Cowboy Ending - Overdrive: Book One

by Adam Knight

  “That is a lot of protein powder,” she laughed.

  My smile felt forced. “Felt like a three scooper day.”

  “That’s nuts.”

  “Cheaper than steak,” I mumbled under my breath, the previous night’s dinner bill still smarting in my mental wallet. I motioned with my head towards the spiral staircase which lead to the weight pit in an “after you” gesture.

  The upper deck weight pit was jam packed with free weights and resistance machines of all shapes, sizes and brands. Around the outer perimeter of the building was a two hundred meter track for those folks who wanted to experience all the tedium of running inside but disdained the use of treadmills.

  I sipped at my overly thick protein shake as I shook out my legs. Already I could feel my body responding. Not with the dread I usually felt at the prospect of running. But with eagerness. Excitement.

  The balls of my feet twitched and I found myself starting to bounce very lightly from side to side, still sipping at the shake. The tingle at the back of my neck was minor but present.

  “You’re really amped up today,” Tamara noted with surprise, a clipboard in her hand and the stopwatch hanging around her neck like any coach in the world. She peered at me cautiously, her smile starting to slip. “Are you … Are you feeling okay?”

  I drained the rest of my shake before answering, dropping the cup into my gym bag where I’d left it on the floor next to the track. “Honestly, I feel tired.” And terrified. Don’t forget terrified. My stomach gurgled loudly. “And hungry.”

  She chewed her lower lip, giving me that judging look women do so much better than men. “Seriously, Joe. It’s been less than three weeks. Do you really think that …”

  “My doctor’s asked me to do some basic fitness tests,” I lied. I suck at lying. I have a great poker face for bluffing and bullshitting people. But actually concocting a lie? “You know, to see how my progress is going.” Horrible.

  Tamara’s face went from concerned to skeptical. “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “Your doctor?”

  “Yup.”

  “The one you hate?”

  “Yup.”

  “The one who’s appointments you told me you were planning on blowing off from now on.”

  Shit.

  “Uh …Yup.”

  Tamara eyeballed me skeptically.

  “What kind of tests?”

  “Endurance. Speed. Strength. You know, the basics.”

  Tamara looked down at the clipboard briefly. “Well, most of the doctors I know through university don’t usually recommend self-conducted therapy testing.”

  “That’s why I need your help. So it’s not self-conducted.”

  “You need an accomplice?”

  “An assistant. A lovely, helpful assistant. Like Vanna White or one of Barker’s Beauties.”

  “Sexist comparisons aren’t going to help you here.”

  “Come on, you never wanted to be one of Barker’s Beauties?”

  “That’s beside the point, Joe. You could hurt yourself doing this.”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. A small part of me was hoping I did hurt myself. The tingle behind my eyes at the back of my neck remained steady. Eager but contained. “I just need someone to help me out. Someone that I trust.” Someone to witness things, convince me I’m not crazy.

  “You trust me?”

  “Yeah. Shouldn’t I?”

  Tamara’s expression changed again. I couldn’t read whatever it was, something vague and inscrutable.

  She grabbed the stop watch up and began fiddling with it. “What do you want to start with?”

  “I’m not sure. I figure I’ll start running. See how things go from there. After that, I’ll hit the weights for a bit. See what’s what.”

  “Okay. But be careful. You’re too big for me to carry if you pass out.”

  “Well if that happens at least we know that CPR works on me.”

  “I’m not doing that again,” she muttered.

  I blinked at her in surprise.

  “What?”

  “Are you going to start running or what?” Tamara stammered, her voice a little flustered.

  Weird.

  My legs were practically bouncing with excitement. The upper floor was completely empty of people aside from myself and Tamara.

  “Start the timer,” I said and bounded onto the track.

  Chapter 23

  “This is unbelievable,” Tamara muttered, staring at the notes she’d made on her clipboard.

  “Well …”

  “Joe… This is impossible.”

  “I don’t know about impossible ...”

  “Two weeks ago I saw you laying half dead in a hospital bed. Today you ran a seven minute mile and followed it up with a three hundred pound bench press!”

  “Well my previous best was three-fifty-five, so I’ve still got ...”

  ”You did it twenty-seven times!”

  I had nothing witty to retort with. So I let my stomach dictate my actions and took another huge bite of my foot long sub.

  It had been an interesting two hours in the gym.

