Infected: Die Like Supernovas (The Outlaw Book 2) (19 page)

Tank and I stood on opposite sides of the field, glaring at each other while our coaches arranged a scrimmage. He and I were living in such a strange existence. We knew each other’s secrets. We hated each other. We were fighting over the same girl, both in the news for various reasons, and both very sick. And yet we were both just teenagers living at home with our families. He had the world fooled and he would kill me if he could do it cleanly. But I didn’t know what to do about him, and he knew it. Our cold war continued.

We forewent pads and helmets during our ‘friendly’ scrimmage because there would be no hard hitting. Yeah, right. During the second play a Dragon creamed Josh Magee, almost knocked his head off. Josh limped off and the Dragon received a scolding from his coach. The rest of his team congratulated him.

Cory was the only Eagle capable of even partially blocking Tank, and so Tank never lined up near him. Tank chased me on every passing play, knocking blockers aside. I ran for my life and threw the ball early every play before he could maim me. One of the Dragons knocked me down and stomped on my hand while the coaches were distracted. He walked off laughing, and I sat there steaming, thankful I didn’t have access to any nuts and bolts.

Our punting unit came on the field. Samantha Gear was trying out to be the punter too, and as she trotted past she said, “I see why you hate these guys.”

“Real classy, aren’t they?” I asked wryly.

“Watch this,” she said and winked.

Uh oh. Samantha was trouble. This was going to be… inflammatory.

The ball was hiked to her. The play should have been a routine punt. The Dragons didn’t attempt blocking the kick because she was a girl and they were astonished by this. She took a step and punted the ball straight into the face of the nearest Dragon defender. Boom! She crushed him! Her kick rebounded twenty yards off his face. He snapped backwards, his feet flying over his head before he landed on his neck.

The Eagles laughed until tears streamed down our faces. We could barely stand. The Dragons appeared to be suffering from a mixture of outrage and mirth. Did the new girl do that on purpose?? The injured Dragon’s nose was busted and his coach helped him stagger off the field. He might have a concussion.

“Kick it again,” Coach Garrett ordered. “Everyone else, put on helmets.”

“You got it, Coach!” Samantha Gear chirped.

Oh no. She was going to do it again.

Another kick. Even though they were wary of her now she still managed to knock one down with a solid blow to the helmet. He stumbled backwards and fell over.

A fight erupted instantly, like a starter’s pistol had been fired. The indignant Dragons were furious and the proud Eagles were defensive and all forty guys jumped on each other. Immediate mayhem! Punches and kicks and face mask grabbing and dog piles as the coaches blew their whistles and tried to drag us apart. Cory stood in the middle, a boulder in the storm, tossing Eagles and Dragons apart.

Tank came snarling, his dark face a mask of malice. I could outrun him but I couldn’t outfight him, not without drawing unnecessary attention. He closed the distance and I dove, putting my shoulders into his shins. He somersaulted over and landed in a howling heap.

Wump! Wump! Samantha Gear found a hopper of footballs and she was blasting rockets one by one into the Dragons. Wump! Solid punt, Dragon destroyed. Wump! Another Dragon sprawling. Wump! She wasn’t missing!

I admired her too long. Mistake. Tank gained his feet and smashed my skull with an enormous fist. Pow! The lights dimmed and I hit the turf hard. I should’ve worn a helmet! My head swam. Tank towered over me and raised a foot. He was about to crush my sternum when his face slackened. He had enough time to grab his temples before he collapsed. He just fell over, like his power had been cut. I yanked my foot out from under his dead weight. He didn’t respond.

“Hey. The hell happened to Tank?” someone shouted.

“Tank! Is he okay? Yo Tank!”

The fight ended as quickly as it began. Tank wasn’t moving and I was on the ground, holding my head, which felt like it was about to split open. A crowd gathered.

“Is Tank breathing?”

“What happened? What’s wrong with Chase?”

“I think they killed each other, yo.”

“I’m okay,” I said through clenched teeth. “I think. Tank might need an ambulance.”

“What’d you do to him?”

“Nothing,” I barked. “I think he had an aneurysm.”

Cory helped me up and guided me towards the locker room. I kept my eyes closed against the awful light. My lip was split and my cheek was swelling. As we walked indoors an ambulance began wailing nearby. Wow, that was fast! Maybe Tank had a chance.

