Until something else happens and takes it away again, he thought.
JUNE 2005
NINE YEARS LATER
CHAPTER TWO
JUNE 03, 2005 | 7:30 PM – 9 YEARS LATER
IN a poorly lit room, a man sat at a desk in front of a computer. The office was simple; old linoleum flooring that had once been white, cinder block walls, one metal door, one power outlet, a desk, a phone, and a filing cabinet. The man was studying images as they downloaded onto the screen. The pictures were from various cities around the globe. The only thing every photo had in common was a tall man with blond hair down to his chin wearing a black woolen trench coat and a fedora. The phone rang.
“Yes?” answered the man at the desk.
“Have you received the files?” asked a voice, masked by a speech modulator.
“I’m reviewing them,” the man said. “Have you found a pattern in his movements?”
“Most of his recent US destinations have been in the Northwest. Seattle specifically,” said the caller.
“Should we expect an incident?” he asked.
“It fits with previous patterns,” the caller replied.
“Have these appearances been confined to a sector of the city?”
“Yes, a university campus.”
The man at the desk didn’t respond immediately. He seemed to be mulling the answer over.
“That doesn’t fit any previous pattern,” he finally said.
There was a delay on the other side of the phone, finally the disguised voice responded.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Any theories?” asked the man.
“Still in progress. Will you be dispatching a team to investigate?” asked the voice.
“Yes; two, one through standard channels, the other through the private sector. Solid work as usual,” the man at the desk said, hanging up.
He saved the images and reports, encrypting the files as he attached them to two identical emails. All that was typed in the first email was “Seattle, WA. Secondary protocol. Dispatch ASAP.” In the second email he wrote the same instruction and then stopped. After thinking for a moment, he added the words “should be safe” and sent off the messages.
The man reclined in his chair and let out a frustrated sigh as he stared at the images of the man in the dark hat.
“What the hell are you doing on a college campus?”
CHAPTER THREE
FRIDAY | JUNE 17, 2005 | 8:00 PM | SEATTLE
“WHAT the hell just happened?” Collin asked, as if on cue.
Jonathan stood over the half dismantled motorcycle, considering just how annoying the slip of his wrench was going to prove. It would slow their progress, of course, but more, it guaranteed him crap from Collin.
“Tibbs! You think I’ll ever let you ride Jenny again if you’re this clumsy?” Collin added.
Collin had a habit of calling Jonathan by his last name when he was about to say something condescending. The two stood in the driveway of the house they shared with the rest of their college roommates. It was an older house, located on Capitol Hill, an inner city neighborhood of Seattle. Living there, Jonathan sometimes got the feeling he was in the woods and not the city at all. The illusion was due to their driveway being sunken into a dense grouping of trees and bushes that blocked the view of the street from the front yard.
Less than half an hour ago, having returned home from school, Collin had stopped Jonathan on his way into the house under the pretext that he needed help with some maintenance on the motorcycle, which he’d endearingly named Jenny. Collin didn’t admit it, but he was trying to get Jonathan to take an interest in the hobby. He’d managed to get Jonathan to an empty parking lot on a couple of weekends so he could learn to drive the thing. He seemed to hope getting Johnathan to do some of the upkeep would get him more excited about guy stuff as Collin referred to it.
With Jenny’s gas tank lying next to them on the pavement, Tibbs had clumsily dropped the bolt he’d unscrewed into her air intake system and couldn’t see where it had gone. Now, he looked at their front door, deliberating on how long it would be before he could get back to work on the half-finished paper he needed to complete by Monday for his Phylogeny class. He didn’t hate working on the bike, but he’d put a lot of work in this quarter to keep his grade in B minus territory. It was only Friday, so he tried to remind himself to relax.
Jonathan set down the wrench and headed toward the garage in search of a flashlight.
“Jenny doesn’t mind,” he said grinning over his shoulder at Collin. “She says it’s all foreplay.”
Collin gave the motorcycle a disapproving look.
