Page 19

19

Somebody Wake Me the Fuck Up Already

G roggily, I blinked awake to discover I was lying in my bed at the mansion. The room was bright despite the drawn blinds, suggesting it was the middle of the day. But was it the same day?

Vague recollections flooded my mind: heated arguing while I lay on the ground, overcome by visual evidence of a reality I’d never realized coexisted with our own. Screaming, moaning, and then I was in Griffin’s arms, being carried. Then here, slurring like a drunkard as I insisted on taking a “suuuuuppah fassssht” shower to wash off the sweat before I collapsed into bed. Then beneath the rainfall showerhead, crying out as the water somehow reactivated Magnum’s lightning energy. Every one of my friends swarming into the shower, desperate to help me escape the pain that had me shrieking and whimpering.

I groaned at the memory. Besides seeing me being all wimpy, they’d also seen me all naked, including Griffin. Including Brady, the self-declared boob connoisseur. He’d probably never let me hear the end of it.

Fuck , the note! I hadn’t gotten into the shower with it, had I?

I lifted the duvet in case it might be tucked into my fresh clothes, but nope—I wasn’t wearing any. Not even underwear. What the hell?

Yanking the covers back down, I blinked up at the ceiling for several moments while trying to remember what else happened.

I couldn’t.

Eventually, I tried to get up. But my entire body ached like I’d gone ten rounds with Homer, Yolanda, and Armando all at once, and lost to every single one of them, badly.

So instead, I croaked out, “Uh, guys? Bobo?”

Instantly, several sets of sneakers squeaked and ran across the floor, growing louder until they reached me.

Griffin was first to rush into the room, his eyes wide as they jumped across what was visible of my body—from the shoulders up. The concern tightening his brow softened, and he walked into the room as Hunt, Brady, and Layla piled in behind him.

Automatically, he reached for me, but then he pulled back. “I should wash up first. I was working on Clyde. I didn’t want to leave your side—”

“But then I made him,” Layla interjected, plonking down at the foot of my bed with a bounce. Even if the guys had all been working on the Mustangs, knowing Layla, she’d probably just sat beside them to sketch, as she preferred to do more often than not. Whereas grease smeared a line across Griffin’s cheek, Layla looked freshly clean.

“He was fussing over you the whole time,” Layla continued, “but you were just sleeping and sleeping and, shit, sleeping . Girl, you’ve been out for, like, three days again.”

My own eyes widened as I moved to sit up, but then I remembered my state of undress and slunk deeper under the covers. “Three days? How’s that possible?” I did have to pee something fierce though.

“You tell us,” Hunt said, standing to hover beside Layla at the foot of the bed. “It’s not just been Griff. We’ve all been pretty messed up about it.”

“What happened—where’s your dad?”

Hunt’s face fell. “They took him.”

I moved to sit up in bed again only to recall I’d be flashing titties if I did.

I shook my head. “You know what? I need to hear it all. But first ya gotta let me pee and get dressed. I didn’t exactly expect to wake up full-on naked here.”

Griffin grimaced, but Brady only grinned. “Joss, dude, your body’s slammin’.”

Layla reached across Brady to smack him on the arm. “Bro, not helping! You don’t want her to think you were all perving on her when she was passed out, now do you?”

Brady’s smile dropped, his eyes widening in alarm. “No, Joss, you know I didn’t mean it that way. We’d never—I’d never. I was just messing with you.”

I waved away his concern. “I know, Brade. I’m just not in the mood to give you guys another show while we talk.”

Brady relaxed, laughing easily. “And what a show you gave us, girl—”

Layla smacked him again before standing and shooing him out. She and Hunt followed. When Griffin lingered, I glanced up at him.

His gaze trailed across my face. “You really had me so majorly worried. Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

I chuckled darkly. “Well, I’d say ‘sure,’ but I don’t really know what I did.”

“Yeah, I know. Get dressed and we’ll catch you up. You want me to get your clothes out for you?”

He seemed to recognize how exhausted I felt. I smiled up at him. “Yes please.”

He rummaged through the chest of drawers, pulling out sleep shorts to start, obviously expecting me to keep resting. “Layla couldn’t sit still while you were out. She put away all your clothes.”

“Hmm, that was nice of her.”

“Yeah.” He spun. “You want a bra or not?”

I blinked at the unexpected question. Was this a best friend or a boyfriend thing to do? We were both, I thought, and there’d been too much dying and upheaval recently to figure out our new relationship.

I smiled gently, refusing to let myself feel awkward with the boy I’d known forever. “How about a camisole with a shelf-bra? Do I have anything like that?”

He was already pulling one out like there wasn’t a single strange thing about him selecting my undergarments. “We would’ve dressed you before helping you into bed, but you were hurting so much and it was hard enough to get you out of the shower and into the room. We didn’t even get you fully dried off before you fell into bed. It seemed worse to leave you exposed while we dressed you, so I just covered you up.” His eyes grew heavier. “We had no idea you’d be out this long.”

