The Keeper
By
Clifford Barr
Text copyright owner © Cameron Bain 2020
All rights reserved
Published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
This is a work of fiction.
All character names are fictional, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Acknowledgements
Prologue
I’ve been able to isolate the NaU to a part of a body. Once the NaU is latched within a person, it is impossible to extract. Through the use of MRI and Cat scans, the NaUs can be led to one part of the body. The RNA decay and cell damage are limited to that one spot. Only the exposure to oxygen and the blood around the isolated pocket of the NaU can cause it to once again warm through the veins and arteries of the infected.
The patient seems to maintain the same nuanced level of health that the NaU gave them in the first place, but it is not a permanent solution. Death is still happening. It is only slower.
I doubt that Matt and his friends would understand, but then again, I don’t think I should expect them to. I doomed them, after all.
Robbie (Research Notes 17, Page 4)
The man awoke with a jolt.
Snow fell above him. He was inside a snowbank in the middle of an empty field. There was something that happened, but he couldn’t remember what. There were lights in the distance.
It was dark, and the air smelled like ozone.
His skin glowed in the night.
He stood up or tried to. Once he did, his vision went dark and blurry. He fell to his knees and threw up blood. There were bright purple flecks in it as he did so, looking at him in an almost accusatory manner.
Bright purple veins crawled around his hands. Words flickered through his mind; cell decay, molecular disentanglement, RNA failings, the substance within him leaking into his cells, and killing them. His body might be shining with light at the moment, but it wasn’t with health. He hacked up another few drops of blood with a bright purple glow.
In the distance, he could see the car wreck. It was far away, a mile or two.
Green and orange light moved around the area. A little bit further back, there was an explosion of blue light as well. Then it all blended into one and disappeared.
A form moved next to him. His daughter, Becca, he remembered, though parts of his mind were still a little bit blurry. They were after both of them, though it was really her that they wanted, needed.
She walked up beside him, the snow crackling under her feet as she did. It was eerily silent as the snow fell around them.
“They’ll be here soon,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, his voice sounding older than he would have liked.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
At least it’ll be quick, Robbie thought, wondering if he might deserve worse. He cleared his throat, a calm spreading over him like a warm blanket.
“Once you do so, I need you to find shelter somewhere,” he said. “My power should be able to protect you. It might look intimidating, but it’s straightforward once you get used to it. Stay away from anything close to a radio or television. They’ll find you through it. Hide well and get away from them. When you do that, just . . ..”
What could he say? Their last option had been to get to the Westford airfield and then go from there. The guys up in Toronto said that they had a way of extracting the power that didn’t lead to death, but that was miles away.
Becca looked so much like her mother had before cancer. He wished he could give her something else.
A dim white light emitted from his daughter. Rather than taking up her entire body like the power of her parents, the white veins reached up from her right hand. They ended with what looked like a blade, created out of nothing, coming out of her hand. It was made of pure light. The air around it wavered and shimmered, the way wind does on a hot day. It wasn’t bio-mechanical. It was pure energy condensed into a tangible form to cut through things.
He looked up at her. A parent was supposed to protect their child, no matter what. And yet, all he had done was make the lives of everyone else around him miserable. He wanted to ask for forgiveness, perhaps say that he was sorry that he couldn’t give her a better life, that he should have let Carol die, that he never should have tried to mess around with the NaU. There wasn’t a rulebook for what a father was supposed to say when he died before his children.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything.”
He raised his head up. He didn’t want her to miss.
“Do it.”
A few snowflakes landed on his face. He enjoyed their cold feeling.
His daughter cut off his head, and everything grew mercifully dark.
Chapter One
From Annabelle and Jack, notes from fifth grade
My Daddy works on the powerlines. He makes the lights go on. He is really important. He lets me and my brother go sledding. I love my father.
I just wish he was around more. Mom wishes to, but she tells us not to bother him about it. His face is red a lot, and he always seems thirsty for the “adult drink.”
He seems happy, but my Mom doesn’t like it.
Jack and Annabelle Davis
Walter Davis woke up the same time he had awoken many other times in his life.
No light came through his window, and his only indicator of the morning was the electric alarm clock that sat next to his bed. He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
He could stay in bed, call in sick. The guys at the rest stop would be surprised, and probably worried. A man his age, people start to look at sick days as a sign of foreboding death rather than initially trying to skip work.
