BRAINRUSH, a Thriller (2 page)

Using the small sink and wall mirror by the door, Jake used a damp paper towel to make sure he got all the blood from his bitten tongue off his lips and chin. His face didn’t look so bad. The tan helped. His hair was disheveled, but what the hell, sloppy was in, right? And if he could get at least one good night of sleep, his eyes would get back to looking more green than red. It was a younger version of his dad that stared back at him. He sucked in a deep breath, expanding his chest. Six foot two, thirty-five years old—the prime of his life. 

Yeah, right.

He tried to sort out just what had happened in that chamber, but the specifics were already hazy, like the fading details of a waking dream. He threw on his T-shirt and jeans, then grabbed his blue chambray shirt from a spike by the door and put that over the tee. Slipping on his black loafers, he glanced back at the donut-shaped ring of the machine that had almost become his tomb. The seam that traveled around it was charred, faint wisps of smoke still snaking into the air.

“Never again,” Jake muttered.

On the way out, a pretty nurse grabbed Marshall’s hand and slipped him a folded piece of paper. Jake stifled a smile. Ten to one it was her phone number, though the concerned look Marshall exchanged with her suggested otherwise. 

He stuffed the paper in his pocket, turned his back on her with a friendly wave, and followed Jake out the door. “Dude, you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Sure.” 

But an odd, sporadic buzzing in Jake’s head told him something was very different.

Redondo Beach, California

J
ake slouched forward on the edge of the patio chair on his backyard deck, hands clenched, elbows propped on his bare knees protruding from his favorite pair of tattered jeans. The midafternoon sun was finally beginning to burn through the clinging marine layer, with patches of sunlight punching holes through the clouds and warming his skin. He drew in a deep breath of moist salt air, his eyes half closed. One hundred feet below his perch, a lone surfer paddled through the breakers. The soft rumble of the waves was a salve on Jake’s nerves. Seagulls drifted overhead, seemingly suspended in the gentle offshore breeze. 

Marshall’s grinning face popped through the small kitchen window. In spite of the slim wireless earpiece that had become a permanent fixture on his left ear, girls seemed to flock to his dark features, though Marshall had never exhibited much of a talent in figuring out how to deal with them. His genius was with computers, not girls—a point that Jake often ribbed him about. 

“You better put beer on the shopping list,” Marshall said. “These are the last two. And I threw out your milk. It expired two weeks ago, dude.”

Jake shrugged. His sixty-year-old two-bedroom Spanish stucco home wasn’t anything to brag about. But it was the one and only place he had planted roots after a lifetime of bouncing from one location to another, first as a military brat and later as a pilot in the Air Force. The panoramic coastal view stretched all the way from Redondo Beach to Malibu.

The porch screen door slammed closed as Marshall walked over and handed him a beer. “If you have to keep every window in the whole house open twenty-four/seven, you’re going to have to start wiping the counters once in a while. It looks like a college dorm room in there.”

Jake ignored the comment. He liked the windows open. Dust was the least of his problems.

Marshall cut to the chase. “You gonna reschedule the MRI?” 

Jake shook his head. “No way.”

“You’re not worried about another shaker, are you? After a couple days of aftershocks, the tectonic pressure will be relieved and that’ll be the end of it, at least for a while.”

Jake recalled the radio broadcast on the ride home. The earthquake had been a 5.7, centered just off the coast, but it had been felt as far south as San Diego and as far north as San Luis Obispo. After the initial jolt, the rolling shaker that followed had lasted only ten or fifteen seconds. Damage had been light, injuries minor.

“No more MRIs. No more doctors,” Jake said.

“But you have to, right?” Marshall left a trail of sneaker prints as he paced across the remnants of dew that coated the wooden deck. He wore a white, button-down shirt, khaki Dockers, and his trademark multicolored Pro-Keds high-tops. “I thought it was the only way to identify how far the disease had spread. You could die, man.”

