Cultivating Heroism Read online

  Cultivating Heroism

  Ray Torrens

  Copyright © 2019 by Ray Torrens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Afterword

  Chapter One

  Mack ducked just in time to narrowly avoiding getting hit square in the face, as someone threw a mini-basketball across the office. He slammed his hands against his keyboard and somehow managed to hit Alt-F4. The document he’d been filling in for the last hour vanished from his screen, and he groaned.

  “God dammit,” he muttered, quiet enough that no one would hear him.

  Taking work seriously definitely wasn’t seen as a good thing in the office, and he’d learned quickly that bringing legitimate complaints or suggestions to his superiors did not go down well. He just had to bite his tongue and do the best he could with what he was given: a bunch of lazy dumb asses to work alongside.

  “Come on, Mack,” his colleague, Derek, called, throwing the basketball back at the exact same height. “Just catch it for once. It’s not poisonous, I swear.”

  “Look at the boy, there’s no way he’s got any kind of hand-eye coordination,” Jeremy joked as Mack ducked once more and let the basketball fly over him.

  ‘Boy’ was as patronizing as their insults got. Just because they were all men in their forties, having worked at the same office their whole lives without progression, because they didn’t take their jobs seriously—it did not mean being twenty-three made Mack any less of a man.

  Finally annoyed to breaking point, Mack snatched the basketball from the air when Jeremy sent it sailing at his head again, and instead of throwing it back at one of his colleagues, landed a perfect shot in the bin in the far corner of the room. He’d cleaned the bin that morning and hoped no one had thrown anything in there since then. He wasn’t hoping to mess up their ball with filth, just annoy them for a moment.

  “What the fuck, dude?” Jeremy complained, sliding down from where he sat on top of his desk and going to look at the bin. “Right on top of some gnarly salad that looks like it’s growing fur. Come and get it out, will you?”

  Derek had stood up from his chair to join Jeremy, wrinkling his nose at the trash can. “For fuck sakes.”

  “I’m not picking it up,” Mack said. Getting his hands dirty didn’t bother him, but cowing down to these jerks certainly did.

  “You shot it in there!” Jeremy argued.

  “Well I obviously didn’t mean to,” Mack lied. “Like you said, I have no hand-eye coordination. It wasn’t what I was aiming for.”

  Jeremy stared him down, as if looking for signs of dishonesty, but Mack didn’t break. Eventually Jeremy rolled his eyes. “I only got it from the dollar store. I’ll pick up another one tomorrow.”

  He went back to his desk and for half a second, Mack actually thought they might sit down and start working. Then he saw solitaire being loaded up on the monitor and realized he was exactly as naive as they thought he was.

  He still had hope that maybe there was somehow more work being done by the people getting paid three times as much as him than he thought. They were older, but must have missed out on getting wiser. Maybe they’d been too busy goofing off when the wisdom was being handed out.

  Mack’s coworkers had schmoozed their way to the top by using their parent’s money to buy expensive drinks for the higher ups at expensive bars, and it had nothing to do with their skills at all.

  Mack reopened the document he’d been working on and started re-entering the information for the auction lots that would be sold at the next charity benefit. That was what his firm did: throw charity auctions to sell rare items donated by a long list of benefactors. He’d thought a charity would be the perfect place for him, as it was the kind of place that everyone should have worked hard and always been trying to better themselves. But he’d realized that it was even more about who you knew than places he’d interned at during college.

  His degree in event management wasn’t being put to use at all in his current position either. He could have helped improve the actual auctions tenfold if he was given the opportunity to streamline the current process, or even just have some of his suggestions heard, but they’d done it the same way for the past five years and some twenty-three-year-old rookie wasn’t going to convince them to start changing their ways.

  So, he stuck to inputting data like he was supposed to and doing the extra work of fixing errors that other people had made. Mack hated the thought that the firm might lose out on money for needy charity causes just because someone else made a mistake.

  He caught one of those errors pretty quickly as he started working again. One of the lots was lacking a proper description, which meant that when it came to the auction, and the brochure, the lot wouldn’t gain the attention it deserved. He knew the donor well—or, he knew them in a professional context from the lots they’d donated in the past—and he had never given something of poor quality to the charity. Underselling one of his items would be a big mistake. All he could tell from the description was that it was a book, and there was no detail of the author or whether it was a first edition, when it was released, when this one was printed—nothing.

  He left his desk and jogged down a couple of flights of stairs to the stock room. He punched the code into the lock—there definitely should have been some kind of guard with the amount of expensive items just sitting there—and the door clicked open for him. Searching the shelves, he found the lot in its correct spot, which was a refreshing change. He’d save some time with not having to hunt around for a wrongly stored item.