“I understand,” I murmured, though I didn’t. Not even a little bit. My friends seeing me naked was the least of my worries when I’d apparently lost control of my body and mind.

Not good. So not good. I was going to motherfucking kill Magnum for this.

Griffin placed my clothes on the bed and leaned over to press a lingering kiss to my head. Then he walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.

Despite my sluggishness, I dressed, peed, and brushed my teeth in record time. When I got a good look at my bare skin—and the totally batshit cray-cray going on there—the need for explanations snaked beneath my skin like desperation. My tattoos—the ones that weren’t supposed to be able to just up and move, because, you know, they were tattoos— had freaking up and moved .

The many designs Layla had painstakingly etched across my skin were now different in size or location—or gone entirely.

Maybe I was still sleeping? Shit, I half hoped I was.

I was barely climbing back into bed when I called for my friends to join me again. “And bring me water too, please! And Bobo!”

Hunt delivered a pitcher of water and was filling a glass for me when I pressed, “Where’s Bobo? Is he okay? I remember him touching me when I was being, well, whatever the fuck that all was. Please tell me he’s okay. And tell me more about what happened to your dad.”

Hunt stared at me for so long that I started to get back out of bed, ready to rush off to save them somehow, though I had absolutely no idea what I could do to help.

But Hunt shook his head till I sat back down, swallowing thickly. “I really wish I could tell you that both my dad and Bobo are okay, Joss, really, I super fucking do. But I don’t know if either of them are, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single thing any of us can do to change that for the time being.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, draining half my glass. God, I was so thirsty!

I stared up at him with imploring eyes. “Your dad’s not … dead , is he? Tell me he’s not. He can’t be.”

“No. At least, I don’t think he is. He was unconscious when Magnum had him dragged off.”

I sat up straighter. “Wait, you guys let Magnum take him?”

Griffin climbed up on the side of the bed to lean against the wall, while Brady and Layla lowered to the foot of the bed, settling in.

Brady said, “We didn’t let Magnum do a damn thing.” His eyes blazed. “He threatened us. It’s the fucker’s M.O. Threaten us till he gets us to do whatever crazy crap he wants.”

Hunt raised one of the blinds and, gazing out the window, added, “Actually, he threatened my dad. Said if we didn’t let him go, he’d kill him.”

I gasped, though surely I couldn’t have actually been all that surprised. Death and threats of death had quickly become our new way of life.

I didn’t like it one stinking bit.

“When we still hesitated,” Griffin said, “he upped the ante. Threatened to run enough voltage through you to power the entire campus.”

“You knew I’d come back,” I whispered.

Griffin and Brady were shaking their heads. Griffin said, “There’s no guarantee, not that it’ll happen every time. There’s too much we still don’t know about all that.”

“Besides,” Brady said, “you took longest to come back last time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I still came back.”

When my friends just stared at me, their expressions terribly heavy, I chuckled awkwardly. “The whole deal with us being here is accepting that we’re going to die over and over again.” I swallowed the lump building in my throat.

“We talked to Magnum about that,” Griffin said. “We made a deal.”

I whipped my head in his direction. “What kind of deal?” When he didn’t answer immediately, I pushed, “ Griff , what kind of fucking deal?”

“The kind where the rest of us die but you don’t.”

“What?” I looked to the rest of my friends as I laughed like this was all some big fucking joke. If it was, it was the worst joke in the entire universe.

My friends all wore somber expressions that made them seem years older than they were.

“You can’t be serious! You actually expect me to just sit back and twiddle my thumbs while you all suffer the consequences of, well, shit, all this? Whatever the fuck this is? ’Cause I’m gonna be real here, guys, I truly don’t know anymore, and that’s assuming I ever had a clue, which I really don’t think I did.”

“Yes,” Griffin said. “You heard Hunt’s dad. He said you’re different.”

“But he didn’t say I was different in that I could actually die. Or did he? I actually don’t remember all that much after the guy shot him up with the lightning … juice … stuff. And so I don’t keep sounding like a total moron talking about this, what’ve you all been calling it?”

“We haven’t been calling it anything much,” Layla said, deadly serious for once. “Just lightning. Haven’t been in the mood to talk much given that we have an uninvited audience to everything we say.”

As one, the five of us shot accusatory glares at the electronic panel inside my bedroom.

I started: “None of this would be stuff Magnum doesn’t know.”

“Nope,” Hunt said. “The issue is that the asshole isn’t telling us shit. He expects us to plaster smiles on our faces while we keep playing along with his stupid little games when he lies to us and doesn’t tell us diddly squat. He’s obviously messing with our lives just so he can become some glorified superhero or some other insanity. The fucker’s ruining lives left and right so he can play dress-up!”