“Yeah, well, ‘could die’ is better than ‘would die.’ So, forget about it.” Jake wished he’d never said anything to Marshall about the tumor that drove him to the MRI in the first place. Marshall was the only one of his friends and family who knew. Even so, Jake still hadn’t told him it was terminal. With only a few months to live, the last thing he wanted was to be surrounded by pity. He’d had enough of that the first time around ten years ago. 

His mom’s uncontrolled sobbing was the first thing he’d heard when he regained consciousness after the exploratory “staging” surgery. Dad seemed okay, but that’s because he kept it bottled up as usual. Jake felt their fear, knew they were both petrified that they might lose their second son, too. When his older brother died in a motorcycle accident, grief had shaken the family to the core. Now it was Jake causing the grief.

Months of chemo and radiation therapy had followed. His weight dropped from two hundred down to one forty in less than six weeks. He’d lost all his hair. But he hadn’t quit, on himself or his family. Halfway through the treatment, Dad had died of a heart attack. A broken heart, Jake remembered thinking—his fault. That’s what unbridled grief did. His mom would be next if he didn’t pull through. His little sister would be all alone. Jake couldn’t let that happen. He’d beat it. He had to.  

In the end, the aggressive treatment regimen had defeated the disease. The war was won—at least the physical part of it. His health improved and he became the anchor that allowed his mom and sister to pick up the pieces of their lives.

No, Jake didn’t want to be surrounded by pity again. He couldn’t handle it a second time around.

Marshall paced back and forth in front of the rail, his fingers unconsciously playing over the smooth corners of the iPhone snapped into a holster on his belt. He took another slug from his bottle of beer. “Dude, at least tell me what happened when you were inside that machine. You’ve barely said a word since we hightailed it out of there.”

Jake still couldn’t remember the sequence of events that actually occurred while he was in the MRI machine, but he recalled the resulting sensations all too clearly: heart pounding, shortness of breath, helplessness, uncontrollable panic—feelings he wanted to banish, not talk about. “Something weird happened to me. I’m still trying to sort it out. I freaked in there. A full-fledged, your-life-is-on-the-line panic, like when your chute doesn’t open and the ground is racing up at you.”

His voice trailed off. “The next thing I can remember is the news talk-radio show in the Jeep. The announcer was reeling off the game scores, and somehow that relaxed me. I saw each score as a different image in my mind. It’s crazy, but instead of numbers I saw shapes.” Jake closed his eyes for a moment. “I can still recall every one of them, and the scores that went with them.”

“Of course,” Marshall said.

“No, really, Marsh, I’m serious.” Jake closed his eyes and recited, “Boston College over Virginia Tech, 14-10; Ohio State beat Penn State 37-17; USC-Oregon, 17-24; California-Arizona State, 20-31; West Vir—” 

“Sure, dude. Here, it’s my turn.” In a mock sports announcer voice, Marshall said, “West Virginia-Connecticut, 15-21; Texas A&M-Missouri, 14-3.”

“Cool it,” Jake said, “West Virginia didn’t play Connecticut; they played Rutgers and trounced them 31-3. And Connecticut played South Florida and beat them 22-15.”

Marshall took a hard look at his friend, as if he was searching for a sign that signaled he was joking around. Jake accepted the stare with a determined clench of his jaw. To him, this was anything but a joke. 

Shaking his head, Marshall pulled the iPhone out of his belt holder, his index finger tapping and sliding along the surface of the touch screen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this again.” 

Jake started over, but recited more slowly this time so Marshall could confirm each score. Following the first several answers, Marshall’s surprised look shifted to a grin. After hearing all thirty-one scores, he looked up from the small screen. “Son of a bitch.”

Jake smiled. “See what I mean? I’m not even sure how I did that. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Sweet is what it is. Kind of reminds me of Dustin Hoffman in that old movie
Rain Man
.” 

