Forgotten (Reject High: A Young Adult Science Fiction Series Book 3)

FORGOTTEN

Book Three in the Reject High Series

Brian Thompson

Copyright © 2014 by Brian L. Thompson

Great Nation Publishing, LLC

3828 Salem Road #56

Covington, GA 30016

www.greatnationpublishing.com

E-mail: [email protected]
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious situation. Any resemblances to actual events or persons, living or dead – are purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the editor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To: My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for the blessing to do what I love.

To my wife, Heather, and my daughters for their support.

To my parents, Bradley and Barbara, for backing me with every new project.

To those who contribute toward this work: my friends Jackie Rodriguez, Jeff Hipps, and Martha Brown; my beta reading team Laura Almond, Tiandria Cotton, Gina Johnston, Crystal Kovacs, Lisa Sinnock, Valerie Strawmier, Adrienne Thompson, and DeAnna Troupe – thank you for your input and feedback.

To my editor, Mary Marvella; my mentors Charles Clark, Tia McCollors, Tyora Moody, Kemya Scott and Cyrus Webb – thank you. Special thanks to Phyllis Conway, Matt Criswell, Debra Harley, Margaret Harley, the Lowe family, Christine Mayfield, Jeff and Diane Ransom, and Susan Scherffel for inspiring me.

To my pastor, Bishop Eddie L. Long for spiritual guidance and support.

The conclusion of the
Reject High
series,
Champion, Immortal
, is coming in late 2015.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

(in alphabetical order)

Joyce Anderson:
Sasha’s mother.

Sasha Anderson:
Jason’s girlfriend; can clone herself.

Debra Brown:
Jason’s legal guardian,
Zachary’s mother and Ray’s ex-wife.

Ryan Cain:
former student at Reject High; Jason broke his jaw.

Amauri Camuto:
member of the Collective.

Jason Ray Champion, Sr.:
Jason, Jr’s and Zachary’s father, goes by “Ray.”

Jason Ray Champion, Jr.:
former Reject High student. He is strong, invulnerable, and can jump immeasurable distances.

Vivienne Coker:
head of Positive Growth troubled youth boot camp.

Esteban Hernandez:
The youngest Hernandez triplet; Positive Growth camper.

Julio Hernandez:
The oldest Hernandez triplet, works for David King.

Luis Hernandez:
The middle Hernandez triplet, works for David King.

Solomon Hughes:
member of the Collective.

Belinda King:
school board chairman and David’s sister.

David King:
member of the Collective.

Deidra Lee:
Jason’s aunt; older sister of Anna.

Susan Lin:
Jason’s therapist.

George Lowe:
Rhapsody’s father, dying of bone cancer.

Rhapsody Lowe:
Jason’s best friend; can turn invisible and quantum tunnel or “ghost” her body through solid objects.

Ruby Martinez:
Rhapsody’s mother.

Julia Mosri-Champion:
Ray’s wife.

Jeff Peters:
former Earth Science teacher at Reject High.

Michael Selby:
Sasha’s ex-boyfriend; can move at tremendous speeds.

Stuart Spivey:
former Student Resource Officer at Reject High.

Eris Courtney Stafford:
member of the Collective.

Ron Welker:
ex-principal of Reject High; member of the Collective.

CHAPTER ONE

the rescue

I don’t know whether to call them nightmares or hallucinations. With all of the painkillers I’m on, sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference. 

Whatever this one was, it began with many of my loved ones circled around me at a table. The room was medium-sized and square.
Where was I? I knew the red and white cardboard boxes stacked on the table’s corner were from my favorite Italian spot, Giovanni’s. But we weren’t there. Giovanni’s had stained wooden paneling and was painted dark green. These walls were a ghostly shade of white that almost glowed.

Suddenly, I blinked and the walls were lemon yellow, which was the color of Grandma Barbara’s dining room. Except the large oval mirror and the wooden and glass china cabinet full of dusty and old knick-knacks weren’t there. The wedding picture of my grandparents and one of my mother and her sister were missing, too.

I eyed the container of garlic sauce sitting on my plate and I could almost taste its buttery goodness. Four steaming hot sausage pizza slices were in front of me. Everything smelled like savory cheese and spices. My stepmom sat across from me and fed my baby brother, who wore more food on his high chair than in his mouth. His yogurt smeared mouth made everyone laugh.

Rhapsody sat next to me, holding my hand under the rectangular table and paper tablecloth.
As I heard the last strains of them singing “Happy Birthday” to me, I grinned so hard that my face hurt. Everything felt real and unreal at the same time – almost
normal.
A new normal, that is. Rhapsody and I didn’t have superpowers and nobody was studying what we were doing or were trying to kill us.

My father moved my pizza and set the round birthday cake in front of me. I didn’t feel any anger toward him for being present, though I maybe should have.     

Rhapsody put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Make a wish.”

