Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero

by T. Ellery Hodges

  “How?” Jonathan asked, his voice betraying his desire for the man’s words to be the truth.

  “This reality is tied to you and this stone. The link can only be severed by you, or it,” the man said pointing to the monster’s corpse. “If you do not destroy the stone, this reality will be fixed. All of those who died tonight will remain dead.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jonathan said. He was shaking again, not wanting the weight of another terrible decision tonight.

  “I promise I’ll explain it to you Jonathan. But now,” he looked again at the helicopter that was making him raise his voice, “but now is not the time. It’s your choice. Do nothing, and hundreds remain dead, and you’ll never know. Trust me or not, I am offering you the only chance to save those lives.”

  “Why! Why should I trust you?” Jonathan said, glaring into the man’s eyes.

  “I can’t give you a reason to trust me. We don’t have enough time. I can only tell you the rules. If tonight you wish to put the rules to the test, it is your decision to live with.”

  Jonathan felt his defiance crumbling. The words reminded him of his father. He wanted to grab hold of those words and believe they were meant to stir him wisely now. How could he dare risk doing nothing if that man might be telling the truth?

  There was no real choice at all.

  “Do you promise? Do you promise they’ll all be alive?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes, Jonathan, I promise,” the man said.

  Jonathan paused.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  The man nodded and went to place the stone into Jonathan outstretched hand. He stopped a moment before putting it in his palm.

  “Jonathan, soon you will be home again. It will be disorientating. You will be confused. Do not discuss this with anyone until we’ve spoken again. Return to the park where you jog, I will be waiting there, it’s very important that you call me by name when you see me.”

  The idea that this man had a name caught Jonathan by surprise. He had referred to him as the blond stranger for so long that he hadn’t thought of him in terms of a person.

  “Right,” Jonathan said with obvious sarcasm, raising his voice over the sound of the helicopter. “Then what’s your name?”

  “Heyer,” the man replied, placing the stone into Jonathan’s palm.

  Heyer pointed at Jonathan’s eyes with his middle and index finger, then pointed at his own eyes with the same two fingers as if to instruct him to focus on what he said next.

  “It will be confusing, Jonathan,” he said, raising his voice now as well over the helicopter blades.

  The wind from the propeller flung their hair about and made Jonathan chill with cold as he was still soaked through from the water. Heyer seemed unperturbed by the wind.

  “Talk to no one. Meet me at the park. Say my name when you see me.” Heyer nodded once, then pointed his finger at Jonathan’s hand. “Now destroy it.”

  Jonathan looked at Heyer as though he were mad. He didn’t pause long. He didn’t take his eyes from Heyer’s when he crushed the stone in his hand. Like holding the man’s gaze would force everything he’d told him to be true. He felt the stone break, like a delicate piece of glass with fluid inside. Heyer stood and backed away from him. As soon as he did so, Jonathan’s heart sank. It seemed an omen of betrayal.

  The fluid from the stone was all over his hand. It burned as it had when his chest had turned on, searing its way from his hand down his arm. Jonathan no longer felt cold in the draft from the helicopter; he was molten lava again.

  Fear gripped him. What had he done? The fire was moving toward the glowing lines on his torso, not away this time. He curled into the fetal position with the pain of it, finally breaking his eye contact with Heyer, pulling his knees up to his chest and gripping tightly as he endured the pain migrating down his arm and into his chest. The world became red all around him.

  “Why are you doing this?” was the last thing Jonathan was able to cry out before everything went white.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THURSDAY | JUNE 30, 2005 | 8:30 PM

  JONATHAN stared at his text book. His head was in one hand, hovering over the kitchen table; the table that should have been split in half. Paige sat next to him reading. She reached down and took a sip of her tea. The TV was on. Collin and Hayden were watching something.

  “I don’t want to wait for September for the new season of Lost to start,” said Hayden.

  That’s familiar, Jonathan thought.

  He felt disoriented. He should be sitting on a dock, dead tired, freezing, talking to the blond man. Heyer? Why wasn’t he tired? How was he so calm? Had he been dreaming? There had been so much pain a moment ago and now, nothing. He felt like he should be bored, or like he had been until a second ago.

  He hit the table with his fist lightly. It didn’t collapse. He hit it again harder; nothing, no impossible strength. Disbelievingly, he brought his palm down with enough force to let out a loud smack and cause the table to shake. Everyone in the room turned to the sound.

  “What the hell?” Paige said, looking at him as though he was a monkey throwing his poo.

  Jonathan stared back at her for a moment, confused by her confusion. He looked about the room trying to orient himself, make sense of what should already make sense. His eyes fell on the clock and he realized the time was wrong. It should have been closer to eleven, yet it read 8:30. He must have fallen asleep. It must have been a dream.

  No.

  How was that possible? The monster, all those people and police, the news footage, the helicopters, sirens, gunfire, all so vivid in his head only seconds ago. The rage, the guilt, the fear; it was more real than any dream he’d ever had.

  No dammit.

  That was no dream; they were memories. He opened his mouth to speak but then stopped. He didn’t know what to say. His last memory was of Heyer specifically telling him he would be disoriented, that he should speak to no one.

