The Impossible Pitcher Page 2

  Dad looked at the disabled machine and shook his head. “All I know is one thing: We’ve been discovered.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  From what we could tell from the grainy footage that we watched later that night, the drone took off from a parking lot miles away, flew up and toward our town. When it stopped and hovered, it didn’t seem to be pointing its camera at our house, but it was hard to tell.

  It didn’t matter to my parents what they saw. They were ready to pack up and leave the next morning.

  “You can’t!” I protested, tears stinging my eyes as we sat in the secure, secret facility underneath our house that was home to all kinds of computers, machines, and lab equipment. “You don’t even know we were being spied on! What if it was some kid’s birthday present?”

  “You have to trust us, Alex,” Mom said behind me, with a hand on my shoulder. “Your safety comes first. If there’s a threat out there getting closer, we can’t stay. We’ll find another home quickly.”

  “What about my friends?”

  “We have security protocols to put everyone in safe places,” Dad averted my gaze as he answered. “But they’re in a different town and you might not see them for a while, maybe never.”

  Something in me snapped. I reached deep for anything I could say to sway them.

  “Aren’t you tired of running?”

  They didn’t respond.

  “I love it here,” I continued. “This is home for me. When there’s been danger, you’ve convinced me you have the security and resources to keep us safe. I’m ready to fight. To stay.”

  “Do you realize what you’re asking us to do?” Dad said, rubbing his temple.

  “What happens when we move to another town? Whoever it is who’s after us will just come after us again!”

  Dad had warned me the government might be after us after he and the doctors fled. But we had no idea if it was a group of agents trying to track us down or someone else.

  “This isn’t a discussion,” he fired back. “This is—”

  “He’s right.”

  Mom silenced the room.

  “When do we stop running?” she continued. “Whoever is coming for us … when do they stop hunting? Do we ever really stop looking over our shoulders? The answers are: We won’t and they won’t. So, what do we do?”

  She moved forward and squatted down in front of me, looking me square in the eye.

  “Alex, if we’re staying, it means one thing: You are the bait for whoever is out there.”

  “Karen!” Dad interjected.

  “He wants to stay, he needs to know the truth,” she barked over her shoulder. I’d rarely seen Mom in head-of-security mode, but now I understood how she treated our guards. “None of us wanted this, but it’s too late to go back. Whoever is after us wants the technology you and your friends have,” she added. “There’s no way for them to get it without getting close and attempting to capture you. When they try, we’ll be there to stop them.”

  “Who’s after us?”

  “We don’t even know,” Dad interjected.

  After my father and the rest of the scientists completed their work on a top-secret government project over a decade ago, they disappeared, erasing their identities from databases and relocating throughout the country. With potential threats getting closer and closer, many of the families with kids who were a part of the experiments moved to the same town to pool resources and protect each other.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mom said. “Your job is to go to school, have a social life, and make it look like nothing abnormal is going on.”

  Nothing abnormal. Right. Speaking of which …

  “You know I activated earlier, right?”

  Dad’s eyes lit up. “You did? When?”

  That was big news. When I threw the game-winning touchdown months ago, I thought I’d used my powers to toss it, but the device Dad gave me to measure my nanobots didn’t register. Did it mean I had actually activated? Or was it, as he theorized, that my body’s immune system was in the middle of shutting down the machines? We were mystified until now.

  “While we were playing in the backyard. I got kind of ticked off and threw a snowball at Dex that hit the house. It left a dent.”

  He glared. “That’ll come out of your allowance, you know.”

  Oops.

  He hit something on the large keyboard in front of the enormous screen that dwarfed the room. An outline of my body popped up as he held up the cell phone-sized machine that was supposed to indicate whether I had activated or not.

  “This is supposed to capture the readings on your body when your powers kick in, as you recall. It didn’t register today, either. I think I finally figured out what happened. Your nanobots are little computers, right? They’re doing something I didn’t bank on. I think they’re learning.”