Jake remembered the character. “He was really good at math, wasn’t he? He did it all in his head. I think I can do that, too.”

“Like simple math or complicated equations?”

“I’m not sure.”

Marshall brought up the calculator on his iPhone and tapped the screen. “Okay, what’s 4,722 times 1,230?”

Jake didn’t hesitate. “Five million eight hundred eight thousand sixty.”

“Suuuuu-weet!” Marshall tapped a few more keys. “Give me the square root of 78,566.”

“To how many decimal places?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Jake shook his head.

Marshall studied the long number stretched across the screen, his lips moving as he counted the digits. “Twelve.”

Jake closed his eyes and rattled out the answer. “It’s 280.296271826794.”

“You have got to be abso-friggin’ kidding me.”

 “Did you just say abso-friggin’? What a geek.”

“Shut up and tell me how you did it.”

“It’s easy, Marsh. The numbers feel like shapes, colors, and textures, each one unique. The shapes of the original numbers morph into the answer in my head. All I have to do is recite it.”

Marshall’s hands danced in a blur over the tiny screen. He talked while he worked. “Jake, I’ve heard of this before. How head injuries sometimes give people unusual new abilities.” His fingers paused and he handed the device to Jake. “Here, read this.”

Jake scanned an article about Jonathon Tiel, a genius savant who developed his incredible mental abilities after a car accident. He developed a gift for memorization, mathematical computations, and languages. He could recount the numerical value of pi to over twenty thousand digits without a single mistake. He spoke fifteen languages fluently, and it was reported that he learned Swahili—considered one of the most complicated languages in the world—in less than a month.

Tapping the screen, Jake opened the link to another article. His eyes blinked like a camera shutter and he tapped the screen again. A second later, another tap, and then another. He was amazed at the speed that his mind soaked in the information. 

Jake wondered how in the hell he was doing it. It was as if each page he read was stored on a hard drive deep in his brain. He could pull each one up just by thinking about it. But what was going to happen when the drive reached capacity? When that happens on a computer, things go wrong.

The blue screen of death.

“Are you actually reading the pages?” Marshall asked.

Jake nodded but kept his eyes glued to the small screen as he sped from one article to the next, each one describing incredible mental feats, artistic talents, and even enhanced physical attributes, all exhibited by ordinary people after various types of head trauma. Marshall watched for a moment from over his shoulder. The images shifted at an incredible speed as Jake absorbed the information on the screen. Marshall shook his head. He sat down on a chair beside him, propped his Keds on the deck rail, and nursed his beer.

After four or five minutes, Jake sank back in his chair. He stared at a contrail high over the water, thinking back.

Two years after his first illness seven years ago, he’d moved to Redondo Beach to take a flight instructor position at Zamperini Field in Torrance. It wasn’t a high-paying job, but it got him in the air. He was a natural stick, and advancing to the lead acrobatic instructor position had taken only a few months. There’s nothing quite like sharing that first-time thrill with a sky virgin. And besides, hot-doggin’ in an open-cockpit Pitts Special was about as close as he could get to the rush he’d felt when he was screaming across the sky in his F-16. The crazier the stunt, the more he liked it. Sure, his boss said he sometimes skirted the edge of flight safety parameters, but Jake had an uncanny knack for knowing just how far he could push it without losing it. Of course, the inverted fly by over a packed Hermosa Beach crowd on the Fourth of July wasn’t his smartest move. He’d almost lost his license over that one, until Marshall hacked into the FAA database and inserted a post-dated permit into the system. 

All that had changed when he met Angel.

She’d bounced in the front door of the flight school amidst a circle of girlfriends. They’d dared her to take an acrobatic orientation flight and she wasn’t about to back down. She sized Jake up with a twinkle in her eye that stood him back on his heels. With hands on her hips she gave him a spunky attitude that shouted, “You can’t scare me.” Between that, and a contagious smile that melted his heart, Jake had all the excuse he needed to show off.