  The book was newer looking than he’d expected. Normally when they auctioned books they were either signed copies or old first editions, but this copy both wasn’t old enough to be an expensive first edition. And it wasn’t written by someone with a name that would make a signature worth anything anyway. In fact there was no name on the cover at all. It was black, leather-bound, and completely without decoration.

  Mack pulled on a pair of gloves before he picked the book up to examine it further, just in case it was more damaged than it appeared. On the inside cover there were no more hints as to its origin. The first page was blank. He flipped it over and instead of a title page with title and author, the story started straight away. The text was small and if he wasn’t mistaken, he would have said it was handwritten. The words were on a perfectly straight line, but the letters had just enough variance that it couldn’t have been a typeface.

  “What the fuck?” he muttered, holding it closer to his face. “No wonder it didn’t have a description.”

  He signed the lot out of the storage room and took it back to his desk with him. He’d start reading and see if it rang any bells. He could search some of the phrases and see if that landed him any answers.

  For the first time since starting his job, he’d been intrigued by something.

  Chapter Two

  Reading a quarter of the b
ook didn’t land Mack any answers. The story was intriguing though. He wasn’t sure what he’d find within the mysterious bound volume, but he was not expected a science fiction story about a faraway planet being ravaged by mutant creatures. Mack loved his sci-fi and fantasy novels, as well as having a pretty decent comic book collection he’d started on at an early age. Even he’d never heard of this book before, but it had been donated to the charity as though it was worth a lot of money. That made it doubly confusing. It wasn’t exactly the high-brow type of book that usually came through the charity auctions. And why was it bound in such a heavy duty cover like it was some rare tome?

  “Does anyone know anything about this?” Mack had asked the office. “There’s no description on the document.”

  “If there’s no information, then we don’t know anything about it,” Derek had replied, irritated. “And if I don’t know anything about an item, how am I meant to write a description?” It was his job to write the descriptions that Mack was supposed to collate.

  Jeremy had also shaken his head when asked about the book, as did everyone else around the office Mack had asked. No one knew anything about the mysterious book. Had they really just been planning to send it to auction without any description at all? Maybe it would have stayed in storage for years, if Mack didn’t try and figure out what it was and where it had come from.

  Who knew how many other mysterious items were sat in storage that people had been too lazy to decipher. He would have to go and have a proper look around down there one day.

  “Is it interesting?” Meghan said, coming up to him in the late afternoon and peering over his shoulder. “This is the most interested I’ve seen you in anything since I started.”

  Meghan was an intern, and the only person lower down on the food chain than Mack himself. She was cute, just nineteen and with brown curls that she wore always tucked over her right shoulder. Freckles littered her pale face. Mack caught himself watching her sometimes, but she didn’t seem to have noticed. She smiled warmly whenever they crossed paths and started conversations here and there.

  “It’s weird,” he admitted. “I have no idea what it’s here for. I tried calling the benefactor, but he’s out of the office for the next week on a personal vacation and no one seems to know anything about the book.”

  “Do you think maybe it’s a mistake that it’s here?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe if someone had actually done their job when they took the donation, we’d have a better idea.”

  “I know, it’s frustrating.”

  “What’s frustrating is that no one seems to realize how much I save their asses by working outside my job description all day every day.”

  “What they think doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me that they get away with not doing their jobs because I pick up the slack.”

  “They’ll get their comeuppance in the end.” She folded her arms. “They’re not important. What matters is that by doing what you’re doing, you’re getting better at your job, making yourself better as a person, gathering your own skills. You can move on and they’ll be left behind. That’s how I try to look at it while I’m an intern. Isn’t that what really matters?”

  Mack tilted his head and looked at her properly. She was smiling sweetly at him, as though her words hadn’t been heavy at all, like they were just chatting about the weather.

  “Yeah,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “Of course I am!” she gave a tinkly laugh and then gestured to the book. “I’ll leave you to read anyway. Sorry if I broke your flow.”

  “Don’t be. I’m glad we chatted.”

  She gave a small wave and then walked over to the kitchen to fetch herself a glass of water. He watched her for a moment, trying to cling to what she’d said as a way to stop feeling so bitter about his current working situation. Yeah, his extra work wasn’t something to be annoyed about. Mack was the one who benefited from the extra workplace skills he cultivated from going above and beyond.

  He knew it wouldn’t be long before Derek or Jeremy said or did something that sent him back in a foul temper, though.