  He typed something into the computer. It was a demo of how my powers worked—the nanobots (which included some, known as respirocytes, which stored and released oxygen) would receive a message from my spinal cord about where to go. Just seconds later, they would race to where I needed the boost, whether it was my brain, my legs, or throwing arm. Then, they would release oxygen instantaneously to give me that extra boost, which had a weird side effect—my muscles would flex simultaneously to make me look like a body builder for a second.

  On the screen, I saw the little red dots representing the nanobots on the screen group together near my spine and race off to my throwing arm. Then they came back and did the same thing, only quicker. It was practically a blur the third time and so on.

  “I was wrong when I thought your body was getting used to them,” he continued. “Instead, they’re adapting to the conditions they’re familiar with. My theory: the reason you didn’t register in the championship game and earlier today was they’ve overpowered the sensor I embedded in you.”

  The screen in front of me focused on the back of my neck, where Dad had injected a chip to take readings when I activated. It was still in there, a small bump that felt like a mole.

  “I’ll have to create a more powerful sensor, which may take some time. Just promise you’ll keep telling me about your activations and how you react.”

  I nodded.

  “You have one other job,” Mom added. “Always use your password if you’re approached.”

  We’d established a phrase and code word for me to use in critical situations. The question to ask if I was suspicious of someone was, “What’s the fastest way down?” If they were part of our team, the answer was “Quicksand.”

  “Right,” I replied. “But if it’s absolutely 100 percent necessary and there’s nothing left to defend me, there’s also the panic button.”

  I was so used to wearing the panic button on my ankle that I almost always forgot it was there. I lifted my left pant leg a little to take a look. There it was, a small device no bigger than a deck of cards strapped to my ankle with a red button covered by a hard plastic shell. If you lifted the cover and pressed the button, something would happen.

  “One last piece of advice, and this isn’t meant to scare you,” Dad said. “We’ll do anything and everything to protect you, but you do need to be wary about what’s going on around you and to remember, more than ever, what you’ve experienced in the last few months. Learn from it.”

  My head was spinning.

  “Can I go now?”

  “Wait. I’ve got something else, too,” Mom said. She grabbed me and held me close. “We love you.”

  Later that night, I sat in my bedroom with my laptop and a pair of headphones. I opened a browser and clicked on a bookmark I’d viewed easily hundreds of times: “TOP 10 PLAYS OF THE YEAR. Strange Country Day miracle Hail Mary, Alex Ptuiac.”

  The voice of an anchor on the nation’s most well-known all-sports network hit my ears as grainy cell phone camera footage of the championship game filmed by one of the player’s parents popped up.

  “And t
he number one Play of the Day? You gotta to see this.”

  The situation: our team, the Strange Country Day Griffins, was down 21-16 in the state championship game versus Harmon High, with eight seconds on the clock facing fourth-and-8. Our star quarterback Jimmy Claw was injured, so Coach Schmick decided to call on me to execute a Hail Mary throw into the end zone to win the game. I convinced him to put in Dex to try the same throw-and-catch we did months before in gym class, a bullet 10 feet above his head, high enough that only he could leap up and snag it.

  “Alexander Pit-too-ee-ack hasn’t taken a snap the entire season for Strange Country Day high school. But today he comes in to do … this.”

  Even now, no one remembered the “P” in Ptuiac was silent.

  I watched the tiny, grainy Alex on-screen take the snap, drop back and wait as two beefy linemen close in on him. I paused the video right as they reach him, the seventh-grade quarterback’s hand cocked back to throw the Hail Mary. After the throw went viral across the nation, I pause on this very spot every time I watch, staring at the pixels on the screen, trying to see if there is any proof that all the little on-screen QB’s muscles flexed at once. At the time, I didn’t think my powers kicked in, but after throwing a snowball that dented my house, I was less sure.

