Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (11 page)

“It seems like it’s passed,” Collin said.

“Was it a seizure?” Hayden asked.

His heart thudded in his ears. He didn’t know if he’d been gone for a moment or an eternity.

Suddenly, he felt his limbs. His eyes shot open as he realized his lids were responding, vision flooded back into him. The burning was gone, the pain suddenly sucked into a black hole within him. Thought returned slowly, drifting in from somewhere that language had not existed, becoming comprehensible words again.

“Shit! Shit!” Paige yelled.

He felt her hands drawn back from his chest in surprise as she swore. He became aware that he was on the floor again, staring up at her wide eyes. He could hear the television still playing in the background. His roommates were surrounding him, Paige still on her knees at his right, Collin standing above his head and Hayden to his left. All staring with their mouths hanging open, but they weren’t looking at his face. They stared at his chest as though he had an armed hydrogen bomb ticking away on his torso.

“What happened?” Jonathan asked.

No one responded.

“Guys!” he yelled.

They snapped out of their trance and shut their mouths, looking him in the eye.

“Jonathan, your chest,” Paige whispered, bringing her fingers to her mouth in worry.

Slowly he propped himself on to his elbows and looked down. His chest was flickering, and as he watched in panic, it suddenly became alive with light.

It hadn’t just kicked on abruptly. Like a halogen bulb, it had worked its way to full illumination. The light seemed organic, glowing red-orange from beneath the skin and submerged in the muscle tissues over his rib cage. He could see it through his shirt like neon lights had been surgically implanted inside his chest.

His hands moved to touch the light, but then he stopped, unsure if it was wise to touch them. Instead, he reached up and slowly lifted the collar of his shirt.

Three lines ran over his front and around his back. Two of the lines, one on each side of his torso, followed parallel to his arms from his shoulder down to his hip. These two lines were intercepted by the third, running perpendicular to his arms across his chest. The third line reached around from his back. It appeared to start at one lat muscle, crossed over his chest, and terminated in the muscle on the opposite side.

The lines looked like liquid energy running through him.

“What the hell is it?” Collin asked.

Only one thought occurred to Jonathan.

This shouldn’t be possible
.

How could all of those tests they ran at the hospital have missed something like this in his chest cavity? Jonathan didn’t know what to do. He laid his head back down on the kitchen floor trying to think. His roommates, seeming to fear he was about to go catatonic again, tried to think for him.

“Call an ambulance,” Hayden said.

“What the hell for?” Collin asked. “Whatever that thing is the doctors don’t have an ointment for it.”

“Well, what the hell else are we gonna do?” said Hayden.

“Why don’t you try praying?” Collin snapped back.

While they began bickering, Paige came to her senses, finally taking her hand from her mouth.

“Jonathan,” she said softly. “Does it hurt?”

His attention shifted to her when the concern in her voice registered. It was hard to gauge exactly what he felt given the circumstance, but he wasn’t in pain any longer.

“No. I mean, there was a terrible pain before, worse than anything I’ve ever felt. Like I was being cremated and I couldn’t move. But it stopped right before this came on,” he said, pointing at his chest. “I feel normal. I’m—”

He realized then that something wasn’t normal.

“Wait—” Jonathan paused.

Collin and Hayden, seeing that something was developing, became silent.

“There’s something tugging at my attention,” he said, then shook his head. “No, it’s not tugging. It’s strange. I can’t… I can’t
not
notice it.”

Jonathan looked up at them, but he could tell by their expressions that he wasn’t making any sense.

He realized it had been there for a while now on the outskirts of his awareness. He hadn’t been paying attention to it. It didn’t feel unnatural, so it hadn’t stuck out at first, like choosing not to ignore the sound of the television while trying to study. It seemed as though he was feeling a new emotion, but could only describe it by comparing it to emotions that there were already words for. Instead of trying to explain it, he just said what it was telling him.

“There’s something southwest of us,” he blurted out, pointing in the direction without looking. “A mile, maybe two.”

Direction sense, but with proximity, and it felt instinctual. He might as well have been seeing or hearing it. Such a novel sensation should have been more upsetting, but it felt like something he’d always been capable of. An ability that had always been there, only he knew it hadn’t been conceivable a moment ago. Some kind of sensory input was being deciphered by his brain, but what was the source of the input? What was he sensing?

“What’s
something
?” Collin asked as though reading his thoughts.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied.

“Jonathan, do you think it could be the man who…” Collin paused. “Did this to you?”

That was a thought.

“Guys, I need to tell you something,” Jonathan said, looking to each of their faces. “I didn’t tell the police everything.”

They clearly hadn’t expected that. His story had been pretty unbelievable in the first place for him to be leaving out details.

“The man; I didn’t think, uh, I don’t think he was human,” Jonathan said. “His strength was more than just overwhelming. It was impossible for a man to be that strong. His eyes weren’t just a strange shade of blue either. They looked like they were lit up from behind, like a computer monitor. I didn’t tell the police because I knew how it would sound. I thought I was crazy, but now that this is happening I know I couldn’t have imagined it.”

