Foreseen (The Rothston Series) Page 2

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Sasha standing off to the side. She was supposed to be making a run for it as well, or at least providing a distraction. But she seemed to have forgotten the game plan, and now was just standing there, daydreaming as her fingers combed through the ends of her silky brown hair. I didn’t dare call to her though, for fear of giving myself away.

  I tried to keep an even, normal pace, like just any other student headed for class, but struggled to remember how fast that would be. I shot my eyes toward the goal which seemed impossibly far away and sped up. But maybe now I was too fast. I slowed a bit.

  Some huge football player-sized guy strode up along side of me on the sidewalk, and I paced him to measure my strides. This seemed faster than my normal walk, and I hesitated for a moment, until realizing that his bulk screened me. Two girls scampered past on the other side, slowing to jabber about some party tonight, without even noticing I was there. That’s why I was the right choice for this. People hardly ever noticed me. And now, I was shielded from both sides. I just needed to keep going, and look normal.

  The slap of sneakers against the brick sidewalk grew behind us, and my stomach tightened. We must be creating a log jam on the sidewalk, and maybe attracting attention. I stared at the bricks ahead of us, unwilling to look around for fear of making eye contact with a zombie. More footsteps. And the shush of fabric sliding together coming from right behind me. My heart pounded as my imagination conjured up thousands of students jostling on the sidewalk, wishing I’d get out of the way. I hated crowds. They made it hard to breathe. Hard to think. Hard to move. But from years of practice, I knew what to do. I focused on the bricks of the path in front of me, and the spots of moss growing between them. I concentrated on taking even, deliberate steps. As long as the people were behind me, I could ignore them and everything would be fine.

  I took a quick glance up, before dropping my eyes again. Ten yards to go. Not bad. Maybe I would make it. But a tangle of legs appeared between me and the bricks, as two guys sprinted around in front of me. My pulse took off at the sight of the legs swinging back and forth. Each beat thundered in my ears, and my even breaths became short gasps. My feet slowed, and the multitudes jostled into me as they passed by, blocking out everything except warm flesh and bodies, shuffling feet, and the smells of soap and leftover pizza and perspiration. A silent scream tore through my head, and I froze.

  I didn’t know how long I stood there or how many people went by – probably only a handful, but it seemed like several hundred. I stood waiting as they passed, and gradually, my breathing eased and my heart began to slow. And then I jumped.

  “You okay, Kinzie?” My eyes darted over to see blue eyes gazing down at me from a stubbled, squareish face. I stared, not comprehending the words, but slowly the face registered – Sasha’s prized boyfriend, probably laughing at me. He was so confident that every girl was swooning over him that he probably thought that was why I was staring. I licked my lips to find my mouth too dry to form words. He cocked his head with a self-assured smile as he waited for me to speak, but I couldn’t. I just stared as the autumn sun glinted red through his light brown hair. Sasha said he was gorgeous. That wasn’t the word I would use, but …

  Darn – Sasha. The game. I’d forgotten!

  I quickly glanced around. Across the quad, two zombies had Kip by his sweatshirt as he tried to twist away. But he went down, probably the last of my team to fall to the zombie horde. I couldn’t let his sacrifice be in vain. My hand touched the pouch of crystals swinging against my hip, as I surveyed my next move. Eight yards from the safe zone. My eyes narrowed and shot up to tell Greg Langston to get out of my way. He nearly jumped back, and I saw that the remaining four zombies had spotted me, dashing forward to cut me off. I took a deep breath and ran.

  Chapter 2

  Greg

  I ran my hand through my hair and swung open the glass door to enter the snack bar. Weird day. Everything seemed a little off. Unpredictable or just wrong. And this place always added to that feeling. It should never have been named the “Pit.” There was nothing dark or dank about it. Despite being in the basement of the student union, the sunlight streamed through the wall of glass windows and doors overlooking a strip of brick patio. The décor only added to the effect. The brick wall on the far side of the room was painted white, and the room was filled with cheery fluorescent colored chairs and tables. A sadistic kindergarten art project gone wild. I stopped inside the door, scanning the occupants while my frat brother caught up.

