The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage

by Selznick, Matthew Wayne

  “Laugh if you want,” I said. “If you know about me, you know what I can do.”

  He laughed again. “Nick, the thing is, you don’t know what I can do. Because we’ve never met. So maybe you should just get back in your little fagmobile and lay off, yeah?” He lowered his head and raised his eyebrows. “Hell, come to think of it, you don’t want to tell me why you bothered with your lame Simon & Simon routine, I’m outta here.” He turned back to his car. “Later!”

  “Stop,” I said.

  He turned around. “Are you trying to tell me what to do? Seriously?”

  “If you leave, I go to the police next.”

  “Fuck, go, then, man. Do as thou wilt.” He smiled slightly and shook his head. “This is boring.”

  If he left…if he got in his car and drove away…I’d be right back where I was when I first saw him. If he left, that’d be one more asshole in the world, getting away with shit they should suffer for. Getting away with hurting people. With fucking with our lives.

  Right then, this guy was Brenhurst and everyone at Tyndale Labs. Everyone at PrenticeCambrian. Every asshole who’d hassled me in school. I couldn’t do a damn thing about them.

  But this guy. Eric Finn was right here, right in front of me.

  The idea of him leaving, of him thinking there wasn’t a damn fucking important reason I’d called him out, of him thinking this was just some teenaged prank…

  That was no way to make justice. No way. He had to stay.

  I said, “Lina Porter.”

  He stopped. Our eyes met. His lips twitched.

  “Ancient history.”

  “Not how I see it,” I said. “It’s unfinished business.”

  He feigned confusion. “What is?”

  “What you did to her.”

  He tilted his head and did smile then. His eyes narrowed. “I think maybe you don’t have your story straight, buddy. I didn’t do anything to her.”

  I should have expected him to deny it, but hearing it come out of his mouth pissed me off. I stepped toward him, bent slightly at the waist, my arms out from my sides.

  “You fucking tried to rape her, you piece of shit!”

  He didn’t back away when I advanced. His scent, under a mask of engine grease and deodorant, was as relaxed as his body language.

  He looked to the sky, grinning. “Is that what she told you? Really?”

  “Not just her,” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” he said easily. “They’d stick together, that tribe. Tight little group. Everybody knows each other. Really well.” He leered. “You probably know how it is if you know Lina.”

  He was dancing around it. That was worse than just flat-out admitting it.

  “You know what you did.”

  I took another step toward him. We were about ten feet apart now. I could be at his throat in an easy leap.

  My fingers clenched.

  He shifted a little, so his side faced me. “Nick, my boy, you’re all worked up over nothing.” His voice was low. If he was trying to sound dangerous to me…well, he really didn’t have any idea who I was after all.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He licked his lips and nodded. “I get it. I do. You’re the boyfriend, right? She’s not going with that Meunetti dude anymore?” He laughed again. “Jesus. That guy has some bad hair, but she picked you? She’s made some seriously bad choices since…well, you know…”

  I didn’t know I was going to leap.

  Nails first, teeth bared, growling, that’s what I did.

  He slipped to the side, and I flew past to land with my feet sinking into the gravel. I whirled around, half-expecting him to be right there, but other than getting out of my way, he hadn’t moved.

  “This is going to be an interesting experience,” he said. “I’m not bored anymore.”

  Jason said, “You’re gonna get ‘interesting,’ all right, asshole.”

  Finn looked at Jason. “Hey, you know what? I forgot you were here.”

  “Jason,” I said, “I’m good.”

  “I got your back, dude.”

  Finn said, “Jason, ‘dude,’ you really better listen to your freak boyfriend.” He said to me, “You’re a, whatever you are, and that’s cool. I think you Sovereigns are great. But you do not want to fuck with me, Nick. Okay?”

  “You tried to rape my girlfriend, asshole”

  Finn adopted some sort of martial arts pose. "’Rape,’ ‘tried’…all a matter of interpretation, Nick. One version of the truth. Who was there? Were you?”

