pocket of his suit and produced…a cigar?

Yeah, he’s nuts.

With a rapid flicking of his fingers he produced enough spark to light it. He puffed and blew smoke into Aaron’s face. “This is a celebration!” he said. “Ever smoke a Cuban, Dad? I’ve got humidors full of them, freshly-rolled. The tobacco’s taste is amazing.”

Too tired to physically protest, Aaron waved his hand. “You’re a criminal now?”

“There he goes with the accusations, Mom.” He took a long drag of the cigar and blew it in her direction before tossing it away. “How about your son’s body raw from being whipped with an extension cord? Assault and battery, right? Locking me in the basement with no food – that’s cruelty. And you let him do it and didn’t tell anyone. Doesn’t that make you an accessory? ”

Selby’s accusations silenced his mother, who didn’t speak much to begin with. Still fatigued, Aaron continued breathing hard.

I hated that my girlfriend had been right.
What should I do though?
All three of them have powers. I can’t take them all down by myself
. I had an idea.

“You don’t know who murdered you? Disappointing.” Selby flipped his hand. “I’ll
let you in on the secret. I know who did it. I wanted to tell you face-to-face, see your reaction.”

I had to do something to get Selby’s attention quickly. I tapped Rhapsody’s hip with my hand and she dropped our invisibility. Aaron and Maura looked straight at me.

Maura lifted her finger in our direction. “Them? They did it?”

Lunging forward, I grabbed Selby’s shoulder, spun him around and punched him in the chest. The force of the blow sent him flying over rows of headstones and rolling to the other side of the grassy hill. The clang of the metal fence must have been his body.

My actions prompted Aaron to move. I anticipated his returning the favor and hitting me back. First, he reached for his hip, where his stun gun or pistol would have been. Finding nothing, he bull rushed me with tremendous speed. Rhapsody ghosted him through my body and he crashed headlong into a granite monument, cracking it and knocking himself unconscious. Aaron was about brute strength, not speed he couldn’t control. Like she had done with her son, Maura ducked behind the nearest headstone and peeked at our fight.

Aaron’s distraction was long enough for Selby to return to the fray. He unleashed a flurry of punches on me too quick for me to dodge even one of them. None of them hurt, but his blurring fists gave me a headache.

Before he could counter my move, I removed his powers with goshenite. Selby held his ribs, the ones I’d broken, and dropped to one knee. I forced him to stay still long enough for me to snap his bracelet and collect the prisms on it.

“Nooooo. . .” he screamed while coughing up blood. Instantly, Aaron and Maura reverted back to decomposing corpses.

Rhapsody was invisible, but I knew she could hear me. “Get the aquamarines. I’ll hold him here.”

She reappeared and headed over to Aaron first. Then, she’d get Maura’s.

Selby cursed me, his breathing ragged. “Hate you.”

I thought about his actions especially hurting Sasha. “After this all you’ve done, we’re nowhere even close to being even, dude.”

“Over
Sasha?”
He cursed again and rolled to his back, unzipping his suit and pulling it down past his waist. “Not worth the price of admission.”

Rhapsody reappeared and used her Geiger counter to check the area for stray aquamarines. My job was to hold myself back from killing him. Comparing Sasha to an amusement park ride almost got him punted into the next county.

“You’re stupid,” he said, talking about the Collective. “Trusting them.”

One slip in my focus and he’d escape. “Whatever you say, Leslie.”

“Almost done here!” Rhapsody yelled from nearby. I saw Maura’s body shift a bit. “Hold him a little bit longer. The grass is thick over here and there’s a lot of them.”

“You know why they gave you aquamarines in the first place?”

I watched Selby writhing in pain out of the corner of my eye. “I don’t know, but I’d wish my white ice could take away your ability to talk.”

“Raised your dead mother, didn’t you?
It’s what they wanted.”

I didn’t answer, which was the worst response. Now he knew about her, too. "Is there a point to all this?"

“They’re playing you. You’re not even supposed to be alive.”

His voice sounded sure, stronger and unbroken. I still had his prisms in my glove, so there was no way his powers could have returned. “Jason!”

Rhapsody’s voice broke through. I’d lost concentration long enough for Selby to reach into his suit and inject himself in the arm with a dose of my blood.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

a lot of people die

I strained to keep Selby powerless. With my blood inside of him, even with Rhapsody at my side to help, my grip on him was slipping. Then it was gone and we were frozen stiff.

He was right. I was an idiot for not seeing all of his homicidal tendencies sooner.

Selby cracked his knuckles. My blood gave him powers. He couldn’t be invincible, though. The transfusion came from me and I still had weaknesses.

