Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (24 page)

“Who says no when a photographer wants to take their picture?” Paige asked, not really hiding that she liked the camera’s attention.

He saw immediately why Leah wanted the photo. There was something about the scene; it struck him enough to briefly distract him from his own concerns. Paige, clean except for the dirty garden gloves she’d rested on the picket fence, smiling while the sun went down behind her. It all captured her so well. The pink flower Leah had put into the picture was the final detail, the thing that completed it.

Leah hardly knew Paige, still she’d been able to see what the scene needed. He found himself impressed by the eye of the photographer, her quick insight, as he watched her taking the shots.

“I think she’s got you pegged,” Jonathan said.

“Maybe, you’ll let me take some shots of you sometime?” Leah asked.

When Jonathan came down the stairs, his hair was still wet from a shower. After he’d returned home, he’d gone for a run. At least it was exercise he was familiar with. His legs had felt heavy from the gym earlier. Now, he felt the night of missed sleep creeping up on him. It was probably for the best, he’d need to be exhausted to get to sleep.

Collin and Hayden were waiting for him expectantly in the living room. For a second he didn’t know what to make of it.

“It was difficult, we couldn’t think of a single time where you even mentioned a movie, but we know the best place to start,” Collin said, like he imagined he was about to teach a blind person how to see.

“Thanks!” Jonathan said, doubtful that they’d actually thought about it as much as they were letting on. “So then what are we watching?”

Hayden and Collin were both visibly excited.

You’d think they were about to tell me I’d won the lottery.

“Rocky!” Collin finally said.

Right!
Jonathan thought. Sylvester Stallone. It wasn’t as though he’d never heard of the film. It was a national phenomenon after all, though he admitted he’d never seen it, just clips and scenes here and there. Mostly things like Rocky at the top of stairs with his fists in the air. He knew it was about boxing. Then, Hayden added something unexpected.

“All of them!” Hayden said.

Jonathan frowned.

“How many of them are there?” Jonathan asked.

“Let’s see, there’s
Rocky
1, 2, 3, 4, then 6 is due out sometime next year,” Hayden said.

“What about part five?” Jonathan asked suspiciously, predicting he was being set up.

There was a pause. Hayden looked at Collin as though Jonathan had just acknowledged the existence of big foot.

“What?” Jonathan asked, playing along.

“Tibbs, you’ll come to find that there isn’t a consensus around whether or not certain films actually exist,” Collin said diplomatically.

“Part five,” Hayden said, shaking his head at Jonathan in disapproval.

“For instance,” Collin said, “Hayden, have you ever seen
Highlander 2
?”

“No such film,” Hayden replied straight faced.

“
Batman and Robin
,
Halloween
3,
Jaws
4?” Collin asked.

“Collin, are you having a stroke? It’s like you aren’t even speaking English right now,” Hayden said in mocked concern.

Collin pointed to Hayden, “You see my point.”

Jonathan was confused. Paige snickered from the kitchen table, she apparently had at least some idea what the two geeks were talking about.

Jonathan shrugged at her.

“Some movies are so bad, and screw up the stories so much, that nerds decide to ignore their existence so that it doesn’t taint the other films in the series,” she said.

“That’s correct, Tibbs,” Collin said.

“Okay, so we’re watching
Rocky
I then?” he asked, fairly sure he was naming a real movie.

When the exhaustion came, it overwhelmed him quickly, and Jonathan only made it through a quarter of the film before he gave in. It hadn’t been immediately clear what he was supposed to see in the story and he struggled to keep his eyes open more than he’d given the film his attention. Had it been otherwise, he would’ve let Collin and Hayden, who were still wide awake, begin explaining the film for him.

The promise of the blankness that unconsciousness would bring became too much to resist. It was all he could do to drag himself up the stairs before he fell asleep in the living room. When his body hit the bed he was out fast, the comfort of the mattress and sheets embracing him. It was relieving, to be so tired that thoughts outside of sleep ceased to carry any weight.

There would be those few sweet moments in the morning before he remembered what his life had become, where he’d just be Jonathan again, waking up in his bed like any other morning, not this frightened boy desperately trying to find his way to yet another new normal. It would be brief, but it would be there.

He had to sleep.

He didn’t have to rationalize it. He had to be able to get up and try again tomorrow. He had another shift to cover at the shop, and there was so much more, so much he didn’t yet have a clue where to begin. When he woke, he hoped his mind would do him the courtesy of forgetting reality as long as it could

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SATURDAY | JULY 02, 2005 | 05:45 AM

HE
was dreaming. He knew on some level, because his father was standing beside him; a logical impossibility that no amount of wishful thinking could change.

They were walking along an abandoned railroad track deep in the woods. Jonathan didn’t remember what had come before, but this was where they were now. It was summer, not many clouds in the sky, warm, but the shade of the trees made it comfortable.

