Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero Read online

  Copyright © 2014 T. Ellery Hodges

  All rights reserved.

  Foggy Night Publishing, LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-09907746-1-7

  ISBN-10: 0990774619

  Dedicated to all who wondered where their Mr. Miyagi was while life was beating them down

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  About The Author

  PROLOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 2003

  IT was cold in the elevator shaft. The surfaces of the building’s inner structure, where only maintenance men ever visited, were sheathed in years of built up dust. It was silent by nature, the only noise that found its way into the dark passage was the occasional passing of the elevator car. A button would be pressed and the hoist would come to life, taking the lift from one floor to another. The doorway would open, the passenger would exit, and the shaft would return to its hibernation.

  Somewhere on the building’s upper levels, a powerful impact broke the silence, ripping the steel doors off their mounts and shooting two enemies into the shaft. Light burst into the passage as the figures struck the adjacent wall. They began to fall, each struggling to gain the advantage over the other, grappling with limbs, trying to maneuver so that one would find himself on top when they hit the ground.

  Peter’s hair whipped past his face as he plunged out of the light and into the darkness below. He grunted as the beast pushed him into one of the I-beams lining the shaft’s corridor.

  The enemy always had an edge in tight spaces. They had more mass to use against him. This, and the darkness, was putting him at a considerable disadvantage.

  He’d been outclassed since the fight began, unable to find a vulnerability. Now, as he fell deeper into the dark, he knew that if he didn’t land on top, it would be the end. It wouldn’t kill the beast to take the brunt of the fall, but it might hurt the bastard enough to turn the tables.

  He could only imagine the ground rushing towards them. He couldn’t see in the blackness, but knew his enemy could. He felt another impact, sensed their momentum slow, and knew the beast had taken a hit against one of the beams just as he had a moment earlier.

  I hope it hurts, he thought.

  They slammed back and forth violently, beam to beam, until their bodies dropped into free fall down the shaft’s center. Despite Peter’s efforts, it had little effect on the uncontrollable spin into the dark. They crashed hard in to the basement floor. The cement cracked beneath them as it absorbed their fall. The lower floors of the building rumbled as the vibrations from the impact shook its foundation.

  The beast’s weight on top of him made the sudden stop feel like being crushed between two walls. Ribs broke. A lung collapsed. The air rushed out of him and he nearly lost his grasp on consciousness. On the ground floor he desperately attempted to breathe, but only coughed on mouthfuls of agitated dust. He knew he’d lost.

  The beast, hurt but not injured, rose to its feet over him. Its massive shoulders and head only an outline as the light from above kept its features in shadow. It seemed to be waiting, hoping Peter would get to his feet and fight back. In his panic, it was all he could do to focus on breathing. Forcing his broken body to stand was no longer possible.

  Peter searched for the zipper holding his jacket shut. His fingers fumbled through gloved hands as he tried to get a grip, desperate to make his breathing easier. Finally grasping the pull tab he drew the jacket open. A soft orange glow from beneath his t-shirt illuminated the passage. The light, like a candle in a cave, brought his enemy's face into view. It flinched as its eyes adjusted.

  Breathing painfully, he met the monster’s gaze. He’d never seen one of them hold still this long, never looked into their empty white eyes. This was the first time he’d been this helpless in front of one. His enemy could see he no longer presented a threat.

  Its large hand reached down, grasping him by the jacket, and raised his body out of the small crater they’d punched into the floor. The movement was agony. He could feel his ribs, loose within his torso, moving unnaturally under his muscles, and he cried out. The beast pressed his back against the wall of the shaft, his feet dangling a foot from the floor, his head at eye level with the monster. Peter let his hands fall to his sides, all his energy going into the effort to breath, to keeping his head up.

  “Go to hell,” he whispered. If he'd had the strength, he'd have spit the blood now pooling in his throat into the thing’s face.

  Its head tilted.

  The beast had heard the words, but did not seem to comprehend. Peter could guess at its confusion. It didn’t know what the term meant. There was no word like hell in the damn thing’s language.

  It didn’t seem to concern itself for long with comprehension. It said nothing, and Peter saw that its neck was contracting, bulging up around its jaw line. He looked away, letting his head come to rest on his chest.

  Better to close your eyes, he thought.

  He tried to think of his parents, his brother and sister. He heard the monster’s mouth opening, heard it growling, felt the heat of its breath. He thought about the damn blond man, how he had asked Peter to fight. When the teeth sunk into his neck, he cried out again, clenching his eyes shut as the blood ran. The beast’s head jerked back and forth mercilessly as it ripped the flesh from him. He wailed as the skin and muscle tore free, heard the beast spitting out parts of him to the shaft’s floor.