  Understatement, he thought. He realized Paige was still staring at him.

  “Um, sorry, I’m just, it’s just a struggle to catch up,” Jonathan said.

  She raised her eyebrow and went back to her book. Jonathan, still at a loss, pulled the neck of his shirt out so he could look down at his chest. There was no eerie orange glow, nothing.

  Talk to no one. I’ll be waiting for you at the park. Say my name when you see me.

  It had literally been seconds ago that Heyer had said those words to him. Hadn’t it? Jonathan rose from the table.

  “I need some fresh air,” he said, pulling his coat off the back of his chair; a chair that shouldn’t have been in one piece. Then he headed for the garage door, which shouldn’t have been on its hinges.

  “You’ll never catch up if you procrastinate,” Paige said.

  He nodded, but didn’t stop. Was he really doing this? Was he really going to go meet this man, this ‘Heyer,’ after what he had been through? Of course he was. How the hell else would he ever prove to himself it was real.

  Why was he so damn calm? On the dock his body had been exhausted from adrenaline overdose, and now it was as though he was just beginning to grow anxious. He should have felt like he’d drowned, instead he was as nervous as someone who was late for an appointment. It just wasn’t on the right level, the state of mind and memories contradicted each other. It was making his brain itch somehow. It was irritating.

  He shut the garage door and headed down the stairs.

  Leah looked up from her laptop when she heard the neighbor’s side door open. She’d been sitting on the balcony above their driveway for a little over twenty minutes now.

  This had proven, by far, the best part of her new home. On the East Coast, Jack and she’d never had a balcony. It made her feel like she was giving in to some storybook cliché for girls just by being so drawn to it. Was this some terrible innate desire to be pursued by Romeo? Had Shakespeare ruined balconies for her? Maybe next she would have an irrational need to own
a pony. She pushed the thought away. She liked the little sanctuary too much to let herself over think it.

  Jonathan came through the door and walked up the driveway. He looked deep in thought and a little pale, like he’d just seen something that was threatening to make him sick. She hoped he wasn’t always in such a state. He’d be attractive if he didn’t constantly appear to be restraining an avalanche of worry.

  “Good evening, neighbor,” she said, making sure she sounded pleased to see him.

  His eyes found her immediately, but the worry didn’t dissipate when they made eye contact. Leah thought it got worse for a moment, before he forced his facial expression to look more relaxed and smiled at her. It wasn’t the reaction she’d hoped for. He looked as though he’d forgotten how to interact with another human being and was attempting to hide it.

  “Hello,” he finally managed.

  “You know Jack hasn’t stopped asking about the motorcycle since you mentioned it to him,” she said, “I think you might be on the hook for showing it to him sometime.”

  “I’ll have to ask my roommate about it,” he said. “I apologize, I’d love to talk more, but I need to be somewhere.”

  “Yeah?” Leah said, a mischievous smile on her face. “Hot date?”

  She was trying to seem playful, but really hoping he would tell her that it wasn’t why he had to go, that he wasn’t seeing some girl.

  He seemed to hesitate.

  “Did you want to wish me luck?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said, in a mocking tone, surprise he’d guessed where she was going with the question. “But only if I thought you needed it.”

  At first she thought he’d been flirting back, trying to see if she’d be jealous if he was off to see a girl, but he just looked inexplicably puzzled. It was like he was somewhere else entirely having a hundred thoughts that had nothing to do with their conversation. He was harder to read than he’d been the other day. She wondered if this was what he’d been like before the attack he’d mentioned. Then she realized that he’d answered her question with a question. He hadn’t actually said where he was going at all.

  He’d taken his eyes off her and was looking up the driveway into the dark streets beyond the light of their homes. Finally, he spoke.

  “It couldn’t hurt,” he said.

  She found it odd, the way he said it. More like he was afraid of something out in that darkness than excited to see a girl. She frowned as she watched him. He was frustratingly difficult to read.

  “Well, goodnight,” he said after a final moment of indecision.

  Her smile slumped with her shoulders; he really did seem to be in a hurry. She couldn’t persuade him to stay longer and keep her company.

  “Goodnight,” she said. “Good luck, just in case it turns out you need it.”

  He walked toward the driveway, but turned a moment before he left her sight and called back to her.

  “Oh, by the way, thanks for that advice the other day. I think, well, I’m pretty sure it helped me.”

  “No problem,” she called back.

  In all honesty she wasn’t certain what advice she’d ever given him. He turned the corner and was gone. She found herself lingering on where he’d walked out of the light.

  “Why Leah?” she asked herself when she was sure he could no longer hear. “Why do they always have to be damaged?”

  As Jonathan came closer, there was something anti-climactic about seeing Heyer sitting there on the park bench in the dark. He was unmistakable from behind, the blond hair hanging down from that ridiculous fedora.

  Jonathan stopped there, a few feet back, hesitantly staring at the back of the man’s head and wondering if he was making the right decision in coming. He had no doubt the man knew he was behind him somehow.

  I can’t trust him, Jonathan thought.

