Zero Sum
(Zero Sight Series, Book 2)
by
B. Justin Shier
Kindle Edition v.1
Zero Sum (Zero Sight Series, Book 2)
(www.zerosightseries.com)
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Justin Shier
(www.bjustinshier.com)
Kindle Edition v.1
ISBN 978-0-9835000-2-5
Editing by Jon Steller
Cover photography by Brian Justin Shier and Jon Steller
Cover design by Jordan Kimura
(www.jordankimuradesigns.com)
Elliot College map by Jared Shier
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this ebook and did not purchase it, please purchase your own legal copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
To James Cherry,
Who taught me to question the world.
To Kenn Kucan,
Who taught me to laugh at the world.
And to Gary Handley,
Who taught me to care for it.
Part I
THE UNBEARABLE ENNUI
OF CLOSE COMBAT TRAINING
Chapter 1
PIECE IT BACK TOGETHER
Six years ago…
“Where is he?”
“Flannigans.”
“I heard it the first time, mister. I’m asking where.”
“By the tower. Main and Ogden. And he’s clogging up the damn gutter. Get over here before he drowns.”
I looked up at the clock. It was only 2 AM. He was still supposed to be at work.
“Shit. Okay, just roll him on his belly. I don’t want him to—”
“Kid, I’m not touchin’ that psycho with anything short of a cattle prod. Do it yourself.”
“But—”
A click killed the line.
“Well then…” I muttered. I was sitting up in my bed, listening to the desert winds roaring outside. The plywood and plaster groaned as another rough gust tried their seams. The roof let out a rattle, and the house leaned back with a sigh. I heaved out one of my own. I was dog-tired, but there was no use in waiting. I pulled a baggy sweater over my PJs and forced my toes to the floor. The hall was pitch dark. I fumbled for the light. It sparked once before burning out.
Cursing, I used my bare toes to feel out the carpet as I went. My father worked the graveyard shift—or was supposed to, at least—so blackout curtains were blotting out all the light from the Strip. The curtains were designed to help him sleep during the day. They also made the place about as homey as the hideout from the Night of the Living Dead. (Although with the amount of ammo and beef jerky my dad had stashed around the house, we’d probably fair better.)
Drops of rain slapped against the pavement as I laced up my shoes. The steamy musk of wet sage filled my nostrils. Compared to the raging wind, the lame smattering of moisture seemed like a lazy afterthought. But the drizzle worried me more. Las Vegas is one giant funnel. Rainwater gathers pace as it races down the rocky mountainsides that surround the shallow desert valley. By the time the runoff reaches the city, it’s worked itself into a foaming freight train. The flash floods are strong enough to toss a truck around. That’s why anyone with half a brain gets to higher ground. Unfortunately, tonight I had to do it backwards. I was headed right to the center of the valley. Right to the base of that giant tower.
The Over the Top. The economy was tanking, but that beast was still growing taller. The scale of the tower was staggering. It looked like it was going to reach up into the sky and poke the moon in the eye. Truckloads of fresh gravel roared past our home to feed it. Half the construction workers in Vegas queued up outside its gates hoping for a shot at a day’s work. No one cared where all the money was coming from. No one asked if it was ever going to last. Folks said the Over the Top was gonna save our jobs. Folks said it was going to kill off the Slump. Folks were morons. No one wanted to come to Vegas because no one could afford the gas.
That’s why I was going to get the heck out of this town. I was going to go to college. I was going to make a name for myself, and I was going to live in a place where they had real grass. But to do that, I needed to ace everything from grade six to twelve. The competition for the Ivies was steep. You had to be on the top of your game from the start.
I grabbed the keys to my dad’s old Ford quad cab. Late night forays downtown to pick up drunken fathers didn’t tend to help an aspiring overachiever’s cumulative GPA, but neither did starving to death from wont of a breadwinner.
My dad’s old junker turned over on the third try. The sudden roar caught me off guard, and I dropped the clutch too hard. Gears shredded. The old work truck leapt off the driveway and dove into the cul-de-sac. I did my best to swerve, but caught our tin trashcan head-on. A heavy gust did the rest—a week’s worth of paper waste ended up in the trees. I let out a curse. The pickup’s lone headlight revealed only some of the Suburbageddon going down around me. Lawn furniture was sliding across the sidewalk. Mrs. Perry’s flock of neon pink flamingos had departed for warmer waters. My own handiwork had already populating the sagebrush three doors down. I huffed. More work for me in the morning—and I had a math test in five hours. I decided to multitask as I drove.
The square root of four is two.
The square root of sixteen is four.
The square root of two-fifty-six is sixteen.
The square root of Dieter’s life is…
I rested my head on the steering wheel. That one was easy.
Zero.
