Riser (Teen Horror/Science Fiction) (Book #1 in The Riser Saga) ((Volume 1)) (2 page)

Mom crawled over to the two of us, renewed hope in her eyes. Whether she knew what I was doing or not, she didn’t say. All that mattered was that she wanted to believe it. She needed to believe it. I could see it in her face. I made Bruce embrace the two of us with a tenderness he was never capable of before. I was doing this for me as much as for my mother at this point. Feeling his strong arms around me, holding me close, affectionate, loving. It was the first time in my life I felt like I had a father: a real dad. I nestled in closer. When my mom saw this she did the same. We both had contented expressions on our bloody bruised faces. I let Bruce sputter and jabber about how much he loved the two of us, how he would never hurt us again, how he was a changed man…

And he was.

After that day he became the best father anyone could ever ask for.

I still find it funny in a strange and disturbing way, that Bruce is a better father dead than he ever was alive. He’s the easiest for me to control now because he was my first, and I’ve had a lot of practice since. It’s almost as if he’s really alive sometimes. But every time I watch his face go slack when he’s watching his holo-tv or he stinks so bad I have to puppeteer him in the shower, I remember.

He’s dead. Truly dead.

And it’s my fault.

Chapter One

Friday September 17, 2320

“Breakfast, Chelsan. Hurry before it gets cold. You’ll be late for school.” Speak of the devil, that was Bruce calling me for breakfast. “Chelsan, I mean it. I made you eggs!” Bruce’s voice called through my door from the kitchen.

“I’m coming,” I said with a sigh. Dead people could be so pushy sometimes. But I had no one to blame but myself. I made him say those things just like I made him cook my breakfast. I had been controlling him for so long, I barely had to think about it anymore. It was like I had a second body to do all the crappy things in life, like cleaning and cooking and anything else annoying. How nice is that?

Bruce is awake when I am and asleep when I am, too. Or at least “alive” anyway, I just make him kind of lie there until I wake up. I can’t control him when I’m asleep. I wish. Think of everything I could get done!

I quickly got dressed in my usual tank top, jeans and Chuck Taylors (still popular after four-hundred years) and checked myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess so I ran a brush through it. I had been growing it out for the last three years now and it was just past my shoulders. I used to have a pixie cut that, unfortunately at the awkward age of fifteen made me look like a boy. So, three years later, I felt a little more feminine. It was chestnut brown and I soon realized brushing it was doing me no favors, so I tied it back in a high-ponytail. I had boring grey eyes (why couldn’t they be blue?!), slightly fuller lower lip than upper lip, small straight nose, high cheekbones, and today, thank goodness, no zits. I remember having a pimple the size of a crater on my forehead just before school ended the year before that I didn’t think I’d ever live down.

As I walked out of my room I blew a kiss to one of my many holo-pics of Jason Keroff (news reporter extraordinaire) plastered on my bedroom wall and entered the living room.

The new holographic-television was on as usual. Mom just had it installed and I was still getting used to the fact that the people were solid holographs as opposed to our old junky holo-tv where you could see right through them. Not to mention they’d flicker every five minutes making it impossible to really get into any kind of show. The only thing I could sit through was the news just because it didn’t matter what the holographs looked like.

And there he was, the adorable reporter himself, Jason Keroff.

He worked for LA’s own Channel 2 News and was a journalist for various magazines and newspapers. It was pretty embarrassing liking the guy that every other girl from the ages of nine to eighteen had a raging crush on.

But to be honest, thinking about Jason kept my mind off of my lost cause, Ryan Vaughn. Ryan was ridiculously perfect in every way… Stop!

Ryan was waaaaaaaay out of my league!

Jason. Jason. Jason.

He was reporting live on my holo-tv on location at a Virtual Reality Bar, about some scandal and such. (I never really did pay attention.) He was looking perfect, as usual, with his short cropped messy coal black hair, big green eyes which would always feel like he was talking specifically to you through the hologram, slightly crooked nose that gave him that extra sexy “I just got into a bar fight” kind of edge, t-shirt and jeans with a nice dress jacket over the top, and a pair of Chuck Taylors. (Yes, I know, I’m a copycat.)

It was amazing how clear the holograms were on the new holo-tv. It was as if a ten-inch version of Jason stood in our living room, Virtual Bar behind him, hover cars flying over-head, all displayed on top of our entertainment stand.

Of course, no one knew how old Jason was. He kept that hidden from the press. He could be any age, really, since three-hundred years ago in 2020, a medical scientist named John Fortski found the cure for aging and put it in a tiny pill called, “Age-pro.”

Basically, this little white pill (if taken everyday) stops the aging process completely.

So if you take it at twenty, you’re twenty
forever.

You can still die, obviously: accidents, guns, murder, hurricanes, tidal waves, there’s no pill for any of those things. But as long as you stay healthy and stay away from sharp objects, you could potentially live forever. I guess there used to be a bunch of diseases you could die from in the twentieth century, but after aging was cured supposedly the properties that were used for Age-pro were such a huge breakthrough in medical science that nearly a hundred years after its discovery almost all of the killing diseases had a cure. But more importantly, they had preventative shots that everyone got as a baby so no one would die from some horrible illness.

People who had money were legally allowed to start taking Age-pro at eighteen, but people like us trailer-park-low-income types, usually started taking it when we were thirty. That’s when the National Insurance kicked in and pretty much anyone could afford it. And let’s face it, even people who had no money managed to find a way to get their hands on Age-pro. Who would want to miss out on immortality?

