Faster
By Annie Reed
()
About this ebook
Jackson’s not a normal high school kid, but he has no idea just how special he is.
Stuck in the foster system with a body that’s slowly betraying him, Jackson struggles just to make it through every day without attracting attention.
Attention from doctors who can’t fix him. Attention from foster parents who can’t cope with a kid in a wheelchair. Attention from bullies who pick on the weak.
He especially doesn’t want to attract the attention of a star football player who could snap Jackson in two without breaking a sweat, but it looks like that’s not going to happen.
And he can’t do a thing about it.
Or can he?
“One of the best writers I’ve come across in years.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch,
author of THE RETRIEVAL ARTIST series
Annie Reed
Award-winning author and editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls Annie Reed “one of the best writers I’ve come across in years.”Annie’s won recognition for her stellar writing across multiple genres. Her story “The Color of Guilt” originally published in Fiction River: Hidden in Crime, was selected as one of The Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016. Her story “One Sun, No Waiting” was one of the first science fiction stories honored with a literary fellowship award by the Nevada Arts Foundation, and her novel PRETTY LITTLE HORSES was among the finalists in the Best First Private Eye Novel sponsored by St. Martin’s Press and the Private Eye Writers of America.A frequent contributor to the Fiction River anthologies and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, Annie’s recent work includes the superhero origin novel FASTER, the near-future science fiction short novel IN DREAMS, and UNBROKEN FAMILIAR, a gritty urban fantasy mystery short novel. Annie’s also one of the founding members of the innovative Uncollected Anthology, a quarterly series of themed urban fantasy stories written by some of the best writers working today.Annie’s mystery novels include the Abby Maxon private investigator novels PRETTY LITTLE HORSES and PAPER BULLETS, the Jill Jordan mystery A DEATH IN CUMBERLAND, and the suspense novel SHADOW LIFE, written under the name Kris Sparks, as well as numerous other projects she can’t wait to get to. For more information about Annie, including news about upcoming bundles and publications, go to www.annie-reed.com.
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Faster - Annie Reed
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About the Author
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Full Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
SWEAT BEADED ON Jackson’s forehead and threatened to run into his eyes. The gym was unbearably hot for the beginning of November.
McKinley High couldn’t afford air conditioning for the classrooms, much less the gym. The football players didn’t seem to mind. They lifted and grunted and grimaced at their reflections in the weight room’s mirrored walls as they concentrated on building thighs and calves twice the size of Jackson’s on a good day, and he didn’t have too many of those.
He hated working out when the football players were in the weight room, but he had no choice. This semester he’d been stuck with sixth period Phys Ed. The football players had the weight room every day during sixth period. Jackson only had to do weight work three times a week, but sharing the weight room three times a week with football players was three times too many.
At the beginning of the semester, the JV guys had openly stared at him and his scrawny legs when he wheeled himself into the weight room. That had stopped after a few weeks of getting their asses handed to them on the field. Not that Jackson ever went to a game, but he couldn’t help but hear the players talk in between the clank of the free weights. Apparently the losses hadn’t been pretty.
The varsity players ignored Jackson completely—just as long as he stuck to the leg machine in the corner.
The mirrors in the corner had cracks. Cracks meant bad luck. Football players hated bad luck of any kind, especially varsity players who were hoping for college scholarships.
That was fine with Jackson. He tried to tell himself that didn’t really believe in luck. Better than believing the universe had gifted him with mostly bad luck his entire life so far.
He also tried to ignore the football players.
Not an easy task with Gil around.
Would you look at that guy?
Gil puffed out his scrawny cheeks in a horrible imitation of Olivas, the center on the varsity squad. Man, who would date somebody like that? He’d fuckin’ squash them flat.
Olivas had to weigh two-hundred fifty pounds, easy. He was currently doing squats with more weights on the bar than Jackson could dream of lifting.
Jackson didn’t bother to point out to Gil that Olivas could squash Gil flat with one muscle-bound butt cheek.
Instead Jackson ignored Gil’s question—it wasn’t much of a question, anyway, considering Gil’s attention span for most things was about a microsecond long—and took a drink of tepid water from the bottle hanging from one of the grips on his wheelchair while he swiped away the sweat from his forehead.
Warm water tasted nasty, but the ice he’d shoved in the bottle before he’d left for school that morning had long since melted. His foster mom had promised to buy him one of those metal water bottles that advertised it kept water cold for eight hours or more—a reward, she’d said, for keeping up with his weight work during the summer—but she’d been promising him that for weeks now.
Jackson didn’t push her. Unlike some of the fosters he’d lived with, she was a kind, caring woman who did the best she could. He’d gotten lucky—at least in that department—when he’d been placed with her that the spring.
He offered the water bottle to Gil, but Gil shook his head.
They weren’t really friends. They’d been paired together as workout partners at the start of the school year. They were both seniors and both physically challenged
(the politically correct term of choice for the administration at McKinley High) , so of course the coach had put them together.
Gil had been in a car accident when he was in third grade, which had left him with a twisted leg and a gimpy walk . He said he got his bad eyesight from his mom, and his red hair and freckles from his dad. His black-framed glasses made his eyes look huge in his skinny face. The rest of him was pretty thin, too. No matter how hard he worked out, his arms looked like pale sticks poking out of his gym shirt.
Jackson wasn’t quite so skinny. His hair was dark, not quite black but too dark to be just brown either. Thanks to what had to be a pretty mixed up genetic history, he looked like he had a natural tan all year, even when he hadn’t been out in the sun. His vision was perfect, or so his doctor told him every time she tested Jackson’s eyes. So was his hearing.