So far, sixth grade had been a major let down. My new school was bigger, but it had even fewer teachers. And there was all this online crud. They had these computer programs that were supposta teach us, but only ten of the seventy computers were approved under last year’s budget.
They told us that we should share.
Can you imagine a bunch of sixth graders sharing anything?
I spent most of my time in the library. There were still a few old textbooks left in the stacks...and most of them agreed with me that Pluto was still a planet.
The only thing that our school wasn’t in short supply of was bangers. A big recruitment drive was going on. (There were flyers out and everything.) The dealers loved pre-teens. They could only be jailed for a few months, and they got free training on the inside. All my friends were joining up. They worked as lookouts and hawkers. An eight ball was the most they were ever trusted with, but that’s still good for about thirty lines. Curious about the whole thing, I picked up a copy of the DEA’s Controlled Substances Handbook that was conveniently located in aisle nine of my library hideout. The handbook said that the United States consumes about eighty-five million eight balls per year. That works out to about twenty lines per person. I shook my head at that factoid. I was lucky enough to get twenty servings of protein per year.
Left turn.
Right turn.
An old man fighting with a drag queen.
Left turn.
Right turn.
A small chapel pumping out quickie marriages.
Left turn.
Green light.
Stop light.
Strip club.
Billy club.
Left turn.
Right turn.
Straight through the stop sign next to the burned out cop car.
Left turn.
Right turn.
Stop.
Stall.
Cursing.
Grinding.
One mile straightaway.
Main and Ogden, ahoy.
Not bad for my third time behind the wheel.
I leaned back and wiped the sweat from my brow.
Flannigans was where the man promised, and I spotted my dad’s brown Lincoln Town Car on the corner. One tire was flat. The front window was bashed in. And there was my only adult supervision, hair sopping up the gutter juice. One hand held a tire iron. The other, some Old Crow whiskey.
Classy.
I crash-parked our truck into the curb and hopped out of the cab. A man stood smoking a cigarette by the door to the bar. He was wearing all black, stood six-foot-six, and was stuck outside a shitty bar on a shittier November evening…he’d be a bad man to run into if you weren’t wearing Peter Parker’s uniform. Trying to stand tall, I adjusted the lie of my Spiderman PJs. I motioned from the giant lump of a man in the gutter to the diesel spewing quad cab that I had just driven illegally across all of North Las Vegas to pick up this bastard of a father that liked to drag his son out of bed at 2 AM on a school night, because rather than working hard like a decent human being, he preferred to pass out at bars that reeked of piss and belly squeezings.
“A little help?” I squeaked. (Puberty blows.)
The big man crossed his bulging black arms. Not a syllable left his lips.
Not a big fan of the Queen’s English…
I waved twenty bucks.
With a smirk, the old bruiser snuffed his smoke.
Se habla dinero, though.
Grabbing my dad by the heels, we dragged him out of the muck. I tried to ignore the unspeakable foulness that was permeating my dad’s jacket. Some of it looked homemade. Others aspects appeared to be donations.
“He get jumped?” I asked.
“Hell no. Some bikers rolled in while he was takin’ a piss. One of ‘em sat on his stool…”
“Oh.”
“Cleared ‘em all out. Left on his own accord afterwards. But then he beat his own car to death…” The man’s brow settled into a puzzled frown. “Why’d he go and do that, you figure?”
“Maybe it looked at him funny…what finally got him?”
“Tripped his own damn self on the slick. Cracked his head good.”
I nodded. Whenever it rains in Vegas, a years worth of the black muck rises like a horde of slippery zombies from the earth. It’s the black ice of the desert.
With all the oil on the ground, the two of us were slipping around a bit too. Getting under both my dad’s shoulders, we managed to get him into the back of the quad cab. The man is built like a sack of boulders. We had to bend up his thick legs before we could get the door shut. Finished, I planted this week’s lunch money in the bouncer’s palm and slammed the door shut.
The bouncer gave the twenty a loving rub between his fingers before adding it to his slender bill roll.
“Your old man brawl in the way back when?”
“No idea,” My dad never talked about the past. Heck, my dad didn’t like to talk about much of anything other than high taxes and scum government. I had no trouble picturing him as a boxer, but I doubted he’d ever show up for practice.
My dad’s stink made me wish that the power windows still worked, but at least he wasn’t yelling. The ride out of the valley proved to be uneventful, and I started to plan my exit as the light poles slid by. Ideally, I would leave the drunk bastard in the driveway and sneak up to my room. I didn’t want to be around for his sobering. I’d make do with some toast for lunch. Now wasn’t the time to ask him for a refund on my allowance. I rubbed at that part of the face where one’s jaw meets one’s skull. Yep, a nice thick wall between him and me would do just fine…
“Damn whore.”
My stomach turned upside down at those words. They declared that Kurtz Resnick, my father, my caretaker, and my sole male role model, had awoken. I turned up the radio. John Denver. John Denver might soothe him.