  Nothing blew up. No light bulbs fritzed out. Nothing freakish in that regard to speak of. That’s part of the reason I wanted to test myself in the weight pit with no one else around. I had no idea what I was getting myself in for.

  Unlike the previous night when the feeling behind my eyes took me over from eyebrows to toenails, the buzzing at the back of my neck remained steady. Slightly pulsing in time with my heart beat but not totally consuming me. More than anything it felt like a constant reassurance. A pressure point to draw from and shore me up as opposed to one that took me over.

  After a few laps around the track without getting winded I began to push myself, reaching slightly for that tingling sensation. “Reaching” isn’t the right word exactly, but it’s the closest one that fits. Just like with the treadmill, my body reacted accordingly. My stride became longer. My heart rate began to pound. But my whole body seemed to cool off from the inside, feeling light as a feather as soothing energy flowed down my spine and shored up my limbs as they continued to pound away around the track. Tamara’s eyes widened as my lumbering frame picked up speed on each and every lap. I wasn’t going a full Barry Allen or anything, no clouds of smoke or Roadrunner action. But I was running pretty damned fast.

  After about fifteen controlled laps at an all-out sprint my stomach began to growl painfully. The tingle in the back of my neck sharpened in intensity, going from a soothing pulse to a stabbing pain up into my head. I took the cue and bumbled my way to a stop, only barely managing to keep my feet in the process. Tamara rushed over next to me, stammering away and showing me her stopwatch and the numbers she’d written down as I fumbled desperately for my second protein shake.

  As the shake settled in my stomach it was like a soothing tonic over an open sore. The grumbling faded away and sent a cooling breeze along my bloodstream. At least, that’s what it felt like. I ain’t a doctor.

  Getting ready to hit the weights made me a bit more anxious. Running was one thing, I already knew that I could do that. But actual planned lifting was going to be a new one. I found myself rubbing subconsciously at the scars through my sweat soaked Thundercats shirt and taking deep, calming breaths. Every day the scars felt less ridged and pronounced. They’d stopped hurting when I moved a few days back, but I would’ve been foolish not to be concerned.

  Turns out I should’ve been concerned for other reasons.

  In every category of my lifts I was as strong as I’d been before the shooting. For safeties sake I did the smart thing and started off at very light weights. But on each exercise it was like my body was insulted at the lack of effort required. How negligently it reacted to my feeble attempts to fool it. Since I felt no painful pulling at my scars or the meat beneath them, I shrugged and continued to stack weights despite Tamara’s rapidly receding concern.

  This wasn’t a Superman moment or a
nything supernatural like that. It was still me doing the lifting, my strength and my body pushing and pulling away. But again it was like drawing from a deep well for cold water, I would find myself deep into a set and ready to flag when suddenly a cool rush would flow from the back of my neck into my limbs. Providing energy and support to keep going. Like the best gym partner ever.

  The scary part of all this? It was knowing that I could’ve done more.

  Maybe a lot more.

  After a full hour of shattering my personal best lifts endurance wise on the weightlifting basics my stomach informed me that it would no longer be satisfied with protein shake supplementation. It informed me thusly by growling loud enough for Tamara to hear it and by making my knees tremble after I completed my last four hundred pound squat.

  I drained a final protein shake to tide me over until I could shower and stagger on over to the mall’s food court. Fifteen minutes later I was parked in a sandwich shop booth with my face buried in a foot long Italian sandwich complete with chips, cookies and milk.

  Tamara sat across from me in the bright yellow booth, taking an early break from work. A Diet Coke bottle open but forgotten on the table before her.

  “This doesn’t make any sense, Joe. Not at all!” Her voice was low but incredulous as she skimmed over the notes on her clipboard.

  My mouth was too full of cheese, bacon and genoa to argue. My stomach gurgled happily as my body cooled off. Energy returning to wherever it had been leached from. A headache that had barely started quickly receded to nothing. My muscles were full of blood and completely swollen in that perfect bodybuilding pump that you always hear about. My knee which was usually on fire after all the running and the heavy squats was surprisingly good. Tight, but more than manageable.

  “Okay. Not one of these numbers - by themselves - is actually impossible,” Tamara muttered, unable to take her eyes off her notes. I eyed her Diet Coke hungrily as I chewed. “I mean, the seven minute mile has to be a miscalculation no matter how quickly you finished some of those laps. But even still, nothing on here is actually beyond what any person should be able to do.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her sarcastically and swallowed. “Gee. Thanks.”