I glanced up at Hunt, who remained standing by the window. “Do you know why your dad was here?”

He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and sighed. “No. I don’t know anything beyond what you saw. Once they started shocking him, he didn’t say anything else you didn’t hear.”

“Will you be allowed to see him again?”

He shrugged. “Magnum said maybe I’d be able to, if we do what he asks.”

“Generous as always,” I muttered, drinking the rest of my water. I took a deep breath to steel myself, already knowing I wouldn’t like their answer. “And where’s Bobo?”

Griffin crossed his legs into a lotus position and leaned his head back against the wall my bed was pressed up alongside. “Last we saw, he was on your thigh.”

I laughed. “No, seriously, where is he?”

Griffin just stared pointedly at the outline of my body beneath the blanket.

I looked at Layla.

“He ain’t shittin’ ya, girlfriend. Seems like he should be, I know, but nope. It’s like we’re on a ’shroom trip and it’s turned bad and now we can’t do anything but wait it out and hope we come out the other side in one piece.”

“’Shroom trip does track with the shit I saw,” I muttered as I flung off the duvet to reveal my legs—

My attention whisked across the tattooed skin of my thigh.

I felt my eyes widen and my mouth drop open before my mind properly registered what I was looking at. A tattoo, yes. But …

I blinked, I stared, and then I blinked and stared some more.

But the scene didn’t change.

From my right thigh, where a year ago Layla had inked a pair of frogs guarding a crystalline pyramid just their size, bordered in psychedelic mushrooms, now a tattoo Bobo smiled up at me instead. His tongue lolled out of his mouth as his lips spread into his goofy wide grin as his tail wagged behind him—across my knee.

“What. The. Fuck?” I breathed.

“Pretty much sums up what we thought of it too,” Layla said. “Sure as shit didn’t see that coming, I’ll tell ya that much.”

“What the fuck?” My voice was squeaky. “Guys, are you also seeing Bobo moving around and hanging out on my frigging leg ?”

“Can’t help but,” Layla said. “I actually watched him gobble down the frogs, pyramid, and shrooms. I’m thinking maybe he morphed into them, or something? They seriously don’t write manuals for this shit.”

My eyes strained to stretch wider. “Please tell me Bobo’s not about to start tripping balls on my leg.” I shook my head across the pillow. “You know what, guys? I’ve just figured it out. I’m dreaming, that’s it. Somebody wake me the fuck up already.”

“You know,” Hunt said in that way of his when he was about to spout some scholarly shit, “communal dreaming is believed to be a possible thing.”

“Then let’s all wake up,” Brady said. “Go back to before the Fischer House party.”

Hunt finally turned to face us, taking a seat in the corner armchair. “Even if communal dreams are possible, this isn’t one of them.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I’ve already tried everything I’ve ever read about that’s supposed to wake you up from dreams. Besides, if you die in a dream, you wake up in real life. Either that, or you die in real life if your mind believes that the body is actually dead.”

He slumped farther into the chair, crossing his hands over his waist. “This is all too real.”

I studied Bobo some more. His mouth was moving as if he were barking, but he made no sound. He wagged his tail some more. At least he seemed happy enough.

I sensed a butterfly a moment before it fluttered over to Bobo, landing on his nose. When I thought it would fly away, it did, and Bobo chased after it, growing smaller as he appeared to put distance between me and him.

While he was still an ink figure on the skin of my thigh.

And Layla had tattooed no butterflies on me anywhere.

“This has gotta be a bad trip,” I muttered to myself, still desperate to make sense of the situation that made no damn sense no matter which way I examined it. “Do you think I need to … feed him in there? In here?”

I shook my head at the absurdity crossing my lips but didn’t bother commenting on it again. My friends were definitely not missing how crazy life had gotten for all of us.

“Seriously, dude, who the hell knows?” Layla said. “Just keep an eye on him. He seems fine for now.”

“At least now you don’t have to worry about Magnum using him against you,” Brady said. “Silver linings, you know?”

I leaned my head onto my pillow and allowed my eyes to close for a few breaths. Bobo was prancing across my skin, just the outline and some simple shading, and I didn’t feel a thing.

“Do we know exactly how he got in there?” I asked.

“I watched it happen,” Griffin said, and I opened my eyes to look at him. “When you touched Hunt’s dad, and that guy’s zappy lightning jumped over to you, Bobo touched you, and when he did, he just kind of got sucked onto your skin. One second he was standing outside of you like usual, the next …” Griffin gestured to my leg. “Talk about freaking the rest of us the hell out.”

“And where did the clothes I was wearing then end up?”

Brady huffed. “What do you want those for? They reeked. You were right to want a shower, even if you did just about give us a heart attack trying to get you out of it before it fried you alive.”

