She raised her face to his. “Scott?”
“Yeah?”
She’d explain the kiss with Tyler to him soon, she told herself, just not tonight.
“Thanks for being you.”
8
The Barn
Thursday, September 26
8:46 p.m.
The tremors that began in Jesse’s arms shuddered to his shoulders and set his man breasts quaking like giant molds of gelatin. Sweat streamed into the pitted depressions of his eye sockets. He squinted against the burn, but it wasn’t just in his eyes. His entire torso was on fire.
And he was losing.
Grunting, he arched his back and splayed his white-knuckled fingers over the black padding as wide as he could. The hydraulic-powered compressor continued to inch down toward his nose.
“My frickin’ elbows are gonna snap!” he bellowed.
“Your problem, not mine,” Gus said. “Told you I was going to set the machine and walk away. In fact, I’m filing my nails as we speak. It’s just you and the Beast, my friend. Put up time.”
Asshole.
Jesse crossed his stinging eyes to the black padding, which less than a minute earlier had been at arms’ length above him. He’d been able to stall it here and there but not reverse its relentless downward drive. The trembling in his arms grew into the flapping of an epileptic.
The compressor lurched down another inch.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Gus said, pausing to blow on his fingers. “There’s still enough space to push yourself out, right? But is that what you really want? You know your old man’s itching to get you into that garage of his. Quit on the Champions, and that’s exactly where you’ll end up. Hauling cars around the shop for him, stinking of used motor oil.”
Something tremored from Jesse’s core. Not fatigue this time. Desperation. He stamped a foot.
“Argghhh!”
He felt his straining face turn beet-red as his cry thinned to a gargling moan. But his arms were steadying, his elbows straightening. Jesse gave a final heave. The padding relaxed against his outstretched arms. The hydraulic system wound down.
Jesse rolled from beneath the unit and sat up. Great breaths thundered from his torso, his heart bump-booming in his chest. He looked back at the sweat-soaked machine. He’d done it. He’d tamed the Beast.
A towel landed on his head.
“Congratulations,” Gus said. “That was two tons you just pressed.”
Jesse took the towel and mopped a freshet of perspiration from his face. “Four-thousand pounds?”
He’d pivoted that ten ton blast door at the nuclear launch facility a month earlier, but pivoting wasn’t pressing, and he’d had Janis’s help then. He checked the machine’s setting.
“Yeah, wanted to surprise you,” Gus said. A grin grew inside his trainer’s salt-and-pepper goatee. “Tell you the truth, you surprised me, too. That was the Beast’s limit—two tons of compressive force. We’re gonna have to call the gear heads in to see what else they can throw at you.”
Jesse’s gaze roamed the training room. Hulking stations with electronic equipment for every motion and muscle in his body, and in less than three months he’d maxed out nearly all of them.
“Not a bad problem to have,” Gus said, punching his shoulder. “Well, a problem for the bad guys, maybe…”
Jesse picked up the gallon jug of cold water at his feet, drank half of it down, and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. A rumbling burp shook his lips. “What’s next?” he asked, rising to his feet.
“Creed’s in speed and agility. We’ll switch you two out, bring him in for strength—if you can call it that in his case.”
Jesse finished off the water.
“And, hey, listen,” Gus said, peering up at him. “I hope you didn’t mind me bringing up your old man. I saw you struggling and just wanted to get your juices flowing. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it worked.”
“He still talking about pulling me?”
“You let us worry about him. I just want you to keep doing what you’re doing. And you know what? In about six months, you’re gonna be eighteen. Legally, you’ll no longer need that bastard’s consent.”
Jesse lumbered toward the speed and agility room, the desperation he’d felt beneath the force of the Beast creeping back into his gut, turning it queasy. Gus could reassure Jesse all he wanted, but he didn’t know Jesse’s old man. Six months was a hell of a long time under his roof.
The next morning
7:10 a.m.
“Jess!”
His father was standing in the doorway at the top of the garage steps in a torn undershirt and striped boxers, an angry redness inching beneath his receding crew cut.