  “You’re getting boring, Langston,” Pete Deitrich joked beside me. “All you ever do anymore is hang out with Sasha Reynolds.”

  My eyes kept searching through the students goofing off or cramming for their last class before the weekend, but it wasn’t Sasha I was looking for. It was her roommate, Kinzie Nicolosi. She’d run away from me twice today – once on the quad this morning, and again an hour ago at the end of our philosophy class. That was a big part of the weirdness today. The one time I had wanted to talk to Kinzie, and every chance I had, she bolted. I wanted to know why. More importantly, I needed to talk to her about class.

  I had no use for Philosophy 101 other than getting rid of another graduation requirement. But after listening to her in yesterday’s class, anyone with half a brain would be trying to snatch her up for the final project. And if I had to endure the class, I intended to make the final project – a third of our grade – as bearable as possible. And Kinzie was the key. But maybe I’d already lost out. Maybe that’s why she’d run away – to avoid having me ask.

  Pete elbowed me in the side and nodded toward a curved glass case of stale sandwiches and gigantic lumpy muffins. My girlfriend was on the other side, leaning across the counter to instruct the snack bar jockey as he scooped the yogurt and fruit into a blender. I searched the nearby tables. Damn. No Kinzie. That was odd. They were always together.

  Sasha tossed her straight brown hair, spotted me and waving furiously, in case I hadn’t seen her.

  “Hey,” I said casually, as I approached.

  She popped up on her toes and gave me a peck on the cheek, then glanced between me and Pete. “What are you guys doing here? I thought you were done with classes for the week.”

  “I, uh …” I paused, not sure how this was going to go over. Girls could be possessive, even when they had no reason. But the idea of me and Kinzie Nicolosi together was – well, she wasn’t my type. Not ugly, but just completely non-descript. Except for her eyes, maybe. Dark eyes. I glanced around the area again and confessed. “I was looking for Kinzie. Is she around?”

  “Kinzie?” Sasha questioned. Pete’s eyebrows raised as well. After all, it wasn’t like Kinzie Nicolosi and I were friends. She’d stare at me – not like other girls did – more like she was studying some foreign life form, but otherwise, we ignored each other. In fact, she almost never spoke to me. Still, she’d never run away before. I wasn’t sure why that bothered me so much, but it did.

  “Need to talk to her about class,” I explained, still searching for the short, dark-haired girl. “Is she here?”

  “Aw, I wish we had a class together,” Sasha whined, not answering my question. “That would be so much fun.”

  Pete smirked at the grimace on my face and I gave him a sideway jab in the arm to knock it off. As a matter of principle, I never hooked up with girls from my classes, and Pete knew it – he’d respected me for it when I told him that I’d done that in boarding school and discovered it was just another way to try to smother me. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “So, where is Kinzie?” I asked impatiently, as I swiped my card to pay.

  Sasha took a long pull on the purple straw of her smoothie and looked up at me from the top of her artificially blue eyes. She was trying to be cute, or at least innocent-looking. But there was nothing innocent about Sasha Reynolds.

  “Kinzie? Your roommate?” I prompted again.

  Sasha shrugged, dropping the cute act. “She went
to class early to set up. Why?” This time, her question carried a note of misplaced suspicion.

  I shook my head. “I told you, I need to talk to her about our philosophy class.”

  “So text her.”

  “I don’t have her number, and I’d rather ask this in person.”

  “Whatever,” Sasha said with a dismissive flick of her hair. “Come to class with me, then. We’re just doing some stupid lab today. You can talk to her before we start.” She grabbed around my arm without waiting for an answer, and started pulling me toward the stairs.

  “Later, Pete,” I nodded. He rolled his eyes, before heading over to a table.

