Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (21 page)

Worse, it wasn’t a decision, but a duty. Jonathan didn’t want to bestow this nightmare on anyone. It was complete BS that his life had been commandeered from him. He would be damned if it would happen to someone else. It was the only small victory he could see, the one thing he might be able to control.

There is no stopping this, not without casualties. If somehow, you find a way to freedom, please show me the way out.

Heyer had given him exactly enough information to be nothing more than a tool, and he’d done it on purpose, yet still, the alien’s final words kept draining the anger out of him. How could an alien that seemed to be able to move space and time be as shackled to this situation as Jonathan was? He hated not being able to see the bigger picture. How could he tell if he was getting the truth at all?

He needed more information, and that meant living.

Living meant time. Time meant learning and planning. If he could just get time on his side, he could take the bread crumbs of information that slipped through, piece it together, and maybe figure this out. He had to believe he could escape this without victimizing someone else. He could find a way. He just had to make sure there wasn’t a deadline in the equation. It meant survival at all costs.

Resolved to this much, he was giving himself one day to think, one day to come up with a plan and move forward. The more he examined every word the alien had said, the more he realized that Heyer had given him more than he’d initially thought.

Clearly, he needed to improve his physical prowess. Also clear, was that he needed to see what the world could tell him about this sort of situation. People who could teach him what he needed to learn were out there. Two of them happened to live downstairs. Others, he would have to seek out.

“Grant!” Jonathan said out loud.

Well, he said to call him if I saw the guy. I saw him after all.

Where was that business card? He’d left it in his jacket pocket, in the closet downstairs. He had an idea, a direction, he would take it! He got up and headed down after the card; as he entered the living room he overheard Collin and Hayden talking.

“I think Jesus should have serious staff skills,” Hayden said.

“Right, cause that way he can resort to violence when the power of faith isn’t enough to defeat the demon he is fighting,” Collin said, “or if he is felled by doubt-inyte.”

“Seriously, we aren’t calling it doubt-inyte. It’s lame. It goes past lame to just uninspired,” Hayden said.

They looked up from their panels when Jonathan entered. They acknowledged him with a halfhearted wave and went back to work. Paige was on the couch watching morning television programs but seemed more entertained by the conversation about Jesus’s martial art skills. When Jonathan came down, she stopped watching the television entirely.

“Hey, Jonathan, long walk last night. I never heard you come home,” she said.

Jonathan was reaching for his jacket in the closet.

“I lost track of time,” he said.

“Want to grab a ride to class with Hayden and me?” she asked.

He’d forgotten about school.

His academic career hadn’t been on his mind since his chest lit up the night before; which given what had passed since that moment, seemed like longer than twelve hours ago, fourteen if he counted the time he’d lived twice. He couldn’t imagine getting anything out of class today. How could he sit in a lecture hall when every minute counted?

He put his hand into the front pocket and found the business card where he had left it.

“No, not today,” he said, “I need to take care of some other things.”

She did not seem to like that answer but didn’t comment on it, just gave him a look that said:
I thought you were getting it together, but who am I to judge? I wasn’t in a pool of my own blood a few weeks ago.

She did, however, eyeball Grant’s card in his hand.

“One of those chores involve Grant?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he replied, “not sure.”

“Did I miss something with you two?” she asked. “I thought you hadn’t exchanged more than ten words.”

“We’ve never spoken when you weren’t around,” he said.

She frowned and then took a longer look at him.

“You look tired. Have trouble sleeping last night?” she asked.

He shrugged and nodded.

“Guess these things take time,” she said politely.

Jonathan, card in hand, went to head back up the stairs, then stopped. He remembered he had to ask the two super geeks in the living room something. He wasn’t sure how to phrase it.

“Guys, if you were going to watch a movie,” he paused, “something with a guy who needs to learn certain things, like fighting, or killing monsters...”

Collin’s eyes were growing large. He seemed to be waiting for Jonathan to give him a complete thought.

“Do you know any movies about people who are badasses?” Jonathan asked, wincing at how ridiculous the question sounded even to him.

Hayden smiled.

“You’re going to have to narrow that down. I think you just asked me about 75% of all modern mainstream cinema.”

Jonathan had an idea.

“If you were writing an essay on the modern hero story, and you wanted to start doing research. What would you watch?”

Hayden’s eyes seemed to twinkle. He smiled, then looked to Collin, then back to Jonathan. They knew he wasn’t writing such a paper, none of Jonathan’s classes would assign such a topic, so they had to wonder where his interest was coming from.

“Jonathan, I think most nerds dream about being asked that question. So, if you would like me to sit on that couch and give you my doctoral thesis on every action movie that has been released in the last thirty years, my answer is yes. A million times, yes.”

“Count me in for that.” Collin put in, grinning.

“Count me out,” said Paige, with a look that said:
You can’t make it to school, but you have time for this crap?
Paige had mastered the art of speaking with facial expressions this morning.

Jonathan walked down one of the steep sloped streets that passed over the freeway connecting Capitol Hill to Downtown Seattle on his way to meet Grant. When he’d called, the man had answered his phone excitedly but soon seemed confused by Jonathan’s peculiar request.