“Do not flirt with this man; you do him no service leading him on.”
The owner of the house had been renting to college kids for over a decade now, as its layout and location were suited to low income students. Meaning it had four bedrooms so the rent was split four ways, it was close to campus, and more important it was close to the bars. Both Collin and Jonathan attended the University of Washington, as did their other roommates, Hayden and Paige. Collin and Hayden had been friends since high school, but the rest had only met when they moved in together for school.
In the garage, Jonathan fumbled through the tool box to find the small flashlight. When he returned, he saw Paige walking down the driveway. She wore her dark hair short, and her skin was remarkably pale for how much time she spent out in the sun. Urban agriculture and the environmental sciences, her majors, tended to put her out in the campus greenhouses a lot, working on her green thumb. Her eyes were up in the trees and she was smiling. The past week she’d been in such a good mood it bordered on irritating.
Jonathan watched as her eyes speculated on the scene in the driveway; first, the dismantled bike parts on the pavement, then Collin bent over the frame staring intently down into where the gas tank should have been, then to Jonathan, hands covered in grime and holding the flashlight. Her smile widened as she raised an eyebrow.
“Oh dear, Tibbs what have you done to Jenny?” she asked.
“Foreplay,” Collin replied before Jonathan could speak.
“I thought she was a classier gal than that,” Paige said.
“Burn,” Collin said.
Jonathan shrugged it off.
“What’s with you?” Collin said to Paige. “You’ve looked stupid-happy for days now.”
Paige considered the two, weighing if she should tell them. They watched the desire to keep a secret dissolve as she gave in to the stronger urge to share it.
“You guys remember Grant?” she asked.
Collin and Jonathan looked from one to the other blankly before Collin spoke for both of them, “I’m going with no.”
“The army guy who bought me a drink at the bar a week back,” she said.
Collin and Jonathan shared the same blank look again. The two weren’t being purposely obtuse. A lot of men approached Paige offering to buy her a drink.
She looked at Collin, “the one you referred to as Meathead for the rest of the night.”
Clarity surfaced on Collin’s face.
“Right. Meathead,” he said, then asked, “Meathead was in the army?”
“Well, Grant,” she said, ignoring his question, “called a minute ago. He’s in Seattle. I invited him to join us tonight.”
“Great!” Collin said.
Only Jonathan caught the false enthusiasm. It was harmless, but not the first time he’d seen Collin turn passive aggressive when Paige talked about dating. He’d chosen to suppress his feelings for her; not just because they lived together, but because of Paige’s blatant attraction to macho males. Dark, muscular, military sorts, like this Grant fellow, always seemed to be the ones she got excited about. Collin was blond, pale, and no more muscular than Jonathan, who probably couldn’t do a pull up if he were hanging off the edge of a cliff. It didn’t help Collin’s physique or complexion that he was a graphics art major and spent large amounts of his time glued to a chair in
front of a computer screen.
“Speaking of, finish with the motorcycle later. We were supposed to meet Hayden ten minutes ago,” Paige said looking hurried as she headed into the house. “He could go off on one of his rants in front of Grant if we leave him unsupervised.”
“Does that make us the less embarrassing roommates?” Collin asked as she disappeared into the house.
Jonathan, thinking about it, didn’t remember ever agreeing to go out this evening.
“So then you’re joining us tonight, Tibbs?” Collin asked, looking needy.
He wanted to decline. On top of the paper he needed to find time for, Jonathan had to work part time at a hardware store to supplement his student loans, and was opening tomorrow. His boss, Mr. Fletcher, was an old veteran who had an uncanny ability to detect a hangover on sight. A skill he obtained from years of experience commanding men in the military. Mr. Fletcher would never mention he suspected it, Jonathan would just slowly find he was being tortured by every task he was given. Regardless, trying to work after a night with his roommates was always a lesson in regret.
He could already feel Collin’s needy facial expression breaking his resolve on that matter, and Paige seemed to have assumed he was coming.
