Off the Wagon (Users #2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Prologue 2

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Prologue 3

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue 1

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue 2

  Credits

  Users

  Book 2

  Off The Wagon

  By Stacy & Jennifer Buck

  Copyright @ 2014 Stacy Buck

  This book is dedicated to addicts, recovering addicts, and those whose lives have been affected by a loved ones addiction.

  This is a stand alone book, but I highly recommend reading Users Book 1 before you start this book. You can purchase Users Book 1 here- http://www.amazon.com/Users-Angels-Demons-Superhero-Novel-ebook/dp/B00OAXIFGO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420871205&sr=8-1&keywords=users

  Or you can email me at [email protected] to sign up for our emailing list. If you sign up for our emailing list I will send you a free copy of your choice between our alternate history horror novel “Squanto Undead” or our Greek mythology steampunk series “Clockwork Wings” in exchange for a review.

  Prologue 1

  Today was the day Carter would forever regret showing up to these damn meetings. The seemingly never ending Seattle rain pounded against the buildings flat roof, but even the torrential downpour was silenced under the chorus of User voices this evening. The Elks Club was rowdier than normal, because today of all days, was sponsor day. The seats that were normally lined up in perfect rows were now strewn about in no particular order as Users pushed them aside to reach one another.

  Users was the slang name that normal people used for the special people, the people with super powers like Carter. Carter was a Scorcher, meaning he could summon fire by transferring the molten lava like blood that ran through his veins out through his pores. But he was just one of an assortment of different Users with super powers. There were Movers, Blinders, Changers, and the list went on and on, all with their own set of powers. Users had a double meaning in this case, because while everyone at the N.A. meeting had special powers, they were also ex junkies, speed freaks, alcoholics, and the like. Every last one of them was a recovering addict.

  Raised voices erupted from one corner of the room as two newly sober men argued over a stunningly beautiful woman who finally had enough time sober under her belt to become a sponsor. The two men sized one another up as if they were going to fight it out, but Vince stepped in before that could happen.

  “All right, everyone take a seat,” Vince shouted over the ruckus. Vince pushed his thin glasses up the brim of his nose as he sat down at the head of the table next to Cody. The room was packed with bodies and there were almost more people than chairs, but Vince was well respected by the other Users, and they did as they were told, fighting for a seat like a game of musical chairs.

  Last minute murmurs died out as prospective Users sought to be aligned with the sponsor of their choice, but no one had approached Carter. Not that he was surprised. His surly nature made him an unlikely choice for the task of being the understanding and comforting sponsor a newly sober User needed. It only bothered him a little that no one had thought to choose him. Well, maybe more than a little. He bounced his leg nervously as Walt took a seat next to him. Walt had been inundated with hopeful Users, having been only sober for months, or maybe even as little as weeks, all wanting the General as their sponsor.

  And why wouldn’t they? He was Walt, the leader of the Compound, the savior of the damned, the one and only great General. Who the hell was Carter? No one but a down on his luck loser, a hanger on, and he wasn’t even good at that. Sure, the Compound was his home, but that was all about to end.

  “I’m leaving the Compound,” Carter whispered in Walt’s ear.

  “Why?” Walt whispered back.

  “It’s time. I need a place of my own,” Carter said.

  “Ssshhh!” A woman sitting in the seat directly to their rear shushed them.

  “Ahem.” Vince pretended to clear his throat before going on and on about who was assigned to who.

  The woman who had shushed Carter and Walt squealed audibly when Vince assigned her to Cody. She batted her eyelashes at Cody, but Carter, who had long assumed that Cody was gay, thought she was barking up the wrong tree.

  Again and again, there were cheers from happy Users who had been assigned to the sponsor they had been hoping for. The whole ordeal was enough to make Carter want to puke, but he didn’t for fear that his lava like vomit would burn the whole building to ashes.

  “That’s all for this week. I’ll see everyone next time.” Vince concluded the meeting and most of the Users climbed out of their seats, but a handful milled about the now mostly empty room. Walt grabbed Carter by the shoulder to hold him back from exiting the room as the others cleared out.

  “If you’re going to leave you might want to set up a new place of residence first,” Walt said.

  “I’ve got something lined up to get me back on my feet,” Carter said. “Once I get the money, I will be able to get an apartment in the city.”

  “I need to speak with you,” Vince said grabbing Carter by the shoulder. Carter silently told himself that the next person to grab him by the shoulder was going to get their hand swatted away.

  Walt threw Vince a worried look.

  “What?” Carter said to Walt, but Vince answered for him.

  “It’s about the sponsor thing,” Vince said.

  “Yeah, I know. No one asked me though.” Carter tried to dismiss the whole thing, playing it off as if he actually wanted to be a sponsor, but that no one had approached him.