  Why was he so fucking calm? I couldn’t take it. He acted like he held all the cards, like he had the power, but he was just a fucking Norm, just a human. He didn’t have shit.

  “I’m gonna fucking kick your ass.”

  “I guess you think you have to try,” he said. “C’mon, then.” He waved his hand at me like he was fucking Bruce Lee or something. “C’mon!”

  This wasn’t like fighting Brenhurst’s augmented agents at the cabin, or even like my brief scrap with Byron Teslowski. For the first time, I wanted it. I wanted to get in with him, feel his skin parting under my fingernails… I wanted him bleeding, and scared, and damn fucking sorry he’d ever even looked at my girl.

  I leapt again.

  Again, he slipped to the side.

  My feet hit the ground earlier this time, though, and my sensorium—the collective impressions of my hearing, my sense of smell, and my hypersensitive vision—placed him behind me and to my right, so I lashed out behind me, pivoting in the gravel as I did.

  He grabbed my wrist and used my own momentum to put me off balance. While I was still scrambling, he punched me in the ribs, fast and hard.

  It hurt, but it was more the shock of the contact that freaked me out. He wasn’t fast in the way Byron Teslowski had turned out to be that painful day we figured out he was a Sovereign, but Finn was fucking fast for a human.

  I found my feet and swiped at him. He knocked my arms away, but I saw him flinch at the contact. Fucking right, asshole. I’m strong.

  Strong and stupid. Before I could get my guard up, he punched me in the stomach, probably as hard as he could. It hurt, a lot, a kind of stinging that spread into a sickening ache as the impact traveled through my abdomen muscles.

  I backed off a couple of steps.

  “I warned you, Nick,” Finn said. “You’re gonna get hurt for real if you don’t stand down. Right now.”

  I was having a little trouble getting enough air in my lungs. “You’ll…get tired…”

  “Not soon enough,” he said. “I’m not kidding. I know how to fight. You, you’re fast and strong, but I’m here to tell you: none of that makes a difference. You’re going to get the shit kicked out of you, and all because your girlfriend made up a little story, got your hackles up.”

  “You’re a fucking liar!”

  He shook his head. “You didn’t know her, man. She wanted to try everything.” He showed his teeth. “Such a little rebel child. Anything to piss off her daddy. "

  Something, not words, came out of my throat. I dove for him again. This time he tried to kick me, but fuck if he wasn’t right about this: I am fast.

  Faster than he thought. I was inside of the arc of his kick before he could do anything about it, and just like that, he was down, and I was on him.

  He tried to hold on to me, in a clinch, or whatever the wrestlers call it. He was right about my strength, too. Yeah, he was taller and older and maybe even heavier than me, but my muscles are simply not the same as his, or yours. They just work better.

  I twisted out of his grip and pretty much by luck avoided having my balls mashed by his leg. He started to punch at my ribs and kidneys, but he didn’t have a lot of room to get anything good in.

  He kept moving his head back and forth. I slapped him across the face. I drew blood, three dark lines right across his cheek.

  His eyes squeezed tight, and his sweat broadcast alarm when the pain hit him, then he opened his eyes and go
t serious. He tried to head-butt me, just like in the movies, but only succeeded in kind of brushing against my face with his cheek when I moved.

  He had stubble on his face. Feeling it scrape against my skin was repulsive. I suddenly hated that I was so close to him, in such close contact. Without deliberate thought, I drew back.

  He took advantage of the space to kick out with more desperation than control, and that gave him the chance he needed to twist out from under me.

  Where was he going to go? Nowhere. But I still didn’t want him to get back on his feet or have a chance to get control of himself.

  I caught him on the back of the neck, right along his ducktail. My fingers slipped in greasy hair product. I tightened my grip. Blood slid down his neck from where my nails broke the skin.

  I heard Jason yell, “Punch him, Nate. Punch him!”

  He didn’t sound like he was urging me on. He sounded worried.

  I got it. If I kept using my nails, I could do some real damage. Dangerous stuff. His jugular vein was millimeters away from my thumb.