“Okay, but I’ll probably leave early,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, of course, definitely,” Collin said. A moment later as he made his way in to the house he added, “Maybe.”
Jonathan pretended not to hear.
The bar was a dive. The booths, square and uncomfortable, looked like they had been built by the owner. It was poorly lit, with dark brown stain on all the furniture and a floor of polished cement. The only light was over the pool table in the back and the entire place smelled like spilled beer had permeated every inch of wood to be found. Jonathan’s roommates were drawn here regularly more because of its proximity to their house than by the atmosphere.
Grant was indeed military; short cropped hair, built, and competitive. He had systematically destroyed Collin and Hayden at the pool table. When he’d picked up on Collin’s lack of enthusiasm about his presence, it hadn’t fazed him, just made him more pleased with himself when he won.
“Want to play for the championship,” Grant asked Jonathan when he’d finished with his roommates.
“No thanks,” Jonathan said. “I don’t play, I’m sure you’d mop the floor with me.”
Grant seemed disappointed he hadn’t risen to the challenge.
After pool, they had shared a table for most of the evening, until it appeared that Grant lost interest in the roommate’s discussion and asked Paige to join him in a separate booth.
She and Grant were now staring at each other intently. Jonathan didn’t have to hear the words to get the context. He figured he would either be seeing Grant tomorrow morning or Paige wasn’t coming home with them tonight.
As the hour grew late, Jonathan had nearly left, but he got caught up in an argument that Collin and Hayden were having.
“It’s the same story!” Collin reiterated to Hayden.
Hayden was a larger man, overweight but not obesely so. He wore glasses and kept his brown hair short with a well groomed beard. The beard was new, and he hadn’t yet broken the habit of rubbing the hair around his mouth with his fingertips whenever he was thinking intensely. He was rubbing it now.
The argument had started over the question of whether or not the stories of Superman and the biblical Jesus were thematically similar. Hayden, being a practicing Roman Catholic, wasn’t initially very enthusiastic about the comparison.
“What have we got so far?” Collin asked, rubbing in his earlier victories. “Superhuman abilities, sent to earth as an orphan by his father who happened to be the leader of a spiritually and technologically superior race, adopted by human parents, and put here to inspire mankind to rise above their less admirable natures.”
“That’s crap,” Hayden replied. “It’s similar on a superficial level at best.”
“Oh come on, there isn’t any defeat in admitting it,” Collin said. “Hey I just thought of another point. In the early nineties, Superman died to save mankind. Hey, Jonathan, can you guess what happened after that?”
“Please don’t involve me,” Jonathan replied.
“That’s right! He was...” Collin paused for dramatic effect. “Resurrected.”
Jonathan would have thought Collin was being a jerk, but the truth was, the two friends bickered like this all the time; that, and Collin hadn’t actually started this debate. Collin had mentioned that he was thinking of getting the superman shield tattooed on his arm. Jonathan had thought it was a misguided, booze induced boast. Unfortunately Hayden, not at the top of his game, hadn’t seen it for the unlit fuse that it was.
“Sad stupid cliché of a thing to get a tattoo of,” Hayden had said.
“No sadder than a crucifix would be,” Collin replied.
Grant and Paige had gone off by themselves shortly after that. Jonathan had lost track of time listening.
“It’s not the same,” Hayden said. “Superman isn’t based on any historical facts, it’s a work of fiction.”
“Hayden, come on. Ask an atheist if the Bible is a work of fiction. They’d hold it with the same esteem they do legends of Zeus and Hercules, which I might add are both also comic book characters,” Collin argued. “If I get a Superman tattoo on my arm, it would be a symbol of values that I happen to find inspiring, just like a crucifix would be on your arm.”
“A crucifix isn’t just a symbol. It’s not based on a work of fiction!” Hayden said.
The two were going to circle around this more than once. Neither was going to sway the other, as was their way, but they enjoyed the bickering nonetheless. As the night moved on and they consumed more drinks, the debate devolved into the apparent differences in the story-lines, which both of them were now actively engaged in.
