Lost Souls: Imperfection – Episode 2 (2 page)

Ryan chanced a glance at the electronic scoreboard on the wall just beyond the basket: Home 36 - Visitors 38.  A three pointer would cinch it for his team.  Piece of cake.  That was his specialty.  Three seconds left.  He had won the three point shooting contest three years in a row.  Two seconds.  His shooting percentage in the tournament was at the highest it had ever been in his entire high school basketball career.  Ryan stopped at the edge of the three point circle and went up for the jump shot…

…suddenly, he opened his eyes.  He was on the floor looking up at the gym lights.  What had happened?  The gym was silent.  Strangely quiet.  He sat up and looked around.  All the spectators in the stands were still on their feet, students and adults alike.  There were no cheers, no excited clapping.  Just an eerie silence.

Confused, Ryan stood up slowly and looked at his team’s bench, but it was empty, all of his teammates gone.  A basketball rolled to a stop against the empty metal bleachers where his team should have been.  He looked down at his hands for the basketball, but that too had disappeared.

He glanced up slowly to see all of his teammates standing in a circle in the middle of the basketball court, looking down at something.  He glanced back into the crowd where he had seen his Mom and Dad earlier.  Their spots were empty.

Slowly, he looked back at the crowd in the middle of the court.  He moved toward them.  Silent.  The gymnasium was so very quiet.  Even Blake McCormick, the prankster, was still and somber.  He moved past him, around his teammates.  Dominick, Henry, Frank.  They all stood staring down at something, their brows furrowed with concern and disbelief.

Something really bad had happened.

Ryan moved forward.  His coach was bent over someone.  He lifted his balding head to look at one of his teammates.  And suddenly the sounds of the world returned and Ryan could hear his coach clearly shout, “Henry, get the defibrillator from my office!”

“Call 911!” someone hollered.

Nervousness fluttered inside of Ryan as he approached.  Who was it?  Who had been hurt?  Had he run into someone?  He craned his neck to peer down past his coach.  A white uniform.  A Hornet.  It was a teammate.  Urgently, he moved forward.  “Let me through,” he demanded.  It was strange how he didn’t touch anyone.  Or that no one jostled him as he moved through such a thick crowd of people.  No one even seemed to notice his presence whatsoever.  Sounds buzzed around him now, people murmuring, their voices filled with alarm.

He saw his Mom kneeling beside the fallen teammate, her faced filled with utter terror.  She was saying something but Ryan couldn’t hear what it was with all the noise filling his head now.  “What happened?” he called out.

Mitch.  Was it his best friend, Mitch?  It couldn’t be!  He surged forward to the front of the line, dropping down to his mother’s side.  “Mom, who is it?”  She didn’t answer.  Ryan glanced down at the body lying in the middle of the court, and froze.  Familiar dark hair lay swept aside from the boy’s forehead.  The boy’s familiar eyes were closed.  His familiar lips were slightly parted.  It couldn’t be.  He stared down at his own face!  His own body!

Startled and horrified, Ryan shot to his feet.  For a long moment he couldn’t move.  It couldn’t be.  He backed up a step in disbelief.

Henry passed through him, the defibrillator in his hand.  The room shifted and queasiness churned Ryan’s stomach.  Henry had moved right through him!  He took a shaky step back.  What the hell?  What was happening?

The coach ripped open the packaging of the defibrillator and placed the pads on his body, on his chest.  
His
chest!

Ryan shook his head in shock.  How could he be laying there?  He was standing right here!  “Hey!” he called.

No one turned to him; no one acknowledged him.

He turned to see his friend Mitch standing close to him.  “Mitch!  Mitch, I’m right here!”  He reached out to grab Mitch’s shoulder, but his hand moved through him.  Ryan quickly pulled his hand back.  He looked at it in disbelief, as if it were not his.

“Okay,” the coach called.  “Everyone stand clear.”

The metallic voice of the machine pronounced, “Stand clear.  Delivering shock.”

Ryan looked at his body laying there on the floor, all hooked up to the defibrillator.  He expected the body to spasm with a giant jolt like in the television hospital shows.  But nothing happened.  The body,
his
body, didn’t jerk, didn’t move.