  It did appear that the man had told him the truth, or at least a version of the truth. If the time was correct, and it seemed to be, Jonathan could only think of a few possible explanations, all of which were science fiction in nature. Either the events he remembered had all taken place in his head, which was a disturbing thought, or hadn’t taken place at all. Yet, Heyer was here, just as he’d specified he would be. When no one else seemed to be aware that anything out of the ordinary had taken place, Heyer still knew somehow.

  Jonathan took another step forward. He needed it to make sense; then he paused again. Heyer had told the truth, but he had certainly left out the part about the blinding pain Jonathan would experience. He reminded himself to keep this omission in mind no matter what the man had to say.

  “It’s a nice park,” Heyer said. “I see why you’d exercise here. It’s a good place to think.”

  Heyer’s head turned as he spoke. He didn’t look at Jonathan; he seemed to be waiting for him to finish hesitating. Jonathan approached slowly, coming around the bench, keeping his eyes on the man, watchful for sudden movement. This wasn’t a narrow hallway. If he was threatened, he had the choice to bolt.

  When he could see Heyer’s face, the man didn’t look up immediately, but smiled to himself knowingly.

  Finally those soulful luminescent eyes turned to face Jonathan. Heyer looked relieved. How did the man appear so villainous, yet at the same time so protective? They looked at each other for a moment. It was unnerving to Jonathan to hold his gaze, waiting for him to speak, to see what the man intended to have happen here tonight in this park.

  Heyer broke the silence.

  “It is a relief to see you, Jonathan,” Heyer said. “I calculated your survival chances to be rather low. In fact, it borders on a miracle that you are standing here now. A good indicator, it would be highly unfortunate to have lost you.”

  He paused as if to see if Jonathan accepted what he’d said so far, then continued, “I instructed you to call me by name, did I not?”

  Jonathan tried his voice, unsure of it.

  “You said it was Heyer,” Jonathan replied, slightly louder than a whisper.

  Heyer nodded.

  “We do not have much time, and we have a great amount to discuss,” Heyer said. “Jonathan, you must have a considerable number of questions, and since I do not know where to begin; I’d advise you to ask what you will. I will answer as best I can, but I must leave soon; so, I will try to keep us focused on pertinent matters. If I feel you are asking something likely to do you harm, or that I cannot yet trust you with, I will not answer. I apologize for this; some things I cannot tell you for your own good, others for my own.”

  Jonathan had no choice but to take that statement for what it was. He doubted he’d be able to tell if the man lied to him, although the way he’d phrased it made Jonathan feel like a child being told that he wasn’t ready to know how dangerous the world was yet, which was ridiculous coming from the man who had put him through the most dangerous experience of his life.

  “What did you do to me?” Jonathan asked, still struggling to put volume behind his voice. “After you put me to sleep?”

  “Yes, a horrible act, that was. I apologize for the circumstances by which that played out. If I had any other alternative at the time, I would have allowed you to volunteer. Unfortunately, that was not an option. I would not have left you with such a disturbing waking experience, but complications led the implantation process to take longer than I’d planned; then your roommates came home, and I was forced to leave you,” Heyer said.

  “What did you ‘implant’?” Jonathan asked, already afraid of the answer. “What do you mean there were complications?”

  “The device in your chest is biochemical in nature, so to speak. It serves to cause a number of physical changes to your body and mind when the time is right. Upon insertion into a host; it mimics the cellular structure of the individual it finds itself in, taking on the form of the cells of the body that it is replacing, and then lies dormant. It is complicated, but the simple version is this; I cut out a great deal of tissue from your body and replaced that tissue with an implan
t that can cause remarkable changes to you once it is activated.”

  “Why didn’t it show up on any test they ran at the hospital?” Jonathan asked.

  “As I said, while dormant, the device mimics the cells of your body. Upon waking, you likely experienced an inexplicable discomfort in your chest. This was part of the process still occurring,” Heyer said. “In a manner of speaking, your nervous system was becoming acquainted with its new cells.”

  “But, mankind doesn’t have that kind of technology,” Jonathan said.

  “You are correct, mankind does not,” Heyer replied, pausing to let his meaning sink in.

  “Then you’re not human?” Jonathan asked, slowly taking a seat on the bench next to Heyer, his reluctance to continue staring down into his eerie eyes finally winning out.

  “No, Jonathan, but I’d advise that my background will not assist you in your current endeavors,” Heyer replied.

  Jonathan wasn’t sure what to make of such an answer. His endeavors? What did that mean? This evening was terrible, but at least it was over. He wasn’t endeavoring to do anything but understand it. He felt like he should have been surprised to find out he was talking to an alien, but after spending an evening the way he had, it hardly seemed like a revelation.

  “When does it come out?” Jonathan asked.

  Heyer’s face looked surprised for a moment, but it quickly returned to a placid calm.

  “It is not removable, Jonathan, it is a part of you now,” he said. “Well, to be more accurate, I could not recover it without killing you. You should not be distressed, though. The implant will function exactly as your normal cells, except when triggered.”

  Jonathan didn’t like the sound of that. A part of him had been torn out, replaced by something alien, something that he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. He didn’t want to hear that it was permanent. Seconds passed in silence. Heyer seemed to be allowing him time to absorb this fact.