  Once we were outside, Sasha babbled about one of her classes as we strolled down the path toward Ross Hall, the science building. She was excited that her team had won some game – they’d saved humanity according to her. She talked like she’d been single-handedly responsible for the success, although she’d yet to mention anything she’d done to help.

  I stretched my arms in the sunshine, pretending to listen. This was my second year at Hutchins College, and as warm as it was today, I knew the weather in southern Indiana could turn on a dime. It wasn’t like Boston, where the ocean tempered the swings. I should take advantage of the day, maybe grab some guys for a pick-up game of soccer down on the intramural fields. My buddy Boomer wouldn’t come. He hated soccer for some reason. But screw him. There’d be enough others hanging around at the Alpha Delt house today. After I talked to Kinzie, that’s what I’d do.

  We stepped into Ross Hall, where a ten-foot mobile of stylized DNA turned lazily in the atrium. Normally, I’d be sprinting up the stairs to the second floor and the physics department, but not this time. The class Sasha was headed for was called Everyday Psychology. Upstairs we knew it by another name – Science for the Stupid, the class people took to fulfill their science requirement when they couldn’t handle the real stuff. That fit my girlfriend to a T.

  Personally, I wasn’t sure psychology should be in with the rest of the sciences, and it seemed like no one else could decide, either. The department’s lab rooms were here, on the first floor of Ross, while the classrooms and offices where next door in Bishop Hall, along with the sociology, history, and philosophy folk. In my book, this wasn’t real science.

  We crossed the atrium to find the first floor hallway empty. Class had already started. That meant I’d missed my chance – again. “Shit. Give me her number so I can text her,” I told Sasha. “Or tell Kinzie that I need to talk …”

  “Just come in and do it yourself,” Sasha insisted. She sashayed through the doorway, making a grand entrance. Several dozen students were clustered around raised black tables, each topped with an open wooden box. Every one turned to watch us stroll in. Every head except one. The thick, dark hair of Kinzie Nicolosi swung forward, hiding her face as she meticulously placed wooden slats into the box in front of her to form a maze.

  I glanced around, waiting for the professor to ask me why I was here, but there wasn’t one. Instead, a tall, blond upperclassman, who hung around Sasha’s roommate a lot, came toward us with an air of authority.

  “You’re late, Sasha,” he said with a snap in his tone.

  She shrugged it off. “You were here with Kinzie. I didn’t see any reason to hurry. You don’t mind if my boyfriend is here, do you Rex?”

  Rex Brolie smirked at me, like I was some kind of pet. My fists clenched. Maybe he was the assistant for this class, but his attitude was damn arrogant. And I hadn’t forgotten what he’d done last year. His fraternity had rushed me hard to join them and I’d considered it until this asshole demanded to know my parent’s net worth, as if that was the determining factor on whether I got in. When I refused to tell him anything more than “enough,” he’d turned against me, saying I didn’t have what it takes. I didn’t need idiots like him in my life.

  I turned away, intentionally ignoring him, but it also gave me a chance to talk to Kinzie. She gingerly placed her last divider into the box to complete the maze, checking the laptop at her side where it looked like she’d plotted out the maze in advance. From my quick survey of the room, her maze was twice as complicated anyone else’s, making me think she didn’t belong in this poor excuse for a class. That was the problem with freshman year. If you weren’t set on your major when you got here, you got dumped into a bunch of random, useless classes. Glad I was past that.

  “Kinzie?” I prompted to start the conversation, but she immediately ducked down under the table. I stared at her back, wondering if she planned to stay there until I gone. Maybe I didn’t want to talk to his girl. She seemed more than a little strange.

  “Kinzie?” I said louder, opting to act like she must not have heard me the first time. “I wanted to talk to you after philosophy, but you …” I started. This time she emerged from under the table, but held her hand up to stop me from speaking. Damn, I was going to have to fall back to Plan B of working with someone else for the project. Except I had no Plan B. No one had ever refused before. But I sized up Kinzie, hunched over with her back to me as she stood up, and decided it was okay. I didn’t want to be saddled for the rest of the semester with a lunatic. Back out. Now.

