Sophomore Freak (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 2) (4 page)

Spivey muttered something I didn’t understand before passing out.

Ray grabbed me by the forearm, but I snatched away. “Don’t touch me,” I said.

“Julia, she’s...”

Before he could finish, I opened the door and stormed into the hallway. Ray got behind me and tried to catch up, but the hallway was too narrow for us to walk side-by-side.

I hustled past a trio of policemen and a pretty blonde with “Department of Homeland Security” stitched in white letters above her jacket pocket.

“Wait!” she shouted at me. “I need to talk to you.”

Her name was on a badge hanging from her neck. I tried to read it without stopping, but she probably thought I was just starting at her boobs.

Once we were outside Ray keyed the alarm to the Cougar. When I got close to it, Sasha flung open the passenger side door. She hugged me and kissed me on the lips. My shirt was stiff with Julia’s dried blood and I know I smelled awful.

I let go of her. “It’s Spivey’s,” I said, showing her the cell phone. “We can use it.”

Sasha snatched it from me and sprinted into the police station. My jaw dropped. “What’s she doing?” I muttered.

Whenever Ray talked about women in front of me, he said they had at least four different agendas going on. That doesn’t include the one they allow us to know about.

My father cornered me next to his car. “There was a four-car accident on I-48,” he blurted out. “If you hadn’t. . . done what you did, Julia...”

“Forget it,” I said, backing away from him. “Are we even now?”

His brow scrunched. “Parenting isn’t a quid pro quo thing. You mean for your therapy? You don’t owe me anything for that, son.”

Breathless, Sasha returned to the Cougar before he could say anything else. “Take me to the roof?” she asked.

Other than to come over to her house so that we could hook up, my girlfriend never asked me to use my powers for no reason. “Go be with your wife, Ray.”

“Jason, no. What the he...”

“Go,” I interrupted him. “We’ll get home safe. Debra already knows.”

His eyes widened. “What do you mean ‘she knows’? She’s in on all of this?”

I shook my fists. “There’s no time to explain.”

“Make time,” he said, pointing his finger at me. “I’m not leaving until you do.”

Sasha took my hand and we walked to the back of the police precinct. Ray followed us there. There was a large blue dumpster at the back of the building. All three of us ducked two feet behind it.

I showed him my necklace. “Radioactive,” I said.

The word radioactive made him back away. “You’re serious?”

I pointed my thumb at myself. “I’m strong and invulnerable. I can jump. Sasha clones herself. Rhapsody can turn invisible. Now you know, too. We’re leaving.”

“Wait, Jason!” he whispered. Sasha already had her arms around my neck and I was cradling her bare legs in my arms. “I’m staying here. Let me help you.”

“Why now?” I asked him. “You never stayed before!”

He looked down at the ground.

It was true. It was a low blow, but I’d gotten to him.  

CHAPTER FIVE

I have a weakness, after all

I vaulted us onto the flat roof. If we stood we could be seen from a distance, so we lay flat on our backs, turned toward each other, and chatted face-to-face.

Sasha’s eyes had sadness in them. “That was a pretty cruel thing to say to your dad, Jason.”

I waved it off. “Yeah, well, when Wesley disowns you, come and talk to me.”

“My parents are getting a divorce. My dad lives somewhere in Oregon. I haven’t seen him in two years.”

Since I had met Sasha she’d made it sound like her parents were still together. “What?”

“They’ve been separated since I was thirteen. His trips and Joyce’s late dinners – have nothing to do with business. They’re seeing other people or whatever.”

“Why didn’t you say something about this before?”

She bit her lip. “It still hurts to talk about it, Jason. My mom kicked him out, and I don’t know why. I avoid her because I’m afraid she’ll tell me.”

“Sorry.” Inside I felt a little guilty about lashing out at Ray. I scooted over to get a view of the parking lot. The Cougar backed out of its spot and drove off.

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I’ve been experimenting with my powers and studying different things.”