Somehow, someway, the fight made the six o’clock local news. I didn’t see it, but Lee texted me afterwards. The anchor announced two local football stars got into a fight during a scrimmage and both suffered injuries. No word on their condition. Pictures and videos had been taken with phone cameras, Lee said.

Great. I’m sure the Patrick Henry Dragons all blamed me. There’d be an outrage if Tank died. Nooooo, I’ll tell them. It wasn’t me. He was suffering from a Super Hero Virus that gave him all those muscles and then killed him. I’m sure they’ll understand.

My headache was NOT going away. I felt as bad and as ragged as I had in weeks, a miserable shell of my former self. None of my painkillers were effective.

I watched the news at eleven to distract myself. The anchor began by warning us the lead story contained a graphic video and viewer discretion was advised. She was right. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

Multiple people had used their phones to film a man going insane. He was running around Gardena (about ten miles from here) without a shirt on. He was screaming. Two police officers attempted subduing him but their mace had no effect, and he tossed them aside like they were children. A minute into the video, the poor dude actually flipped over a Nissan! He was a short, skinny white guy with no business over-turning a car. He was about my age. Finally he ran into the street, grabbed his eyes, and fell down.

The news anchor said that he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. Police suspected his erratic behavior was due to an over-dose of illegal bath salts.

Bath salts. Maybe, but I doubted it. The strength, the insanity, the aneurysm…I bet he was Infected.

I got up and started pacing the room. My own head was throbbing. Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap. I really don't want to lose my sanity. How long do I have?

I grabbed the Outlaw’s phone and texted PuckDaddy,
Did you see the video of crazy man in Gardena today?

>>affirmative

Think he was Infected?

>>probably got no intel on him tho

What are the odds of three guys being Infected in Los Angeles at the same time?

>>ZERO who is the 3rd guy?

You don’t know?

>>i know about the third guy. PuckDaddy knows all. Im just surprised u know about him

So…what’s going on? Why are there three of us?

>>no idea my man u stay chill stay calm stay alive

I wanted to keep texting but I could no longer concentrate. My stomach was churning. Stars were flashing in my vision. This was bad. This was scary.

What I needed was a way to relax. So I grabbed my helmet with shaking fingers and navigated to my motorcycle through squinting eyes.

Somehow I safely and slowly wobbled all the way to Holy Angels Catholic Church. I love this place. I started to unclench immediately as I shouldered through the heavy wooden doors. I dropped to my knees on the rear pew’s kneeling bench and tried to pray the virus out of my pores. This church was the best. Were all churches this great? I especially loved the candles and the smell. However, the aroma was faint. I need more than intermittent wafts.

I moved deeper into the mostly vacant sanctuary. A handful of other pilgrims sat alone in their own pews. Soft recorded worship music drifted down from above. The closer I approached the alter the closer I came to the candles and to the incense and to peace, so I didn’t stop until I reached the front row.

This is what heaven must be like. Peace. No pain. No worries. No stress. I was about to drift off when someone sat down beside me.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Jackson.” It was one of my football coaches, Todd Keith. He worked at this church, and he helped break up the fight today. “You’re here late.”

“So are you. But I don’t blame you. This place is the best.”

“Oh yeah?” he chuckled quietly. “I’ve found you sleeping here twice, you know. Everything okay at home?

“Yes sir. No problems at home. My life has been wild, and this church…I don’t know, Coach. It’s keeping me sane. Keeping me alive. God’s the best.”

His eyes widened and he laughed. Everyone frowned at him. I frowned too and said, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, Chase. Kids your age don’t usually think God is the best because of a church.” He wiped tears out of his eyes. “You caught me off guard.”

“Other kids don’t value peace as much as I do. They don’t realize how precious it is, you know?” I said, staring at the flickering candle flames. “You know how teenagers have all these hormones that make us feel and act weird? I have that too. More than most guys, and it sucks, and this place calms me down. Isn’t that what church is for? That’s why God invented them?”

“Sure, partly,” he nodded.

“I should probably come more often.”

“Your face doesn't look so bad,” he noticed, indicating my bruises. “I thought you’d be black and blue for a week.”

“I heal quickly. How’s Tank, do you know?”

He shook his head and said, “No. You two sure seem to hate each other.”