“What?”
His father rattled a plunger overhead. “Done clogged the damn toilet again is what. Now get inside and unclog ’er.”
Jesse took a final look at his Chevelle in the driveway—so close—then heaved his weight around and plodded back the way he’d come, wending a path through the car-part-littered garage. He ducked his head to avoid the motor for the garage door. His father squinted and sucked on his teeth. Six months ago, Jesse could have expected his father to beat him with the plunger before throwing it at him. Now his father only pushed it into his hand.
“And turn the fart fan on while you’re in there,” he snarled. “Don’t know how many times I’ve gotta tell you.”
Jesse squeezed into the hall bathroom. Gray water hovered near the rim of the toilet bowl. Paper stop-up. At least that’s what he told himself. Jesse lowered the plunger to the drain and pushed. Something behind the unit cracked. Water began gushing out. Within seconds, it was flooding around his Army boots. He shuffled backward, nearly colliding into his father.
“Smells like a damned garbage truck offloaded in he—” He stopped. “Well now what the hell you gone and done?”
“Plunged too hard,” Jesse said.
“Yeah. You plunged too hard.” His father squinted up at him, the white hairs on his cheeks bristling. He lowered his shoulder and threw his compact weight into Jesse’s side. Jesse didn’t budge. He hardly felt him.
“Would you get outta my way so I can shut the damn water?”
Jesse stepped to one side. His father splashed into the bathroom in his bare feet and ducked behind the toilet. Thick gray hairs sprouted from his low back. As Jesse watched him work, he knew why the old man had stopped whaling on him. He couldn’t hurt him anymore.
Jesse’s father grunted, and the water inside the tank stopped hissing. He stood from behind the toilet.
“You know how many cars I got waiting for me at the garage?” He dried his palms on the sides of his threadbare boxers. “But that ain’t gonna happen, is it? ’Cause I gotta stay home and fix another of your fat messes.”
“We can hire a plumber,” Jesse said. “I’m earning money now.”
“Yeah. You’re earning money now. Come talk to me when you’re earning money a year from now.” His father stalked to the hall closet and returned with a sponge mop. “You’ve messed up every opportunity ever given you, I don’t expect this Champions business to go any different.”
“You talked to Gus lately?”
“I don’t need to talk to Gus,” his father spat, pushing the mop over the hilly linoleum. Water sloshed and splashed over the loose baseboard. “I’ve got seventeen damn years of experience with you to go by.”
Jesse turned to leave.
“You know, I’ve still got half a mind to pull you from that program.”
Jesse stopped.
“That’s right. Pull you from school, too. I only went along with this Champions business ’cause it’s what your mamma wanted. Damn near yanked her hair out over it. But I don’t trust the government any farther than I could throw their fifty-thousand-page tax code. Never have.”
“I signed a contract,” Jesse said. “A deal’s a deal.”
“Yeah. You signed a contract. I signed a contract, too.�
� With arms that were beginning to waste and sag above the elbows, he squeezed gray water from the mop into the sink. “It was called your birth certificate. You know what that makes me? Your goddamned father. And no fruity government program’s gonna tell me the hell otherwise. If I need you at the garage, then that’s where you’re gonna end up. Ain’t no two damned ways about it.”
He rounded on Jesse, his peeled-back lips daring defiance.
“They wouldn’t let us live here anymore,” Jesse pointed out. “They’d send us away.”
“They’d send us away.” His father’s voice sizzled with spite. “I’d like to see ’em try. Sons of bitches never dealt with a Hoag. Anyone of ’em sets a finger on me, my family, or my house, and they ain’t gonna live to brag about it.”
Jesse tried to imagine a future as this man’s employee, and a sensation like eternal emptiness opened in his vast belly. He began backing away. “Sorry about the toilet,” he mumbled.