I rolled back over to Sasha. “Different things like what?”

She handed me Spivey’s phone. “Here, look at this.”

“I don’t get it. I thought you gave this back.”

Sasha made an expression that she does whenever I miss something. “I took Spivey’s original phone back to the precinct after I cloned it.”

“Hold on, since when can you clone
things
?”

“Not just anything. If I don’t know exactly how it works, it’s worthless.”

I stared at the lit screen. “So, this does everything Spivey’s real phone does?”

She nodded. “For the most part. Kind of like Clone Sasha.”

“Uh huh.” I wondered about the limits of her powers. “What about money?”

Her face twisted. “Can’t do that. It’s complicated. . .the watermarks and all.”

Sasha is a terrible liar, but I wouldn’t call her on it. The only way we’d need her to counterfeit paper or coin money was if we were on the run from the law or something.

Spivey’s phone connected with a call to a blocked number. Sasha answered it and muted the call so we could listen in on the conversation.

Spivey didn’t greet anyone, but retold everything that had just happened – he’d detained me, and I’d escaped. He left out the part where I slapped and robbed him.

“What now?” Spivey asked his partner. “Don’t we need him?”

The person’s voice was disguised. “Dispose of the body,” he said. “Get there first this time. We don’t need your people asking questions.”

The call dropped. Whose body was he talking about, Rhapsody’s? He killed Selby’s parents – is that what he meant by “this time”? I rolled over to the roof’s edge and peeked over. Spivey hurried to his car, turned on the emergency lights, and sped off.

I turned my face to Sasha. “If I stop him, we’ll never find out who he’s. . .”

Sasha placed a hand against my chest. “I know, but I’m not the one who can fly.”

Jump.
“I don’t know where he’s going!” I panicked. “He’ll see us landing.”

Sasha grabbed hold of my hand. “Baby, we have to go, like yesterday.”

We got to our feet. I held Sasha tight and jumped without thinking. We soared over large business buildings and residential neighborhoods. Whenever he turned I set down on a building or a house and jumped again in his direction. Once we hit the highway my comfort level skyrocketed. It was a straightaway. There was little on the side of the road I could accidentally kill.

Before I realized it we were in the Harleysville industrial district where my mother and George used to work. The area shut down years ago. We used to be the Motor City of the West until about ten years ago.

A minute before Spivey parked we landed softly in the alleyway. Landing was something I’d been working on since Rhapsody tucked and rolled on a rusty nail.

“Stay here.” I pointed to a nearby dumpster. “Maybe inside it?”

She looked me up and down. “Sasha Nicole Anderson doesn’t get in trash cans.”

I didn’t feel like arguing, so I rushed past her to the backdoor of the nearest warehouse and yanked it open. The screeching hinges meant there would be no element of surprise, so I stormed inside.

The stress dried out my mouth to the point that I imagined there was no spit in it. I’d been this nervous once before, and I hoped this time it wouldn’t be because someone else I cared about was dead. At the risk of revealing our location, I lit up our path with my cell phone.

Sasha bumped into me from behind and dug her face into my back when she saw what was in front of us. I stared because I couldn’t
stop
staring. By the way Sasha shuddered behind me she must have known who was lying face down on the ground.

The body was completely still and twisted – dead, for sure. I couldn’t tell much else about it beyond that, a strange blue glow, and the hideous smell of body fluids.

Two other things, however, were clear. I was looking at the body of a girl who hadn’t died too long ago. Maybe someone we went to school with? And it wasn’t Rhapsody.
I couldn’t relax about it, though. We were still looking at a corpse.

“Freeze!” Spivey shouted and opened fire.

Turning my back to the gun blasts, I shielded Sasha. Bullets bounce off of me, but these didn’t. These were fiery darts that sizzled against my skin. Spivey had found a way to make white ice bullets, and the pain was unbearable.

