Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (2 page)

It was one of the last things he could do for his own father now, and it wasn’t enough.

The photos of Douglas had been set out for the wake. They were all taken long before Jonathan was born. He picked up one of the black frames from the table. The picture was of Douglas with four other men from the army, none of whom Jonathan recognized. A notation underneath was put out for the guests. It read
Staff Sargent Douglas Tibbs with the surviving members of his army ranger strike team
,
Libya 1984.
The men in the picture looked solemn, sad. Jonathan had to assume that the keyword from the photo was ‘surviving.’ Perhaps this photo was taken after one of the team had been lost. There was a lot his father had never gotten the chance to tell him.

Jonathan set the frame back down carefully and walked away, making his way through the friends and relatives in his living room. He was hoping to get away before he was drawn into another outpouring of a visitor’s condolences. A man he didn’t recognize put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder before he could make his way out of the room. Jonathan halted politely, looking up at him.

“I just wanted to tell you, Jonathan,” the man said, “you were well-spoken today. The words you said at the funeral were heartfelt. Your dad would have been moved to hear them.”

Jonathan nodded politely, thanking the man for the compliment.

He’d been told this a number of times today, and didn’t know what else to say outside of “thank you.” He didn’t understand why they felt the need to tell him this. Perhaps, having never met Jonathan outside the funeral, it was all they knew of him to comment on. If Jonathan was supposed to find some pride in his speech, he couldn’t feel it through his grief. That, and didn’t they see he hadn’t said a word of his own? All he’d done was written down his father’s own thoughts as he remembered them, putting the words together in a speech. His dad had always had a way of saying things. He’d have been a fraud taking credit for them.

He left the man and walked into his father’s garage. It was the only place in the house that wasn’t made immaculate for the wake and the closest thing Douglas had had to an office. The garage had a cement floor. It was cold and dusty, having seen years of cars being torn down and rebuilt. There were oil stains that had absorbed the grime of the floor, metal shavings, loose bolts. The work bench was exactly how Douglas had left it. His tools were still out. A rag where he’d wiped grease from his hands sat on a vise grip bolted to the work bench. His father’s stool was empty.

Taking up most of the garage space was an old truck. Jonathan didn’t know where his dad had found these projects, or what moved him to work on them. The thing looked like it belonged a hundred miles away on a farm. It was the color of rust, if it wasn’t just simply rusted, Jonathan couldn’t tell. Douglas had still been in the middle of repairing it, but Jonathan couldn’t imagine what was wrong with the thing. He’d never asked because he wouldn’t have understood the answer.

Heavy chains attached to a hoist had the truck’s engine suspended out of the vehicle. Jonathan gripped the links with his hands. The chain was cold, tough, so strong it held gravity at bay. The metal was clean and new, in stark contrast to the dirty engine that it supported.

When he released the chain, he sat on his father’s stool, his feet not yet able to reach the floor, and pondered the engine. He thought he should try to finish the project; a symbolic effort to his father’s memory, but it seemed too complicated. Without his dad, he wouldn’t know how to start, and he felt defeat before he’d even begun. For a fleeting moment, finishing what his father had started seemed worth the effort to learn.

“He’d never see it,” Jonathan said to himself, the statement crushing his drive to carry out the sentimental gesture as soon as he’d said it.

When his mother had told him his father was gone, when what she was saying had truly sunk in, he’d been ashamed at his initial reaction. It hadn’t been grief, although that had come later. It had been a suffocating fear. Jonathan had known, quite suddenly, that the shield between him and the world, the force that had defied reality to keep him sheltered, was suddenly gone, and he was afraid; afraid that he wasn’t ready to rely on himself.

Remembering it now, he began to sob. Was he so selfish? Was his first reaction to the death of his father no more than fear for himself? The self-defeating thoughts made him want to lie on the floor and cradle his knees against his chest. He couldn’t though, not here. He wasn’t going to lie on the filthy floor. Not in the clothes he wore out of respect for his father.

The garage door creaked open and Jonathan turned away to face the wall. He didn’t want to be seen sitting in this depressing garage sobbing. He hoped whoever it was would find that they’d opened the wrong door and leave him. Instead, he heard footsteps, and when a hand rested on his shoulder, he was forced to look up through his reddened eyes and see who was interrupting him despite his obvious wish for solitude.

He was relieved to see his mother, Evelyn. There was no shame crying in front of her; there never had been. They’d had their bouts with tears since the news had come, and this wouldn’t be the last of it. Still, his mother seemed to have more control over the emotions. It wasn’t that she loved Douglas any less than Jonathan did, or that she wasn’t assaulted by unwanted pain. It was more that she seemed to have accepted the reality of the loss.

She didn’t have the same luxury of a thirteen year old boy. After all, she was a mother, and still had Jonathan to keep herself together for. Evelyn was more practiced with grief. She’d already endured the loss of her own parents as well as her father-in-law just two years earlier. She knew the terrain of this pain, whereas Jonathan walked it now for the first time.

“Gonna be okay?” his mother asked.

Jonathan shook his head, wiping the tears from his cheeks. She hugged his head to her and began to rock. Some time passed, neither speaking as they swayed. Eventually, Jonathan broke the silence.

“When do we feel normal again?” he asked.

Evelyn sighed.