“Jonathan!” Grant said. “You find that bastard?”

Jonathan had fudged the truth.

“Um no, nothing like that,” he’d said.

Technically Heyer had found me.

“Grant, actually I was hoping, and I’m not sure how to ask this, but I was wondering if you might teach me a thing or two about putting on some muscle?”

There had been a pause on the phone as Jonathan waited for Grant’s answer.

When he finally responded, it was as though he felt a responsibility to say yes but didn’t want to.

“Sure, I could help you bulk up,” he’d said. “When did you want to start?”

“As soon as you can,” Jonathan said. “Today, if possible.

Grant seemed hesitant. Jonathan almost asked him to forget it. The offering of the business card was just an unspoken politeness. Grant was just trying to impress Paige, and now he was putting him out by calling him on it.

Still, Grant had agreed to meet him at his gym downtown.

“You’ll need to get a membership, so I’d get there early,” he’d said.

It occurred to Jonathan then that he didn’t have a great deal of extra money to fund whatever plans he might make. He was going to need to pick up more shifts.

Damn alien tells me to get ready for a fight, he might have thought about what I had to work with.

He was missing school, he was changing his schedule; the reality of what it might take to survive was starting to take shape, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. How was he going to maintain a semblance of his life? College students scraping by on student loans and part-time jobs don’t have disposable income, and he was already so far behind. What would he tell people?

He’d put three years of his life into college, he’d invested too much of himself, he couldn’t just drop it. His mind rebelled at the notion. His freedom taken away, aliens and alternate worlds now a reality, it was hard to believe that the question of school could weigh so heavily on him. As if, should he find the means to escape it all tomorrow, he would go back to the life he knew? Yet he felt he had to get back to that life. It wasn’t just his freedom that would be taken if he didn’t, but who he was.

Until he freed himself of this mess, he had to find a way to put his real life on hold. The college had already given him the option of a grace quarter. He would have to take it, postpone attendance.

I might be dead at the end of the quarter.
Jonathan winced at the thought and got angry with himself.
Stop! There’s just no damn point thinking that way
.

When he turned the next corner he saw the gym. As he passed the front windows, he walked by a man leaning against the wall talking on his cell phone. His sheer size was intimidating. Jonathan figured the guy must have weighed 250 pounds and it was all muscle. He wondered if that was what he had come here to be and tried to imagine adding that much weight to his body. He couldn’t picture it. How long had it taken that man to become what he was?

He couldn’t help but question Heyer’s judgment as he thought this. If there was a guy like this working out at a gym a few blocks away, how the hell did Jonathan get picked to fight the Ferox? This guy looked like he’d been preparing to fight monsters his entire life, like he was perpetually built to be a warrior. What was the alien thinking, throwing someone like Jonathan into this situation?

Genetic and psychological compatibility,
he remembered.

“Really Carla!” the big man said, yelling into his cell phone. “You want to get your BMI back down to nineteen but you want to reschedule training?”

What’s a BMI?
Jonathan thought as he couldn’t avoid eavesdropping.

“Well, I’m already here waiting.”

It was the last part of the conversation he overheard as he entered the double doors into the facility.

The gym was alive with activity. The front desk was checking people in, handing out towels, answering phones. Everywhere he looked there was someone doing cardio on a treadmill or a StairMaster. High energy hip hop music was blaring over the sound of machines, even though everyone in the place seemed to be plugged into head phones. The floors were carpeted wall to wall with some type of rubber foam, the walls made up entirely of mirrors.

He could smell sweat. It wasn’t as bad as a locker room, but it was still hard to miss.

He talked to the girl at the counter briefly. She asked him to wait while she got a membership salesperson to come speak to him. This was nothing like what he remembered from the local gym in high school, even if he’d seldom actually gone in there. The walls near the front desk were lined with shelves and displays. The shelves were stocked with tubs and bags, the kind Jonathan had only seen in vitamin stores at the mall. He had no idea what any of the stuff was supposed to do.

Crap, will I need to know
?

He looked at the labels. He recognized some of the words from his classes, but had no idea what function they served as a supplement. What was nitric oxide and creatine? What was a BCAA? Every vial or tub looked expensive to his college student-sized wallet.

As he waited, the big guy from outside came in. He still looked pissed off. He stopped by the front desk to talk to the girl handing out the towels.

“I’m sick of training these wanna-be models,” he said, “they all want perfect bodies, then they ignore it when I tell them it’s 80% diet and they can’t blow off training. You know they’re gonna blame the trainer when they don’t get the results they want.”

The front counter girl nodded at him in agreement. She seemed only half interested though, like she heard the complaint frequently. The big man walked away from the counter, into the gym. Jonathan watched him go. He was so large people moved aside like they would for a semi-truck merging into their lane on the freeway.

He was growing more and more intimidated with just how much there might be to this whole working out plan when the account representative finally showed up. He took one look at Jonathan and something about him seemed to waiver, but he quickly put on his sales face. After thirty minutes of Jonathan explaining to the guy that all he could afford was the simplest of memberships, the guy stopped trying to sell him every service the gym offered and finally let him buy a membership.