One after another, the shots penetrated my flesh. Struggling to breathe between my screams, I closed my arms around Sasha and pushed off, like a sprinter from his stance. We rocketed forward, punched a hole through the building’s metal walls, and skidded down an access road into a ditch.

I rolled over onto my stomach and fell unconscious. 

“C’mon, baby, wake up!”

Sasha must have been shaking me for a while, because she was out of breath and my neck hurt. As a matter of fact,
everything hurt.

I slowly blinked my eyes. “Wha – ”

“He’s coming,” she gasped. “We’re not that far down the road.”

I didn’t remember how we got so muddy or why we were in a ditch. The answers to those questions would have to wait. My Adderall had worn off. Tonight I’d have to double up on the dosage or use the Concentra I pocketed from the doctor’s office.
“They?”

“Spivey, Welker, whoever.” She grabbed my hands. “Get up.”

When I moved my right knee buckled under my weight. It was hard to breathe, so I concentrated on short breaths. There was a stabbing pain in the middle of my spine. I slapped at it, but came nowhere close. Sasha hated it when I cursed, but it was torture
.

She jumped behind me and dug her nails into the exact spot, which for a second burned like fire. “I missed that one. You had about fifteen of them in your back.”

“Fifteen knives? Needles? Flaming steel spikes?”

Sasha pitched it into the open clearing behind us. “White ice,” she said.

“They’ve made. . .weapons?” After I popped the Adderall pill I had stashed in my pocket into my mouth, my strength started returning little by little. Without the goshenite around my knee stopped throbbing. “Two minutes for the meds to kick in.”

The flash of siren lights about a mile away grabbed our attention.

“We don’t have that long,” Sasha said.

Nothing surrounding us could provide us enough cover. Even at full strength, I’m a slow runner. With a flashlight and more goshenite, Spivey could easily take us down. My brain was all over the place. We could crash if I jumped us out now.

Sasha grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a nearby tree. Though its trunk was thick around, the two of us couldn’t squeeze behind it. The rotted-out core couldn’t fit one of us if we tried to squeeze into it. Climbing it seemed stupid, so I wondered where she was going with this.

“Get behind me,” she whispered.

I did it.

Sasha touched the bark of the tree and closed her eyes.

Then something happened that I don’t believe. Suddenly, where there had been one tree, now there were
four
around us
.
Then
eight
, more, and more,
dozens
– I didn’t count them all. They’d just
appeared.
No glowing, sprouting up from the ground, or an earthquake. Each of them was an exact copy of the first, spaced out at a believable distance for a pop-up forest.

We had to split up – she chose the far end of the miracle forest, so I stayed closer to the front.
If something happens, I think I can stop it.

Spivey sped right past us to the stop sign at the end of the road. He doubled back in our direction. He must have known the area well enough to realize it wasn’t supposed to have so many trees.

Every time Spivey’s flashlight shined in my direction I held my breath and stayed completely still.
How close does he have to be in order to try reading my mind?
Any thought would let him know I was nearby. In my mind’s eye I pictured a black sheet of construction paper with no holes and tried to control my thoughts on that. It worked for thirty seconds. Then I wanted a loaded Pudgy Burger with seasoned fries.

Spivey laughed. “You’re hungry, I get it. I’ll buy you a burger. Come on out.”

If Sasha had heard him she was probably cussing me out in her head. It’s not my fault using my powers make me hungry. Ryan had interrupted my dinner, too.

“I’ve got goshenite rocks in this gun,” he said. According to the sound of his voice, he’d be to my right, maybe a yard or two off. “Give up now, and I won’t use them. I’m not trying to kill you, kid. We need your help.”

You could’ve fooled me.
I imagined telling him what he could do with his gun. I hoped my thoughts didn’t get stronger the closer he came to me.

“Okay.” He cocked the gun and readied to fire. “We’ll do it your way.”

One thing about a forest of identical trees in the dark – it’s impossible to tell one from the other. By the time he actually found me my powers would be back to normal.
Just another minute. . .