His challenge
(was it really a better word than disability
?) had to do with his legs. Or maybe it was his spine. He didn’t think his doctors and the specialists he’d been sent to had ever quite figured it out.
On his good days, he could walk with braces on his legs. On his bad days, his legs trembled so bad he had to resort to using a wheelchair to get around.
Today wasn’t one of his good days.
He’d managed to shift his body from the wheelchair to the leg torture device on his own. That wasn’t the machine’s official name, but Jackson didn’t much care what anyone else called it. The point was to strengthen his thigh muscles on both flexion and extension (fancy words for bending and straightening—why couldn’t adults use words that meant what they really wanted to say?) with the goal of letting him walk someday without the braces.
Or that was the general idea, according to his physical therapist.
Today, all the bending and straightening was killing him. Gil had even tried to take some of the weights off the bar, but Jackson wouldn’t let him.
No pain, no gain,
he’d said through clenched teeth.
You’re nuts, you know that?
Yeah, he probably was. No sane seventeen-year-old cripple dreamed the kind of dreams Jackson did.
Dreams where he ran faster than any man alive.
Faster than the Blue Bullet.
Faster than any of the other superheroes in the comic books or on TV. And certainly faster than any of the football players working on their muscles while they thought about scoring the winning touchdown. Or just scoring, period.
Jackson gripped the handholds on the leg torture device while he grunted with the effort to raise his legs one more time.
He could have lifted the weights easily with his arms. Most of a lifetime spent using his arms as much if not more than his legs to get himself around gave him the kind of shoulder muscles the football players worked so hard to get.
He looked in the mirror while his legs made their slow, trembling ascent, but he didn’t look at himself.
He watched Olivas .
Something about Olivas was different than all the other jocks working out. Jackson had never been able to figure it out. Olivas lifted like the other players, and sure, he always lifted more weight than anyone else on the team, but he was bigger than anyone else on the team, too. More weight just seemed to fit.
Olivas had moved on from squats to dumbbells. Muscles bunched under the slick skin of his arms as he worked each heavy dumbbell in a steady rhythm, right arm and then left and back to the right again. The movement rocked his body back and forth, but Olivas made it look easy. He didn’t even grunt like the rest of the guys did.
Except for the bit of a belly hanging over the belt on his sweats, the guy was all muscle. How many kids had he flattened on the field just by running into them? Had anyone actually ever taken him down? Jackson had no idea.
Maybe Olivas had dreams where he was a superhero, too.
Gil, now he didn’t dream of superheroes—at least as far as Jackson knew. Gil dreamed about girls. In great and glorious detail, which he told Jackson all about during their workouts.
On good days, Jackson didn’t mind listening to Gil’s dreamland exploits.
On good days, Jackson hoped he might have his own exploits with girls someday.
On bad days—like today—he knew he never would.
You going to Homecoming?
Gil asked.
The question surprised Jackson enough that he quit watching Olivas.
That’s a dance, right?
Well, duh.
Gil pushed his glasses up his nose.
Well, duh.
Jackson nodded at his legs. I don’t dance, jackass.
Doesn’t mean you can’t go and make out with someone.
Jackson didn’t do that, either, but he didn’t say that. He wasn’t about to admit to Gil that he’d never even held hands with a girl.
Girls went to Homecoming with football players. Hell, Olivas probably had his choice of dates.
For all Jackson knew, even Gil had a date.
You going?
he asked.
Gil shrugged. If I had someone to pal around with.
Ah. So that was it. Gil wanted to go to Homecoming and drool over the girls in their fancy lo-cut dresses, but he didn’t want to go by himself. He wanted to buddy up with Jackson.
Who, by comparison, would make Gil look good.
Jackson tried to stifle the thought.
Yeah, today definitely wasn’t one of his better days.
Gil might be girl crazy—what normal seventeen-year-old wasn’t?—but just because the guy drooled over girls 24/7 didn’t make him a jerk. Gil probably hadn’t been to a dance in his life. From what Jackson knew, other than obsessing over girls, Gil spent most of his time on the computer.
I’ll think about it,
Jackson said.
He knew he wouldn’t. The last thing he wanted to think about was spending all night at a dance sitting alone in his wheelchair and feeling like a total freak.
A freak whose doctors couldn’t even figure out what was wrong with him.
His legs gave out under the weight he was trying to force them to lift. His knees buckled, dropping his feet straight back down.
The weights on his machine clanked hard as they came to rest behind him. The pulleys and cables attached to the machine were supposed to cushion the weights if they came down too fast, but Jackson wasn’t surprised they didn’t.
He winced at the sound. It called attention to him in a room where he preferred being overlooked.
A few of the football players glanced his way. Jackson felt his cheeks burn.
You okay?
Gil asked.
I’m fine.
Jackson bit the words off. Gil, of all people, should know how fine he wasn’t.
The football players went back to their own workouts, once again ignoring him.
All except Olivas.
He stared at Jackson in the mirror.
Jackson didn’t think he’d ever seen Olivas’s eyes look so dark before. Not angry. Jackson had been looked at in anger before.
When he’d been younger, one of his fosters had looked at him with eyes that dark, right before he’d hit Jackson and kept right on hitting him. If one of the older kids in the house hadn’t intervened, the man would have put Jackson in the hospital. All because he hadn’t put his braces on right and he’d fallen down.
No, Olivas didn’t look angry, precisely. Annoyed, maybe. And something else that Jackson couldn’t put his finger on.
Something else that sent a chill of unease down his spine.
I’m done for the day,
he said to Gil.
Gil raised