Jumper: Books 1-6: Complete Saga

by Sean Platt

“Lock the door!” I yell.

  Chelsea runs to the door and flips the lock. I wonder how she turned it, or, for that matter, how I opened the door if our bodies aren’t really here. Is it some form of energy we’re exerting, even without a physical shell? Or are souls somehow able to interact with objects? I feel like I’m trying to figure out ghost logic, but I can’t stop to consider any of this now. I need to help her focus, to try and teleport us somewhere else — away from those things.

  She comes to me as I back out of the stall.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Keep trying to think us somewhere else.”

  “How?”

  “Close your eyes, think of somewhere you’ve been. Think of the details, imagine them so real you can almost touch them.”

  Suddenly, I have another idea.

  “No, forget that. Focus on someone you have a strong emotional connection to.”

  “Like Carla?”

  “Yes, like Carla.”

  The door shakes in its frame, someone trying to open it.

  No, not someone, something.

  Chelsea’s eyes are wide, terrified. “Oh, God.”

  “Just focus,” I tell her.

  The door shakes harder.

  Now pounding.

  The Collectors don’t speak. Or demand entry. They just act.

  They’re pounding on the door. The handle is rattling.

  The way the door is moving in its frame, The Collectors must be stronger than the women they occupy.

  Can they break down a door? And once they do, what will happen? Will they take my soul? Or Chelsea’s?

  The assassin said that I’m dead if they catch me. Worse than dead, whatever that means.

  We’ve got to get out of here. Now.

  Chelsea is squeezing her eyes shut, crying. “I can’t.”

  I look at the door, shaking harder. Grunts come from the other side — animalistic sounds from demons determined to get to us.

  I look at Chelsea. Her eyes are wide open, staring at the door. She can’t focus.

  I reach out and put my hand on her cheek.

  Startled, she looks away from the door, and toward me.

  “Think about the painting you made for Carla. She still has it. She’s waiting for you to finish. You need to finish it, Chelsea. You will finish it.”

  The door breaks open.

  And in an instant, Chelsea vanishes.

  I turn to see The Collectors storming the restroom.

  Chapter Six

  I wake with a gasp, startled and relieved to find myself in a teenage boy’s dark and messy bedroom.

  She got away.

  We got away.

  But I wonder if and when The Collectors might come searching for me again. I escaped them the first time only because the assassin killed my host. But killing the host isn’t an option for me. I can’t kill innocent people just to escape these Collectors.

  I’m not sure how I escaped this time. The only thing that makes sense is that Chelsea somehow brought me there, and once she was gone, my reason for being went with her, and I was sent to wherever my body goes when I’m out of a host.

  So, I escaped. Again.

  But what happens when they come for me when I’m in the body of a little kid or someone’s parent? It’s not like I can fall asleep on command. Given that those are the only ways I know of jumping to another body, I feel trapped like a hunted animal, without any means to fight back.

  I look at the clock and see that it’s five after noon on Sunday. I didn’t miss a day. I went from being Susan on Saturday to waking up early Sunday as myself, and now I’m waking again, this time back in a body. Not just any body, but Anthony Rocco.

  I sit up, excited that maybe this is the chance I’ve been waiting for — a chance to find out who the hell blackmailed Chelsea into making that video.

  I get out of bed, step over piles of dirty clothes, books, and video game boxes, and find Rocco’s iPhone sitting on a desk littered with pornographic pictures that look printed from his computer, empty Mountain Dew cans, and a half-eaten box of pizza sitting wide open.

  Wonderful.

  Doesn’t this kid have parents? In every other teenage boy I’ve been in, they’ve at least made an attempt — half-assed as it might have been — to hide their pornography. But Rocco leaves his right out in the open. And not even the tame stuff, but hardcore smut that looks borderline illegal.

  I sit back down on the bed and swipe his phone.

  It’s password protected, but the password comes instantly to mind.

  I’m in.

  I find a text thread between him and Blake Wellington starting back from forever ago.

  I start thumbing backward, looking for anything mentioning Chelsea or the video.

  A recent text from Blake says:

  Yo, maybe you should delete some of that shit. A lot of heat might be coming down with this suicide attempt.

  Rocco responded:

  Already done.

  But as I thumb back and find the beginning of the conversation, I realize he lied.

  The first message is from Blake, and it says:

  Yo, Rocco, look at good lil bible girl.

  Seems like she’s not such a “good girl” after all, is she? More like a big slut!

  P.S. Now you owe me.

  Attached: Good_Christian_Slut.mov

  The preview thumbnail shows Chelsea in that dark room as she lost everything to these sick fucks.

  And it wasn’t Rocco. Blake was the one who had been blackmailing her. After that it’s a back-and-forth between the jocks, laughing, saying how “surprisingly hot” she is, and debating whether or not she’s any good in bed. Later in the thread, Rocco asked:

  How did you get her to do all that freaky shit?

  Blake: LOL. The ladies love me.

  Rocco: No, for realz.

  Blake: Let’s just say I recorded her and a certain dyke art teacher licking each other.

  Rocco: NO WAY!