“Left me to raise this freak.”
Or not.
“You’re one to talk,” I grumbled. I was so tired that the thought of sleep made my mouth water.
Kurtz gave my seat a sharp kick.
The blow knocked me forward, and we almost landed in a ditch. I corrected course just in time and managed to keep the truck on the pavement.
“Dude, this ‘freak’ is driving your drunk ass home. Would you mind sitting still for the ride?”
“Home?” He fired off a bitter laugh. “There’s no home for the likes of us.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “There sure as hell won’t be if you keep this up.”
“What?” He tried to sit up, but only managed to slump over on to his side.
“We’re gonna lose the house if you get fired. We’ll be out on the streets. Is that what you want? Do you want us to starve to death?” The road darkened at the turn. Our housing development had seen better days. The HOA couldn’t afford to keep the streetlights on, and half the homes were deserted, long ago stripped of their copper. My dad would never be able to sell the place…but it was a roof over our heads and that mattered.
I turned around to glare at him, but he was already back to snoring.
“You’re so worthless. No wonder she left you.”
My words were met by silence.
Tiny red and yellow sparkles filled the perimeter of my vision.
Shit. A thick lump grew in the back of my throat. I’d been an idiot. I’d been a colossal idiot.
“Dad?”
Silence.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
I tired to deny it but the flashes of red sparks were getting stronger.
Don’t bait bears. Don’t ever bait bears.
He wouldn’t do anything until we stopped. He’d wait until he could drag me inside.
I didn’t give him the chance.
Scared out of my mind, I swung the wheel and we hopped the curb. I didn’t even wait for the truck to stop rolling. I popped out of the truck like a bottle rocket. No use running to the neighbors. They’d shuttered their blinds the last time I’d tried that. I could only hope that the drink would get the better of him. That he might trip and fall before he caught me.
The sound of his heels matched mine on the driveway, and the shimmers of light transitioned to a firm red beam as I struggled to open our front door. That meant his thoughts had changed to actions. My key found the lock in time, and I dodged the first blow, bursting through the door and down into a forward roll. I felt his hand catch my canvas jacket. I arched my shoulders and let him have it. Knocking over an old floor lamp, I took the living room couch on the fly. I heard him get tangled up in the cord behind me. He let out a curse as he fell. I didn’t dare gloat. I ran for the stairs at a full gallop.
I wouldn’t have made it without the aid of my Sight. I didn’t know what the lights were; I only knew that they could help me. My Sight only seemed to show up when I really needed it. I had no idea how to turn it on or control it, but I sure was thankful when it decided to fire up. The lights told me where the punches would come from. They told me when I should dodge. I’d discovered the skill a few years earlier, in the middle of one of my father’s constant beatings. But my Sight could only get me so far...
My father’s enormous gait made up for his stumble. He made a second grab for me as I reached the stairs. I extended my lunge to avoid his fingers—and missed the landing by an inch. My chin slammed into the wood instead. The sweet tang of blood filled my mouth. I went to scoot forward, but he had me by the heel.
“Curse you, Thetis,” I groaned. I didn’t try to fight anymore. There w
as nothing I could do to stop him.
Always magnanimous in victory, he let my chin catch every stair. I was enjoying the ride across the carpet until the door to the den clocked me in the head. (He always preferred to do this business in the den. Why was one of life’s many mysteries.) The muscles of my back grew taught with anticipation. The colors of my Sight were swirling like little birdies…and I fought off the urge to laugh.
I once thought the lights were angels, sent from Heaven to protect me.
But there were no angels for Dieter Resnick.
I once hoped a hero would come and save me.
But heroes live in stories.
I once sent a letter to Santa asking for my mother back.
But nothing ever came down our chimney.
I once walked the ten miles to church and spent the whole day in prayer.
But when he finally found me he just hurt me worse.
I listened as my father slid off his belt. Listened as he doubled it over. This was my life. This was my reality. There was no running from his savagery. No hiding from the pain. But I didn’t have to let it break me. I didn’t have to let it chain me. I was smart. Really smart. The teachers all knew it. The students all knew it. Even my bastard father knew it. And that gave me hope. I could become the greatest student this town had ever heard of. I could claw out of here with my bare will. And as I listened to the leather tighten, I decided that was exactly what I would do. Nothing and no one would ever stop me. Giving up had been struck from the menu. I looked up at the worn brown leather and smiled. I was getting the fuck out of here—and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop me.
“Anything to say for yourself?” he growled, phlegm rustling about in his throat.
It occurred to me that this was nothing but a chore for him. Like paying taxes. Like mowing the lawn. And so it could be with me…nothing but another chore. The clarity of that thought struck me dumb. It was like I’d been handed a loaded gun.
Zero Sum (Zero Sight Series, Book 2) Page 1