  It was no use watching, one of the Harmon High lineman blocked the camera’s lens, much to my relief. I clicked “play” and the sportscaster stayed silent to watch the football reach Kenny Lupino, the opposing safety who, to my shock, also happened to have powers like us. He leaped at least 10 feet to get a hand on the throw. A half-second later, Dex jumped over him to put his hands on the ball. “There’s receiver Dex Harrison! What a catch!” Again, I hit pause. The camera was far enough away and at an odd enough angle that you couldn’t tell in real time just how high up the two of them were, that both Kenny and Dex weren’t just ordinary middle school football players. At least that’s what I thought. Unpause.

  The pair landed in the end zone as referees ran over to assess who had possession. One of them threw up his arms … touchdown. The same familiar shiver ran across my back. Just who had seen this? What were they going to do if they noticed something out of the ordinary? The worst thought: Did a drone potentially spy on us because I had used my powers in a public situation that ended up going viral?

  “You may never see anything that incredible again in your life!” The sportscaster’s voice squawked into my earphones.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “TOOOOOOOUUUUUUEEEEEEYYYYY!”

  That booming, gravelly voice could belong to only one person. Before I could turn around to greet its owner while standing in the cold of our town’s main square, everything went black and I found it hard to breathe through the puffy, soft, down lining of a winter coat. I held my breath for as long as I could, but the attacker with the vice-like grip holding me waited patiently. I was finally forced to gulp in as much oxygen as possible and along with it came the noxious but familiar odor of sweat from a locker room.

  Suddenly, light. I was freed. That was followed by the laughter of five ninth grade boys, one of whom was the possessor of the aforementioned coat: the Strange Country Day offensive lineman known simply as Flab.

  The nickname didn’t quite suit him—sure, he was huge, standing around six feet and still growing, and yes, his stomach had some paunch around it like those of many of his fellow linemen. But his arms were rock-solid and his legs, even in ski pants, had the makings of tree trunks. He’d made my first few months at Strange Country Day a nightmare, but ever since Dex and I pulled off the miracle in the state championship game, he’d been an angel.

  “Tooey! How’d it smell?” Flab yelled.

  “Dude, you look like you’re going to pass out!” one of the other linemen said. The chatter was met by a SLAP on the back—ow!—and a couple of high fives from the other four members the Griffins’ line.

  On top of that, they even pronounced my last name right, though the nickname “Tooey” sprouted out of “Ptuiac.” Dex and I didn’t hang out with them on weekends or anything, but we had earned some serious respect, even though they still didn’t know how we had pulled off the throw-and-catch of a lifetime.

  We stood around in the ice and snow that blanketed the entire town. It was days after we discovered the drone. Though we were looking over our shoulders everywhere we went, being in a crowd felt safe. It was Winterfest, the annual event with sales and games, local restaurants handing out samples and local celebrities signing autographs.

  I felt another hand on my back and recoiled at a slight shock. Sophi.

  “Hey guys,” she said, but she looked right at Flab, and a pause hung in the air just long enough to make the air even icier.

  One of the reasons Flab got on my case to begin with was the fact he was the ninth-grader I hit in front of his teammates on the first day of freshmen orientation during a tradition known as Fresh Meet Friday that turned into an all-out riot (I blame it on my powers, it was the first time I’d activated). The other reason? He was under the impression he and Sophi were dating (spoiler alert: they weren’t). After learning she and I were secretly going out, he followed me and Sophi into the woods to her hideout, and broke my pinkie finger in a fight that would have lasted longer, except that he was stopped by a shock from Sophi so powerful it knocked him unconscious.

  Flab’s smile disappeared. “Sophi,” he half-mumbled in response. Flab’s fellow offensive linemen began looking around everywhere but at us. “Awwwkwaaard!” someone whispered loudly.