“Superman will resort to violence,” Collin said starting to slur, “but Jesus was a pacifist.”
“Jesus didn’t have a secret identity,” Hayden said, his eyes looking drowsy.
Jonathan was getting up to leave as it was approaching one in the morning and he still needed to be half competent at work the next day. He said goodbye to Collin and Hayden, waving across the bar to Grant and Paige.
As he was putting his coat on, Hayden turned to him.
“Jonathan, if you had to pick between Superman or Jesus, which would it be?” Hayden asked.
“For a tattoo?” he asked.
Hayden shrugged, as if to say take the question however you want.
Jonathan thought about it as he zipped his coat up.
“Neither,” he said. “Yeah, definitely neither.”
Hayden frowned at him as he made for the door, obviously feeling like the answer had been a cop-out. He turned back to Collin.
“This might be blasphemous, but I think we should reboot the New Testament as a graphic novel and present Jesus as a parody of Superman. I bet it would be hysterical.”
The last thing Jonathan heard as the door shut behind him was Collin saying, “you had me at blasphemous.”
At the end of the bar, a tall blond man in a long black coat rose to his feet. Placing a black fedora on his head, he followed Jonathan out the door.
CHAPTER FOUR
SATURDAY | JUNE 18, 2005 | 1:15 AM
AFTER so long in the bar, the smell of alcohol and secondhand smoke was heavy on him and the street was crowded with others who smelled the same.
Laundry day tomorrow he thought, retracting from his T-shirt. On second thought, he considered throwing the shirt away entirely.
As he began to walk away the bar door opened again behind him. He turned to look, thinking Collin and Hayden might have decided to head home with him. Instead, a tall blond man stepped out of the door way and turned in his direction.
“Excuse me,” the man said as he passed, never really looking Jonathan in the eye.
The sight of the man gave Jonathan pause. Like he’d
seen the relative of someone he may have known once, but the association was too distant to grasp. His eyes watched the man’s back as he walked away, and he felt a chill. It wasn’t that it was disturbing, just that the man shouldn’t be there, but Jonathan didn’t know why.
He’d never been a fan of intuition. He didn’t like getting a notion and not knowing its source any more than he liked following a rule without understanding the reason behind it. Intuition was like bringing a new lover home for the first time and having your dog get overly upset at the sight of her. It forced him to speculate on what the animal’s instincts might see that he could not, and it was irritating. If his animal brain knew something, he’d prefer it explain itself.
If the man had seemed out of place, it was something not easily achieved given the surroundings. Standing on a street corner on Capitol Hill was like being bombarded with what might otherwise be called the ‘out of place.’
This region of the city was diverse; a mixture of overpasses, hills, and parks. Old brick buildings resided next to modern condos, upscale coffee shop chains sat next to stores owned by spiritual gurus selling Buddhist and Indian nick-knacks. Expensive restaurants were across the street from adult toy stores. The union of unlikely neighbors was a reflection of the community itself. College students, all shades of the LBGT, goths, hippies, and hipsters were all thrown together here.
Sticking out in this crowd took a lot more than a ridiculous fedora. Why should a stranger, in a street full of strangers who were all more noticeable, stand out to him? Why would he evoke such a peculiar reaction?
Standing there looking troubled, he started to realize he was being ridiculous. After all, he’d been drinking, and though it was odd, it wasn’t the first time that alcohol had swayed his emotions in a strange direction. He turned away and headed home, plunging into the moving crowds on the sidewalk. He looked over his shoulder once more, but the tall man was now lost in the flock.
He soon found that his instincts weren’t so easy to shake off. His mind wouldn’t let go of the unexplained anomaly he’d sensed at seeing the man’s face. It became worse when he walked past his reflection in a window and thought he’d spotted the man behind him only to look again and see it was some other stranger walking amongst the crowd. He tried to laugh at himself, turn his thoughts over to other distractions, yet suspicion lingered, and he didn’t feel safe.
Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero Page 2