Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero

by T. Ellery Hodges

  For a moment neither of them had moved. Their feet were like iron weights anchoring them to the floor as they tried to process what they saw in front of them. When Jonathan’s body finally took a long labored breath they’d snapped back into the moment, stopped trying to understand and rushed to find some way to help.

  They had been forced to kneel in the puddle surrounding their friend, desperately yelling his name. They’d felt the blood, cold from the linoleum, seeping into their clothes and covering their hands as they searched for some way to help him, both frantically looking for the injury where it had all come from.

  “Jonathan! Can you hear me? What happened?”

  “Jesus! Where is he hurt! Where is the blood coming from?”

  Until he’d been put in the machine, Jonathan hadn’t been able to close his eyes without seeing the blond man’s face, the needle, the blood on linoleum.

  The loud noise of the equipment was dampened by the ear plugs. He’d never been in an MRI. On television the machines had always appeared loud, uncomfortable, and claustrophobic. Jonathan didn’t feel any of those things. He found the cocoon of metal safe, the dulled white noise soothing, each a layer of buffer between him and reality.

  As a child he’d often fallen asleep to the sprinkler systems running outside his bedroom window. When the water would stop, the abrupt end of the noise would wake him from sleep and leave him feeling like he’d been abandoned. The repetitive sound was just as comforting now as an adult, but the MRI would only provide this retreat for a short time. It gave him something to focus on, something to hold his panic at bay.

  No one knew anything yet. The doctors, the police, not even Hayden and Collin could help piece together the moments between losing consciousness and waking in the puddle.

  Jonathan had felt their distrust of his story. All that blood with no wound; it left too many unanswered questions. They hadn’t said it, but their eyes gave them away as he tried to explain. Whenever he said he couldn’t remember, that he’d been unconscious, the look of skepticism flashing through their thoughts was poorly hidden. At least they kept their opinions to themselves until the facts had been gathered.

  He couldn’t blame them for it. Overwhelming fear was the worst lens to observe a situation through. It rendered the observer’s memory untrustworthy. He heard the words come out of his own mouth and knew his response would have been the same. Jonathan himself questioned what he remembered, doubted it. He found himself leaving out details as they seemed impossible.

  Until he’d been made to lie still in the machine he hadn’t really been given enough time alone to try and process it for himself, without an audience, to reconstruct events in a manner that made any sense. He struggled to build a timeline in his head. Alcohol, physical and psychological trauma, drugged sedation, all allied against him to create a fog of uncertainty over everything he thought he remembered.

  He had dreamed.

  He was a child, sometime near his ninth birthday. He was riding in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, a blue Ford Ranger that belonged to his father. He’d remembered the smell and feel of the plastic canvas car seat, so distinct, not like leather or upholstery. His father drove, he’d tuned the radio to the same oldies station he always had when Jonathan was young.

  The truck itself betrayed that he was dreaming. It had been totaled in the wreck that took his father’s life. He’d taken this drive with his father as a child.

  The dash was too high and he had to push against his seat belt to try and see the road in front of them. He’d forgotten that about childhood. The repeated struggle to see what was happening right in front of him, whether it was because he was being sheltered from it by his parents, or just because he was too damn short to see over the dash.

  Perspective, literally and figuratively, was gained with age.

  It was early morning, and as they drove he’d asked his father why cats meowed and dogs barked. His father took the question seriously enough, not blowing Jonathan off, not getting impatient at the question of a child that seemed obvious.

  “Everything just does what it can,” Douglas said.

  To Jonathan the statement only begged more questions.

  “Why can’t cats bark?”

  His father smiled, taking his eyes off the road for a moment.

  “Why can’t you talk out of your ears? Things are all born able to do certain things, and the parts they’re born with have limits. Cats aren’t born to bark, dogs aren’t born to purr.”

  That had given Jonathan something to think about for a while and some time passed before he’d spoken again.

  “Can I have a dog, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

  His father had sighed as the real reason for his son’s questions was revealed. He looked out the driver’s side window quietly for a few moments, thinking of how to respond.

  “Son, sometimes wanting something is better than having it,” he said, clearly amused with himself.

  What Douglas found funny at the time had been lost on Jonathan. His eye’s fell to his lap while he pondered, but when he looked back to argue, his attention was drawn away by abrupt changes in his surroundings; changes that didn’t belong in the memory.

  The daylight seemed to fade away quickly, as though the hours were moving forward at an unnatural speed, pushing them into the onset of night. The weather grew turbulent, rain beginning to pound the windshield as they drove. Douglas squinted through the window, turning on the wipers but no longer able to see the road clearly in front of them. The radio cut out, the music replaced with the static of dead air.

  Suddenly his father turned to him, taking his eyes off the road. Douglas’ face had become so serious, as though they were having a conversation about life and death, not cats and dogs. It gave Jonathan a chill to see such a sudden change in the way his father looked at him.

  “It’s got to be close, Jonathan, so close death can’t tell you apart.”