  I rolled him over and punched him in the stomach as hard as I could. His eyes bulged. A rush of breath came from his gaping mouth, along with a spray of spit. He tried to curl up.

  I fucking pummeled that fucker. His arms, his face, his head, whatever. Wherever my fists ended up, I didn’t care. It was all pain. It was all justice.

  Eric Finn was getting what he deserved.

  I didn’t see him. Not like you’re seeing these words. I was running on all cylinders then, my whole sensorium driven by the slippery, sharp heat of blood. The sound of flesh on flesh. The stomach-turning crunch of cartilage. Of bone. The spray of saliva. The breath. The tears.

  If I’d been more in my own head, Jason wouldn’t have been able to pull me back. He yanked on my shoulder, and we both tumbled. I growled, crazy, and made a sloppy, blind grab for him, but Jason either got lucky or had good instincts because he had scrambled away.

  “Dude, enough!”

  The red haze cleared from my eyes a little. I wiped the sleeve of my hoodie across my face and that took care of the rest of it. My sleeve was wet.

  My hands throbbed. Some of the blood there was from my knuckles.

  “Enough,” Jason said again. “Fuck!”

  I held my hand out, nodded. I got to my feet, swayed, took a step, got steady.

  Eric Finn was fucked.

  He was curled up, fetal, shaking. The three cuts on his face had split open where I’d hit him again and again. Those were scars he would wear for a long time.

  His lips…his eyes… You’ve heard the phrase, “a bloody pulp.” Right? It’s like a cliché.

  I made that happen.

  To a person.

  On purpose.

  I gagged. My gorge rose, and I forced it down, hot and sick. I was breathing shallow and fast. Something like a groan or a sob came out of my mouth. Snot ran onto my upper lip, warm and slick on my tongue.

  “We gotta go,” Jason said. “We gotta go. Is he…fuck!”

  I walked over to Finn, who was still curled tight on his side. The eye I could see was nearly swollen shut, but I could feel him looking at me.

  He put words together. His lips were fucked up, and I had to have broken some of his teeth, but I think I heard him right.

  What he said was, “Thank you.”

  What he said next was, “I gave her what she wanted.”

  From The Journal Of Nate Charters – Twelve

  I got into the car. Jason got us out of there.

  He drove us back toward El Toro. I sat in the passenger seat and shook.

  My hands hurt. My stomach felt like it was gnawing on my other organs with a slow grind of acidic teeth. There were a couple of Slim Jims left, but the thought of eating anything, no matter how much my spent metabolism told me I needed it, made me dizzy with nausea.

  Jason pulled into a gas station, near a pay phone. He opened the door and turned to me before he got out. “Don’t…don’t move, man. Don’t. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  The fluorescent lights of the gas station were so bright. I closed my eyes against the glare, but that wasn’t good: a movie of red and black and heat and pain played against the inside of my eyelids. I couldn’t stand it.

  I settled for just keeping my head down and staring at the floor of the car.

  There were specks of blood on my shoes.

  I heard Jason drop coins into the phone and press three buttons. Breathlessly, he anonymously called in a badly beaten man in the festival parking lot on Laguna Canyon Road, then hung up. I heard his coins falling into the coin-return slot, since you didn’t have to pay to call 911, but he didn’t seem to care. He got back in the car and put us back on the road.

  “Someone will get him,” he said. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Good.” The sound of my voice seemed very, very far away from my ears. That was crazy. I had really, really good ears. Right now, they felt like conch shells were strapped to the sides of my head. “Good.”

  Jason hunched forward and hovered over the steering wheel while he drove. He kept his eyes on the road. “Man. I knew about it, but…fuck, Nate.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you were gonna…”

  “I didn’t either,” I said. The roaring was starting to quiet down some. “I swear. I was just gonna freak him out. I didn’t know we were gonna fight. Not like that.”

  “He’s more badass than we thought he’d be,” Jason said, “not that it did him any fucking good.” His voice didn’t have any of the enthusiasm he’d expressed on the drive out. “What happened to you, man?”

  “He…I just…”

  I didn’t know.