But Walter had never missed a day of work in almost forty years, and this day wasn’t going to be any different. Besides, once you start to stay in bed too much, it gets harder and harder each day to get out of it.
A few things cracked as he sat up in his bed, but that was to be expected with someone his age. He put his feet down onto the wooden floor.
He had built that floor almost seventeen years ago. He knew that it needed to be replaced, perhaps with some of that fancy locking floating vinyl tiles or whatever the hell it was the people still went t
o Lowes for. Last time he went into Lowes, he had been so overwhelmed that he hadn’t gone back. Everything was so loud, and people wanted to try and sell you stuff, continually asking if you need any help, or this or that. It made him sick. If he was going to redo his floor, then he would do it himself!
But he wouldn’t be able to do it himself.
Although he wasn’t, in his mind, a senior yet, not by a long shot, he wasn’t as young and useful as he had been when he first put the floor in. He would have to get help, and once he did that, there would be questions, or if not questions, then perhaps people mildly keeping their odd thoughts to themselves, the way that their mothers had taught them to do and such. People wouldn’t outright call him incapable, but their faces would tell the story for them.
Besides, Walter didn’t like anyone else in his home.
So when he put his feet down onto the wooden floor, the insulation long gone and the boards themselves starting to give, he almost had a heart attack from the chill.
“Have to get a rug or something,” Walter said out loud, his voice sounding very loud in his house. He found his slippers, the same pair that he had owned for close to a decade, put them on, and then walked over to the bathroom.
Well, it looked like no, he hadn’t grown younger in the night.
His hair was still grey, though, so that was something. Hell, everyone in his family had been early “grayers.” His mother even had grey hair in her twenties. It was a genetic thing and not an indicator of age. The day he saw white hair starting to sprout upon his head, he would no longer be the early grayer.
He’d be old in a way he could no longer lie about.
Jack and Annabelle might have ended up as “grayers,” but Walter didn’t need to think about that. He wouldn’t have been able to check. He wouldn’t have been able to know if Jack had inherited his father’s love of baseball, or if Annabelle had wanted to try her turn at softball.
Walter found himself not liking the person looking at him from the mirror.
He walked out of the bathroom and into the main room.
The Davis house was a small one, but compared to where Walter had grown up, the house was a godsend. It was one story, two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. They had a cellar, and their attic was always to become a new storage lodge if they needed the space once the kids grew up. They had also talked about trying to build on another room, one for either Jack or Anabelle. It was all right for the twins to share a place when they were younger, but once puberty started, no one thought it would be a good idea for them to share anymore.
Neither Walter nor Beth had planned on having more than one child. They didn’t have the money or time. Also, there was a fear of responsibility that plagued many people who were hippies in the sixties. Coming from families with five or seven children, they had seen what it could do to a person and would much rather prefer to have a small household.
Now, if they did happen to have another child by mistake (neither one of them were perfect), they, of course, would raise the second, or God help them, the third child.
But when they had originality set out with the intentions of making a child, they had only intended it to be a single one.
Well, three months later, they were informed that they were not going to have one child, but a pair, Jack and Annabelle. The guest room was transformed into the nursery, and then the kids’ room.
No one had been in there in twenty or so years.
Walter walked over to the coffee pot and turned it on. The TV kept playing ads for this thing called a Keurig, which sounded like the stupidest thing in the world to Walter. There wasn’t anything wrong with a good old-fashioned coffee pot, and Walter intended to stick to tradition. He started up a batch, a small one since this coffee was going to go with his breakfast. When he set out to work, he’d pick up a light roast or something from Stewarts, to which he would drink throughout the day since he was old and the old like to take things slow.
“Especially dying,” he said, chuckling a little. He took out a few eggs and made himself breakfast.
Now, years prior, he might have made a few links of sausage with the eggs or even a few strips of bacon. But his doctor had been all over his ass of late to try and get his cholesterol down. There was always something, something that the doctors would have preferred you do. When the doctors told him to quit smoking, he quit smoking. When they told him to either quit drinking or slow down on the alcohol, he had stopped drinking . . . for a few weeks. He stopped drinking eventually, but he wasn’t going to give that victory to the doctors. Smoking and drinking were terrible for you, and you didn’t get some kind of merit points for pointing out the obvious. No one ever drinks or smokes for their health.
He put a piece of bread in the toaster and waited for his eggs to cook. The doctor was also trying to get him to stop eating eggs, or if he did, only the egg whites. Walter patiently ignored that request. The doctor might have gone to school for ten years so he could tell other people how to act, but that didn’t mean any of them had to listen to him.