  Unsure what his father was telling him, Jonathan starred back at a loss for what to say. Before he had the chance to ask for an explanation, the speakers blared to life, as though the radio had tuned itself to a new station. No music followed, only a voice that brought a rise of panic inside him.

  “I’m sorry Jonathan. The selection process is not always clear. I don’t know that you are right for this,” said the voice of his attacker. “You’ll know what to do. I’ll be there to help you, when it comes. Follow your—”

  Whatever the blond man had been saying had faded out. Jonathan’s mind had shut down completely. Not even a dream could persist.

  Waking from those drug induced depths had been slow, fragmented.

  He didn’t immediately remember what had happened and at first it was just unpleasant sensations. The floor he was on felt wrong. Cool and hard against his back, not comfortable like a mattress should be. He was damp. His eyes were shut but the darkness had retreated, and he’d become aware of light hitting the surface of his closed lids. His thoughts had become more lucid.

  Did I get sick drinking? Did I sleep on the bathroom floor? He had heard his name over and over again as if it were far away.

  “Jonathan! Jonathan!”

  He thought he recognized the voices. He could hear their panic, but had still been too distant to share in their fear.

  Are Hayden and Collin yelling for me? He’d thought.

  Why did they sound so upset, so desperate? He’d felt like he should wake up, see what the problem was, but he couldn’t open his eyes. He was caught between states, and couldn’t will himself back to consciousness. He’d remembered that he didn’t want to wake up, that he didn’t want what waited for him in the waking world. He just couldn’t remember why.

  There had been something wrong with his chest. He’d remembered that the muscles felt like they had fallen asleep. They tingled with the pins and needles that came with lack of blood flow. A sensation he’d had in his limbs, but never his chest.

  Hayden and Collin’s voices had grown louder. He’d
been aware of hands on his exposed skin. There was a stinging jolt to his face. Were they slapping him? The feeling in his chest wasn’t fading. It was moving, spreading down his abdomen, up into his shoulders and around his back. As he noticed it, pain surfaced as well. His shoulder hurt, the right side of his neck as well.

  My neck, it seemed important. The memories began rushing in, gripping Jonathan in panic.

  There was someone in the house. He’d had something in his hand.

  He didn’t recall bolting up, just that the drowsiness holding him had vanished and been replaced with a tidal wave of adrenaline. Remembering the needle in his neck and the liquid forced into his vein had triggered an onset of fear that overpowered the drugs still keeping him sedated. He’d darted up gasping for breath, panting as though he’d surfaced from a pool after being held under for too long.

  The light stung his eyes and he was forced to shut them. Collin and Hayden were kneeling on either side of him. As he fought to see against the brightness he saw their expressions. The intensity of the concern in their eyes had driven him deeper into panic.

  Time had seemed broken, it moved in fits and starts that he didn’t understand. Sounds and sights were dulled and myopic. Within the MRI machine, trying to recall it, the memories didn’t seem to belong to him. He thought he must have lost his sanity, and it wasn’t clear when he’d regained it; if he’d regained it.

  He’d seen the blood, but hadn’t at first believed it could be his. His hands were red and wet with it, shaking in front of him. He couldn’t make them stop. The trembling wasn’t coming from his hands. They were like tree limbs swaying in the wake of an earthquake, a symptom of the tremors in his core. He looked to Collin and Hayden for help. They stared back at him wide eyed, the helplessness clear on their faces. No one knew what to do and it was terrifying.

  Suddenly, he’d grown sick and faint. He turned over on his hands and knees vomiting. His eyes had pinched shut as he wretched. When the contractions in his stomach stopped long enough, he opened his eyes again. The red was everywhere, the linoleum covered with it. He tried to look away but there was nowhere to look. Even Collin and Hayden were tainted with it; their jeans soaked to their calves and their hands turned a shiny crimson.

  His mind had seemed to do the math for him. There was too much of it. It couldn’t be his; he’d be dead.

  “Where are you cut?” Collin’s voice, so dull and slow; Jonathan realized then that he’d asked him the question more than once, but it hadn’t registered through the madness.

  “Hospital.”

  He didn’t remember if he’d actually said the word. It had begun repeating over and over in his head but he didn’t know if it was coming from his lips.

  “We called, Jonathan. They’re on their way,” Hayden had said.

  Panic took hold of him again as the image of the man in the hallway resurfaced. His eyes shot around the room nervously, a sudden instinctual need to press himself into a confined space overwhelmed the faculties he had left. Collin and Hayden had jumped back startled as he’d suddenly scrambled on his hands and knees through the blood and wedged himself into the corner between two cabinets. He remembered feeling trapped there, lost, for what felt like an eternity of frantically searching the room for signs that the man was still in the house; still coming for him.

  He didn’t remember being pulled out of the corner and he hardly remembered the ambulance or getting to the hospital. He recalled speaking, or trying to, grasping for a nurse and begging.

  “My chest; he did something,” he’d cried. “Please, it doesn’t feel right.”

  They had given him something to calm him down.