Outside, he watched his damp boots scuff down the driveway. Birds chirped and called from the oak canopy overhead. When he raised his face to his car, he noticed the card. Like the last one, its transparency rendered it nearly invisible. Now Jesse understood that to be the point. He glanced around before freeing it from behind his windshield wiper.
The same tiny ten-digit phone number stared up at him.
He heard Director Kilmer’s voice from the other night. Let me back up. Has anyone already tried to contact you?
An old station wagon rattled past. Jesse looked up in time to glimpse a dark face and a row of smiling teeth. The name Geech crossed his mind, but that was all. He was late for school, and he couldn’t afford the principal’s office placing another call to the house. He had to stay in his father’s good graces—or at least out of his bad ones—until he was a legal adult. Otherwise, he was done as a Champion.
Dropping the card into his pocket, he squeezed behind the wheel of the Chevelle and rocketed from the driveway.
9
Thirteenth Street High Library
7:20 a.m.
“I would’ve grabbed one for you Scott-o,” Wayne said, holding out the front of a blinding yellow T-shirt that proclaimed ‘Champion!’ in digital font, “but these are only given to those who successfully complete the FORTRAN challenge. And we conquered said challenge in eight hours, forty-two minutes—a mere eighteen minutes shy of the camp record. Isn’t that right, men?”
Craig and Chun, in matching yellow shirts, nodded dutifully and joined Wayne and Scott at the table in the back of the library.
Scott was familiar with the FORTRAN challenge. It was the culmination of the computer camp his three friends had attended in Atlanta that summer and had to do with hacking a supercomputer using bit manipulation. With his helmet, Scott would have hacked it in eighteen seconds.
“Wow,” he replied, anxious to start their meeting.
“Who knows?” Wayne stroked his threadbare mustache. “Maybe we’ll feel inclined to throw you some informational crumbs. That way your summer won’t have been a total loss.”
Before Scott could prevent it, a single, short laugh burst from his lungs.
Wayne’s eyes shrank to points, his high-and-mighty grin withering. “What’s so funny?”
The part of Scott’s psyche that still saw Wayne as a competitor was burning to tell him everything: being selected by a super secret organization, training with Goblin, preventing a catastrophic nuclear strike, and, at summer’s end, being inducted to become a real Champion—not a generic moniker some camp organizer slapped onto a Pic 'n Save shirt.
Scott sighed. Even if he could brag on himself, he knew all it would earn him was Wayne’s hissing contempt and another round of banishment. “Nothing,” he muttered. “I just feel like I’m falling behind you guys.”
“Way behind,” Wayne assured him, the blooms of redness slipping from his cheeks.
“It’s actually why I asked you to meet me here this morning. I, ah, I need your help with something.”
Wayne folded his smallish fingers on the table. “We’re listening.”
Scott peered around to make sure they were alone. In the room behind them, someone fussed with the Ditto machine. “Well, it has to do with my yardman, Mr. Shine. You guys remember him? He’s been working for our family for the past seven, eight years. The thing is, I don’t know anything about him. None of my family does, really.”
“And you’re afraid that, what, he’s going to come in while you’re asleep and mow your hair?” Wayne’s remark sent Craig and Chun into spasms of laughter, Craig’s own hair billowing like a giant blond cloud.
Scott’s neck stiffened. It occurred to him that no matter how much he’d matured—or thought he had—he could always count on his old friends to drag him back into adolescence.
“Maybe he’ll prune your dad’s nose hairs while he’s at it,” Chun put in.
“All right, all right.” Scott held up his hands. “I can see you’re not up to the job. One that would have paid, I might add.”
Chun’s bowl cut stopped shuddering. Craig’s face fell slack.
“How much?” Wayne asked suspiciously.
“Twenty apiece.”
“Forty,” Wayne countered. “Fifty percent up front.”
Scott affected like he was on the fence, eyes squinting at the asbestos ceiling. “All right,” he said after a moment. He’d been prepared to go as high as fifty dollars each, which really didn’t feel like much, considering the income he was earning as a Champion. But with Wayne you always had to start low.
“And what is it you need?” Wayne asked.