A few minutes later, Walter was sitting down at his table, alone, of course. When he was younger, he might’ve put on the television and listened to the morning news. The world seemed a whole hell less threatening back then, and you could watch your local news without fear that World War Three was around the corner.
But not anymore.
Nowadays, whenever Walter watched a news story, it was as though they were actively trying to give him a heart attack; and making a man with high cholesterol have a heart attack wasn’t exactly something hard to do. One station hated the president, the other loved them. One thought that the new laws were good, another said that they were terrible. Walter said to hell with it and decided to stop watching. He was old, after all, and it wasn’t like this world was meant for him anymore. He might have helped build it, but nothing ever lasts, no matter how hard one tried to preserve it.
He finished his meal and washed his dishes, putting on gloves as he did so. The water was apt to dry out his knuckles, and while he didn’t like the thought of having to wear gloves when cleaning his dishes, he loved being able to move and his fingers in relative peace all the more.
He walked into the shower, careful to avoid the mirror.
Then he walked back to his room and got his clothes for work. Jeans and an old flannel, not one of those cheap ones that were worn to be stylish, was good enough for him. No, this was a pure flannel that was practically a carpet cut into the shape of a shirt. He laced up his work boots and stood up.
It was snowing outside, but why wouldn’t it be? The snow was sort of the norm when you lived in upstate New York during the winter. It wasn’t as bad as Canada, but it was awfully close. Almost everyone that Walter had known had gone down south to live, enjoying the high temperature and the low taxes.
Walter was born in upstate New York, and he figured that he’d die there as well. His family had been farmers before him, from Argyle, a small town that almost nothing important ever happened, which was part of the allure. No cites there to ruin your way of life with their petty politics and all that other crap that universities seem to teach people these days.
The country was going to hell, but it wasn’t like it mattered to him, though. People could get into massive amounts of debt, get useless degrees, and demand other people listen to how they wanted them to act.
Walter had never gone to college, and considering that he was able to get to the middle class without a degree, proved to him, at least, that college was a waste of time and money. Let the desperate and broke dreamers build their utopias. They could have all of that since Walter figured he’d probably be dead in twenty to thirty years already. He just didn’t want to be forced to be okay with it.
He looked around his house. It had been a lovely house once, and he had never expected to be there alone. He looked down the hall to the twin’s room.
For a second, his right foot lifted off the ground, suggesting to him that maybe it was time to cl
ean up that old room, turn it into storage or something. What Walter would be storing he wasn’t sure, and what he would do with his kids’ now-faded bedsheets and dust-covered clothes and the spider web-covered windows? Probably nothing.
Not today, he thought, his foot going back down. If Walter couldn’t get rid of any of Beth’s things, then he doubted he’d be able to do any serious work on Jack and Anabelle’s room. Besides, he had to go to work.
He put on his jacket and headed out.
****
The Stewarts by his house was always open, rain, or shine. They used to not be open twenty-four-seven, but one of the higher-ups somewhere thought it would be a good idea, a way to get rid of the competition. Walter was thankful for that change, even if the shop would have been open at this time regardless.
Walter had to explain to a friend from down south once what a Stewarts was. He could have done the easy thing, saying it was the damn near best gas station/small grocery store of upstate New York. He settled for the simple answer, though; it was a gas station. A nice one, mind you, but a gas station all the same. All across America, there were similar gas stations, all going by different names but with the same sort of service. Stewarts felt better, in Walter’s view, though, so it worked for him all right, especially the one by his house.
The lady there, Janice, was about the same age that Walter figured his own daughter would have been. Sometimes the two of them would have a pleasant conversation, whether it be the weather, how her kids were doing, or how Walter was a few years away from the grave. She often joked that if he ever felt like he’d be close to death, that he should give her a call. Janice was looking for a house to move into, and while the cashier had never seen Walter’s house or knew what it looked like, she wanted it all the same. If an old man like him could afford to live in it, she thought, then why can’t I and the kids? She would sometimes slip him a brochure for one of the local nursing homes with his coffee. It was harmless enough.
But that morning, Walter saw that there wasn’t going to be any playful banter between them. It was close to six in the morning, and she obviously didn’t want to be there. She was wearing makeup all right, but not even makeup can cover all the signs of being hungover. She smiled, glad that he was one of the regulars who never tried to get her number.
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