All three roommates were looking at the floor now. All trying to process what he was saying into something that made the current situation make sense.

“I still think we should get him to a hospital,” said Hayden.

Paige seemed to agree, but Jonathan hardly saw the point. If whatever was in his chest had eluded their detection after they had run every test they could, he didn’t see how they would suddenly know what to do with him now. He needed time to think. He wasn’t ready to do something that might make the situation worse. Collin spoke up as though he were reading his mind again.

“Guys,” Collin said, “am I the only one who saw
E.T.?
We need to think before we involve any authorities.”

Suddenly, Jonathan felt the thing to the southwest move. The signal, if he could call it that, had increased the distance between them. It was farther away than when it had started.

“No,” Jonathan said, starting to get to his feet and reaching for the table, “I’m not-”

There was a loud pop followed by the sound of wood splintering. Jonathan found his butt still on the floor.

The table had broken down the center as he’d pulled to lift himself. The two halves crashed in on each other, books dropping in a heap onto the linoleum. The room got quiet as they looked at the mess, the only sound was that of a pencil rolling across the floor.

Jonathan didn’t understand. His roommates stood looking at the pile with the same confusion. Finally, Hayden and Collin looked at each other like a light bulb had gone off in both their heads simultaneously.

“I don’t think we can blame IKEA for that,” Collin said.

“Can you do that again?” Hayden asked.

“What?” Jonathan asked, still sitting on the linoleum.

“Er, break something,” Hayden said.

Seeing what they were getting at, Jonathan carefully rolled over onto his hands and knees and gently pushed himself to stand. The roommates all backed away from him. Standing over the broken table he reached, slowly and carefully, for the chair he’d been sitting in a moment earlier. He looked to his roommates, as if to ask permission. They all nodded.

He slowly started to put pressure on the wood of the chair. It creaked once before giving way to the force, the back of the chair broke free of the seat.

He’d hardly pushed on it at all.

“No one get close to me,” Jonathan said, putting his hands up as if they were weapons he didn’t know how to operate.

It took a few moments to set in. First there was awe, then fear, then disbelief, but eventually, there was curiosity, and they all wanted to see to what extent Jonathan’s strength had increased. Hayden eventually ran and got the aluminum bat from the closet and handed it to Jonathan.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“See if you can bend it,” Hayden said.

Jonathan held the bat with a hand on each end, then tried bringing his hands together. It wasn’t difficult; it bent under the pressure from his arms like it was made of rubber.

Jonathan didn’t like it. He felt like they were children playing with fire. There was a reason for this strength and it wasn’t amusement. He walked away carefully, giving each of them a wide birth, and made his way to the bathroom.

“Where are you going?” Paige asked.

“I want to get a better look at this thing,” he said, pointing to the light in his chest.

When he got to the bathroom he removed his shirt and examined himself in the mirror. His roommates crowded around the door. The glow was made of fixed straight lines. There seemed to be one main line to each of the three beams, but along the edges he could see that small threads of light were coming off the main lines and embedding themselves into his tissues. It looked as though the lights were interconnected with his muscle fibers, veins, and arteries. A glowing web of connection under his skin, and it was amazingly complex.

He wasn’t in awe of it; this just confirmed his worries. Whatever was inside him was so permanently embedded no surgical operation was going to remove it. It was a part of him.

Carefully, he put his shirt back on. He was going to need something thicker than a t-shirt if he didn’t want to attract attention. He left the bathroom, his roommates giving him plenty of space as he exited for fear he might accidentally bump them and send them sprawling across the living room.

He began pacing in front of the television set. They watched him trying to make sure they could warn him if it looked like he might accidentally put a foot through the coffee table. He kept trying to reason it out.

“Why?” Jonathan asked out loud. “Why do this to someone?”

The signal moved again, farther away, toward the waterfront he thought. Upon noticing it, he remembered the last thing the blond man had said.

You’ll know what to do. I’ll be there to help you, if you make it. Just follow your—

“Instincts,” Jonathan said softly.

That had to be it. He hadn’t been able to put it together because the ‘instinct’ the man had been talking about hadn’t triggered yet. Maybe it had taken so long because the man hadn’t finished whatever he’d intended? Maybe he hadn’t been sure if Jonathan would survive; that was why he’d said “if you make it.” The signal in his head was pointing the way.

His roommates had become unusually silent.

“I think you were right, Collin. This compass in my head, it must point to the man. It will lead me to him,” Jonathan said.

His excitement hit a wall as he thought about it more.

“Wait, no, why piss a person off, then give him superpowers and paint a heat seeking target on your own back?” Jonathan asked disappointedly as his theory unraveled.

He stopped pacing and looked up at his roommates. They didn’t appear to be paying attention to him. They were looking past him at the television set.

“Jonathan, I don’t think the blond man is what’s southwest of here,” Collin said.

CHAPTER TEN

THURSDAY | JUNE 30, 2005 | 09:30 PM

HAYDEN
had set the television to mute when Jonathan had broken the table in half, but the news had come on behind him as he paced the living room. He turned around as all of his roommates were pointing at the screen.