“It’s so bad, Coach,” I sighed. “It’s so much worse than people know. I wish I knew how to make it stop. He despises me. He would truly kill me if he could.”

“Wow. That part of the reason your life has been so wild?”

“Yeah.”

“The last time we talked here,” he said and he screwed up his eyes trying to remember our conversation last fall. “You were struggling with dual identities. You are the real Chase Jackson but also someone else. You still feel that way?”

“Absolutely.”

“You feel pressure to live up to people’s standards? To be the star quarterback and the perfect student and everything else?”

“Yes. Definitely everything else,” I said.

“I know the feeling,” he said. He was sitting sideways on the pew with his hand resting on the seat back near my shoulder. “That’s a good way to be lonely.”

“You get lonely?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s part of the human condition.”

“Explain.”

“All the things we humans have in common,” he waved his hand to indicate the people in the big sanctuary. “We all love. We all get lonely. We make mistakes. We sin. We all will die.”

“What’s going to happen to me when I die?”

“Well,” he took a deep breath and thought about his answer. “No one knows for sure. But the New Testament tells us that God’s children will go be with Him. And the rest… won’t.”

“I like the New Testament. It seems to be right about everything. And here in this church? I don’t hurt at all right now,” I realized.

“Are you often in some kind of pain?”

“A lot of the time. There’s just so much stuff going on. And things like today’s fight don’t help.”

“I bet.”

“And the secrets,” I groaned. “So many secrets.”

“Is there a chance that keeping your secrets bottled up is contributing to your pain?”

“Maybe? I don’t know. We probably all need an outlet, right? I used to be able to tell things to my friend, Katie. But…you know, things change.”

“Would you like to try Confession?” he smiled.

“Maybe sometime. I’m not really Catholic, and I think that’d be a very bad idea right now. The confessional might catch fire if I really unloaded.”

“Perhaps not,” he smiled. “I’ve heard some doozies.”

“Coach. Trust me. You’ve never heard anything like this.”

Los Angeles was becoming nightly global news. Even though there’d been no Outlaw sightings recently, except for a few grainy photos of Katie and me jumping between buildings, the city was ripping apart at the seams.

A law enforcement task force was quarantining sections of south LA, trying to contain the spread of a new strain of highly addictive bath salt designer drugs, while also searching for a criminal mastermind they believed was behind both the new drugs and the recent civil unrest. Riots were spontaneously breaking out all over the sprawling city and the government could neither stop them nor determine if they were caused by the communities’ revolt against new immigration legislation or the drugs.

To top it off, the LA Sniper was on a roll. He shot an average of three people a night for a week and the police were stumped. The Sniper was still using non-lethal wax bullets, but the public was petrified. Anytime I texted PuckDaddy and demanded he tell the Sniper to stop, he just laughed at me.

I didn’t know how to help with the drugs or the riots or the criminal mastermind. But I had an idea how to make the Sniper stop. I was going to meet him.

I knew Sniper attributes that the police didn’t. The police believed the Sniper was constantly roving, due to the wide dispersal of his targets. But I knew the Sniper was really Infected and could hit targets at an unheard of distance; he didn’t have to move as much as the police assumed in order to make those long range shots. I also knew the Sniper had shot Tank, shot me, and shot the vial of blood all within the northern limits of downtown. The Sniper had reached those venues extremely quickly, so I deduced he had a favorite perch with an excellent view and easy access to Natalie’s building. After all, he was in LA because of me so he wouldn’t stray far from my favorite haunts.

I purchased a map of downtown and marked the locations of all known attacks, including mine and Tank’s. After glaring at the markings for three nights I decided he was setting up shop on the roof of either the Plaza skyscrapers or Los Angeles City Hall. An even better guess was that he rotated between them. Tonight I would investigate City Hall, for several reasons. First, the City Hall tower was much older than the Plaza towers so there was less chance of roof-top security cameras, which the Sniper would want to avoid. Second, it was closer geographically to two of the locations where I’d been shot. Third, the Plaza towers were nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows, like big single-sided mile high mirrors, so I didn’t know how I’d scale the side without being seen. City Hall looked much easier to climb. And fourth, the 450 foot City Hall tower was several hundred feet shorter than the Plaza towers. Much less scary. Hopefully.