Suddenly, the instinct to turn, the feeling of being beckoned, came over him.  Something was silently calling him.  He scanned the room passed concerned faces and finally stopped on a woman standing near the gym doors.  While all the other eyes were gazing at his fallen body, she was looking at him.  She was a lady he had never seen before.  She was beautiful, with golden blonde hair cascading over her shoulders in perfectly shaped waves.  She wore a white summer dress.  A blinding white light seemed to shine from behind her.  An inviting grin curved her lips and her warm smile drew him.

Ryan fought the call as panic gripped him.  What the hell?  Who was she?  Was she looking at him?

The woman lifted her hand, palm up to him, her smile ever serene.

Warmth flooded through him and with it a sense of relaxation.  Ryan turned to look back at his body.  His Mom was leaning over him, screaming something.  He couldn’t hear her words.  The world seemed distant somehow, as if it were fading away.

He looked at the faces around him.  Blake scowled in concern.  Henry leaned forward trying to see over the coach’s head.  Mitch wiped away tears from his eyes.

No.  Ryan shook his head.  This couldn’t be happening.  He wasn’t leaving his friends.  He looked at the beautiful woman.  No.  He shook his head.  No.  Confused and frightened, he whirled and raced away through the locker room.  He had to get away from here.  He had to figure out what had just happened to him.  He had to keep running.

“Ah ha!” Christian exclaimed, proudly lifting the apple before him.  If any living human had been within eyesight, they would have seen an apple floating in mid-air as if by magic.

Samantha nodded.  He’d better be able to pick up an apple by now.  It had been weeks since Christian’s death.  He had plenty of time to practice reaching from their ghostly world into the land of the living and influence it physically.  It just took concentration and a belief that it could be done.  His boyish face almost glowed as he looked at the apple being held aloft by his ghostly hand.  His blonde hair was cut close to his head, the top longer.  His t-shirt was tight over his muscular torso and his jeans fit him just so.  Yeah, Sam supposed he was good looking.  But in the days he had traveled with her and Ben, he had started to get on her nerves.  She pointed to another apple at the bottom of the tree resting on one of the roots.  “Try that one.”

With his newfound confidence, Christian strolled over to it and bent.  He tried grabbing it with a swiping movement, but his hand moved right through it.  His eyebrows rose in surprise.  Then they furrowed as he tried it again.  Again, his hand swiped through it.  “What the hell?”

“Just concentrate,” Sam said to Christian.  “Pick up the apple.”

Lines of determination formed around Christian’s narrowed eyes as he wrapped his ethereal hand around the solid apple beneath the apple tree.  This time, his fingers managed to grip the fruit, but he could not lift it off the ground.

Christian stood, staring down at the apple.  “What’s wrong with that thing?  It’s not budging.”

“It’s not the apple,” Sam advised.  “It’s you.  You have to concentrate on what you’re doing.”  As Christian bent to try again, she glanced at her brother Ben across the field.

Ben leaned against her silver Audi R8 Spyder as he talked on his ghost cell.  It was a device their friend Eugene created for them.  Worked just like a regular cell phone.  Sent data across subatomic particle streams, or something like that.  Ben looked down at the ground, kicking the dirt with the toe of his black hiking boot.  Even that subtle reach from their ethereal world into the physical world took concentration, but she and her brother had been trapped in the land of the Lost Souls for over six hundred years now, so for them it was second nature.

She looked back to Christian.  He was trying so hard, his expression so earnest.  She almost confessed to him that she had nailed the apple to the root of the tree.  Almost.  Ben would disapprove of her punishment of Christian, she was certain.  But Christian deserved this.  He had been bothering her for two days to drive her car.  He was relentless.  Every time they stopped, he asked, knowing damn well she would never let him drive.  She rarely even let Ben drive.  His badgering was driving Sam crazy.  “Go ahead and move it,” she encouraged Christian.

If Christian had veins pumping blood through them, she was certain they would have popped out of his head.  She patted him condescendingly on the back.  “Maybe some day you’ll join the big leagues.”  She turned and walked away, heading toward her brother.

Christian fazed before her.  “Let’s get this out in the open right here and now.  You don’t like me.  You don’t want me with you and Ben.  You think I’m useless.”

Sam cocked a hand on her hip.  “I guess you’ve summed it up.  What more is there to say?”

Christian’s brow furrowed, his brown eyes darkening.  “I’m trying my damnedest to fit in, but you are making it next to impossible.”

“So, take off.”