  Blake: Yup. And I told her if she didn’t put on a show for me, I’d send it to everyone. Maybe even to her Daddy, or the news.

  Rocco: MUST SEE DYKE VIDEO.

  Blake: No. I promised her I’d delete it.

  Rocco: No way you deleted it! Bullshit.

  Blake: Maybe, maybe not.

  Rocco: Trade?

  Blake: What you got?

  Rocco: Okay, here. Attached: drunksex_Becca.mov

  I click on the thumbnail and immediately wished that I hadn’t.

  It’s Rocco coercing some drunk girl into sex, recording the whole thing from a hidden camera focused on his bed.

  I can’t see her face, just from her chest down. She’s in a shirt and skirt, but not for long. He’s taking them off.

  She’s resisting, but he’s not taking no for an answer.

  Soon, he’s between her legs.

  She’s barely conscious, but he doesn’t care. Hell, that might be what makes it so thrilling.

  This is rape!

  I’ve seen enough of the video, but then, just as I’m about to turn it off, her face comes into frame, and I realize it’s that Becca, the redhead who told me that Chelsea was sleeping with the teacher.

  She seemed nicer than the others in her crew. She also seemed so uncomfortable telling me that news.

  And I realize — they made her tell me. They wanted the student-teacher affair to get out there, maybe to take the focus off the video.

  Those fuckers.

  In response to the Becca video, Blake wrote:

  Awesome. Keep ’em cumming. And maybe I’ll send you the dyke on dyke action.

  Rocco sent him eight more videos, each with a different girl’s name.

  No. These can’t all be him. Can they?

  I click on the first one, and it’s the same setting and scene as the Becca video. As are the next three.

  I can’t watch any more.

  These people are monsters.

  Later in the thread, Blake texts, pissed
.

  Blake: Did you upload the Chelsea shit to porn sites?

  Rocco: Wasn’t me.

  Blake: Nobody else has the video!

  Rocco: It wasn’t me!

  Rocco: Oh, shit, I bet it was Kris.

  Kris is a cheerleader fuck buddy of Rocco’s.

  Blake: What? You showed Kris?

  Rocco: No, I didn’t SHOW her. She saw it on my computer and asked what the hell it was. Thought I was sleeping with Chelsea. I told her no, someone sent it to me.

  Blake: You had it on your computer?

  Rocco: Kinda hard to jerk off on a phone video. Too small, so I sent it to my computer. And she was over here using it for her report. She laughed, calling Chelsea a fucking hypocrite. But I had no idea she was gonna upload it to a porn site! I swear!

  Rocco: U mad?

  Blake didn’t respond until a few days ago when he made the comment about erasing the texts because the heat would be on them.

  If Blake ever sent the video of Chelsea and her teacher, it wasn’t on Rocco’s phone. But there are a ton of other videos on there, all with different girls’ names.

  Did he rape all these girls?

  Pretty ballsy, or damn stupid, not to delete any of them, especially after Blake told him that shit might get hot with Chelsea’s suicide attempt.

  I’m getting some memories indicating that Rocco was hanging on to the Chelsea video and the texts as leverage against Blake, in case Blake ever decided to fuck with him.

  The blackmailer getting blackmailed over his blackmail video.

  Seems appropriate, even if I’m disgusted by both of these scumbags.

  I have to do something. I’ve got the evidence to nail both of these monsters and put them away for a long time.

  Suddenly, I hear a girl say, “Gross!”

  I look up and see Chelsea, standing right in front of Rocco’s bed, looking at his disgusting decor.

  “Chelsea! It’s me, Ella. I’m in Rocco’s body!”

  “Yeah, I can see you. What happened? Last thing I knew I was thinking of Carla. I wound up in a doctor’s office with her and Waylon, but I don’t think it was a normal office because doctors aren’t usually open on Sundays, right?”

  “No, it’s probably someone Waylon knows. Is she okay?”

  “I think so. What happened to you? Did those Collectors get a hold of you?”

  “I don’t think so. I vanished right after you, then woke up here, in paradise.”

  Chelsea laughs.

  It’s good to hear her laugh.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I just thought of you, and I wound up here.”

  “Wow. So you can control it now?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I got lucky twice. I don’t wanna mess around too much and wind up somewhere I don’t want to be, or lost without a way to get back.”

  “I understand. Listen, I found out who coerced you into making that … video.” It feels weird to mention the video to Chelsea, like I’m violating her just by talking about it, and, of course, by having seen it.

  “Who?” she asks, eyes wide, waiting for an answer.

  “Blake Wellington.”

  She stares at me for a long moment, and I’m not sure if she’s in disbelief, shock, or some other emotion I can’t quite decipher. I wait for her to speak.

  I fill her in on everything I found out, how Rocco was raping several girls and filming it, how Kris probably uploaded Chelsea’s video to some porn site, and how Blake admitted to the whole thing in his texts.

  She’s still staring, no expression.

  “This is good news,” I say. “We’ve got them. I can walk into the police station right now and turn in this phone with enough evidence to put Rocco and Blake away.”

  “No,” she says.

  “What?”

  “They’ll get off.”