  Peter remembered the blond man had asked, “Will you help us stand against them?” It was the last thing that crossed his thoughts before they stopped forever.

  The light in his chest began to flicker and fade as his heart struggled to push less and less blood through his body. Eventually the glow died out entirely and the creature was returned to darkness. It frothed from its jaws, its saliva becoming thick with a waxy purple excretion. The process was short lived, interrupted by the arrival of the gate as it surrounded the beast and Peter’s body. For a moment the shaft was filled with the gateway's bright red light. Then there was a sudden flash of white.
>
  The passage was dark; no light from above, no imploded doors, no damaged walls, and no crater in the flooring. Somewhere in the upper floors a passenger called the lift. The elevator came, the doorway opened, and the passenger boarded. The car lowered, stopped, and delivered its occupant. The shaft returned to silence, a place no one ever went, waiting for its next passenger, hibernating.

  DECEMBER 1996

  SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  CHAPTER ONE

  DECEMBER 1996 | SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  HIS hand glided over the mahogany, lingering on the table’s smooth surface, cool to the touch as he moved his fingertips slowly from one picture frame to the next. The table with the photos stood out against the gray walls and white trim. Jonathan had chosen those colors. His father had let him pick out the paint when they had refinished the hallway, under the condition that he chose something tasteful.

  “Be nice if it matches the furniture too,” his father had said.

  Getting to pick the paint had made Jonathan more interested in helping to do the work, as its success or failure then hinged on one of his decisions. He’d only realized later that Douglas, his father, had planned it that way, to give him a stake in the outcome.

  That memory was far away now as he stood there in his black suit and tie, his brown hair combed neatly; a thirteen year old boy without a father.

  When Jonathan’s grandfather had passed, he’d put up a fuss about wearing the suit. He’d asked his father why it mattered. What was a pair of slacks over a pair of jeans? How was an uncomfortable collar or a tie relevant to showing respect? If they had to be grieving, couldn’t they at least do it in comfortable clothes?

  He’d been eleven then and his father, patience wearing thin from grief, had let out a tired sigh as he knelt in front of Jonathan to help him with his tie.

  “Traditions get passed down; they become the rules. Some make sense, some seem pointless, but others,” Douglas said, “others only show their value when you don’t obey them.”

  “This one seems stupid,” Jonathan responded, squirming in his tight collar as his father finished.

  “Well,” Douglas said, standing and turning to the mirror to put on his own tie, “I don’t think today is the day that we test the rules.”

  Jonathan had started to press his case. He’d never liked following rules. He wanted to know the reasons behind things, but his father had cut him off.

  “Jonathan, your grandfather followed this rule, and he would appreciate it if you followed it for him. It’s literally,” he paused, “the last thing you’ll ever have to do for him.”

  Douglas looked cross at first, but even at eleven, Jonathan could see it wasn’t anger. After all, his father had just lost his own father, and Douglas’ own words, the last thing you’ll ever have to do for him had caught him unprepared. They brought the kind of outpouring of emotion that even a grown man was hard pressed to hide, and a tear emerged from his father’s eye.

  It was the only time Jonathan had ever seen him cry, and a wave of guilt washed over him. Immediately, he felt ashamed of himself for worrying about a thing like comfortable clothes on the day of a funeral. Even at eleven, that guilt had brought his father’s grief into clarity.

  “Yes sir,” he said, staring down at his shoes, “I’m sorry dad.”

  Now, only two years later, in a suit and tie again, staring at the photos of his own father in the hallway, Jonathan understood. His mother hadn’t had to fight with him to put the suit on. It wasn’t a rule he cared to challenge. If his father would have wanted it, it didn’t matter if it made sense.

  It was one of the last things he could do for his own father now, and it wasn’t enough.

  The photos of Douglas had been set out for the wake. They were all taken long before Jonathan was born. He picked up one of the black frames from the table. The picture was of Douglas with four other men from the army, none of whom Jonathan recognized. A notation underneath was put out for the guests. It read Staff Sargent Douglas Tibbs with the surviving members of his army ranger strike team, Libya 1984. The men in the picture looked solemn, sad. Jonathan had to assume that the keyword from the photo was ‘surviving.’ Perhaps this photo was taken after one of the team had been lost. There was a lot his father had never gotten the chance to tell him.

  Jonathan set the frame back down carefully and walked away, making his way through the friends and relatives in his living room. He was hoping to get away before he was drawn into another outpouring of a visitor’s condolences. A man he didn’t recognize put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder before he could make his way out of the room. Jonathan halted politely, looking up at him.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Jonathan,” the man said, “you were well-spoken today. The words you said at the funeral were heartfelt. Your dad would have been moved to hear them.”