  “I don’t know.”

  I felt like I didn’t know much of anything, really. Situation normal for the boy freak.

  Why had Finn seemed so…guiltless?

  Jason took his eyes off the road long enough to look quickly at me. His face was pale beneath his teen beard. “Jesus fuck, look at you. You’re a fuckin’ mess, dude. How’re you gonna get past your mom?”

  “Garage door, right to my room, or right to the shower. Do it all the time.”

  What did Finn mean, what he said, right before I left him back there? How could he even think of fucking with me, when I’d just kicked the shit out him? Fuck, I was pretty sure I was in shock, and I wasn’t the one bleeding all over the gravel.

  How could I find out what he meant?

  “Let’s go to Lina’s first,” I said.

  “Bogus idea, dude.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “C’mon. I should see her. It’s been since Friday. We should talk.”

  “I don’t know about that. Seriously, dude, you look like you just walked out of a Wes Craven movie. Scary shit. Seriously.”

  I sighed, and it damn near turned into a sob. I clamped my mouth shut and looked out the window, away from Jason. I took a few deep breaths. I was so tired. I’d burned through just about everything I had in that fight. It was like Kirby Lake all over again.

  Only this time, I’d played the part of my father. At least Eric Finn’s guts were still on the inside of his body.

  I shuddered. My mouth filled with saliva, a threatening precursor to puking whatever bile was left in my gut. I swallowed and took a few more deep breaths.

  “She’s seen worse,” I finally said.

  Jason shook his head. “You shouldn’t see her.”

  “Gotta.”

  “What are you gonna tell her?” His voice went up, volume and pitch. “She’ll know, one look at you. She’ll know what went down.”

  “I know.” I closed my eyes, snapped on the fight, opened them up again. “We have to talk. I have to ask her about some stuff.”

  “Oh, no. Get out. You—you’re not buying that shit, are you? Dude, the fucker was trying to psych you out, man. It’s all part of his bullshit!” He glanced at me again. “You don’t have to ask Lina anything, Nate. Fuck.”

  I closed my eyes; looked at the ceiling
of the car; opened my eyes. “Are you gonna take me? ‘Cause I’m just gonna get on my bike and go there anyway if you take me home.” I laughed; it was pitiful. I looked at him. “You’re seriously gonna make me ride my bike after all of this?”

  Jason expelled a long breath and licked his lips. “She’s not gonna like it.”

  “You’ll take me, though. Right?”

  He nodded without looking at me. We didn’t say anything else until he parked at the curb in front of her house, when I asked him to go get her. The way I looked, if her folks or brother answered the door, all hell would break loose.

  I waited in the car, watching. Lina answered the door herself. She was dressed in gray sweats and a Care Bears T-shirt, probably pretty much ready to relax before bed and cute as hell.

  It was terrifying to see her.

  As she followed Jason down her lawn, I stepped out of the car.

  Lina saw me, stopped, and actually took a step back. Her mouth fell open.

  “What…did they come after you? Is it them?”

  The fear poured off of her. I didn’t understand.

  And then I did. She thought this was to do with the people who’d caused us grief last year, the people who came after us in Kirby Lake with augmented killers and who continued to come after my mother and me with lawyers.

  It threw me, how freaked out she was.

  “No. No, no, nothing like that,” I said quickly. “I’m okay. It wasn’t them. It was…”

  Her relief came and went. “Then what the hell, Nate? You look horrible! You’re…bloody!”

  “Lina…” My legs shook. I think the term is “wobbled,” and right then, I clearly and fundamentally understood what that meant. My arms felt like rubber. I couldn’t tell if I was dangerously fatigued or just scared to say anything else to her.

  But I had to. Tonight was all about “had to.”

  “I saw him. I saw Eric Finn.”

  “You what?”

  “I saw him.”

  Her face turned hard. She kept her focus on my body.

  Her words came out just louder than breath. Plenty loud for me.

  “Is he all right?”

  I felt like my legs might stop working. I reached back and braced myself with a hand on the roof of the car.