“Information. As much as you can scrape together. Where he’s from, where he lives, whether he’s married, has family, past work, any references he might have used to get the custodial job at school…”
“A dossier, in other words,” Wayne said in a tired voice. “Do we get to do surveillance at least?”
“No,” Scott warned. If Mr. Shine had picked up on Janis’s attempt to probe him that first day of school, there was no way these three, who possessed the subtlety of the original Stooges, were going to escape the man’s detection. “No surveillance. Don’t even look at him. Strictly background.”
Wayne sighed.
Scott took out his wallet, removed three twenties, and slid one apiece toward each of them. But before Craig and Chun could claim theirs, Wayne’s hand darted out and snatched the entire down payment.
“You men will be working for me,” he asserted, pushing the folded-over bills into the front pocket of his orange shorts. “And I pay on delivery—after taking my twenty-percent commission, of course.”
Craig and Chun looked at one another and shrugged.
“How soon can you get me the dossier?” Scott asked.
“If my men quit crapping around on that new Gauntlet game in the mall, we can have it to you inside of two weeks.”
Scott nodded. He could have gathered the information within hours, but it was too great a risk. The Program, which continued to keep close tabs on them, would want to know why he was interested in Mr. Shine. Then they would become interested in him, especially in their heightened state of paranoia. When it was all said and done, Scott would be jeopardizing the livelihood of someone who might very well have nothing to hide.
Better to outsource the job to Wayne and company.
“And in case you’ve forgotten,” Wayne was saying, “you still owe me for a smashed tube laser.”
“Huh? Oh, that.” His original helmet, the one he’d built with Wayne’s science fair project, had been smashed to pieces in April, courtesy of Agent Steel’s rifle butt. “I guess you’ve got some more comic books coming your way. Will my Fantastic Fours do?”
“Sure. And all your Iron Man and Daredevils.” Wayne chortled as he pushed himself from the table and slung his pack over a narrow shoulder. “I guess that’s the price you pay for pretending to be a superhero.”
Scott stared as they disappeared beyond the circulation desk in the
ir matching shirts. Does it really matter what Wayne thinks? he thought, massaging fresh tension from his neck. You know the truth. You were just commended by the President of the United States, for chrissake.
“If you ask me, it’s too early in the morning to be looking so serious,” someone said from beside him. “Sun’s hardly even up.”
Scott jerked toward the familiar voice. The man was standing in front of the open door whose sign read FACULTY ONLY, wiping his hands with a white rag stained purple with ink. Scott’s brain went into math mode, marking the distance between the table and the room Mr. Shine had just emerged from, recalling the volume of their voices, gauging the noise resistance of the wall and door, trying to determine whether he could have overheard their conversation.
Of course, none of that matters if the man’s a mind reader.
To shield his panicked thoughts, Scott began reciting the digits of pi in his mind. His gaze drifted from the man’s hands to his dark, sun-weathered face and row of neat white teeth. He almost forgot to say hello.
In the quiet of the library, the man’s crackling laughter sounded like an explosion. “What say you, young blood?” He limped forward. “I don’t know that I’ve seen you all summer.”
Scott forced a chuckle. “Yeah. Guess I was catching up on my sleep.”
…nine, two, six, five…
“That where you grew them muscles?” Mr. Shine’s twinkling eyes studied Scott’s arms. Scott fought an impulse to hide them behind his back. “Sound like the kind of sleep I need.”
Rubbing his wrist, Scott laughed weakly. “Well, better than coming back in another cast, right?”
He fumbled the digits and started over: one, four, one, five, nine…
“You speaking the truth there,” Mr. Shine said, nodding sagely. He studied his fingernails, picked at the corner of one with the rag, and then slung the rag over his shoulder.
“Been here long?” Scott asked.
“Only since six thirty this morning. That ol’ mimeograph was eatin’ up the teachers’ originals, smearing pigment every which way. School called me, frantic, asking if I knew anything about that kind of repair work.”
XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop Page 6