  Jonathan nodded politely, thanking the man for the compliment.

  He’d been told this a number of times today, and didn’t know what else to say outside of “thank you.” He didn’t understand why they felt the need to tell him this. Perhaps, having never met Jonathan outside the funeral, it was all they knew of him to comment on. If Jonathan was supposed to find some pride in his speech, he couldn’t feel it through his grief. That, and didn’t they see he hadn’t said a word of his own? All he’d done was written down his father’s own thoughts as he remembered them, putting the words together in a speech. His dad had always had a way of saying things. He’d have been a fraud taking credit for them.

  He left the man and walked into his father’s garage. It was the only place in the house that wasn’t made immaculate for the wake and the closest thing Douglas had had to an office. The garage had a cement floor. It was cold and dusty, having seen years of cars being torn down and rebuilt. There were oil stains that had absorbed the grime of the floor, metal shavings, loose bolts. The work bench was exactly how Douglas had left it. His tools were still out. A rag where he’d wiped grease from his hands sat on a vise grip bolted to the work bench. His father’s stool was empty.

  Taking up most of the garage space was an old truck. Jonathan didn’t know where his dad had found these projects, or what moved him to work on them. The thing looked like it belonged a hundred miles away on a farm. It was the color of rust, if it wasn’t just simply rusted, Jonathan couldn’t tell. Douglas had still been in the middle of repairing it, but Jonathan couldn’t imagine what was wrong with the thing. He’d never asked because he wouldn’t have understood the answer.

  Heavy chains attached to a hoist had the truck’s engine suspended out of the vehicle. Jonathan gripped the links with his hands. The chain was cold, tough, so strong it held gravity at bay. The metal was clean and new, in stark contrast to the dirty engine that it supported.

  When he released the chain, he sat on his father’s stool, his feet not yet able to reach the floor, and pondered the engine. He thought he should try to finish the project; a symbolic effort to his father’s memory, but it seemed too complicated. Without his dad, he wouldn’t know how to start, and he felt defeat before he’d even begun. For a fleeting moment, finishing what his father had started seemed worth the effort to learn.

  “He’d never see it,” Jonathan said to himself, the statement crushing his drive to carry out the sentimental gesture as soon as he’d said it.

  When his mother had told him his father was gone, when what she was saying had truly sunk in, he’d been ashamed at his initial reaction. It hadn’t been grief, although that had come later. It had been a suffocating fear. Jonathan had known, quite suddenly, that the shield between him and the world, the force that had defied reality to keep him sheltered, was suddenly gone, and he was afraid; afraid that he wasn’t ready to rely on himself.

  Remembering it now, he began to sob. Was he so selfish? Was his first reaction to the death of his father no more than fear for himself? The self-defeating thoughts made him want to lie on the floor and cradle his knees against his chest. He couldn’t though, not he
re. He wasn’t going to lie on the filthy floor. Not in the clothes he wore out of respect for his father.

  The garage door creaked open and Jonathan turned away to face the wall. He didn’t want to be seen sitting in this depressing garage sobbing. He hoped whoever it was would find that they’d opened the wrong door and leave him. Instead, he heard footsteps, and when a hand rested on his shoulder, he was forced to look up through his reddened eyes and see who was interrupting him despite his obvious wish for solitude.

  He was relieved to see his mother, Evelyn. There was no shame crying in front of her; there never had been. They’d had their bouts with tears since the news had come, and this wouldn’t be the last of it. Still, his mother seemed to have more control over the emotions. It wasn’t that she loved Douglas any less than Jonathan did, or that she wasn’t assaulted by unwanted pain. It was more that she seemed to have accepted the reality of the loss.

  She didn’t have the same luxury of a thirteen year old boy. After all, she was a mother, and still had Jonathan to keep herself together for. Evelyn was more practiced with grief. She’d already endured the loss of her own parents as well as her father-in-law just two years earlier. She knew the terrain of this pain, whereas Jonathan walked it now for the first time.

  “Gonna be okay?” his mother asked.

  Jonathan shook his head, wiping the tears from his cheeks. She hugged his head to her and began to rock. Some time passed, neither speaking as they swayed. Eventually, Jonathan broke the silence.

  “When do we feel normal again?” he asked.

  Evelyn sighed.

  “Never really,” she said softly. “Tomorrow we’ll get up, and what we thought was normal will just be a memory we took for granted. So we’ll try to find a new normal, and eventually, wherever that is, we will start to feel okay again. Until—”

  She’d cut herself off, but it didn’t matter. Jonathan had already known where her thoughts had been headed.