“You’re actually good for something, Freak,” he said, smiling at us.

He knew what my blood would do to him. Selby used the scarlet emerald energy I’d absorbed in the explosion against us. All I could do was breathe, blink, think and talk. Nothing else. Dumbfounded, I wondered how we’d get out of this alive.

His right eyebrow twitched as he read my facial expressions. “I don’t see Rhapsody that way,” he said. Meaning he wouldn’t kill her, I guess. His word did nothing to help her relax. “I was going to tell them I shot them if you had let me.”

“King made you shoot them. It’s not your fault,” she said.

“Morganite,” he said pointing to his bracelet in my hand. “Totally my fault.”

Cold shivers ran up my back. That wasn’t true. Sasha wouldn’t have lied to me. Besides, when I told him he’d killed them before Reject High exploded, he acted surprised. I know about the memory gaps morganite leaves firsthand, but he’d forgotten doing that?

He licked his lips like he enjoyed the taste of his memories. “King needed a heart to search for the protein. Mom’s wasn’t healthy enough and Dad wasn’t using his anymore.”

The blood protein makes our powers work. It disappears when we turn eighteen.

When Selby almost stabbed me with a knife in the Reject High cafeteria, I'd figured his elevator didn’t go to the top floor. But nothing warped enough for murder.

Rhapsody kept him talking. “There’s no way you didn’t leave evidence.”

“Spivey had it handled until Sasha turned him into a drooling vegetable. It’s not like they’re going to catch me anyway.” He turned a fierce gaze toward the funeral attendees. “You think to yourself,
what did I do?
What did I just do? There’s guilt. Then the rush. It’s electric, like nothing you’ve ever felt.”

He sounded as if he was talking about sniffing a drug, not slaying innocent people. Then his control over me dropped. He was
daring
me to stop him. Timing was everything when attacking someone with super speed. Guess it wrong, and we’d be better off as leaves during a windstorm.

Rhapsody appealed to his humanity. “Michael. Don’t.”

A glimmer of sympathy showed in his face. I’d seen it once before.

He zoomed off into the crowd. Rhapsody ghosted as many people as she could but it wasn’t enough. A good third of the adult crowd dropped to the ground, their necks twisted at grotesque angles. Selby whisked back in our direction and circled us at hundreds of miles per hour, creating an artificial funnel cloud. The force ripped up a number of headstones and tossed them around the cloud’s walls.

The lack of breathing air had us both gasping for breath, even after we put our masks back on. Looking up, I saw bits of sunlight through my mask’s visors. I could fly us out, though the path wasn’t straight. A swirling concrete block to the body could injure or kill Rhapsody. No way I’d leave her. We were in this together.

The winds were so high, I couldn’t tell if Selby was still creating them. Sparks of electricity popped in the twister, making it easy to see up but not out. The mask’s breathing apparatus filtered most of the strong rotten egg stench in the air. Right when I decided to try flying out, the tornado stopped as soon as it began. The sun shone in the cloudless sky as if nothing had happened.

We surveyed our surroundings. Selby had created a wide path of destruction. The winds had uprooted headstones and monuments and dropped them all over the cemetery. I thought of the funeral-goers and wondered if anyone had survived. The new gravesite was behind me. I didn’t want to look. Barely an arm’s length away, Rhapsody was facing the opposite direction. I thought her staggered breathing pattern had to do with the tornado’s effects. No, she had seen what Selby had done, what she couldn’t have prevented no matter how hard she tried. She hunched over, removed her mask, and sobbed, her tears dropping onto the ground.

I rubbed her back and knelt beside her, counting the survivors. One little sandy brown-haired boy found his dead father and kept lifting his limp hand, expecting him to get up. A brunette woman stood, unmoving. A little girl with black hair and a trail of blood running down the left side of her face slapped the woman’s leg, but she didn’t respond at all. Three was a slender, elderly man whose left arm dangled from its socket. Four, someone in the distance who screamed curse words among the chaos. Five, then six. Then no more.

Selby was true to his word. We couldn’t stop him. But he hadn’t killed them all.

Original Sasha approached us from the opposite side of the grassy hill. Two of Sasha’s clones helped Esteban walk. The constant teleportation must have zapped his energy. They stopped at the hill’s peak. From there they could see everything – the tornado’s destruction and all the people Selby killed to entertain himself. Rhapsody rolled over onto the grass in the fetal position. I held her hand and spooned with her. She blamed herself for what happened.

Original Sasha stood next to us and spoke to me. “Someone will be here soon.”