  “What do you mean they’ll get off? This is evidence of blackmail, extorting a sex video, and God knows how many rapes Rocco committed.”

  “You don’t know how this town works. Their parents will find a way to get them off. They’ll pay off witnesses, experts, or something. Rocco’s father is a lawyer for criminals; it’s his job to get scumbags off on technicalities or bribe jurors.”

  I’m not sure how she can possibly know they bribe jurors, or if she’s just overly dramatic.

  “And Blake’s dad will never let his son do time. Never. It won’t happen. Blake had an older brother who was in a hit and run, was totally drunk, killed a family of three, and he never saw a day behind bars. You think a blackmail video will get him locked up? It’s his word against mine. And when it comes right down to it, he didn’t put a gun to my head. I could’ve said no.”

  Her eyes are welling up, and it suddenly occurs to me that maybe, in some twisted way, Chelsea thinks she deserves what happened. Maybe that’s partly why she tried to kill herself. I want to ask, but I’m afraid if I’m wrong, I’ll only hurt her feelings.

  “He forced you. He used a video he took of you, probably also illegal, to coerce your performance. That’s illegal as hell, and there’s no way any jury could see otherwise.”

  “You’re assuming I’ll ever wake up to testify. Maybe this is it for me — doomed to walk the earth as a ghost forever. Maybe this is God’s sentence for trying to kill myself, or for being a lesbian. Maybe this is karma for all the shit I caused Carla to go through.”

  I stand, put my hands on her shoulders, and meet her eyes.

  She can barely look at me.

  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m in the body of one of her tormentors, or if she doesn’t want to hear reason.

  “First of all, God didn’t punish you for being a lesbian. That’s bullshit, okay? I don’t care what holy book says what, those books were written by men with agendas. You have to know that.”

  “I don’t know what I know anymore.”

  “Second of all, Carla is a grown woman. She should’ve been more cautious. Yeah, I get it, she loves you, but still, it’s on her more than you. You’re just a kid.”

  “I’m eighteen. Not a kid.”

  She’s starting to fight back a bit. Good.

  “I’m going to the police station and turning Rocco and Blake in.”

  “It won’t work!”

  “We don’t know unless we try.”

  “I have a better idea,” she says, finally meeting my gaze.

  “What?”

  “I want you to stop them so they can never do this to anyone else.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “No,” she says. “Really stop them.”

  “Are you saying you want me to … kill them?”

  She nods.

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t kill innocent people.”

  “They’re innocent?”

  “Well, no, they’re not innocent, but it’s not up to me to decide if they live or die. That’s why you have laws.”

  She pauses for a moment, eyebrow arched. “Wait a second, what do you mean you ‘don’t kill innocent people?’ Are you saying you’ve killed others? Guilty ones?”

  Shit, I was afraid she caught that.

  I let out a deep sigh.

  “You have, haven’t you?” Her grin is huge.

  She hops onto the bed, sitting cross-legged. “Tell me.”

  Well, I have wanted someone to confide in, and this is the first person to come along that’s in a similar situation, at least one who isn’t an assassin.

  I tell her everything.

  Once I’m done, she’s staring at me again, but this time not in shock. Judging from the small smile teasing the corners of her mouth, I think she’s admiring me.

  “Don’t you see? This is why you’re here! You were meant to kill them. Why else would you be in Rocco’s body, one of the few people in Blake’s inner circle who could slit his throat or something?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right.”

 
She stares at me, arms crossed, “It feels freaking perfectly right to me. Hell, I’d say it’s almost karmic! You were meant to be here, to do this. For me.”

  “Killing them won’t change what happened to you, or Carla. And it won’t bring you back. It might even make you feel worse.”

  “I can’t possibly feel worse than the way they made me feel.”

  “You say that, but you don’t know it. Thinking about killing someone and doing it are two very different things. You have to live with it forever. I have to live with it forever.”

  My phone rings.

  I look at the screen and see Blake’s name.

  Chelsea sees it and looks at me. “See? Fate!”

  I pick up the phone.

  “Yeah?” I say, figuring that’s how Rocco would answer his phone. I avoid the urge to add a grunt, even though I’m pretty sure it would crack Chelsea up.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Dude, don’t tell me you forgot!”

  I pretend to sound like I’m just waking up, stalling for time until Rocco’s memories fill me in on what it is I’m supposed to be doing with Blake. I’m guessing it’s not going to church.

  Then I remember: a fishing trip on his new boat. Just the two of us.

  “Nah, I’m just fucking with you. Gimme a few minutes to freshen up.”

  “Freshen up?” There’s no way Rocco would say “freshen up.” He’d say “take a shower” or “wash my nuts.” Something more macho.

  “Did you grow a pussy overnight?”

  “You wish.”

  “Well, hurry the hell up, I’m outside in your driveway. Tell your maid to open the door and let me in.”

  There’s no way I want to put him in the same room as Chelsea. No, he probably can’t see her, but I’m pretty sure she’ll lose it if she sees him.

  “I’ll be right out,” I say.

  “You sure you don’t want to freshen up?”

  “Fuck you,” I say and hang up the phone.