Jason was gone before I could really appreciate the crooked little smile he always gave at the end of each report and was replaced with boring Carleton Gordan, news anchor for the last hundred years not looking a day over nineteen.

Carleton droned on in his monotone, annoying voice, “Overpopulation has reached an all time high, and the death rate has dropped to a record low. The government commented this morning about its terraforming project on Mars, but no other word or solution has been made…”

“Come on, eat your food before it gets cold.” Bruce pulled my attention away from the news.

“Sure, thanks, Bruce.” I sat down at the rusty Formica-topped kitchen table where my waiting eggs rested. The smell finally reached my nose and my stomach grumbled in response.

“You better hurry, sweetheart, that rich school of yours won’t tolerate tardiness from a trailer kid.” Mom came into the kitchen with her usual hostility toward the high school I went to. It was a private, richy-rich-school that we could never afford, but I worked at the ice-cream parlor off campus to pay the tuition that scholarships didn’t cover. She wanted me to go to the public school about ten miles away.

But I physically couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell her why.

The first time I realized that my control of dead things had a proximity limit was when I was on my way to my friend’s Aunt’s house twenty miles away.

About five miles out, I got a call from my mother, screaming that Bruce had just dropped to the floor, dead. I cried hysterically until my friend’s parents turned the car around. I concentrated as hard as I could until I could feel Bruce’s black hole and brought him back to life. It was just shy of four miles away from the trailer park.

I knew then that I could never go beyond a four-mile radius of my home, or Bruce would become a corpse again. Not only that, but in the few minutes that I let him die for a second time, his body began to decay, as if it knew the exact date when he died.

Think if I left and let him die for good? He’d be a skeleton within minutes.

Luckily, he’d only rotted a bit on his upper arm and leg, so no one seemed to notice. Gross!

But this is my life, my existence, making sure all the dead things I’ve brought back to life stay fresh so my loved ones aren’t in excruciating emotional pain from their losses.

When I found out that the public high school was outside my “safety zone” I looked for another school I could go to.

Only one was exactly three miles away,
Geoffrey Turner High School
.

A super elite, super expensive private school named after the Vice President of Population Control, which was pretty much the most powerful position in the world, even more than the President, since population was the world’s biggest concern today. He was the only man in the public eye who showed any sign of age. He was fifty when Fortski created Age-pro and Turner had been fifty ever since. I always tried to get a closer look at his wrinkles on the holo, but I think they did some kind of effect to hide most of them. He was a very distinguished man, always in a suit and tie, dark hair with flecks of white. His features were classic: straight nose, chiseled bone structure, strong chin.

Mom cringed every time I mentioned the fact that we had the same grey eyes. Even the shape was the same. In fact, she’d cringe every time I mentioned his name. She said it was because he was creepy to look at, being old and all, and not to
ever
compare myself to him again. And that was about all she’d say on the matter, but I suspected there was more to it than that. Vice President Turner must have done something political over the years to piss Mom off. Even though she looked thirty, she was about to have her fiftieth birthday soon, and Geoffrey Turner had been in office for over two hundred years. That was a lot of time to do something that my mom could hold a grudge for.

“Do you want to take the rest of your birthday cake for lunch?” Mom asked me as she was already packing it into my lunch box. I turned eighteen four days ago. I was the oldest in my senior class. It was always annoying starting the school year older than everyone else. By the end of the year everyone had caught up to me, but for some reason a year in high school was the equivalent of ten normal years. So for at least the first few months I’d be getting jokes and the condescending glares from all the seventeen-year-old seniors equating my “old” age to my intelligence or lack thereof according to them. I would say I couldn’t wait to graduate and get out, but I knew if I left, Bruce would be bones and I still didn’t think I could do that to my mother.

Mom handed me my lunch as she kissed the top of my head affectionately. She gave me her usual wink and a smile. Her way of saying she loved me. My mom was pretty gorgeous considering the time she began taking Age-pro. Her hair was brown like mine, but her eyes were light hazel. Her skin was ivory in color with a smattering of freckles across her nose and her body was perfectly thin. She was thirty-one when she started Age-pro so she only had faint lines around her eyes, which I personally loved. Her face lit up when she laughed and the slight crinkles seemed to make her eyes sparkle. I used to think this was the reason my real father fell in love with her. I would sometimes imagine what he was like, what he looked like, what his voice sounded like. He died the day I was born and my mom didn’t have any pictures of him. She said it was too painful a reminder. He was the love of her life and she always said it killed her the day he died. For some reason the way she’d say it always sounded like she meant it literally. Maybe that’s why she ended up with Bruce, she picked the complete opposite of my father so she’d never be reminded of him again.

“Thanks, Mom. I better go. I have to work at the shop after school today. I took a shift for Jenny,” I told her between mouthfuls as I shoveled down a few more bites of Bruce’s eggs. “I’ll see you around seven.” I kissed her cheek and ran out the door.

The flimsy aluminum door slapped shut behind me as I left the trailer.

I made my way to the Hover-Shuttle waiting area just outside the park. The Hover-Shuttle came every five minutes or so and could take you pretty much anywhere in the larger city of Los Angeles. The trailer park was pretty dead at the moment. Most of the people who lived there had blue-collar jobs that required getting up at the crack of dawn. I resigned myself to working at the ice-cream shop for the rest of my life if I didn’t figure out what to do about Bruce. And that could be a
very
long time, an eternity possibly. An eternity of working retail! I hoped at some point I could be honest with my mom and make her understand what I did and let Bruce rest in peace. Yeah right.