  “Hey, never mind. I just thought …” My words halted as she turned toward me, a fat white lab rat twisting in her tiny hand. Maybe that’s why she had stopped me – she’d been trying to hold onto the rat.

  “Hang on a second,” she stated, confirming my guess. “Then I can talk.” She positioned herself at one end of the box, struggling to hold the frantic rat over the corner of the maze while reaching for a small timer on the table on the other side.

  “Here, let me help,” I offered and took the rat from her. “Where do you want it to go in?”

  “It’s a him,” Kinzie corrected me, pointing to its back end.

  I held him up and grinned. “Sure is a him. Where does he go?” I was pretty sure Sasha was her lab partner and supposed to be doing this, but she was engrossed in some irrelevant babble with Brolie. They knew each other growing up, she’d told me, which must be how he’d met Kinzie.

  She pointed to the bottom corner of the maze. “You can put him right there when I start the timer. Okay?” I nodded and Kinzie got a determined look on her face as she fingered the timer. “Ready. Set. Now!”

  I lowered the rat by the tail, letting go when his feet scrambled on the wooden floor of the maze. He paused for a moment to check out his new surroundings, then began meandering along, curiously sniffing as he went.

  Kinzie spoke without taking her eyes off the rodent. “Now, what were you saying?”

  “You ran out on me in Philosophy,” I told her.

  “I did?” she asked, scrunching her nose. The rat made the first turn in the maze.

  “Yeah. I tried to talk to you, but you kept going.”

  “Oh … uh … sorry. I guess didn’t hear you,” she said with her cheeks turning red. My guess was she was lying. She’d heard me and bolted for the door anyway. This didn’t bode well.

  “And you did it on the quad this morning too. Ran away from me.”

  This time, Kinzie looked more confused. She turned and studied my face with her dark eyes narrowed. After a moment, they widened in some sort of recognition. “Oh! That didn’t have anything to do with you. It was the game for Freshman Studies. I had to get to Edwards to win.”

  “A game? Right. Sasha said something about that. She said she won.”

  Kinzie stifled a laugh, shooting a quick glance at her roommate who was still behind me. “We were on the same team in the end,” she explained. “We won because I made it to Edwards without being turned into a zombie. I couldn’t have made it without the rest of the team, I suppose, but …”

  “Sasha didn’t do anything, did she?” I asked directly.

  Kinzie fidgeted for a moment, then a shy smile spread on her face. I rarely saw her smile, and there was something nice about it. Made her more approachable – and less crazy. “I don’t really know, but I
didn’t see her do anything to help,” she answered diplomatically. “But it doesn’t really matter. We still won. And we had the best discussion about it in class. It was disturbing really. We’d acted like real governments – outwardly working together to solve the crisis, while regions were cutting deals behind each other’s backs to try to gain an advantage. Mankind could have been completely destroyed because we didn’t trust each other at the outset, and acted so that we shouldn’t be trusted.”

  I tried to follow what she was saying, but still was more interested in her smile. It twisted into a wry expression as I watched.

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about do you? I figured Sasha would have explained the game to you. We’ve been playing all week.”

  “Nope. Didn’t hear anything about it until a few minutes ago. Or, maybe I wasn’t listening.”

  Kinzie grinned at the admission. “So that’s why you wanted to talk to me? To find out why I ran away from you this morning?”

  “No, no. I wanted to talk about what you said in class yesterday – about Kant not taking quantum mechanics into account in his theories about the perception of reality.”

  “You do?” she asked skeptically, looking up at me again. For a moment, it was like all the air had been sucked from my lungs. Her eyes, almost black in color, pierced through me. It made me uncomfortable every time she did this – like I was suddenly standing naked before her. Worse than naked. Transparent.

  I looked away to shake off the feeling. “Uh, yeah. I thought maybe you’d want to work with me on the final project. That would be a good topic, you know? The link between quantum mechanics and the philosophical views of the nature of reality?”