I stared at the white icing and purple script that spelled out “Happy 16
th
Birthday Jason” I thought about the one thing I wanted more than anything else and inhaled.

BOOM.

Before I could blow out the candles, the house detonated and blew apart, much like the gas leak blast at Reject High. Planks of burning wood and metal shards the size of my hands flew past me. I screamed out “No!” until my throat and lungs ached with fatigue. I looked down and noticed crimson streams gushed from my throat, my chest, and at the bend in my right arm.
How am I bleeding like this and not in pain?

Somehow, I was still alive. Grunting from effort, I moved a massive pile of debris then another and another. I had to be able to save
someone.
They can’t all be dead.

Still bleeding.
Shouldn’t I be dead by now? Or at least unconscious?

I shrank back when my hand touched skin.
Who is it?
I concentrated on unearthing the body. I had to save him or her. Reaching down, I found a shoulder. I pulled forward, bringing them to a sitting position.

It was
me.
A quite
dead
version of me.

That was last night’s adventure in my brain. My throat still ached from yelling and the spot on my hand where the IV connected was sore from flailing. Like the rest of my nightmares, hallucinations, whatever, this one seemed totally possible until the end.

What did that even mean? I’m going to die and find myself?

Every day I was laid up in a hospital bed made me think a disaster like that would come true and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.

So I binged on reality television, ate Jell-O and tried to forget a coma which had erased
an entire month of my life
. Rage blackouts sliced up my memory, but nothing as long and suffocating as this. A psychiatrist on staff encouraged me to talk to her about it. My therapist, Susan, might be dead because of me.
I just can't deal with that right now.

One of the doctors likes to remind me “Talking helps, but patients rarely remember anything…maybe random sounds and smells.” Easy for him to say. I don't even get those. Based on my heavy knee brace and the thick gauze bandages covering my chest, I figure they operated on my injuries. My right lung doesn't hurt anymore when I breathe. The surgery to fix it and the bullets they pulled out of me probably had something to do with that.

To my surprise, the phlebotomist who takes my blood never asked how I got in such bad condition. How would I have explained it to her if she had? She'd have freaked out. I'd been shot so many times I could've started a gangster rap career. I absorbed a nuclear blast, too. My brain hurt when I thought about it all, and I was the one who’d been through it.

Worst of all, I could be walking without a limp, or
flying
even, if someone had given me a radioactive piece of beryl. Those stones give us, about 700 people on earth, superhuman abilities. Not even Rhapsody who visited me every day would bring me an emerald or heliodor prism.

My ex-girlfriend Sasha was right about my flying.
I'll finally admit it
.   

The early afternoon sky looked angry with white streaks of lightning against slate gray. The phlebotomist was on her rounds, I guess. Since I hadn’t seen her in a day I fully expected her and her needle to show up soon. Meanwhile, I started on my lunch, a half decent turkey sandwich on wheat. As I ate, rain slapped against the windows. I cranked the TV volume to drown out the noise. The weather must have sensed it, because it got louder. 

Rhapsody slipped in through the door instead of using her quantum tunneling powers – we called it “ghosting” – to walk through the walls. “Geez, dude. Your hearing is gone, too?”

The first couple of times she appeared out of nowhere I almost fell out of bed. She didn't startle me anymore, but all the invisible-then-visible popping in and out gave me the creeps, like someone was always watching me.

“Look who learned how to use the door!” I checked the time on the television. She wasn't due for another two hours or so. “Early release?”

Rhapsody planted a peck on my lips. “Fire drill. I ditched.” She must have thought I cared. “North hasn’t cleaned the attendance rosters yet. It's fine.”

I disagreed. Drawing any kind of attention to ourselves, even if it was just IN the administrators at North High, was risky. We could not be too careful. Our enemies were scattered or missing, not dead. I’d relax once they were dead.

“Man. I really wanted homework over the weekend, too.”

Her black lips hesitated in forming a smile, and her tanned skin paled against her black tank top, shorts and ripped stockings. Her emerald necklace was missing. Had she turned it into a bracelet or something she could more easily hide? Weird. I couldn’t detect its addictive energy.

“You've gotten a little funnier since I met you.” She plucked the ear buds from her ears and fiddled with her spiked leather wristband. “Must be my influence.”

This wasn't the Rhapsody I knew. Wisecracking, yes, but something was up. “You good?”

She seemed surprised I'd asked. “Groovy.”

There’s no way she was all right. Her dad died of bone cancer not long ago. If it weren't for the Collective, the group of two-hundred-year-old people who oversaw our activities, he and my mom would still be alive. She died of bone cancer, too. Normal people who are around the radioactive prisms too long get terminal cancer. Who would have thought that the prisms that gave us these amazing abilities could also kill people?