“I’m not going anywhere.  You’ll just have to get used to that.  You’re stuck with me.”  He turned and began to stroll across the field, but suddenly he stopped and stormed back to her.  “I don’t understand why you’re like this.  What have I done to you?”

“You’re a freshie.”

“But one day I won’t be.  Until then, just deal with it.”  He turned and stormed away.

Sam smiled at his retreating back.  That was the most backbone he had shown since he joined them.  He had potential.  But she would never tell him that.  Then he’d just hound her even more to let him drive her Spyder.

She shook her head as she watched him.  He was still too used to his human form.  He needed to be a Soul and use the powers available to him.

Sam fazed, disappearing and then reappearing next to the Spyder.

Ben paced before the car, speaking on the cell phone.  Sam could tell the conversation wasn’t going well.  When Ben snapped the phone shut, Sam asked, “Did he find Cora?”  Her brother shook his head and Sam saw the frustration in his tight lips.  “We’ll find her,” she said.

“He wants our help with something else,” Ben said.

~ ~ ~

Sam walked through a fallen tree, not bothering to step over it.  She had left her Spyder in the camouflaged garage Eugene had built for it and was now leading the way through the forest, Ben and Christian following.  On their way through the thick trees, she saw Christian still hesitate before every big obstacle in their path, not knowing whether to lift his leg over it or just move right through it; she knew his brain was still trying to figure out the new world he was in.  He still had a ways to go to acclimate himself to his new surroundings.

“The last thing you ever want to do is startle Nichols,” Ben explained as they walked toward the run-down looking wooden house buried deep in a forest in Wisconsin.  “He has to know you’re coming.”

Eugene Nichols had been their friend for a very long time, at least five hundred years.  So, when he said he needed help, there was no hesitation.  They went right away.

“Isn’t this a little unsafe for him?  I mean out in the middle of a forest.  A lone Soul?” Christian asked.

Sam shook her head as she had numerous times on their little road trip.  “Eugene knows we’re here.  We’ve already come through numerous alarm systems.  He’s shut off the systems to allow us entry.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“You’re not meant to.”

“You’re not looking,” Ben explained.  He pointed to a towering evergreen tree.  “Look halfway up that tree.”

Christian saw a bird sitting on the branch.  “I only see a black bird.”

“It’s a camera,” Sam said, walking through a tree that grew too close to another.

“It’s moving,” Christian said, peering closer.

“Eugene is a talented techno geek.  He has all the time in the world to work on his creations.”

“He’s probably watching us right now trying to figure out who you are,” Ben answered, following Sam.  “And to make sure you’re not coercing us into leading you to him.”

Sam nodded.  “Eugene is very paranoid that way.  He thinks everyone is out to get him.”

“Well, everyone except you,” Ben remarked.

Sam cast Ben a warning glance.

“Why not Sam?” Christian wondered.

Another low chuckle came from Ben.  “Eugene has a crush on her.  He built her car for her.”

“Ahhh.  That’s why there was an iron garage for it that you knew the code to.”

Ben nodded, a crooked grin on his face.  “Hidden by camouflage.”

“Behind a barbed wire fence.”

“Electrified.”

“Okay.  Okay,” Sam cut in.  “Maybe he likes me a little.  But that’s all.”  She heard Ben laugh softly and then Christian.  “He’s a friend, that’s all.”

“Sam!”

Suddenly, Eugene Nichols stood before them.  At five foot eleven, Eugene did not present an intimidating figure.  He had a stocky, compact build.  He wore a t-shirt that read ‘Bronies’ and loose-fitting jeans.  He had somehow managed to give his short brown hair a gelled looked so it shone.  He rushed forward, his arms open as if to embrace Sam.

She stepped back, holding her hands palm out and shook her head.

Eugene came up short, nodding.  He ran a hand through his slick hair and wiped it on his jeans.  “It’s, um, good to see you, you know?”

Sam nodded.  “You too, Eugene.”

“Hi, Nichols,” Ben greeted.

Eugene nodded at him and then his gaze speared Christian.  “Who’s he?”

Sam knew she had to be the one to introduce him to alleviate Eugene’s paranoid fear.  “This is Christian, Eugene.  You can trust him.”

Eugene grunted doubtfully.  He looked around at the surrounding forest, then back at Christian.  “Did you lead anyone here?”