  But Sophi smiled at Flab and called him by his real name since they’d know each other from grade school. “Hey Jared, what’s up?” She walked over and gave him a hug. I saw Flab wince a little, as I did, fully expecting her to give him a little shock to remind him to behave. But Sophi controlled herself and walked back to me, a sly half-grin let me know she had delivered a peace offering. Flab exhaled.

  “’Sup, Shrimp?” Flab asked. That was his endearing nickname for Dex, though if he knew what was embedded in my friend’s DNA, he might have chosen a different species.

  “’Sup, Whale?” Dex and Flab exchanged a fist pound. Who knew that after all the torture Dex and I endured, we’d all end up friendly enough to give each other nicknames? As the saying goes, winning cures everything.

  A small girl jumped in front of us and held up a pen and a Winterfest program to me. “Will you sign this for me, please?”

  This was far from the first time someone in town had stopped us to talk about the game-winning toss or ask for an autograph. For weeks, strangers who were “Strangers” (the nickname for die-hard fans of our school’s football team) would stop us, shake our hands, or ask us to sign photos or whatever they were holding.

  “Sure. What’s your name?”

  “Leeza. With two ‘e’s’ and a ‘z’.”

  To Leeza, Go Griffins! Alex Ptuiac. I handed it to Dex. Suddenly, there were a few more programs and pens thrust in our faces. I glanced at Flab and the rest of the offensive linemen, who cracked a few jokes under their breath. But I could see it in Flab’s eyes that he wished he was signing autographs with us.

  “Those guys are our offensive linemen,” I said to the small crowd. “You should get their autographs, too. We couldn’t have done anything without them.”

  They were overtaken by the fans and tried to look nonchalant and chill about handing out autographs. I saw a few smiles as they signed and the crowd began to disperse.

  “Could I have one too?”

  A hairy hand thrust a Winterfest program right to the tip of my nose. Whose skin could be covered in that much fur?

  A familiar spike-toothed grin stared back at me, along with dozens of black curls stuffed into a winter hat. It was the face of Kenny Lupino, the Harmon High safety who watched as Dex snatched a championship away from him. The same Kenny Lupino who had powers similar to Dex’s. He could jump just as high and had an insane amount of speed for someone of that size.

 
; I recalled what Dad had said the night of the championship game: “Remember, many of the families whose kids received treatment kept their identities a secret even after moving here. But, yes, there was a boy whose DNA was mixed with a wolf’s.”

  It wasn’t just his Big Bad Wolf grin that gave it away. His ears were covered by the wool cap, but I remembered thinking they were pointy when I first saw his photo. Looking at his hairy hands now, I realized that was another trait. That said, he was any girl’s dream, blue eyes, high cheekbones and one of those noses that’s the perfect shape and proportion.

  “You serious?” I inquired, narrowing my eyes at him.

  “Naw, dude.” He withdrew the pamphlet. “Just messin’. I wanted to come and say what’s up. I didn’t get the chance to tell you guys ‘good game.’”

  He stuck out his hand.

  I looked back at Dex, whose eyebrows were so high they looked as if they wanted to crawl up into his hat. We’d talked about what would happen if Kenny ever confronted us about the game, knowing in the back of our minds that would almost certainly happen sooner or later given that he had powers too. We all remembered Kenny hit so hard that his tackles damaged the shoulder of Jimmy Claw, our star quarterback who left the championship game and underwent surgery not long after. The word was, Jimmy would still have a shot at a continuing his sensational career despite the setback, though I wondered if we would be as lucky.

  But here was Kenny, right in front of us, offering … his paw?

  “Whoa, hey there, Lose-pino.” I felt a meaty hand on my shoulder as Flab slid in. “Guess it wasn’t enough to practically kill our quarterback. Now you’re going to injure another one?”

  Kenny glared at him and held up his palms.

  “Bro, calm down, I just told your boys it was a good game, you deserved it.”

  “Sure, sure, Kenny,” Flab said. “You tell yourself that. Just do it somewhere else.”

  Lupino shrugged and turned to walk away.