Once I found out the truth – that our mentors had basically poisoned our parents – thoughts of revenge washed over me in sudden, violent waves. Rhapsody got them, too. Some days we wanted to hurt the Collective, all eight of them that remain. Other days we struggled to deal with angry tears.

The situation with my ex-girlfriend, Sasha, made everything worse. We never officially broke up. While I was busy saving the world, she ran off to do who-knew-what with her ex-boyfriend Selby, who moves at the speed of sound. Now something inside me pulls tight whenever I kiss Rhapsody or touch her. Sooner or later I will have to man up and officially finish off the old relationship. 

Rhapsody unlaced her army boots and climbed into bed with me, curling up on my left side. “Take me to Xobai, Cap. To Shelly's, the classy seafood joint. We'll order crab cakes.”

I maneuvered my white hospital gown to cover my underwear. Hours away, Xobai was a high-class coastal beach town with luxury mansions and a famous boardwalk. The closest we would ever come to Xobai is watching a reality show filmed there. The only way I could afford something like that would be to smash open an ATM machine. “I wish.”

She tapped her fingers on my chest. “I mean it. When it's all over.” 

Being hunted? Looking over our shoulders? Fighting for our lives? God, I hope so.
The last four months of my life had been the longest ever. “You think it'll ever be over?”

After a few moments with no answer, she kissed me on the lips and laid her cheek next to mine.
Is she trembling?

“I keep having this feeling, like one-by-one they're coming for us.”

When she called my room late several nights ago I figured the damage to the world’s cell towers was repaired, finally. A month ago, a monstrous solar storm knocked them out. Following their repair, I guessed her fear was the reason she called my room late at night. I heard a train in the background. She must have slept in a train station. Another time, dead quiet. I had no idea where she’d gone that time. Rhapsody moved around, barely staying at home since her mom disappeared.

Her slow speech and the hot tear traveling from her left eye onto my ear grabbed at me. She
really
believed we were going to die soon. She could be right. But I'd been in the same spot for almost two months and no one had come for me. Or had they already come? Was something sewn inside of me that didn't belong? I’d seen that happen in a movie.

Now I was paranoid.

Heart pounding, I mouthed, “Then get me out of here. I'll protect you.”

“You can't,” she said. “No one can.”

Rhapsody knelt, straddling my knees on the bed, and pulled her necklace from her pocket. Bare setting. My pulse raced. Where was her stone?
If she's so afraid of dying, why didn't she come with an emerald?

“Are you nuts? Where's your prism?”

She put her finger to her lips and shushed me. Her eyes darted to the window. She hadn't come alone.
The Collective is out there
. They took her crystal or made her ditch it. Why? What could they do from way out there? Even a teleporter like Esteban would have trouble from that far away.

With a crystal she could have just ghosted me through the hospital floors. Simple solution. But when the Collective was involved, nothing was ever simply black and white.

“Knock, knock!” Taylor, the phlebotomist, always announces things as she does them. Her eyes widened when she spotted Rhapsody kneeling on my bed. “Oh, God, I'm sorry.”

“You're good.” Rhapsody waved her hand and composed herself. “We're just talking. He's cute and all, but this chick doesn't give it up in a hospital bed.”

Taylor laughed and blushed. Meanwhile, I was totally embarrassed. No way would Taylor think anything was wrong now. “Sorry for interrupting,” she said. “Staying for the show?”

Rhapsody shook her head. “Not really my scene. Gonna raid the vending machines while you do that.” She slipped on her boots and left the room. I hoped she'd return and bring me something worth eating.

Taylor's silver tray held a needle, white gloves, and a pair of glass vials on it. A cheery phlebotomist with sea green eyes and light tan freckles, she often showed the dimple on her left cheek. Her blue scrubs hung from her thin frame and she always smelled freshly-showered. “Ready?” she asked me.

Most times she carried on a good conversation. It distracted me from the mind-numbing pain in the early days, except when she went on about her boyfriend, who sounded like a self-involved jerk.

“Ready?” She asked again
after
she had tied a gray rubber tube around my forearm and prepped my skin with a solution. The purplish veins under my skin bulged. I turned away for what came next, since I have a thing about seeing blood. Following a sharp prick into the bend of my arm, I waited and counted to fifteen.

She topped them off and put gauze on my arm. “You should have seen yesterday's sunset,” she said while pulling off her clear latex gloves. “It was so beautiful. Like a giant peach. Me and the boyfriend watched it. So romantic. You should take Rhapsody.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. I'd heard these kinds of stories every day since I woke up from my coma. She'd make small talk about the guy she was dating. Full of curiosity, I finally asked her “What's his name, anyway?”

At that, Taylor dropped the tray. The glass tubes fell onto the floor and broke.

“What a mess!” she shouted, squatting down to clean it up. She'd need help, but I wasn’t the person for that. I had no desire to see shards of glass and my blood spattered on the wooden paneled walls. If I looked she would be cleaning up my vomit, too.