  When it got to 4:45 pm, he stood up and turned his computer off. The book had to go back into storage before he could clock out. He wished he could take it home with him, but he’d be fired if anyone found out about that. He might dislike some of the people he worked with, but he needed this job. His one bedroom apartment didn’t pay its own rent. Asking family for help was out of the question. His parents had both died when he was young. He was on his own now since his grandmother had passed a few years back.

  By the time he got back from the store room, it was five past the hour and he got to leave in peace and quiet.

  And five minutes was still plenty of time to make sure he got to his martial arts class on time. Muay Thai was definitely the release he needed after a day in the office, and if the classes had run every day he would have been there religiously. Unfortunately they were only a twice-a-week event, so he had to make the most of the few hours he got after work.

  The extremely affordable gym he practiced at was underwhelming in appearance both from the outside and inside. It was a rundown building slotted between a cockroach infested convenience store and a seedy adult store, on a side street in central San Diego that didn’t make you feel very safe about walking down it.

  Inside the gym was just as grimy. The walls were covered in damp and the gym was really nothing more than an empty room with a minimal weights and equipment.

  The decor didn’t matter at all though. What mattered was the teacher, and Lance was the best teacher Mack had ever had. The scrawny, fifty year old white guy shouldn’t have been such a master at Muay Thai, but of all the teachers Mack had had over the years, Lance was superior in every way. He could not only demolish anyone he came up against in a fight—he could actually explain how he’d done it, and how any one of them would have been able to counter it. He didn’t spar with his pupils just to get his rocks off at beating them to a pulp, but would let his pupils beat him to show them how they could take advantages of weak spots left by opponents.

  It had been a stroke of luck that Mack had picked UC San Diego as his college of choice after finishing high school, and that he’d walked into Lance’s makeshift gym after coming across a flier in his laundromat.

  The only disappointing part was some of the other people who had picked up fliers and decided to come along over the years.

  The current group was dominated by four guys who had joined up together and were part of the UCSD college football team. They stood in a group around two girls who had been coming for three years now. They were the only two girls in the group, and had bonded over their years at the gym because they were always sparring against each other as the only two women.

  Lance clapped his hands and called everyone to attention so they could begin their warm-up, then they broke off into pairs to begin sparring. Lance didn’t teach a certain lesson each class or show specific moves that everyone went away to learn. Instead he watched people of similar skill levels spar and showed them how to improve their technique from the sidelines. It was a highly effective way to learn, at least for Mack. He reveled at the times when Lance told him exactly what he was doing wrong and how to correct it.

  Today Mack was against Drake, the biggest of the football guys. Drake leered at Mack and stuck his hand out. Mack resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he shook the guy’s hand.

  “May the best man win,” Drake said. Then he whispered so only Mack would hear, “Meaning me.”

  “It’s not about winning,” Mack replied.

  “Loser talk.”

  Drake attacked without waiting to make sure Mack was ready, and like always he came at his opponent with a fist straight to the face. It wasn’t even done with any sort of technique appropriate for their lessons.

  Mack avoided the blow with a deft step backward with his right foot, and twisting his b
ack just enough that he wouldn’t lose his balance. He countered immediately with a roundhouse kick to Drake’s side.

  Mack’s technique was perfect, he knew it was—his problem was that there wasn’t enough power behind him. He’d tried to bulk up before, and he had the height for it at just over six feet, but his body never seemed to approve. He’d get a bit more strength, but no matter what his diet and the amount of weights he lifted, he had never even come close to being the stack of muscle that Drake was. There must have been something he was doing wrong, but he just didn’t know what.

  It meant that despite his perfect execution of the roundhouse, it didn’t knock Drake off his feet like it should have done. Instead it elicited a small grunt of pain and a blaze of rage in his expression.

  Drake stepped forward, instead of backward to collect himself, and kicked out. The kick was sloppy and should have been easy to block, but Mack was still recovering from the perfect roundhouse he’d landed and hadn’t completely gotten his balance back yet. In an even fight, Mack would have had time to get back into his fighting stance because his kick would have dealt significant damage, but in the world where strength was everything, he’d only made his own defeat inevitable by going for such a powerful move.

  Drake’s shin slammed into his left leg and it immediately buckled with pain, sending Mack sprawling against the mat. For a moment, Drake pulled his leg back like he was going to kick him while he was down, but then controlled himself. There was nothing controlled about the grin he gave Mack, though.

  “Better luck next time, dude.”

  Mack held his tongue. He remembered what Meghan the intern had said about patiently cultivating skills purely for his own benefit, and he felt confident in the knowledge that he’d performed his techniques perfectly. He was there to master the discipline, not to beat people up like Drake seemed to enjoy. He was about to pick himself up off the ground when a hand appeared in his vision.