  In truth, as with most things, he was conflicted. Part of him wanted to pass on the tools he had gathered from over half a decade of being sober, but there was another part of him that was scared shitless that something bad would happen. While he had learned a vast array of coping techniques, how to watch for his triggers and manage himself, being responsible to help someone else maintain their sobriety, was a whole new game.

  “He didn’t ask you, but he did ask me to assign him to you,” Vince said. “But well, we’ve got some concerns.”

  “Whose got concerns? Wait, what?” Carter asked “Who wants me to be his sponsor?”

  “Barber,” Walt and Vince said in unison.

  “I tried to talk him out of it, but he keeps insisting,” Walt said.

  “You tried to talk him out of it?” Carter asked questioning their lack of faith in him.

  Why was he arguing with Walt over this? He didn’t even want to be a sponsor. At least that’s what he thought; but the fact that Walt and Vince didn’t think he should be, really irked him.

  “We just don’t know if you’re ready,” Vince said.

  “It is a lot of responsibility. He’s got nowhere to go, but the Compound, and if you’re leaving then you won’t be around to help him when he needs it,” Walt said.

  The two of them were bombarding Carter with reasons why he couldn’t or shouldn’t be Barber’s sponsor.

  “Barber can move in with me!” Carter shouted.

  He could hardly believe his own words, but it made sense. The kid had no parents, nowhere to go, and how hard could raising a teenager really be?

  “But you don’t even have a place yet,” Walt a
rgued.

  “I’ve got something lined up next week, something big, and it will pay for everything we need,” Carter said cryptically.

  Chapter 1

  Next week.

  Carter had never broken into a bank before, but he had done more than his fair share of B&E’s.

  His hands glowed red hot. The sleeves on his sweatshirt were pulled up well past his elbow to keep the highly flammable fabric from bursting into flames. He used the same tactic he had used months before when he had melted through the floor of Fox’s building, expecting to find himself in the elevator shaft, but instead he ended up smack dab in the middle of the lobby. The mistake had cost four men their lives. His aim had better be on point this time, or his brief stint as a bank robber would be short lived.

  Molten sparks spewed around him like a welding torch burning into a piece of hot iron. The boiling blood that ran through his veins caused him more than a mild discomfort, but he had learned to live with the pain. Just like the Hulk from that Avengers movie, where his secret was to always be angry so he could turn into the Hulk on command, Carter had learned to always be in pain to keep his Scorcher powers constantly at the ready. He could call forth the fire within him using his superheated heart to pump blood as hot as molten lava through his veins and force the flames out his pores.

  Carter pushed in on the ceiling above him and the re bar within the concrete sizzled like a pressed burger patty. Carter jumped back just as the metal bars gave way and a huge chunk of concrete ceiling caved in and crashed to the sewer floor. Foul smelling sewer water splashed Carter in the face.

  “Oh, fucking great!” He spat against the rough concrete wall. “It got in my god damn mouth!”

  Carter was a germ-a-phoebe and he almost yakked at the thought of what decay and waste was in the foul tasting water. It had the distinct flavor of what a dead body smelled like. Carter cocked his head to his shoulder, opened wide, and scrubbed his tongue against the fabric of his sweatshirt.

  “Ack!” He spit once more for good measure as he waited for the dust to settle in the opening above.

  It was almost as dark above as it was below, but the bank had moonlight streaming in from the drive through teller window, while the sewer was as black as tar. Carter squeezed into the man sized hole he had created in the ceiling and lifted himself up and onto the square tiles of the bank floor. He was right where he had planned for a change, directly behind the teller counter, and hidden from the view of the lobby cameras. Lifting only his right hand above the counter, Carter popped off three fireballs from the palm of his hand in rapid succession. Using the ability to send them arching in different directions, that the now deceased Dan had taught him, Carter hit each camera in the building squarely on the lens. The cameras exploded.

  Carter stood up and with no cameras left to film his face, he casually sauntered over to the vault door. A square, stainless steel door with a huge wheel for a handle and a combination lock stood between Carter and the bounty of riches that no doubt waited for him inside the safe. He spun the combination lock for no particular reason and it clicked repeatedly as it twirled. Carter pulled his sweatshirt over his head and tossed it on the counter behind him. Using both hands, he gripped the combination.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  With a grimace, Carter let the fires build within him again. Flames erupted from his palms. The flesh on the back of his hands glowed with an orange hue. His arms and chest burst into flames. Carter focused his rage and the fires that burnt within him into his hands until the gray steel around the lock burnt red hot, smoldered, and began to melt away. With molten steel dripping around his arm, Carter reached into the door and fumbled around for a moment before his nimble fingers found the lock’s tumbler.

  “Almost got it,” he said and with a flick of the wrist he undid the latch. “And done.”

  Carter spun the large wheel on the door and watched as the cogs and clockwork turned within. He held his breath, half expecting the alarm to go off, as he tugged on the heavy door, but he was met with only silence as the door slid open.