“Never really,” she said softly. “Tomorrow we’ll get up, and what we thought was normal will just be a memory we took for granted. So we’ll try to find a new normal, and eventually, wherever that is, we will start to feel okay again. Until—”

She’d cut herself off, but it didn’t matter. Jonathan had already known where her thoughts had been headed.

Until something else happens and takes it away again
, he thought.

JUNE 2005

NINE YEARS LATER

CHAPTER TWO

JUNE 03, 2005 | 7:30 PM – 9 YEARS LATER

IN
a poorly lit room, a man sat at a desk in front of a computer. The office was simple; old linoleum flooring that had once been white, cinder block walls, one metal door, one power outlet, a desk, a phone, and a filing cabinet. The man was studying images as they downloaded onto the screen. The pictures were from various cities around the globe. The only thing every photo had in common was a tall man with blond hair down to his chin wearing a black woolen trench coat and a fedora. The phone rang.

“Yes?” answered the man at the desk.

“Have you received the files?” asked a voice, masked by a speech modulator.

“I’m reviewing them,” the man said. “Have you found a pattern in his movements?”

“Most of his recent US destinations have been in the Northwest. Seattle specifically,” said the caller.

“Should we expect an incident?” he asked.

“It fits with previous patterns,” the caller replied.

“Have these appearances been confined to a sector of the city?”

“Yes, a university campus.”

The man at the desk didn’t respond immediately. He seemed to be mulling the answer over.

“That doesn’t fit any previous pattern,” he finally said.

There was a delay on the other side of the phone, finally the disguised voice responded.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Any theories?” asked the man.

“Still in progress. Will you be dispatching a team to investigate?” asked the voice.

“Yes; two, one through standard channels, the other through the private sector. Solid work as usual,” the man at the desk said, hanging up.

He saved the images and reports, encrypting the files as he attached them to two identical emails. All that was typed in the first email was “Seattle, WA. Secondary protocol. Dispatch ASAP.” In the second email he wrote the same instruction and then stopped. After thinking for a moment, he added the words “should be safe” and sent off the messages.

The man reclined in his chair and let out a frustrated sigh as he stared at the images of the man in the dark hat.

“What the hell are you doing on a college campus?”

CHAPTER THREE

FRIDAY | JUNE 17, 2005 | 8:00 PM | SEATTLE

“WHAT
the hell just happened?” Collin asked, as if on cue.

Jonathan stood over the half dismantled motorcycle, considering just how annoying the slip of his wrench was going to prove. It would slow their progress, of course, but more, it guaranteed him crap from Collin.

“Tibbs! You think I’ll ever let you ride Jenny again if you’re this clumsy?” Collin added.

Collin had a habit of calling Jonathan by his last name when he was about to say something condescending. The two stood in the driveway of the house they shared with the rest of their college roommates. It was an older house, located on Capitol Hill, an inner city neighborhood of Seattle. Living there, Jonathan sometimes got the feeling he was in the woods and not the city at all. The illusion was due to their driveway being sunken into a dense grouping of trees and bushes that blocked the view of the street from the front yard.

Less than half an hour ago, having returned home from school, Collin had stopped Jonathan on his way into the house under the pretext that he needed help with some maintenance on the motorcycle, which he’d endearingly named Jenny. Collin didn’t admit it, but he was trying to get Jonathan to take an interest in the hobby. He’d managed to get Jonathan to an empty parking lot on a couple of weekends so he could learn to drive the thing. He seemed to hope getting Johnathan to do some of the upkeep would get him more excited about
guy stuff
as Collin referred to it.

With Jenny’s gas tank lying next to them on the pavement, Tibbs had clumsily dropped the bolt he’d unscrewed into her air intake system and couldn’t see where it had gone. Now, he looked at their front door, deliberating on how long it would be before he could get back to work on the half-finished paper he needed to complete by Monday for his Phylogeny class. He didn’t hate working on the bike, but he’d put a lot of work in this quarter to keep his grade in B minus territory. It was only Friday, so he tried to remind himself to relax.

Jonathan set down the wrench and headed toward the garage in search of a flashlight.

“Jenny doesn’t mind,” he said grinning over his shoulder at Collin. “She says it’s all foreplay.”

Collin gave the motorcycle a disapproving look.

“Do not flirt with this man; you do him no service leading him on.”

The owner of the house had been renting to college kids for over a decade now, as its layout and location were suited to low income students. Meaning it had four bedrooms so the rent was split four ways, it was close to campus, and more important it was close to the bars. Both Collin and Jonathan attended the University of Washington, as did their other roommates, Hayden and Paige. Collin and Hayden had been friends since high school, but the rest had only met when they moved in together for school.

In the garage, Jonathan fumbled through the tool box to find the small flashlight. When he returned, he saw Paige walking down the driveway. She wore her dark hair short, and her skin was remarkably pale for how much time she spent out in the sun. Urban agriculture and the environmental sciences, her majors, tended to put her out in the campus greenhouses a lot, working on her green thumb. Her eyes were up in the trees and she was smiling. The past week she’d been in such a good mood it bordered on irritating.

Jonathan watched as her eyes speculated on the scene in the driveway; first, the dismantled bike parts on the pavement, then Collin bent over the frame staring intently down into where the gas tank should have been, then to Jonathan, hands covered in grime and holding the flashlight. Her smile widened as she raised an eyebrow.