  Now, within the MRI, his mind rebelled, fleeing from his attempts to reason it out. He succumbed to it, instead just listening to the dull whirring of the machine. He wished he’d stayed asleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SUNDAY | JUNE 19, 2005 | 09:30 AM

  PAIGE had difficulty resolving what she’d seen in the kitchen with the person lying in the hospital bed. The room they had placed him in for observation was nothing special. There was a typical tile floor, white walls, handrails, machines used to monitor body activity. There was a curtain that would normally be used to divide the room, but the bed next to him was empty. Paige was glad he didn’t have to share the room with a stranger. Yet it looked so lonely to her. It was cold, isolated.

  She hadn’t spoken yet. Jonathan didn’t know she was there or that Grant was standing behind her. Lying there, his expression looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth but was too lost in thought to bother doing anything about it.

  Collin had warned her, told her not to go home at all. She’d underestimated his concern, but nothing he could have said would have prepared her for the disturbing reality. She’d been able to see every hand print in the blood, every place the roommates had touched after they’d sank into the puddle to help him. She’d smelled the iron in the air, the vomit. She’d almost been sick herself.

  Collin had also warned her that the kitchen made Jonathan’s condition appear far worse than he was, but she couldn’t accept it until she saw him now.

  That so much could happen while they had been separated by a handful of hours seemed surreal. She’d had an unremarkable evening with Grant. Meanwhile, Jonathan had had the most traumatic experience of his life. She had no idea what to expect, no idea what he was feeling. He might not even want to see her yet.

  Collin and Hayden had summarized their version of what Jonathan had told the police for her. It had taken a long time for him to pull himself together enough to speak coherently. Hayden had said it reminded him of someone trying to explain a nightmare. Like the details had seemed to make some sense to Jonathan, but when he tried to explain it out loud they had lost continuity. He’d paused a lot as he tried to sort it out.

  The police hadn’t been able to do much with the story. His memory was obviously sketchy, which was to be expected given the nature of the trauma he’d experienced. Though they were skeptical of the details, there was consistency with other information. They had no witness to confirm the assailant had been in the house, but the roommates and the bartender were able to confirm that a man fitting the description of the attacker had been at the bar. Specifically, they’d all noted the height of the man in the fedora. Unfortunately, the suspect had paid his tab in cash and wasn’t traceable through any type of credit card. The bartender had been unsuccessful in recalling the man’s name from his ID. The police had no similar cases reported in the area.

  Jonathan had told the officers that the man overpowered him. He’d mentioned that the man’s eyes were unnaturally blue, but he had trouble defining what he meant by ‘unnatural.’ He said he had hit the man dead on in the forearm with a baseball bat, but the doctors and police all seemed reluctant to accept that he’d successfully connected with the man. It was unlikely a person could take such an attack, as Jonathan described, without injury. They assumed he had missed, probably hitting a wall or door frame, and mistook what happened due to the state of panic he’d been in, although the police had failed to find any apparent damage in the hallway. There were no holes in the dry wall or gouges in a door frame. However, the bat was found precisely where Jonathan had said it would be.

  The police had asked the standard questions, but Jonathan was largely useless. He didn’t have any enemies, he didn’t owe anyone money. He didn’t have any questionable prior romantic relationships nor did anyone have anything to gain by assaulting him. On top of that, nothing in the house had been stolen.

  The blood work from the kitchen confirmed it belonged to Jonathan. This had been a relief to the police, but only in that it confirmed the blood didn’t belong to another victim. The doctors reported that Jonathan’s body didn’t show much trauma outside of his psychological state on arrival. Ketamine and various other sleep and paralyzing agents had been found in Jonathan’s bloodstream. With no witness to the administration the doctors assumed that the initial syringe forced on Jo
nathan had been predominately anesthesia and that the assailant may have followed up with additional shots once he’d been unconscious.

  A sonogram, chest X-rays, and the MRI had turned up nothing out of place within Jonathan’s torso. Both Hayden and Collin had said that Jonathan had been hysterical about the sensation he was experiencing in his chest, but he’d admitted that a few hours after waking he no longer felt it. The doctors suggested that a numbing agent may have been applied to his chest and that this may account for what he described; if not that, then possibly something to do with the mixture of drugs that he’d had in his system.

  The best possible motive that the police could come up with was that the assailant had been there to harvest organs. They guessed that the man had been spooked by the timely return home of Hayden and Collin and fled. Paige understood why the police came to the conclusion. Jonathan had reported the assailant used his name during the assault.

  The attacker must have observed the roommates long enough to find an opportune moment to strike when Jonathan was alone. This detail of the story had given Paige a disturbing chill. If true, how long had some stranger been standing in the shadows around them, watching them through their windows, following them? She realized it might not be safe to be near Jonathan if it were the case. The moment she’d had the thought she’d felt terrible.

  You don’t abandon family, Paige, she’d reprimanded herself. I can’t believe you’re even thinking so selfishly with a friend in danger.

  She didn’t know much about the organ black market and had to assume that the police knew their business, yet it seemed they were ignoring what couldn’t be easily explained. All of that blood had to come from somewhere. Why hadn’t the attacker moved Jonathan to a different location once he’d had him incapacitated? The cop’s theory, riddled with holes, was still the only one.