Saying nothing, I looked in her direction. I was aware we couldn’t stay here forever. We needed a plan. Though she was several times more analytical than I was, Original Sasha expected me to formulate a plan. I didn’t have a clue as to what to do. We’d witnessed a mass murder, one where the person who committed the act would never be held responsible for it.

The police force might not be under King’s thumb anymore, but the truth about everything sounded like a fantastic lie or the plot of a dark comic book movie. It meant we had to prove Selby wrong. We had to be the ones to stop him, by any means necessary.

Gathering myself enough to stand, I held out my hand to Rhapsody. When she didn’t take it, I put my arms under her legs and at her back and lifted her. She sniffled beneath her mask. “Text Camuto,” I said, my voice cracking. Rhapsody’s body sagged against mine. “We need to get back on the train and finish this.”

Esteban huffed a bit. “I can’t cover the distance, Jason. Not this soon.”

Carrying the three of them was a burden I wasn’t sure I could handle. The train had a good day’s travel on us. The longer we waited, the more time it would take to get to it. Whatever the case, we couldn’t stay here and talk about it. The survivors were mobilizing and we were four masked people in their sightlines.

“Can you go a shorter distance, Esteban?” Sasha asked.

“Yeah,” he said, still breathing hard. “More than a hundred miles is pushing it. We eat and I grab a nap, I can get you back.”

I remembered the cash in my knapsack. “Alright. Breakfast first.”

Rhapsody and I flew to a pancake house on the highway. Esteban teleported himself and Sasha, meeting us in the parking lot. With our armor cloaked, we filtered into the restaurant. The hostess offered us a booth, which we gratefully slid into. Rhapsody still wasn’t quite herself. She sat with me and Sasha and Esteban were across from us. They had an all-you-can-eat weekend pancake special. I ordered us four and a pot of coffee for each of us.

“You sure have interesting taste in men, Sasha,” Esteban joked while drinking his coffee. “Sorry. Too soon?”

I didn’t laugh, because I was one of the guys she’d chosen. Rhapsody wouldn’t have laughed if you pumped her full of laughing gas and tickled her. Sasha wasn’t amused, either. We didn’t talk after that. The only sounds came from our moving forks and filled cups. On any other day I’d have loved a meal of blueberry pancakes and syrup, turkey sausage, and a bottomless coffee cup. Today I ate and drank because I’d drop without it. I didn’t even know what any of it tasted like. When I finished eight plates of refills the emptiness in my gut was still there.

At first the waitress tried to make small talk. “You eat more than any kids I’ve ever seen. You all going to the beach?” she asked us.

“Yes,” Sasha lied. Otherwise, there would be no rational explanation for the clothes we were wearing – especially the girls’ bikinis.

From that time on, she stopped by only to replenish our coffee carafes and to bring more short stacks to the table as we requested them.

Rhapsody picked at her pancakes at first until her hunger kicked in and she ate a little more at a time. I made sure she swallowed at least enough to keep her functional. She lingered a little longer over her last plate before sliding out of the booth and going to the restroom. Sasha did the girl buddy system thing and went with her while I laid a crisp fifty dollar note from my money stack onto the bill.

Esteban belched into his fist and didn’t follow it with a smart comment. The youngest of the triplet Hernandez boys, he must be the only kid I knew as skinny as I was. When we first met, I mistook him for Luis or Julio. His older brothers were in league with Ryan Cain, who I hadn’t seen since Esteban teleported him away.

He wiped his napkin all over his mouth in case he missed a spot. He had plowed through more orders of pancakes than the three of us together. “What?”

I shook my head. I’d seen dead bodies before – the Selbys after they were killed, the girl in the empty warehouse – but the cemetery scene was unreal. “Nothing, man.”

He wagged his index finger at me. “You ever ask yourself how weirder can things get?”

Resurrected mother, Sasha’’s mass murderer of an ex, and I’m aging and dying at the same time. “I try not to.”

Esteban set his empty coffee mug on the table and refilled it. “Me and my brothers, we grew up in Everwood. I’d give anything not to have to go home to that place.”

Everwood sounded like a nice place to visit, but it wasn’t. The tough kids and wannabe gangsters claimed the housing project as their hometown. Famous rappers name-dropped it in songs. One of them even shot a video in front of it. In protest against all of the violence that occurred there, some residents painted its parking lot red. It was on the news.

Esreban didn’t seem like the kind of kid to lie about that. To prove it, he flipped his left arm over. On its underside was an ugly, scarred-over divot.
A bullet wound.
“I got this walking home across the red road. Drive-by. My brothers were smart enough to duck.”