  Inside the vault, the walls were lined with lock boxes and in the center of the room stood a single long rectangular table covered in stacks of one-hundred dollar bills.

  “Jackpot,” Carter said, but he stopped just short of the table covered in cash, turned around, and leaned casually against it. “And that’s how I’d rob your bank.”

  The halogen lights in the room came up, illuminating the mock up bank and a glass wall with dozens of men and women standing behind it.

  “Very impressive,” Lillian, the head of the bank’s security, said, but a rail thin man in a white coat was not as impressed with his handy work.

  Carter smiled and nodded, ignoring the angry glare coming from the rail thin man’s direction.

  “This new vault was built to withstand an atomic bomb,” a second man said.

  “Well it wasn’t built to withstand a Scorcher, so what good is it,” Lillian said.

  She stared at the skinny man with contempt as she passed him on her way around the glass wall and into the mock up bank.

  “We’re living in a new world gentlemen. A world filled with Users with powers of all types, and some of them are bad people,” she said. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Carter said. He was fully aware that Users, like any other group of humans, came with a diverse moral character. Carter at one point had been a member of the most elite team of Users in the world, the All Americans. But he had also seen the darker side of Users. At one point, he and a handful of his User friends had been heroin junkies. Heroin was illegal, immediately making them criminals in the eyes of the law, but along with the expensive habit came petty to the not so petty crimes they had done to provide for their habit.

  “If we can’t keep our money safe then our customers won’t feel safe, and if they don’t feel safe they will start burying their money under their mattresses,” she said. Her high heels clapped across the tile floor as she moved to examine the hole Carter had burned through the vault door. “No, this will not do, not at all,” she said.

  Men wearing fancy suits that were more expensive than any object Carter owned, nodded in agreement.

  Lillian was a hard ass and everyone in the room knew it. Her blouse was low cut, but her skirt was all business, reaching down past her knees. She wore a thin pair of glasses that sat snugly on her sharp featured face. She exuded confidence and Carter found himself weirdly attracted to the woman. He didn’t normally go for the take no shit type of woman, but she was something different. She commanded the room and demanded everyone’s attention all at the same time, and Carter liked it.

  “We’re doing the best we can,” the rail-thin man said, then shrunk back like the weasel he was.

  “Well your best isn’t good enough,” she snapped back. “You’ve got two weeks to design, build, and complete a vault that Carter won’t be able to burn through.”

  The thin man and his colleagues looked at each other doubtfully, and Carter couldn’t blame them. He was yet to find a substance that he couldn’t burn through, and these eggheads didn’t look up to he challenge.

  “That’s not enough time,” the man said reaffirming Carter’s suspicions.

  “Mr. Donovan, everyday we delay is another day we are vulnerable to an attack on any one of our two thousand locations. As the nation’s largest bank, we are expected to have secure vaults, and if you can’t provide them we will take our business elsewhere.”

  “About the business…when can I expect to get paid?” Carter asked.

  “The money has already been deposited into your account,” she answered. “But I expect to see you back here in two weeks to test the new vault.”

  “I’ll be here,” Carter said. “Don’t worry about that.” And with the amount of money they were paying him, he meant to keep his word.

  *****

  The alarm bell rang, signaling the end of class and Barber’s head snapped up off the desk. He
had been face down on the desk sleeping for most of the class. Using his sleeve, Barber wiped up a trail of drool that had formed in the corner of his mouth.

  “First day and you’re already falling asleep,” the teacher said as Barber strolled past her desk. Barber hadn’t truly been asleep, but he might as well have. He had been and still was in some sort of a daze, and he hadn’t heard a single word she said the entire class.

  “Yeah…I didn’t sleep well last night,” Barber lied. He was tired, but it wasn’t because he didn’t sleep well. He had been up all night playing video games and drinking soda. Making matters worse, he hadn’t so much as stepped into a classroom in almost a year and he really had no desire to be there. Walt had never made him go to school during his time at the Compound, but Carter had insisted that Barber return to high school if he wanted to come and live with him in the city.

  The teacher removed her glasses so she could look Barber directly in the eye.

  “Try and get a better nights rest tonight please,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, for sure,” Barber said. “No problem.” Barber exited the classroom and went right for the bathroom. His bladder was full and he needed relief. He pushed open the door and entered a bathroom covered in square blue tiles all the way to the ceiling. Barber took the first stall he could find, but he wasn’t alone. A trio of boys about the same age as he was were already waiting in the bathroom near the sinks.

  “You try that new batch?” the dark haired skinny one asked. The boy had a wave of black hair that partially covered his face like some kind of Justin Bieber wanna be.

  “I did. Tried it last night and I didn’t sleep all night. Shit had me up and feeling like a rock star,” the other boy said. The second boy was a muscle bound jock wearing a letterman's jacket. The two boys high-five’d one another and the clap of their hands smacking together echoed off the tile walls.