“So that memory was real. Sweet . How did the current reactivate or whatever? I majorly need more accurate ways to describe all this stuff that’s happening to us.”

“No kidding.” Hunt’s eyes were grave. “ We don’t know . Apparently, that’s the theme of our lives lately.” He frowned severely. Nothing bothered Hunt, the one with a beach-ball-sized sponge for a brain, more than not knowing. “But when we meet with our academic instructors, I’m going to ask to learn about everything that has even the slightest chance of affecting us. Magnum agreed meeting them could wait till you recovered.”

“So, my clothes?” I asked.

Layla waggled her brows obnoxiously at me in a blatant message. “I grabbed them.” For good measure, she also winked.

“Got it,” I said, in a hurry to stop her gestures which were so exaggerated she could have starred in an early silent film. “You know, I thought I wanted to wait to grab some fresh air, but now I think it’ll do me a lot of good.”

Griffin leaned forward. “Are you sure you’re up for it? It looked like you took some major voltage—twice.”

Layla said, “I’m surprised our girl can string two words together.”

Fuck my life. I smiled tightly. “I’ll be fine if I just go slowly. I really just want the fresh air and to think things over.”

One by one, I looked at my friends, trying to silently broadcast to them, Bring your notes .

We still knew pretty much jack squat. I was beyond over it.

With Griffin’s arm wrapped around my waist to steady me, we trudged beyond the pretty flower garden and its perfect clusters of outdoor seating until nothing surrounded us but wild forest.

“If they’re watching us all the way out here,” Brady said, “then there’s really no escaping them, and we should just accept that we’re as fucked as fucked gets and move on with our lives as best we can, being Magnum’s fucking puppet bitches.”

After a squinty-eyed scan of the forest, Brady added, “Now, guys, whip ’em out so we can compare ’em.”

When the four of us jerked our heads in his direction, he cackled. “Not our dicks, you dirty fuckers. The notes, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Layla muttered, but her eyes danced in delight. She and Brady were definitely twins when it came to a crass sense of humor and ill-timed jokes. It was part of their highly dubious charm.

As Layla handed my note to me, still folded, still unpleasantly damp, I asked, “Have you guys looked at yours yet?”

“No,” Griffin said. “We decided to wait for you.”

“Even though it might’ve helped with something?” I asked him.

“Yes. We’ve been a united team forever. Not about to change that up now.”

Hunt nodded. “We waited. But I’m super curious, so let’s not wait any longer.”

The five of us set to unrolling our tightly folded scraps of paper. I moved slowly with mine, relieved to find Jude’s familiar cramped handwriting scrawled in pencil instead of ink. It was faded and difficult to read, the letters tiny to maximize space, but at least the words hadn’t smeared. With some patient deciphering, it was all still there.

My dearest Joss,

I hope that someday you’ll learn to forgive me for the many lies I told you. I promise, I only ever did all I did because I genuinely, with all my heart, believed it was the only way to help you. We had to get you out of the lab. Things were really bad already, and they were only getting worse. Remember when we admitted to cutting off the stalks of plants to see how quickly they’d regrow? I’ll just say this: It wasn’t plants. I’m too ashamed to say more. We decided we had to do something. When our boss told us the lab was going to close and we were to euthanize you all, we took you and ran.

Magnum Chase wants to become an immortal. He’s convinced many of his staff that he intends to cure disease the world over with his findings. He says he intends to eradicate poverty and suffering around the globe.

But he will stop at nothing and will use anyone he thinks will help him to achieve his ultimate goal. It’s not just to become a man capable of living forever, but also to be the most powerful man alive. He doesn’t want just immortality, as if that weren’t enough: he wants it all. Like in the superhero movies you used to love watching when you were younger. Picture that. He wants actual superpowers.

When the Aquoians refused to give him the information and biological material he wanted, he took them by force. And he started looking elsewhere for other legends of what I’ve come to consider “magical powers.” He searched especially in the ancient tribes that still preserve some of their previous ways of life. We believe he didn’t stop there, that he’s searched the world for more hints of abilities that science cannot explain.

Even though science can’t properly explain a condition as remarkable as immortality, it can confirm it. Joss, my sweetheart, I fear what might come of his continued insistence on forcing a natural, though mysterious, condition into a box of science. As much as it pains me to admit, there are some abilities beyond the scope of my beloved science.

There is so much we need to discuss. If you’ll learn to trust me again, we can help each other. I fear that Magnum will want to experiment on you. A man like him will never take the risk of absorbing the totality of the powers he wants before testing them. You already have immortality. He’ll next want to test if we can add more powers to your arsenal. He wants it all, but not at the risk of unexpected side effects to his person.

Don’t worry, my Jossy girl. We’ll figure it out together. Just be careful. We’re all being watched. We’ll have to be discreet.

I love you with all my heart. Please don’t ever doubt that.

Even if it’s just in my heart,

Your Dad