  Tamara clapped the board down to the table and stared at me. The sound drew a few eyes in the sandwich shop but mostly out of surprise, not interest. They all looked away when I gave my small smile to them.

  “Joe.” Tamara’s voice remained low. Insistent now, and concerned. “Two weeks ago I watched you get shot. I nearly watched you die. I visited you in the hospital and saw you hooked up to IV’s and tubes, with nurses checking your vitals every hour.”

  For some reason we’re having trouble monitoring your heartbeat electronically, Mr. Donovan. So a nurse will pop by every so often to make certain that everything’s all right until we get the matter resolved.

  “Guess I can add that to the list,” I muttered.

  “And today,” Tamara went on, ignoring my muttering. “Today you’re in the gym lifting weights and sprinting around the track like a Olympian. Scratch that, an Olympian combined with a World’s Strongest Man competitor.”

  My stomach growled. I took another bite, nodding to Tamara as I did so.

  She looked down at the clipboard then back up at me. Her eyes were very wide behind her librarian glasses.

  “Joe. What’s going on?”

  I put down the sandwich carefully as I finished chewing, taking a sip from my chocolate milk as I tried to get my thoughts in order. Debating on how much of the truth as I understood it I dared to share.

  Tamara, likely sensing what I was about to say cut me off. “And if you go back to the doctor’s request crap I will walk right out of here and not look back.”

  “Really?” I asked skeptically, quirking my eyebrow at her mockingly.

  She was full of shit and we both knew it. Tamara was about as likely to walk away from this booth without answers as I was to suddenly become a Tragically Hip fan.

  “Yes. Really.” She lied to me, her jaw set stubbornly.

  My fingers fiddled with the wax paper wrapping of my sandwich noisily as I stalled. Not sure where to begin. Not sure how to begin.

  Tamara’s hand reached out hesitantly across the table, settling on my fidgeting fingers. They stayed there. Cool. Comforting. Calm.

  “You said you needed someone you can trust?”

  I stared down at her hands, my throat thickening. I nodded.

  “Joe.” I looked up and met her eyes. They held mine back unblinkingly. “You can trust me.”

  A long slow breath blew out of my nose in a heavy, pent up sigh. The back of my neck tingled again, but not in a dangerous way. It prickled and thrummed lightly, like it did at the TV studio and then at the club shortly after. Absently I noticed the old school neon sign advertising that the sandwich shop was OPEN against the window behind Tamara’s seat. It flickered and popped in time to the buzzing behind my eyes.

  I grimaced.

  “I’m scared, Tamara.” Her fingers squeezed mine quickly, offering comfort. I hate being at a loss for words. The flickering of the sign was distracting me, my fingers twitching underneath Tamara’s light grip. “Weird things are happening and I think it’s because of me.”

  Tamara’s face softened. “Joe, it’s not your fault that you got shot.”

  “You ever notice streetlights going out when you walk past them?” I broke in, surprising myself. This isn’t where I’d planned on starting this conversation.

  She blinked in surprise, leaning her head back and away slightly. “Uhm … Not really. I mean, sometimes I’ll see one pop on or off I suppose…”

  “I see it all the time.”

  In the back of my head I could remember the first time I ever noticed it happening. The memory flashed in my head clear as day, despite it being years since I’d even thought about it.

  I used to walk past the same block on my way home from a friend’s house every day after school. In the wintertime it got dark early in Winnipeg, so the streetlights were always on by dinnertime. And on the same block at the same lamp I would watch the light suddenly die as I got within twenty feet of it only to see it relight as I got twenty feet away. I showed it to my friends one day when they wouldn’t believe me. All of them were convinced that I had rigged it somehow, pulled a David Copperfield or something.

  I was twelve years old.

  “All the time,” I repeated.

  Tamara squeezed my fingers tighter. “Joe, I don’t understand.”

  I shook my head. “Neither do I. But …”

  “But?”

  I sighed heavily, my voice shaking just a bit. The buzzing in my head hummed in sync with the annoying neon sign.

  “But I can’t pretend it isn’t happening anymore,” I growled, my teeth grinding together as I reached for the buzzing sensation at the back of my neck.

  The OPEN sign snapped off with an electric hiss. The buzzing in my head suddenly abated. Tamara’s head snapped around in surprise, staring at the sign as I sighed in relief.

  She turned back to me after a moment, catching me mid-cookie munching. I wiped crumbs away from lips with the back of my bruised forearm.