If it weren’t for the tracks, he wouldn’t have known if anyone had ever been here. He wondered when the last person to come this way might have been. It seemed important, but there was no way to know. The rails were in disrepair, overgrown and rusted. Entire lengths of tracks and ties were missing in places. Maybe a few people, like Jonathan and his father, still used it as a trail, but it had been decades since anyone had used this track for its intended purpose.

His father wore his work uniform. He’d become a mechanic after leaving the army, and the blue pants and shirt were how Jonathan always saw him in his memory. The name tag on the front was a white circle with blue letters that read
Tibbs
. Douglas’ hands still had the black grime from car parts, the dirty rag hung out of his back pocket. The only thing that stuck out now was that Douglas was wearing hiking boots, light brown and in sharp contrast with the blue uniform. His father had left work and thrown them on just to take Jonathan on this hike.

He must have been about twelve; he still had to look up to meet his father’s eyes. They hadn’t spoken; both were enjoying the quiet walk along the track.

Breaking the peace, Jonathan saw a large shadow move quickly through the woods. It had been brief, soundless, at the edge of his vision. He quickly lost sight of it, but his skin prickled in warning. It had been the shadow of a beast, and it somehow seemed familiar, but it didn’t feel right. It shouldn’t have been there, hiding in these woods. It shouldn’t be there at all.

Jonathan looked back to his father, to see if he, too, was afraid. Douglas was looking down at his hand. In it he held a gold pocket watch, a gift from Jonathan’s grandfather, a family heirloom that would one day be passed onto Jonathan. He was simply checking the time.

“Jonathan,” Douglas said, “don’t worry about that just yet.”

“I’m afraid of it,” Jonathan replied.

“Can’t blame you for that, son,” Douglas smiled reassuringly. “But it shouldn’t bother us for a while. Try and put it out of your mind for now. The time will come for dealing with that.”

Jonathan moved closer to his father. Despite his words, it felt safer near him and after a time the shadow left his thoughts.

As they continued along the track they came to a tunnel in the side of a stone cliff. It was man-made and as abandoned as the railroad. It had taken hundreds of men years to forge this path through the cliffside. Work crews with dynamite, pick axes, and hammers; all that effort and still the passage had been forgotten.

His father took out a flashlight from his back pocket and nodded to Jonathan to proceed. It was dark on the inside, cold. Douglas kept the light on the rails lining the ground in front of them so they could both see where they were going. As they moved farther from the entrance, the light from outside the tunnel grew less and less. They had to walk slowly, to be careful where they placed their feet.

Without warning, the ground started to tremble. All around him Jonathan could hear pebbles shaking loose from the sides of the tunnel and running down the stone walls. He turned quickly, thinking they would run back toward the entrance. When he looked, all he saw was the outline of a man standing in the mouth of the tunnel. The man was hard to see with the light behind him. Jonathan couldn’t make out his features, but he didn’t have to. He knew by that ridiculous fedora who was behind them.

The shaking of the walls was becoming more violent. With jarring visibility he saw Heyer taking some steps into the cave. There was one last powerful swell of the ground and Jonathan stumbled to the rocky floor of the tunnel. He skinned his hands on gravel as he’d put them out to break his fall. The sting of raw flesh shot through them.

With a loud crash, thousands of pounds of stone closed in the entrance, and took the light with it. Jonathan couldn’t see if Heyer had made it inside safely. He didn’t know if the alien was now buried under stone, or if he could survive such a weight falling on him. For a moment, the earth’s rumbling persisted through the tunnel. When it finally stopped, the sound of the large boulders coming to rest ceased. Eventually the sound of the falling pebbles that had come with the onset of the quake dissipated and the passage became silent.

It was hard to breath with all the dust that the cave-in had put in the air. Jonathan’s hands ached. It brought a tear to his eyes. He felt his father’s hand on his back.

“Are you all right, Jonathan?”

He rolled over and turned his palms up. His father pointed the flashlight down on his hands and saw the nicks and cuts from the fall.

“It hurts,” Jonathan said, grimacing. He didn’t sob, but his eyes watered with more tears.

Douglas took Jonathan’s hands and looked them over closely to make sure the injuries were only skin deep. His hand looked like it belonged to a giant when it was next to Jonathan’s.

“Sorry, Son. It looks like it hurts,” he said, “but there’s nothing to be done for it, not in here. Right now, you’ll just have to take the pain.”

Jonathan looked back down at his hands and nodded.

His father turned the flashlight back to the entrance of the tunnel, surveying the wreckage. It didn’t take an engineer to know they weren’t digging their way out.

“Well,” he said, turning his flashlight in the other direction, into the dark, “sometimes, the only way out is further in.”

Jonathan looked up at him, his expression unsure.

“We’d always planned to come out the other side anyway. The only difference is, now we can’t turn back.”

“Maybe we should wait for help?” Jonathan asked.