“No!” Jim shouted in my ear. “You are not giving up! Not this time.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stand. “Hey,” he yelled, “you guys want to see a real wimp? This loser’s been stuck on this same rep for a month and he’s about to wuss out again.”
I sucked air and shook my head at him, anger filling me faster than air. In the mirrors on the side walls I saw a few guys stop what they were doing and look at us. I hated them for it, hated them for all the crap they and others like them had given me, hated them for having fathers they could go home to, hated them for all the times they knew how guys were supposed to behave and I didn’t, hated them for already having the kind of body I wanted, hated them for everything I wasn’t and didn’t have.
“Go ahead, Matt,” Jim said. “Fail. Just get out of there fast so somebody else can use the machine.”
I wanted to kill him. The rage formed into a single word, first in my brain and then in a hiss from my lips: “No.” I beat my head against the back support, hit it and hit it and hit it again until the pain in my head overwhelmed the pain in my legs, and then I let the weight down and slammed it back up, then down again, no pause, my legs almost throwing the weight. The rep numbers appeared in red in my mind. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t give them the satisfaction of doing only the minimum. Twenty-one. That would show them. I pushed the twenty-second rep up so hard the weights actually left contact with my feet for just a second, slammed up the supports, and unstrapped my hands as the weight fell back onto the supports. I jumped up, seeing only red, ready to kill, anger with no goal or target, just anger.
“Good job, Matt,” Jim said from somewhere not far away.
The anger receded like the tide flowing away from the beach, leaving me breathing hard, legs shaking, the back of my head pounding, and I sat down hard on the bench where Jim had been.
“I could have killed you,” I said between gasps.
“Nah,” Jim said. “You couldn’t have caught me, not with those legs after that monster set.”
We both laughed. Even though I didn’t think I could stand I felt so good, so happy to have cracked that barrier, so free of any anger—for the first time, even if only for just that moment—that I laughed again, and Jim laughed with me.
* * *
I parked the BMW in back of the gym near the employees-only entrance, next to R.C.’s enormous truck. I put down the window to give R.C. a good look at me; after this morning, he’d have all the defenses activated and be monitoring the security cameras, ready for bear and heavily armed.
“I have one of them with me,” I said. “I also have these.” I held the bag out the window in my left hand and twisted my body so I could pull out a diamond with my right. “I’m working.”
The gym’s metal security door clicked three times and popped open. I got out of the car and Greg followed, unfolding more quickly than I would have thought he could. We walked inside, and the door closed automatically, leaving us in total darkness. I stood while R.C. finished the scans and satisfied himself that all was well, then the door a few feet in front of me opened to our office. R.C. was off to the side, his eyes and a shotgun trained on the alien.
I handed R.C. the diamonds. He took them but kept his eyes on Greg.
“What’s the job?” he asked.
“Apparently, Jim really is alive. I have to find him, and then Greg here will take him and some stuff of theirs away.”
R.C. raised an eyebrow and asked, ” `I’?”
I watched Greg’s arms, but nothing moved. Their translators had worked well enough so far that I had to assume he was following everything now. “Yes,” I said. “I have to do this on my own. I think Greg here and his people would be a lot more comfortable that way.”